Black Legends and the Light of the World
The War of Words with the Incarnate Word
(Remnant Press, 2011)
[Paperback version available from publisher.]“Christ said ‘I am the Truth’. He did not say, ‘I am custom’.”
-Pope St. Gregory VII, citing Tertullian
“There are times when an elevated spirit is a true infirmity. No one understands it. It even passes for a kind of mental limitation.”
-Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe
“Now battle had to be joined, and therefore men were needed to restore a new order, and new theologians as well, to whom the evil was manifest from its outward phenomena down to its most subtle roots; then the time would come for the first stroke of the consecrated sword, piercing the darkness like a lightning flash. For this reason individuals had the duty of living in alliance with others, gathering the treasure of a new rule of law. But the alliance had to be stronger than before, and they more conscious of it.”
-Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, XX
With many thanks to my father, mother, and sister, Mrs. Carol Palmieri, for their constant encouragement; to Linda and John Cuff for the initial inspiration for this work; to Christopher Ferrara and Michael Matt for intellectual support; to Richard Dunn and George Sanseverino for financial aid; to Jeanne Barrett for editorial assistance; to Pasticceria Rocco in New York City for a congenial working environment; and to all the friends of the Roman Forum, from New York to Gardone Riviera and Estonia, for their love of the Incarnate Word---the Light of the World---and their Catholic pilgrim spirit.
Table of Contents
Introduction:
On Weaponry and Terrain
Chapter One
First Blood
Chapter Two
The Attack of the Word
Chapter Three
The Turbulent Battle for a Christian Imperial Order
Chapter Four
The New Ascent of Mount Tabor
Chapter Five
Counterattack and Resistance on the Cheap
Chapter Six
The War of All Against All or the Peace of the Reinvigorated Word
Chapter Seven
The Global Battle for Nature: Modern Naturalism
and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo
Chapter Eight
The Naturalist Revolution, the Implosion of the GCSQ,
and the Troubled Beginnings of the Ninth Crusade
Chapter Nine
The Ninth Crusade: Retrenchment and Renewed Assault
Chapter Ten
Firestorm in the Kingdom of the Word
Chapter Eleven
When the Salt Loses its Savor:
Mindless Rout and Voluntary Enslavement to the Words
Epilogue
My End is My Beginning
Introduction:
On Weaponry and Historical Terrain
A. A War Between “Words” and “the Word”
The following pages offer a number of reflections on ecclesiastical history, based upon lectures given for the Roman Forum’s Summer Symposium at Lake Garda in Italy between 1993 and 2011. Although these meditations do, at times, focus upon rather specific events in the two millennia long life of the Church, they nevertheless do not represent an academic presentation of the Christian record and its theological underpinnings as such. Instead, their purpose is to provide the interested layman with a general, readable, thematic and bibliographic guide through a mass of otherwise daunting historical data. This guide is intended to inculcate the message that the essential issues, fundamental difficulties, and precise details of Catholic History can only properly be grasped with reference to the irrepressible, unending, and ever more global war that the genesis, birth, and growth of the Catholic Faith have everywhere provoked.
What, exactly, is the nature of this war? Several giants of nineteenth century Catholic apologetics offered the clearest description of it. They argued that the struggle in question was a conflict waged over acceptance or rejection of the fullness of the Way, the Truth, and the Life brought into the world through the Incarnation of the Eternal Word: the only truly “new” and “different” event that has ever really taken place in the history of mankind. This clash, they added, was rendered inevitable, permanent, and monumental due to the existence of the Mystical Body of Christ—the Church—as the visible, organized, active continuation of the Incarnate Word and His teaching through the ages. And that struggle, they concluded, was intensified still further given that the Church more and more became a powerful, effective, rage-provoking “sign of contradiction” not simply to the opponents of Christian Truth, but to the enemies of each and every kind of Truth—rational, scientific, and aesthetic truth included.
Basic Church power and effectiveness come from the fact that fully awakened and practicing Catholics understand their need to struggle for individual salvation through her living, authoritative reality. But the actualization of the Church’s provocative potential in the natural realm has varied greatly over time in proportion to the seriousness of her commitment to two goals of the Incarnate Word possessing immediate, practical, historical and sociological importance.
The first of these aims is the correction of sinful men and the flawed natural order in which social beings of flesh and blood must live and work out their salvation. Despite its supernatural foundations, such a project has precise contours and can even be spelled out in transparent legal language. The second aim, on the other hand, is much more difficult to capture in limited human terms. It is centered round a spiritual reorientation of both man and nature to the exalted task of giving glory to the God who created them; to a renovation of the entirety of Creation; to a transformation of all things in Christ. Exactly what this means entails a complex learning process that has unfolded over time, and has only done so in union with individual and social progress in sanctification.
Whenever the Church takes her examination of and commitment to the full significance of the Incarnation of the Word seriously, she more vigorously proclaims the fact that her Christ-centered Faith, which is undeniably focused primarily on the work of individual salvation, nevertheless must also inevitably toil to perfect the whole of the created universe. The fully conscious Bride of Christ sees and exuberantly rejoices in the truth that Catholicism cannot help but mobilize all the diverse riches of the cosmos and place them at the service of distinct persons; that, in doing so, it enables human beings to obtain everything that life offers temporally, upon the earth, to the greatest degree that its mortal, dependent character permits; and that in transforming the incomplete and subordinate natural order, it actually sharpens the individual man’s yearning for God, thereby providing him with further tools to labor more vigorously for a complete and eternal life with the Trinity in Heaven.
An increased celebration of the treasures of the Catholic path to perfection is necessarily accompanied by a much more firm repudiation of any determinedly anti-incarnational, anti-Word message. That kind of teaching, represented most powerfully in modern times by the man-centered naturalism promoted by the Enlightenment and its various interpreters, is understood to cheat and diminish the individual. Naturalism is seen to do so through its acceptance of the earthly status quo, marred by sin, as though it provided a self-evident, common sense, and truly practical guide to life. Such an outlook is recognized as actually putting men to sleep regarding the multiform character and full potential of the universe that God intended human persons to inhabit and enjoy. Closed to correction and transformation in Christ, naturalism—along with all the other anti-incarnational positions taught throughout the ages—is therefore condemnable not only for blocking men from that fruitful temporal use of Creation which acutely sharpens their desire for eternal life. It is also reproachable for encouraging the individual to embrace earthly “goods” which unfailingly turn out to be peripheral, ephemeral, or even utterly meaningless and repulsive shadows.
A sleeping, inactive Church is already an irritant to the supporters of the natural status quo. After all, even such a half-dead body still suggests the possibility of an alternative to the guidelines for human existence that they wish to remain totally unquestioned. On the other hand, a fully awakened, militant Church; a Church stirred by a proper ecclesiology to a complete consciousness of her character and mission, is a truly much more threatening phenomenon. Defenders of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” must inevitably view her as launching an intolerable assault on the good life as they conceive it. It is therefore logical that they feel the call to meet an active Catholic challenge in one of two ways: either by unleashing a total war to eradicate what is perceived to be an intrusive and unnatural monster, or, failing to break her back directly, to deconstruct, subvert, and radically dilute the Church’s depraved historical and sociological influence. Hence, that perennial conflict carrying us from the time of Christ until the present; from the sophists of the later Roman Empire to the personalists, pluralists, neoconservatives, and libertarians of our own era, whose basically unchanging battle plan and weaponry must now be addressed.
B. Word Games
Mars has not been friendly to the Church and to Catholics in their struggles on behalf of the cause of the Word in recent centuries. All the strong points on the battlefields of this endless conflict seem to lie in the hands of their well-outfitted opponents. The enemy’s overwhelming strategic advantage can be explained with reference to two points: the character of the arms that he carries into the fray, and the unwillingness of believing Catholics both to open their eyes to the weaknesses in their own line of defense, as well as to employ the most powerful weapons at their disposal on the terrain most suitable to gaining them a victory.
The best of the arms shouldered by the anti-Word enemy are not always the ones that directly draw blood. For, potent as the swords and guns aimed against the Church throughout the ages have admittedly been, such weapons generally pale in long-term effectiveness next to the damage that has been inflicted through written and spoken words. I am referring here to the words eventually shaped by gifted enemy rhetoricians into two related types of myth: “black legends” designed to ridicule the Mystical Body and Catholic efforts to correct and transform the world in Christ on the one hand, and alternative “good stories” mimicking the language of the Faith, while stripping it of all substantive Christian meaning, on the other. So important is the broad role of these black legends and substitute narratives in the imposing array of forces battling the Faith through the centuries that the entire clash of the opponents and supporters of Catholic Christianity can legitimately be discussed as this book treats it: as a war between “words” and “the Word”. Let us briefly examine both types of myths in turn.
Strictly speaking, the term “Black Legend” refers to the complex of yarns invented in sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch, English, and German circles to defame Catholicism in general, but the Spanish Habsburgs and King Philip II (1556-1598) in particular. However, I am employing it in a much wider sense here, to indicate the entire body of half-mythical tales that has been used throughout the ages to attack the Catholic Faith and Catholic believers. We shall see that this arsenal of rhetorically effective cannon balls already began to be assembled in pre-Christian times, in the midst of the battles of the sophists against the Socratics, when proponents of “nature as is” grasped the threat to the demands of “business as usual” emerging from the philosophical hunt for the deeper meaning—the logos—that lay behind immediate surface appearances. It was augmented, bit-by-bit, even through the seemingly most Christian of centuries. Modern naturalism ultimately filled the rhetorical anti-Catholic arsenal to repletion in the period stretching from the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748 down to the present.
Black legends shaped by talented rhetorical artisans playing critical word games have marched into battle against the message of the Incarnate Word from crisis to crisis and from age to age throughout the history of Christianity, with no final settlement of their quarrel ever being reached. Even at the apparent nadir of their anti-Catholic fortunes, the black legends have always maintained a basic strength and potential for vigorous counterattack. Unfortunately, their periodic successes in the past, and their continuous and ever more widespread victories in contemporary naturalist times, are to a large degree due to the very credibility the distortions that they perpetrate seem to possess. And this credibility, in turn, owes much to the extremely clever manner in which the black legends are presented: majestic in vision, while starkly simple, popular, and often quite vulgar in form. Although we shall have manifold opportunities to illustrate these effective characteristics in the chapters immediately to follow, a full explanation of the structure and scope of the black legends as I am defining them must await the complete formation of the anti-Catholic camp by the first third of the twentieth century.
