4. The Rise of Christianity

THE DARKENING AGE

The rise of Christianity is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in history. It occurred at a time of upheaval and change associated with the dissolution of slave society, which found its reflection in a crisis of the old morality, philosophy and religion. The Roman Empire in the phase of its decline was a fertile ground for the spread of mystical ideas. This partly explains the rapid spread of new religions from the East. The old religion and morality represented a world that had outlived its usefulness and was already on the point of passing into history.

The temples stood empty and people sought a religion that would offer them some consolation for their endless suffering, and some prospect of salvation. In this context, the idea of a Saviour, a Redeemer, had an obvious attraction. The only real hope for a revolutionary overthrow of slavery would have been to unite the slaves with the Roman proletariat – the mass of propertyless, free citizens in Rome. But the Roman proletariat, unlike the modern working class, was a non-productive, parasitic class that lived off the state. The real productive class was the slaves, on whose backs the whole oppressive edifice rested.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Karl Marx quoted Sismondi’s statement: “The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”^[1] In its psychology, the Roman proletariat resembled the poor whites of the southern states of the USA at the time of the Civil War. Although they were the lowest of the low, regarded contemptuously by the wealthy slave owners as ‘white trash’, in the last analysis, they sided with the slave owners against the slaves. As a result, the numerous slave uprisings that characterised the late Roman Republic, despite some spectacular victories under the great revolutionary leader Spartacus, inevitably ended in defeat.

THE EARLY CHRISTIANS

The early Christians were a revolutionary movement based on the poor and oppressed layers of society. The class nature of early Christianity is faithfully reflected in the gospels. The Acts of the Apostles show that the early Christians believed in equality. The communion of believers was expressed in the form of primitive communism.

All who joined this communion had first to relinquish all their worldly goods. Tertullian (c. 155-220 AD) wrote:

… our brotherhood is upheld by the family substance, which among you as a rule dissolves the fraternal tie.

So we, who are united in mind and soul, have no hesitation about sharing property. All is common among us – except our wives. At that point we dissolve our partnership, which is the one place where the rest of men make it effective.^[2]

John Allegro notes:

The early Church also observed a form of communism, was at loggerheads with established Jewry as represented by the Jerusalem cultus, practised a ritual meal of some kind, baptised its initiates, and paid special regard to the teachings of the biblical prophets, whose every word was thought to offer insight into the future of mankind.^[3]

The early Christians were convinced that the profound crisis of society heralded the imminent end of the world, the second coming of Christ and the emergence of the New Jerusalem. For them this was not a kingdom in the clouds, but a very real kingdom of God on earth. They were committed to an unrelenting struggle against the existing order, which the Book of Revelation – the earliest and most authentic of surviving Christian texts – describes as the ‘Whore of Babylon’. They adopted a proud and obstinate revolutionary standpoint.

They remained stubbornly steadfast before the heathen judges, refusing to renounce their faith and willingly embracing martyrdom, confident in their final victory. They impatiently awaited the imminent return of Christ and the thousand-year kingdom, which was shortly to dawn. Originally, Christianity had been a Jewish sect. It was Paul who developed the idea of converting non-Jews, eliminating circumcision and the dietary prohibitions that were serious obstacles to winning over the latter. It proved to be extremely successful.

Friedrich Engels explained:

What kind of people were the first Christians recruited from? Mainly from the ‘labouring and burdened’, the members of the lowest strata, as becomes a revolutionary element. And what did they consist of? In the towns of impoverished free men, all sorts of people, like the ‘mean whites’ of the southern slave states and the European beachcombers and adventurers in colonial and Chinese seaports, then of freedmen and, above all, slaves; on the large estates in Italy, Sicily, and Africa of slaves, and in the rural districts of the provinces of small peasants who had fallen more and more into bondage through debt. There was absolutely no common road to emancipation for all these elements. For all of them paradise lay lost behind them; for the ruined free men it was the former polis, the town and the state at the same time, of which their forefathers had been free citizens; for the war-captive slaves the time of freedom before their subjugation and captivity; for the small peasants the abolished gentile social system and communal landownership. All that had been smitten down by the levelling iron fist of conquering Rome…

The pressure of taxation and the need for money which it caused in regions with a purely or predominant natural economy plunged the peasants into ever deeper bondage to the usurers, gave rise to great differences in fortune, making the rich richer and the poor completely destitute. Any resistance by isolated small tribes or towns to the gigantic Roman world power was without prospect. Where was the way out, salvation, for the enslaved, oppressed and impoverished, a way out common to all these diverse groups of people whose interests were mutually alien or even opposed? And yet it had to be found if a great revolutionary movement was to embrace them all.

