The Darkening Age Page 5
In front of this illustrious group, however, was one rather less distinguished guest: on a large board at the front of the room, tied fast by ropes around each limb, was one doubtless rather distressed-looking pig.
Then a young man stepped forward and assumed his place beside the pig. He was only in his early thirties, yet his manner was confident, arrogant even; he had the air of a performer who knew that he would soon have the audience in the palm of his hand. This was Galen. He would quickly become the most renowned doctor in Rome and within a few decades, the most famous physician in the Roman Empire. After his death his fame would spread throughout the entire Western Hemisphere. But all that was yet to come. On that day, in that room, Galen was little more than a man with a pig. And in a few moments, through a bravura demonstration of surgical skill, he was going to steal its squeal.
Gatherings of this sort were not unusual in those days. At this time, the intellectual was also fashionable. Even the emperor himself was a philosopher—and not a bad one: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are still widely read today. Surgery had become a popular spectator sport and educated citizens crowded round to watch an animal being vivisected with the same enthusiasm with which they might once have listened to the melodramatic declamations of a tragic poet. Those attending such performances needed inquiring minds, long attention spans (for demonstrations could go on for days) and strong stomachs. A favorite trick of Galen’s was to tie an animal to his board and lay bare its still-beating heart. Audience members were then invited to squeeze the throbbing muscle—albeit with care: the pulsing wet heart was apt to jump from between inexperienced fingers. At times, for anthropomorphic drama, Galen used an ape, though its agonized expressions could be so vivid that they were off-putting. For this particular experiment he preferred pigs because, as he put it in one of his more heartfelt asides, “there is no advantage in having an ape in such experiments and the spectacle is hideous.”1
And “hideous” was not what Galen wanted. Galen wanted awe and admiration from his audience—and practiced relentlessly to get it. The whole Galenic performance—and make no mistake, dissection for him was just that—had been ceaselessly rehearsed. Everything, from the experiments he chose to the way in which he flourished his glittering steel instruments, had been practiced with the same obsessiveness with which a magician might burnish their sleight of hand. Galen was a consummate showman. He was hardworking, brilliant—and crashingly vain. “Even as an adolescent,” he later wrote, “I looked down on many of my teachers.”2 His skill as a healer would later be rivaled only by his talent as an irritant.
But then, he was stupendously talented. It would take centuries for many of Galen’s observations to be bettered. His understanding of neuroanatomy would not be superseded until the seventeenth century; his understanding of certain functions of the brain would not be surpassed until the nineteenth.3 It was Galen who proved that arteries contained blood and not, as had been thought, air or milk. It was Galen who proved that the spinal cord was an extension of the brain and that the higher it was severed, the more movement was lost.
Note that word “proved.” Galen knew vivisection was a good show, but it was not merely a show for him. It was utterly essential to understanding how bodies worked. As Galen wrote: “the anatomy of the dead teaches the position . . . of the parts. That of the living may reveal the functions.” His writing is littered with the phrases of empiricism: “then you can show . . . ,” he writes at one point; “you have seen all this publicly demonstrated,” he adds at another; “you observed . . . ,” he writes at a third.4 He was a dedicated empiricist* and had nothing but the deepest scorn for anyone who was not. After describing the experiment to show what arteries contain, Galen writes contemptuously that he never saw milk in them and “nor will anyone who chooses to make the experiment.”5
Back in Rome, the experiment went well. Galen tied some hair-like nerves in the pig’s larynx, its squeal was silenced, and his reputation in the capital of the empire—and hence in history—was assured.
There was, however, one group of people who even the great Galen found himself unable to convince. This was a group who did not form their beliefs by basing them on experiments or on observations, but on faith alone—and who, worse still, were actually proud of this fact. These peculiar people were for Galen the epitome of intellectual dogmatism. When he wished to adequately convey the blockheadedness of another group of physicians, Galen used these people as an analogy to express the depths of his irritation. They were the Christians.
To show the extent of some doctors’ dogmatism he used the phrase “one might more easily teach novelties to the followers of Moses and Christ.”6 Elsewhere, he disparaged physicians who offered views on the body without demonstration to back up their assertions, saying that to listen to them was “as if one had come into the school of Moses and Christ [and heard] talk of undemonstrated laws.”7 Galen had little time for Moses himself, either. “It is his method in his books,” wrote Galen, disapprovingly, “to write without offering proofs, saying ‘God commanded, God spake.’”8
To a proto-empiricist like Galen, this was a cardinal error. Intellectual progress depended on the freedom to ask, question, doubt and, above all, to experiment. In Galen’s world, only the ill-educated believed things without reason. To show something, one did not merely declare it to be so. One proved it, with demonstrations. To do otherwise was for Galen the method of an idiot. It was the method of a Christian.
At around the same time as Galen was torturing pigs in Rome, another Greek intellectual was performing a rather different sort of dissection: a merciless intellectual carving up of Christianity.
This was a new experience for all concerned. For the first hundred-odd years of Christianity’s existence, there are no mentions of Christianity in Roman writings. Then, around the turn of the second century, it started to appear, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, in the writings of non-Christians. In AD 111, there is a letter from Pliny, the Roman governor. Then a few years later come some tantalizingly brief references to it in Roman histories—a quick section in the historian Tacitus’s Annals and another mention in a history by Suetonius. And that was it. None of these accounts were particularly detailed. Certainly none were lengthy—a few paragraphs in total. But then why would they have been longer? Christianity may have seen itself as the only truth but to most people then it was little more than an eccentric and often irritating eastern cult. Why waste time rebutting it?
Then, about fifty years later, everything changed. Suddenly, in around AD 170, a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental and vitriolic attack against the religion. It is clear that, unlike the other authors who have so far written about it, Celsus knows a lot about it. He has read Christian scripture—and not just read it: studied it in great detail. He knows about everything—from the Creation to the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the Resurrection.
It is equally clear that he loathes it all and in arch, sardonic and occasionally very earthy sentences, he vigorously rebuts it. The Virgin Birth? Nonsense, he writes; a Roman soldier had gotten Mary pregnant.9 The Creation is “absurd”; the books of Moses are garbage; while the idea of the resurrection of the body is “revolting” and, on a practical level, ridiculous: “simply the hope of worms. For what sort of human soul would have any further desire for a body that has rotted?”10
What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion—a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar—might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome.
Over 1,500 years later, the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians. The Christians’ belief in their forthcoming heavenly realm made them dangerously indifferent to the needs of their earthly one. Christians shirked military service, the clergy actively preached pusillanimity, an
d vast amounts of public money were spent not on protecting armies but squandered instead on the “useless multitudes” of the Church’s monks and nuns.11 They showed, Gibbon felt, an “indolent, or even criminal, disregard for the public welfare.”12
The Catholic Church and its “useless multitudes” were, in return, magnificently unimpressed by Gibbon’s arguments, and they promptly placed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books.* Even in liberal England, the atmosphere became fiercely hostile to the historian. Gibbon later said that he had been shocked by the response to his work. “Had I believed,” he wrote, “that the majority of English readers were so fondly attached even to the name and shadow of Christianity . . . I might, perhaps, have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies, and conciliate few friends.”13
Celsus did not soften his attack either. This first assault on Christianity was vicious, powerful and, like Gibbon, immensely readable. Yet unlike Gibbon, today almost no one has heard of Celsus and fewer still have read his work. Because Celsus’s fears came true. Christianity continued to spread, and not just among the lower classes. Within 150 years of Celsus’s attack, even the emperor of Rome professed himself a follower of the religion. What happened next was far more serious than anything Celsus could ever have imagined. Christianity not only gained adherents, it forbade people from worshipping the old Roman and Greek gods. Eventually, it simply forbade anyone to dissent from what Celsus considered its idiotic teachings. To pick just one example from many, in AD 386, a law was passed targeting those “who contend about religion” in public. Such people, this law warned, were the “disturbers of the peace of the Church” and they “shall pay the penalty of high treason with their lives and blood.”14
Celsus paid his own price. In this hostile and repressive atmosphere his work simply disappeared. Not one single unadulterated volume of the work by Christianity’s first great critic has survived. Almost all information about him has vanished too, including any of his names except his last; what prompted him to write his attack; or where and when he wrote it. The long and inglorious Christian practice of censorship was now beginning.
However, by a quirk of literary fate, most of his words have survived. Because eighty-odd years after Celsus fulminated against the new religion, a Christian apologist named Origen mounted a fierce and lengthy counter-attack. Origen was rather more earnest than his occasionally bawdy classical adversary. Indeed, it was said that Origen had even taken the words of Matthew 19:12 (“For there are some eunuchs . . . which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake”) a little too much to heart and, in a fit of heavenly self-abnegation, castrated himself.
Ironically, it was the very work that had been intended to demolish Celsus that saved him. No books of Celsus have survived the centuries untouched, true—but Origen’s attack has and it quoted Celsus at length. Scholars have therefore been able to extract Celsus’s arguments from Origen’s words, which preserved them like flies in amber. Not all of the words—perhaps only seventy percent of the original work has been recovered. Its order has gone, its structure has been lost, and the whole thing, as Gibbon put it, is a “mutilated representation” of the original.15 But nevertheless we have it.
