Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

10

Pagans and Christians, Mediterranean and Germanic Traditions

The Roman achievement was colossal. The Romans themselves were aware of it and it is no surprise that they came to believe in Roma Aeterna, the eternal city. But, as every schoolchild knows, Rome was not eternal. ‘The best-known fact about the Roman Empire,’ says Arthur Ferrill, ‘is that it declined and fell.’¹

This is due, in part at least, to what is probably the best-known modern work of history, referred to at the end of the last chapter, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That work is dated now, as scholars have built on Gibbon’s ideas. For example, one recent German title, almost seven hundred pages long, lists no fewer than 210 factors that may have helped cause the decline.² Which doesn’t take us forward very much, other than to underline the fact that there is now no consensus about the main causes. Gibbon, on the other hand, and despite the fact that his book appeared in six volumes from 1776 to 1788, had a simpler view of Rome. He identified two weaknesses – one internal, one external – which in his view above all others brought about the decline of the western empire. ‘The internal weakness was Christianity, and the external one barbarism.’³ This view still finds support. Again, as Arthur Ferrill has pointed out, in the last decade of the fourth century, one emperor, Theodosius, still ruled over an empire larger than that of the great Augustus, and commanded a massive army. Fewer than eighty years later, both empire and army in the west had been wiped out. Or, as the French historian André Piganiol put it, ‘Roman civilization did not die a natural death. It was killed.’⁴

There can be no doubt that in Europe the change from the world of antiquity to the medieval world was characterised above all by the spread of Christianity. This is one of the most momentous changes in ideas that helped shaped the world as we know it. In tracking this change, there are two things to be kept in mind. We need to explain exactly how and in what order this change occurred, but at the same time we need to show why Christianity proved so extraordinarily popular.⁵ To answer these questions we need to return to the creation of the gospels, a discussion already begun in Chapter 7.

In the New Testament, Judaea is described as the homeland of the new faith, with a mother church located in Jerusalem. There is no reference to contemporary political events, no mention for example of the Jewish revolt, or the siege and destruction of Jerusalem.⁶ Traditionally, this silence has been ascribed to the fact that the revolt had no significance for the church, because the early Christians had already removed themselves from the doomed city, and migrated to Pella, in Transjordan. For centuries no one queried this view because, in the first place, it fitted perfectly with the idea of Jesus as a divine figure who would not involve himself in politics and because the Jewish historian, Josephus, in The Jewish War, written in the 70s, explained that the revolt was due mainly to a party of fanatical Zealots who ‘goaded a peaceable people in fatal revolt’.⁷ This traditional picture is now widely doubted. In the first place, Pella never features in the scriptures as a centre of Christianity. Both St Paul’s epistles and the Acts of the Apostles confirm that the mother church of Jerusalem was the ‘accepted source of faith and authority’ to which all adherents had to submit. Therefore, the complete silence about this mother church after AD 70 needs to be explained. This is where the new scholarship comes in.

The starting point is the gospel of St Mark, which has been the subject of much reinterpretation, in particular two ambiguous statements. The first is when the Pharisees (see here) tried to trap Jesus about his attitude to Rome, when he famously replied, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ Traditionally, Jesus’ answer is seen as neat footwork and that, implicitly at least, he condones the idea that the Jews pay the tax. The alternative scholarship, however, starts from the point that the gospel of St Mark is scarcely a long book, so this episode was clearly important to the author. Since it was originally written in Greek, in Rome, around AD 65–75, it is now assumed that it was phrased so as to ‘meet the needs’ of Gentile Christians in Italy. This was very early on in Christianity and the faithful were worried about their status. On this reading, Jesus’ attitude towards the payment of tribute to Rome was vital to their own well-being. This was because one of the main causes of Roman pressure, which led to the Jewish revolt in 66, was the non-payment of the tribute.⁸ The founder of Zealotism, Judas, was, like Jesus, from Galilee. The suspicion now is, therefore, that what Jesus actually meant was the exact opposite of what the gospel of St Mark makes him say – namely, that the tribute should not be paid. That meaning was changed, because otherwise the situation of the early Christians in Rome would have been untenable. But it casts an interesting light on a second phrase in St Mark. This is when he names one of the twelve Apostles as ‘Simon the Canaanean’. Gentiles in Rome in the first century AD would have had no idea what this was supposed to mean without elaboration. In fact, Simon was also known in Judaea as ‘Simon the Zealot’. The gospel thus covers up the fact that one of the Apostles, chosen by Jesus, was a terrorist against Rome. As S. G. F. Brandon observes, ‘It was too dangerous to be admitted.’⁹ Against this view, other scholars maintain that the number of Christians in Rome was too small to bring about such a momentous change in the gospel, and that there were countless parts of the New Testament that would make no sense to Gentiles (e.g., circumcision) which were not changed.

These episodes, and their interpretation, are vital for an understanding of early Christianity. When put alongside the New Testament, in particular the Acts of the Apostles, we see that the alternative scholarship explains what has been called ‘the Jewish infancy of Christianity’. We cannot forget that the original disciples were all Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel. Although his death had been a shock, they still thought he would return and redeem Israel. Their main job, as they saw it, was to convince their fellow Jews that Jesus really was the Messiah and that they should all prepare for the Second Coming. And so they continued to live as Jews: they observed the Law and worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem. They were led by James, the brother of Jesus, and won a number of converts, not least because James had a reputation for the zealous practice of Judaism. (So zealous, that he too was executed by the high priest, who was concerned to control revolutionary elements in Israel.¹⁰)

Furthermore, while these events were taking place in Jerusalem, between the Crucifixion and the revolt, Paul had become active outside Israel. Paul, a tent-maker from Tarsus, west of Adana in modern Turkey, was not one of the original disciples of Jesus. Unlike Christ he was a city man, who was famously converted, around AD 33, ‘on the road to Damascus’, when he had a vision of Christ (Acts 9:1–9). (He had a chronic ailment, epilepsy being suspected.¹¹) Paul had conceived his own version of Christianity and saw it as his duty to spread these ideas outside Israel in the Graeco-Roman world. His conversion, incidentally, should not be exaggerated: Paul was a Pharisee, and therefore a fervent believer in resurrection: so far as he was concerned, he was converting from one Jewish sect to another.¹² There can be little doubt that there were, at the time, rival versions of Christianity. In his second epistle to the Corinthians, for example, Paul says this: ‘For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, who we did not preach, or if ye receive a different spirit, which ye did not receive, or a different gospel, which ye did not accept, ye will do well to bear with him.’ Elsewhere he refers to his rivals as ‘the chiefest apostle’, and to James, Cephas (Peter) and John. Because some of Paul’s ideas threatened the credibility and authority of the Jewish-Christian disciples in Israel he was denounced and, in 59 or thereabouts, arrested and taken to Rome (because he was a Roman citizen).¹³ Had the revolt in 66–70 never occurred, the chances are that history would have heard nothing more of Paul. But the revolt did occur, Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed and although vestiges of Jewish-Christianity lingered, for a century, it was never again the force it had been and eventually died out. Instead, Paul’s version survived, with the result that there was a massive change in the character of the religion. What had been a Jewish Messianic sect now became a universal salvation religion propagated in the Hellenistic world of the Mediterranean – in other words, among Gentiles. Paul confirms his independence by specifically asserting that God had revealed ‘his Son to me, that I might preach among the Gentiles’.

Paul’s differences in belief, compared with the disciples in Jerusalem, lay mainly in two areas. One, as we have seen, was his conviction that he was to preach among Gentiles. To begin with, this may have been special groups of non-Jews, sympathisers with the Israelite tradition but who refused circumcision, and were known as ‘god-fearers’ (Acts 13:26).¹⁴ Allied to this was Paul’s belief that Jesus was not just a martyr, but divine, and that his death had a more profound meaning – profound for those outside Israel and profound historically speaking.¹⁵ Paul’s aim, here, according to Christopher Rowland, cannot be understood without reminding ourselves of his Hellenistic background, in particular the idea of a salvation-god and the fallen state of man. The classic example of a saviour god, it will be recalled, was the cult that worshipped the Egyptian deity, Osiris. Followers of this god believed that he had once died and risen from the dead and that, through ritual worship, they could emulate his fate. Paul has also to be seen against a background of the many Gnostic sects, some of which had adopted Platonist ideas and taught that every human was a compound of an immortal soul ‘imprisoned’ in a physical (and mortal) body. Originally, the Gnostics said, the soul had fallen from its ‘abode of light and bliss’ and descended to the material world. In becoming ‘incarnated’ in this world, the soul had been ensnared by the demonic forces that inhabited earth (and other planets) and could be rescued only by a ‘proper knowledge’ (gnosis) of its nature. It was the object of gnosis to release the soul from its imprisonment in the body, so that it could return to its original abode.¹⁶ Paul’s Christianity was thus an amalgam of three elements: Jewish-Christianity (Jesus’ belief in a saviour-God and saviour-Messiah), pagan-saviour-gods and Gnostic ideas about the fallen state of man. The latter two ideas were anathema to the Jerusalem Christians, as was Paul’s view that the Law of Moses had been superseded by Jesus’ arrival.¹⁷ When Paul travelled to Jerusalem to negotiate these beliefs with the Jerusalem Christians he was set upon by a mob. He was rescued by Roman soldiers, whereupon he asserted his right as a Roman citizen to be tried before the imperial tribunal (he would almost certainly have been lynched in Jerusalem). This trial appears to have taken place in the year 59, though the verdict isn’t known.

