Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

V

CHARITY

AD

362: P

ESSINUS

The new emperor, heading across Galatia, found signs of decay in every temple he visited. Paint flaked from statues, and altars stood unsplashed by blood. The strut of the ancient gods had, in recent decades, become a cringe. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more evident than in Pessinus. Here, since primordial times, Cybele had her seat. Once her castrated priests had ruled the entire city. It was from Pessinus, in 204 BC, that the first statue of the goddess to arrive in Rome had been sent. Half a millennium on, pilgrims still took the road there to pay honour to the Divine Mother. Fewer and fewer, though. Even in Pessinus itself, Cybele’s hold was slipping. The great bulk of her temple, which for centuries had dominated the city, increasingly stood as a monument not to her potency, but to her fading.

The shock of this cut Flavius Claudius Julianus to the quick. The nephew of Constantine, he had been raised a Christian, with eunuchs set over him to keep him constant in his faith. As a young man, though, he had repudiated Christianity – and then, after becoming emperor in 361, had committed himself to claiming back from it those who had ‘abandoned the ever-living gods for the corpse of the Jew’.¹ A brilliant scholar, a dashing general, Julian was also a man as devout in his beliefs as any of those he dismissively termed ‘Galileans’. Cybele was a particular object of his devotions. It was she, he believed, who had rescued him from the darkness of his childhood beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, heading eastwards to prepare for war with Persia, he had paused in his journey to make a diversion to Pessinus. What he found there appalled him. Even after he had made sacrifice, and honoured those who had stayed constant in their worship of the city’s gods, he could not help but dwell in mingled anger and despondency on the neglect shown Cybele. Clearly, the people of Pessinus were unworthy of her patronage. Leaving the Galatians behind, he did as Paul had done three centuries before: he wrote them a letter.

Or rather, he wrote to their high priest. Julian, in his struggle to explain why the worship of Cybele had fallen into such desuetude, did not content himself with blaming the ignorant and weak-minded. The true blame, he charged, lay with the priests themselves. Far from devoting themselves to the poor, they lived lives of wild abandon. This had to end. In a world rife with suffering, why were priests getting drunk in taverns? Their time would be better spent, so Julian sternly informed them, in providing succour for the needy. To that end, subsidies of food and drink would be provided out of his own funds, and sent annually to Galatia. ‘My orders are that a fifth be given to the poor who serve the priests, and that the remainder be distributed to travellers and to beggars.’² Julian, in committing himself to this programme of welfare, took for granted that Cybele would approve. Caring for the weak and unfortunate, so the emperor insisted, had always been a prime concern of the gods. If only the Galatians could be brought to appreciate this, then they might be brought as well to renew their ancient habits of worship. ‘Teach them that doing good works was our practice of old.’³

An assertion that would no doubt have come as news to the celebrants of Cybele themselves. Behind the selfless ascetics of Julian’s fantasies there lurked an altogether less sober reality: priests whose enthusiasms had run not to charity, but to dancing, and cross-dressing, and self-castration. The gods cared nothing for the poor. To think otherwise was ‘airhead talk’.⁴ When Julian, writing to the high priest of Galatia, quoted Homer on the laws of hospitality, and how even beggars might appeal to them, he was merely drawing attention to the scale of his delusion. The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance. Certainly, there was little in the character of the gods whom Julian so adored, or in the teachings of the philosophers whom he so admired, to justify any assumption that the poor, just by virtue of their poverty, had a right to aid. The young emperor, sincere though he was in his hatred of ‘Galilean’ teachings, and in regretting their impact upon all that he held most dear, was blind to the irony of his plan for combating them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian.

‘How apparent to everyone it is, and how shameful, that our own people lack support from us, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well.’⁵ Julian could not but be painfully aware of this. The roots of Christian charity ran deep. The apostles, obedient to Jewish tradition as well as to the teachings of their master, had laid it as a solemn charge upon new churches always ‘to remember the poor’.⁶ Generation after generation, Christians had held true to this injunction. Every week, in churches across the Roman world, collections for orphans and widows, for the imprisoned, and the shipwrecked, and the sick had been raised. Over time, as congregations swelled, and ever more of the wealthy were brought to baptism, the funds available for poor relief had grown as well. Entire systems of social security had begun to emerge. Elaborate and well-organised, these had progressively embedded themselves within the great cities of the Mediterranean. Constantine, by recruiting bishops to his purposes, had also recruited the networks of charity of which they served as the principal patrons. Julian, clear-sighted in his loathing of the Galileans, understood this very well. Trains of clients, in the Roman world, had always been an index of power – and bishops, by that measure, were grown very powerful indeed. The wealthy, men who in previous generations might have boosted their status by endowing their cities with theatres, or temples, or bath-houses, had begun to find in the Church a new vent for their ambitions. This was why Julian, in a quixotic attempt to endow the worship of the ancient gods with a similar appeal, had installed a high priest over Galatia, and urged his subordinates to practise poor relief. Christians did not merely inspire in Julian a profound contempt; they filled him with envy as well.

