Miss Buddha (107 page)

Thus, from its very formation, Christianity
manifested a dual relation to the Jewish faith: one of continuity
and one of fulfillment. Above all, the presence of so many elements
of Judaism in the Christian Bible has acted to remind Christians
that he whom they worshiped as their Lord was himself a Jew, and
that the New Testament did not stand on its own but was based on
and appended to the Old.

However, in the
2
^nd
Century CE, Christians with Gentile backgrounds began to
outnumber Jewish Christians; clearly, the work of the apostle Paul
was influential.

Born a Jew, Paul was deeply involved in the
destiny of Judaism, but as a result of his experience and
conversion, he believed that he was the “chosen instrument” to
bring the message of Christ to the Gentiles.

And so, he was to formulate—in his Epistles
(letters of instruction) to several early Christian
congregations—many of the ideas and terms that were to constitute
the core of Christian belief; and for that he certainly deserves
the title of the “first Christian theologian.” Most, if not all,
theologians who came after him were to base their concepts and
systems on his Epistles, by now collected and codified in the New
Testament.

From these Epistles and from other sources
during the first two centuries after Jesus’ birth, it is possible
to deduce how the early congregations were organized.

The Epistles to Timothy and to Titus—both
apparently written by Paul, although many biblical scholars now
find his authorship of these letters implausible—show the
beginnings of an organization based on an orderly transmission of
leadership from the generation of the first apostles to subsequent
“bishops.”

However, the rather fluid
and interchanging use of terms such as bishop, presbyter, and
deacon in these documents makes it impossible to discern a single
and uniform policy, and it was not until the
3
^rd
century that we saw widespread agreement about the authority
of the “bishop” as the link with the apostles. The bishop was,
however, to constitute such a link only if he adhered to the
teaching of the apostles as this was laid down in the New Testament
and in the Catechism (“Deposit of Faith”) as promulgated by the
apostolic churches.

Councils and Creeds

However, as various versions of the
Catechism began to show signs of varied and personal
interpretations, it was deemed necessary to clarify such deposits
of faith to ensure uniformity throughout the still fledgling
church.

The most important of these
deviations—soon to be termed
heresies
—concerned the person of
Christ. Some theologians sought to protect his holiness by denying
that his humanity was like that of other human beings, while others
sought to protect the monotheistic faith by making Christ a lesser
divine being than God the Father.

(Note, that no one consulted Christ, or the
Father in these matters of deposit-of-faith interpretation).

In response to these two
tendencies, early creeds began the process of defining the divine
in Christ, both in relation to the divine in the Father and in
relation to the human in Christ. The definitive formulations of
these relations took form in a series of official church councils
during the 4
^th
and 5
^th
centuries—notably the one at Nicaea in 325 and the
one at Chalcedon in 451—which outlined the doctrines of the Trinity
and of the two natures of Christ in a form still accepted by most
Christians.

In order to establish these
formulations, Christianity had to refine both its thought and
language, and in this process created a philosophical theology—both
in Greek and in Latin—that was to be
the
dominant intellectual system
of Europe for
more than a thousand years.

The principal
architect—some say founding father—of the Western Christian
theology was Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose literary output,
including the classic
Confessions
and
The City of
God
, did more than any other body of
writings, except for the Bible itself, to shape that
system.

Persecution

First, however, Christianity had to sort out
its relation to the political order of the day (aka Rome).
Initially, as a Jewish sect, as far as the Roman Empire was
concerned, it was just another flavor of Judaism; but before the
death of Emperor Nero in 68 CE it had already been singled out as
its own freestanding religion, and declared an enemy to Rome.

The grounds for Roman hostility toward the
Christians were not uniform throughout the Empire, and opposition
and persecution of the fledgling movement was more often than not a
local matter.

However, the loyalty of Christians to “Jesus
as Lord,” was irreconcilable with the worship of the Roman emperor
as “Lord,” and those emperors, such as Trajan and Marcus Aurelius,
who were the most deeply committed to unity and reform were also
the ones who recognized the Christians as a threat to their take on
things and who therefore undertook to eliminate this threat.

But, as in the history of other
religions—especially Islam—overt and official opposition to the
faith only managed to produce a result exactly opposite to the one
intended and, in the epigram of the North African church father
Tertullian, the “blood of the martyrs” became the “seed of the
church.”

Thus, by the beginning of
the 4
^th
century, Christianity had grown so much both in size and in
strength that it had to be eradicated once and for all, or
accepted—no middle ground here, it was one or the other.

Emperor Diocletian tried Plan A
(eradication) and failed; Constantine the Great went with Plan B,
converted to the new religion and so (overnight) created a
Christian empire.

Official Acceptance

The conversion of
Constantine the Great to Christianity assured the church a
privileged place in society, and it soon grew easier to be a
Christian than not to be one. As a result, the more devout
Christians perceived that the standards of Christian conduct were
being lowered (to accommodate the masses) and that the only way to
obey the moral imperatives of Christ was to flee the world (and the
church that was in the world, perhaps even
of
the world) and to follow the
full-time calling of Christian discipline as a monk.

Thus, from its early
beginnings in the Egyptian desert—with the hermit Saint
Anthony—Christian monasticism spread to many parts of the Christian
empire during the 4
^th
and 5
^th
centuries.