Less needs to be said about the “word merchandising” involved in the creation of good stories, even though these have frequently proven to be much more seductive and effective than openly hostile black legends. Whichever type may have the final edge in their anti-Catholic competition, the two certainly grew in tandem, with the former generally emerging out of the work of the very men responsible for the latter. For hatred of the substantive teaching of the Christian Faith, followed by bitter admission of the reality of its success in establishing a hold over large and varied populations, caused a number of the supporters of black legends to retreat from an apparently losing strategy of open opposition to Catholicism to another approach that was much more subtle. And it was precisely this change of tactic that dictated an assault on the religion of Christ by means of its “deconstruction” and replacement with “friendly” alternative interpretations that could be of danger to no one dedicated to a continued life of “business as usual” in the service of “nature as is”.
C. A Self-Destructive Catholic Disdain of History
Rather than entering into a premature discussion of the brilliance of the black legends and alternative good stories at this juncture, it is much more fruitful for us first to examine an infinitely more distressing reason for the successes enjoyed by the rhetoricians inventing them: the Catholic contribution to their triumph. The very many factors entering into this strange assistance that believers give to their enemies’ cause will be explored in the following chapters—all of them dedicated to uncovering the complexity of the Truth needed to correct the picture painted by what is an often understandable, clever, but, in the final analysis, painfully unsatisfying reductionism. For the moment, I should like to discuss the suicidal aid given by many of the faithful to the victory of the reign of myth with reference to their stubborn and self-destructive disdain of Church History.
Admittedly, disregard for the past is a widespread modern disease, especially in countries that pride themselves on their “newness”, like the United States. This modern malady has badly infected the large number of believing Catholics who treat a serious study of anything other than the Church’s past devotional life as something positively frightening; even intrinsically dangerous as well. Rather than viewing the complete record of a Faith necessarily grounded in history as a jewel-box filled with invaluable treasures, many believers—Catholic academics included—often build a thick wall between themselves and a thorough consultation of their own religious tradition. Construction of this wall has had disastrous repercussions on their ability effectively to fend off the assaults of the black legends and alternative good stories. It is a wall to which militant Catholics committed to the full message of the Incarnation can come only to wail over the loss of the memory of past glories.
This is not to say that such disdain arose from nowhere. Catholic nervousness regarding history is partly due to terror over the potential side effects of exposure both to the sheer volume of historical data chronicling human errors and stupidities, as well as to the seemingly endlessly insane reactions to them from age to age. For many people, all that this historical data appears to do is to offer infinite nuances and caveats unacceptably diverting minds away from the clear supernatural truths taught by the Eternal Word active in time. Moreover, the complex historical record also seems capable of creating a sense of existential pointlessness, depicting life as a peculiar Hegelian dialectic of twisted theses, antitheses, and syntheses, with no sure exit from its dead end of false alternatives ever visible on the horizon. If nothing else, a visit to Data Mountain can look like an enormous waste of time better spent on the study of pure theology. Why—to take but one commonly expressed conservative American Catholic complaint—bother to rummage through the biographies and developing ideas of the Fathers of the Church, whose path to truth was filled with the inevitable potholes accompanying all such groundbreaking work? Are not the polished dogmatic treatises of the greatest medieval scholastics—men who inherited all of the Fathers’ achievements, but purged them of their errors—immeasurably superior and sufficient unto themselves?
Then, again, many believing Catholics have also turned against history because of the influence of historicism. Historicism can be attacked on similar grounds as data mongering, for its unacceptable introduction of the principles of flux and changeability into our appreciation of the unchanging God and His purposeful Providence. It naturalizes and perverts all theological and philosophical efforts to reach the unquestionable, bedrock meaning of life, and in a much more open fashion than mere data grubbing. Why, therefore—so the impassioned believer’s argument often goes—open an examination into something as sacred as the development of the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist? Historicists would only use such a study to feed the impression that the doctrine of the Real Presence emerged through a natural evolutionary process rather than from a meditation upon a direct and eternal revelation of the God-Man.
It is not my purpose to downplay all the potential perils of my own discipline. Historical data-peddlers who calmly bark out their giddy catalogues of pointless human follies, oblivious to the deep feeling of futility and ultimate absurdity this anecdotal chatter may evoke in their hearers, do indeed exist. I am myself quite conscious of a personal professional temptation to indulge in blithe, data-rich recitations of the errors, sins, and madness of clergy and laity which do not in the slightest disturb my cocktail hour, much less my Faith, even as they send some of my historophobe Catholic comrades straight into the nearest alleyway to slit their wrists. Also, there is simply no denying history’s ability to indulge that modern penchant for wasting attention on petty detail that swallows up all time for devotion to more noble tasks. And, finally, the fear of a very real, very seductive, naturalist, Faith-killing historicism is no idle one indeed.
Nevertheless, Catholic suspicion of history has to be quieted through acceptance of the simple fact that life affects different people in different ways. Those men and women who experience real perils to their souls when exposed to intoxicating spirits, films, or novels should certainly be encouraged in their desire to avoid them. Similarly, it may honestly be the case that the spiritual well being of some Catholics actually does compel them to headlong flight from all prolonged contact with data-rich historical accounts of the truth and development of the Faith in time that they find disturbing. But palpably negative as exposure to history can sometimes be, I still insist that it reflects a spiritual problem that affects individuals. It is not an existential dilemma that can be turned into a universal guideline for eliminating history from the education of the Catholic faithful—as it is so excised in a number of contemporary conservative religious curricula—especially when the instruction of the Catholic clergy and lay Catholic activists is at stake.
And what, exactly, is there for believers to fear in the annals of mankind? Yes, history does reveal man’s seemingly endless record of comical and tragic disaster; his failure to harmonize his actions with his stated aspirations. But why should Catholics, of all people, fear exposure to a chronicle of dysfunctional behavior? A record of failures should simply confirm, drive home, and draw out for them the consequences of some of the Church’s central dogmatic teachings: that individuals are unique; that they all possess a free will which prevents their being approached as mechanically predictable automatons; that their actions may be conservative or innovative, good or bad, logical or illogical, rigidly consistent or highly contradictory; that their reactions to fresh and often disturbing developments can be as flawed and unpredictable as the decisions that brought these developments on; that “stuff happens” in history and has to be confronted with both courage and a great deal of humor if one is successfully to tackle new and changing conditions in the temporal realm.
Moreover, believers ought to be perfectly conscious of the fact that no given individual Catholic’s path through life can be fully and accurately understood or foreseen through abstract, rational, and scientific studies of theology, philosophy, and the laws of nature alone. They should thus not be surprised to discover that the day-to-day effort of imperfect Catholics to understand how the perfect God works in time has never been totally devoid of ambiguity or scientifically complete. Neither should they marvel over stumbles and fruitless detours in Catholics’ attempts to relate their understanding of God and His Providence to familiar as well as to changing historical circumstances, nor their application of these judgments to daily decisions crucial to their own personal lives.
Besides, believers’ acceptance of the reality of human freedom and the ever-attendant possibility of sin should readily prepare them for making the acquaintance of an ample number of individual members of an otherwise divine institution who publicly confess their commitment to Catholicism while ignoring its practical consequences and engaging in precisely the sort of immoral behavior condemned regularly by it. Scripture itself indicates that these sinners can include quite significant individuals, the Apostles themselves among them. That alone should steel the faithful for discovering many other Catholic reprobates, some holding positions of importance inside the Church and even dominating her affairs over long stretches of her history.
Similarly, the faithful should in no way be stunned that the broad effects of the Fall have produced even well-intentioned Catholics who have been seduced into intellectual errors and practical behavior of breathtaking self-destructiveness. For they must know that in a world weakened by sin, nothing infallibly assures the choice of men of wisdom, courage, and prudence to wield authority within the Body of Christ. Nothing mandates that a Church leader will have the intelligence and energy to use his Faith and Reason to deal effectively with fresh temporal dilemmas in sensible and well-considered policies, or, for that matter, that he will teach and act in any serious manner at all. In fact, nothing ensures that popes, bishops, priests, and their flocks, through ignorance, laziness, and spiritual weakness will not be tempted to believe the most blatant distortions of alternative good stories, conclude that their false recipes for the Christian life are reconcilable with and beneficial to the cause of their supernatural Faith, and act accordingly.
Finally, believers confronting the ecclesiastical record should expect many instances of confusion and madness if for no other reason than the immense complexity of raising natural “spaces” and institutions to fulfillment of their mission in Christ. After all, this difficult work, essential as it is to facilitating the individual’s spiritual journey, nevertheless lies precisely in his own weak and sinful hands. Understanding exactly how to accomplish such an exalted labor has to entail a great deal of painful sifting, judging, and practical maneuvering. This, in turn, requires the calming of numerous negative spiritual instincts and intellectual judgments shaped by previous experiences with an as yet unrepentant and unreformed nature. It also risks offending personal, deeply ingrained, individual sensibilities. More importantly still, it demands the courage to confront many vested and overwhelmingly powerful worldly interests that can inflict immediate and intense bodily harm upon anyone threatening them.
Transforming nature in Christ thus calls for a realistic understanding of existing secular conditions, along with an appreciation of what the outside world actually ought to be and could be through changes effected by the alliance of faith, grace, and reason. Such a two-pronged understanding is not easy to gain and translate into mechanisms for change under the best of circumstances or even under the guidance of the greatest of the saints. When sought out by weak, ignorant, foolish, or hypocritical sinners—that is to say, basically all of mankind—it would be surprising were it not regularly misconstrued and thrown into the greatest chaos and contradiction. If the difficulties of thinking about and living the Drama of Truth as presented by the deepest of ancient pagan thinkers were already formidable enough, how much more would this then have to be the case when their character and the stakes involved were highlighted in Christian terms? In sum, no believer should be shocked to find Catholic History replete with perhaps the most extraordinarily tragic and comic figures of all. For any fall from the vision of the transfigured life of Christ as seen by the Apostles on Mount Tabor must inevitably be more horrible or ridiculous than those from the heights of human aspiration identified even by the finest of Greek dramatists and Socratics. All this should be obvious. If so, then history, where is thy sting?
Be that as it may, whatever the evils and confusions that Catholic History may uncover, the failure to plumb its depths is deadly. It amounts to a voluntary and unilateral disarmament, leaving believers with only crippled arms to deploy against the supporters of “nature as is”. Why? Because without consulting the historical record the seductions of the alternative good stories, the lies of the black legends, and the real message of the Incarnation can never be completely and accurately illuminated. In shutting their eyes to the full teaching handed down to them from the past, believers indulge their own parochial limitations, focusing on second-class problems and weak apologetics that actually ignore Catholicism’s true nature and strengths. Meanwhile, they parry assaults of their enemies that ought not to concern them, neglect their substantive follies and contradictions, and give their foes a semblance of superiority that they do not in any way deserve.