His adversaries named him the Apostate, a turncoat from his faith; but Julian likewise felt betrayed. Leaving Galatia, he continued eastwards into Cappadocia, a rugged landscape famed for the quality of its horses and its lettuces, and which the emperor knew well. As a boy, he had been kept there under effective detention by a suspicious Constantius, and so was perfectly familiar with the character of the local notables. One, in particular, might almost have been a mirror image of himself. Basil, like Julian, was a man deeply versed in Greek literature and philosophy, a one-time student in Athens, and renowned for his powers of oratory. He was, in short, precisely the kind of man the emperor hoped to recruit to his side – except that Basil had embarked on the opposite path to Julian. Far from repudiating his upbringing as a Christian, it was instead his initial career as a lawyer that he had abandoned. Committing both his energies and his fortune to Christ, he and his younger brother, a brilliantly original theologian named Gregory, had fast developed international reputations. Even though Basil did not meet with Julian during the emperor’s progress through Cappadocia, such was his celebrity that many, feeling that the two most famous men of the age really should have confronted one another, took the matter into their own hands.* When, a year after leaving Asia Minor, Julian perished in Mesopotamia, fighting the Persians, a soldier in his train wrote an account of how Basil had, in a vision, seen Christ personally send a saint to dispatch him with a spear. While there was no one, in the wake of the emperor’s death, to continue his counter-revolution, both Basil and Gregory went from strength to strength. In 370, the elder brother was elected bishop of Caesarea, the capital of Cappadocia; two years later, the younger was appointed to a new bishopric on the main road to Galatia, at Nyssa. Both were renowned for their labours on behalf of the poor; both, as a consequence, came to wield an influence that extended far beyond the borders of their native land. Julian’s insight was confirmed: charity might indeed breed power.

Yet that did not mean that his own strategy had been any the less doomed. A concern for the downtrodden could not merely be summoned into existence out of nothing. The logic that inspired two wealthy and educated men such as Basil and Gregory to devote their lives to the poor derived from the very fundamentals of their faith. ‘Do not despise these people in their abjection; do not think they merit no respect.’ So Gregory urged. ‘Reflect on who they are, and you will understand their dignity; they have taken upon them the person of our Saviour. For he, the compassionate, has given them his own person.’⁷ Gregory, more clearly than anyone before him, traced the implications of Christ’s choice to live and die as one of the poor to its logical conclusion. Dignity, which no philosopher had ever taught might be possessed by the stinking, toiling masses, was for all. There was no human existence so wretched, none so despised or vulnerable, that it did not bear witness to the image of God. Divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too.

This was the conviction that in 369, on the outskirts of a Caesarea ravaged by famine, prompted Basil to embark on a radical new building project. Other Christian leaders before him had built ptocheia, or ‘poor houses’ – but none on such an ambitious scale. The Basileias, as it came to be known, was described by one awe-struck admirer as a veritable city, and incorporated, as well as shelter for the poor, what was in effect the first hospital. Basil, who had studied medicine while in Athens, did not himself scorn to tend the sick. Even lepers, whose deformities and suppurations rendered them objects of particular revulsion, might be welcomed by the bishop with a kiss, and given both refuge and care. The more broken men and women were, the readier was Basil to glimpse Christ in them. The spectacle in a slave-market of a boy sold by his starving parents, the one child sacrificed that his siblings might have some few scraps of food, provoked the bishop to a particularly scorching excoriation of the rich. ‘The bread in your board belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe to the naked; the shoes you let rot to the barefoot; the money in your vaults to the destitute.’⁸ The days when a wealthy man had only to sponsor a self-aggrandising piece of architecture to be hailed a public benefactor were well and truly gone.

Basil’s brother went even further. Gregory was moved by the existence of slavery not just to condemn the extremes of wealth and poverty, but to define the institution itself as an unpardonable offence against God. Human nature, so he preached, had been constituted by its Creator as something free. As such, it was literally priceless. ‘Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.’⁹ This, for his congregation, was altogether too radical, too seditious a perspective to take seriously: for how, as Basil himself put it, were those of inferior intelligence and capabilities to survive, if not as slaves? Unsurprisingly, then, Gregory’s abolitionism met with little support. The existence of slavery as damnable but necessary continued to be taken for granted by most Christians – Basil included. Only when heaven was joined with earth would it cease to exist. Gregory’s impassioned insistence that to own slaves was ‘to set one’s own power above God’s’,¹⁰ and to trample on a dignity that was properly the right of every man and woman, fell like seed among thorns.

