Chapter Two:

  Starker Light and Darker Resistance
(Part One)

A. Re-Opening the Debate

It was at this point, however, during the first decades of the Roman Principate, that the closed cosmos of the Hellenistic World was tossed history’s greatest “curveball”. Plato had said that “some god” might have to intervene in human events in order to resolve the seemingly insoluble dilemma of exactly how the individual and society were to aid one another to gain possession of the True, the Good and the Beautiful. The one true God now did just that. The Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity as Jesus Christ, the God-Man, compelled society in general and the individual in particular to deal with a new factor in each and every one of their daily calculations. Both had to accept or reject the permanent presence in life of a natural force which was also supernatural and divine; a force that worked to provide individual access to the True, the Good and the Beautiful through two bodies---the human body and community of the God-Man, Jesus Christ Himself, to begin with; and His Mystical Body and the community of His Church thereafter.

Christ immeasurably strengthened the cause of those ancient philosophers who saw that the purpose of life involved much more than unquestioning indulgence in whatever the unreflecting senses pushed individuals and societies to do. He, like them, rejected the rhetoricians’ contention that the wise man’s task was the formulation of “appropriate explanations of strongly felt desires”. His message, like Plato’s, showed that the debate concerning the nature of the human endeavor could never be settled by acquiescence in the self-interested, willful, and ultimately hollow dictates of the passions.

Unlike His philosophical “colleagues”, however, Christ was not troubled by lack of confidence in the ultimate import of His words, or fear of implementing their message due to the possibility of disturbing the immediate socio-political status quo, or lack of physical courage in acting on the logic of His teaching. Christ was a Divine Teacher, Eternal Wisdom itself. He taught “as one speaking with authority”---the supernatural authority of the Creator God, now given flesh for all to see and hear in that earthly realm that He Himself had called into being from nothing.

As this self-referential authority, He confidently proclaimed whence “closure” in the debate over all things natural and human did come. This did not emerge through the fiat of the hero, public opinion, the polis or the Hellenistic God-King, forces which could never understand the full meaning of existence, and generally would not even put into practice the partial knowledge of it which they could conceivably gain. Christ showed that closure came only through His unchanging supernatural Word and the definitive, objective Truth that it affirmed. As “one speaking with authority” over the heavens and the earth, He thus commanded men to do two things: on the one hand, to believe what He had revealed to them for their own benefit and which they could not come to know by means of their own abilities; on the other, to believe in the limited but crucially important knowledge to which their natural reason did indeed lead them. Perhaps most significantly of all, He ordered them to act upon a faith in both Faith and Reason, and to accept the fact that their temporal reward for this action would be the Way of the Cross.

Moreover, Christ’s Church taught with that very same self-referential self-assurance demanding acceptance of both Faith and Reason. She did so precisely because she was Christ continued in time. Being the source of authority in and through Christ gave His Mystical Body the right to reject the depiction of Truth as the plaything of strong passions, strong men and the “appropriate explanations” of their respective court sophists. It gave the Church the right calmly to dismiss opposing, alternative assertions based on human will with the dogmatic intolerance which would always characterize her when she was true to herself; i.e., truly Christ-continued-in-time.

How could such self-confidence rooted in a kingdom that acted in, but was ultimately not of this world fail to impress sensitive men of all classes---and perhaps those from the governing elite most of all---who were hungry for substantive answers to the problems of life? How could it not leave an impact upon souls who realized that other wise men spoke to them only as representatives of different and parochial “schools of thought”---some decent, some cynical, but all rooted firmly and solely in the kingdom of this world; all painfully united, in practice, by their treatment of the search for Truth as a parlor sport, impotent to change and perfect men and society?

Christ’s Church, in contrast both to the earth-bound schools as well as the word games of the sophists and the philosophers emasculated by them, electrified the cause of truth-seeking. It gave that cause energetic backbone as well as a practical outlet. Here was a force with a universal, evangelical message to send to every single individual, male or female, mighty or oppressed, whatever his ethnic background; a message pregnant with immediate, life-changing significance. Here was a power reaching beyond the boundaries of the old Kingdom of Israel and the Jewish ethnos, even, in the long run, beyond the boundaries, the limes, of the Roman Empire as well. Here was a teaching authority which asserted that the reign of a truth-drenched “Kingdom of God” was not to be put off until some indefinite “end time”, but, rather, was a reality which had in some way mysteriously already arrived upon the earth. The consequences of its arrival, as different in a physical sense as these might be from that which the men of an “old Israel” without eyes to see and ears to hear might have wished, had to be made manifest in everyone’s daily life, individual and social... now.

Such a manifestation of God’s presence in political and social life necessarily implied a visible sacralization of the various and different “spaces” of nature; the possibility of a supernatural “transformation” of all institutions, places, functions and symbols of life, “in and through Christ”. And this was all to be accomplished not by some Academy, Lyceum or Stoa, but by an agmen, an army on the march, with chains of command which eventually became as elaborate as those of the Roman legion and the Roman state themselves.