Paul’s ideas caught on because they seemed to account for what had happened. In Jewish tradition a cataclysm would precede the coming of the Kingdom and what was the sacking of Jerusalem, if it wasn’t a cataclysm? These events were seen as the forerunner of the Messiah’s return and the end of the world.¹⁸ Paul himself shared some of these views – for example, he never bothered to date his epistles, as if time didn’t matter. But of course, the Messiah didn’t reappear, the Second Coming didn’t materialise and, gradually, the early Christians had to adjust. They did not abandon their hopes of apocalypse, but that aspect of their belief system gradually assumed less importance. And this brought about another innovation of Paul. Hitherto, Jewish-Christianity had accepted the basically Jewish view of history, that time would culminate with the coming of the Messiah. But for Christians Jesus had come. If his incarnation was part of God’s plan for mankind, then time must be seen as having two phases, one that lasted from the Creation to the birth of Jesus, the preparation of Israel for the coming of Christ, which was documented by the Jewish scriptures; and a second phase from the time of Jesus forward. Paul had referred to the writings of the Jews as the Old Covenant, or Testament, and he now spoke of Jesus instituting a new covenant.¹⁹ He saw Jesus as a saviour, a path for people to follow, by which they might obtain eternal life. In this way, Christianity became a religion of Gentiles and actively sought converts, as the only true way to salvation.

Paul also provided early Christianity with much of its ‘colouring’ around the edges. He condemned idol worship, sexuality and, implicitly, the practice of philosophy.²⁰ In Rome in the early years, Christians often paraded their ignorance and lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride.²¹ Finally, we must note that this form of Christianity, Paul’s kind, emerged in a Roman world, with Roman law and surrounded by Roman – pagan – gods. (Paganus = villager.) Loyalty to Rome, very important in the imperial context, meant acceptance of the divinity of the emperor and acceptance of the state gods, which were much older than Christianity. Tacitus (c. 55–116) was just one who dismissed Christianity as ‘a new superstition’.

In Rome the secular and religious life had always been intertwined. Each city in the empire was ‘protected’ by its own god and the buildings in ancient Rome, from baths to circuses, were graced with statues of the gods, with altars and small shrines. Augustus was very concerned with the religious life and during his reign restored eighty-two temples which had fallen into disrepair and authorised the building of another thirteen.²² But no one in the pagan world expected religion to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People looked to philosophy for that kind of understanding. Instead, Romans worshipped the pagan gods to seek help during crisis, to secure divine blessing for the state, and to experience ‘a healing sense of community with the past’.²³ The Christian god seemed to educated pagans as primitive. Whereas it made sense for a great emperor and warrior such as Alexander the Great to be a god, or the son of god, to worship a poor Jew who had died a criminal’s death in a remote corner of the empire made no sense.²⁴ Although there were many gods which the pagans worshipped, and shrines everywhere (‘The shrine is the very soul of the countryside’, said one writer), in practice three cults in Rome were more important than the others. These were worship of the emperor, of Isis, and of Mithras.

Julius Caesar was deified posthumously after his death in 44 BC, the first emperor to receive this accolade. Being related to Caesar, Augustus openly referred to himself as the ‘son of [the] god’.²⁵ He too was deified after his death, as was his successor, Tiberius. His successor, Caligula, deified himself during his lifetime. The pagans had a tradition of free thought and citizens were free to vary in the literalness with which they viewed the emperor as god. In the western part of the empire, it was often the emperor’s numen, a general divine power, attaching to the rank, which was worshipped. In the east, on the other hand, it was often the man himself who was believed to be a god.

Many worshipped Apollo, the predominantly solar deity, which was encouraged by Augustus but also popular was the cult of Isis and Serapis (originally Osiris), which had been first conceived in Egypt. Serapis was identified with the divine Bull, Apis, which Osiris turned into after death, and this allowed him to be linked to Zeus, Poseidon and Dionysus, all of whom were associated with bulls in the Middle East. Isis was the mistress of magic and the bringer of civilisation to the world. She was a saviour-goddess, and reminiscent of the Great Goddess of earlier ages.²⁶ Mithraism was an offshoot of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia. The emperor Commodus (180–192) worshipped Mithras and the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius founded a Mithraic temple on the Vatican hill. This cult appears to have begun in Syria around AD 60 and was brought to Rome by soldiers: it remained a religion for soldiers, with no place for women in its rites.²⁷ There was an elaborate, and fearsome, initiation ceremony and seven grades of membership. Followers were called sacrati, ‘consecrated ones’, and the practices included a communion meal. Possibly for this reason, many Christians saw the Mithras cult as a debased and blasphemous version of their own faith. One of the central ideas of Mithraism was the dualistic notion that there is abroad in the world a perennial battle between good and evil, light and darkness. This too was shared with Christianity and contrasted strongly with the rest of pagan ideas, which saw the natural world as either basically good, or neutral. The feast day of Mithras was 25 December (this was a world without weekends, remember, when feast days were the only holidays). Although these figures were the dominant ones, it was not in the Romans’ nature to conceive a monotheistic religion. They were more interested in finding links between their gods and the gods of other people. This made them tolerant.

Besides the three main cults, there was a pagan institution that was not paralleled in either Judaism or Christianity. This was the oracle. As in classical Greece, so in Rome: oracles were shrines, often much more than shrines, such as caves, where, it was believed, the gods spoke. Normally, an elaborate ritual was associated with this, with a dramatic and mysterious build-up, often at night. The gods spoke through individuals (the ‘prophet’) to whom the pilgrims put questions. Sometimes, the prophet was a local priest, sometimes he or she was chosen from among the pilgrims themselves. Sometimes there were two: one made inchoate noises, and the other turned them into verse. The best known were the oracles to Apollo at Didyma and Claros, both on the Ionian coast of modern Turkey. Robin Lane Fox tells us that pilgrims to Claros came from forty-eight cities stretching from modern Bulgaria to Crete and Corinth.²⁸

Judaism and Christianity differed from pagan religions in the important respect that they offered ‘revelation’ rather than mystery. Each of the pagan cults offered a secret experience, initiation by way of ceremony, leading to a specific experience and message. Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, offered a general truth, applicable and available to all, and were quite open about it.²⁹

Christianity had been a separate religion from Judaism since the time of Paul. Following the Jewish revolt, and the destruction of Jerusalem, in 66–70, it had taken the Jews about twenty years to reorganise themselves. This they had done by abolishing the Temple priesthood and its sacrifices, replacing it with a rabbinical structure and, in the process, excommunicating all Christians.

Many of the most basic Christian ideas were anathema in Rome. For example, the idea of the spiritual worth of the poor was revolutionary. In the same way heresy was a foreign notion. People were free in Rome to belong to as many cults as they liked, though atheism was frowned upon. (Atheism, as we mean it, didn’t exist. ‘Atheists’ were Epicureans, who denied the gods’ providence, though not their existence.³⁰) The implacable nature of the early Christians can be gauged from the behaviour of one group, who sold themselves into slavery in order to ransom fellow Christians who had been imprisoned.³¹ The fact that women played a conspicuous role in the early Christian congregations was also at odds with Roman practice. But the greatest difference between the ideas of pagans and Jews on the one hand, and Christians on the other, lay in their attitudes to death. Pagans and Jews died and even if they believed in some sort of ‘afterlife’ – the Islands of the Blessed, for example – they did not envisage full bodily resurrection here on earth. The Christians did. The Second Coming might no longer be seen as imminent, but there was no doubt that, one day, resurrection in the full sense would occur.³²

At that time, however, the empire was suffering on several fronts. There was a trade recession, the birth rate was falling, the Goths were threatening across the Danube and, to cap it all, the army returning from the east in 165–167 had brought with it the plague. This situation was made worse in the years that followed, as Rome allowed migrating tribespeople from outside the empire to join the army and, in consequence, to settle inside the boundaries (limes). Control of many units soon passed to able barbarians and, since the army played a major role in electing emperors, this diversity and instability was reflected in politics. Of the twenty emperors between 235 and 284 all but three were assassinated.³³ These circumstances were propitious for new ideas to flourish. One was the rise of Neoplatonism, brought from Alexandria to Rome by Ammonius (fl. 235), Plotinus (204–275) and Porphry (fl. 270). They taught the ultimate unity of all religions, preaching the doctrine of ‘emanation’ from the spiritual Unity, the One, to the material multiplicity of the world. The Neoplatonists were rivalled by Mani (d. 276), who taught the essential evilness of the material world and the necessity for believers to continually purify themselves, in order to approach closer and closer to the eternal Light.³⁴ Mani believed that each human being had an angelic Twin, watching over and guarding him or her. Particles of light and goodness were trapped in evil matter, and both eating meat and working the soil were anathema. Stories were told about how vegetables had once wept to Mani, as they were about to be cut, and palm trees complained when they were about to be pruned.³⁵ When the Elect died, they went to the kingdom of light, whereas disbelievers went to hell at the ending of the world. This, the Future Moment, would follow Jesus’ Second Coming, when the world would collapse in a massive fire lasting 1,468 years.

