The Darkening Age Page 6
In the ensuing centuries, texts that contained such dangerous ideas paid a heavy price for their “heresy.” As has been lucidly argued by Dirk Rohmann, an academic who has produced a comprehensive and powerful account of the effect of Christianity on books, some of the greatest figures in the early Church rounded on the atomists.39 Augustine disliked atomism for precisely the same reason that atomists liked it: it weakened mankind’s terror of divine punishment and hell. Texts by philosophical schools that championed atomic theory suffered.
The Greek philosopher Democritus had perhaps done more than anyone to popularize this theory—though not only this one. Democritus was an astonishing polymath who had written works on a breathless array of other topics. A far from complete list of his titles includes On History, On Nature, The Science of Medicine, On the Tangents of the Circle and the Sphere, On Irrational Lines and Solids, On the Causes of Celestial Phenomena, On the Causes of Atmospheric Phenomena, On Reflected Images . . . The list goes on. Today Democritus’s most famous theory is his atomism. What did the other theories state? We have no idea: every single one of his works was lost in the ensuing centuries. As the eminent physicist Carlo Rovelli recently wrote, after citing an even longer list of the philosopher’s titles: “the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation.”40
Democritus’s atomic theory did, however, come down to us—but on a very slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius’s great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would eventually find and save from extinction. That single volume would have an astonishing afterlife: it became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought, created what Stephen Greenblatt has called “an explosion of interest in pagan antiquity” and influenced Newton, Galileo and later Einstein.41
In the Renaissance, Lucretius and his atomic theories were revolutionary. In Celsus’s time they were utterly unremarkable. It wasn’t just the fact that Christians were ignorant about philosophical theories that annoyed Celsus; it was that Christians actually reveled in their ignorance. Celsus accuses them of actively targeting idiocy in their recruitment. “Their injunctions are like this,” he wrote. “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils.”
He went on: Christians “are able to convince only the foolish, dishonourable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children.”42 They made overtures to children, cobblers, laundry-workers and yokels, then dripped honeyed intellectual poison into uneducated ears, claiming “that they alone . . . know the right way to live, and if the children would believe them, they would become happy.”43 Christianity’s lack of intellectual rigor worried Celsus for the same reasons that it had bothered Galen. Christians, Celsus wrote, “do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe, and use such expressions as ‘Do not ask questions; just believe,’ and ‘Thy faith will save thee.’”44 To men as educated as Celsus and Galen this was unfathomable: in Greek philosophy, faith was the lowest form of cognition.
Celsus wasn’t merely annoyed at the lack of education among these people. What was far worse was that they actually celebrated ignorance. They declare, he wrote, that “Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good”—an almost precise quotation from Corinthians. Celsus verges on hyperbole, but it is true that in this period Christians gained a reputation for being uneducated to the point of idiotic; even Origen, Celsus’s great adversary, admitted that “the stupidity of some Christians is heavier than the sand of the sea.”45 This slur (and it almost certainly was a slur—Christians were no more likely, it is now thought, to be poorly educated than any other religious group) would make conversion socially awkward for Rome’s upper classes for centuries to come. An educated man on the brink of becoming Christian would have to ask himself not only whether he was able to make the leap of faith but whether he was able to make the necessary social leap as well. Such a man would wonder to himself, as Augustine succinctly put it, “Shall I become what . . . my concierge, is and not a Plato, not a Pythagoras?”46
There is more than a whiff of actual as well as intellectual snobbery in Celsus’s criticisms—and more than a dash of misogyny: Christianity is not something that educated men in Rome do: it is the habit of women and vulgar foreigners in foreign places. However, there was more to it than that. Lack of education, Celsus argued, made listeners vulnerable to dogma. If Christians had read a little more and believed a little less, they might be less likely to think themselves unique. The lightest knowledge of Latin literature, for example, would have brought the interested reader into contact with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This epic but tongue-in-cheek poem opened with a version of the Creation myth that was so similar to the biblical one that it could hardly fail to make an interested reader question the supposed unique truth of Genesis.
Even the most fervent Christian must notice the similarities between the two. Where the biblical Creation begins with an earth that is “without form,” Ovid’s poem begins with a “rough, unordered mass of things.” In Genesis, the Creator God then “created the heaven and the earth” and ordered “the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.” In Ovid’s version, a god appears and “rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land” before instructing the seas to form and the “plains to stretch out.”
The God of Genesis ordered that “the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven,” while Ovid’s deity (“whichever of the gods it was,” he adds, somewhat vaguely) ensures that “the sea fell to the shining fishes for their home, earth received the beasts and the mobile air the birds.” Both Creation stories culminate in the creation of man, who in Ovid is “moulded into the form of the all-controlling gods”; while in Genesis, “God created man in his own image.”