This way out was found. But not in this world. As things were, it could only be a religious way out. Then a new world was embraced. The continued life of the soul after the death of the body had gradually become a recognised article of faith through-out the Roman world. A kind of recompense or punishment of the deceased souls for their actions while on earth also received more and more general recognition. As far as recompense was concerned, admittedly, the prospects were not so good: antiquity was too primitively materialistic not to attribute infinitely greater value to life on earth than to life in the shades; to live on after death was considered by the Greeks rather as a misfortune. Then came Christianity, which took seriously recompense and punishment in the world beyond and created heaven and hell, and a way out was found which would lead the labouring and burdened from this vale of woe to eternal paradise. And in fact only with the prospect of a reward in the world beyond could the stoico-philonic renunciation of the world and ascetics be exalted to the basic moral principle of a new world religion which would enthuse the oppressed masses.^[4]

The Church had an obvious appeal: in a troubled and anxious age, it offered every individual the hope of salvation and the promise of life after death. By contrast, the old gods seemed cold and aloof. But when the new religion broke out of its original Jewish context, it was mangled, changed beyond recognition and turned into something quite different. This led to new contradictions. Although the new religion found its first and most enthusiastic adepts in the most oppressed and marginalised elements of society (slaves and women), it gradually attracted the attention of a layer of the educated and privileged classes, who were increasingly alienated by the spiritual emptiness of a decadent society. Over a period, the early Church changed and regulated its doctrines to suit its new position in society.

All the attempts to crush the Christian movement by state repression failed. Despite the most ferocious persecution, the Christians won mass support. Therefore, the ruling class did what they always do in such circumstances. If they cannot defeat a movement by force, the oppressor classes resort to cunning. They corrupt the leaders. The unprincipled cynic Constantine (306-337 AD) realised that the Christians could not be crushed by repression and decided that the best tactic was to neuter them by bribing their leaders, the bishops, and co-opting them.

In the period of approximately 100-300 AD we see a gradual consolidation of the power of the bishops, the crystallisation of a privileged bureaucratic stratum. Gradually, the Christian Church acquired a bureaucratic apparatus, which fused with the Roman state.

The bishops were originally the treasurers. They began to concentrate considerable wealth and authority in their hands. In a biting footnote, the English historian Edward Gibbon, in his monumental work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes:

I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: “My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.”^[5]

With his characteristic irony, Gibbon wonders to what excesses the abbot’s vows of chastity had led him.

CONSTANTINE

When the new religion was eventually recognised by the Emperor Constantine, it changed into its opposite. From being a revolutionary movement of the poor and oppressed, the Church was absorbed into the state to become a formidable weapon in the hands of the rich and powerful. Constantine calculated correctly that any disadvantages that might flow from the abandonment of the old religion would be outweighed by the advantages of having the Church, with its powerful apparatus and control over the masses, as an ally.

This opportunist used religion to strengthen his grip on power. The earlier doctrines of the Christians, with their strong revolutionary and communist overtones, were persecuted as heresy and stamped out once Christianity became accepted as the state religion. To do this the Church had to be centralised as part of the imperial state. As a result, the bishop of Rome, who originally had no special status (and would have been subordinate to the bishop of Jerusalem), was now elevated to the Supreme Head of the Church – the Pope.

It was Constantine who built the church of the Holy Sepulchre and other ‘Holy Places’ in Jerusalem, although there was absolutely no basis for claiming that these places were what they were supposed to be. Constantine’s mother, Helena, who is said to have been the daughter of a fishmonger, went to Jerusalem to obtain the nails that were supposed to have been used in the crucifixion of Christ, together with pieces of wood from the original cross, and even some milk from his mother’s breasts!

The Catholic Church still has possession of these ‘Holy Places’, which every year bring in a handsome profit. The Church and its ruling elite began to amass vast amounts of wealth. In fact, the introduction of the rule of celibacy was actually a measure to protect Church property and prevent it being lost to children through inheritance.

ORTHODOXY

In the first decades of the second century there were a large number of rival Christian sects, each with their own gospels and rites, that were in bitter conflict. This presented a problem. There had to be one emperor, one state, one religion, one god and one Church. Deny one of these things and you must deny them all. In order to consolidate his power, Constantine had to eliminate all competing versions of Christianity and introduce orthodoxy. It took a series of bloody wars to extirpate these ‘heresies’. Constantine imposed order by state violence, backed up by the even greater threat of eternal punishment wielded by the authorities of a Church that had become merely an arm of the state power.