With orthodox and even heretical Christians unable and/or unwilling to accept the traditional practices of Rome, and with so many of their own ways at variance with established ritual behaviour, their faith and their loyalty naturally came under suspicion. Although the early church was not consistently suppressed (by 211 there were bishops around the Mediterranean and as far afield as Lyons), there were emperors who were very cruel in the number of martyrs they created. Given the apocalyptic view of the early Christians, this only added to their sense of mission and drama (virgins had sixty times the reward of ordinary Christians in heaven, it was affirmed, but martyrs received rewards a hundredfold).³⁶ And so, when Constantine became emperor in AD 312, and the fortunes of Christianity changed, persecution being replaced by favour, there was a great sense of triumph.³⁷ By this stage a canon of scriptures had emerged, which confirmed for the faithful that the ‘divine purpose for mankind’ had two phases, and that the slow but steady triumph of the Christian doctrine was part of that purpose.

This takes us back to the new view of time. Traditionally, time had been seen as moving in cycles. This was reinforced by the movements of the stars, each of which had a cycle, and many people felt that once these cycles were understood the mystery of the heavens would be revealed. But a cyclical view of time in a sense made history meaningless (it just repeated itself), whereas Christians now came to see time as a linear process, according to God’s will. This meant that history moved towards a definite end, or teleos. The birth of Christ was the focal point in this linear process, but it now became the purpose of Christianity to understand the role of the incarnation as a way to help the salvation of all humans on earth. The early Christian writers were not backward in making the most of this situation. For example, Julius Africanus (c. 160–240) argued that the world would last for six thousand years. According to his calculations the birth of Christ had occurred exactly 5,500 years after the Creation and therefore, by his lifetime, there were about three hundred years waiting before God accomplished his divine purpose. In this way, Christianity was set apart. In the creation myths of other religions, there were only vague references to events that occurred in an indeterminate and remote past. But Christianity was specific; for Christians their God had intervened in history, proving he had a purpose, and that he was the true god.

These ideas had great appeal, the more so for the poorer slaves and labourers of the Roman empire. The reasons were obvious enough: Christianity argued that ‘suffering is noble’ and offered a better world in the future, with the Second Coming imminent. This was most attractive for people at the bottom of the ladder and it was among the urban masses, rather than the Roman aristocracy, or the upper ranks of the army, for example, that the new religion caught on. (The pagans did not, of course, just give way. The emperor Maximin Daia introduced anti-Christian schoolbooks, which pictured Jesus as a slave and a criminal.³⁸)

Not even the most passionate Christian, however, could wait for the Second Coming for ever, and other devices were needed. One was provided by persecution. To begin with, as has been noted, the Romans were fairly tolerant, and required only that conquered peoples recognise Roman gods in the same spirit as their own. But they grew less tolerant after the inauguration of emperor-worship. Like many ancient peoples they believed that the continued prosperity of the state depended on continuing favour of the gods. Christians did more than refuse to worship the Roman gods, and the Roman emperor: the very idea of salvation, or a Second Coming, implied the overthrow of the state by somebody. That was bad enough but when they refused to hold public office or to undergo military service, that was a more direct affront. Moreover, in their services they did not distinguish between slaves and masters and that was an equally serious social flaw. They did pray to their God for the ‘welfare of the state’ but it wasn’t enough and, slowly, imperial policy turned against the Christians.³⁹ First, the emperor Trajan made it a capital offence to fail to pay homage to the emperor. Then, in 248, after Christians had refused to take part in the celebrations to mark the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome, they became especially unpopular and Decius decreed that everyone must appear before a magistrate to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. At this time, according to some estimates, Christians comprised as many as 10 per cent of the population and so the population of martyrs was especially high. But the Christians counter-argued that the reason for the obvious decline in the empire, which was evident to all at the time, lay in the fact that the Romans worshipped the wrong gods. This began to cut some ice with the upper classes and forced both Valerian and Diocletian to attempt to root out Christianity completely, by threatening senators with loss of office for life, if they converted, by purging the army, by destroying churches and burning books.

By the third century, a curious cross-over time had been reached, when ‘the desire for martyrdom was almost out of control’.⁴⁰ By now Christians deliberately flouted Roman practices – they insulted magistrates and destroyed effigies of the pagan gods, in an attempt to emulate the suffering of Jesus. Persecution was what they sought. ‘For suffering one hour of earthly torture, it was believed, the martyr would gain an eternity of immortal bliss.’⁴¹ These were (depending on your point of view) fine sentiments. But in fact the crucial change, from persecuted religion to the official faith of the empire, came about not for any fundamental change in philosophy in Rome but because one emperor, Constantine (306–337), found Christianity more practically useful. In 312, at the battle of the Milvian bridge, outside Rome, Constantine faced the usurper, Maxentius. Constantine was advised by his Christian supporters that if he sought support of their God, he would win. In some accounts he is reported to have had a vision in which he was instructed to have his troops paint a looped cross, , on their shields.⁴² He agreed, and his victory was decisive. Thereafter, he allowed all faiths in the empire to worship their own gods and, most importantly, removed the legal constraints that had been directed at Christians. From then until his own deathbed conversion, Constantine believed that he was guided by Christ. In frescoes he was depicted with his head surrounded by the nimbus of a saint.

He made other changes. The observation of Sunday became obligatory, at least in cities, and he initiated a fashion for collecting relics, to install in shrines. No less important, he transferred the capital of the empire away from Rome to the new city of Constantinople, which was founded in 330 on the ancient site of Byzantium. This city had once been protected by the goddess Hecate, but Constantine looted pagan shrines in the Aegean to enrich his new base, and had built a massive statue of himself, holding an orb, symbol of world dominion, in which was embedded a fragment of what was claimed to be the True Cross, discovered by his mother.⁴³ Christianity was widely spread by now – as much as half the population in Greece, Turkey (Asia Minor then), Egypt and Edessa (towards Armenia). But it extended, in pockets, to Abyssinia, Spain, Gaul and Persia, to Mauretania in Africa and Britain in the north of Europe. Its success was helped by the fact that its growing confidence enabled it to relax a little and absorb pagan practices where this was felt to serve its interests. Besides the adoption of the feast day of Mithras, 25 December, as the date of the Nativity, the very word ‘epiphany’ was a pagan concept, used when gods or goddesses revealed themselves to worshippers, as often as not in dreams.⁴⁴ The terms ‘vicar’ and ‘diocese’ were taken from the emperor’s administrative reforms. The original ‘Sunday observance’ was conceived as a day of respect not for Jesus but for the sun. In 326 Constantine gave the shrine of Helios Apollo in Nero’s circus to the Christians for the foundation of their new church of St Peter. The shaven heads of Christian priests were taken from the practices of pagan priests in Egypt and when Mary was first honoured as the Mother of God, at Ephesus in 431, the church dedicated to her was constructed on the site of the temple of Diana.⁴⁵ The incense used at the dedication ceremony was the same as that used to worship Diana.

From the early 340s comes the first Christian text which demanded the ‘total intolerance’ of pagan worship. Between 380 and 450 paganism shrank fast. In particular, after the 380s nothing more is heard of the gymnasium. This was partly to do with the declining fortunes of the empire: city authorities could no longer afford to fund the civic schools. But it was also due to Christian attitudes. ‘ “The physical side of education languished in a Christian environment”: in the cities, it had been linked with naked exercise, paganism and consenting homosexuality. The eventual “collapse of the gymnasia, the focal point of Hellenism, more than any other single event brought in the Middle Ages”.’⁴⁶ In 529 the emperor Justinian closed the ancient school of philosophy at Athens, ‘the last bastion of intellectual paganism’.⁴⁷ By 530, when the same man founded a new city in north Africa, the art there was totally Christian, all the pagan elements incorporated into a new iconography.

There was one final reason for the success of Christianity. People thought that religious solidarity would help the declining fortunes of the Roman state. In turn this implied a crucial change in the organisation of society, a change that, as we have already indicated, would shape the Middle Ages. This was the rise of the priesthood.

In the early days, the main idea sustaining the Church was ‘the gift of the spirit of Jesus’. It was believed that the Apostles had received this spirit from Jesus: this is why Peter spoke in tongues, and Paul had visions. In turn the Apostles passed the spirit on to the early Church leaders in Rome: these ‘presbyters’ were distinguished from their congregations in that they sat at a table, while the others stood. But the most important development, what made the priesthood a class apart, was the emergence of the bishops. The term ‘bishop’ is Greek, originally a word meaning ‘overseer’. In the early Church, congregations were grouped into colleges of seven, and the bishop was the chief of the seven presbyters.⁴⁸ Out of this, and combined with the ‘gift of the spirit’, there grew the idea that only bishops could mediate between Christians and their God, only they could interpret the scriptures.