Yes, this self-assured presentation of a universal, immediate, life altering, sacralizing, and organized mission on behalf of eternal, unchanging Truth clearly struck at the principle of “closure” and its attendant justification of earthly willfulness. The Church’s potential success, however, was complicated by one, major, though all-too-familiar problem. This was the old Platonic dilemma of the interdependence of individual and society, now confronted on a much higher and thankfully more hopeful plane than before the Incarnation.

Why should such a dilemma continue to be present? Because a world which possessed the ability to make the Kingdom manifest---due to its access to the teaching and grace of the Son of God in His Church---had not, through the existence of that ability alone, already achieved the goal of transformation in Christ. Individual Christians living on the earth were merely on the way to perfection. They were all part of Christ’s Body, and grew through participation in it, but they could still simultaneously misunderstand and resist the graces coming from membership in that extraordinary supernatural society. The spaces and institutions of nature, whose value the Incarnation had confirmed, and which these fallible individuals desperately needed in order to aid their upward journey, were themselves also not yet raised to God. They were all wounded by the Fall. Moreover, the fresh medicine coming with Faith in Christ and openness to His free gift of grace had not been applied to heal their wounds in any truly serious, much less complete fashion.

The task of correcting and elevating all of the varied elements of corrupted nature---the societies in which they lived above all else---lay with the individual members of the Body of Christ. Ironically, however, all these individuals, weakened by sin, themselves desperately needed the ministrations of the equally fragile natural “spaces” and institutions which they were called upon to strengthen! Heaven or Hell were at stake---both with respect to the individual’s eternal destiny as well as to the character of his pilgrimage to that destiny while on earth---in this battle for the supernatural transformation of nature in all of its complexity. If the Drama of Truth on earth as presented by the deepest of incomplete ancient thinkers was gripping enough already, how much more was this the case once its eternal stakes had been clarified?

 Difficulties connected with the dilemma of individual-social interaction emerged in two specific ways, the first of which involved the action and image of the visible, organized Body of Christ herself. Yes, the Church knew that she was divine, and that she could, with full self-assurance, teach the truth and provide the grace required to live Christ’s message. Still, she was also aware that her members, both clerical and lay, were all too human and perpetually subject to the allurement of sin---even those among them who were basically consistent in their eagerness to complete their personal union with Christ.

Bad Christians could not damage either the substance of the Faith or the supernatural medicine taught and offered through the Body of Christ. In dealing with these essential matters, the Church was simply acting as Our Saviour Himself, her ministers mere conduits for a strength greater than their individual failures or achievements. Nevertheless, bad Christians could still cause an enormous amount of harm even in this sphere, especially if they happened to exercise some public office in the Church. Nothing miraculously preserved them, Christians though they might be, from the sin of hypocrisy: from saying one thing, but actually believing or doing another. Nothing prevented them from teaching a message over which they ultimately had no control, but then seeking to promote and implement that message through ignorant or ill-considered policies that contradicted and even made a mockery of its sublime truths. Nothing blocked their unfortunate failure to use their Reason in union with Faith to provide answers to many new and higher questions which might permit a better appreciation and defense of the Truth to which Revelation had exposed believers possessing critical minds. Nothing stood in the path of their being so contemptuous or indifferent to the dignity of their ecclesiastical office and its chief task that they actually taught absolutely no message whatsoever. In short, the stupidities and evils of Church leaders and believers could always give forces eager to destroy the liberating impact of the Christian mission grounds for questioning and ridiculing the credibility of the Faith itself.

Moreover, the task of sacralizing the “spaces” and institutions of the created world is, to say the least, an excrutiating one. It involves a great deal of painful and risky sifting, threatening offense either to the Faith or to many vested worldly interests. It requires both courage and contact with a myriad of false spiritual instincts and bad judgments forged through bad experiences with fallen nature. Anyone undertaking it has to possess a clear awareness of the “mystery of iniquity” and its allurements, while at the same time recognizing that these nevertheless exercise an ultimately unnatural impact on Creation; an impact out of synch with nature because out of synch with the desires of the God who defined what nature is meant to be in the first place.

In order to complete the task of transformation in Christ successfully, one has to try to see the different aspects of nature through the eyes of the God who created them and loved them. This means both understanding, “realistically”, what existing conditions truly are and what could trouble and corrupt them still further, while simultaneously appreciating what they ought to be and could be through changes effected by faith, grace, and reason cooperating together. Such a two-pronged understanding is not easy to gain and translate into mechanisms for change under the best of circumstances and under the guidance of the greatest of saints. When sought out by ignorant, foolish or hypocritical sinners it might become an open invitation to the mockery of Christianity by the non-believer.

Let us examine this problem with reference to the anti-Platonic rhetorical school. At first glance, what could seem to be more representative of the ultimately unnatural “old skin” totally unfit for receiving the “new wine” of transforming Christian Faith and grace? Here was a force which limited human horizons to the concerns of the moment alone, and prohibited use of the data of life as a springboard for grave and long-lasting meditation. Here was a program encouraging an obsession with the petty, changing stuff of life, useful to sinful man’s penchant for flight from the exalted to the vulgar. Here were guidelines preventing the individual and society from ever understanding their specific mistakes, much less conceiving general purposes more elevated and fulfilling for both. Here were instructions prohibiting the hunt for a cure for their sickness and a medicine guaranteeing more satisfying life on God’s earth before passage to God’s eternity.

