Constantine and the sword

Constantine’s sword-The Church and the Jews. By James Carrol.

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THE PREVIOUS EASTER, in 387,1 this same Ambrose had taken a thirty-three-year-old man naked into a pool of water, and three times, pushing by the shoulders, he had forced the man under, saying, "I baptize you, Augustine." After Constantine, the conversion of Augustine (354—430) may be the most momentous in the his­tory of the Church. He was born seventeen years after Constantine died. He was a bishop in Hippo, a small city in North Africa, but it is as a writer that he is remembered. He wrote nearly a hundred books, by his count, and thousands of letters and sermons, most of which survive. Garry Wills describes his method: "Augustine dictated to relays of stenographers, often late into the night . . . He employed teams of copyists.

His sermons, several a week, were taken down by his own or others' shorthand writers. In some seasons, he preached daily. His letters were sent off in many cop­ies. He paced about as he dictated, a reflection of the mental restlessness and energy conveyed in the very rhythm of his prose"' His greatest work, to which we will turn, may be The City of God, a meditation on the rela­tionship of the Church and the empire, of politics and virtue, of history and hope. But his most compelling work is surely The Confessions,' the Western world's first great autobiography.

This book, with its realistic ex­ploration of human psychology and its affirmation that subjective experi­ence is of ultimate value, stamped the mind of Europe. Its search for God in an act of memory makes each person a center of Christian revelation. That idea is the birthplace of modern individualism, for good and for ill.

Augustine's solid grounding in the classical intellectual tradition prepared him for the task of applying categories of Platonic thought to Christian theology.

To take only one example of the importance of his ideas, he marshalled the definitive argument against the Donatists, held that saintly virtue was a prerequisite for full membership in the Church.

Augustine's position was rooted in Plato's distinction between the ideal and the real and Augustine knew that the ideal would not be realized until God brought about the fulfillment of Creation at the end of time.

Therefore, he held, the human condition was by definition flawed. Gospel was addressed to human beings, not to angels. Because Augustine carried the day against the Donatists, Christians could come together before God, confessing sin, and knowing that the Church itself, too, remained imperfect. The Church would not be a sect of the saved but community open to all. Augustine is commonly credited as the father c Western Christian theology, but he is, perhaps more basically, the father of the inclusive Western Church we know, in both its Catholic and Protestant manifestations.


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But recall further that the Dark Age itself was, in part at least, an unintended consequence of powerful but ambiguous developments occurring Christian theology, an intellectual equivalent of the Church's political accommodation of the imperium in the aftermath of Constantine's conversion.

The theological formulations that jelled between the council of Nicaea (325) and the Council of Constantinople (381) had reflected an accommodation with Greek thought, and so had the work of the great Augustine (354-430).

In this period, the metaphors that early Christians used describe their experience of and faith in Jesus of Nazareth were reinvented in the categories of Hellenistic metaphysics.

Obviously, the movement from religious expression which began, essentially, as poetry, which prizes ambiguity and allusiveness, to religious philosophy, which values precision above implication, represents a decisive shift.

When the Church fathers found the mysteries of revelation to be illu­minated by their understanding of Plato's dichotomy between form and matter — between the world, that is, of ideal perfection and the inherently awed material world of everyday experience — a new idea of the cosmos raced the Christian vision.

Less a construct of Plato than of his syncretist interpreters of late antiquity, especially Plotinus (c. 205-270), Neo-Platonism posited a dualism that would become Christianized as between grace and sin.

This was one culture's form of the perennial human temptation binary thinking, as evidenced among Gnostics of various kinds in the ancient world. The Neo-Platonic divide between soul and body would have its later equivalents in the post-Descartes alienation between the self and the world, and even in the postmodern deconstruction of the bond between the self and the self's expression.

Now God was understood to be the True, the One, the Holy; the material world — enigmatic, chaotic, profane — could only be ontologically unrelated to such a God.

Creation was merely the Creator's shadow. For a people with roots in the biblical view of reality, this was a massive mutation, for the God of Israel, while very much a transcendent God, was the Lord of human history who had chosen to be intimately involved in that history.

Among Christians, a new idea of the person took hold too, one equally foreign to the biblical idea, with a split between the body and the soul, which in nature could not be reconciled.

This split posed large problem for theologians who sought to define exactly how Jesus could he both God and man, and disagreements over the formulas constructed to answer the question — "begotten, not made," "hypostatic union," " filoque - became violent, leading to the first great condemnations of heresy.

But perhaps the most damaging consequence of this new dualism was the devaluation of the physical world that seemed logically to flow from a Neo-Platonic suspicion of "matter."

This led not only, say, to the distrust of sexual pleasure — original sin defined as the sex act — which has been a mark of Christianity ever since, but to the idea that human beings, mired in the material world, were inherently unable to arrive at a state of happi­ness — in religious language, salvation — that was natural to the realm of the ideal.

The body, that is, condemned the soul to live in permanent exile from the realm for which it was made. It is only when such Hellenistic cat­egories shape Christian theology that the idea of the immortality of the soul becomes the content of religious hope — a notion that has nothing in common with biblical hope, which is based on personal wholeness, not dichotomy; on God's promise, not the soul's indestructibility.

But in the scheme of Christian Neo-Platonism, even the soul's intrinsic immortality was no hope, because its pollution by the body left it doomed.

The gulf between body and soul was itself a pale shadow of the infinitely larger gulf between God and the human person.

For the purposes of this book, it cannot be emphasized enough that one effect of this thor­oughgoing Hellenization of the meaning of Jesus, whatever positive re­sults it had as an intellectual construction, was the final obliteration of the Jewish character of that meaning.

With the Christian adoption of Greek intellectual categories, the parting of the ways became turnpikes set in concrete.

From now on, most ominously, since there was nothing intrinsi­cally Jewish about Jesus, there would be nothing to prevent Christians from defining themselves in opposition to Jews.

Despite the intellectual monuments created by Church fathers from Tertullian to Augustine, a collapse of intellectual pursuit and scientific inquiry was an ultimate consequence of the Christian adoption of a dualistic worldview, since there was no reason to take the experience of the senses seriously.

On the contrary, the senses became the enemy, and where once the sexual body was celebrated as the very image of God — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." “the sexual body now became an "occasion of sin” to he subdued.

Among Christians, the Greek idea of soul became entirely removed from the biblical idea of spirit, which, since it literally means "breath," is intrinsically physical.

Indeed, now the body, even with its breath, was defined as the source of all evil. Christian piety became penitential — the self-flagellation of body hatred became the highest form of devotion — and even work of the mind, like reading.