Origins of the Western Chasm

How did Christ’s revelation of the key of knowledge – man’s tendency to found religion and culture upon murder – so clearly recorded by the bible, become obscured in western culture, even within the Christian tradition? That it did so is clear both from the historical record of the middle ages, in which the church became complicit, even instrumental, in the murder of heretics and infidels, and in the modern period, when a highly educated nation could – in the name of German nationalism – rationally plan and undertake the genocide of the very nation through whom the key had been revealed.

To answer this question we need to summarise some history.

From the first to the early fourth century, Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean world, unified as never before by the Roman Empire whose greatest virtue was its tolerance, albeit imperfect, of religious plurality. Christianity was not entirely uniform in its beliefs, structures and practices, but grew by virtue of its appeal to those alienated from the confusion of paganism, and drawn to a life of self-discipline, charity and piety. The contradictory essence of the faith, and its ability to free the person from the vanities of the upward journey, survived, as is illustrated in the following description of Christians from the Epistle to Diognetus of the second or third century:

It is clear from this that the contradictory ethic of the original followers of Christ had survived his death by at least two centuries. ‘They love all men’ — this could stand as a summary of an ideal for all time. And the very orderliness of the lives of Christians made them successful in worldly terms also. By the early fourth century:

The Empowerment of the Church

The obvious solution was for the empire first to legalise Christianity, then to give it the status of state church. But what would happen to Christianity itself if Christians lost their status as a persecuted minority, and became not merely tolerated but privileged? This question was answered in the aftermath of the Edict of Milan of 313 CE, in which the Emperor Constantine declared the freedom of Christians to practise their faith throughout the empire. When he granted to the Christian clergy the same status, emolument and fiscal privilege as had attached to the pagan priests, clerical status soared and became itself a source of bitter conflict. Ammianus records that in 366 CE a disputed election for bishop of Rome left 137 dead in one church. He explained that the bishops of Rome are free from money worries, enriched by offerings from married women, riding in carriages, dressing splendidly, feasting luxuriantly – their banquets are better than imperial ones .³Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 77

It is clear from this that, as soon as it gained state patronage, Christianity itself had immediately embarked, especially among its clergy, upon the upward journey. This journey would take it to wealth and power which, by the eleventh century, would make the popes, in the view of their most sycophantic theologians, a supreme authority, uniting all temporal and spiritual power.

The Church Becomes Intolerant

Worse, far worse was the fact that this upward journey would, like all such journeys, involve new victims. The initial victims were the pagans. St Ambrose explained to the Emperor Valentinian I why the pagan high priest deserved no hearing:

The implication is clear. The separation of church and state, implicit and explicit in the teachings and death of Jesus, is to be abandoned immediately upon the church’s promotion to the status of state church. The Empire is to be Christian, which means that Christianity will accept the new pyramid of esteem which places Christianity in a dominant position. Pagans will suffer the proscription once enjoyed by the Christians, losing their temples and their freedom to worship. Christianity of the upward journey is to be almost as partisan as paganism had ever been, setting no new standard of tolerance. So, inevitably, Christian victims will be replaced by pagan ones, at the hand of a Christian Emperor. This is the beginning of the process whereby Christianity, in becoming powerful in the human sense, alienated itself from its own roots and inspiration. The alienation would never be complete, but this was not for want of trying.

St Augustine of Hippo and the Donatist Dissidents

What Ambrose did for the pagans, Augustine of Hippo would do for Christian dissidents. At first convinced that belief must be a free act, he pledged to a Donatist⁵The Donatists were Christian dissidents who believed that sacraments could not be valid if administered by a sinful cleric.bishop in 388 CE:

Yet he later abandoned this position and supported suppression:

Here we see in the mind that dominated the Middle Ages an administrator’s preference for ‘solid discipline’, which included confiscations, imprisonment and other forms of coercion, over freedom of belief – which Augustine, as a theologian, contrarily also verbally upheld. How innocuous the transition sounds, until we reflect that the Inquisition would grow naturally out of Augustine’s rethink on religious freedom, and the clerical presumption of a greater wisdom to be imposed for the greater good. The enormous reputation that Augustine won for his defence of the Christian establishment in The City of God is based, at best, upon clerical paternalism — the conviction that the clergy, patronised by the state, should determine religious policy and discourse.

