The New Contours of Christianity

Once the new faith became dominant within the Roman Empire it underwent some major changes in forms of thought, organization, and conduct. These changes all bore relationships to earlier tendencies, but the triumph of the faith greatly accelerated certain trends and altered the course of others. The result was that in many respects the Christianity of the late fourth century was a very different religion.

One consequence of Christianity’s triumph was the flaring up of bitter doctrinal disputes. These brought great turmoil to the Church but resulted in the hammering out of dogma and discipline. The first of the bitter disputes was between the Arians and Athanasians over the nature of the Trinity. The Arians – not to be confused with Aryans (a racial term) – were followers of a priest named Arius and were the more intellectual group. Under the influence of Greek philosophy they rejected the idea that Christ could be equal with God. Instead they maintained that the Son was created by the Father and therefore was not co-eternal with Him or formed of the same substance. The followers of St. Athanasius, indifferent to human logic, held that even though Christ was the Son he was fully God: that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were all absolutely equal and composed of an identical substance. After protracted struggles Athanasiu’s side won out and the Athanasian doctrine became the Christian dogma of the Trinity, as it remains today.

The struggle between the Arians and Athanasians was followed by numerous other doctrinal quarrels during the next few centuries. The results were momentous. One was that the dogmas of the Catholic faith gradually became fixed. It should be emphasized that this was a slow development and that many basic tenets of Catholicism were only defined much later. In the subsequent history of Christianity this concern for doctrinal uniformity was to result in both strengths and weaknesses for the Church. A second result of the doctrinal quarrels was that they aggravated regional hostilities. In the fourth century differences among Christians increased alienation between West and East and also aggravated hostilities among regions with the East. Although the Roman Empire was evolving toward regionalism for many different reasons, including economic and administrative ones, and although regionalism was partly a cause of religious differences, the sharper and more frequent doctrinal quarrels became, the more they served to intensify regional hostilities.

Finally, the doctrinal quarrels provoked the interference of the Roman state in the governance of the Church. There were two major reasons for this. First, religious disputes were more prevalent in the East than the West and quarreling parties often appealed to the emperor for support. Second, the weight of imperial government was generally heavier in the East, and after 476 there were no Roman emperors in the West at all. When Eastern emperors were not appealed to by quarreling parties they interfered in religious disputes themselves, in order to preserve unity. The result was that in the East the emperor assumed great religious authority and control, while in the West the future of relations between State and Church was more open.

Even while emperors were interfering in religious matters, however, the Church’s own internal organization was becoming more complex and articulated. There was the development of a hierarchical organization within the ranks of the clergy. Christian organization was centered in cities and one bishop in each important city became the authority to which all the clergy in the surrounding vicinity answered. Those who had their headquarters in the larger cities came to be called metropolitans, with authority over the clergy of an entire province. By 400 A. D. the Christian clergy had come to embrace a definite hierarchy of patriarchs, metropolitans, bishops, and priests. The climax of all this development – still largely in the future – was the growth of the primacy of the bishop of Rome, or in other words the rise of the papacy.

The growth of ecclesiastical organization helped the Church to conquer the Roman world in the fourth century and to minister to the needs of the faithful thereafter. The existence of an Episcopal administrative structure was particularly influential in the West as the Roman Empire decayed and finally collapsed in the fifth century. The church in the West took over many of the functions of government and helped to preserve order amid the deepening chaos. But the new emphasis on administration also had its inevitably detrimental effects: as the Church developed its own rationalized administrative structure it inevitably became more worldly and distant in spirit from the simple faith of Jesus and the Apostles.

The clearest reaction to this trend was expressed in the spread of monasticism. In their origins, monks were not priests but laymen who almost always lived alone and who sought extremes of self-torture rather than ordered lives of spirituality. Monasticism began to emerge in the third century as a response to the anxieties of that age, but it only became a dominant movement within Christianity in the fourth century. Two obvious reasons for this fact stand out. First of all, the choice of extreme hermitlike asceticism was a substitute for martyrdom. Second, as the fourth century progressed the priesthood became more and more immersed in worldly concerns. Monks customarily became priests only later during the Middle Ages. In this way even while Christianity was accommodating itself to practical needs, monasticism satisfied the inclinations of ascetic extremists.