Yes, once again, breaking down the iron curtain between Catholics and their inevitably troubled history does mean confronting crimes and shortcomings that have helped mightily to give the black legends just that sufficient tinge of verisimilitude to survive and prosper. But this is absolutely necessary in order to understand three much more important truths: first of all, that one is, precisely, speaking here of “crimes and shortcomings”, owed to the failure of believers to grasp and implement the full Catholic vision, rather than adherence to its precepts; secondly, that such real crimes and shortcomings are regularly the product of Catholic acceptance of alternative “good stories” that distort both Faith and behavior, and actually reflect the kind of world that the proponents of the black legends long desperately to create; and, finally, that the historical record, even at the nadir of Catholic fortunes, everywhere offers hopes and guidelines for regaining the sure path to union with the Word active in time.
A serious study of Church History must necessarily identify shortcomings and crimes for what they are, through the simple expedient of directing the believer to all the sources of Catholic doctrinal and moral teaching and practice. Such an investigation propels him to a consideration of Scripture, councils, papal pronouncements, the work of the Fathers, and similar founts of full orthodox enlightenment. It points him towards the stuff of what is referred to as positive theology. And it is positive theology that provides the nutritious food guaranteeing speculative, systematic theology protection from mythmaking or pontificating in thin air. Examination of Catholic History thus directs the faithful to a careful reading of the complete record of all of the Church’s positive thoughts and actions through the centuries—our chief means of learning how Christ works in time. This has the further benefit of demonstrating what has and has not had substantive pastoral value in spreading Christian Faith and practice. Moreover, examination of the roots and daily chronicle of the Church’s message, structure, and actions shows that there has indeed been a growth in Catholic understanding, defense, and practice of the Way, the Truth and the Life; and that the consequences of that grand intellectual growth translated into the formation of a highly sophisticated Catholic Christendom populated by many great and holy men and women in whom the faithful can take deep and justifiable pride.
A plunge into the unexpurgated fullness of the Church’s past story thus offers one of the most splendid paths for earth-bound souls to open themselves up to the music of the spheres and judge what is and is not in harmony with it. I am convinced that this is the case, because it performed such a service for me. It was history that indicated to me that I had to look beyond the flux of mere historical experience to the ultimate source and seat of an eternal wisdom that might place the daily ecclesiastical horror show in its proper perspective. It was history that fueled an unexpected longing for deeper instruction in the superior disciplines of philosophy and theology, which at first confused and even repelled me. It was history that unwrapped for me the priceless gift that Christianity offers: a life-and joy-filled, body-and-spirit-exalting phenomenon, testified to by armies of great minds and souls; a Faith that gives the lie to the cheap, parochial, and often scurrilous depiction of Catholicism by men who have no “eyes to see or ears to hear”. Finally, it was history that also identified and denounced to me the impact that the age-old, word merchandising spirit makes: that of a strait jacket seeking to limit or crush the deepest aspirations of the human mind and soul—my own included; that of a permanently effective sleeping pill guaranteeing an existence equivalent to a life-long euthanasia in a toneless universe. In short, history pointed the way far beyond its limited self, and for this I am forever grateful to it. It gave me four goods—history, philosophy, theology, and love of life in general—for the price of one. And all three of these, laboring in tandem, form a mighty battering ram to break down the outwardly impressive house of cards built up by the black legends and alternative good stories to devastate or defuse Catholicism.
It is its work in uncovering the latter fraud that is most significant to my argument at the moment. For confrontation with the full historical record reveals just how frequently clergy and laity have not listened to the music of the spheres, accepting pale, alternative tall tales regarding the Faith in consequence. And acceptance of this mess of pottage, in turn, explains why Catholics have so often appeared to be nothing other than drugged actors in a two thousand year performance of theater of the absurd. Time after time they trot in and out of history to play a role worthy of Ionesco. There they are, again and again, chastising zealous defenders of Christ’s mission as traitors to God; praising purveyors of false but alluring words as the real heroes of the Faith; demanding modifications of Christian thought to accommodate the demands of their deadly opponents; pursuing policies which are detrimental to the short and long-term profit of the Church, nature as a whole, and the individual in particular. Devastating as it is to admit, there are some points in their history when so many Catholics have given such credence to erroneous good stories that little further reason for the successes of their enemies need be provided. The tragic reality of such twisted assistance has played its part in rendering the war between “words” and “the Word” the highly baffling conflict that it often is.
Catholic apologists need to know if they are defending Catholicism or a caricature thereof. A true supporter of the Word Incarnate must be sure that he is getting the substance of a heartfelt obedience to His Savior’s wishes from Catholics he seeks to defend as opposed to a purely pro forma song of praise from their lips. Pointing solely to a man’s recitation of the Creed does not give the loyal soldier of Christ all the information he requires to make a proper judgment regarding past reality. An honest study of history most helps in identifying whether one is dealing with men who were, in practice, exactly what they said they were. My fellow B.A. recipients in 1973 all sang hymns praising the crushing of heresy that, on the surface, made them sound like several hundred manifestations of St. Athanasius. But anyone familiar with their daily history understood that they had no interest in Christian doctrine at all, and that they were belting out their song only because they had been told to do so by the school authorities, who had made singing it with gusto a condition for awarding them their degrees.
Catholics who disdain study of the reality of the vast number of “curveballs” which individual believers have thrown to Church History by their replacement of the fullness of the Faith with a good story emasculating it, allow for the victory of precisely that evil which they claim to fight: the distortion, naturalizing, and minimizing of the effects of supernatural truth and grace operative in time. For unwillingness to probe and expose the many bad, mistaken, and often unpredictable actions that were taken by fallen Catholics in a fallen nature is an open invitation to placing a blessing upon everything that they did as somehow “god-fearing” in character. It is an open invitation blindly to baptize the grotesque use of Christ’s message by either the ignorant or clever strong men, whose illogical or hypocritical hosannas to the Son of God masqueraded their erroneous or self-interested purposes.
What is perhaps most troublesome about neglect of serious investigation of the past crimes, blunders, and intellectual seductions of erring believers is the way that it has blinded many contemporary Catholics to the precise means used by the modern naturalist enemy who dominates their lives today to forge his path into the heart of Christendom. For we shall see that naturalism’s dangerously anti-Word argument to a large degree slithered onto center stage in disguised form, with an especially “nice”, alternative, effective good story, using seemingly faith-filled, nature-friendly language to make its ultimately harmful case. We shall learn in Chapters Seven through Nine just how many beguiled Catholics were lulled by familiar-sounding words into giving their support to a set of naturalist beliefs and practices that actually aimed to destroy the message of the Word. We shall witness how they surrendered the citadels of the Faith to their deadly foes before they had any real sense of what was happening to them. Catholic man cannot live by words alone; by means of a good story that is actually a lie. It is through an historical examination of what naturalism did—and does—in practice, rather than an unquestioning acceptance of the truth of what it blithely says that it does, that its anti-Catholic character and path are most easily revealed and combated.
A study of Church History serves one final purpose: it offers profound hope and thought-provoking guidelines for future recovery from our current spiritual and temporal nightmare. Once he consults the full ecclesiastical record, the startled believer is awakened to the long-lived character of the problem facing Catholicism. He learns how seriously and successfully the supporters of “nature as is” have contested the Christian achievement in every stage of its development. He sees how they have done so in a fashion that has periodically involved Catholic loss of consciousness of the fullness of the Incarnation’s mission to correct and transform man and society in Christ. But most importantly, he encounters innumerable heroes who understood what was truly “practical” from a Catholic standpoint, and how a road back to implementing the full message of the Incarnate Word can effectively be paved.
Allow me once again to stress the fact that the entirety of the historical record is essential to this task of fighting the alternative good stories and the black legends. Failure to investigate all of Catholic History, each and every one of its facets, condemns men to an arbitrarily limited self-defense and rearmament in the fight against the enemies of the Faith. Believers who think that it is sufficient to know the “end result” of Catholic History in 2011 without respecting the contribution made by the faithful in all past ages are infinitely more likely to fall prey to the particular temptations fought off so valiantly by the special efforts of previous bands of Christian warriors. They deny themselves knowledge of what “experts in the field” did or did not do “back then” to parry unique shades of error with which they might not be so familiar in their own time. Should such problems reappear once again to trouble their own life—and this is always a possibility in a world inhabited both by free men as well as artisans of black legends and good stories on the lookout for any “angle” that works—they would thus be sitting ducks for destruction by them.
Believing Catholics who persist in disdaining the value of history have an unfortunate tendency to hunt for protection from the enemies of the Faith behind a wall of well-intentioned, Word-friendly, but rhetorically-bloated good stories of their own. However nice these stories may be, they are in no way rooted in the history of Christ and His Mystical Body: neither in the Gospel narratives, nor in the Acts of the Apostles, nor in the work of the Church Fathers, nor in the hard-won teachings of councils and popes. Such well-intentioned good stories can sound orthodox in a number of ways, such as in their attribution of temporal Catholic victories solely to supernatural interventions or in their linkage of historical defeats to the seemingly superhuman evil of one particular “scapegoat” individual or conspiratorial group. But insofar as these tales are totally untrue, severely flawed, or as marred by false stereotypes as anything their opponents produce, they cannot ultimately shield the Christian front from a sophisticated onslaught launched against it.
In fact, when believers seek protection behind the Maginot Line of their own myths alone, they are sorely tempted to operate by the rules of victorious naturalism as soon as they emerge from the citadel walls to confront “reality”. With little or no knowledge of how Catholics solidly rooted in the truths of the Incarnation should behave and defend themselves in their daily dealings with the natural world, they are no danger to their sworn naturalist enemies. Supporters of an uncorrected “nature as is” can even praise the Christianity that they represent, since, in practice, it is nothing other than the harmless, personal or group sport of a religious fraternity—a Catholic Club, which demands precious little, if anything, of this world in practical terms.
In any case, such behavior explains why one frequently finds firm believers who speak with the voice of a Torquemada while inside their “Catholic clubhouse” yet espouse eighteenth century “common sense” principles once they emerge into the “real world”. And it clarifies why such men can continually make political and economic alliances with individuals and groups who truly mock their substantive corrective and transforming Faith. Less reliance on seemingly orthodox tall tales, and more willingness to consult the historical record, would demonstrate the bitter truth that much of the standard operating procedure of ill-informed believers throughout the ages, the present one included, has, in practice, been dictated by opponents of Catholicism who have been accepted as friends; that this accords badly with true Catholic doctrines; that it seriously promotes only those alternatives to Faith that are praised by the sculptors of the black legends and the good stories; and that, ironically, it then allows the word merchants to criticize the Faith for wrongful actions of the faithful that have little or nothing to do with the message of Christ whatsoever.