And yet this totally unnatural rhetorical spirit was passed down through potentially valuable and therefore truly natural rhetorical skills. Moreover, these skills were central to institutions like the Roman State and instruments such as Roman Law, both of which also possessed natural,  God-given roles which could shine forth clearly if purged of their unnatural corruptions through proper use of the new Christian wine. Yes, any attempt to “dive into” a rhetoric dominated by an evil spirit, and the spaces and structures of a world where such a rhetoric dominated, was dangerous. After all, their crippled vision of the meaning of life, authoritatively revealed for the fraud that it was with the coming of Christ, still exercised a tempting influence even upon the very men seeking to evangelize them. Yes, many of the daily experiences one had had with the pillars and institutions of ancient Greco-Roman life were negative, repellent ones. But did not Christ Himself sit down to banquet with men whose contact others ostentatiously fled?

Christianity forced a reopening of that debate over the meaning of life and the means to achieve its promise which the rhetorician, powerful in all realms of Greco-Roman society, had provided the justification for shutting down. It did so through a consciousness of its own innate strength, and with the ever more clear intention of itself co-opting the Socratic philosophical weaponry which the rhetoricians had reduced to near impotence. Moreover, it did so by also co-opting and injecting with fresh vitality a rhetorical science long dedicated to pointless word games, as well as the Roman State and Roman Law which utilized that science and were defended by it.

Christians demonstrated an ability to exploit the weaknesses and contradictions of the ancient powers-that-be in order to press this fundamental rethinking of how nature and supernature, the individual and society, were meant to work together; this fundamental rethinking of what natural and personal fulfillment really entailed. They showed that they could be successful in revealing the fraudulence of “fulfillment” as defined by the rhetorician, as well as the value of that truth-drunk path which the word merchants had disdained as a road to nowhere. And they added insult to injury by developing rhetorical skills to aid in this destructive-constructive enterprise which ended by far surpassing those of their truth-hating opponents.

Development of a complete consciousness of the Christian mission, the ability to perform that mission and the capacity to pass an understanding of its meaning down to future generations, was not the work of a day. Strictly speaking, that development can never come to an end, for the truths that it concerns are supernatural ones, in the last analysis far beyond any full human comprehension. Moreover, they are always subject to disruption in a world of flux and sin. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a maturation process, continuing down to the present, through a number of stages interrupted by troubles and backsliding reflecting terrible Christian “growing pains”.

In the present chapter, we are concerned with the enormous accomplishments and growing pains of what we might call Imperial Christendom, and this from the First through to the beginning of the Eleventh Century. A three-fold task lies before us in discussing the impressive exploits and unfortunate shortcomings of that millennium: first of all, an examination of the questions the Church asked herself with respect to her relationship to the mission of the Incarnate God; secondly, a description of the way in which this “attack of the Light” provoked construction of what I like to call the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo---a union of different groups which wished to accept nature “as is”, aided by men and women whom various errors, mistakes, or sins accidentally tossed into its camp; and, finally, a demonstration of just how much Christian failures of self-knowledge and behavior contributed to the recruitment of such a hostile horde, thereby leaving the Church more vulnerable than might have been necessary to new historical “curveballs”: those thrown her way by the unexpected entry of Germans, Slavs, Persians, Arab Moslems, Northmen, and Magyars into the list of performers in the exciting Drama of Truth. 

B. Self-Discovery

            Anyone reading the Gospels would think that Christ had left a clear enough program for His immediate followers to carry out already before the Ascension: that of going forth to teach and baptize all nations. And yet the Acts of the Apostles present us with the picture of a rather confused Church leadership, bumbling its way through decisions regarding what she was supposed to do next. This fundamental document for the study of the first decades of Church History shows us that even after Pentecost basic questions involving the nature of the Christian mission continued to trouble the apostles and their disciples.

Examination of and response to the most obvious and immediate mission question of all---namely, should the message remain the property of the Jews alone, or, if the Gentiles were indeed also chosen to receive it, whether they should adhere to the ritual practices of the Old Covenant---was the central dilemma out of which Christianity first developed. Hence, the mission troubles of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and the early battles over their apostolate in Jerusalem, Antioch, Asia Minor and Greece.

Ironically, although such conflicts were indeed resolved in favor of a mission to Gentiles who would not be called to act like Jews, there is very little indication that real zeal for the evangelization of new peoples was uppermost in the minds of thinking Christians for any significant length of time. Obviously, evangelization inside the boundaries of the Empire did take place---through appeal to existing Jewish communities, the quiet aid of members of the Greco-Roman elite, and in many other fashions about which we know precious little. Evangelization outside the borders, the limes, after the initial labors of men like St. Mari in Persia, soon became the work of pure accident alone: perhaps due simply to the influence exercised on their masters by especially devout slaves or by a captured slave community which remained stubbornly loyal to its Christian beliefs. We hear something of this type of evangelization in the case of Georgia and among the Goths. But for open expressions of the specific kind of missionary zeal so vibrantly reflected in the writings of St. Paul in the first decades after Christ one has to wait for the Fifth Century and the appearance of St. Patrick, the truly self-conscious and determined Apostle to Ireland.