It is argued on Augustine’s behalf that the doctrine of conscience evolved only slowly to Aquinas’ position that even an erroneous conscience was morally compelling, and that Augustine by contrast believed the opposite. Yet the fact remained that the church, which embraced the union of church and state for the next millennium and a half, became deeply ambivalent about human freedom.

New Vistas of the Expanding Church

The roots of this betrayal of the crucified Christ lie in the new vistas that lay before the hierarchy of the newly promoted church. For Augustine, the church was a house abuilding which would soon dominate the earth.

Two things are noteworthy here: Augustine’s vision of the final dominance of the church, and, by contrast, his contempt for the Donatists as frogs crying from the marsh. This ‘house’ of Augustine became Christendom. He is pivotal in the church’s transformation from minority fellowship before Constantine into a power structure determined to retain and expand its temporal power.

And so, of course, Augustine could watch unmoved as under oppression these Christian dissidents, these ‘frogs’ who stood in the way of his and the church’s upward journey, would commit mass suicide rather than yield. Their opposition to orthodoxy had placed them at the base of Augustine’s pyramid of esteem, and they paid, under the gaze of this great churchman, the price that Christ had paid, apparently fruitlessly.

The Argument for Intolerance

The means by which he argued himself into this position were important also. Writing to a Donatist who had argued that ‘no man should be compelled to that which is good’, Augustine insisted:

St Paul’s conversion is interpreted to the same purpose:

And here is how Augustine argued his church into systematic oppression:

 

A Fateful Exegesis

It would be a mistake to attribute gross insensitivity to this rhetorical lecturing of someone who, in real terms, would have been have been at the end of his tether. Augustine is here lecturing the church universal, using this instance of opposition to declare what he probably hoped would become its established policy. An exegesis based upon the dignity and forbearance of ‘Will you too go away?’ (John 6: 67) is rejected, quite arbitrarily, in favour of a plainly self-indulgent exegesis of the meaning of ‘Compel them to come in!’ in the parable of the banquet to which a wealthy man’s friends have refused to come (Luke 14:16-24) – as though ‘compel’ in that parable meant ‘coerce into lifetime submission‘, rather than ‘make sure the poor come to a banquet that the rich do not deserve’. Upon this misuse of a Gospel text turned the lives of countless thousands of humans in the centuries that followed. ‘Compel them to come in!’ became the very foundation of religious oppression and victimisation for over fifteen centuries.

It is worth noticing here also how Augustine argued that ‘Will you too go away?’ could only be the church’s policy in a time of relative weakness. A powerful church — one to which kings would bow the knee — had no need of such a policy. Augustine had been misled by the church’s upward journey to state power, and by his heady visions of what it would yet become – forgetting Jesus’ solemn instruction to the apostles never to ‘Lord it over’ anyone (Matt 20: 24-28). Here we find the root of the alienation of the modern mind from its Christian origins.

Thus the record shows that, at the first opportunity to demonstrate, from a position of power, its solidarity with all victims, the church leadership failed, and went on doing so. The church’s political upward journey peaked in 1076 CE when pope Gregory VII compelled Henry IV, whom he had excommunicated and deposed for investing bishops, to stand for three days in the snow at Canossa. However, the full horror of what could follow from a papacy wedded to political power was revealed at the end of the same century, when pope Urban II asked at Clermont in 1095:

Crusades

The solution to this, and to Europe’s own internal violence and land hunger, was the First Crusade, culminating in the taking of Jerusalem in 1099. Four centuries earlier, when the Caliph Umar had taken Jerusalem from the Christians, he had refused to pray in the church of the Holy Sepulchre lest he give offence to Christians and tempt his own followers to seize it. He had then signed a peace agreement which gave the Christians: ‘security for their lives, property, churches, and the crucifixes belonging to those who display and honour them … There shall be no compulsion in matters of faith. ’¹³Quoted in T. Jones & A. Areira, Crusades, p. 52

Now in the same Jerusalem in 1099, according to the Christian Fulcheron of Chartres: ‘Our Squires and footmen … split open the bellies of those they had just slain in order to extract from the intestines the gold coins which the Saracens had gulped down their loathsome throats while alive … With drawn swords our men ran through the city not sparing anyone, even those begging for mercy.’¹⁴Quoted in T. Jones & A. Areira, Crusades, p. 52

Virtually all in the city, women and children not excepted, perished. The Jewish population was exterminated by setting fire to the synagogue in which all had taken refuge. Those few Saracens who survived were employed in a manner foreshadowing the years 1942-45:

An estimated 40,000 Muslims and Jews died in a manner that can be explained only in terms of a complete suspension of reason and compassion – the hallmarks of the scapegoating violence which the bible and the crucifixion had so clearly exposed. And this was done at the behest of a Catholic pope and Christian clergy.

The Peak of Church Power in Europe

The church was not immediately abashed however. The apex of its intellectual inflation came with the ‘Polycraticus’ of John of Salisbury almost a century later (c. 1159):

This was the final intellectual fulfilment of the grand Augustinian vision, that climb to dominance that had begun in the matrix of the pagan Roman Empire. It was to produce yet further victims, however. In 1209, in pursuit of the Albigensians, ‘Arnold Aimery exulted to the pope that the capture of Beziers had been “miraculous”; and that these crusaders had killed 15,000 showing mercy neither to order, nor age nor sex”.’ ¹⁷Quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Penguin Books, 1976, P. 252

We do not need to labour the point by recounting all the horrors of the Middle Ages (although it is spiritually necessary for all educated Christians to revisit these events, as well as the passion of Christ). In defence of the church it can be said that heresy itself perpetrated atrocities, and that the church was reliant upon a secular power that often lacked discipline and order. However, the fact remains that in the era of the church’s greatest political and social influence, bloody and systematic murder was often done in the name of Christ, and that this was in the end a decisive factor in the alienation of western civilisation from the same Christ. In embarking, under Augustine’s influence, upon the upward journey to power, the church had effectively buried the truth that in the Christ of the downward journey lay the only solution to the problem of religious violence.

There is a key truth in all of this that needs to be emphasised. When someone is killed in the name of truth, the truth that is upheld is one which denies the right of that individual to intellectual and religious freedom. This is not Christian truth, but Christian falsehood, since Christ deliberately rejected the option of the use of force – and explicitly instructed the apostles never to ‘Lord it’ over anyone (Matt 20:25-29). In setting out to exterminate heresy of doctrine, Augustine, and all clerics of the same overbearing journey, were perpetrating a heresy of praxis which would teach the world to associate Christ with violence – the ultimate betrayal of his real purpose. No heresy of the word was ever greater than this.

Notes

1. Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, Ante-Nicene Fathers
2. Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 76
3. Ibid., p. 77
4. St Ambrose, Epistle XVIII, Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers
5. The Donatists were Christian dissidents who believed that sacraments could not be valid if administered by a sinful cleric.
6. St Augustine of Hippo, Epistle XXIII, p.L., XXXIII, 98
7. St Augustine of Hippo, p.L., XXXII, 632
8. St Augustine of Hippo, on Psalm XCVI, Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8
9. St Augustine of Hippo, Letter CLXXIII, Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, penguin Books, 1976, p. 244
13. Quoted in T. Jones & A. Areira, Crusades, p. 52
14. Ibid., p. 52
15. Ibid., p. 53
16. Polycraticus, 1. IV, p.L., 119, 516
17. Quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 252

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