The scriptures were repeatedly purged to wipe out all traces of the original revolutionary and communist message of early Christianity, with only a few remnants in the version of the New Testament available today. But it was impossible to remove the revolutionary content completely. Later, in western Europe, the Church got round this difficulty very simply: the Bible was only made available in Latin, which the overwhelming majority did not understand. The only ones allowed to interpret the scriptures were the priests, who were gradually separated from society as a special privileged caste.

From the very beginning, the authority of the gospels was gradually acquired by tradition. The gospels do not even claim to have been written by the Disciples of Christ, but gradually, people have accepted that they were – from force of tradition, and nothing else. By the end of the third century there were at least twenty gospels in circulation, as well as numerous letters, lives and sayings of Jesus Christ etc., amounting to more than eighty in total. This situation was intolerable to Constantine, who decided to put an end to it once and for all.

THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA

It was the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), organised by Constantine, that formally settled all the disputed issues, such as the divinity of Jesus. But few people nowadays are aware of the methods whereby this result was achieved. For many days, in the Bithynian city of Nicaea, a delegation of Christian bishops and their retinues, overseen by Constantine himself, pondered the problematic question of the nature of Christ and the Trinity. How could the Son be also the Father, and what about God the Holy Ghost? These questions were not satisfactorily resolved even when the Council ended. There was still no agreed text, which probably did not matter to most of them, since they could not read.

Very little is known about this celebrated meeting because it has been erased from the historical record by the Church, who wished to hide the truth about what went on. The Council was packed by Constantine’s henchmen, who were willing to carry out the will of the emperor. The bishops were a motley crew: some were ex-slaves or ex-convicts from as far afield as the border with India, Egypt, the Sahara Desert, Persia, England, Africa, Greece and other exotic places. Many were supporters of an array of heretical sects: Arians, Donatists, Gnostics, etc.

Such men were in no position to compete in debate with the educated intriguers who supported Constantine. There were a number of problems that irked the Emperor such as the refusal of Christians to serve in the army or worship the Emperor. But these could be managed with intelligent tactics. And in any case, all attempts to destroy the Church through repression had failed. The presence of the emperor was in itself enough to make those present shake in their sandals. Many probably had never seen him before, and certainly not this close. And if psychological intimidation was not enough, other more direct methods were available.

Some of those present had already suffered torture at his command. These tortures included having an eye extracted with a hot iron, or having one’s leg ligaments cut, and other pleasant methods of persuasion that left one blind or crippled. These men would not be eager to repeat the experience. But, just to make sure of the vote, before the meeting ended, some delegates had been murdered or disappeared, never to be seen again, for having expressed their thoughts with excessive frankness.

In the end, there remained a small handful of accepted works that have come down to us as the Bible. What people could or could not read was decided by an endless series of religious wars, purges, persecution and martyrdom. The struggle to suppress heresy was long, bitter and bloody, and it lasted for hundreds of years. It was far more vicious than any of the persecutions launched by the pagans against Christianity.

PERSECUTION AND DESTRUCTION

The persecution of other religions commenced almost immediately. In 386 AD, a law was passed declaring that those “who contend about religion … shall pay the penalty of high treason with their lives and blood.”^[6] Books were systematically burned. The military colony of Aelia Capitolina in Jerusalem destroyed a pagan temple for the purpose of constructing a Christian church. This was only the beginning of a long campaign that lasted centuries and led to the wholesale eradication of many brilliant cultures in all parts of the world.

The Spanish Conquistadores slaughtered millions of men, women and children in their American colonies under the banners of Christ. They melted down priceless objects of art for gold and they built Christian churches and cathedrals over the ruined temples of the Mayas and Aztecs. Christians went on to destroy thousands of ancient religions and cultures in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and elsewhere. The persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire began during the reign of Constantine. The Christians were bitterly hostile to anything remotely resembling rational thought and philosophy. They were hell-bent on tearing up the old world, root and branch. Gibbon remarks:

The Christians, who, by the interposition of evil spirits, could so readily explain every præternatural appearance, were disposed and even desirous to admit the most extravagant fictions of the Pagan mythology. But the belief of the Christian was accompanied with horror. The most trifling mark of respect to the national worship he considered as a direct homage yielded to the dæmon, and as an act of rebellion against the majesty of God.^[7]

This hatred of the old religions was openly admitted by the Christians themselves. Take the following words of St. Augustine: “That all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!”^[8]

This was a superstitious time, when people believed it possible to conjure up supernatural powers by the use of magic signs, formulas and rites. They believed in miracles. To win popularity, the Church had to provide a plentiful supply of miracles. Eusebius of Caesarea, a Christian biblical scholar and historian who wrote the first biography of Constantine, portrayed the cross as a magical sign, the effectiveness of which was said to be proved by the following story, which he clearly invented for his own purposes.