Instead, once the initial clarification imparted by the Holy Spirit and the vibrant enthusiasm of the Pauline and Petrine apostolates to the Gentiles began to wear off, the most fundamental “mission question” seemed to be a quite different one. This was the one which asked whether so much human effort for winning souls for Christ ought even to be expended in the first place. After all, might it not be the case that a dramatic appearance of the purifying Spirit or even the return of the Incarnate God Himself lay just around the corner? An event of that kind would alter the conditions of human life and action entirely. With such a prospect in mind, would it not be the Church’s task simply to prepare those who had already been won to the Gospel for imminent, definitive, earth-shattering change---or their final judgment---rather than to put together totally superfluous plans for expansion?

Then again, what if the Millennium or the Second Coming were not to be expected for tomorrow or the day after? What if troubling oneself too much about the time and the place of “the end” were itself to be viewed as a dangerous game, reflecting a presumptuous curiosity which was actually displeasing to God? Under those circumstances, expansion and guidelines for Christian survival rather than in-gathering and waiting might readily rise to the top of the Church’s priorities.

Temptations to believe in the imminence of “something big” which could easily render missionary activity pointless were apparently indulged by many an early Christian. Millenarian temptations reached their peak in the movement stimulated by Montanus, a self-mutilated priest of Cybele who lived in the vicinity of Ancyra in Asia Minor in the Second Century. After becoming a Christian, he and female followers of his, such as the prophetesses Priscilla and Maximilla, attracted many believers to a site somewhere in present-day Turkey called Pepusa, to await the imminent coming of the Holy Spirit. So strong was the appeal of this millenarian Montanism that it even attracted Tertullian, the first great Latin African theologian, into its ranks.

But the Church as a whole fought off the Montanist position. Explanations of the differences between a Montanist and a non-Montanist vision of Christianity, and the grounds for rejecting the one as heretical and the other as orthodox, made an enormous intellectual impact in the Second Century, helping mightily to fuel the growth of Christian theology. Anti-imminentist theology necessarily brought along with it further reflections on the Christian understanding of nature and just how much the message of Christ required labor with and upon the existing order of things rather than merely waiting for that order to dissolve.

Such reflections then worked back on the practical realm, smoothing Christian relations with Roman authorities who were revolted by millenarian or apocalyptic calls to opt-out of the society which they governed and wished to continue to exist. Moreover, these meditations further stimulated Church organization, catechesis of a community more and more expecting to lead a problem-filled life in a potentially hostile environment, and an apologetic defending the Christian message from the taunts of a surrounding pagan and Jewish world suspicious of this peculiar tertium gens. Practical work on many such matters had, of course, already begun before the Montanist controversy. But what was especially needed, once the foundations for practical activity were questioned, was a more profound theoretical investigation of the underpinnings of a merely “felt” Faith and its day-to-day consequences.

Ultimately, however, there can be no accurate understanding of the mission and the tools required by the Church to fulfill that mission without gaining a still more fundamental knowledge regarding the historical God-Man establishing her task in the first place. This, as the great Greek and Latin Fathers teach in depth, and the earliest Christian thinkers grasped in germ, was due to the fact that the Church, the Mystical Body, is actually Christ-continued in time; what St. Augustine calls the “Whole Christ”. Furthermore---and here the great African Doctor made his most significant contribution to western theology-- one cannot focus attention upon the Redeemer and His sacrifice without thinking more deeply of the flaws requiring that Redemption and the urgency of the need to correct them now that the Kingdom of God was definitely “at hand”. Thus, historical efforts to grasp the character and demands of the Church’s mission very swiftly merged together with more profound questions concerning where knowledge regarding Christ could be obtained; who, exactly, the sources of that knowledge indicated He was; in what ways the individual and nature have been so damaged as to call forth such a terrible sacrifice on the part of this unique being; and how that damage might practically be remedied.

Questions of this sort were also being forced upon believers by the hostile outside world. Jewish thinkers and defenders of Graeco-Roman paideia---that body of knowledge considered to be essential for the proper training of the men who guided the ecumene---were the ones posing them. Both these groups saw themselves as representatives of something old, venerable and intellectually sound, yet threatened by the growing influence of a force which they insisted possessed no such qualities.

Jewish “questioning” was generally offered in the form of denunciation of the Christians to local populations and authorities, and, after the destruction of the Temple, through clear and regular anathematization of this new and “blasphemous” teaching. Greco-Roman questioning, given the educated aristocracy’s distaste for even mentioning the existence of the tertium gens, might often be simply an implicit one. Nevertheless, it could also sometimes be insightful, bringing up the chief points that divided the Christians from their pagan masters. Hence, to take but one example, the criticism of a medical man like Galen makes it abundantly clear that the notion of the Resurrection of the dead and the Christian insistence upon creation ex nihilo by a loving God were both understood---the former being rejected as a grotesque denial of the obvious realities of nature and the latter as the introduction of a willful “tyranny” into what was actually an eternally ordered cosmic mechanism.