To begin with there were bishops in all the great Mediterranean cities – Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria, Carthage and Rome – and they were all more or less equal in power and influence. They would occasionally gather in councils, or synods, to settle matters of doctrine, such as whether they had the power to forgive sin. This had the effect of making the bishops a rank apart from the rest of the Church. Celibacy was not yet an issue but a life apart, dedicated to meditation and study-reading, was becoming the fashion for priests. A final factor in the build-up of the priesthood was Constantine’s decision to grant to the Christian clergy the benefit that had been granted to pagan priests – freedom from taxation and conscription in the army. A later emperor, Gratian (375–383), also freed priests from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, placing them instead under the bishops’ courts in all cases except criminal matters. Given that bishops were also allowed to receive bequests, the priesthood had become, by the fifth century, a privileged class: they were rich, they were firmly in charge of church doctrine, and they were very largely a law unto themselves. As one historian put it, the priesthood had ‘acquired those political, economic and intellectual privileges which were to make it for a thousand years always an important and sometimes a dominant element in western society’.⁴⁹

The rise of Rome as a pre-eminent centre of Christianity was by no means a foregone conclusion. In the early days, if anyone was more important, it was the bishop of Antioch, but Carthage and Alexandria also ranked high. The bishops in each place were addressed as ‘Patriarch’. But Rome was capital of the empire, and both Peter and Paul, according to tradition, had been there. So the ‘spirit of Jesus’ was especially strong along the Tiber. Even so, Clement, the first bishop of Rome (discounting Peter), did not claim to be above the other bishops. Not until the time of Victor (fl. c. 190–198) did this change, when he tried to excommunicate a number of bishops in the east who refused to accept his decision over the dating of Easter.⁵⁰ At the first ecumenical council, in 325, Rome was said to have more prestige than anywhere else, but not more power. But by the time of the Council of Serdica (modern Sofia in Bulgaria), which was held in 343, the delegates agreed that when certain ecclesiastical matters were disputed, they would be referred to Rome.

Rome’s authority was never fully accepted in the east, of course, but a number of enterprising popes made Rome more and more of a focal point during the decline of the empire, when powers were leaching away from the emperors. (‘Pope’, Latin Papa, is of course the equivalent of Patriarch = Father.) Pope Damasus (366–384) drained the hill where his villa stood (this is now the Vatican) and took up where Constantine left off, collecting relics of the martyrs. He also renovated the tombs of the early Christians. Rome, therefore, became a spectacle for Christian pilgrims in a way that Antioch or Carthage, for example, never did. Pope Leo I (440–461) identified (that is to say, invented) the doctrine of the ‘Apostolic Succession’, specifically quoting Matthew 16: 18 – ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ The gift of the spirit also came in useful here. Leo prevailed on the emperor of the time to insist that Rome’s authority was supreme throughout the empire and was able to do so because of two spectacular diplomatic victories of his own – first, in 451, when he persuaded the Huns to withdraw from Rome; and second, in 455, when he saved the city from the Vandals.⁵¹

But early Christianity was not only about the development of the ‘sacred hierarchy’, the priesthood. The other dominant idea of the early years was the notion of monasticism, the idea that full spirituality is best achieved by renouncing the world and all its temptations.⁵²

Monasticism, as we shall see, was not only a Western notion. But, in the Mediterranean area, it was born in a hollow known as Wadi Natrun, or the valley of Soda, ‘about a day’s camel journey west of the Nile delta’.⁵³ As early as the middle of the second century a group of hermits began to gather there. By the following century both men and woman from all over Christendom were drawn to the wadi, led by a hermit known as Ammon. Each hermit would build a two-roomed cell, hewn from the raw rock (this usually took about a year). After that they lived mostly by weaving rugs which merchants bought from them and sold in the markets of Alexandria. According to one estimate there were 5,000 hermits in the valley of Soda by the end of the fourth century. ‘The attraction lay partly in the fact that, with the decline of persecution, and the opportunities it offered for martyrdom, the temptations of the daemons that were supposed to inhabit the Wadi Natrun were the next best thing.’⁵⁴ ‘Hermit’ derives from the Greek word for ‘desert’.

In contrast to the hermits of the desert, the first community of monks was established very early in the fourth century, some 600 miles further up the Nile, at Tabennesi. Here, Pachomius (c. 292–346) conceived the first set of rules for a way of life removed from the world. Each monk had his own hut and his time was divided into two main segments – learning the New Testament by heart, and an occupation which was assigned to him.⁵⁵ As a result of all this, the first monks in Rome were known as ‘Egyptians’. But the idea of retreat had grown popular and monasteries in the west began to be established at the beginning of the fourth century. The most influential, by far, was that founded by Benedict of Nursia (d. 543), who devised a form of living together that had a great influence on the intellectual life of Europe. (The period 550 to 1150 has often been called ‘the Benedictine centuries’.)⁵⁶ His monastery was built at Monte Cassino, on a hill some hundred miles south of Rome. It took Benedict a long while to prepare his Rules for Monks which, after a number of painful experiments, aimed to provide the ideal religious life. He had tried the hermit approach, but found it lonely and even psychologically dangerous.⁵⁷ His community was conceived as entirely self-contained, economically and politically as well as spiritually. Outside interference was allowed only when scandal threatened. The abbot was elected by the monks for life and his authority was absolute. But he had a duty to feed his charges and keep them healthy. The ‘black monks’ (from the colour of their habit) were to live in silence and ‘abstraction’ from the world and admittance wasn’t easy. To begin with, all applicants were kept waiting – refused entrance – for five days. Only if they were prepared to wait were they admitted, and only then as a novice, who was kept under the protection and guidance of an established monk for a full year. Only after that time, and if the novice still wished to continue, was he granted ‘stability’, as full membership was called. And membership was very different from the Wadi Natrun, being communal in every respect. Men worked, prayed, ate and slept together and took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Their duties filled every hour of the day and services were held throughout the day and night.

Without meaning to, Benedict had created an institution that turned out to be perfectly suited to the early Middle Ages. Amid and after the fall of the empire, when the cities declined and the world became less organised and more localised, when schools and other civic functions decayed, monasteries – located far from the cities – remained strong and offered a lead in education, economic, religious and even political matters. The monks often became intercessors with the deity and in consequence monasteries were endowed by royalty and the aristocracy alike. They enjoyed immense riches and abbots became local powers of great influence.

Christianity was a new system of belief but it was also much more. Between the fourth and sixth centuries, in Europe mainly, its priestly elite took over many of the civil, political and even legal functions of the declining empire. Useful as this was, it determined the basic character of the Middle Ages, as a gap opened up between the clergy and the laity, who were no longer allowed to preach in the churches (there would come a time when they were not even allowed to read the Bible). Simultaneously, the Church offered an escape from the harsh rigours of everyday life into an ‘otherworld’. This idea in particular gave the clergy great control over the laity.

This authority of the clergy was reinforced by the development of the scriptures and the liturgy. In the very beginning, Jesus had written nothing. But gradually a canon of written works was established. The first two were in Aramaic, one known as The Sayings of Jesus and the other as A Book of Testimonies. These comprised mainly excerpts from the Old Testament which appeared to confirm that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. It was, in other words, a text aimed at Jews rather than Gentiles. There was a third work, called The Teaching of the Lord by the Twelve Apostles, which was a guide on how to organise the early church, and on the correct form of worship.⁵⁸ The very idea of holy scriptures was a Jewish idea, and Christianity retained its debt to Judaism in many areas (such as the observance of the Sabbath, albeit on a different day of the week). Baptism and communion were both Christian innovations, which are still with us, but there was a third practice that, but for a few sects, has dropped out. This was speaking in tongues, ‘which was held to be the way the Holy Spirit made itself known to congregations’.⁵⁹ The practice had been taken over from the Greek mystery cults.

But the literary tradition really began to flourish after Paul began writing letters to the congregations he had founded (‘Letter to the Corinthians’, ‘Letter to the Ephesians,’ and so on). Neither Paul nor the congregations ever imagined these ‘epistles’ would one day form part of any sacred book; he was just commenting on the doctrine he had been handed down orally. Most were written between the years 50 and 56.⁶⁰ Interpreting Jesus’ career was all very well but for the faithful, in the early years especially, the most important fact was that he had existed, been crucified and resurrected. Therefore, around 125, at Ephesus, the decision was taken to use all four gospels as the basis for worship. This would keep all aspects of Jesus in perspective and contain any heresies that broke out. It was the early heresies that eventually resulted in the establishment of a canon of works. Three early heresies were particularly influential in shaping church doctrine. These were those of Valentinus (d. 160), who argued that Jesus was a phantom, not a real person, who had suffered no pain on the cross; of Marcion (fl. c. 144), who argued that Jesus wasn’t Jewish and was the son of a ‘higher and kindlier’ god than Yahweh; and Montanus (fl. c. 150–180), who was against the Church structure, arguing that the clergy should consist only of ‘inspired prophets’ who had ‘the gift of the spirit’ and that what they said, rather than any gospel, should determine worship.⁶¹ In response to these wayward beliefs, the Church came together to form not just the canon of New Testament works, but also the central elements of religious practice. This was when communion became established, a re-enactment of the Last Supper, by means of which Christians believed they atoned for their sins (a Jewish idea) and gained salvation (a Greek Gnostic idea). The phrase ‘New Testament’ was first used in 192.⁶² And so, by the year 200 Christianity was well on the way to becoming a religion of the book, something else it shared with Judaism. This, of course, only added to the power of the priesthood because they were, for the most part, the only people who could read.