Monasticism first emerged in the East, where for about one hundred years after Constantine’s conversion it spread like a mania. The most successful architect of communal monasticism in the East was St. Basil (330?-379), who started his monastic career as a hermit and ascetic extremist but came to prefer communal and more moderate forms of life. Basil expressed this preference in writings for monks that laid down the basic guidelines for Eastern monasticism down to the present. Basil encouraged monks to discipline themselves by useful labor. He prohibited monks from engaging in prolonged fasts or lacerating their flesh. Instead he urged them to submit to obligations of poverty and humility, and to spend many hours of the day in silent religious meditation. With the triumph of St. Basil’s idea, Eastern monasticism became more organized and subdued.

Monasticism did not at first spread so quickly in the West as it did in the East because the appeal of asceticism was much weaker there. This situation changed only in the sixth century when St. Benedict (480?-547) drafted his famous Latin rule which ultimately became the guide for nearly all the monks in the West. Recent research has shown that Benedict coped much of his rule from an earlier Latin text known as the “Rule of the Master”. The Benedictine rule imposed obligations similar to those laid down by St. Basil: poverty, obedience, labor, and religious devotion. Yet Benedict prescribed less austerity than Basil did: the monks were granted a sufficiency of simple food, clothing, and enough sleep. For such reasons the Benedictine monastery became a home of religious enrichment rather than a school for punishment.

Here we may point in advance some greatest contributions of Benedictine monasticism to the development of Western civilization. One was that Benedictine monks were committed from an early date to missionary work: they were primarily responsible for the conversion of England and later most of Germany. Such activities not only helped to spread the faith but also served to create a sense of cultural unity for western Europe. Another positive contribution lay in the attitude of the Benedictines toward work. St. Benedict wanted his monks always to keep busy, for he believed that “idleness is an enemy of the soul.” Therefore he prescribed that they should be occupied at certain times in manual labor. And early Benedictines worked hard themselves and spread the idea of the dignity of labor to others. With Benedictine support, this idea would become one of the most distinctive traits of Western culture. Benedictine monasteries often helped to advance the level of the western European economy and sometimes even to provide wealth that could be drawn upon by emerging western European states.

The fact that Benedictine monasteries were often islands of culture when literacy and learning were all but forgotten in the secular world is better known. St. Benedict wanted his monks to serve only Christ – not literature or philosophy. Once there was teaching there would obviously be at least a few writing implements and books. The impetus behind the development was the work of a monastic thinker named Cassiodorus (477?-570?). Inspired by St. Augustine, Cassiodorus believed that some basic classical learning was necessary for the proper understanding of the Bible; this justified the study of the classics by monks. Furthermore, Cassiodorus recognized that copying manuscripts was in itself “manual labor” and might be even more appropriate for monks than hard work in the fields. Benedictine monasteries became centers for learning and transcribing that were without rival for centuries. No work of classical Latin literature would survive today had they not been copied and preserved during the early Middle Ages by Benedictine monks.

Carnal love of women was not, however, a Benedictine preference. Compared to most other religions, Christianity was favorable to women. St. Paul even went so far as to say that after baptism “there is neither male nor female”, a spiritual equalitarianism which meant that women could be saved as fully as men. But Christians from earliest times shared the view of their contemporaries that in everyday life and in marriage women were to be strictly subject to men. They should be “silent in church” and could never be priests. Women were more “fleshly” than men and therefore should be subjected to men as the flesh is subjected to the spirit.