Examining the development of Christian self-consciousness in this light, one could say that it grew out of asking how believing men and women living in a Greco-Roman dominated universe which was guided by a proud, secular paideia could gain a supernatural paideia; how this new paideia could be shown to have legitimately emerged from Jewish roots which were now condemned to wither and die; and how that fresh form of Christian supernatural education could be made to work to serve the construction of an ever more solid pathway to eternal salvation and temporal well-being.

Through this educative venture, the holistic character of all of existence was reaffirmed: the fact that nature was, from the moment of its creation, a gracious gift of God intended for fulfillment of the designs of uncreated Being; that nature’s various elements were intended to work in harmony with one another; that Christ’s mission underlined the need to wean individuals and the social environment crucial to their existence from the error and sin preventing a lifting up of their hearts to their true final purpose; that judgment was to be passed on the merits and blemishes of Greek rhetoric and philosophy in the process; and that the imperial Roman State had to be weighed on the scales of life and an attempt made to redirect its energies towards militant Christian ends.

Formation of a Christian paideia was thus required both negatively---to arm believers for a militant fight against Jewish anathematization and the Greco-Roman sense of self-sufficiency---as well as positively---to teach men and women that the Kingdom of God was truly at hand. The work of forming it lay with the thinkers we call the Greek, Syrian and Latin Fathers. Study of their labors is the task of patrology, a term invented by Johannes Gerhard in his book, Patrologia, of 1653.

Patrology has come to be divided into the study of the Apostolic Fathers, the men who had direct contact with either the Twelve or St. Paul, and lived through the beginning of the Second Century; the Apologists, whose work is self-explanatory, except to note just how much it was inspired by the battle against the above-mentioned confrontation with Montanism; and, finally and most importantly, the immense achievement of the Ante-and Post-Nicene Fathers, whose line continues down to the time of St. John of Damascus in the 700’s. Great men like Tertullian, whose teachings are crucial to understanding the growth of this Christian paideia, are nevertheless chastised for their fall into heretical positions by being referred to merely as Ecclesiastical Writers.

Even if the greatest of the Fathers wrote in the 300’s and the 400’s, there is no disagreement among theologians and historians over the fact that the Third Century was the era of the Great Leap Forward in the creation of Christian paideia, and this in both the Greek and Latin-speaking parts of the Empire. It was in the 200’s that the Catechetical School of Alexandria began to function, gaining its greatest representative in Origen (c. 185-253), the creator of ecclesiastical Greek. His work was to be of enormous influence not just in Egypt but, due to his lengthy sojourn in Caesarea (232-244) and the achievements of the students who came to learn from him there, in Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor as well. Origen’s work was seminal. It was really only through his labors that the language and categories essential to discovering and explaining even his own manifold errors of genius were created. Hostile reaction to Origen---often not very charitable, and increasingly less so long after his death---was inevitable, with gifted opponents swiftly becoming active in regions influenced by him. The center of this hostility eventually emerged in Syria and its great metropolis, Antioch, although critics of Origen were active everywhere, his native Egypt included.

Meanwhile, in Africa, Tertullian (c.155-after 220), the creator of ecclesiastical Latin, was also active. Despite the errors indicated above, Tertullian’s labors provided the linguistic framework through which western Christianity could grow, theologically, and find points of contact with what was being discussed at points further east. Third Century Africa also offered the Christian world the great and more solid achievement of St. Cyprian (200/210-258), Bishop of Carthage. Rome sneezed whenever Carthage caught cold, so that St. Cyprian’s thoughts---and errors---were frequently debated in the Eternal City. So were the propositions of a number of active Popes and the two schismatics, St. Hippolytus (d. 235) and Novatian (late 200’s), regarding issues involving everything from the Trinity, moral practice, and the sacraments through to the nature of the perhaps not-so-immediately to be expected Antichrist.

By the end of the 200’s it had become clear that the effort to understand the Church through Christ, and the responsibilities of the believer and all of nature through knowledge of the Redeemer, would be accompanied by different basic emphases and eventual debate over their relative merits. These debates---as the above comments regarding Origen already have intimated---could be very acrimonious indeed. How far could one travel down a Platonic pathway influenced by allegorical interpretations of Scripture as praised and developed by Origen and his disciples? How much could one pursue that more literal scriptural exegesis concerned with investigating precise historical reality and the exact meaning of words in context, favored by the school of thought growing out of Antioch and Syria, without losing the broader and more elevated picture of divine mission emerging from the Alexandrian method? To what extent did the use of philosophy and rhetoric as represented by the approach of both of these schools of thought open Christians to co-option by the outside world? Would a primary focus on dogmatic questions and the character of transformation in Christ---what was commonly referred to at the time as deification---hopelessly blur appreciation of the more mundane but more pressing need for believers to learn how to avoid sin in a sinful world? The great African thinkers and their often more prosaic Roman brethren seemed to argue the need for a re-ordering of Egyptian mystical priorities to the hard labor of identifying human flaws and the spiritual medicines and procedures essential to correcting them.

