What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (27 page)

This point became clear back in the early 300s over the most controversial of all the Jesus-stuff theories—Arianism. Named for Arius (250–336), the priest who proposed the idea, it said that God created the
logos
(Jesus) out of nothingness. Therefore, Jesus was more than a man but
less
than God. Arius argued that God and Jesus had to be made of
different
stuff because, as mentioned earlier, Jesus called God “my Father.” If they were one and the same, Jesus would be his own father, which is not even possible in Appalachia. Arius also said Jesus had to be
fully human
lest his suffering on the cross be just an act.

Well, this got a lot of butts in a pucker because it put Jesus in a position inferior to God. The Arian Heresy flew directly against the mainstream Church view, later represented by Bishop Athanasius, who held that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit were the
same
stuff—equal and co-eternal. This became the single most controversial issue in the Christian world.

To settle the matter, Emperor Constantine (with the guidance of our old pal Eusebius) called a meeting in A.D. 325—the Council at Nicaea—an assembly of some 250 bishops from across the Empire. Surely they could put the issue to rest.

Unfortunately, if you laid all the bishops in Rome end-to-end they couldn’t reach a conclusion. Their verdict: Jesus was both fully human
and
fully divine. Then they insisted this wasn’t confusing—they actually used those words. Yet, after the Council meeting, some wanted to take back their vote. Whoops, too late. The Athanasius school won the fight, and those who disagreed were about to catch hell.

Over the next five decades, the line between church and state continued to blur. Emperors sought to pin down theological issues while bishops took on governmental authority. By the end of the fourth century, the quest for imperial unity under religious conformity would narrow what you could say about the faith to the God = Jesus orthodoxy of Nicaea.

Why Christian Theology?

The entire controversy once again raises the question: Why was any of this necessary? Why four centuries of philosophical food-fights to sort out precisely what we’re all supposed to understand about Jesus? Why didn’t God make it all self-evident? The whole idea of Jesus’ ministry was to make simple truths available to simple people so that the maximum number could avoid damnation. Why did we need experts and councils to figure out what should be obvious to a first century shepherd?

Isn’t the very complexity of these ideas proof that they’re not the clear truths of a perfect deity, but the work of imperfect humans? It seems crazy that we can’t get religious ideas right without archeologists to unearth scraps of parchment, and linguists to figure out their meaning, and theologians to write libraries full of hair-splitting interpretations of it all.

Yeah, sure, to understand the universe scientifically we need PhD’s in physics and astronomy. Puzzling out stuff like quantum mechanics or superstring theory isn’t easy. But science doesn’t insist the laws of nature were laid down by a loving God. The universe of science doesn’t care if we understand it or not. The Christian universe does. So why is it so damned hard to figure it out and get everyone on the same page?

The problem comes from what’s being sold: Faith—something that can’t be proven or disproven and, therefore, an issue that can never be resolved. If you’re searching for hard facts, like the sum of 2 + 2, you eventually reach a consensus because you can verify that it equals 4 and not 5. You toss out the wrong answer and agree on the right one. This is why history isn’t full of feuding math cults.

But religion is stuck with unalterable “sacred truths,” and often they don’t add up. So, arguments must be bent around these foregone conclusions, and this demands creative wiggle room. How else do you defend beliefs like a Jesus who is both fully human
and
fully divine? It’s like insisting 2 + 2 equals 4
and
5. This kind of silliness calls for a theologian. Some genius who can fuzzy the issue with heady ramblings about how, “In Christ, 2 + 2 lives, and transcends mere addition with a Truth beyond ‘plus’ that is God’s grace, which is infinite, and in which dwells the sum of 4 in harmony with 5.” A hundred pages of pious obfuscation later, he concludes that 2 + 2 = Jesus. And if you’re still confused, just think of it as a beautiful mystery. But don’t ever abandon your nonsense belief.