The usurper Constantine won a great victory on 28 October 312 AD. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge was the final battle of the civil war, by which he became Emperor. Eusebius claims that, before the battle, Constantine and his army saw a cross of light in the sky above the sun with words in Greek that are generally translated into Latin as “In hoc signo vinces” – “In this sign thou shalt conquer”. That night Constantine had a dream in which Christ told him he should use the sign of the cross against his enemies. He then ordered his soldiers to mark the Christian symbol on their shields, which naturally gave him overwhelming victory.

The truth of this story – like everything else Eusebius writes – is open to doubt. The earliest account of the battle, dating from 313 AD, mentions nothing about a vision or a dream. But it is in any case self-evident that the battle was won, not by the sign of the cross, but by sharp steel blades and the strong arms of the men that wielded them.

In 315 AD the Senate dedicated a triumphal arch in Rome to Constantine with an inscription praising him because ‘with divine instigation’ he and his army had won the victory. It tactfully refrained from saying which god had provided the ‘instigation’ and citizens could credit it to Sol Invictus or the Christian deity or whichever god they chose. Actually, there is not a shred of historical evidence that Constantine was ever converted to Christianity. He never actually claimed to be a Christian during his lifetime and it is said that he only converted on his deathbed. But we only have Eusebius’ word for that, and he lied about practically everything. Early Christianity was thoroughly impregnated with such superstition.

In place of reason, the Church Fathers preached blind faith, summed up in the celebrated phrase attributed to Tertullian, “Credo, quia absurdum est” – “I believe because it is absurd”. Science was looked on as suspicious, a heritage of paganism. In the period under consideration, pagan priests and philosophers were the primary target of the early Christians, who knew they were the spiritual and intellectual elite of the pagan society and culture. Once they were destroyed, it would be a simpler task to convert the pagans. And this is what they did.

Their attitude to the Jews is shown by a statement of one of the most celebrated early Church Fathers, St. John Chrysostom – he of the Golden Mouth: “… the synagogue … is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts … a dwelling of demons …”^[9] These words were quoted with approval in Nazi Germany 1,500 years later.

Today, as we walk through the marvellous national museums of Athens, admiring the miraculous artistry of its ancient statues, our admiration is tinged with a profound sense of sorrow at the loss of so much of the art of classical Greece. All over Greece, the evidence of wanton destruction is plain to see: ruined temples, headless statues of gods and goddesses bear mute witness to an orgy of vandalism. One might suppose that this deliberate destruction of culture was the work of the barbarians. But this supposition would be fundamentally mistaken. This crime was perpetrated by Christians at the instigation of Emperor Theodosius (392-395 AD).

Up to that time, Rome was still more pagan than Christian. In Gaul, Spain and northern Italy, all but the urban areas remained stubbornly loyal to the old gods. Even Milan remained half pagan. But all that was about to change. In the year 392 AD, Theodosius became Emperor of both the eastern and western part of the Roman Empire; the last emperor to rule over both. In the same year he authorised the destruction of pagan temples throughout the empire. He issued a comprehensive law that prohibited the performance of any type of pagan sacrifice or worship. Paganism was proscribed as a “religio illicita”.

Theodosius dedicated himself steadfastly to the work of establishing a single brand of faith, Nicene Christianity, as the only accepted religion of the state, repressing dissident Christians (heretics) and enacting explicit legal measures to abolish paganism. In order to complete his work, he enlisted the services of mobs of fanatical monks, who set about the work of destruction with ferocious zeal. In her book, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey delivers a hard-hitting and truthful account of the savage war of extermination waged by the Church against the religion and culture of the ancient world.

She opens her book with a description of black-robed zealots taking iron bars to the beautiful statue of Athena in the sanctuary of Palmyra in Syria. Their vandalism was completed by ISIS not long ago. Athena was the deity of wisdom. But it was not just statues embodying this virtue that were mutilated and beheaded. Intellectuals in Antioch and elsewhere were tortured and beheaded by the Christians. Nixey writes:

Damascius’s [a Greek philosopher] own brother had been arrested and tortured to make him reveal the names of other philosophers…

Others in Damascius’s circle of philosophers had been tortured; hung up by the wrists until they gave away the names of their fellow scholars. A fellow philosopher had, some years before, been flayed alive. Another had been beaten before a judge until the blood flowed down his back.^[10]

THE MURDER OF HYPATIA

In the history of philosophy, we do not find the names of many women. But there is at least one notable exception to the rule. Hypatia of Alexandria was one of the most remarkable women who has ever lived.

