Scattering the Proud - Chapter VI

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:

“They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evildoers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.”¹

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:

Christianity had become in many striking ways a mirror-image of the empire itself. It was catholic, universal, ecumenical, orderly, international, multi-racial and increasingly legalistic. It was administered by a professional class of literates who in some ways functioned like bureaucrats, and its bishops, like imperial governors, legates or prefects, had wide discretionary powers to interpret the law. It was becoming the Doppelganger of the empire. In attacking and weakening it, the empire was debilitating itself.²

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 .³

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:

But, says he, let the altars be restored to the images, and their ornaments to the shrines. Let this demand be made of one who shares in their superstitions; a Christian Emperor has learnt to honour the altar of Christ alone. Why do they exact of pious hands and faithful lips the ministry to their sacrilege? Let the voice of our Emperor utter the Name of Christ alone, and speak of Him only, Whom he is conscious of, for the King’s heart is in the hand of the Lord. Has any heathen Emperor raised an altar to Christ? While they demand the restoration of things which have been, by their own example they show us how great reverence Christian Emperors ought to pay to the religion which they follow, since heathen ones offered all to their superstitions.⁴

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 Donatist⁵bishop in 388 CE:

‘On our part let the terror cease which is caused by the civil powers … let us use reason to settle our differences …’⁶

Yet he later abandoned this position and supported suppression:

‘Because I had not yet seen either how much evil their (i.e. the Donatists’) lack of restraint would cause, or how effective solid discipline would be in changing them for the better.’⁷

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.

Tell it out among the nations, that the Lord reigneth from the wood (i.e. the cross): and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved. What testimonies of the building of the house of God! The clouds of heaven thunder out throughout the world that God’s house is being built; and the frogs cry from the marsh, ‘We alone are Christians’.⁸

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:

When you threw yourself the other day into a well, in order to bring death upon yourself, you did so no doubt with your free will. But how cruel the servants of God would have been if they had left you to the fruits of this bad will, and had not delivered you from that death! Who would not have justly blamed them? Who would not have justly denounced them as inhuman? And yet you, with your own free will, threw yourself into the water that you might be drowned. They took you against your will out of the water, that you might not be drowned. You acted according to your own will, but with a view to your destruction; they dealt with you against your will, but in order to your preservation. If, therefore, mere bodily safety behoves to be so guarded that it is the duty of those who love their neighhour to preserve him even against his own will from harm, how much more is this duty binding in regard to that spiritual health in the loss of which the consequence to be dreaded is eternal death!⁹

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

If a bad will ought always to be left to its own freedom, why was Paul not left to the free use of that most perverted will with which he persecuted the church? Why was he thrown to the ground that he might be blinded, and struck blind that he might be changed, and changed that he might be sent as an apostle, and sent that he might suffer for the truth’s sake such wrongs as he had inflicted on others when he was in error?¹⁰

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

I hear that you have remarked and often quote the fact recorded in the gospels, that the seventy disciples went back from the Lord, and that they had been left to their own choice in this wicked and impious desertion, and that to the twelve who alone remained the Lord said, ‘Will ye also go away?’ But you have neglected to remark, that at that time the church was only beginning to burst into life from the recently planted seed, and that there was not yet fulfilled in her the prophecy: ‘All kings shall fall down before Him; yea, all nations shall serve Him’; and it is in proportion to the more enlarged accomplishment of this prophecy that the church wields greater power, so that she may not only invite, but even compel men to embrace what is good. This our Lord intended then to illustrate, for although He had great power, He chose rather to manifest His humility. This also He taught, with sufficient plainness, in the parable of the Feast, in which the master of the house, after He had sent a message to the invited guests, and they had refused to come, said to his servants: ‘Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.’ And the servant said, ‘Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.’ And the Lord said unto the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.’ Mark, now, how it was said in regard to those who came first, ‘bring them in’; it was not said, ‘compel them to come in,’ by which was signified the incipient condition of the church, when it was only growing towards the position in which it would have strength to compel men to come in. Accordingly, because it was right that when the church had been strengthened, both in power and in extent, men should be compelled to come in to the feast of everlasting salvation, it was afterwards added in the parable, ‘The servant said, “Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.” And the Lord said unto the servants, “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in.” Wherefore, if you were walking peaceably, absent from this feast of everlasting salvation and of the holy unity of the church, we should find you, as it were, in the ‘highways’; but since, by multiplied injuries and cruelties, which you perpetrate on our people, you are, as it were, full of thorns and roughness, we find you as it were in the ‘hedges’, and we compel you to come in. The sheep which is compelled is driven whither it would not wish to go, but after it has entered, it feeds of its own accord in the pastures to which it was brought. Wherefore restrain your perverse and rebellious spirit, that in the true church of Christ you may find the feast of salvation.¹¹

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:

Can anyone tolerate that we (Europeans) do not even share equally with the Moslems the inhabited earth? They have made Asia, which is a third of the world, their homeland … They have also forcibly held Africa, the second portion of the world, for over 200 years. There remains Europe, the third continent. How small a portion of it is inhabited by us Christians.¹²

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. ’¹³

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.’¹⁴

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:

They also ordered that all the corpses of the Saracens should be thrown outside the city because of the fearful stench; for almost the whole city was full of their dead bodies. The Saracens who were still alive dragged the dead ones out in front of the gates, and made piles of them, as big as houses. Such a slaughter of pagans no one has ever seen or heard of; the pyres they made were like pyramids.¹⁵

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):

The prince therefore, as very many assert, is the public authority, and a certain image of the divine majesty on earth … Therefore, the prince receives this sword from the head of the church, since she herself would never wield the sword of force. However she has it and she uses it through the hand of the ruler on whom she confers the power of keeping persons within limits, though keeping for herself the authority of spiritual things in her pontiffs. Wherefore it is that the chief authority seems unsuited for the hand of a priest … Certainly, as is witnessed by the testimony of the Teacher of the Gentiles, he who blesses is greater than he who is blessed; and the authority with which the dignity has been conferred distinguishes the spiritual power insofar as it has been placed under it by God, namely, in those things which pertain to the salvation of the soul, and therefore in these things the spiritual power must be obeyed rather than the secular power. In those things which pertain to the civil welfare the secular authority must be obeyed rather than the spiritual authority, in accordance with Matthew 22: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, etc.,’ unless perhaps the secular power is joined to the spiritual power, as in the pope, who holds the summit of each power, namely spiritual and secular.¹⁶

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”.’ ¹⁷

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

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

Chapter VII – Downward Journeys

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Lumen Gentium 37

The right of all Catholics to speak and to be heard!

Scattering the Proud – Chapter VI