Holy Payback

Anyway, once Christianity got the upper hand in the Roman government, it was time to give the pagans what they deserved. The men who had once persecuted the Christians were now persecuted themselves. Pagan priests were accused of ghastly crimes and perversions. They were tortured, chained to statues, and left to starve. Their sacred scrolls were burned and their temples were desecrated or turned into churches. They suffered horrors as bad as anything they had dished out.

Purging the pagans, however, wasn’t the end of it. Christians fought other Christians over who were the genuine Christians. Sticking a Jesus fish on your bumper wouldn’t cut it. During the Great Persecution (303–311), many believers had caved in to the Roman authorities—they ratted out their friends, destroyed holy texts, or participated in pagan rituals. While the mainstream Church wanted to go easy on them, independent churches full of hardliners, known as Donatists, insisted that these weak-kneed stoolpigeons be punished or excommunicated. Some of these churches took brutal actions of their own.

To put a stop to persecutions by these splinter groups, the Catholic Church decided to…well, persecute them. (Old habits die hard.) Churches went after churches. Bishops hatched murder plots against one another and, once again, the Empire was faced with the possibility of unraveling. It was a mess.

So, over the next century, the new church-state partnership flexed its muscles to straighten things out, and became what history writer Jonathan Kirsch calls the world’s first totalitarian state. Around 374, the sixty-six books of the Holy Bible were officially canonized. In 381, heresy was outlawed. By 386, bands of salvation-crazed monks ran riot throughout the Empire. They were described as mobs dressed in black, armed with cudgels and bars of iron. They tore down temples, demolished statues, and if the local priest objected, he was killed. By 391, Emperor Theodosius had all pagan temples shut down and all anti-Christian books burned. Unofficial concepts of God were more or less extinguished—which is why the surviving records of those days are a bit sketchy and rather one-sided.

Emblematic of this great social change was the fate of a scientist from Alexandria, Egypt. In 415, a brilliant female mathematician and philosopher named Hypatia found herself on the business end of a Christian horde that didn’t much care for her fame or for her preference of science over mysticism. She was stripped naked in the streets, dragged off, and flailed to death—in a church. Then she was burned.

Hypatia’s death was an epic tragedy, and it’s often regarded as the dividing line between the end of the classical world and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Cue the creepy music.

Pagan Postscript

The popular cliché is that the Roman Empire deteriorated due to its pagan debauchery. Many liken modern America to ancient Rome and insist that, if we simply come back to Jesus, we’ll avoid the same fate. But think again. Rome grew as a pagan empire and unraveled as a Christian one. Christianity didn’t necessarily cause it to fall apart, but it didn’t stop the downfall either.

In its heyday, Hellenistic civilization established roads, aqueducts, schools, currency, a justice system, religious tolerance, enduring innovations in art and architecture, and a barbarian-free zone unequalled in the ancient world. The classical era was an astounding success. It was a spectacular age of scientific discovery, political sophistication, literary achievement, and economic prosperity that would be unsurpassed for 1,500 years.

So why didn’t it last if it was so terrific? Well, look around you. Essentially, it’s still here. Most of our modern world is built on the foundations of Greece and Rome—science, democracy, law, free debate, medicine, sports, drama, wine-making, nude wrestling, you name it. Their political structure collapsed because of infighting among leaders, vast economic factors, and barbarian attacks. But their values are still around. All things considered, they had a pretty good run and, in a very real way, they’re still going strong.

Goin’ Medieval

Augustine—the Middle Age Man

Paganism was giving way to Christianity but, for some, it wasn’t happening fast enough. Chief among those who advocated religious militancy in the name of the Prince of Peace was a North African bishop named Augustine, who lived and worked around A.D. 400. He’s advertised as the most important Church father of the ancient world because he laid the intellectual groundwork for the Age of Faith. A little more of that creepy music, please.