The apostolic tradition was of course a powerful tool for the faithful, and a useful way of asserting Rome’s supremacy in Christendom. But Rome was not the only centre, not the only influential location for ideas. Just as the gospel of John was influenced by Greek and Gnostic beliefs at Ephesus, so other writers in the eastern Mediterranean combined philosophy and theology to produce a more sophisticated Christianity. These men are usually called the Church Fathers (patres ecclesiae). Outside Rome, there were two centres where they shone, at Alexandria and Antioch. The Alexandrians, much influenced by Gnostic beliefs, developed in particular an allegorical method of understanding the Bible – to such an extent that hidden meanings were found even in misspellings. It was in this way that the practice of biblical exegesis was begun.⁶³

The best-known of the Alexandrians was Clement (c. 150–216), whose aim was to reconcile pagan scholarship – especially Greek ideas – with Christianity. In his book, Pedagogus, Clement argued that Plato occupied a position analogous to the prophets of ancient Israel. Plato’s Logos, translated in English as ‘Word’, though it is more complex than that, was the eternal principle of reason, which creates a link between the higher world of God and the lower, created world of man. This was, said Clement, revealed to Plato as the prophets of Israel had had inspiration revealed to them, so that man might come to know the true faith, the preparation of Israel for the coming of Jesus. In Plato’s theory of ideas, Clement found a ‘contempt’ for ‘this world’ which was echoed in the teachings of Jesus (and found expression, for example, in the practice of monasticism).⁶⁴

Clement had run a school in Alexandria but was forced to leave. After a gap of some years, his school was reopened by Origen (c. 185–254), teaching pagan subjects (rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, philosophy) alongside Hebrew. He produced many books, two of which were the first work of Christian exegesis, known as the Hexapla and the ‘earliest systematic presentation of Christian theology’, The Principles of Things.⁶⁵ Origen’s most famous innovation was that everything in the Bible has three meanings – the literal, the moral and the allegorical and that only the last of these is the revealed truth. For him, for example, the Virgin Birth of Christ in the womb of Mary was not to be primarily understood in a literal way. It really represented the birth of divine wisdom in the soul.⁶⁶ Origen was the pupil of someone we have met before, Ammonius Saccas, the founder of Neoplatonism. Under his influence, Origen argued that the universe was ‘a hierarchy of spiritual beings, with God at the apex and the devil and fallen angels at the base’.⁶⁷ God, Origen said, was knowable in two ways – through nature, the rationally ordered universe, and through Christ, who was the full revelation of his mercy and wisdom. Man comprised a rational soul in a body of flesh and because of that occupied a position half-way between the angels and the demons. The soul was corrupted by its presence in the body and the object of life was to ‘behave in such a way that one corrupted one’s soul as little as possible’.⁶⁸ For Origen the soul pre-existed man, while after the death of the body it passed into a state of purification and ‘in the end all souls, purified by fire, will share in the universal restitution’.⁶⁹ Origen did not believe, however, that resurrection would be of the material body, and this view became more and more influential as time passed, and the Second Coming did not occur.

Jerome (c. 340–419) was an earnest, educated man, who had tried and failed to start his own monastery, and had studied Greek and Hebrew in the Near East. He was recalled to Rome in 377 by Pope Damasus (305–384), who charged him with translating the book of Psalms into Latin. In turn this led to Jerome’s major claim to fame. In Rome he mixed with a group of wealthy women who eventually clubbed together and provided funds for him to build a monastery and research institute near Bethlehem and there he spent the rest of his life translating the entire Bible into Latin, a project which would replace the fragmentary translations that then existed, known as the Itala.⁷⁰ He used both Hebrew and Greek texts as source material and his aim was to write a work that would please not only scholars and bishops but ordinary people as well. What he produced was a text midway between the Ciceronian Latin of the educated literati and the vulgar language of the streets (the tongue that eventually became vernacular French, Spanish and Italian). This ‘Vulgate’ (popular) Bible was a great success and was the standard version for centuries.

Without question the greatest of the Latin Fathers of the Church, and a major figure in the history of ideas, is Augustine (354–430). Thanks to his own writings, a great deal is known about him. He was born on 13 November at Thagaste, now Souk-Ahras, south of Bône (Annaba) in Algeria. His father was a local government officer and a pagan, whereas his mother, Monica, was a Christian. (These ‘mixed marriages’ were not uncommon in the fourth century as the attitudes of Christians softened.) Augustine turned into a great writer (113 books, 200 letters) but he is famously known to history as ‘a great sinner who became a great saint’.⁷¹ According to his own confessions, he was a sinner until he was thirty-two, when he turned to Christianity, but even after that he was unable to live up to his hopes because of a ‘weakness in dealing with sexual temptation’. (‘Lord, give me chastity,’ he used to pray, ‘but not yet.’⁷²) Augustine’s great humanity makes him a very sympathetic character, to which he added the gifts of a great writer – the Confessions and City of God are masterpieces of vivid Latin which are of interest today because, before he turned to Christianity, Augustine flirted with most of the other systems of thought available at the time. Because his mother was a Christian, he was exposed to Christianity very early on but, he tells us frankly, he found the Itala dull. He read Hortensius, allegedly written by Cicero, which led him to Plato and Aristotle and scepticism. For a while, he sampled Manicheism. That didn’t last long. He took a mistress and they formed a stable relationship (fourteen years), creating more flesh (which Mani said was evil), by producing a son. Augustine next tried Neoplatonism but that didn’t suffice either. Then, one day he was reading in his garden when he heard some children singing. The phrase he actually heard was ‘Take up and read’, whereupon, he says, he flipped open his copy of Paul’s epistle to the Romans. (According to Marcia Colish, this opening of a book at random, in order to find a solution to a personal problem, was an early Christian practice derived from the pagan use of Homer and Virgil.⁷³) The thought that Augustine’s eye alighted on that day, and which so attracted his attention, was Paul’s understanding of evil as the ‘spoliation of order’. (The rise of the influence of Paul, the anti-intellectual, in the late fourth century, had an effect on the decline of classical learning, which is the subject of the next chapter.) Neoplatonism had been concerned with order – the hierarchy of beings in the universe. But Augustine’s own great contribution was to add to this the idea of free will. Humans, he said, have the capacity to evaluate the moral order of events or episodes or people or situations, and can then exercise judgement, to order our own priorities, so that we shun the bad route and follow the good one. To choose good, he realised, was to know God. This has proved hugely influential.⁷⁴

His humanity apart, Augustine’s cleverness was important too. This was impressively revealed in his ideas about the Trinity, the most important and impassioned division within the early church, which had occasioned the famous council at Nicaea, on the shores of a picturesque lake, near the Sea of Marmara, in modern Turkey, in May 325, under Constantine. As we saw in Chapter 8, the division had been kindled by Arius, from Alexandria, who had argued that Jesus could not be divine in the same way as God the Father was. Arius wasn’t denying that Jesus was divine in some fashion – but, nevertheless, Jesus himself had specifically said that God was greater than he.⁷⁵ For Arius, Jesus was therefore both different from humans, but different from God also. Insofar as Jesus called God his ‘father’, this implied prior existence and a certain superiority. For Arius, Jesus had been born mortal but became divine; if he had not been human, at least to begin with, there would be no hope for us. At Nicaea, however, the bishops took a different view and in the Nicaean Creed (still in widespread use), it was set down and agreed that God had made the world ex nihilo, from nothing, and that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were the same substance.

Just because the bishops had agreed didn’t mean the laity had to go along with it. In fact, many early Christians found the idea difficult to grasp (many still do). After some years, however, three formidable theologians from Cappadocia, in eastern Turkey, came up with a solution that satisfied at least some, mainly in the east. These were Basil, bishop of Caesarea (329–379), his brother Gregory, bishop of Nyssa (335–395) and their friend, Gregory of Nazianzus (329–391). Their solution was to argue that God was a single essence (ousia), which remains incomprehensible to us, but there are three expressions (hypostases), through which he was known.⁷⁶ The Trinity was not three gods but a spiritual/mystical experience, the result of contemplation.

