The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (12 page)

After three months’ discussion, the assembled bishops agreed upon a creed—the Nicene Creed—which would become the dogma of Christian orthodoxy for succeeding centuries. Was Jesus the Son of God identical in substance with God or merely a demigod? The Council declared that Jesus was “begotten not created, one in being (
homoousios
) with the Father.” Eusebius of Caesarea was there and reported the decisive intervention by Emperor Constantine himself. “Our emperor, most beloved by God, began to reason [in Latin, with a Greek translation supplied by an interpreter] concerning [Christ’s] divine origin, and His existence before all ages: He was virtually in the Father without generation, even before he was actually begotten, the Father having always been the Father, just as [the Son] has always been a King and a Savior.” To enforce this dogma, all books by Arius or his followers were to be burned “that not a single record of it should be left to posterity,” and anyone who possessed such a work and refused to burn it should be put to death.

This search for agreement on the two natures of Jesus the Christ did not succeed in enforcing orthodoxy. For forty years after Constantine, Arianism remained the doctrine of the Eastern Empire. But it had drawn Christians together and brought an ominous new institution into being. The Church would be governed by the bishops of the whole Christian world. By 324 Constantine had seen himself, he explained to the bishops, as “a bishop established by God of those outside [the Church],” even as a “thirteenth apostle.” The seeking would unite, while the finding and defining would divide. Succeeding Church councils would elaborate the dogma as they continued to redefine the nature, or two natures, of the Christ. Each new definition provided new targets for objection, more ammunition for dissent.

* * *

Battles between Church and state would punctuate all Western history and leave fertile ambiguities even in the New World. But Constantine had created a new relation between the state and religion. The religion of the state would no longer be a state religion. Yet Constantine’s name would be given to the policy of establishing a Christian Church as the religion of the state, signaling a special close alliance between the state and a particular Christian Church. “Constantinism” troubled Europe for centuries.

Ironically, too, this close association of the state with the independent Christian forces of virtue provided a classic example of the historic powers of forgery. The so-called Donation of Constantine was a supposed grant by Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester I (314-335) in Rome of spiritual sovereignty over all the other great patriarchs and over all matters of faith and worship, as well as temporal sovereignty over Rome and the entire Western Empire. This was said to have been Constantine’s thank-you gift to Sylvester for miraculously healing his leprosy and converting him to Christianity. A brilliant example of the independent Renaissance spirit was the demonstration in 1440 by the vigorous Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) that the “donation” was only a forgery designed to empower the papacy. This was a foretaste too of the spirit of the Protestant Reformation. For centuries Constantine’s supposed Donation remained the basis for the expansive powers of medieval popes over kings, princes, bishops, and patriarchs.

* * *

Christianity, we must not forget, did not come into a religious vacuum. It came on a Roman scene adorned by a vivid and sumptuous state religion, headed, as we have seen, by the college of pontiffs and a pontifex maximus, now the emperor himself. Even when Gratian became emperor in 375, six decades after Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, most senators were pagans—still being sworn into office on the altar of the ancient Roman goddess of Victory in the Senate Hall, with libations of wine and incense. This was only one sign of a still-powerful pagan religion that commanded the loyalty of most of the ruling nobles of Rome. Edward Gibbon’s famous “Five Causes of the Growth of Christianity,” which aroused the ire of faithful and credulous Christians, is not often enough seen as a catalog also of the powers of the dying but still-prevalent and revered pagan religion. “While that great body [of the Roman Empire] was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol.”

The affair of the Altar of Victory in 382 dramatized the power of the ancient Roman religion. Fortunately, the words of the heroes on both sides have been preserved. This affair actually offers us one of the most vivid and eloquent dramas of appeal to the spirit of tolerance and the force of tradition. The fortunes of the Altar of the ancient goddess of Victory in the Senate Hall had varied with the tastes of the emperors. Constantius had removed it, Julian the Apostate had restored it, but the Christian zealot Gratian removed it again in 382. In Rome at the time there were some 424 pagan temples, so that, as Gibbon observes, “in every quarter of Rome the delicacy of the Christians was offended by the fumes of idolatrous sacrifice.”