In 410, the “invincible” city of Rome was invaded by the Visigoths, who acted like a bunch of barbarians. Many thought this was divine punishment for Rome having abandoned the traditional pagan gods in favor of Christianity. But Augustine thought Catholicism was the “Divine Philosophy,” and he re-imagined the Church as the
City of God
—a spiritual community of believers that could never be sacked by a horde of thugs. It transcended the physical world, so it would survive and flourish no matter what. And if it had to use force on occasion to drive that point home, so be it. Welcome to the Dark Ages.

Like a lot of righteous firebrands, Augustine made radical swings in his value system over the course of his life. He sired a child with a concubine he kept on tap for fifteen years, only to become a crusader for celibacy. When he turned thirty, his mother arranged a marriage into money with a girl so young he had to wait two years for her to come of age. While waiting, he found himself another cookie, during which time he famously begged God to “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Apparently, God obliged.

Augustine’s mother wanted him to be Catholic, and he broke her heart by becoming a Manichaean Gnostic, and then a skeptic. Then, in the usual trajectory for guys who become spiritual steamrollers, he had a sudden personal crisis. He called off the wedding to his child bride and pursued the priesthood. He opted for celibacy. Though abstinence was considered virtuous by the larger culture of the time, it wasn’t yet Church doctrine. Alas, Auggie helped to make it so.

Augustine was inspired to become celibate when one day he heard “a voice.” (You know this isn’t gonna be good.) It told him to read the first thing he picked up. Sadly, it was a copy of Paul’s letter to the
Romans
,
Chapter 13
, which talked about walking soberly through life and making “no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” Terrific. He couldn’t have found something about Solomon’s 300 concubines?

From then on, Augustine was a puritanical knuckle-rapper. He gave his money to the poor, embarked on a monastic lifestyle, and proceeded to pitch for Catholicism with the zeal of a spammer for male enhancement drugs. His big contribution to theology was to revive Paul’s grim views of God and man after they had been neglected for centuries. He incorporated Greek philosophy into his thought, but he rejected most classical ideals. Reason, which the Greeks exalted, was now only a handmaiden to faith; logic was the shoeshine boy to religion. Science and worldly wisdom were no longer important. What you really wanted was God’s grace—and that wasn’t easy to come by. Most of us didn’t deserve it.

Augustine’s masterpiece,
Confessions
, is regarded as the West’s first real autobiography because it explored his confused inner life as much as the events around him. He decided that God lived outside of normal time. He distinguished miracles from magic. (If
his
god did it, it was a miracle. If
yours
did it, it was magic.) He condemned curiosity as a distraction from God, and called astrology the work of women taught by demons, which established a justification for medieval witch hunts.

Since he lived at a time when barbarians were literally at the gates, he came up with handy notions like “just warfare.” He supported authoritarian rule to enforce theology, and dreamt up the concept of Original Sin—a term found nowhere in the Bible and one of the issues that would split the Christian world into the western Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox faith. The guy has a lot to answer for.

Reason Takes a Holiday

Augustine’s pessimism fit the troubled times, and others signed on to his anti-intellectualism. John Chrysostom, a theologian, asked that we all, “Restrain our own reason, and empty our mind of secular learning, in order to provide a mind swept clear for the reception of divine words.” In other words, don’t you worry your pretty little head. God will do the thinking. And who speaks for God? The same guys peddling this self-imposed lobotomy.

For the next thousand years, this faith-first, reason-second mentality shackled most critical free thought and produced the longest stretch of ignorance, poverty, oppression, and stagnation in the history of western civilization. But hey, they had faith.

Medieval governments, many of them tiny, took a back seat to the increasingly powerful Church. Princes collected the taxes and kept the torches burning. But the Church is what gave a king his divine credibility, and it had free reign to keep his sinning little subjects on the straight and narrow with its own morality cops. Since all of humanity was headed for one common destiny and judgment, anyone who strayed from that path with an idea of their own was trouble. The West became one big faith-based initiative.