God Against the Gods (19 page)

Such reasoning was appalling to the rigorists of Carthage. Now that no Christian in the Roman empire was at risk of martyrdom, it was all the easier to denounce those who had struggled to survive the Great Persecution and to sentimentalize and celebrate those who had martyred themselves. So the rigorists refused to recognize the spiritual authority of Caecilian or the church over which he presided. They elected a bishop of their own, and they sought to distinguish themselves from their rivals by constituting themselves as a new and separate church—the Church of the Martyrs.

Errors, Schisms and Heresies

The first bishop of the Church of the Martyrs in Carthage was a man called Maiorinus. His successor was Donatus, and so the clerics and congregants of the Church of the Martyrs came to be known as Donatists. The rebellion of the Donatists against the authority of the established Christian church is called the Donatist schism, a bloodless phrase that conceals the zealousness of the true believers on both sides who fought against one another in the name of the Only True God. When Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313, and thereby established the Peace of the Church, the Donatist schism was already an open wound.

The Christian bishops who sought to crush the Donatists claimed to be acting in the name of the “catholic” and “orthodox” church. According to the literal meanings of these terms, “catholic” means “universal” and “orthodox” means “correct belief ”—and they were used by the enemies of Donatists to suggest that the established church was the guardian of the only authentic and authoritative version of Christianity.
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By contrast, the Donatists were condemned by the officials of the established church as rebels against their rightful authority.

Ironically, Donatism was only one of the many “errors,” “schisms” and “heresies” that plagued the Christian community at precisely that moment in history when Christianity was free to offer itself to the pagan world as the right and proper way to worship the Only True God. By the fourth century, one bishop was able to count a total of 156 false beliefs and practices within the community of Christians, and a whole new vocabulary was required merely to categorize and describe the heretics and schismatics—the Archontici, the Barbelognostics, the Cerinthians, the Encratites, the Menandrians, the Nazarenes, the Ophites, Phibionites, the Quartodecimians, the Stratiotics and the Valentinians were just a few of the sects that came to be harshly condemned and ruthlessly persecuted by the authorities of the Christian church that called itself “catholic” and “orthodox.”

Many of the so-called heretics of the fourth century were charismatic preachers and teachers whose rigorism was especially off-putting to some of their fellow Christians. The supposed sins of a Spanish bishop called Priscillian (c. 340-385) included “extravagances in self-discipline”—that is, he forbade his congregants to indulge in carnal pleasure of any kind, including the consumption of meat and wine, out of a conviction that the body was a dungeon in which souls were confined as a salutary punishment for sin.
⁶
Sex was always a touchy subject, of course, whether it was a matter of too much or too little. Thus, for example, the followers of a man called Carpocrates, who engaged in what one historian calls “sexual communism,” were condemned as heretics—and so were the followers of a man called Marcion, who suffered the same fate for insisting that sex even between married couples was equivalent to fornication.
⁷

Sexual excess and other exotic practices have always attracted the attention of those who see their mission as maintaining law and order among the men and women over whom they exercise authority. The same anxieties that prompted the Senate of pagan Rome to ban the public celebration of the Bacchanalia in the second century B.C.E. were at work among the church councils of the fourth century that condemned the less conventional varieties of Christianity as heretical.

But the Christian authorities differed from their pagan counterparts in one fundamental way. The pagan senators voted to condemn the Bacchanalia only because they believed it posed the acute risk of anal rape in the streets of Rome—they did not object to the worship of the good-natured god of wine as long as it was conducted in private, and they never even considered the notion of criminalizing mere belief in Bacchus or, for that matter, any other god or goddess, no matter how bizarre. By contrast, the believers in the Only True God concerned themselves with far more than unruly or unseemly public conduct among their fellow Christians. Indeed, the bishops who gathered in great church councils and voted to declare one sect or another to be “anathema”—that is, so hateful to the revealed truth of Christianity that its members merited excommunication from the orthodox church—felt themselves to be empowered and even obliged to dictate not only what a Christian might
do
, whether in public or in private, but also what a Christian might
believe
.

700 Dedicated Virgins

Women, according to the stern fathers of the early church, were at the greatest risk of seduction by teachers of false and dangerous ideas—heresy, as they saw it, was “the besetting sin of the female mind.”
⁸
That is one reason why, starting around 318, the bishop of Alexandria was so unsettled by a strikingly tall, slender and handsome priest whose sermons seemed to attract a remarkable number of women—“700 dedicated virgins,” according to one ancient source—and set them aflame with passion.
⁹
His name was Arius (c. 250-336) and his teachings prompted a crisis so profound that it shattered the “Peace of the Church” that Constantine had established only a few years before.

Arius was severe in appearance and solemn in demeanor, and his gravitas was only deepened by a life of self-denial and self-mortification so rigorous that it left him pale and emaciated—a quality that the women in his congregation seemed to find compelling. Then, too, he was a charismatic speaker who was gifted with the ability to express complex and subtle ideas in an accessible, even lyrical way. He wrote a book of theology with the cheerful title
Thalia
—“Happy Thoughts.” He reduced his teachings to simple phrases that his followers chalked on the walls as graffiti or chanted out loud at public gatherings. He even set them to catchy tunes so that they could be sung like work songs or drinking songs. That’s why his church in a suburb of Alexandria was always filled with attentive and enthusiastic parishioners, not only ardent women but also schoolchildren, sailors and stevedores who chanted his ditties as they worked on the docks of the busy port.