This extraordinary woman was the leading mathematician and astronomer in the world at the time. She is probably the only woman for whom such a claim can be made. One of the last of the pagan philosophers, she was born around the year 355 AD, though the precise date is not known. However her death occurred in March 415 AD, and the circumstances are known only too well. Hypatia was a product of the brilliant scientific school of Alexandria – the intellectual hub of the Roman Empire – where the precious heritage of the knowledge of antiquity was preserved in its world-famous library.

Her father, who had also been a mathematician and astronomer, is best known for the part he played in the preservation of Euclid’s Elements, and he also wrote extensively, commenting on Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables. His life’s work was devoted to the preservation of the Greek mathematical and astronomical heritage. Hypatia continued his work. Her philosophical views led her to adopt a life of dedicated virginity. She was also a popular teacher, whose lectures on philosophical topics attracted huge audiences and a numerous following of dedicated students. But these were very dangerous times, and dark clouds were gathering over Hypatia and her world. Her successes aroused the suspicions of the Christians. It was precisely her popularity that sealed her fate.

Hypatia was an adherent to the philosophical trend known as Neoplatonism – a trend that was actually the main source of the early Christian dogma. But this fact was completely unknown to the fanatical Christian mob in Alexandria, for whom anything that smelled even remotely of pagan philosophy came straight from the mouth of the Devil. Alexandria, like many other cities at that time, was the scene of bitter religious conflicts in which Christians vented their blind hatred, now against Jews, then against ‘heretical’ Christians and, naturally, against all pagans.

An early warning was the razing of the Serapeum, the temple of the Greco-Egyptian god Seraphis by Alexandria’s bishop Theophilus. This event marked the final end of the great Library of Alexandria, since the Serapeum seems to have contained some of the Library’s books. Theophilus, however, was friendly with Synesius, an admirer and pupil of Hypatia, so she was not herself affected by this development and was permitted to pursue her endeavours unimpeded. But she was living on borrowed time. Her life was hanging by a slender thread, which could break at any moment.

This fragile equilibrium was suddenly destroyed by the death of Theophilus and the accession of Cyril, a vicious bigot, to the bishopric of Alexandria. The uneasy climate of tolerance lapsed and, shortly afterward, Hypatia became the victim of a particularly brutal murder.

She was butchered with indescribable cruelty by a Christian mob, fired up by blind hatred and blood lust. Soraya Field Fiorio describes the scene:

One early spring day during the year 415 in the city of Alexandria – the intellectual heart of the waning Roman Empire – the pagan philosopher Hypatia was murdered by a mob of Christian men. These men, the parabalani, were a volunteer militia of monks serving as henchmen to the archbishop. Their conscripted purpose was to aid the dead and dying but they could be more readily found terrorising opposing Christian groups and levelling pagan temples. At the urging of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, they had already destroyed the remains of the Library of Alexandria. The parabalani razed pagan temples, attacked the Jewish quarters, and defiled masterpieces of ancient art they considered demonic by mutilating statues and melting them down for gold. They now set their gaze on the city’s beloved teacher of mathematics and philosophy, whose social ranking was on par with Alexandria’s most important men. Understanding nothing of her philosophy, they called her a witch. They pulled the elderly teacher from her chariot as she rode through the city and dragged her to a temple. She was stripped naked, her skin flayed with jagged pieces of oyster shells, her limbs pulled from her body and paraded through the streets. Her remains were burned in a mockery of pagan sacrifice. Hypatia’s death marked the end of paganism and the triumph of Christianity, the final act of a one-hundred-year-old feud waged by the new religion against the ancient world.^[11]

Thus perished the last notable philosopher of antiquity. With her an entire world of light and culture passed away. Europe was plunged into a world of darkness, ignorance and superstition that lasted a thousand years. To quote the words of William Manchester, it was a world lit only by fire.

Endnotes

[1] K. Marx, ‘Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire’, MECW, Vol. 21, p. 57.

[2] Tertullian, Apologeticus, XXXIX. 10-12, pp. 177-179.

[3] J. M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, p. 4.

[4] F. Engels, ‘On the Early History of Christianity’, MECW, Vol. 27, pp. 460-61.

[5] E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2, p. 13n.

[6] The Corpus of Roman Law, Vol. 1, The Theodosian Code, 16.4.1, p. 449.

[7] E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1, pp. 395-96.

[8] Quoted in C. Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, p. xxv.

[9] Quoted ibid., p. 133.

[10] Ibid., p. xxvii.

[11] S. F. Fiorio, ‘The Killing of Hypatia’, Lapham’s Quarterly, 16 January 2019.