With the growth of the ascetic movement in the third and fourth centuries, the denigration of women as dangerously “fleshly” creatures became more and more pronounced. Since sexual abstinence lay at the heart of asceticism, the most perfect men were expected to shun women. Monks, of course, shunned women the most. Originally priests could be married. But in the course of the fourth century the doctrine spread that priests could not be married after ordination, and that those already married were obliged to live continently with their wives afterward.

Once virginity was accepted as the highest standard, marriage was taken to be only second-best. The major purposes of marriage were to keep men from “burning” and to propagate the species. Thus Christianity reinforced the ancient view that woman’s major earthly purpose was to serve as mother. Men and women were warned not to take pleasure even in martial intercourse but to indulge in it only for the purpose of procreation. Women were to be “saved in childbearing.” Almost all women were expected to become submissive wives and mothers. As wives they were not expected to have their own careers and were not meant to be educated or even literate. Hence even though they had full hopes for salvation, they were treated as inferiors in the everyday affairs of the world, a treatment that would endure until modern times.
3. The Shaping of Western Christian Thought

The period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the West was also the time when a few Western Christian thinkers formulated an approach to the world and to God that was to guide the thought of the West for roughly the next 800 years. This concurrence of political decline and theological advance was not coincidental. Between 380 and 525 there were Western Christian thinkers whose accomplishments were intimately interrelated. The towering figure among them was St. Augustine, but some others had great influence as well.

Three contemporaries who knew and influenced each other – St. Jerome (340?-420), St. Ambrose (340?-397), and St. Augustine (354-430) – count as three of the four greatest “fathers” of the Western, Latin Church. (The fourth, St. Gregory the Great, came later.) St. Jerome’s greatest single contribution to the future was his translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. His version, known as the “Vulgate” (or “common” version), became the standard Latin Bible used throughout the Middle Ages; with minor variations it continued to be used long afterward by the Roman Catholic Church. Fortunately Jerome was one of the best writers of his day, and he endowed his translation with vigorous, often colloquial prose and, occasionally, fine poetry. His writing had as much influence on Latin style and thought as the King James Bible has had on English literature. Jerome also influenced the Western Christian future by his contentious but eloquent formulations of contemporary views. Among the most important of these were the beliefs that much of the Bible was to be understood allegorically rather than literally, that classical learning could be valid for Christians if it was thoroughly subordinated to Christian aims, and that the most perfect Christians were rigorous ascetics. In keeping with the last position Jerome avidly supported monasticism. He also taught that women should not take baths so that they would not see their own bodies naked.

Unlike Jerome, St. Ambrose was most active in the concerns of the world. As archbishop of Milan, Ambrose was the most influential Church official in the West. Guided by practical concerns, he wrote an ethical work, On the Duties of Ministers, which followed closely upon Cicero’s On Duties in title and form, and also drew heavily on Cicero’s Stoic ethics. But Ambrose differed from Cicero and most of traditional classical thought on two major points. One was that the beginning and end of human conduct should be the reverence and search for God rather than any self-concern or interest in social adjustment. The other – Ambrose’s most original contribution – was that God helps some Christians but not others in this pursuit by the gift of grace, a point that was to be greatly refined and amplified by St. Augustine. Ambrose put his concern for proper conduct into action by his most famous act, his confrontation with the Emperor Theodosius the Great for massacring innocent civilians. Remarkably the archbishop succeeded in forcing the sovereign emperor to do penance. This was the first time that a churchman had subordinated the Roman secular power in matters of morality. Consequently it symbolized the Church’s claim to preeminence in this sphere, and particularly the Western Church’s developing sense of autonomy and moral superiority that would subsequently make it so much more independent and influential on the secular world than the Eastern Church.