But there was seed as well that fell on good ground. Lepers and slaves were not the most defenceless of God’s children. Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in their hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state. Sparta, one of the most celebrated cities in Greece, had been the epitome of this policy, and Aristotle himself had lent it the full weight of his prestige. Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents – so much so that it had long provided novelists with a staple of their fiction. Only a few peoples – the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews – had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.

What the implications might be for infants tossed out with the trash was best demonstrated not by Basil, nor by Gregory, but by their sister. Macrina, the eldest of nine siblings, was in many ways the most influential of them all. She it was who had persuaded her brother to abandon the law and devote himself to Christ; similarly, she could be hailed by Gregory as the most brilliant of his instructors. Erudite, charismatic and formidably ascetic, she devoted herself to a renunciation of the world’s pleasures so absolute as to fill her contemporaries with awe; and yet she did not abandon the world altogether. When famine held Cappadocia in its grip, and ‘flesh clung to the bones of the poor like cobwebs’,¹¹ then Macrina would make a tour of the refuse tips. Those infant girls she rescued she would take home, and raise as her own. Whether it was Macrina who had taught Gregory, or Gregory Macrina, both believed that within even the most defenceless newborn child there might be glimpsed a touch of the divine. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Cappadocia and its neighbouring regions, where – even by the standards of other lands – the abandonment of infants was a particular custom, should also have been where the first visions of Christ’s mother had lately begun to be reported. Mary, the virgin Theotokos, ‘the bearer of God’, had herself known what it was to have a baby when poor, and homeless, and afraid. So it was recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Obliged by a Roman tax-demand to travel from her native Galilee to Bethlehem, Mary had given birth to Christ in a stable, and laid him down on straw. Macrina, taking up the slight form of a starving baby in her arms, could know for sure that she was doing God’s work.

Yet Gregory, when he came to write in praise of his sister after her death, did not compare her to Mary. Of good family though she was, born to wealth, she had always slept at night on planks, as though on a cross; and so it was, on her deathbed, that she prayed to God to receive her into his kingdom, ‘because I have been crucified with you’.¹² It was not his brother, the celebrated bishop, the founder of the Basileias, whom Gregory thought to compare to Christ, but his sister. Here, in a world where lepers could be treated with dignity, and the abolition of slavery be urged on the rich, was yet another subversion of the traditional way of ordering things. Solid as these hierarchies were, very ancient, and with foundations deeply laid, they were not to be toppled as readily as Gregory might have hoped; and yet, for all that, in his homilies there was an intimation of reverberations that lay far distant in the future. Much was immanent, in the new faith clasped to its bosom by the Roman ruling classes, that they could barely comprehend. ‘Give to the hungry what you deny your own appetite.’¹³ Gregory’s urging, which to previous generations would have appeared madness, was one with which the wealthy increasingly found themselves bound to wrestle.

Sharing and Caring

In 397, in a village beside the Loire, two rival gangs gathered outside a bare stone chamber where an old man lay dying. It was late afternoon by the time he finally breathed his last; and at once a violent argument broke out as to where his body should be taken. The two groups, one from Poitiers, the other from Tours, both pressed the case for their respective towns. The shadows lengthened, the sun set, and still the dispute raged. The men from Poitiers, agreeing amongst themselves that they would spirit away the corpse at first light, settled down to sit in vigil over it; but gradually all fell asleep. The men from Tours, seizing their chance, crept into the cell. Lifting up the body from the cinders in which it had been lying, they smuggled it out through a window and sped away upriver. Arriving in Tours, they were greeted by exultant crowds. The old man’s burial in a tomb outside the city walls set the seal on a triumphant expedition.

Stories like these, told by people proud of the might of the dead in their midst, had a venerable pedigree.* In Greece, the bones of heroes – readily distinguishable by their colossal size – had long been prized as trophies. It was not unknown for entire skeletons to be chiselled out of rock and abducted. Tombs as well, great mounds of earth raised over the ashes of fallen heroes, had for a millennium been sites of pilgrimage. Julian, even before becoming emperor, and making public his devotion to the ancient gods, had made a point of visiting Troy. There, he had been shown the tombs of Homer’s heroes, and the temples raised to them, by none other than the local bishop. Seeing Julian’s raised eyebrow, the bishop had only shrugged. ‘Is it not natural that people should worship a brave man who was their fellow citizen?’¹⁴ Pride in ancestral warriors ran very deep.