In both, things then go wrong as mankind falls into wicked ways. The Ovidian god, at once grand and a trifle camp, looks down upon the world he has created, shakes his head in despair and groans. “I must,” he declares, not without some melodrama, “destroy the race of men.”47 The God of Genesis looks down at the world and its wickedness and says: “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.”48 In both accounts, the rainwaters fall, and the oceans rise across the lands. In both, only two humans, a man and a woman, survive.
The idea of “the Flood” was, to Celsus, “a debased” version of this classical flood, a “myth” for Christians to recount to small children.49 To Christians it was the truth. Even in nineteenth-century England, the Church was still defending it as such. At this time, the story’s authority was less in danger of erosion from scornful philosophers than from the new science of geology. The sheer age of the earth was beginning to make any belief in a Creation difficult—particularly in a Creation that had happened, as one Christian theologian infamously stated, on October 23, 4004 BC. Many pious Victorian academics fought back against this new and threatening science, including, somewhat bizarrely, some geologists. In his inaugural address, William Buckland, the first professor of geology at Oxford University, delivered a paper entitled “Vindiciae Geologicae, or, the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained,” in which he announced that a recent “deluge” is “most satisfactorily confirmed by every thing that has yet been brought to light by Geological investigations” and that “the Mosaic account is in perfect harmony with the discoveries of modern science.”50
The Christian belief that their religion was unique—and uniquely correct—frequently grated on others. An educated critic of Christianity could point not only to other flood stories but to numerous characters who had made similar claims to those made by Jesus and his followers. The empire was not lacking, Celsus observed, in charismatic preachers who claimed divinity, espoused poverty or announced that they
were going to die for the sake of mankind. There are “others who go about begging [and] say that they are sons of God who have come from above.”51 Nor, Celsus pointed out, was Jesus the only one to claim resurrection. Did the Christians believe that other tales of risings from the dead are “the legends which they appear to be, and yet that the ending of your tragedy is to be regarded as noble and convincing?”52
The Greek rhetorician Lucian, who described the Christians as those “poor wretches,” wrote a satirical account of one such man, a charlatan (as Lucian saw him) named Peregrinus who lived in Greece. Desperate for fame, this pseudo-philosopher grew his hair long and traveled about the empire preaching platitudes. He lived off charity, gathered a reputation among the credulous, and eventually committed suicide by jumping into a fire “to benefit mankind by showing them the way in which one should despise death.”53
Lucian, watching, learned not to despise death but he did learn to despise the “villainous reek” of an elderly man burning to death.54 Before Peregrinus had died, he had hesitated, pausing on the edge of the flames, speechifying. As he hesitated, some of the assembled crowd begged him to save himself while others—the “more manly part,” as Lucian approvingly describes them—bellowed, “Get on with it.”55 You can imagine, says Lucian, “how I laughed.”56
After Peregrinus had been “carbonified” (as our unsympathetic narrator puts it) his stock only rose among his followers.57 Before his end, Peregrinus had sent letters to all the great cities of the empire, bearing witness to his great life and encouraging and instructing his followers. He even “appointed a number of ambassadors for this purpose from among his comrades, styling them ‘messengers’”—the Greek word is angelos, the same word translated in Christianity as “angel”—“from the dead.”58 Rumors that Peregrinus had indeed risen from the dead began to spread: one disciple declares that “he had beheld him in white raiment a little while ago, and had just now left him walking about . . . wearing a garland of wild olive.”59
The Church was profoundly unamused by such irreverence. As one tenth-century Byzantine text explained, the nickname for Lucian was “the Blasphemer” because “in his dialogues he went so far as to ridicule religious discourse.”60 In the sixteenth century, the Inquisition also added Lucian to its list of banned books. Christianity found its own grimly humorless punch lines for such men. As the same Byzantine chronicle informed its readers, “the story goes that [Lucian] was killed by dogs, because of his rabid attacks on the truth, for in his Life of Peregrinus he inveighs against Christianity, and (accursed man!) blasphemes against Christ himself. For that reason he paid the penalty befitting his rabidity in this world, and in the life to come he will share the eternal fire with Satan.”61 An invigorating lesson for all satirists.
