The Darkening Age Read online

  Some of the descriptions of demonic attack have an almost Proustian precision. One monk recorded the working of what he called the “noonday demon” that struck between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. At this time the monk was supposed to be working, but this particular demon would thwart him and make “it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour”—the hour of dinner. The demon might then force the monk to poke his head out of his cell to see if any other brethren are about. Then, in the warmth of the noonday sun, the monk finds that he “rubs his eyes and stretches his hands, and he takes his eyes off his book and stares at the wall. Then he returns to the book and reads a little. As he unfolds it, he becomes preoccupied with the condition of the texts . . . he criticizes the orthography and the decoration. Finally, he folds the book up and places it under his head, and he falls into a light sleep.”7

  For the majority of mankind, however, demons conducted their work through the more pedestrian yet insidious means of incitement and enticement, putting ideas into men’s heads (and these accounts are all by men) that they were seemingly unable to resist. To counter these diabolic whispers one monk created a phrasebook of words with which one might respond to almost any such apparition. In much the same manner as old guidebooks would offer stock phrases for what to say at foreign railway stations, so this book offered handy phrases, all taken from the Bible, to use in the case of demonic assault. If one found oneself tormented by a thought that suggested a glass of wine would be good for you, one might piously reply: “He who takes pleasure in banquets of wine will leave dishonour in his strongholds”—and, hopefully, the temptation would flee.8 The book is compendious, offering 498 passages to deploy as and when necessity demands. It is nice to wonder whether fourth-century monks, like contemporary travelers who can ask where the station is but cannot understand the answer, found themselves confounded when their interlocutor did not stick exactly to the prescribed script.

  One consequence of the concept of demons was that wicked thoughts were the fault of the demon, not the man: an exculpatory quirk that meant even the most sinful thoughts could be—and were—freely admitted to. In writings of astonishing candor, the monkish id is laid bare as monks confess to being tormented by visions of naked women—not to mention other monks—“performing the obscene sin of fornication,” visions that left their soul in torment and their thighs aflame. Monks write about being so overwhelmed by thoughts of sex that they are forced to “jump up at once and to use our cell for frequent and brisk walks.” An erotic phantasmagoria danced—sometimes quite literally—before their eyes as the demon of fornication—a devious demon “that imitates the form of a beautiful naked woman, luxurious in her gait, her entire body obscenely dissipated”—turned on them.9

  In one intriguing portmanteau temptation, an elderly monk suffered a vision in which he was lured not only by young bodies, but also by food and the forbidden fruit of “the other.” As he sat in his cell a young “Saracen youth,” as he describes him, wearing a bread basket, climbed through the window of his cell and started to sway, asking: “Elder, do I dance well?”10 The blame was not always entirely lifted from the confessor. The same monk who wrote about his burning thighs also, in some distress, wrote about “the demon that threatens me with curses and said, ‘I will make you an object of laughter and reproach among all the monks because you have investigated and made known all the kinds of all the unclean thoughts.’”11 Even at this distance, the sense of a soul smarting at a confidence rebuffed is unmistakable.

  But however alarming the demons of fornication may have been, the most fearsome demons of all were to be found, teeming like flies on a corpse, around the traditional gods of the empire. Jupiter, Aphrodite, Bacchus and Isis; all of them, in the eyes of these Christian writers, were demonic. In sermon after sermon, tract after tract, Christian preachers and writers reminded the faithful in violently disapproving language that the “error” of the pagan religions was demonically inspired. It was demons who first put the “delusion” of other religions into the minds of humans, these writers explained. It was demons who had foisted the gods upon “the seduced and ensnared minds of human beings.”12 Everything about the old religions was demonic. As Augustine thundered: “All the pagans were under the power of demons. Temples were built to demons, altars were set up to demons, priests ordained for the service of demons, sacrifices offered to demons, and ecstatic ravers were brought in as prophets for demons.”13

  The demons’ motivation in all of this was simple: if they had human followers, then they would have sacrifices and these sacrifices were their food. To this end, Christian writers explained, demons had created the entire Greco-Roman religious system so that “they may procure for themselves a proper diet of fumes and blood offered to their statues and images.”14 It wasn’t merely a question of nourishment, though: the demons also feasted on the very sight of people turning aside from the true Christian God.

  Baroque explanations were brought to bear, explaining away all aspects of the old religious cults. One of the most devious demonic ruses was, it was said, to pretend that they could predict the future by prophecy, a talent so beguiling that it brought humans flocking to their altars. It was, Christians fulminated, nothing more than a trick. The demons achieved their so-called prophecies through that vestigial angelic power of swift flight: their wings enabled them to travel so fast that they could watch an event, then flit away and “prophesy” it to mankind. Thus the demons seem to be able to predict, say, the weather and thus “even promise the rain—which they already feel falling.”15

  Temples to the old gods served as centers of demonic activity. Here they settled in swarms, gorging on the sacrifices made by Romans to their gods. Creep into a temple late at night and you would hear petrifying things—corpses that seemed to speak, say—or you might even hear the demons themselves whispering together, plotting against mankind. Those who attempted to build Christian constructions on ruined temples did so at their own risk. In Turkey, a stonemason working on a new monastery found himself lifted into the air by outraged demons and tossed over a cliff. In front of his horrified companions he fell hundreds of meters, bouncing down the sides of the rocks, until he finally came to rest on a stone in the middle of the river far below. So great was the demons’ fury at the advance of the Church.

  In these early centuries, and in the face of this awful threat, Christian preachers began to exhibit a new, almost hysterical, desire for purity. It wasn’t enough not to perform a sacrifice oneself: one had to avoid all contact with the blood, smoke, water and even the smell of other people’s sacrifices. To be contaminated by the smoke or sacred water of the old cults was utterly intolerable. Questions of religious contamination—practical to the point of bathetic—were asked, and answered, with great seriousness. At the close of the fourth century, a faithful Christian wrote an anxious letter to Augustine. May a Christian use baths which are used by pagans on a feast day, he asked, either while the pagans are there or after they have left? May a Christian sit in a sedan chair if a pagan has sat in that same chair during the feast day celebrations of an “idol”? If a thirsty Christian comes across a well in a deserted temple, may they drink from it? If a Christian is starving and on the point of death, and they see food in an idol’s temple, may they eat it?16

  This tension between the divine and the domestic would persist. Over 1,500 years later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, would find his mind winding round such questions as whether baptism with mineral water is valid; whether a tiny particle of the Eucharist contained all the body and blood of Christ or only a part of it; and whether, if the consecrated wine then went sour, Jesus was still in the remaining vinegar or whether he preferred a fresher vintage. Back in the four
th century, Augustine replied to his anxious correspondent with a letter that concluded on a note of uncompromising rigidity. If a Christian is starving and on the point of death, and the only food that they can see is food that has been contaminated by pagan sacrifice, “it is better to reject it with Christian fortitude.” In other words, if it is a choice between contamination with pagan objects and death, the Christian must unhesitatingly choose death.17

  The fathers of the early Church turned their full rhetorical force on religious lapses. Time and time again they insisted that Christians were not like other religions. Christians were saved; others were not. Christians were correct; other religions were wrong. More than that: they were sick, insane, evil, damned, inferior. A newly violent vocabulary of disgust started to be applied to all other religions and anything to do with them—which meant almost everything in Roman life. Religion ran through the Roman world like lines through marble. At that time, gladiatorial games were preceded by sacrifices; as were plays, athletic contests and even sessions of the Senate. But all, now, were demonic and to be avoided. One Christian soldier was obliged, in the course of military duty, to enter a temple to the old gods. As he went in, a drop of sacred water splashed onto his robe. Ostentatiously unable to bear it, he instantly slashed off that part of his cloak and flung it away. Christians, or so their preachers claimed, felt anxious when forced to inhale the smoke that drifted from altars in the Forum—the good Christian would rather spit on the altar of a pagan and blow out the incense than accidentally breathe in its fumes. The worship of the old gods began to be represented as a terrifying pollution and, like a miasma in Greek tragedy, one that might drag you to catastrophe.

  The old laissez-faire Roman ways, in which the worship of one god might simply be added to the worship of all the others, were, preachers told their congregations, no longer acceptable. Worship a different god, they explained, and you were not merely being different. You were demonic. Demons, said the clerics, dwelt in the minds of those who practiced the old religions. Those who criticized Christianity, warned the Christian apologist Tertullian, were not speaking with a free mind. Instead, they were attacking the Christians because they were under the control of Satan and his foot soldiers. The “battleground” of these fearsome troops was nothing other than “your minds, which have been attuned to him by his secret insinuations.”18 Demons were able to “take possession of men’s souls and block up their hearts” and so stop them believing in Christ.19

  This talk of demons, at the distance of a millennium and more, can sound trivial, almost comical. It was not. Nor was it mere rhetoric. It concerned the salvation and damnation of mankind and nothing could be more important. When Constantine had entered Rome in AD 312, it might at first have seemed as though little would change. The emperor, for the first time in the history of Rome, was a follower of Christ—but he intended to allow citizens of the empire to continue worshipping the gods that they had worshipped for centuries. Or so he said. “No man whatever should be refused complete toleration,” announced his famous Edict of Milan of 313,* adding that “every man may have complete toleration in the practice of whatever worship he has chosen.”