Allow me to conclude with a word in favor of certain “good stories”—true ones. Christianity can never wage war versus anything aesthetically pleasing. It needs the beautiful much too much to do so. Men are not creatures of pure intellect, hermetically sealed off from the manifold messages of a world of flesh and blood and the innumerable envelopes in which these can be sent. Catholic man cannot live by syllogisms and dogmatic formulae alone. The Son of God came to redeem, raise, and “divinize” the entirety of nature. Created nature involves human communication, which has an enormous and demonstrable impact on the individual. A talented, aesthetic development of the rational use of words is, in the long run, as natural to man as efforts to perfect his mind, and often much more immediately important. The enmity of the faithful must be directed only against that form of rhetoric which seeks to “close life down”; to put men to sleep regarding a full philosophical and theological understanding of its meaning; to prevent attempts to grasp the True and the Good lying behind the Beautiful; to manipulate words to bury the profound longing of the human soul for definite, eternally-significant knowledge under one, large, oppressive, but golden-tongued wet blanket. A rhetoric used in union with good philosophy and theology is, on the other hand, a weapon of nuclear force. It provides a “good story about a true story”.
This is where history also plays a significant role. The historical profession has been allied with rhetoric since its origins, given its clear concern, from the very outset, for engaging men’s attention to move them to practical action. Sadly, this alliance has meant that history has frequently been abused, serving primarily as a sophistic propaganda tool on behalf of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”. But when united with good philosophy and theology, a knowledge of history can capture the human imagination and move men to intelligent, informed action in the service of the greatest story ever told. And it is to such a goal that the present work is dedicated, in its effort to demonstrate that many false friends have repeatedly flown the most impeccable Catholic banners while literally getting away with murder, to the detriment of the name of Christ and His Church.
For a Catholic who cannot overcome his distaste for history, a study of the war between “words” and “the Word” may appear to offer nothing more than another near occasion of secularizing, intellectual sin. For an opponent of substantive Christianity shaped by those black legends and alternative good stories whose nefarious influences we shall be attacking, this book may seem to be doomed from the very outset by its dogmatic leitmotif and a presumed temptation to twist historical data to its service. Even the indifferent may be tempted to join in the critical fun, quite accurately noting that the author of a general, reflective history of this kind, whatever his sense of having satisfactorily researched his work, regularly stands in need of corrections provided by experts in specialized fields. Believers, non-believers, and neutral observers alike could well join hands in a one-time display of camaraderie to toss the present tome into the rubbish heap without permitting it the slightest chance to work its magic on them.
I must once again insist that I admit that all the dangers outlined above are real. But my abandonment of this work would entail a renunciation of a much needed depiction of a thematic forest that the trees of the specialist, however true and essential their cultivation undeniably is, often badly obscure. It would also be an indirect admission that recounting the experience of Catholic Christianity’s impact upon my life plays no legitimate role whatsoever in explaining the influence that that Faith has had on human history in general. Finally, abandoning the writing of a general, reflective book of this kind, whose inevitable flaws of detail I shall always be happy to correct, would bring with it an effective acknowledgment that the only writers permitted to interpret Christianity’s significance are those men and women whom I firmly believe to be precisely the ones who have arbitrarily closed themselves off from seriously grasping its real consequences and import. Accepting that thesis would be a morally repugnant decision. So let us allow the words to flow and see if this work, with all its obvious limitations, can nonetheless tell something of a “good story about a true story.”
Chapter 1
First Blood
The dominant forces of the contemporary western world actively stimulate the blithe acceptance of the lessons of immediate sensual and emotional experiences. In varying ways, some open, others disguised, they all insist that voluntary abandonment to the teaching of surface phenomenon, far from being a frivolity, is actually the only realistic approach to existence. Anyone seeking meaning, fulfillment, and joy in life must energetically fight off that temptation to deeper thought and reflection which prevents “closure” and “moving on” to satisfaction of the ever changing and evolving messages of immediate sensation.
Study of the roots of the militant modern preference for the shallow over the profound must begin in the ancient, pagan world. For the conscious encouragement of a spirit favoring “closure” and “moving on” over “stepping back” and “reflecting” is already noticeable in the Classical Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., especially in the eye-opening period of the Peloponnesian War and its dismal aftermath (431-336 B.C.). This is because Greece, as the home of the first insightful discussion of the meaning and practice of education—of paideia, as they called it—inevitably provoked the original open battle between those men primarily valuing the lessons of surface phenomena and others insisting upon the hunt for their underlying and more nuanced truths.1
Epic, lyric, and dramatic poets were the first teachers of Hellas. They sought answers to the basic issues of life by asking aesthetic questions; i.e., queries regarding the meaning of beauty. Aesthetic preoccupations led them to tackle the problem of how best to educate for a knowledge and possession of “the Beautiful”. Their hunt for the tools essential to a primarily aesthetic formation gradually became “holistic”. It slowly uncovered the need for consultation with, and guidance from, a variety of different sources: the individual and his immediate desires, the family and its long-term requirements for stability, and, perhaps most importantly, the demands of the polis, the city-state, in its search for attainment of a common as opposed to a merely individual or familial “beautiful” life.
The reputation of the polis as an aesthetic, educative, guiding force was enormous at the end of the Persian Wars (490-479 B.C.). Athens and Sparta, its two greatest contemporary representatives, had assured their polis’ prestige by winning a victory over the most impressive power in the world—a force before which, in startling contrast, a number of important individuals and purely family-dominated Greek lands had humiliatingly cowered. Such an unexpected but clear triumph made it appear that the community-focused polis could, in effect, accomplish absolutely anything. It was for this reason that Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), in his Oristeia trilogy, has an unending cycle of superhuman vengeance and counter-vengeance concluded through polis-shaped (i.e., political) judicial action. Beauty, education, and the polis, one might have said; now and forever; one and inseparable.
Unfortunately, however, it was precisely the same cherished polis of Athens and Sparta which revealed insane, self-destructive passions and limitations during and after the Peloponnesian War, thereby stimulating further debate regarding the basic tools required for a proper education designed to gain possession of the beautiful. Control of the renewed dialogue passed out of the hands of the poets alone, who had seemingly said everything that they could possibly say on all sides of this issue of paideia by the time of the plays of Euripides (480-406 B.C.). Greece, even before this moment, had witnessed the emergence of a quite different approach towards education, along the lines suggested by the first philosophers, the so-called pre-Socratics, who wished to replace an aesthetic understanding of man and nature with one founded firmly upon knowledge of the material structure of the universe itself; knowledge of its constituent “scientific” elements. But pre-Socratic approaches to life and education proved to be too radical a break with the traditional aesthetic vision for the mainstream Greek world to accept. They were rejected, in particular, by two schools of thought, both active in the war and post-war period, which were themselves destined to lock horns in mortal combat.
One of these schools was that of the Sophists, men concerned with rhetoric, the successful use of language. Sophists, in effect, argued that the old-line aesthetic approach to hunting for the Beautiful was correct, but that it needed to be organized, taught, and followed much more rigorously if it were to become a sure foundation for the individual, the family, and society. The other school was that of Socrates (469-399 B.C.), who, while also retaining much of the traditional aesthetic approach to education, felt a call to critique, transform, and elevate it. The battle that this entailed was related for us not by Socrates himself but by his most brilliant pupil, Plato (427-347). And Plato reveals the nature of the conflict in his debate with Isocrates (436-338)—perhaps the most self-conscious and instructive proponent of the opposing, sophistic, rhetorical approach.
Plato’s great achievement as a philosopher and as an educator was one of demonstrating that the classical Greek formation of an individual for the possession of the beautiful required an understanding both of the nature of goodness as well as of the underlying truths of the universe for which the pre-Socratics were groping. He presented Socrates, his model teacher, as a “soul doctor”, a man who sought the cure of moral and intellectual flaws in his continued hunt for aesthetic perfection. Education for beauty in the fullest possible sense was indeed a holistic project, Plato insisted, but an exciting and dramatic one, drawing the individual closer and closer to God, the measure of all things, shaping his soul as an image or icon of the divine as he advanced. Every tool that the Greeks had come to consider to be important—the polis included—had a crucial role to play in this all-encompassing, life-long enterprise. Nevertheless, those valuable tools were flawed, each and every one of them. Paradoxically, the means of education themselves required correction and improvement at the hands of the individual “icons” that they helped to shape. Soul doctoring could thus be a perplexing, immensely difficult, exhausting task, involving much meditation and self-questioning. And such an enterprise could not help but appear to be a pointless, frustrating detour to those on a perpetual hunt for “get possession of beauty quick” schemes; those interested in “closure” and “moving on”.
“Pointlessly frustrating” was certainly the criticism attached to Platonic education by Isocrates, who claimed the title of philosopher with as great a sense of justice and fervor as his fellow Athenian did. Still, apt student of the Sophist Gorgias (c. 485-c. 380) that he was, Isocrates understood philosophy to be a wisdom that only the trained rhetorician could possibly grasp and use properly. This inevitably meant that his definition of any Good or Truth underlying the Beautiful would differ considerably from the one given to it by Socratics eager to pass beyond the borders of rhetoric alone.
For Isocrates, there was no question of seriously critiquing, transforming, and possibly even rejecting the immediate emotional and sensual experiences and preoccupations of the ordinary man. Man was the measure of all things, and unquestionably correct in his urgent, common sense appreciation of the importance of obtaining the riches, power, and fame that he obviously knew would yield the beautiful life. The average individual’s sole problem was a technical one: he could not relate one, justifiable, obvious, common sense experience to another, and thereby understand how best to exploit and satisfy them regularly and comprehensively. His efforts to explain his reactions to daily problems, both to himself as well as to others, proved to be “dumb” ones. It was effective words, and the arguments shaped through them, which were lacking to the average man. Only the well trained rhetorician, the master of words, could clarify the full depth of immediate feelings and experiences, show where they were headed, and stir people to do what was necessary to fulfill their promise. The Good and the True were, therefore, ultimately nothing other than “appropriate explanations” of reality, and developments of those obvious and common sense reactions to the raw stuff of daily life that are themselves absolutely infallible guides to the possession of Beauty.
To take but one simple example, the average person might be said to have an eminently justifiable, positive, common sense reaction to the powerful feeling and experience of sexual passion. Nevertheless, without the right words and arguments to explain his “opinions” regarding this formidable force de la nature, he is not able to relate the meaning of his reaction to experience properly; not even to himself. Pragmatic efforts to gain the full promise of sexuality and cause it to work together with other deeply felt experiences about which he has positive “opinions” are even further out of his reach. It is the rhetorician who illuminates Everyman through the use of appropriate and stimulating words, demonstrating the key to sexual understanding and its link with the multitude of other desirable goals.