Celsus, however, implied that if people were better educated they would be more resistant to such hucksters as Peregrinus—or indeed to Jesus, whom Celsus considered little more than a “sorcerer.”62 The “miracles” that Jesus performed were, he felt, no better than the sort of thing that was constantly being peddled by tricksters to the gullible across the Roman Empire. In a world in which medical provision was rare, many laid claim to magical powers. Travel in the east and you would come across any number of men who “for a few obols make known their sacred lore in the middle of the market-place and drive daemons out of men and blow away diseases,” and display “dining-tables and cakes and dishes which are non-existent.”63 Even Jesus himself, observes Celsus, admits the presence of such people when he talks about men who can perform similar wonders to his own. Modern scholarship supports Celsus’s accusations: ancient papyri tell of sorcerers who had the power to achieve such biblical-sounding feats as stilling storms and miraculously providing food.64
Celsus touches on a sore point here. Early Christianity would have to spend a considerable amount of time and effort policing the boundaries between sanctity and sorcery. A large amount of ink was spilled on the subject of Simon Magus (the Magician). A quick summary of Simon’s life makes it clear why he was so threatening: Simon performed various miracles, gathered a following of people who thought he was a god—including a former prostitute—and one of Simon’s disciples “persuaded those who adhered to him that they should never die.”65 His followers even honored him with a statue inscribed with the words “To Simon, the Holy God”—in Latin, Simoni Deo Sancto. Interestingly, it is not Simon’s supernatural abilities that are denied by Christian accounts—the texts admit he can perform amazing feats—merely his divine right to do so. The criticism seems to be not one of religious fakery but of religious fuel: Simon gains his power not from God but “by virtue of the art of the devils operating in him.”66
Christians debunked pretenders. The ancient world debunked everyone else. Stories of witty atheists were treasured, told and retold. When one man asked a Greek philosopher to go with him to a shrine to pray, the friend replied that he must think the god was very deaf if he couldn’t hear them from where they were.67
Some Romans had so little patience for Roman religious rites that they discarded them entirely. One moonlit night in the third century BC, a Roman consul called Publius Claudius Pulcher decided to launch a surprise attack against an enemy fleet. Before he moved, he took the usual auspices required before military action. In accordance with these rites, the sacred chickens were released from their cage. They refused to eat—a terrible omen and a clear sign to all that the gods did not favor this attempt and that it should be abandoned. It was not clear to Publius Claudius Pulcher. Throwing the chickens into the sea he scoffed: “Let them drink, since they don’t wish to eat,” and sailed into what would be a disastrous battle.68
There was a strong strain of skepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God is—provided there is a God—. . . he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.”69 Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.”70 Rome was not an empire of atheists—emperors were even deified after their death, and their “genius” (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: “Gah. I think I’m turning into a god.”71
But Romans were not all cynics. “We too are a religious people,” one nettled official tartly told some pious Christians.72 It was a commonly held belief that Rome’s great success depended on the goodwill of the gods. As a character in a Roman history observed: “All went well so long as we obeyed the gods, and ill when we spurned them.”73 This state of divine benevolence—the pax deorum or “peace of the gods”—was not manna that fell from heaven on the divinely deserving Romans. They weren’t automatically gifted with the gods’ favor and they were not automatically assured of this peace. Instead pax in that phrase was like the pax in pax Romana: less a state of eternal peace than the absence of war that had been negotiated through effort and could be lost by neglect. The real punch line of the Claudius Pulcher tale, retold by Cicero, is not the gag about chickens but what came next: after losing the battle, Claudius Pulcher was tried and died soon after.74
Religious they may have been; dogmatic and unbending they were not. Like the Roman Empire, the Roman pantheon could happily expand. Rome was not a paragon of religious pluralism. It had no scruples about banning or suppressing practices—whether Druidic or Bacchic or Manichaean—that seemed for any reason pernicious. But equally it could admit foreign gods—though as with so much else in Rome a bureaucratic process had first to be observed. To ignore this process and worship a foreign god that had not been accepted was a socially unacceptable act; it risked upsetting the contract with the incumbent gods and spreading disaster and pestilence. This was one of the problems with Christianity and its growth was, for some, nerve-rack
ing: what effect would this new religion have on the pax deorum? “I cannot think there is anyone so audacious,” wrote one, neatly summarizing this attitude, that they would “endeavour to destroy or weaken so ancient, useful and salutary a religion.”75 The old religions had served Rome well. Why abandon them now?
Despite his contempt for Christians, Celsus seems unsurprised that yet another religion had appeared in this world full of gods: religious diversity is precisely what one expects. Celsus shows an almost anthropological interest in the different sorts of worship that flourished across the Roman Empire. “The difference between each nation is very considerable,” he writes. Some Egyptians “worship only Zeus and Dionysus. The Arabians worship only Ourania and Dionysus. The Egyptians all worship Osiris and Isis.”76 So what? is the implication. There is a strong strain of relativism in Celsus’s work. At another point he states: “even if something seems to you to be evil, it is not yet clear whether it really is evil; for you do not know what is expedient either for you or for someone else or for the universe.”77 It was clear to Celsus that a person’s religious affiliation was based less on any rational analysis of competing religious ideologies than on the geography of their birth. Every nation always, he points out, thinks its way of doing things is “by far the best.”78 He quotes Herodotus approvingly: “if anyone were to propose to call men and to tell them to choose which of all laws were the best, on consideration each would choose his own.” But that didn’t matter. As Herodotus himself said, “it is not likely that anyone but a lunatic would make a mock of these things.”79
Christian observers would look on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbors with astonishment. Augustine later marveled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions. Indeed, many pagans like Celsus seemed to actively praise plurality. To the Christians, this was anathema. Christ was the way, the truth and the light, and everything else was not merely wrong but plunged the believer into a demonic darkness. To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive.