A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

In effect, Christianity had become polytheistic; and were it not that the personalities of Father, Mother and Son satisfied the average religious need, as it had so long done in pre-Christian Egypt, the dispute actually begun by Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople in the fourth century over the modality of the Holy Ghost would have gone as far as those over the Son and “the Mother of God.” In its first stage, the conception of the Holy Spirit, so vague and purposeless in the orthodox doctrine, would seem to have been distinctly that of a feminine Deity. We know from Origen that in the lost gospel of the Hebrews Jesus was made to speak of “My Mother the Holy Spirit.” This was a heretical reversion, on Judæo-Gnostic lines, to the original Semitic theosophy, according to which every God had his female counterpart; but ordinary Jewish monotheism, which had put aside the female Spirit (Ruach) of its older lore, was sufficiently strong to prevent the acceptance of such a heresy in the gospel-making period; and the accepted gospel birth-myth was better adapted to the general purposes of the cult. For the paganized Church, finally, the divinization of Mary was a simple matter, as we have seen; and the Holy Spirit, which had obscurely entered the orthodox myth in a form really Samaritan, but permitted by Judaic doctrine, thenceforth remained a gratuitous enigma, capping the mystery of the co-eternal Father and Begotten Son. The Eastern Church, recoiling from a reiteration of the latter countersense, decided (381) that the Spirit “proceeded from” the Father, but not from the Son, thus virtually depriving the Son, after all, of his so-often affirmed equality.

The root of the difficulty, as of the Trinitarian dogma in general, is to be seen in the old Egyptian pantheism, according to which the all-comprehending Amun “is at once the Father, the Mother, and the Son of God”; but even as the Amunite priests made play with the Son-God Khonsu after affirming the oneness of Amun, so the Christian priesthood was forced at every step to distinguish the Son while affirming the oneness of the Trinity; and each new dogma was a fresh ground for the old quarrel. In the end the Western Church rejected this Eastern heresy as it did the Monothelite; and the Council of Toledo (589) added to the creed the Filioque clause, thus stating that the Spirit proceeded from the Father “and from the Son.” But at this point the Eastern Church remained obstinate; it admitted that the Spirit came through the Son, but would not say it “proceeded from” the Son; and the Filioque clause remained a standing ground of feud between East and West, as well as a standing instance of the irrationality of the orthodox system. It is no wonder that in the seventh century eastern churchmen were still writing treatises against paganism, which, despite all the penal laws, persisted in virtue of its incoherent simplicity as against the systematic unintelligibility of the Christian creed.

A politic Christian, indeed, might point to the mere history of heresy as showing the need for a dogma which should give no foothold to reason. Like the Arians, the Monophysites had divided into warring sects, their crux being that of the corruptibility or incorruptibility of the body of Christ; and the two parties thus formed split in turn into five. The total schism was in the main racial, Egyptian opposing Greek; and the carnal jealousies of the patriarchs and bishops seem to have played a great part in creating it; but nothing could arrest the process of sub-division and strife. In one furious feud over the election of a bishop of the Monophysite church of Alexandria, a hundred and seventy years after the first Eutychean schism, the fighting reached the lowest stage of savagery; and Justinian’s general Narses, who supported the “incorruptible” candidate at the behest of the empress Theodora, had to burn a large part of the city before he could carry his point. Soon afterwards, another imperial nominee, who entered the city in battle array, had to fight for his place; and the carnage was enormous. In every doctrinal strife in turn the parties proceeded to bloodshed with a speed and zest which turned to derision the moral formulas of their creed. Such social delirium was chronic in Christendom from the age of Constantine to the triumph of the Saracens; and, needless to say, under such conditions there was no progress in civilization.

§ 3. Moral and Intellectual Stagnation

On the intellectual side, ancient Christianity is on the whole at its strongest in the West, just before the fall of the western empire, as if the last mental energies of the Roman world had there found a channel. Augustine passed on to the middle ages a body of polemic theology sufficiently vivacious to constitute a Christian classic; and in him at last the Latin church had produced a personality comparable to Origen. Jerome, on the other hand, could compare with Origen as a scholar, and like him he laid bases for the scholarship of a later and reviving age. But the total achievement of Christianity on behalf of ancient civilization had amounted to nothing. By spreading the dogma that error of belief, whether as paganism or as heresy, doomed men to eternal torment, it negated the very basis of human brotherhood, and gave a new dominion to hate, individual and corporate. It made neither good rulers nor a sound society. Valentinian must have been made tolerant in state affairs by the spirit of pagan policy: as a man he was so abnormally cruel that had he been a pagan the historians would have compared him to Nero. That a year after Julian’s death there should be on the throne a Christian emperor who caused offenders to be thrown to wild bears in his own presence is a memorable item in Christian history. Of his Arian brother Valens it is told that he caused to be burned at sea a shipload of eighty ecclesiastics who had come to him as a deputation. This may be an orthodox fiction; but such fictions are themselves signal proofs of demoralizing malignity; as is the orthodox suppression of the story of how the Arian bishop Deogratius at Carthage succoured the captives brought by the Vandals from the sack of Rome—one of the rare records of magnanimous humanity in the history of the age.