The old man claimed for burial by the party from Tours had once been a soldier. Indeed, he had served in the cavalry under Julian. It was not, however, for any feats on the battlefield that Martin was admired by his followers. Nor was it for his lineage, nor for beauty, nor for splendour, nor for any other of the qualities that traditionally had ranked as those of a hero. Among the notoriously haughty noblemen of Gaul, Martin had inspired many an appalled curling of the lip. ‘His looks were those of a peasant, his clothes shoddy, his hair a disgrace.’¹⁵ Yet such had been his charisma, such his mystique, that various aristocrats, far from despising him, had been inspired by his example to leave their estates and come to live as he did. Three miles downriver from Tours, on a grassy plain named Marmoutier, an entire community of them was to be found, camped out in wooden shacks, or else in the caves that honeycombed a facing cliff. It was a venture that brought a flavour of distant Egypt to the banks of the Loire. There, out in the desert, amid the haunts of bandits and wild beasts, men and women had been living for many years. Their ambition it was to reject the delusions of civilisation, to commit to a lifetime of chastity and self-abnegation, to live as monachoi: ‘those who live alone’. True, the Loire Valley was no desert. The monachoi – the ‘monks’ – who had settled there did not think to sacrifice everything. They kept their land. Peasants still worked fields for them. As they might have done in their leisure time back in their villas, they passed their time reading, talking, fishing. And yet for all that, to live as they did, after having been bred to greatness, and luxury, and worldly expectations, was undoubtedly a sacrifice. Seen in a certain light, it might almost be heroic.

And if so, then Martin – judged by the venerable standards of the aristocracy in Gaul – represented a new and disconcerting breed of hero: a Christian one. Such was the very essence of his magnetism. He was admired by his followers not despite but because of his rejection of worldly norms. Rather than accept a donative from Julian, he had publicly demanded release from the army. ‘Until now it is you I have served; from this moment on I am a servant of Christ.’¹⁶ Whether indeed Martin had truly said this, his followers found it easy to believe that he had. That he had breathed his last on a bare floor, his head resting on a stone, was the measure of how he had lived his life. Not even the most exacting standards of military discipline could have compared with the austerities to which he had consistently subjected himself. In an age when the rich, arrayed in gold and silk, shimmered like peacocks, Martin’s followers, camped out with him in their cells, dressed in nothing but the coarsest robes, looked on him as raw recruits might, gazing admiringly at a battle-hardened captain. By choosing to live as a beggar, he had won a fame greater than that of any other Christian in Gaul. In 371, it had even seen him elected as bishop of Tours. The shock, both to the status-conscious elite of the city, and to Martin himself, had been intense. Ambushed by those who had come with news of his elevation, he had run away and concealed himself in a barn, until his hiding place had been betrayed by geese. Or so the story went. It was evidence of Martin’s celebrity that many such tales were told of him. The first monk in Gaul ever to become a bishop, he was a figure of rare authority: elevated to the heights precisely because he had not wanted to be.

Here, for anyone bred to the snobbery that had always been a characteristic of Roman society, was shock enough. Yet it was not only the spectacle of a smelly and shabbily dressed former soldier presiding as the most powerful man in Tours that had provoked a sense of a world turned upside down, of the last becoming first. Martin’s disdain for the appurtenances of power – a palace, servants, fine clothes – was more than just a slap in the face of those who measured status by the possession of such things. It had charged him with a potency that, in the opinion of his admirers, owed nothing to human agency. Fabulous stories were told of its reach: of how fire would turn back at his command; of how water fowl, if they offended him by gorging too greedily on fish, would be ordered to migrate, and do so. None of his followers doubted the source of this authority. Martin, so they believed, was touched by Christ himself.

‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’¹⁷ So Jesus, asked by a wealthy young man how he might obtain eternal life, had replied. The rich man, greatly saddened, had beaten a retreat; but Martin had not. Even as bishop, he had lived his Saviour’s advice to the full, shunning the palace that was his by right of office, and living instead in a shack out at Marmoutier. That he had indeed stored treasure in heaven for himself was evident from the sound, heard as he lay dying, of psalms being sung in the sky; but also from the miraculous services that he had been able, while alive, to do the sick and wretched. Reports of his feats were lovingly treasured: of how the paralysed had been made to walk by his touch; of how lepers had been healed by his kiss; even of how a suicide, found hanging from a ceiling, had been brought back from the dead. Here, in these tales, was a challenge to the wealthy that grew more pointed with every retelling. Anecdotes no less than homilies could serve to instruct the faithful. Martin was not, as Gregory of Nyssa had been, a great scholar. It was his deeds rather than his words that his disciples tended most to admire. Unlike Gregory, whose vision of God as ‘the helper of the lowliest, the protector of the weak, the shelter of the hopeless, the saviour of the rejected’¹⁸ was powerfully informed by Origen, Martin’s genius was for the memorable gesture. Such was his truest and most influential legacy: the stories told about him.