Augustine built on this and for many people it was his greatest achievement. He argued that since God had made us in his own image (as it said in the Scriptures), ‘we should be able to discern a Trinity in the depths of our minds’.⁷⁷ In On the Trinity he showed how this idea underlines so much of life. For example, he said there are three faculties of the soul – memory, intellect and will. There are three stages of penance after sin: contrition, confession and satisfaction. There are three aspects to love – the lover, the beloved and the love that unites them. There is memory of God, knowledge of God and love of God. There is the Trinity of faith: retineo (holding the truths of the incarnation in our mind); contemplatio (contemplating them); and dilectio (delighting in them). This was numerology of sorts but it was also a clever intellectual achievement, a fusion of theology and psychology that had never been conceived before.⁷⁸

Augustine’s other well-known work was City of God. This was written in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, by far the most traumatic and dramatic of setbacks, and he wrote the book, at least in part, to counter the charge that Christianity must take the blame for this catastrophic reversal. His main aim, however, was to develop a philosophy of history. Augustine was one of those who repudiated the ancient idea of time as cyclical; instead, he said, time was linear and, moreover, it was the property of God who could do with it as he liked. On this reading, the Creation, the covenant with the Old Testament patriarchs, the Incarnation and the institution of the Church may all be seen as the unfolding of God’s will. He said that the Last Judgement would be the last event in history, ‘when time itself will cease and everyone will be assigned their posthumous habitations for eternity’.⁷⁹ The fall of Rome, he insisted, took place because she had fulfilled her purpose: the Christianisation of the empire. ‘But we should not be deflected by what happens on the grander scale.’ The real purpose of history, he said, was to pit self love against the love of God. ‘Self love leads to the City of Man, love of God to the City of God. These two cities will remain at odds and conflicted throughout time, until the City of God is eternalised as heaven and the City of Man as hell.’⁸⁰ Augustine’s view of history also involved a great and influential pessimism. The fall of Rome, for example, coloured his doctrine of original sin, which would form such a central part of the Western Christian vision. Augustine came to believe that God had condemned humankind to eternal damnation, all because of Adam’s original sin. This ‘inherited sin’ was passed on through what Augustine called concupiscence, the desire to take pleasure in sex rather than in God. This image, of the higher life of devotion, dragged down by ‘the chaos of sensation and lawless passion’ was paralleled by the decadence in Rome and as an idea would prove extremely durable. From Augustine on, Christians viewed humanity as chronically flawed.⁸¹

By the time Gregory the Great (540–604) achieved prominence, the barbarian invasions had transformed the map. For example, by the sixth century, the Ostrogoths – who had penetrated Italy more than half a century before – had themselves been chased out by the Lombards. There was still an emperor in Constantinople (Justinian, 527–565) but in the west the extent of barbarian rule meant that many of the functions traditionally carried out by the Roman civil service – education, poor relief, even food and water supply – were carried out by the bishops.⁸² Gregory was a marvellous administrator and under him the church became ever more efficient in an everyday, worldly sense. But he was also a contemplative man and this mix made him perfectly suited to advancing doctrines that added to the appeal of the church for ordinary souls. For example, he wanted to make the liturgy more accessible to the faithful and his genius was to involve music. Thus was born Gregorian chant. In the same spirit he invented the notion of purgatory. He was particularly concerned with what should happen when a sinner received absolution from a priest, and had been instructed in a programme of ‘satisfaction’, as it was called, but died before the programme could be completed. To Gregory, it would be grossly unfair to condemn such a person to hell, but at the same time he or she could not go to heaven, since it would be wrong to admit that person alongside those who had completed their programme. His solution was a new, albeit temporary destination – purgatory – where people could complete their satisfactions, endure their punishments, and then, all being well, move on – to heaven. His other ‘user friendly’ idea for the faithful was that of the seven deadly sins. Evil, for Gregory, would always be a mystery for man: God intended it as such, as a test of faith (as it had been for Job). But the seven deadly sins were intended by Gregory to be a guide for the faithful, so that they weren’t always ‘overwhelmed’ by a sense of sin. The seven sins were set out on a scale of increasing seriousness: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.⁸³ This made it clear to all that sins of the intellect were more serious than sins of the flesh.

By now the Christianisation of time was almost complete. The main festivals of Christianity, celebrating the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, had not been agreed upon for quite a while after Christ’s crucifixion. The English word Easter was named after the old Scandinavian pagan goddess of dawn and spring, Eostre, and to begin with, this festival was far more important than Christmas, because it celebrated the resurrection, without which there would be no Christian faith. (The French Pâques – Italian and Spanish too – is derived from the Hebrew, pesakh, for Passover.) In Rome, Easter was being celebrated as early as AD 200, according to a letter written on that date, which mentions a ceremony involving the burning of wax candles. Christmas, on the other hand, was not celebrated until the fourth century.

Since the gospels give no information about Jesus’s birth date the early theologians, as we have seen, took over pagan practices. Easter was a more complex matter. According to the gospels, Christ died on the first day of the Jewish Passover. This, according to Hebrew tradition, is the day of the full moon that follows the spring equinox and, because it is based on a lunar calendar of 354 days, changes its date in the solar rotation (3651/4 days) every year. This would have been a tricky enough calculation to do at the best of times but the early Christians made it even harder for themselves by adding a further twist. They decided that Easter should be always celebrated on a Sunday, since Christ’s resurrection had taken place on that day, and because it set them apart from the Jews, who celebrated their Sabbath on Saturday. In the very early days of the Church, Easter was celebrated on different days in different countries around the Mediterranean, but in 325, at the Council of Nicaea, 318 bishops decided that the festival would be observed on the same date all over Christendom. The day chosen was the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. Apart from being mentioned in the Bible, the theological significance of this date was that it was a day of maximum light – twelve hours of daylight, followed by twelve hours of full moonlight. This contrasted strongly with Christmas, in the depths of darkness. In time Christian theologians built up layers and layers of allegory linking the moon to the Easter story. Easter falls in the spring, the season when the world was first fashioned and the first man installed in Paradise. The moon itself is resurrected each month and, like Christ, offers a light to the world. The moon shines with reflected – i.e., borrowed – light from heaven, just as man’s grace is borrowed from the Lord.⁸⁴

Greek astronomers, as was discussed in Chapter 8, had discovered that, after nineteen years, the sun and the moon returned to their respective positions (the Metonic cycle). But this took no account of the seven-day week (which the Greeks didn’t use) and once the Council of Nicaea had ordained that Easter must fall on a Sunday it took another century and more before Victorius of Aquitaine, in 457, worked out that a further 28-year cycle (accounting for days of the week and leap years) needed to be added to the arithmetic. He therefore came up with a 532-year cycle (28 × 19) as the only repeatable rhythm that took account of all the variables.⁸⁵ This continued to be tinkered with and was not properly finalised until the Venerable Bede, in England, put an end to the controversy in his great work on time, De ratione temporum (On the Calculation of Time), published in 725. But the ‘Easter controversy’, as it became known, had two further knock-on effects. Twentieth-century scholars, with the benefit of later archaeological discoveries, numismatical finds, not to mention the much more accurate astronomical advances that were made after the Copernican revolution, have been able to date the original Good Friday more and more precisely – the two most favoured dates now are 7 April AD 30 and 3 April AD 33. But the early Christian scholars had none of these advantages, and in the sixth century the abbot of Rome, Dionysius Exiguus (‘Dennis the Little’, on account of his self-demeaning manner), conceived the idea that the Easter tables, as well as being used to calculate the dates for Easters in the future, could also be worked in reverse, all the way back to find the exact date of the original Passion. Dating, as we have noted, had not been of prime concern to the early Christians, for two reasons. In addition to the fact that they were convinced that the Second Coming of the Messiah was imminent, they tried to stress, in Rome at least, that Christianity was an old faith, not a new one, that it had grown organically out of Judaism and was therefore much more established than the rival pagan cults. This helped them avoid the derision of critics, so they kept new dates to a minimum. But, as time went by, and the Messiah failed to appear, the liturgical calendar took on a new urgency, highlighting points in the year when the faithful could rally.⁸⁶

The calendar in use at the time Exiguus made his calculations was based on the accession of the emperor Diocletian, which took place in 285. Thus, the year that we call 532 was for Dionysius the year 247. But Exiguus didn’t see why time should start with a pagan emperor and it was during his Easter calculations that the abbot conceived the idea to divide time according to the birth of Christ. And here there befell Exiguus an extraordinary numerological coincidence. Victorius of Aquitaine, as we have seen, had come up with a 532-year cycle. As Exiguus worked back, in the year we call 532, he found that a Victorian cycle had begun in the very year in which he believed that Christ had been born – what we now call 1 BC. In other words, the sun and the moon, at the time he was working, were in exactly the same relation as they had been when Jesus was born. This was too much of a coincidence and, in the words of the Venerable Bede, confirmed for Dennis that 1 BC was indeed the year ‘in which He deigned to become incarnate’. From then on, and thanks to Dennis, dates were given as Anni Domini, ‘years of the Lord’. However, it was not until the eighteenth century that it became customary to designate the preceding era ‘before Christ’.⁸⁷

Such dates had far more resonance then than they do now. This was because, according to the early theologians, the world would last for six thousand years. The reasoning behind this arose from the second letter of Peter (3:8), where it says, ‘. . . one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’. It had taken the Lord six ‘days’ to make the Earth, so it made tidy sense for it to last equally long. Using genealogies in the Bible, theologians such as Eusebius calculated that the world was 5,197 or 5,198 years old when Jesus was born. By AD 532, therefore, the world had only another 271 years, at the most, before the Apocalypse – and Paradise for the faithful. Accuracy in the calendar really mattered.