From the orthodox themselves we know how Pope Leo had banished and imprisoned the Manichæans and Pelagians who sought refuge at Rome when the Vandals attacked Carthage. The emperors exhibit the process of decivilization. Valentinian died of rage: his pious sons were weaklings; and Theodosius, when the rabble of Thessalonica braved him by murdering his governor for enforcing the law against a popular charioteer, treacherously planned a systematic and indiscriminate massacre by which there perished from seven to fifteen thousand men, women, and children. No pagan emperor had ever done the like; and no such number of Christians can have been put to death by Nero. Heraclius, after beheading Phocas, sent his head and limbs to be dragged through the streets of Constantinople—a reversion to barbarism. Two centuries earlier (415) a rabble of Alexandrian monks, acting in the interest of Cyril the Patriarch, seized the pagan teacher Hypatia, stripped her, tore her flesh from her bones with shells, and burned the remains. It is one of the anomalies of historiography that a moral rebirth of the world should have been held to begin in an age in which such things could be. Rather the Mediterranean world had grown more neurotically evil than ever before. The facts that Bishop Ambrose of Milan denounced the act of Theodosius, forcing him to do penance for seven months before re-admitting him to worship, and that Theodosius in his remorse submitted to the sentence and was afterwards less vindictive, are the best that can be recorded per contra. Ambrose himself warmly justified the burning of Jewish synagogues; and while he, with all his ecclesiastical frauds, showed a public spirit, it is a commonplace of Christian history that from the third century onwards bishops in general were self-seekers, who battled furiously over questions of diocesan boundaries, and were the ideal contrast to the legendary apostles. Among the Christianized barbarians who in their turn overran the empire the moral phenomena become even worse, their religion seeming only to make them more savage and vicious.

All that Christianity had yielded under the form of moral betterment was an increasing glorification of chastity and celibacy, with some restraint on infanticide. When the western empire is on the verge of destruction, Rome being already sacked, we find Jerome expanding in an insane exultation over the news that a young Roman lady had taken the vow of virginity, an event to which he ascribes cosmic importance. The mother of such a virgin, he declares, becomes ipso facto “the mother-in-law of God.” As always happens where sexual virtue is identified with abstinence, vice was excessive. Chrysostom in the East, and Salvian in Gaul, testify that alike in licence and in cruelty the Christianized State at the beginning of the fifth century was the worsened copy of the pagan world of four centuries before. The Greek Basil and the Italian Ambrose alike bear witness to the survival in the Christian Church of all the excesses of the old Bacchanalia. Even the tradition that in the reign of Honorius (404) the horrible gladiatorial games were abolished, is admitted by Christian scholarship to be false. It may be that a humane monk did lose his life in trying to stop them; but there is clear proof that the games subsisted in Christian Gaul at a later date, though even humane pagans had called for their abolition, and their cost was a heavy burden on the falling revenue. Centuries before the time of Honorius, Apollonius of Tyana was credited with causing them to be abolished at Athens. Not till the Gothic conquest did the games cease in the West; nor did the piety of Honorius and his advisers withhold them from treacherous massacres, and from enacting the punishment of burning alive for frauds on the fisc.

And the wrong of wrongs was left not only untouched but unchallenged. Slavery remained, and the average lot of the slave was no better than in the Rome of Horace. Christian matrons in the East were as cruel mistresses as those of the West in the days before Nero. That Christian credences counted for little in setting up even the species of virtue most esteemed may be gathered from the Confessions of Augustine. By his own account, what first drew him in his youth to moral reflection and conduct was not the pious teaching of his mother but the writing of Cicero; he was scrupulous as a Manichæan before he became orthodox; and his charges of hypocrisy against some Manichæans merely place the heretical sect on a level with the orthodox. As regarded the weightier matters of morals there could be no vital reform, because there was at work neither an intellectual force nor a self-saving pressure from the wronged orders of society. The ethic which led Origen to make himself a eunuch was not a force for betterment.

A survey of the literature of the fourth and fifth centuries will make equally clear the failure of Christianity to renew the mental life which had been dwindling in the Hellenic world since the days of Alexander, and in the western since those of Augustus. No modern seeker for wisdom or beauty in ancient lore thinks of turning for it to the Greek and Latin writings of the age of established Christianity. Augustine, whose energy was sufficient for a great literary performance, leaves a mass of work out of which two or three treatises only have any truly literary as distinct from an archæological interest; and these are vitiated as compared with good pagan work by their wearisome hysterical pietism no less than by their utter lack of serenity. The Confessions, which might have been a great human document, are reduced by their religious content almost to the plane of the surrounding wilderness of rhetorical theology, whereof a library still subsists, unreadable and unread. Rhetoric, the bane of the decadent pagan literature, infects equally all the Christian writers, giving to the most vehement the ring of inflation and false passion. Literature of artistic or intellectual value was almost at an end. Such Christian poets as Prudentius and Paulinus have indeed merit in their kind; but they could not begin a literary renascence under the conditions set up either by fanatical Christianity or by the worldly spirit which divided with fanaticism the control of the Christian Church and State in the West as in the East. And when the spirit of literature did later revive, it turned with less zest to the pietists named than to their pagan contemporary Claudian, who if not a great poet is yet high among the lesser classics of Rome.