And one in particular. The setting was the dead of winter, back in the days of Martin’s youth, before his resignation from the army. The cold that year was exceptionally bitter. A beggar in rags stood shivering by the gateway of Amiens, a city in northern Gaul. The townsmen, wrapped up warm as they crunched through the snow, gave him nothing. Then came Martin. Dressed for duty, he had no money, only his arms. As a soldier, though, he did have his heavy military cloak; and so, taking out his sword, he cut it in two, and gave one half to the beggar. No other story about Martin would be more cherished; no other story more repeated. This was hardly surprising. The echo was of a parable told by Jesus himself. The setting, as recorded in Luke’s gospel, was the road leading eastwards from Jerusalem. Two travellers, a priest and a Temple attendant, passed a fellow Jew who had been attacked by thieves and left for dead. Then came a Samaritan; and he tended to the injured man, taking him to an inn, and paying the landlord to care for him. Shocking to the sensibilities of Jesus’ original listeners, who would have taken for granted the thorough contemptibility of Samaritans, it was shocking as well to those of distant Gaul. To the tribalism that had always run deep there, Roman urbanism had added its own assumptions: that the wealthy, if they felt a responsibility to the unfortunate at all, owed it only to those of their own city. Martin, though, was not from Amiens. Born beside the eastern foothills of the Alps, and raised in Italy, he was not even a Gaul. More than any legal prescription could have done, then, more than any sermon, the compassion he had shown to a shivering stranger in the Gallic snow made vivid the principles to which he had devoted his life: that those with possessions owed a due of charity to those who had none; and that no bounds, no limits, existed on that due. The night after his encounter with the beggar, so it is said, Martin had dreamed; and in his dream he had seen Christ dressed in the very portion of the cloak that he had given away that day. ‘And the Lord said to him, as he had done on earth, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”’¹⁹

There could be no doubting, then, the sheer potency of Martin’s reputation; nor the prize that those who had abducted his corpse from his deathbed had won for Tours. The miracles which he was reported to have performed in life did not cease now that he was dead. In dreams, he would appear to the sick and the disadvantaged, straightening twisted limbs, giving voice to the mute. Yet if this inspired devotion, then so also – among the leading families of Tours – did it provoke unease. At Marmoutier, the monks put up signs indicating where he had prayed, and sat, and slept; but in Tours he tended to be remembered with less fondness. His successor as bishop, although he built a small shrine over Martin’s tomb, did not promote its fame. In the upper reaches of a church dominated by the urban elite, Martin was an embarrassment. His shabbiness; his lack of breeding; his demand that the gap between rich and poor be closed: none of it had been welcome. This, so Martin’s admirers charged, was because he had put other bishops to shame, by serving as a living reproach; but the bishops themselves, unsurprisingly, disagreed. They had a more elevated sense of their role: as the defenders of the natural order of things. How, if they were to give all their possessions to the poor, could they possibly be expected to maintain their authority? Why would God wish to see the very fabric of society fall apart? What, without the rich, would be the source of charity?

Here, in a world where the wealthy were becoming ever more Christian, were questions that would not go away.

Treasure in Heaven

Far beyond the horizons of a provincial town like Tours, in villas sweet-smelling with expensive perfumes, adorned with marble of every colour, and brilliant with gold and silver furnishings, there shimmered the dimension of the super-rich. The very wealthiest of families owned estates that reached back centuries, and spanned the Roman world. By virtue of their pedigree and their income, the men who headed them were enrolled in the empire’s most exclusive club. The Senate, an assembly that could trace its origins back to the very beginnings of Rome, constituted the apex of a rigidly stratified society. Its members – albeit in private – might even sneer at emperors as parvenus. There was no snob quite like a senatorial snob.

How, though, for Christian plutocrats, was all this to be squared with one of their Saviour’s most haunting warnings: that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? In 394, an answer to this question was proposed so radical that it sent shock-waves through the empire’s elite, thrilling some, appalling many others. Meropius Pontius Paulinus was the epitome of privilege. Fabulously well-connected, and the owner of a vast array of properties in Italy, Gaul and Spain, he had enjoyed every advantage that breeding could bring. He had talent as well. Both in the Curia, the venerable building in the heart of Rome where the Senate met, and as an administrator, Paulinus had won himself a brilliant reputation while still only young. Nevertheless, he was tormented by self-doubt. A keen admirer of Martin, who had miraculously healed him of an eye complaint, Paulinus had come to believe that the surest blindness was that caused by worldly goods. Encouraged by his wife, Therasia, he began to contemplate a spectacular gesture of renunciation. When, after many years of trying, the couple had a son, only to lose him eight days later, their minds were made up. Their plan was ‘to purchase heaven and Christ for the price of brittle riches’.²⁰ All their property and possessions, Paulinus announced, would be sold, and the proceeds given to the poor. Just for good measure, he renounced his rank as a senator, and sexual relations with his wife. When together they left Therasia’s native Spain, and headed for Italy, it was as a couple pledged to poverty. ‘The deadly chains of flesh and blood were broken.’²¹