It is easy to see why it upset the ancient Christians. Even by today’s standards, Celsus’s On the True Doctrine feels bracingly direct. It wasn’t just Mary and Moses who were attacked. Everything was. Jesus was not, Celsus wrote, conceived through the Holy Spirit. This, he scoffs, was most unlikely because Mary wouldn’t have been beautiful enough to tempt a deity.16 Instead, he says, Jesus was conceived via the rather baser means of that Roman soldier named Panthera.* When Mary’s pregnancy and infidelity had been discovered, she was convicted of adultery and “driven out by her husband.”17
If that feels shocking, Celsus had barely begun. The divine scriptures were, he said, rubbish; the story of the Garden of Eden was “very silly” and Moses “had no idea” about the true nature of the world.18 The “prophecies” that had predicted Jesus’s coming were also nonsense, since “the prophecies could be applied to thousands of others far more plausibly than to Jesus.” Judgment Day also came in for scorn. How precisely, asked Celsus, was this going to work? “It is foolish of them also to suppose that, when God applies the fire (like a cook!), all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly roasted and that they alone will survive.”19 Cherished Christian beliefs were dismissed as being the sort of tales that “a drunken old woman would have been ashamed to sing . . . to lull a little child to sleep.”20
Celsus professes himself baffled by the extent to which Jesus’s teachings seem to contradict many of those laid down in the Old Testament. Have the rules of an allegedly omniscient god changed over time? If so, then “who is wrong? Moses or Jesus? Or when the Father sent Jesus had he forgotten what commands he gave to Moses?” Or maybe God knew he was changing his mind, and Jesus was a legal messenger, sent to give notice that God wished to “condemn his own laws and change his mind.”21
Celsus cannot understand, either, why there was such a great gap between the creation of mankind and the sending of Jesus. If all who don’t believe are damned, why wait so long to enable them to be saved? “Is it only now after such a long age that God has remembered to judge the life of men? Did he not care before?”22 Moreover, why not send Jesus somewhere a bit more populous? If God “woke up out of his long slumber and wanted to deliver the human race from evils, why on earth did he send this spirit that you mention into one corner” of the world—and, Celsus implies, a backwater at that?23 He also queries why an omniscient, omnipotent God would need to send someone at all. “What is the purpose of such a descent on the part of God?” he asks. “Was it in order to learn what was going on among men? . . . Does not he know everything?”24
Jesus’s logistical abilities are, like God’s, called into question. Celsus attacks the tendency for some of his most miraculous moments to be witnessed by the fewest number of people. “When he was punished he was seen by all; but by only one person after he rose again; whereas the opposite ought to have happened.”25 What witnesses the Bible did offer were, for Celsus, rarely reliable. Of the Resurrection he says: “Who saw this? A hysterical female, as you say”—and one other person who then went on to invent this “cock-and-bull story.”26 The Resurrection was therefore either “wishful thinking” or perhaps “a hallucination.”27
The claim that Christ was divine seems to Celsus a logical impossibility: “How can a dead man be immortal?”28 The idea that Jesus came to save sinners also comes in for short shrift. “Why on earth this preference for sinners?” he asks. “Why was he not sent to those without sin? What evil is it not to have sinned?”29
The arguments go on, hammering at Christianity’s central beliefs. The Creation story itself takes a particular bashing. Celsus disdains the idea of an omnipotent being needing to piece out his work like a builder, to make so much on one day, so much more on a second, third, fourth and so on—and particularly the idea that, after all this work, “God, exactly like a bad workman, was worn out and needed a holiday to have a rest.”30
To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of a “Creation myth” was not only implausible but redundant. During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philosophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory—an Epicurean one—stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos—“the uncuttable thing”: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space “in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that.”31 Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing mo
re than “a haphazard union of elements.”32 The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics—the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligence—survived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these “lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit . . . until nature brought that race to destruction.”33
The intellectual consequences of this powerful theory were summarized succinctly by the Christian apologist Minucius Felix. If everything in the universe has been “formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, what God is the architect?”34 The obvious answer is: no god at all. No god magicked up mankind out of nothing, no divinity breathed life into us; and, when we die, our atoms are simply reabsorbed into this great sea of stuff. “No thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing,” wrote Lucretius in his great poem On the Nature of Things, and “no single thing returns to nothing.”35 Atomic theory thus neatly did away with the need for and possibility of Creation, Resurrection, the Last Judgment, hell, heaven and the Creator God himself.
As indeed was its intention. Thinkers in the classical world frequently lamented the mortal fear of divine beings. Superstition, wrote the Greek biographer Plutarch, was a terrible affliction that “humbles and crushes a man.”36 People saw earthquakes and floods and storms and lightning and assumed, in the absence of any other explanation, that they are “done by divine power.”37 The consequence of this was that people tried to propitiate these temperamental gods. Writers such as Lucretius argued that atomism, correctly applied, could blast this fear into tiny pieces. If there was no Creator—if lightning, earthquakes and storms were not the actions of irate deities but simply of moving particles of matter—then there was nothing to fear, nothing to propitiate and nothing to worship.38 Including no Christian God.