The fact that Arius was capable of inspiring such ardor in ordinary men, women and children only served to deepen the distrust and sharpen the suspicions of the higher clergy, who regarded him as a dangerous rabble-rouser. What did Arius teach that the bishops found so appalling? Reduced to its simplest expression—and that is exactly what Arius himself tried to do—Arianism was based on the seemingly unremarkable idea that Jesus is the Son of God and not God himself. After all, that’s exactly what the Christian Bible says of Jesus in perhaps its single most affecting and oft-quoted line of text: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” goes the verse in the Gospel of John, “that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
¹⁰

The whole crisis of the so-called Arian heresy begins with a uniquely Christian innovation in the theology that Christianity inherited from Judaism. The Hebrew Bible is simple and straightforward on the subject of monotheism: “Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One.”
¹¹
But when Paul declares that “for us there is but one God,” he does not stop there. Rather, he goes on to distinguish between “one God, the Father” and “one Lord Jesus Christ.”
¹²
Elsewhere, he further complicates the question by acknowledging the existence of the “Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those that obey him.”
¹³
But Arius felt obliged to simplify and humanize the theological complexities of the Trinity by reducing them to words and phrases that ordinary people could understand—Jesus was “more than a mere man, but less than God.”
¹⁴

Of course, the Christian belief that God begat a son by causing a woman to conceive was a notion that their fellow monotheists—the Jews—found alien and offensive. Jewish theology held that God might endow a man or woman with the power of prophecy or appoint a king or conqueror to perform wondrous feats as a Messiah or “anointed one,” but he simply did not sire children, whether mortal or divine.

Ironically, the same idea was perfectly plausible to the pagans whom the Christians sought to convert to monotheism. Indeed, it is a commonplace in the myth and legend of paganism—gods were both willing and able to impregnate mortal women, according to the pagan way of thinking, although mortal men were believed to be incapable of doing the same with a goddess. Thus, as one of countless examples, Alexander the Great was reputed to be the flesh-and-blood offspring of Zeus-Amon, who was said to have conveniently manifested himself in the form of a snake and engaged in sexual intercourse with Alexander’s mother, much to the shock and distress of Alexander’s human father.

Then, too, the notion of a father-son relationship between God and Jesus was a convenient way for Christians to explain to the pagan world what the New Testament means when it seems to refer to not one but three divinities: “All power is given to me in heaven and earth,” Jesus tells his disciples, instructing them to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
¹⁵
Once Constantine ascended to the throne—and once Christianity was decriminalized by the Edict of Milan—the churches began to fill with curious pagans who were willing to sit and listen to Christian preachers like Arius, and he expressed himself in words and phrases from the Holy Writ that they would understand.

Those who condemned the way Arius explained the Trinity readily conceded that it was not easy to express or understand “the single divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” as one church historian puts it, “within an equal majesty and an orthodox Trinity.”
¹⁶
That is exactly why the whole idea is referred to as “the
mystery
of Trinity.” Even Augustine, who participated in the struggle against Arianism, concedes in
The Confessions
that he has not penetrated the mystery—“the Trinity appears unto me,” he writes, “in a glass darkly”—and he doubts that anybody else has a much better grasp. “Which of us comprehendeth the Almighty Trinity?” he shrugs. “Rare is the soul which while it speaks of It, knows what it speaks of.”
¹⁷

Still, the enemies of Arius in the church of Alexandria insisted that he was putting a not-so-subtle pagan spin on Christianity. Father, Son and Holy Ghost must be understood as three “attributes” of the Only True God or three “persons” in which the divinity manifests itself. Arius, according to the orthodox critique, was suggesting that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are “secondary gods,”
¹⁸
and thus his theology was “nothing but a disguised polytheism.”
¹⁹
His clever little ditties reduced the solemn mystery of “Unity in Trinity” to a kind of “tri-theism,” and reduced Jesus to “a demigod, a sort of inferior deity, tricked out in divine attributes.”
²⁰
And for that sin—the sin of false belief—they condemned him as a arch-heretic.

The Harlot in the Bishop’s Bed

Arius and his parishioners, according to the Edict of Milan, enjoyed “complete and total freedom” to believe that the Bible means what it says when it calls Jesus the “only begotten son” of God. But Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, true to the oldest traditions of monotheism, refused to tolerate a theological stance that he regarded as wrong. Alexander summoned a council of his fellow clergy in 321, and they voted to excommunicate Arius and to send him into exile. The Arian heresy, as the teachings of Arius came to be called, was declared to be “anathema”—and so it is still called in histories of the church that was the ultimate victor over Arianism.

Not every Christian, however, was quite so appalled. The teachings of Arius, in fact, were rooted in old and honorable traditions of early Christianity, including such revered figures as Origen and Lucian of Antioch, the martyr under whom Arius himself had studied. For every cleric who sided with Alexander, others of equal or greater stature sided with Arius. Among the churchmen who embraced his ideas were highly influential Christians who served in the court of Constantine, where they counseled the emperor on the intricacies of church politics and tutored his children in the new faith. For that reason, Arius could be denounced by Bishop Alexander as a “heresiarch” and driven from his parish, but—unlike Priscillian and thousands of other Christians only a few decades later—he could not lawfully be put to death by his fellow Christians under the authority of imperial law.

Still, the disputation between Arius and his adversaries resulted in a flood tide of theological propaganda and counterpropaganda, much of it expressed in concepts so airy and language so convoluted that the whole debate sometimes seems like gibberish. At its hottest moments, the argument was reduced to a few simple words and phrases that could be flung back and forth like stones by the contending factions. Was Jesus “begotten,” as the Arians insisted with fervor—that is, was he created by God? Or was he “unbegotten,” as the anti-Arians insisted with equal fervor—that is, was he one and the same as God? Was Jesus created by God
ex nihilo
—(“out of nothing”) or had he coexisted eternally with God?