But how will Everyman know that the rhetorician is “speaking appropriately” about reality? The answer to this question is also an obvious one. For the master rhetorician’s advice will not only “sound right”—clearly, consistently, and self-assuredly responding to the average individual’s personal sense of the obvious truth of his own preoccupations, and where, more or less, those concerns are headed. Beyond that, it will prove itself by being crowned with clear success. Hence, Isocrates’ recognition of his need to underline the simplicity, lucidity, harmony of purpose, confidence, and material achievements of his pupils, while contrasting them with the cranky and ultimately unfathomable detours, self-criticisms, bitter divisions, and practical failures of the Socratics.
Isocrates longed to prove rhetoric’s ability to gain possession of the Beautiful on a grand, world scale. In order for him to find the key to such great success, the philosopher/rhetorician had to begin with the study of the raw experiences and the common sense reaction to them not merely of an individual, but of an entire people, since only a city-state or nation could conceivably become a long-term driving force in global events. The work of Herodotus (484-424), Thucydides (mid-400’s-c. 403), Xenophon (c. 430-c. 355) and others offered guidelines as to how such historical data might be collected. Rhetoricians like Isocrates saw one of their tasks as being that of explaining to a population the appropriate greatness to which its otherwise “dumb” historical experiences were calling it. History thus came very early under rhetorical purview and influence: partly to its profit, since it became more readable, dramatic, and effective, but very often to its severe detriment, by being transformed into a tool of pure propaganda.
From the raw history of his environment, Isocrates claimed to learn a number of important principles: that there actually was a Greek people, united by a shared culture, Hellenism; that the essence of Hellenism was the development of the illuminating, life-giving, and unifying “word”; that the universal value accruing from appropriate use of “the word” gave to a Greece which possessed knowledge of its significance a world-wide cultural mission; and, finally, that this universal vocation had been shown to involve the sea, struggle against Persia, and imperial expansion.
Fulfillment of future Hellenist destiny would require two things simultaneously. On the one hand, it was crucial to maintain a constant respect for the “good old days” of the foundation of the Greek spirit and the institutions giving clout to it. On the other, it was necessary to shape a loyal population obedient to any vigorous strong man who might guide that spirit to the discharge of its contemporary mission. Moreover, the institutions embodying the spirit of the good old days, the strong man giving them clout, and the populations obedient to his fiat were to be stirred to their appropriate political roles through the vital words of the creative rhetorical genius.
But “philosophy”, as defined by Isocrates, can easily constitute a gigantic circle, manipulated by the rhetorician who, through the clever use of appealing words and images, may seize control of the familiar concerns of the average man or State and run with them where he wills. Common sense experience is pronounced the infallible basis for action simply because the experience appealed to is arbitrarily declared “common sense filled” and thus an infallible basis for action. Successful attainment of riches and power is said to prove the appropriateness of the rhetorician’s understanding of the beautiful life and guidance of Everyman to its promise because possession of riches and power is presented as unquestionable, axiomatic proof that beauty has indeed been grasped. Respect for the “good old days”, contemporary strong men, and obedient populations are essential because denial of such esteem to any one of these elements would rip apart the “beautiful” rhetorical image tying together ancient roots with present hopes and future destiny, mass popularity, and elite power. And all those aspects of “the vision” were necessary since experience had proven them essential to the construction of the career of the master of words, whose personal success worked to guarantee the validity of their union.
Absolutely no questioning of “obvious experience”, “common sense”, “success”, the “historic mission”, and the consistency of the tools required for its realization could be contemplated, lest this lead to the unacceptable argument that obvious experience, common sense, success, the historical mission, and its vital tools were themselves somewhat problematic. Isocrates, as Werner Jaeger notes, makes a virtue out of abandoning any deeper investigation of the meaning of life once he has shaped what for him appears to be a rhetorically beautiful “point of view’ with a chance of obtaining a successful outcome. That “point of view”, if attractive and potentially useful, must be accepted as though it were Truth itself.2 With this, the debate is over. Closure has been achieved. One must move on to accomplishment of the Great Promise, or face the wrath of the rhetorician and the outraged nature whose unerring voice he has infallibly proclaimed himself to be.
And the rhetorician is powerful. He knows that his words do have “the ring of truth”. He is sure that he can count on the support of immediately felt, individual, family, or polis-wide “common sense” passions in his call for their immediate satisfaction. He senses the understandable and well-neigh universal fear that acceptance of Socratic self-criticism would paralyze swift action, thus preventing exploitation of favorable opportunities to fulfill desire, thereby causing men to “lose out” on success, perhaps even up to the very moment of death. The rhetorician, with his mastery of words, can paint the profound, life-determining, “either-or” option offered to men by Sophists and Socratics in all of its dramatic colors, though clearly weighted to his advantage. After he has skillfully organized the picture as he wishes, any Socratic who calls the average man to logical, painful soul-searching at the possible expense of satisfying urgent passion becomes a sitting duck for his rhetorical abuse. A Platonic philosopher would all too easily lend himself to the accusation of representing both a crackpot idealism, indifferent to the obvious demands of human nature, as well as a cynical opposition to the successes of “real men”, whom he cannot emulate, bitterly envies, and wishes to destroy in consequence.
Plato was not just a Socratic philosopher but a literary genius in his own right, sensitive to the power of purely rhetorical arguments over the average man, and the need to respond to them “beautifully” to demonstrate their flaws. He did so reply, by depicting the pure rhetorician as an ultimately self-deluding failure. Yes, Plato argued, the Sophist rhetorician was influential. But contrary to his claim that that influence came from his role as a wise man, teaching individuals and states the meaning of the beautiful and how to get possession of it, his impact actually and ironically emerged from something quite different: from his total inability to educate those whom he prided himself upon illuminating. For the “word” spoken by the rhetorician styling himself to be a philosopher could itself never rise above “dumb” opinion, and merely illustrated the trained man’s ability effectively to flatter peoples’ fancies. Rhetoricians possessed what Plato called a “knack” of appealing to a particular appetite, like that of a cook in a fast-food restaurant, ignoring entirely the question of whether they ought to have indulged in such an admittedly successful flattery and knack in the first place.
The successful rhetorician deceives himself into thinking that he is superior to his “wordless” audience, but he is simply more effectively “thick” than it is. His words resemble an overbearing and endlessly repeated rock rhythm in a room filled with impressionable but musically illiterate hedonists. They fail to elevate, just as any tool that uses man rather than God as the measure of all things falls miserably short of its pretensions. Anyone responding to the “either-or” option confronting him by choosing for the rhetorician would, therefore, be voting for eternal mediocrity and blindness. Sadly, precisely due to the rhetorician’s observable knack for maintaining power over the vulgar mob, the pathetic outcome of such a wrong choice could conceivably be hidden from its victims forever. False rhetorical “philosophers” needed only to do two things: 1) enthusiastically to invent ever “new” surface variants on the proven appealing slogans to keep men thinking that fulfillment of the brilliant promise of the Empty Life lay just around the corner; and, 2) constantly to drill into a benumbed population’s mind the fear of the “dead-end” impotence that the Socratic hunt for a more profound goal would ensure.
One of Plato’s painful labors was that of explaining embarrassing instances of this seeming Socratic impotence, with the disasters of his own political missions to Dion in Sicily in 388 and 367 primary among them. Such shipwrecks, he insisted, were not attributable to true philosophy’s innate inability to navigate effectively. Rather, they were simply another confirmation of the difficulty and very infancy of the task that the real lover of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth had set for himself. Yes, he admitted, philosophy needed the aid of rhetoric, of the lesser “word”, to explain itself successfully to a world filled with ambiguous though powerful passions and convince it to change its ways. But that secondary “word” must always be subordinated to a deeper Word—that Logos towards whose ultimate knowledge the talents of the rhetorician should be directed. Alas, at least in Plato’s own day, it had proven to be “hard to find the creator and father of the universe”, and “impossible to describe his nature publicly.”3 Men could not yet be guided properly to the divine imitation that would definitely perfect them and give them possession of the Beautiful. As dilemmas went, this certainly was a killer, and Plato feared that it would remain an unresolved one unless “some God” came to the earth to unravel it.
Faulty or not, the ideas of his opponents did more than those of the Socratics to form that mixed Greek/Middle Eastern/Latin civilization which we call the Hellenistic World. This new reality certainly did demonstrate the literal value of the Greek language, whose superiority in transmitting manifold, complex concepts became universally recognized. It also reflected all of the potential practical consequences of a cosmos shaped by a purely rhetorical “word” alone. For Hellenistic Civilization was one that did indeed work for the “common sense” benefit of those “vigorous strong men” praised by the rhetorician as essential for the fulfillment of its mission. These leaders learned to create and manipulate powerful state machinery for the purpose of keeping the “dumb” mass of the population in obedient submission to their will. Such “doers of great deeds”, from Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.) through to the Caesars and the Senatorial Aristocracy of the Roman Empire that worked together with them, were even willing to tolerate satisfaction of certain specific, immediate desires of the multi-cultural, pluralist world over which they ruled, so long as its constituent elements accepted “closure” regarding matters that might disturb what really counted: the personal power, wealth, and fame of the victors. And rhetoricians in abundance gained a decent income justifying the order thus created.4
Rhetoricians were very active from the 300’s B.C. through the 300’s A.D. providing the Hellenistic cosmos, the ecumene, the arguments proving that the debate over who possessed the things that made life beautiful and what those things were was over. They also contributed mightily to efforts to overcome “parochial” religious “superstitions” whose concerns might threaten the status quo. Such integration of divisive elements involved publicizing the need to submit to and adore the divinity of the State apparatus and the self-made men who dominated it. “Closure” had been achieved in the realm of the gods as well as that of men, and the “word” could now “move on” to “get the ordinary job of living done”.
That “word” moved on by devoting itself to legal and civil service careers, and to sickly praise or boring, encyclopedic chronicling of the existing, unchangeable order of things. Manipulators of the “word” thereby shared in any trickle-down benefits that the Divine Masters supposedly serving the Great Visions they rhetorically identified awarded them. They moved on by finding substantial employment producing that esoteric, archaic, and pointless heap of pretty sounds and properly placed commas adulated by exclusivist literary circles. Aside from that, they also moved on by churning out pornographic material for the gross diversions of a rabble ever tempted to accept subordination and abandon true enlightenment for cheap material satiety.