Still, divided as these emphases might be, one from the other, their protagonists were united by something that marked them off most clearly from their pagan counterparts. They all possessed a sense of the unfathomable boundary between error and truth, and the need to hunt for and embrace the consequences of the latter with all one’s heart and all one’s soul.

It was through resolving issues regarding the Church’s mission in conjunction with these related and still deeper concerns over who Christ really is and what we and the nature we live in are meant to do to respond to His sacrifice that all the battles of the Second through Ninth Centuries emerged: the struggle over the written and oral sources of knowledge concerning the Saviour and the obedience required to them; the question of Church structure; Trinitiarian and Christological wars involving Arianism, Nestorianism and Monophysitism; the lengthy discussions regarding the difficulties of the ascetic life and the problems of living a moral existence while active in the secular world; the heated arguments surrounding the respective roles of grace and freedom; the authority of the five so-called “patriarchs”; and, finally, the exceedingly important Monothelite flip on the Monophysite heresy and the equally significant Eighth-Ninth Century conflict over Iconoclasm.

For some Christians, the question of sources seems to have been a pointless one. A simple believer just “knew” what the Faith was; any insistence upon further guidance illustrated the appearance in the flock of illicit outside influences, especially Greek ones.

Other Christians thought differently. Perhaps this second group of faithful was merely guided by the emphasis upon written sources central to the Jewish world out of which it had emerged. On the other hand, perhaps it already sensed the deadly, mindless and easily manipulated error lurking deep inside what might be labeled ecclesiastical populism---an idea which would never lose its supporters in the Christian world, which was periodically to reappear to threaten the foundations of the Church, and which became especially dangerous from the nineteenth century onwards in the hands of the Abbé de Lamennais, the “Catholic Rousseau”. This second approach was obviously the one backed by the organized, bishop-dominated entity which historians refer to as “Great Church”.

Aided by the development of the codex (our “book”), use of Jewish and Christian scriptures for both liturgical and teaching purposes spread rapidly. This diffusion was accompanied by deep disputes regarding the validity of various texts. Which of the writings eventually referred to as those of the Old Covenant were to be utilized? Gnostics in general and Christians such as Marcion, the second century heretic from Sinope in Asia Minor, disdained the God of the Jews as different from that taught by Christ; as a God of harsh laws in an evil nature as opposed to a God of love committed to escape the wickedness of Creation. Moreover, Alexandrine and other Jews had different versions of the sacred writings, Jewish apocrypha abounded, and the militant spirit shaping a violently anti-Christian “Judaism” in the years after the destruction of the Temple was reinventing and reinterpreting the past—the heritage of the prophets in particular--for its own polemical purposes.

What would eventually be called New Testament writings reflected similar problems. Gnostic-minded writers and Marcion had their favored texts; Gospels, Acts, Epistles and other writings abounded. Which of these could be trusted? Which were not to be treated as God’s Word, but could nevertheless be accepted for non-liturgical and non-dogmatic purposes? Which were to be discarded entirely? Difficult questions indeed, all to be answered while simultaneously tackling the issue of an oral as opposed to a written teaching and who it was who was empowered to interpret the meaning of both voices of tradition, especially when disagreements as to their significance manifested themselves.

Again, as noted above, due both to the realistic character of practical action and a sense that Christ was truly present as a guide in the “body” of Christians, all these matters were resolved with reference to the judgment of the Church. But a Church with what kind of structure? Structural differences, after all, seem to have been the rule in the First Century. These appear to have been brought about by the inevitable problems caused by the Blitzkrieg of early evangelization, the swift disappearance from the scene of the apostolic founders of the new local churches, and the well-known efforts of Gnostics or Jews to take them over or destroy them quickly thereafter. Hence, the existence of more base-oriented communities, where power was either firmly in the hands of men we would call “ordained”, or strongly influenced by charismatic lay prophets and prophetesses. Hence, also, the reality of “monarchical” churches, dominated by a given city’s bishop, a man who might or might not pay much heed to what was being done by fellow-bishops outside its own diocesan border---especially the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and, eventually, Constantinople and Jerusalem as well.

But, once more, the question of this Church’s tie to Christ, already clear in St. Paul, imposed its concerns upon the general debate. Determination of the structure and action of Christ’s Church would be shaped mightily by the kind of Christ in whom Christians believed. Was that Christ the Christ of the Gnostics, who, following the advice of Mani (d. 274) and utilizing Christianity as their tool, taught a loathing of God’s Creation? Such a Christ could not be the Incarnate Word, and His Church would flee in horror from the notion of being a “body” in her own right. She would inevitably be a much more inward and spiritual force, and a body perhaps only in the sense of a mirage or a symbol. Ebionites, Elkasites and Docetists were all associated with commitment to variations of this basic theme.