For the rest of his life, Paulinus would live in a simple hut inland from the bay of Naples, in the city of Nola. Here, where as a young man he had served a term as governor, he devoted himself to prayer, to vigils, and to giving alms. Gold that would once have been lavished on silks or spices was now spent on clothes and bread for the poor. When wealthy travellers came to gawp, ‘their swaying coaches gleaming, their horses richly caparisoned, the carriages of the women gilded’,²² Paulinus would present himself as a visual reproach to their extravagance. Pale from his sparse diet of beans, and with his hair roughly cropped like a slave’s, his appearance was calculated to shock. His body odour too. In an age when there existed no surer marker of wealth than to be freshly bathed and scented, Paulinus hailed the stench of the unwashed as ‘the smell of Christ’.²³

And yet to stink was, for a billionaire, as much of a fashion choice as it was to be expensively fragrant. Decades after his declaration that he would dispose of all his property, and despite his undoubted commitment to doing so, the precise details of Paulinus’ affairs remained opaque. One thing, though, was evident: he never lacked for cash to spend on his chosen projects. The poor were not the only focus of his ambitions. In the showiest tradition of the Roman super-rich, he had a fondness for grands projets. That he sponsored churches rather than temples did nothing to diminish the spectacular extravagance of their fittings. Despite his pointed refusal of the dues that had been his as a senator, Paulinus remained, at heart, a recognisably patrician figure: a grandee dispensing largesse. Perhaps this was why, despite his renown as a camel who had passed through the eye of a needle, he himself rarely made allusion to the famous saying. Instead, he far preferred another passage from the gospels. The story had been told by Jesus of a rich man, Dives, who refused to feed a beggar at his gates named Lazarus. The two men died. Dives found himself in fire, while Lazarus stood far above him, by Abraham’s side. ‘Have pity on me,’ Dives called up to Abraham, ‘and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’ But Abraham refused. ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.’²⁴ Such was the fate that haunted Paulinus – and that he was resolved at all costs to avoid. Every act of charity, every scattering of gold coin, promised a drop of cooling water on his tongue. Wealth, if diverted to the needy, might serve to extinguish the flames of the afterlife. Here was the comfort to which Paulinus clung. ‘It is not riches in themselves that are either offensive or acceptable to God, but only the uses to which they are put by men.’²⁵

This, as a means for resolving the anxieties of wealthy Christians, was a proposition that seemed to offer something for everyone. The poor profited from the generosity of the rich; the rich stored up treasure for themselves in heaven by displaying charity to the poor. The more a man had to give, the greater would be his ultimate reward. In this way – unsettling reflections on camels and the eyes of needles notwithstanding – traditional proprieties could be preserved. Rank, even among Christians as literal in their interpretation of the gospels as Paulinus, might still count for something. Yet not all were so sure. The fixed order of things was tottering. Ancient certainties were literally under siege. In 410, a decade and a half after Paulinus had renounced his wealth, a far greater spectacle of abasement shocked the world. Rome herself, the ancient mistress of empire, was starved into submission by a barbarian people, the Goths, and stripped of her gold. Senators were bled white to pay their city’s ransom. The shock was felt across the entire Mediterranean. Yet there were some Christians, rather than sharing in the outrage, who saw in the sack of Rome merely the latest expression of a primordial lust for riches. ‘Pirates on the ocean waves, bandits on the roads, thieves in towns and villages, plunderers everywhere: all are motivated by greed.’²⁶ True of the Gothic king, it was no less true of senators. Rare was the fortune that had not been raised on the backs of widows and orphans. The very existence of wealth was a conspiracy against the poor. Alms-giving, no matter what Christian plutocrats might hope, could not possibly serve to sanctify it. The fires were waiting. The rich would never make it to Abraham’s side.