The spiral downward from the more sophisticated “apologetic” writings and literary achievements of earlier Hellenistic regimes to the servile, pedantic, and vulgar oeuvre of much of the powerful and widespread “second wave” of literary Sophism of the second through fourth centuries, A.D. is instructive. Plato, for one, would not have been surprised by the decline, since he had argued that rhetoricians indifferent to true philosophy were destined to a low-class butchering of even their own legitimate art and talent. One need only consult the biographies and stories to be found in Aulius Gellius’ (123-165) Attic Nights, the 2nd Philostratus’ (c. 170-248), Lives of the Sophists, Eunapius’ (346-414) Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, Diogenes Laertius’ (no later than 200’s) Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and Athenaeus of Naucratis’ (200’s) Doctors at Dinner to test the validity of his hypothesis.5
But what can one say about the Socratic opposition? What about their war with immediate appearances and superficial judgment? Did not the materialist passions of the Hellenistic Monarchies far surpass those of Athens and Sparta at the time of the height of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, when Socrates himself had shown that the call to possession of a flawed Beauty could never, in the long run, satisfy either the population or the dominant forces misleading it? Was there not a fraud to be identified and corrected here? Or had some mystery of iniquity done its job, quieting the outrage of the true philosopher?
Alas, philosophy had generally been tamed, adapting itself nicely to the depressing, conformist, “common sense” rules established and rhetorically-justified by a combination of power-worshipping adventurers and Sophists. This was partially due to certain innate weaknesses of the Socratics, as well as subsequent, powerful, related schools of thought like Stoicism. Aristotelians retreated into their cubbyholes of knowledge, working in spheres that did not necessarily have to bring up the big questions disturbing to the daily status quo. Neo-Platonists, even while conducting a truly exalted discussion of the Hierarchy of Being leading to clarification of the final, divine, unchangeable principle of the universe, also became propagandists for the powers that be. They were fearful that any disorder and alteration in the political and social world around them could open the path to what they considered to be a totally unacceptable conception of change, willfulness, and unpredictable action affecting one’s notion of the proper character of the very Godhead itself. Stoic insistence on the purpose-filled structure of the universe tempted it, in the absence of a concept of sin, to treat accommodation to the successful status quo as though it were obedience to the will of God. Acceptance of the idea that meaning lay behind every aspect of natural life also convinced many Stoics that crude popular experiences of reality, including truly offensive superstitious practices, should be treated seriously alongside more profound ones. Plato’s effective rhetorical use of allegory could be called upon, though in reverse, to show the more “sophisticated”—dare we say “appropriate”?—significance expressed through their vulgar exterior peculiarities.6
But none of this would work if the populations thus “guided” by the rhetoricians and their political allies did not in some way respond to the song that was sung to them. This, the majority of them seem to have done, dealing with the bewildering change backed by willful men and their propagandists by going on vacation to a Never-Never Land where native beliefs and customs which did not shake the established order could still be maintained. Many ancient Greeks, Romans, and Near Easterners took this holiday of denial, stunned as they were by the innovations accompanying the multicultural empires shaping their world beginning with the conquests of Alexander and continuing down to the eve of the victory of Christianity.
Once arriving in Never-Never Land and establishing their clubhouses in its Japanese gardens, they often even denied that anything new and dangerous had actually entered into their lives at all. In order to obtain permission for traditionalist Never-Never Land games, however, the visitors to these varied ancient playgrounds had to collaborate with the existing system and its rulers on those matters that really guided their practical lives. Forget about simply avoiding anything that might give offense to the powers that be. Personal security required that they enthusiastically praise the divinity of the establishment oppressing them. And this they readily did: over and over again. Acceptance of Divine Oppression was engraved over the entrance of each native clubhouse door as the price for permission to open it up to its members.
Beyond that, collaboration, for truly significant subordinates, might entail the shouldering of active obligations to the great monarchs of the age before rushing home to the more pleasant task of cultivating impotence. Collaboration, for the weak mass of men, might mean just working, paying taxes, and never transgressing the sacred wall separating private fantasy from social and political reality. Most collaborators kept the wheels of the regime machinery going because they did not wish to risk their necks by openly opposing it; some, since they had become so used to its gears that they took them for granted as an unquestionable given, maintaining ties with their own oppressed traditions through pure inertia alone. A few of those who collaborated were fully co-opted by their masters. They became fervent propagandists for the new order, alongside the official rhetorical class, even hoping one day to be accepted into its inner circles.
Of course not everyone confronted by bewildering, force-backed change, justified by rhetorical bombast, went down the escapist-collaborationist path. A respectable number reacted to such transformations by militantly taking up arms against them, and this often outside of those customary structures of their societies which had cowardly or unthinkingly opted for an accommodating posture. But such a path was fraught with danger as well. On the one hand lay the overwhelming power of the existing order of things to punish such a frightful choice. On the other stood the tendency of initial opponents of the status quo who burned with desire for victory so to adopt the same successful approach as their enemies as to become indistinguishable from them—even as they masqueraded their transformation by cloaking themselves with the respectable name of “defenders of the faith”. One can think of the transformation of the Maccabees from martyrs and confessors into typical Hellenistic tyrants in this regard.7
All of which is not to say that tyrants and their propagandists were necessarily “fulfilled” human persons. How could they be, unless one truly believes that their pathway is indeed the route to individual perfection? Plato himself insisted that the tyrant had to be the least contented of all men. In point of fact, the elite of the status quo was permeated with discontent, and not just that expressed by material dissatisfaction. Some members of the elite themselves retreated into the Never-Never Lands of the ineffectual philosophical clubs. Others “went native”, seeking meaning in the local gods of conquered lands; gods whose labors could be construed, through Hellenism, to signify something much more universal than Egyptians or Mesopotamians had ever thought possible. A few even went so far as to adore the strangest god of all, the god of the Jews. But the status quo remained unchanged through it all.
Something “other”, a miracle, the intervention of some god, as Plato indicated in the Timaeus and the final words of The Laws, was needed in order to fight this unchangeable beast. Only the intervention of a force from the outside could inject new strength into sufficiently large numbers of the “dumb” population—which, by this point, included not only ordinary individuals but philosophers as well. Only this could elevate and stiffen men’s awareness of the real Drama of Truth in which they were the actors, and thus strike some fear into the Sophist opposition. Only this would have the means to reach everyone effectively, and therefore teach a “good story about a true story” with eternal significance. Only then would the proponents of “business as usual” be fully stirred to conscious, bitter resistance, and the war between the “words” and “the Word” truly begin in earnest.
In sum, as Werner Jaeger explains, it is the desire for a knowledge of God that would assure a universal knowledge of man that represents the real longing of the Socratics.8
The culmination of this system is the systematic knowledge of values, is the knowledge of God; for God, as Plato taught us, is the measure of all things…The continuation of Plato’s metaphysics in the theology of Aristotle and others of his pupils…proves that behind the significantly vague hints of those final words [of The Laws] there lies the outline of a great theological science which would be the understanding of the highest things in the universe and would be the crown and culmination of all human knowledge. Here there is nothing of the difference between knowledge of reality and mere educational knowledge which some modern philosophers have tried to establish: for in Plato’s there is no possible educational knowledge which does not find its origin, its direction, and its aim in the knowledge of God… And thus, after a lifetime of effort to discover the true and indestructible foundations of culture, Plato’s work ends in the Idea of that which is higher than man, and yet is man’s true self. Greek humanism, in the form which it takes in Plato’s paideia, is centered upon God. The state is the social form given by the historical development of the Greek people to Plato in which to express this Idea. But as he inspires it with his new conception of God as the supreme standard, the measure of all measures, he changes it from a local and temporary organization on this earth, to an ideal kingdom of heaven, as universal as its symbol, the animate gods which are the stars. Their bright shapes are the divine images, the agalmata, with which Plato replaces the human forms of the Olympian deities. They do not dwell in a narrow temple built by human hands; their light proclaiming and manifesting the one supreme invisible God, shines over all the nations of the earth.
The hunt for this knowledge constituted the substance of Plato’s prophetic vision and ensured his readiness to “educate for combat”. It was this hunt that made him and his followers the noblest of ancestors of all who would not accept “nature as is”. And it was this hunt that made their work the providential prelude for what was to come into the world through the work of the Word Incarnate, the Catholic Church, and her crusading, transforming mission.9
As long as we try to conceive his educational system as a state, we feel it strange and unnatural. But if we think of the greatest educational institution of the post-classical world, the Roman Catholic Church, it looks like a prophetic anticipation of many of the essential features of Catholicism… At the opening of the book {The Laws}, he said man was God’s toy. If we take that image together with the remark in the prologue to the law, in which he said that God was the measure of all things, we may think out his real meaning. He means that human life is not worth taking seriously. In reality only God is worth taking seriously, and what is divine in man. But that is the logos, the word by which God moves man. Man at his best, is God’s plaything; and the life he is trying to attain consists in playing so as to please God. If humanity is not seen in that divine perspective, it loses its own independent value. In particular, war and strife are not the really serious things in life. They contain ‘neither play nor culture of any importance: therefore we must try as far as possible to live in peace’—just as we say that one makes war to live at peace. All life should be a festival for God, with sacrifices, songs, and dances, in order to win God’s favor. And yet the duty of resisting the enemy remains, and is inevitable. No one is better fitted to fulfill it than the man who has been trained in that spirit during peacetime. Perhaps those who came closest to fulfilling this ideal were the religious orders of knights in the Middle Ages.
Chapter 2
The Attack of the Word, the Seeds of the Logos, and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo
A. The Attack of the Word
It was during the first decades of that dramatic transformation of the Roman State from Republic into Empire that history’s greatest spiritual and intellectual “curveball” was tossed into the closed cosmos of the Hellenistic World. The Divine Light that Plato said would have to intervene in human events to resolve the seemingly insoluble dilemma of exactly how the individual and society were to aid one another to gain possession of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful did just that: it entered palpably into history, with the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, as Jesus Christ, the God-Man. Through this act, the Eternal Word of God Himself went on the attack. In doing so, He gave to the Socratic hunt for the logos—the essence of things; the life-giving “word” lying behind the mere surface phenomena dogmatized by the sophist—a strength that it could never have had on its own. For, as the masses listening to him recognized, Christ spoke as no mere founder of a school of thought, however didactic his words might be. He spoke as one in full possession of a divine authority.1
Readers might perhaps object that, based upon what I just finished saying in the previous chapter, possession of an aura of divine authority would not have seemed particularly unusual to anyone. After all, if Christ spoke “divinely”, He did nothing more than any divinized Hellenistic monarch would have done. And that would indeed have been true if the God-Man had spoken as an authority that was divine in the pagan sense of that word—that is to say, as the possessor of some admittedly mysterious, sublime, and frightening power that was far beyond the reach of ordinary mortal men, but, ultimately, nevertheless, still part of that same natural world in which lowly human beings were active, alongside more potent “godly” beings.