St. Ambrose’s disciple, St. Augustine, was the greatest of all the Latin fathers; indeed he was one of the most powerful Christian intellects of all time. Augustine’s influence on subsequent medieval thought was incalculable. Even after the Middle Ages his theology had a profound influence on the development of Protestantism; in the twentieth century many leading Christian thinkers have called themselves Neo-Augustinians. He hesitated until the age of thirty-three to be peptized, passing from one system of thought to another without being able to find intellectual or spiritual satisfaction in any. Only increasing doubts about all other alternatives, the appeals of St. Ambrose’s teachings, and a mystical experience movingly described in his Confessions led Augustine to embrace the faith wholeheartedly in 387. Thereafter he advanced rapidly in ecclesiastical positions. He still found time to write a large number of profound, complex, and powerful treatises in which he set forth his convictions concerning the most fundamental problems of Christian thought and action.

St. Augustine’s theology revolved around the principles of the profound sinfulness of humanity and divine omnipotence. Ever since Adam and Eve turned away from God in the Garden of Eden humans have remained basically sinful. Human will have nothing to do with this choice: although one has the power to choose between good and evil, one does not have the power to decide whether he will be saved. God alone, from eternity, predestined a portion of the human race to be saved and sentenced the rest to be damned. In other words, God fixed for all time the number of human inhabitants of heaven. Humans themselves must do good, and if they are “chosen” they usually will do good; since no one knows who is chosen and who is not, all should try to do good in the hope that they are among the chosen. For Augustine the central guide to doing good was the doctrine of “charity,” which meant leading a life devoted to loving God and loving one’s neighbor for the sake of God. Seen from the opposite, humans should avoid “cupidity,” or loving earthly things for their own sake. Put in other terms, Augustine taught that humans should behave on earth as if they were travelers or “pilgrims,” keeping their eyes at all times on their heavenly home and avoiding all materialistic concern.

Augustine built an interpretation of history in one of his major works, On the City of God. He argued that the entire human race from the Creation until the Last Judgment was and will be composed of two warring societies, those who “live according to man” and love themselves, and those who “live according to God.” The former belong to the “City of Earth” and will be damned, while the blessed few who compose the “City of God” will on Judgment Day put on the garment of immortality. As for the time when the Last Judgment would come, Augustine argued vehemently that no human could know its exact date; nonetheless since the Judgment might come at any time, and since no other world-historical events were in store for humans that mattered, all mortals should devote their utmost efforts to preparing for it by leading lives of righteousness.

Although St. Augustine formulated major new aspects of Christian theology, he believed that he was doing no more than drawing out truths found in the Bible. Indeed, he was convinced that the Bible alone contained all the wisdom worth knowing. But he also believed that much of the Bible was expressed obscurely, and that it was therefore necessary to have a certain amount of education in order to understand it thoroughly. This conviction led him to a modified acceptance of classical learning. The ancient world had already worked out an educational system based on the “liberal arts,” or those subjects necessary for the worldly success and intellectual growth of free men. Augustine argued that privileged Christians could learn the fundamentals of these subjects, but only in a limited way and for a completely different end – study of the Bible. But Augustine intended liberal education only for an elite; all others were simply to be catechized, or drilled, in the faith. The true wisdom of mortals, he insisted, was piety.

Augustine had many followers, of whom the most interesting and influential was Boethius, a Roman aristocrat who lived from about 480 to 524. Since Boethius was indisputably interested in ancient philosophy, wrote in a polished, almost Ciceronian style, and came from a noble Roman family, it has been customary to view him as the “last of the Romans.”

Boethius could see far more clearly that the ancient world was coming to an end. Therefore he made it his first goal to preserve as much of the best ancient learning as possible by a series of handbooks, translations, and commentaries. Accepting a contemporary division of the liberal arts into seven subjects – grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music – he wrote handbooks on two: arithmetic and music. These summaries were meant to convey all the basic aspects of the subject matter that a Christian might need to know. In order to preserve the best of classical logic, he translated from Greek into Latin some of Aristotle’s logical treatises as well as an introductory work on logic by Porphyry (another ancient philosopher). He also wrote his own explanatory commentaries on these works in order to help beginners. Boethius’s translations and commentaries became a crucial link between the Greeks and the Middle Ages. Boethius helped endow the Latin language with a logical vocabulary, and when interest in logic was revived in the twelfth-century West it rested first on a Boethian basis.

Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, his masterpiece, at the end of his life. In it Boethius asks the age-old question of what is human happiness and concludes that it is not found in earthly rewards such as riches or fame but only in the “highest good,” which is God. Human life, then, should be spent in pursuit of God. His basically Augustinian message is unmistakable. The Consolation of Philosophy became one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages because it was extremely well written, because it showed how classical expression and some classical ideas could be appropriated and subordinated into a clearly Christian framework, and most of all, because it seemed to offer a real meaning to life.
4. Eastern Rome and the West

Boethius’s execution in 524 was in many ways an important historical turning point. For one, Boethius was both the last noteworthy philosopher and last writer of cultivated Latin prose the West was to have for many hundreds of years. Then too Boethius was a layman, and for hundreds of years afterward almost all western European writes would be priests or monks. In the political sphere Boethius’s execution was symptomatic as well because it was the harbinger of the collapse of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy. Boethius’s execution showed that the Arian Ostrogoths could not live in perfect harmony with Catholic Christians such as himself. Soon afterward, the Ostrogoths were overthrown by the Eastern Roman Empire. That event in turn was to be a major factor in the ultimate divorce between East and West and the consequent final disintegration of the old Roman World.

The conquest of the Ostrogoths was part of a larger plan for Roman revival conceived and directed by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian (527-565). Justinian took great strides toward this goal. But ultimately his policy of recovering the West proved unrealistic. One of Justinian’s most impressive and lasting accomplishments was his codification of Roman law. This project was part of his attempt to emphasize continuities with earlier imperial Rome and was also meant to enhance his own prestige and absolute power. When Justinian came to the throne in 527, he immediately decided upon a revision and codification of the existing law to bring it into harmony with the new conditions and to establish it as an authoritative basis of his rule. To carry out the actual work he appointed a commission of lawyers. Within two years the commission published the first result of its labor, the Code, a systematic revision of all of the statutory laws. By 532 the commission had completed the Digest, a summary of all of the writings of the great jurists. The final product of the work of revision was the Institutes, a textbook of the legal principles reflected in both the Digest and the Code. The combination of all four of these results of the program of revision constitutes the Corpus Juris Civilis, or the body of the civil law.

Justinian’s Corpus was a brilliant achievement in its own terms: the Digest alone has been justly called “the most remarkable and important law-book that the world has ever seen.” In addition, the Corpus had an extraordinarily great influence on subsequent legal and governmental history. Revived and restudied in western Europe from the eleventh century on, Justinian’s Corpus became the basis of all the law and jurisprudence of European states, exclusive of England (which followed its own “common law”).

Only a few of the more specific influences of Justinian’s legal work can be enumerated here. One is that in its basic governmental theory it was a bastion of absolutism. But the Corpus also provided some theoretical support for constitutionalism because it maintained that the sovereign originally obtained his powers from the people rather than from God. Perhaps most important and influential was the Corpus’s view of the state as an abstract public and secular entity. The modern conception of the state as a public entity concerned not with the future life but with everyday affairs gained strength toward the end of the Middle Ages largely because of the revival of assumptions found in Justinian’s legal compilations.

Justinian aimed to be a full Roman emperor in geographical practice as well as in legal theory. To this end he sent out armies to re-conquer the West. Shortly before he died Justinian became master of all Italy as well as northwest Africa and coastal parts of Spain that his troops had also managed to recapture. The Mediterranean was once more briefly a “Roman” lake. But the cost of the endeavor was soon going to call the very existence of the Eastern Roman Empire into question. In 568, only three years after Justinian’s death, another Germanic tribe invaded the country and took much of it away from the Eastern Romans. The Roman unity had finally come to an end. The future in this decentralized world may have looked bleak, but new forces in the separate areas would soon be gathering strength.