  Fine words. And like many fine words, they proved empty. Christian clerics could not—would not—allow such liberalism. The competing clamor of Roman religion did not, in their eyes, provide different but equally valid opportunities for worship: they were nothing more than different opportunities for damnation. The Devil seized every newborn child and if they were not baptized as Christian then the Devil would keep them. How could a Christian, in good conscience, stand by and watch as his brothers knowingly danced with demons?

  It needn’t have been this way. There is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that while Christian preachers demanded complete purity, their congregations were much less enthusiastic. An Augustine or a Chrysostom might believe that worshipping the Christian God meant forsaking all others, but many of their congregants were much less convinced. What was even meant by “Christian” at this time? The habits of polytheism, in which each new god was merely added to the old, died hard. Many “pagans” happily added the worship of new Christian god and saints to their old polytheist gods and continued much as before. Gravestones happily reference Christ and the old Roman gods of the underworld. Many “Christians” might turn up at church one day, and then the next, when a jubilant, drunken Roman festival started to whirl through town, defect from the one true God and go and drink in celebration of pagan ones, dancing late into the night. “Christians” might pray to God for the truly substantial things in life and yet when they desired something a little smaller—the return of their cow, help with their bad knee—turn to slightly less awesome spirits,20 much to the despair of their preachers who argued that God, while He might also have made heaven and earth, could still find time for livestock. “Let us reduce it to the very least things,” Augustine told an (evidently wayward) congregation. “He sees to the salvation of your hen.”21

  Even the faith of the emperor Constantine himself seemed troublingly ambiguous. A coin exists which shows Constantine in profile alongside a god who looks very much like Apollo: as well as his more famous Christian vision Constantine was also said to have seen a vision of this decidedly pagan god.22 Later in life Constantine allowed a temple to be built to the imperial family, as if they themselves were divine. With a confidence that seems astonishing to modern Christians—but that would have seemed much less so to ancient polytheists who were used to their emperors being deified—he was titled Constantine “Equal-to-the-Apostles.”

  Such behavior might be overlooked in an emperor but it was not what bishops wanted. In sermon after hectoring sermon delivered by this new generation of rigidly unbending preachers, the people’s choice was made clear. In deciding who to worship, congregations were not choosing between one god and another. They were choosing between good and evil; between God and Satan. To allow someone to follow a path other than the true Christian one was not liberty; it was cruelty. Freedom to err was, Augustine would later vigorously argue, freedom to sin—and to sin was to risk the death of the soul. “The possibility of sinning,” as one pope later put it, “is not freedom, but slavery.”23 To allow another person to remain outside the Christian faith was not to show praiseworthy tolerance. It was to damn them.

  The preachers spoke and, eventually, the people—some of them, many of them—started to listen. The pace of Christianization started to increase.

  In the nineteenth century, the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold would stand on Dover Beach and hear the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” as the sea of faith retreated, leaving man alone, confused, on a darkling plain. In the years of St. Augustine, Christians heard the counterpart of this noise. They called it the strepitus mundi, the “roar of the world.”24 This was not the roar of religion retreating but the sound of it advancing: the sound of Christianity pouring, as unstoppable as a tide, across towns, countries and continents. To Augustine, the sound of this change was as reassuring as to Arnold it had been melancholy. When Augustine came face to face with a group who had not yet converted to Christianity he told them that they should wake up, they should listen to the strepitus mundi.

  But the definition of strepitus is not entirely straightforward. Strepitus is not a happy, reassuring sound in Latin. It is not even a neutral sound. It is not really a sound at all but a noise, and a stressful noise at that. It is the noise of wheels clattering over cobbles, the deafening roar of a river in full spate, the cacophony of an agitated crowd. Strepitus is at best an ambiguous word: something that if you are on the right side of it—standing above the flooded river, in the center of the jubilant crowd—can be exciting, even awe-inspiring. But rivers can drag you under; crowds, if they turn on you, can kill you. When Augustine told those people who had not yet converted that they should wake up and listen to the strepitus mundi it was, in part, an invitation to the Christian celebration. It was also, unmistakably, a threat.

  To oppose a
nother man’s religion, to repress their worship—these were not, clerics told their congregations, wicked or intolerant acts. They were some of the most virtuous things a man might do. The Bible itself demanded it. As the uncompromising words of Deuteronomy instructed: “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.”25

  The Christians of the Roman Empire listened. And as the fourth century wore on, they began to obey.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  Wisdom Is Foolishness

  Utter trash.

  —the Greek intellectual Celsus evaluates the Old Testament

  IN EARLY AD 163, some of the most glamorous figures of second-century Rome gathered in a distinctly unglamorous-looking room. These people were not the merely rich, they were something that in those days was considered far more chic: they were the empire’s intellectual elite. Eminent philosophers, scholars and thinkers could be glimpsed among the gathering crowd.