This reading of God’s purposes, grim though it might seem to Paulinus, was no less derived from an attentive reading of the gospels than his own had been. Those who proclaimed it made sure to cite their Saviour. ‘Christ did not say, “Woe to you who are the evil rich”, but simply, “Woe to you who are rich.”’²⁷ Yet radicals, in the troubled decade that witnessed the sack of Rome, did not confine themselves to quoting scripture. In their ambition to fathom what Christ’s teachings on wealth and poverty might mean for a society dominated by billionaires, and how the differences between the rich and the poor might be erased, they turned for inspiration to the most fashionable ascetic of the age. Pelagius, a burly and intellectually brilliant Briton, had made such a name for himself after settling in Rome that he had become the toast of high society. His teachings, though, had an appeal that extended far beyond exclusive salons. Man, Pelagius believed, had been created free. Whether he lived in obedience to God’s instructions or not, the decision was his own. Sin was merely a habit – which meant that perfection might be achieved. ‘There is no reason why we should not do good, other than that we have become accustomed to doing wrong from our childhood.’²⁸ Pelagius, in formulating this maxim, had in mind the life of the individual Christian; but there were some among his followers who applied it to the entire sweep of history. Expelled from Eden, they argued, humanity had fallen into the fatal habit of greed. The strong, stealing from the weak, had monopolised the sources of wealth. Land, livestock and gold had become the property of the few, not the many. The possibility that riches might ever have been a blessing bestowed by God, untainted by exploitation, was a grotesque self-deception. There was no coin dropped into a beggar’s shrivelled palm that had not ultimately been won by criminal means: lead-tipped whips, and cudgels, and branding irons. Yet if, as Pelagius argued, individual sinners could cleanse themselves of their sin, and win perfection by obedience to God’s commands, then so too could all of humanity. Evidence for what this might mean in practical terms was to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, the book written by Luke in which he had described Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, and which had come to be incorporated into the New Testament. There, preserved for the edification of all, it was recorded that the first generation of Christ’s followers had held everything in common. ‘Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.’²⁹ A just and equal society was, then, an ambition for which there existed the direct sanction of scripture itself. Only achieve it, and there would be no need for charity. Grandstanding philanthropists like Paulinus would become one with the beggars who thronged his churches. ‘Get rid of the rich, and where will the poor be then?’³⁰

In practice, of course, as a manifesto, this was barely less implausible than Gregory of Nyssa’s urging that slavery be abolished. Indeed, in the years that followed the sack of Rome, the western half of the empire became ever more a playground for the strong. The sinews that had long held it together were starting to snap. The mighty bulk of it was falling apart. A century on from Paulinus’ great gesture of renunciation, and the complex infrastructure that had sustained the existence of the super-rich was gone for good. In place of a single Roman order extending from the Sahara to northern Britain, there was instead a patchwork of rival kingdoms, spear-won by an array of barbarous peoples: Visigoths, Vandals, Franks. In this new world, those among the Christian nobility who had managed to avoid utter impoverishment were rarely inclined to feel guilty about it. The poverty embraced by Martin and Paulinus was more liable to appear to them now as a fate to be avoided at all costs than an example to be followed. What they wanted from bishops and holy men was not admonishment on the inherent evil of riches, but something very different: an assurance that wealth might indeed be a gift from God. And this, sure enough, in the various barbarian kingdoms of the West, was precisely what churchmen had come to provide.

Behind them lay the massive authority of a man who, back when Paulinus had still been the talk of the empire, and Pelagius the toast of Rome, was serving as the bishop of an isolated port on the African coast – and yet whose influence had far outshone them both. To Augustine of Hippo, it was precisely the diversity of the Christian people, the joining together of every social class, that constituted its chief glory. ‘All are astonished to see the entire human race converging on the Crucified One, from emperors down to beggars in their rags.’³¹ Augustine himself had known what it was to be brought to Christ. His conversion had come when he was already in his thirties. Had he not turned to a passage in Paul, after hearing, as though in a hallucination, a child chant ‘Pick it up and read’ in a neighbouring garden, perhaps he would never have become a Christian at all. Certainly, Augustine had led a restless life. Prior to his baptism, he had clawed his way up from provincial obscurity to the margins of the imperial court; he had moved from city to city, from Carthage to Rome to Milan; he had dabbled in a whole range of cults and philosophies; he had picked up women in churches. Such a man knew perfectly well just how various humanity was. Nevertheless, returning from Italy to his native Africa, and in due course to election as the bishop of Hippo, he had dared to dream of a Christianity that was properly catholic – universal – in practice as well as name. ‘It is high time for all and sundry to be inside the Church.’³² Yet this conviction had not – as it had the more radical followers of Pelagius – encouraged Augustine to claim that divisions of class and wealth might be erased, and all goods be held in common. Quite the contrary. The bishop of Hippo was far too sombre, far too pessimistic, in his view of human nature to imagine that charity could ever not be needed. ‘The poor you will always have with you.’³³ So Christ himself had warned. The wealthy and the wretched: both were destined to exist for as long as the world endured.

Augustine’s mistrust of where social upheaval might lead had been bred in part of personal experience. In Hippo, as in the rest of Africa, the schism in the church had remained something violent and raw. Ambushes on the roads beyond the city were a constant danger; acid attacks a particular risk. Augustine, as a Catholic bishop, had always known himself a potential target. Donatist radicals, he had charged, were rebels not just against his own authority, but against everything that made for order. Attacking villas, they would seize the owners, ‘well-educated men of superior birth’, and chain them to gristmills, ‘forcing them by the whip to turn it in a circle as if they were the lowest kind of draught animal’.³⁴ Not for Augustine the conviction that the poor were purer in heart than the rich. All were equally fallen. Divisions of class were as nothing compared to the condition of sinfulness that all of humanity shared in common. This meant that a billionaire who, like Paulinus, gave away his entire fortune could be no more certain of salvation than the destitute widow who, according to the gospels, had been watched by Jesus donating to the Temple treasury all that she had: two tiny copper coins. It meant as well that any dream of establishing an earthly society in which the extremes of wealth and poverty were banished, and all rendered equal, was just that: a dream.

Indeed, to Augustine, the teaching of Pelagius that Christians might live without sin was not merely fantasy, but a pernicious heresy. It risked damnation for all who believed it. Men and women could not possibly, in a fallen world, attain perfection. The doctrine formulated centuries earlier by Jesus Ben Sirah, that Eve’s disobedience in Eden had doomed all her descendants to share in her original sin, had largely been forgotten by Jewish scholars; but not by Augustine. Every day was a day that demanded penance: not just prayers for forgiveness, but the giving of alms. Here, for everyone who could afford it, from the poorest widow to the wealthiest senator, was the surest way to expiate the fatal taint of original sin. Position and wealth, so long as those entrusted with them put them to good purposes, were not inherent evils. The wild demands of the more radical among the Pelagians, that all possessions be held in common, could be dismissed as a folly and a delusion. ‘Get rid of pride, and riches will do no harm.’³⁵ Augustine’s message, in the centuries that followed the collapse of Roman rule in the West, was one that found many listeners. Amid the rubble of the toppled imperial order, it offered both to local aristocrats and to barbarian warlords a glimpse of how their authority might be set upon novel and secure foundations. If the old days of marble-clad villas were gone for ever, then there was now another index of greatness that might more readily win God’s blessing: the ability to defend dependants, and to grant them not just alms, but armed protection. Power, if employed to defend the powerless, might secure the favour of heaven.

The surest evidence of all for this, perhaps, was to be found at Tours. There, a century and more after Martin’s death, it was no longer his cell at Marmoutier that provided the focus of pilgrims’ devotions, but his tomb. All the reservations about his memory had long since been swept away. A succession of ambitious bishops had adorned the site of his burial with a great complex of churches, courtyards and towers. Over the tomb itself there glittered a gilded dome.* Here, dominating the approaches to Tours itself, was a monument that proclaimed an awesome degree of authority. Martin, who in life had shunned the trappings of worldly power, in death had become the very model of a mighty lord. As he had ever done, he continued to care for the sick, and the suffering, and the poor with manifold acts of charity; chroniclers of his miracles lovingly recorded how he had healed children, and provided for impoverished widows. Martin, though, like any lord in the troubled years that had followed the collapse of Roman order, knew how to look after his own. Even the most grasping kings, in dread of his potency, made sure to treat Tours with a certain grudging respect. Clovis, the Frankish warlord who in the last years of the fifth century had succeeded in establishing his rule over much of Gaul, ostentatiously prayed to Martin for his backing in battle – and then, after receiving it, sent him appropriately splendid gifts. Clovis’ heirs, the rulers of a kingdom that would come to be called Francia, tended to avoid Tours altogether – as well they might have done. Sensitive to the parvenu quality of their own dynasty, they knew better than to compete with the blaze of its patron’s charisma. When, in due course, one of them obtained the capella, the very cloak that Martin had divided for the beggar at Amiens, it fast came to serve as the badge of Frankish greatness. Guarded by a special class of priest, the capellani or ‘chaplains’, and carried in the royal train in times of war, it bore intimidating witness to the degree to which holiness had become a source of power. Martin’s death, far from diminishing his authority, had only enhanced it. No longer, as they had been back in Paul’s day, were ‘Saints’ held to be the living faithful. Now the title was applied to those who, like Martin, had died and gone to join their Saviour. More than any Caesar had been, they were loved, petitioned, feared. Amid the shadows of a violent and an impoverished age, their glory offered succour both to the king and to the slave, to the ambitious and to the humble, to the warrior and to the leper.

There was no reach of the fallen world so dark, it seemed, that it could not be illumined by the light of heaven.