The second knock-on effect of the Easter controversy was the development of a new form of literature which, although largely forgotten now, was for centuries the most sacred form of all writing after the Bible itself. This was the computus. Computus, as a word, originally meant more or less what it means now – any kind of calculation. But in the Middle Ages it referred exclusively to the set of tables, compiled by mathematicians, which predicted the date of future Easters. These tables were sacred for reasons that were obvious to the medieval mind: the movement of the heavens was the most important and awesome mystery facing humankind and the fact that the rhythms of the sun and the moon could now be harmonised meant that God had revealed – to mathematicians at least – part of his grand design for the universe.⁸⁸ The attempts to date Easter had therefore caused a major mystery of the heavens to be revealed to humankind. For the faithful, this was another sign that Christianity must be true.

Between Augustine and the Easter controversy, the character of Christianity changed decisively, according to such historians as Peter Brown and R. A. Markus. During the years of persecution, with martyrdom so widespread, and with early (poor) Christians expecting the Second Coming at any moment, there was less emphasis on this life, on the Bible, on liturgy, on art. This was the era of the cult of the saints, which grew out of martyrdom, and in which saints and saints’ relics were regarded by Christians as the main stimulants to faith and proof of Christianity’s power and veracity, and yet which many pagans looked upon with horror. For these early Christians, chastity, self-denial and monasticism were the ideal. However, between say 400, roughly when Augustine was writing, and the 560s, when the last vestiges of paganism are recorded, Christianity came to terms with sex, and turned itself into a more communal – and more urban – faith. As the Second Coming receded in importance, as it seemed less and less likely to be imminent, the Bible came to the fore, the Christianisation of time helped the liturgy to expand throughout the year, and the Christianisation of geography, especially the eastern Mediterranean, created a raft of holy sites, pilgrimage routes, and with it a greater sense of history. The Church’s communal and urban character was helped by the depredations of the barbarians and Christianity began to take on a form recognisably similar to today.⁸⁹

Whatever Christianity’s true role in the decline of the Roman empire, German historians in particular have favoured Gibbon’s idea that the barbarians were the main event. They have conceived the so-called Völkerwanderung, ‘the age of barbarian invasions’, which, they argue, was the chief element in this era of history and produced a significant twist on Graeco-Roman classical civilisation.⁹⁰ Combined with Christianity, they say that this was ‘a cataclysmic event, a sharp break in European history’.⁹¹ This view is supported by the very simple – but undeniable – observation of A. H. M. Jones, who points out that the whole of the Roman empire did not fall in the fifth century: it continued to survive in the east in what we know as the Byzantine empire, until the Turkish conquest in the middle of the fifteenth century.⁹² These observations are important, says Jones, ‘for they demonstrate that the empire did not, as some modern historians have suggested, totter into its grave from senile decay, impelled by a gentle push from the barbarians. Most of the internal weaknesses . . . were common to both halves of the empire’.⁹³ If Christianity weakened the empire internally, since the religion was stronger and more divisive in the east, why did the west fall and the east continue to stand? The main difference, as Jones saw it, was that ‘down to the end of the fifth century . . . the East was strategically less vulnerable and . . . subjected to less pressure from external enemies.’ In short, the barbarian invasion was the main cause of the fall of Rome.⁹⁴

‘The origin of the word barbaros is early Greek, and it gained three central meanings in the course of classical antiquity which it has retained to the present day: an ethnographical, a political and an ethical definition.’⁹⁵ For example, Homer used it in the Iliad, referring to the Carians in Asia Minor; he said they ‘spoke barbarically’. He meant he could not understand them, but he did not describe them as ‘mute’, as others in antiquity would dismiss foreigners, nor did he liken their language to ‘the twittering of birds or the barking of dogs’, as many others did, from China to Spain.⁹⁶ As time passed, however, the Greeks’ view of themselves changed as their successes in philosophy, science, the arts and government began to ripen. They now started to think of themselves as the ‘ideal people’ and their enemies as lesser souls. In 472 BC, during the Persian wars, Aeschylus dismissed the enemy as ‘barbarians’ partly because ‘they spoke like horses’, but mainly because he thought their political traditions were primitive – they were little more than slaves subjugated to an oriental military tyrant, and did not enjoy the freedoms of the Greeks.⁹⁷ ‘Barbarian’ was no longer a neutral term, but an insult.

The meaning changed again during the Hellenistic period, when Greek culture and Roman government existed alongside each other in the eastern Mediterranean. Now, as men began to be judged by their humanity, according to their ethical and social habits, rather than by their military exploits, the term barbarian came to mean people who were raw, uncultivated, cruel.⁹⁸ According to Arno Borst, this was how Cicero understood the word ‘barbarus’, which is why the literate, Hellenic-educated Romans maligned the Christians, calling them primitive, enemies of the empire, barbarians. (The early Christians were proud to accept the insult: ‘Yea, we are barbarians,’ said Clement of Alexandria.⁹⁹)

All of this, however, paled alongside the invasions of the Germanic peoples which overran the newly Christianised Roman empire in the fifth century. The term barbarian was not only revived but ‘magnified into the satanic’. ‘The advancing Germanic tribes spoke incomprehensible dialects, had military power, were as robust as peasants and disdained urban civilisation; and their pagan superstitions rejected Christianity.’¹⁰⁰ The attitude of Christian Romans was summed up by Cassiodorus, around 550, who found a hidden meaning in the very word barbarus: it was, he said, ‘made up of barba (beard) and rus (flat land); for barbarians did not live in cities, making their abodes in the fields, like wild animals’.¹⁰¹

The very idea of the ‘Middle Ages’ as a ‘dark’ period of history was first expressed by the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), for example, confessed to ‘a stronger attachment and a closer spiritual kinship’ with the great classical writers than to his more immediate medieval predecessors.¹⁰² ‘The disdain he expressed for the allegedly idle speculations and bad Latin of medieval authors soon became the fashionable slogan of the humanist movement.’ The first man actually to use the term media tempestas, or Middle Age, was Giovanni Andrea, bishop of Aleria in Corsica, in a history of Latin poetry, published in 1469.

Our view of the dark ages is now somewhat different. The densest of the medieval centuries, between AD 400 and AD 1000, are recognised as the true dark ages – and dark for two reasons. One, because comparatively few documents survive to illumine them. Two, because so few of those monuments of art and literature as do survive can be considered as major achievements. But Europe by the thirteenth century, say, boasted great cities, thriving agriculture and trade, sophisticated government and legal systems. There were many universities and cathedrals spread across the continent, and copious masterpieces of literature, art and philosophy to rival those of any other period. The chronology of the ‘medieval millennium’ therefore needs to be adjusted accordingly. We now recognise the early Middle Ages (the dark ages) and the high medieval period, when many of the foundations of the modern world were laid down.

Just how dark these dark ages were is instructive. The true medieval mind was very different from our own way of thinking. Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor and the greatest of medieval rulers, was illiterate.¹⁰³ By 1500 the old Roman roads were still the best in Europe. Most of Europe’s major harbours were unusable until at least the eighth century.¹⁰⁴ Among the lost arts was bricklaying: ‘In all of Germany, England, Holland and Scandinavia,’ says William Manchester, ‘virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries.’¹⁰⁵ The horse collar, harness and stirrup, all invented in China, much earlier, did not exist in Europe until around 900. Horses and oxen, though available, could hardly be used. The records of the English coroners show that homicides in the dark ages were twice as frequent as death by accident and that only one in a hundred murderers was ever brought to justice. (The threat of death was also widely used in the spread of Christianity. In conquering Saxon rebels the emperor Charlemagne gave them a choice between baptism and execution. When they hesitated, he had 4,500 beheaded in a single morning.¹⁰⁶) Trade was hampered by widespread piracy, agriculture was so inefficient that the population was never fed adequately, the name exchequer emerged to describe the royal treasury because the officials were so deficient in arithmetic they were forced to use a chequered cloth as a kind of abacus when making calculations.¹⁰⁷ As well as being dangerous, unjust and unchanging, the medieval way of life was also invisible and silent. ‘The medieval mind had no ego.’ Noblemen had surnames but this was less than 1 per cent of the population. Because so few inhabitants ever left the village in which they were born, there was in any case no need. Most of the villages had no name either. With violence so common it is no surprise to learn that people huddled together in communal homes, married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects developed which were incomprehensible to people living only a few miles away.