This was precisely what Christ did not do. Rather, He spoke as one possessing a supernatural authority; that of the omnipotent Creator God, now given flesh to redeem the realm that He Himself had first called forth into being from nothingness. This meant that the character of “the word” that He uttered—the word of the Eternal Word— must necessarily surpass that of a “divinized” this-worldly monarch, who was but a much more powerful part of the kingdom that the Creator of the world had fashioned.
Christ’s action as one possessing omnipotent supernatural authority also meant something else as well: namely, His right to claim the last authoritative word on any given subject of central importance to man and nature. The fact that He took such a claim for granted, without feeling any necessity to spell it out and plead for it like a suppliant in court, can readily be seen throughout his ministry. For, although He was always willing to explain His “word”, He would not subject its merits to a debate with those who refused all openness to accepting it. He was there to teach, to command, and to be obeyed; not to be Himself corrected.
All this stands to reason, because it was only possession of the final and unchangeable word in human affairs that could give to a truly different supernatural authority a serious distinction from any merely worldly “divine” power, and thereby make it worthy of belief. A supernatural authority that was willful and could conceivably alter the firm decisions it revealed to men to guide their path to eternity was seemingly subject to passions that it either could not foresee or simply did not choose to resist. Moreover, a supposedly supernatural word that might always potentially be overridden by yet another, equal or higher pronouncement from an as yet silent ethereal realm—a supernatural word that always had to look over its shoulder in anticipation of possible second-guessing or rebuke from something as powerful or still greater than itself—destroyed its own “omnipotent” pedigree.
In practical terms, a force of this kind would represent only a naturalist vision of an omnipotent, otherworldly authority, and, as such, would be in no way detrimental to the interests of those men determined to ignore its decrees. The entry into history of a King of Kings who either could not or would not tell men what He would think or do tomorrow, and, even worse, whether or not another authority would emerge to contradict or correct Him in the future, would change absolutely nothing whatsoever in their earthly environment. The willful reign of other “divine” monarchs, aided by the purveyors of manipulative words providing them their justifications for the exercise of their power, would never seriously be threatened by a supernatural being whose behavior appeared exactly to mirror their own. They could continue their normal practices in “nature as is” while waiting for new pronouncements from a King of Kings who was “better informed about reality”, or the appearance of yet another messenger from still another supernatural realm with precepts and an “appropriate explanation of strongly felt desires” more to their taste. Under these circumstances, the question that legitimately could be posed by someone like a Plato, excited, in theory, by the concept of a life-changing temporal guidance emerging from a truly “other” source would be easy to predict: “Is that all there is”?
Thankfully, to the everlasting chagrin of the proponents of “business as usual”, the answer to that query, from the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church and in the writings that she attests to tell the true story about Christ, is a resounding “no”. And it is precisely because Christ and Catholicism are truly different from anything else in the experience of mankind that they are the obvious and eternal “sign of contradiction” unfailingly targeted with the greatest fury by everyone accepting “nature as is”.
The final, unchanging, authoritative “word of the Eternal Word” was also a patently nature-loving teaching emphasizing that exultation in Creation that God, the author of love in addition to being the author of the cosmos, wished all men to feel. Appropriately enough, this nature-loving teaching was frequently uttered in the context of a joyful dining experience of the type that Socrates and Plato also cherished, whether in the company of a large crowd of common people at the time of the Sermon on the Mount, at a more private wedding banquet, or in the home of a single, rich, and even highly unpopular urban host. These varied, convivial, dining venues brought together individuals representing a wide range of personalities, talents, and problems, and the God-Man addressed His word to each of them. Each of them, in turn, therefore had to see that what He said was meant to have an impact on all the different aspects of nature that they represented. His redemptive mission was thus revealed “to all who had eyes to see” as one that engaged everyone and everything in a spirit of overflowing love and joy in life; a mission that provided an earthly foretaste of the exuberant eternal banquet in heaven to which all men in the fullness of their diversity were equally called.
On the other hand, Christ’s final, unchanging, authoritative, nature-loving word did not pronounce a blessing upon “appropriate explanations of strongly felt desires”. This word was also a truth-drenched word. The full, joyful life that Christ came to offer was something quite different from that encouragement of unquestioning acceptance of the immediate passions to be found in the writings of sophist rhetoricians skilled at stoking the ambitions of their powerful patrons. For such passions could never be indulged properly, nor could they yield good results, without first understanding their true purpose and their correct relationship with one another.
This understanding had, tragically, been marred by sin—the free rejection by man of God’s plan for His Creation—the very malady that Christ came to provide a medicine to cure. The Word made flesh thus authoritatively taught an awareness of the existence of self-produced evil obscuring man’s vision of the universe around him, causing him blindly to chase after self-destructive, unnatural delusions that he mistakenly perceived to be natural and valuable. The consequent need was for everyone accepting Christ to correct everything that had been corrupted through the embrace of sin and its delusions.
Correction of such a monumental disorder would obviously not be an easy matter. Men could only examine life correctly if they viewed the world through God’s eyes. But seeing the world through God’s eyes could only be realized if individuals themselves were literally “divinized” in Christ, incorporated into the life of the Incarnate Word through acceptance of His message, imitation of His behavior, the eating of His body, and the drinking of His blood. Not only did such a transformation mean that individual men would have to change themselves, but, given their social nature, the entire environment around them as well. For, as Christ’s example clearly indicated, whether an individual liked it or not, even the pain occasioned by sins of others in some way fell upon him as well.
God’s loving Providence ensures that if this difficult work of correction were to be accepted, every individual and social aspect of the splendid Creation presided over by men would shine forth in ever-greater glory. Creation as a whole might then be rendered fit to give man more abundant peace and temporal joy than ever before. And it could provide this greater peace and joy as it aided the human person to attain the one supreme goal that really counted in his and every other individual’s life: an unending and loving union, through Christ, with the Triune God; a reward much more splendid than the blissful earthly existence first promised to Adam; a prize that he would share eternally with other distinct personalities, together with all their own unique perfections, in a resplendent, fraternal, Communion of Saints.
Christ’s call to a correction of an unnatural evil that would thereby offer to all of Creation a more glorious mission and destiny than before Adam’s sin was also extremely militant in character. Correction of this kind was a summons to recognize that the “Kingdom of God”, gained by seeing life in and through Christ, was not the apocalyptic gift of some indefinite “end time” but a reality that had already definitively arrived with the appearance of the Eternal Word made flesh upon the earth. The consequences of the arrival of the Kingdom of God—which was to be very different in character than the uncorrected Kingdom of David that men of an “old Israel” without eyes to see and ears to hear had envisaged—had to be made manifest in everyone’s daily existence... now. This was an immediate call to arms if ever there was one.
The purgation and supernatural transformation of all institutions, public “spaces”, and aspects of daily customary life that such a message entailed was good in and of itself, as a means of praising the one, true, supernatural God. Still, let us remember—especially given modern preoccupation with this point—that that social labor was primarily intended by God to work for the divinization of the individual human persons presiding over nature as its stewards. Society and individual were called upon mutually to complete and divinize one another “in and through the Word”, but for the ultimate advantage of the human person and his union, together with his brothers, with the Triune God. Reason was helpful in aiming man’s mind and heart to attainment of this goal, but grace was the efficacious medicine through which the Platonic circle of individual and social corruption was really to be squared—and the intellect itself mobilized for serious action.
Here was an “either-or” option that turned the sophists’ vision on its head. Isocrates claimed that we must either opt for the Platonic Great Detour that deprives the individual of the obvious joys of earthly life while leading him on a goose chase after an unreachable Truth or his own, common sense based, nature-affirming message. Plato, however, had said that “where divine goods are cherished, human virtues appear of their own accord” and that “those who try only for the latter, lose both”.2 And now Christ confirmed and enhanced that prophetic Socratic vision, telling us that we must either accept the need for a militant correction of a natural world made unnatural through sin, and gain, as individuals, all that earth and heaven could offer in the process, or remain with “obvious, common sense, nature as is”—thereby losing both the temporal convivium provided by this life and the eternal banquet of the next.
If Christ made militant demands on everyone with respect to everything, so that human persons could win both a God-given earth and a God-promised heaven, He also did so with supreme awareness that the life He was calling men to lead is a highly complex matter. That life might be compared to an intricate dance that requires different steps at different times in order to correct, harmonize, and exalt all the innumerable aspects of Creation contributing to its proper choreography. As a divine Person, Christ saw this dance in all its incomparable natural beauty. As a divine Person with a human nature, He knew that limited mortals, marred by sin, had to struggle to dance it well, and that they had to do so in an environment that also had been disfigured by evil. In effect, He knew that individual men had to labor at gaining the fruits of their redemption while at war with themselves, and in a magnificent but dilapidated ballroom studded with obstacles that could easily reduce the intended beauty of the dance of life to a chaotic free-for-all. Hence, His invitation to individual men to become part of His body, to take the corrective and transforming medicine of grace and thereby join in the complex dance of life, came along with the promise of an overwhelming supernatural patience and compassion as they slipped and fell in an inevitably clumsy whirl-a-gig.
Contemplation of this “messy” truth once again leads us back to the fact that Christ did not shirk from inviting to the mysterious dance of life even those whom He knew to be capable of wreaking havoc within it. Such risky guests included men and women generally considered to be the least acceptable members of contemporary society. Even more importantly for the future, they numbered in their ranks the very apostles whom He called to be His closest collaborators. The ability of these colleagues in evangelization to do evil as well as good was obvious to Him from the outset. It was made still more manifest after their call by the mutual jealousy and envy tempting each of them to grasp for recognition as the principal recipient of His supreme love and authority.
Much more will have to be said to flesh out all the dilemmas such problems pose in the chapters to come. At the moment, however, it is necessary simply to note that they become all the more complex and dramatic with the appearance in history of each new and distinct individual person equally capable of embracing good and evil. Indeed, the good and evil actions of fresh personalities in the ballroom of life can be seen as innovative contributions to the choreography of the dance of all to sanctity, capable of either enhancing its beauty or damaging its smooth and harmonious flow. Hence, those already whirling along about the dance floor must need to be ready to adjust their movements accordingly—for the sake of their basic survival on the one hand, as well as for that of their positive personal and fraternal growth and development in obedience to Christ’s message on the other.