Four respectable pagan deputations begged Gratian’s successor, Emperor Valentinian II, to restore the Altar of Victory, symbol of the gods under whom Rome had flourished. They set the stage for a classic confrontation between the old religion of the greatness of Rome and the new religion of Christ and Constantine. Spokesman for restoring the pagan altar was the eloquent Symmachus, a wealthy and noble senator, prefect of the city, a pontiff and augur, and proconsul of Africa, who reported on the affair to Emperor Valentinian II. His moving plea for tradition was also a surprisingly liberal diatribe against ideology. “Grant, I implore you,” urged Symmachus, “that we who are old men may leave to posterity that which we received as boys.” The ancestral Roman polytheism had kept people honest, and would continue to do so. “All things,” he declared, “are full of God, and no place is safe for perjurers, but the fear of transgression is greatly spurred by the consciousness of the very presence of deity.” Then Symmachus quoted the Eternal City herself (
aeterna Roma
) begging the emperors:

Let me use my ancestral ceremonies, she says, for I do not repent me of them. Let me live after my own way; for I am free. This was the cult that drove Hannibal from the walls of Rome and the Gauls from the Capitolium. Am I kept for this, to be chastised in my old age? . . . I do but ask peace for the gods of our fathers, the native gods of Rome. It is right that what all adore should be deemed one. We all look up at the same stars. We have a common sky. A common firmament encompasses us. What matters it by what kind of learned theory each man looketh for the truth? There is no one way that will take us to so mighty a secret. All this is matter of discussion for men of leisure. We offer your majesties not a debate but a plea.

The answer to Symmachus is also eloquent, but more surprising. It is given by Saint Ambrose (340-397), who had brought Saint Augustine to Christianity. Apologizing for his homely words, Ambrose deals respectfully with Symmachus’ arguments in a simple paean to progress, a translation of the Gospel message of Good News to the people of Rome:

Why cite me the examples of the ancient? It is no disgrace to pass on to better things (
nullus pudor est ad melora transire
). Take the ancient days of chaos when elements were flying about in an unorganized mass. Think how that turmoil settled into the new order of a world and how the world has developed since then, with the gradual invention of the arts and the advances of human history. I suppose that back in the good old times of chaos, the conservative particles objected to the advent of the novel and vulgar sunlight which accompanied the introduction of order. But for all that, the world moved. And we Christians too have grown. Through wrongs, through poverty, through persecution, we have grown; and the great difference between us and you is that what you seek in surmises, we know. How can I put faith in you when you confess that you do not know what you worship?

Islands of Faith: Monasteries

Of all the institutions created by Christian Seekers, none was more influential in its time nor more obscured in the currents of later history than the monasteries. All the great world religions have found a place for the monk. Monasticism is generally based on a belief that the world is evil and that withdrawal will somehow open the way to higher truth. Withdrawal has commonly included celibacy (escape from physical passions and family ties), obedience to a superior (escape from the selfish will), and poverty (escape from the material world). The Hindus from earliest times had monasteries where monks shared a life of mortification and study of sacred texts. The Gautama Buddha elevated the Hindu doctrine of deliverance and withdrawal into the only path to Nirvana, and provided more than two hundred rules for his monks. In Tibet after the seventeenth century Buddhist monasteries became major state institutions. Before the Communist conquest there, monks were said to form a fifth of the population and the government was controlled by the chief abbot, the Dalai Lama.