And not only in Greek and Latin portions of
the Roman empire, but even beyond its eastern borders, far into
Asia, Christian monks devoted themselves to prayer, asceticism, and
service.

In fact, these early monks were to become,
during the Byzantine and medieval periods, the most powerful single
force in the conversion and Christianization of nonbelievers, in
the renewal of worship and preaching, and in theology and
scholarship.

The fact is that most Christians today owe
their Christianity to the work of monks.

Eastern Christianity

One act with far-flung Christianity
repercussions was Constantine the Great’s decision in 330 CE to
move the capital of the Roman empire from Rome to the “New Rome,”
the city of Byzantium at the eastern end of the Mediterranean
Sea.

This new capital, then named Constantinople
after Constantine (though now known as İstanbul), also became the
intellectual and religious focus of Eastern Christianity.

While Western Christianity grew increasingly
centralized—taking the shape of a pyramid with the pope in Rome as
its apex—the principal centers of the East, that is:
Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, all developed
and grew independently of each other.

This independence gave Eastern liturgy and
theology a quality that Western observers, even in the Middle Ages,
came to characterize as mystical—a quality enhanced by the strongly
Neoplatonic strain in Byzantine philosophy.

Western versus Eastern Christianity

Several distinctive features of the
Christian East contributed to its growing alienation from its
Western sister: the lack of a centralized authority; the close tie
to the Byzantine Empire; the mystical and liturgical tradition; the
continuity with Greek language and culture; all of which finally
produced the East-West schism.

Historians have often dated
the schism from 1054, when Rome and Constantinople
exchanged excommunications
, but much can be said for fixing the date at 1204 instead,
for in that year, the Western Christian armies—on their way to
wrest the Holy Land from the grip of the Turks—actually (and under
what pretext one wonders) attacked and ravaged the Christian city
of Constantinople.

However, whichever date we choose, the
separation of East and West has since continued and it exist even
today, despite repeated attempts at reconciliation.

The Slavs

One particular point of
controversy between Constantinople and Rome was the evangelization
of the Slavs, beginning in the 9
^th
century. Although several
Slavic tribes—Poles, Moravs, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and
Slovenes—eventually landed in the orbit of the Western church, the
vast majority of Slavic peoples became followers of the Eastern
Christian tradition.

From its early foundations in Kyiv, Ukraine,
this Slavic Orthodoxy then permeated Russia, where the features of
Eastern Christianity outlined above took perhaps its firmest
hold.

Western Christianity

Although Eastern
Christianity was in many ways
a more
direct heir to the early church
, some of
the most dynamic development in the Christian religion took place
in the western part of the Roman Empire.

Two closely related forces lie behind these
developments, and deserve particular mention: the growth of the
(power of the) papacy and the migration of the Germanic
peoples.

Once Constantine had moved the capital of
the Roman empire to Constantinople, the most powerful force now
remaining in Rome was its bishop.

Rome, which could trace its Christian faith
to the apostles Peter and Paul and which repeatedly acted as
arbiter of orthodoxy when other centers—including, interestingly,
Constantinople—fell into heresy or schism, was the capital of the
Western church, and it continued to hold this position even when
the succeeding waves of Germanic tribes, in what used to be called
the “barbarian invasions,” swept into Europe.

Conversion of these invaders to Catholic
Christianity meant at the same time their incorporation into the
institution of which the bishop of Rome was the head; a fact which
the conversion of the king of the Franks, Clovis I, well
illustrates.

As the political power of Constantinople
over its western provinces continued to decline, several separate
Germanic kingdoms were created, and finally, in 800, an independent
Western “Roman empire” was born when Charlemagne was crowned
emperor by Pope Leo III.

Thus, Western medieval Christianity, unlike
its Eastern counterpart, was a single entity, or strove to be one.
When a Western tribe became Christian it learned Latin and often,
as in the case of both France and Spain, lost its own language in
the process. Latin, the language of ancient Rome, thus became the
liturgical, literary, and scholarly speech of western Europe
Christianity.

Papal Power

Archbishops and abbots, although wielding
great power in their own fiefdoms, were—at least on paper, and
despite his frequent inability to enforce his claims—subordinate to
the pope.

Theologically, the long shadow of Saint
Augustine continued to dominate and by the middle ages there was
little independent access to the (now often deemed heretical)
speculations of the ancients.

The spirit of cooperation between church and
state, symbolized by the pope’s coronation of Charlemagne, did not
mean that no conflict existed between them in the Middle Ages. On
the contrary, and not surprisingly—we’re dealing with humans, after
all—they clashed repeatedly over the delineation of their
respective spheres of authority.

The most persistent source of such clashes
was the right of the sovereign to appoint bishops in his
realm—known as lay investiture—which eventually came to a head and
brought Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to a
deadlock in 1075.

Wielding his Christian sword, the pope
excommunicated the emperor, while the emperor flatly refused to
acknowledge Gregory as pope. They were temporarily reconciled when
Henry subjected himself in penance to the pope at Canossa in 1077,
but the tension was never truly resolved.

A similar issue was at stake in the
excommunication of King John of England by Pope Innocent III in
1209, which ended with the king’s submission to the pope four years
later.

The basis of these disputes
was the complex involvement of the church in feudal society.
Bishops and abbots administered a great deal of land and other
wealth and constituted, consequently, a major economic and
political force, over which the king had to exercise
some
control if he was to
assert his authority over his secular nobility.