The more that one accepted the idea that Christ was a real man with a real body acceptable to God, the more that a Church possessing a true body inexorably intertwined with His own would be appreciated. With this would come greater horror at the thought of “dividing the body of Christ”, whether laity and priests from the bishop, or bishops from one another, in what we call schism. And schisms there were and would continue to be, over all manner of issues, including deeper discussion of the exact way in which God and Christ were connected. Was Jesus Christ linked to God as a result of his great achievements? This was the viewpoint of the Adoptionists, some of them Jews who understood “merit” in terms of obedience to the Old Law. But if Jesus Christ were God from the moment of conception, then the study of who Christ was became more one of a study of the character of God the Eternal Word who had taken flesh at a specific moment in historical time.

Some—the Subordinationists, of whom the earliest was Theodotus of Byzantium and his Roman convert, Artemis—viewed the Word as not merely distinct from God the Father but less than Him in power and majesty. Others, known under an assortment of names—Monarchists, Patropassian Monarchists and Modalists---were most famously represented by the Roman, Sabellius (189-210), himself a convert to this position through the work of missionaries from Asia Minor. Such thinkers saw the Word as but another “manner” in which the Father manifested himself and acted, equal in power and majesty to Him, but precisely because not truly distinct from Him. Representatives of both groups had an influence on Paul, that strange and ambitious Bishop of Samosata, a luxury loving prelate of the rebellious Third Century Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. He, in effect, saw how the two concepts could be made to converge to effect the same practical result. The full character and meaning of Christ’s Church would only become clear by working one’s way through all of these meditations, profound and trivial.

And what of the question of the behavior of the individual? The answers given regarding this subject depend very heavily on those stemming from the dogmatic discussions posited above. After all, if Christ is a Gnostic, then the proper behavior of the Christian will involve a wholeheartedly disgusted flight from the world and from the flesh. Once again, if Christ is basically a meritorious disciple of the Mosaic Law, then firm adherence to Jewish practices would be the necessary model for Christian behavior. If, however, working out one’s salvation is based upon what did, in fact, emerge from the decisions of the early bishops, popes and councils concerning Trinitarian and Christological doctrines, something else entirely is demanded. Christians are then called to a much more complete transformation of the inner and the outer man than anything envisaged by the Mosaic Law; one requiring a simultaneous recognition of the importance of working with all of nature and nature’s tools and the need for a “medicine” from God to cure the ills afflicting a good Creation flawed by freely-willed sin; one accomplished as a social enterprise, in union with secular institutions, the Church, and one’s fellow believers---all of which had to be mobilized for the joint supernatural-natural venture.

This last approach to individual behavior is a much more complicated matter, given the number of different doctrinal, rational, psychological and sociological factors that have to be taken into account in determining how a Christian is to act properly. It is a much riskier task as well, since the opening to nature brings with it the continued influence of powerful “customs” which may always leap outside of their acceptable place in the hierarchy of values in order to manipulate, subvert and even destroy a solid “transforming” Christian doctrinal sense. Hence, Roman irritation with certain communities’ unchanging appreciation for a Jewish calendar---computed by men known to be eager to discredit the Faith. Hence, also, the troubles of Pope Calixtus in pressing for the acceptance of slave/freeman marriages in the face of the opposition of venerable, age-old, but ultimately unchristian Roman Law.

 Concern for radical moral improvement could conceivably take men down two quite divergent and warring pathways regarding falls from grace. One of these, inspired by the grandeur and unique character of the gift given to overcome sin by a loving Savior, found it difficult to forgive lapses into the behavior of the Old Adam, especially on the part of the clergy. The other was so conscious of the difficulties of the call to divinization from an understanding God that it sought to explore the variety of means by which the wretched sinner could rise to favor once again.

Moreover, an awakened moral consciousness could take men down two separate, pathways to reform: that of a via negativa, which dictated abandonment of a world that was nonetheless recognized as a gracious gift of God---the path of the monastic movement---or that of a via positiva concerned with a plunge into the life of the Greco-Roman Imperium. Perfectly acceptable as both these paths were, they, too, could lead one into troubled waters. Hence, the possibility that the via negativa could join forces with an outright world-hating Gnosticism or the sort of murky mystic elitism attributed rightly or wrongly to Priscillian in the latter Fourth Century. Hence, also, the awakened moral concerns and sharpened outrage over human transgressions veering into the exaggerated emphasis upon free will associated with Pelagius just slightly later.

What concerns us most at this juncture is the question of the Church’s outward, socio-political impact. Again, this involved such a positive working with what the Second Century St. Justin Martyr had called the “seeds of the Logos” that Aristides of Athens had insisted that he did not hesitate to say that the world continues to exist only because of the prayers of supplication of the Christians. But that positive involvement, indirectly aided even by men like Tertullian, whose disdain for the secular world never caused him to back away from the use of Roman legal language, did, indeed, entail much of the sifting indicated above. The briefest glance at the writings of men like Clement of Alexandria---who presumed the absolute necessity of operating in the world and participating in its daily life---is filled with a realistic appreciation of the evils afflicting the believer therein and complex advice regarding how to save one’s souls admidst them.