The descriptions which the Roman writers left of the peoples of temperate Europe had some definite limitations. They were generally written in a military context, and they were written as outsiders – none of the Latin authors ever lived in an Iron Age village, nor did they travel among foreigners as merchants. They perceived a fundamental difference between their literate civilisations and the barbarians but they drew two different conclusions. At times they portrayed barbarians as uncouth, uncivilised savages, exceptionally strong and wild, and childlike in many respects. Caesar observed that the Germans were less civilised even than the Celts, lived in smaller communities, in landscapes less transformed by cultivation and had less highly developed religious practices. They had no permanent leaders but elected temporary chiefs for military escapades. The further north these people lived, the more extreme they were. At other times, however, they were idealised as simple, noble people, unspoiled by sophisticated lifestyles.¹⁰⁸

When the classical texts were rediscovered in Renaissance times (see below, Chapter 18), preserved as copies in European monasteries, their descriptions were accepted as objective accounts but, as Peter Wells has shown, there are now good grounds for querying this. The main thrust of Caesar’s account, for example, is that the Germans lived east of the Rhine and that the Celts lived to the west. Yet there is no reason to suppose that either the Celts or the Germans felt that they belonged to a common people, or that they saw themselves as members of a super-regional population. Caesar’s reliability may be gauged from his description of the unusual creatures in the German forests, among them the unicorn and the elk, ‘an animal without leg joints’. Because this meant the elk could not raise itself from the ground, and had to sleep standing up, the recommended way of catching one was to saw part-way through a tree. Then, when the elk leant against the tree, it fell over, and the animal fell with it, becoming easy prey.¹⁰⁹

Our understanding of the early Middle Ages is in fact now a mixture of nineteenth-century philology and late twentieth-century archaeology. The terms ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ are artificial creations by philologists based on a study of known languages from later times: Breton and Irish, for Celtic; English, German and Gothic for German. As Patrick Geary puts it, ‘Barbarians existed, when they existed at all, as a theoretical category but not as part of a lived experience.’¹¹⁰ In the case of Celtic languages the earliest traces are inscriptions written in Greek in southern Gaul, as early as the third century BC. Personal names are mentioned and they are very similar to those mentioned by Caesar two hundred years later.¹¹¹ So far as Germanic is concerned, the earliest evidence comes in the form of runes, short messages written in characters made up of straight lines, and dating from the end of the second century AD.¹¹² The distribution of early Celtic in Gaul, and runes in northern continental Europe, do suggest a general geographical distinction between those who spoke Celtic and German at the time the Romans extended north and west. Herodotus said that the Keltoi lived around the headwaters of the Danube (i.e., in the Alps in what is now Switzerland) and archaeology has linked them with the culture known as Early La Tène. This was discovered at the east end of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland in the run-up to the First World War. Excavations revealed a predominantly wooden culture: wooden piles (the remains of houses?), two timber causeways and a quantity of tools and weapons of bronze, iron and wood. Several objects bore curvilinear patterns which have since become the hallmark of La Tène art everywhere from central Europe, to Ireland, to the Pyrenees.¹¹³

Recent anthropological evidence suggests that the very presence of powerful empires themselves cause changes among the people who occupy the fringes. To begin with, says Patrick Geary, barbarians consisted of small communities living in villages along rivers, sea coasts and clearings in forests, from the Black to the North Seas.¹¹⁴ There were clans, with incest taboos, who came together for defence. They had divine genealogies and elected headmen for specific occasions, such as war (‘barracks emperors’).¹¹⁵ They didn’t think of themselves as Celts, Franks or Alemanni, until the empire forced such defensive identity upon them. (Franci, which means ‘band’, and Alemanni, ‘all men’, are Germanic words, which the Romans can only have learned from the groups themselves, or their neighbours.¹¹⁶) The anthropological evidence also shows that, broadly speaking, hitherto amorphous peoples, when presented with a threat, are forced together into ‘tribes’, groups who coalesce around a leader and acquire territorial claims.¹¹⁷ There is some evidence that this is what happened near the edges of the Roman empire. Analysis of pottery, for example, shows that before the time of Caesar the communities of Germany had broadly similar pottery, ornaments and tools, and burial practices, but these varied quite considerably from one (small) region to another. (This is known to archaeologists as the Jastorf culture.¹¹⁸) At the time of the Roman expansion, however, and over the next centuries, this pattern changed and both pottery and burial practices became more uniform along wider regional lines. It appears that the presence of a nearby imperial power did indeed have the effect of ‘solidifying’ the tribes into larger and less diverse units. Around the time of the Gallic wars, at the turn of the second century, new and considerably larger settlements were established, of which Feddersen Wierde and Flögeln, both in Lower Saxony, are well-studied examples. The archaeology also shows that the peoples on the edge of empire began imitating the Romans in their burial practices, interring men with their weapons, even their spurs.¹¹⁹

About three dozen sites have now been excavated along the frontier of the Roman empire, a broadly north-west to south-east axis, as delineated by the Rhine and Danube rivers.¹²⁰ This has produced a whole raft of new information about the social organisation of the ‘barbarians’, about their beliefs, their art and their thought. In the first century BC, the barbarians are described by Caesar, and by Tacitus around AD 100, in a very different manner to the way they are portrayed by third-century writers. The earlier authors described smaller, tribal groups of people, inhabiting small localities. The third-century groups are much larger and better organised – tribal confederations. The Romans themselves had helped bring this about: they trained foreigners as auxiliaries, and the empire created a demand for goods, so that provincial centres expanded to cater to this market. Centres such as Jakuszowice, Gudme and Himlingøje grew up, though the best studied is Runder Berg, one of fifty hilltop forts on the border of the empire in south-west Germany. Here the archaeological evidence shows that the fort was occupied by an Alamannic king and his followers. Workshops in the fort produced not only weapons, but bronze and gold ornaments, carved bone objects and gaming pieces. There was also an abundance of late Roman pottery and glassware, imported from Gaul, west of the Rhine and at least ninety miles away.¹²¹

The Celts worshipped in sacred groves or nemetona but did not have elaborate temples to house images of their deities. Dio Cassius wrote that the Britons had sanctuaries dedicated to Andraste, goddess of victory.¹²² ‘These groves were dread places, held in great awe and approached only by the priesthood.’¹²³ Reconstruction of such places of worship as have been found in the Germanic lands show them to have been modelled on Gallo-Roman temples. At Empel, on the south bank of the Maas river in Holland, metal fibulae and other objects indicate worship of the deity Hercules Magusenus, a typical combination of Roman and indigenous identities. Weapons and horse-riding equipment were left at these sanctuaries. Deposits of objects in water was another variant in ritual. The source of the Seine in eastern France was a site where wooden sculptures of human figures and human body parts were left, dedicated to the pre-Roman goddess Sequana. Wells were centres of ritual in the same way.¹²⁴ Gods worshipped by the barbarians also included Sirona, goddess of warm springs and healing (Moselle, Rhine; Sul or Sulis in Bath, England), Epona, a Celtic horse goddess, Nehalennia (North Sea coast of Holland), a goddess of seafaring, and the mother goddesses, Matronae Anfaniae and Matronae Vacallinehae, in the Rhineland.¹²⁵ Tacitus tells us in Germania that the Germans had only three seasons: spring, summer and winter. In fact, they had a six-fold year divided into sixty-day ‘tides’, or double months. The year started at the beginning of winter with a feast equivalent to the Celtic Samhain.¹²⁶ Runes began to appear in the first or second century AD, the prevailing view now being that this was a deliberate attempt to devise a system of writing comparable to the Latin alphabet, as a result of cross-cultural contact between the barbarians and the Latin-speaking Romans.¹²⁷

Careful consideration of the archaeological evidence, therefore, leads us to conclude that, with one major exception, the barbarians did not appear from nowhere and that there was no raw ‘clash of civilisations’ in any overnight sense.

The exception was the Huns. A nomadic confederation under central Asian leadership, and living in the late fourth century in an area near the Black Sea, the Huns ‘were like no people ever seen before by Romans or their neighbours’.¹²⁸ Everything – lifestyle, appearance, above all style of warfare – was terrible to the Old World, and more than anything else the Huns’ arrival changed the way the Romans and barbarians thought about themselves. These steppe nomads had to keep moving to survive. Aided by their own invention, the double-reflex bow, which allowed them to fire deadly volleys of arrows while still on horseback, they attracted supporters from many tribes, growing from a band to an army and existing on pillage. Save for the reign of Attila (444–453, the ‘scourge of God’ but whose name means ‘Daddy’ in Gothic, showing how ethnically diverse they were), the Huns were never a unified or centralised people, and they disintegrated after a few generations. But their intervention – barbarian within barbarian – enabled other tribes to take advantage of the empire the Huns had ravaged.

These people were more primitive than the Romans – they did not have sophisticated systems of law or politics, no great communal architecture, no educational system, so far as we can tell, no great literature that has survived. (The earliest law code, the Visigoths’ code of Euric, dates from c. 470–480.¹²⁹) But the Germanic invaders were more flexible and less implacable than some accounts imply. One by one, during the sixth century, the tribes adapted to Christianity and this had a curious consequence. A division was established that would never be fully rectified in Europe, a national gap between Latin and Germanic peoples, a social gap between Latin-versed clergymen and dialect-speaking peasants.¹³⁰ ‘Because Franks and Anglo-Saxons were learning these [Christian] traditions as pupils instead of applying them as masters, they were haunted by feelings of inferiority. Frankish and Germanic writers had to suffer being mocked as “barbarians” by Latins throughout the entire Middle Ages.’¹³¹ Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, wrote in 830 that he himself was regarded as ‘little more than a barbarian, ill-practised in the Roman tongue’. This division between Latin and Germanic peoples would never be entirely removed from the European mind-set, nor the associated notion that the former were somehow more ‘cultured’ than the latter. But the conversion of the Franks and Saxons to Christianity produced the final twist in this particular story. From then on, it was pagans and heretics who were the barbarians. This set the stage for the most vicious battle of ideas in the High Middle Ages. As we shall see, paganism, though ‘defeated’, was by no means destroyed.