The Old Testament religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—give monasticism a lesser role. In Judaism, withdrawal from the world to seek union with Jehovah would be blasphemous. Still, the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to record rules for the monastic life of the Essenes. Mohammed declared that there were no monks in Islam, and did not mention them in the Koran. Nor does monasticism seem to have been essential to Christian practice. We know of no Christian monks until at least two centuries after the death of Jesus. And withdrawal never became as integral to Christianity as it was to Buddhism. But Christianity developed its own fertile monastic institutions. Although only one form of Christian life, the monastic way attracted some of the most eloquent, persuasive, and constructive of the faithful, and it became a vehicle and catalyst of Western culture.

The story of Christian efforts at withdrawal dramatizes the problems man makes for himself by efforts to separate the quest for meaning from experience of the world. The monasteries that would shape Christian life in Europe in the Middle Ages found their unlikely origins in the Egyptian desert. The Church, which, as we have seen, organized and had given power to the faithful, created a new need for escape. Escape from the oppressive powers of the community into the sacrificing Christlike self, and from the burdens of the material world. And the ascetic spirit took the form of monasticism.

The ironies of this monastic search for meaning have made monks in the West an attractive target for criticism. They provided Edward Gibbon with the subject for one of his most vivid and acerbic chapters. “The Ascetics fled from a profane and degenerate world, to perpetual solitude, or religious society” but “soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised.” The monks with poverty and self-denial “trod the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness. . . . Time continually increased, and accidents could seldom diminish, the estates of the popular monasteries . . . and in the first century of their institution, the infidel Zosimus has maliciously observed that, for the benefit of the poor, the Christian monks had reduced a great part of mankind to a state of beggary.” For the worldly, Gibbon’s monastic history revealed the futility of the effort to flee from the community and the material world into the security of the self.

The legendary founder of Christian monasticism, usually called the first Christian monk, was a Coptic Christian, Saint Anthony of Egypt (c. 250-355), who had inherited wealth. He became an ascetic at the age of twenty and at thirty-five retired to solitude in the desert. For the next twenty years he remained in retreat in a ruined fortress, then instructed others who followed his example. So he set the style and suggested the name “hermit” (from the Greek word for desert) for those who (in Gibbon’s phrase) sought “lonely retreat in a natural or artificial desert.”

Saint Anthony’s own career was a parable of the impossibility of retreat. Athanasius’ classic life of Anthony recounted how he had read Jesus’ command to the rich young man to “go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Son of a wealthy landed peasant, Anthony had chosen the desert for his experiment because it was the proverbial habitat of the demons against whom the hermits would wage war. The “Demonology” of the New Testament was a rich and vivid inheritance from Jewish apocalyptic literature, recounting the many forms that Satan took to seduce mankind. Athanasius reported how Satan, having failed to tempt Anthony by the joys of the family he had given up, then took ingenious guises—monks with bread when he was fasting, women, beasts. All these Anthony repelled with prayer and the sign of the cross. These Christian efforts to ward off evil spirits led the emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363) to declare that “the quintessence of their theology [was] to hiss at demons and make the sign of the cross on their foreheads.” The struggles of Saint Anthony would enrich Western art with the visions of Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, and Max Ernst.

Anthony’s fame attracted visitors and disciples. During his lifetime others made their retreats into the desert, where they followed the tenets of Egyptian monasticism—manual labor, prayer, and reading Scripture. They favored the region around Luxor in Upper Egypt and areas west of the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt. Commonly they settled in huts near the cell of a seasoned saintly hermit. Many were illiterate peasants who had to memorize passages of Psalms and the New Testament for recitation and meditation. But they managed somehow, assisted by their literate fellows.

The fourth century saw a wide variety of ascetic experiments from Egypt and neighboring regions. The monk (from
monachos,
Greek for one who lives alone) sought isolation from ordinary social relations, but not necessarily from other ascetics. The retreating monk imposed chastity on himself along with a strict routine of prayer and Scripture reading. Scholars speculate that in the year 1000, when the population of the Byzantine Empire was about 15 million, the empire may have held more than 150,000 monks and some seven thousand monastic establishments. Emperors aiming to prohibit new monasteries recited the excessive numbers already in existence.