No nuanced approach to life, even one based upon the via negativa, could ever leave the State out of its considerations. Acting as though the State were a negligible force in either aiding or putting obstacles in the path of salvation in no way fits together with the message taught by the Incarnation. Christianity grew to adulthood under the authority of a variety of states—Armenia and Persia come immediately to mind in this context. Nevertheless, it was really through her dealings with the Roman state, the imperial res publica, that the mainline Church first came to understand her relationship with the institution as such, and also to make certain basic mistakes which she has been tempted to repeat down to the present day. Several points need to be made with respect to Rome during our current time frame, the first of which involves the drastic change in its character from the First to the Fourth Centuries.

The imperial order as created by Augustus was the “tightrope walk” which we call the Roman Principate. This was founded upon a recognition of the fact that the res publica could survive only by a) providing an order which its old institutions could no longer guarantee; b) giving the impression that those decrepit organs of government were still alive and well; and c) maintaining a standing army, which was the chief source of the generalissimo/imperator’s power and could be called upon for assistance in the case of trouble. What this tightrope walk required was a skillful and prudent emperor who respected and employed the Senatorial and Equestrian (i.e., wealthy plebeian) classes traditionally most essential to the functioning of the State, relied upon municipal governments and their local aristocracies, from Britain to Mesopotamia, to do the basic work of administrating their cities and surrounding countryside, and, last but definitely not least, kept the army and its leadership contented. In effect, the Principate was a Bonapartist mélange which sought to hide as much as possible the truth that its roots lay in brute armed force, and was helped in doing so by the conservatism of the ruling classes, both in Rome and in the provinces.

Nevertheless, the reality of that brute force finally came to the fore in the course of the 200’s A.D., due to the combined impact of organized Persian and chaotic barbarian incursions, difficulties in providing for the imperial succession, disastrous economic problems, and other order-threatening dilemmas. By the time the situation was brought under control in the 270’s, the Roman State was transformed into what we call the Dominate.

This telling name came from the increased responsibility, work and quasi-totalitarian clout of the emperor and the centralized institutions of his government. The Dominate did what it did---namely, dominate---openly, its increased taxes and other service demands on the population making the omnipresence of the Roman State infinitely more vivid to its subjects than had previously been thought possible. Under its sway, the ultimate power of the army over the system was clarified, and that of the older aristocracy---both in Rome and in the other cities of the Empire---correspondingly weakened. New men, often from lower classes, open to different ways of dealing with life and the worship of non-traditional gods popular with the army, replaced the old, conservative aristocracy. The latter either grudgingly cooperated with the Dominate or retired to indifference on its members’ vast country estates, where many representatives of an overtaxed and conscripted peasantry sought refuge under its wing.

 Ironically, this brutal change ultimately led to an altered and improved situation for the Church and Christians as such. This is not to say that the Principate had been a system deadly to the Faith. It was more erratic in its relationship with the new religion than anything else. Its official rejection of Christianity as an unacceptable superstition translated into a basically friendly indifference punctuated by persecutions generally not of its own doing; persecutions brought on by local issues, irritation over Christian abstention from state affairs, popular scapegoating, or conservative, aristocratic reaction.

This change “for the better” also does not mean that the Dominate, with its greater mobilization of resources on behalf of a unity backed by the fist, could or would not strike at the Church with more intense vigor than ever before if it deemed it to be in its best interest to do so---as the Great Persecution under Diocletian amply illustrates. Still, the arrival of the Dominate’s new men and new ideas indicated a greater willingness to experiment with society than was noticeable in the past. That experimentation led to the temporary Constantinian and more permanent Theodosian “Settlements”---the official recognition of the existence of the Church and  her mission and the granting of many imperial favors, especially to the clergy, with a vast amount of practical financial assistance at the top of the list.

Full, unquestioning acceptance of the benevolence of the imperial government would have been foolhardy, given the physical power and the strength of inertia supporting the highly stratified, self-confident, and self-sufficient system that it represented. Such acceptance could easily have involved a lowering of the Christian guard against co-option and political corruption. Rejection of the State’s friendship, on the other hand, was an insult to the role that it seriously did have to play in the holistic picture painted by the message of the Incarnation. Once again, the only proper and realistic approach that the Church authorities could take would be the difficult one of a cautious acceptance of the changed role of an innately good but terribly flawed institution; a cautious acceptance that would save for it the freedom to criticize and follow her own path for the sake of her integrity and higher, transforming mission.

All of which was very hard to “get right”, especially when the imperial government, both following its own ancient traditions and pushed by outside forces, entered into the still quite youthful Christian self-discovery mission. State involvement regarded all of the broad themes at stake in this enterprise--- an understanding of the character of Christ, the corresponding nature of His Church, the question of the behavior expected of the men and women offered salvation, and the problem of their relationship with the rest of the created world around them. Discussion of each of these issues, both in and of themselves as well as under the new conditions provided by a “friendly” State, pointed up weaknesses of previous theological and philosophical speculations. It honed arguments bringing further and perhaps unexpected disagreements to the fore. It illustrated the structural, administrative, political and social consequences of Christian concepts more clearly, and underlined the surprises that human personality, human freedom, sin, envy and ambition could bring into the life and growth even of a divine institution.

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