In pastoral terms, what Christ demands of those He has chosen at any moment in history is a readiness to accept appropriate change in that changeable earthly realm where permanence in every respect is utterly impossible. Every one of His followers is, in a sense, called to “pick up his pallet and walk”; to flee from paralysis and move on, under the guidance of what probably is best referred to, broadly speaking, as “a pilgrimage spirit”. Even if each and every one of Christ’s disciples is not expected literally to take to the open road, all are certainly called upon to do so with their hearts and minds. This is absolutely necessary, since man’s familiar everyday surroundings, which do not provide the setting for his eternal banquet and his eternal ballroom, can easily enslave him, hindering and destroying his work of self-correction and transformation.
Without the proper pilgrimage spirit, enslavement to the familiar can block the learning of new steps in the complex dance of life. It can make a man perform a clumsy and ever more ugly dance that he may nonetheless persist in calling Christ-like and beautiful. Taken to its extreme, it can ultimately blind one to the very need for corrective change at all. Enslavement of this kind provides an Elysian Field for the machinations of the worshipers of “nature as is” and their word merchant priesthood, who can exploit the average man’s paralysis to work for their own benefit alone. For paralyzed men and women cannot turn to face the many new directions from which these enemies may advance to destroy the followers of Christ—and themselves (in their self-deluding enterprise) in the process.
Let us note that the need for new steps in the dance of life does not prove the existence of some innate willful element in the structure of the universe. Instead, one can say that it demonstrates, first of all, the necessity of finding inventive pastoral strategies for shielding believers from novel unnatural actions on the part of the sinful, and then, secondly, the value of discovering fresh means of assisting the return of the wicked to both natural and supernatural health. All acceptably different steps in the dance of life can thus be seen logically to follow from the message of the Savior as new circumstances demanding novel applications of His teaching arise.
Once again, the difficulties of this call to accept appropriate change as part of the unchanging plan of God are evidenced by the example of the apostles themselves. Their own temptation to nurture a “stand pat” mentality deadly to the pilgrimage spirit is clearly depicted in the eagerness of their designated leaders to build tents on Mt. Tabor at the time of the Transfiguration, and thus avoid the trials, known and unknown, of the unfamiliar and dramatic highway that almost all of the them were literally summoned to trod. Our Lord rejected their request for a permanent encampment. Participation, through Christ, in the transformed life of an eternity with God was the unchangeable and final goal to which the Eternal Word had ordained them. The moral behavior required to reach that unchangeable goal was equally fixed and final. But that fixed and final path towards the unchangeable goal was a highway filled with ruts, detours, road works, and surprises. A new and more dramatic ascent of Mount Tabor was what was demanded of the faithful, and there would be no fixed tents upon its summit until entry into the exceedingly different realm of supernatural eternal life.
Finally, in speaking His final, unchanging, authoritative, nature-loving, compassionate, and militant word, Christ did so in a way that was designed to reach the hearts and minds of all men. Therefore, like Plato on the natural level, the supernatural Savior of mankind could not and would not disdain the use of rhetoric. Instead, He completed the purgative and transformative oratorical work of the Academy, showing rhetoric its proper value and use, enticing the men and women around Him through the telling of a “good story” about His true story. He spoke in gripping parables to crowds, and probably in a similarly approachable fashion to smaller groups at table. He offered people a good story about His true story in all the many ways that human persons were disposed to hear that tale and capable of listening to it. Even the explanations of His teaching that he gave privately to the apostles were a “good story” about the true Christian story of a more direct and more comprehensive kind.
But there is a second crucial reason why the Blitzkrieg launched by the Word could do what no mere natural school of thought properly employing rhetoric would ever have been able to accomplish on behalf of the Truth. This is the fact that the divine commander responsible for that militant assault never disappeared from the battlefield. Jesus Christ was a Plato who remained ever present in His Academy. He undertook the threefold task of individual and social affirmation, correction, and transformation in His physical body for a little more than three decades alone. He actively invited men to participation in His life for merely three short years. But with His death and Resurrection, His teaching and His invitation to participation in the life of God moved ceaselessly onward through His Mystical Body—His Church.
This Church was integrally Christ in a sublime, mysterious way, and pursued His activity in a fashion that human persons could clearly see, hear, and touch. As a result, the truth about the individual, nature as a whole, and their eternal destiny in God could still be taught in a human manner. It could continue to be presented with the same self-assured sense of being the final, unalterable, authoritative, supernatural Word, engaging everyone and everything, with a simultaneous recognition of human potential and weakness, and the necessary pilgrim spirit to confront life in the changing earthly realm. An unchanging affirmation of all of nature, a “boat-rocking” demand for its supernatural correction, and its “lifting up” to a higher destiny could thus continue until the end of time with exactly the same militant but humanly nuanced intensity.
And indeed the Church did emerge as an agmen, an army on the march, with chains of command that swiftly became as elaborate as those of the Roman legion and the Roman state. This was an agmen on the march beyond the boundaries of the old Kingdom of Israel and the Jewish ethnos, and even, in the long run, beyond the borders of the Roman Empire as well. This was an agmen commissioned to carry on the attack of the Word to the very ends of the earth. Powerful and effective word merchants working for the benefit of their “divine” patrons had shut down the debate over the meaning of life and the tools necessary for achieving its promise. But that debate could now be reopened. All the arms capable of revealing the inadequacy of “appropriate explanations of strongly felt desires”, the fraudulence of “fulfillment” as defined by the rhetorician, and the need for a Platonic Great Detour from the path indicated by mere surface judgments in order to enter onto the true highway to perfection could henceforward much more successfully be deployed. For through the Church, all the tools for a new ascent of Mount Tabor lay readily at man’s disposal.
Furthermore, they could be deployed in a way that reached beyond an intellectual elite and into the hearts of the average man and woman; into the hearts of all of us. And, in truth, all of us are “ordinary” at certain moments, perhaps even at almost every moment of each and every day. This is why the parables, in the final analysis, are as necessary for the instruction of the most convinced apostles as they are to the “average” man in the largest crowd of simple folk, and repeatedly so throughout their entire lives. Every human being needs the retelling of the true story in dramatic, gripping ways—including those whose developed minds must hear it in complex intellectual form as well.
One great “if” stood behind the successful propagation of this good and true story. Its telling was very much dependent upon whether or not the Church did her work properly, in full consciousness of her innate strength, which came solely from her life as the continuation of the Eternal Word Incarnate in history. This, alas, proved to be a very shaky “if” indeed. Endowed with the supernatural vigor of Christ, the Church’s practical daily life was, nevertheless, in the hands of limited and potentially very sinful men. Hence, her development of a complete consciousness of what she actually was; of the unchanging character of Christ, the ground of her being; of what exactly she was called upon to do; of what type of activity was required of her to perform that mission; of a courage actually to fulfill her responsibilities, and a capacity to pass all her wisdom and daring down to future generations to imitate: none of this was to be the work of a single or particularly easy day, year, or millennium.
Strictly speaking, that development can never come to an end. The truths that it concerns are supernatural ones, ultimately beyond any total human comprehension. The courage required to do the full work of redemption is superhuman, while the labor involved is constantly subject to disruption in a world whose flux brings repeated attacks of confusion and fear. And, once again, the successful performance of the Church’s tasks can unceasingly be thwarted in a universe where the reality of endless individual free choice may habitually result in deadly, sinful consequences, both personal and social.
Nevertheless, despite all of its haphazard twists and turns, regardless of an irrational and sinful backsliding sometimes even lasting for generations at a time, it is possible to identify a maturation process in the life of the Church and her recognition of the demands of transformation in Christ. This maturation process can be seen to continue down to the present, providing her, along the way, with ever more effective means of triumphing over the illogic and evil constantly threatening to stunt her growth in self-consciousness and mission. Once again, however, the following basic point needs constant emphasis. Although the maturation process is palpable, individual and social awareness of that ever-clearer teaching, and the practical pastoral implementation of an awareness of the implications of the Incarnation of the Word in history, by no means must reflect this growing clarity. Alas, they all too frequently have not done so, and with the enthusiastic complicity of Christians themselves.
In the remainder of this chapter and the whole of the next, we will focus upon both the enormous accomplishments and the failures of perception and behavior of what can be called “Imperial Christendom”: the Christendom, broadly speaking, of the first millennium. A three-fold task lies before us in discussing the impressive exploits and unfortunate shortcomings of those thousand years. We must first of all examine the kind of knowledge the Church and Christians gained through these centuries concerning the Incarnate Word and their relationship and responsibilities to Him. Secondly, we shall need to describe the way in which the life-changing consequences flowing from the physical activity of the Word in history provoked the varied proponents of the acceptance of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” to begin constructing a powerful anti-Christian alliance; an alliance that drew especially heavily on the enormous strength that comes from the love of inertia and the potency of cleverly crafted words in the work of the divinization of mere custom; an alliance whose victory always ensures the triumph of the will. Our final task will be to illustrate just how much the unwillingness of Christians to take increased knowledge of the Word seriously, and to conform their behavior to all of its demands, has marred their harmonious, pilgrim-like participation in the dance of life, thereby mightily assisting the obstructionism of their opponents. Discussion of all three of these topics must, to a large degree, be undertaken in tandem. And that discussion will ultimately focus upon the difficulties of pouring into the “old skins” of Greco-Roman society, the Roman State, and their often stubborn and unyielding “foundation spirit”, the new wine flowing from the Incarnation of the Eternal Word in a makeshift pilgrim shelter in Bethlehem.
B. Stumbling Towards Knowledge of the Word and His Kingdom
Anyone reading the Gospels today would think that Christ, before His Ascension into Heaven, had left a transparently clear militant pilgrim program for his immediate followers to carry out: that of going forth to teach and baptize all nations. And yet the book of the Acts of the Apostles presents us with the picture of a rather bewildered Church leadership, bumbling its way through decisions regarding what it was actually supposed to do next when left on its own. This fundamental document for the study of the first decades of Church History shows us that even after Pentecost and the supernatural enlightenment provided by the Holy Spirit, basic questions involving what we would consider to be the most obvious and essential aspects of the Christian pilgrim mission continued to trouble the apostles and their disciples. Should the evangelical message remain the property of the Jews alone, or was it intended for the Gentiles as well? If it was intended for the Gentiles, was it necessary for them to adhere to the ritual practices of the Old Covenant? Attempts at resolution of these questions lay behind the conflict of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and the early battles over their apostolate in Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Asia Minor, and Greece. In the midst of the tensions they aroused, any willingness to remain open to the complex dance of life and the pilgrim spirit required to respond to the new steps needed to perform it properly appeared as though it might be decisively strangled in its very cradle.
These basic mission questions provided the crucial framework for Christianity’s first growth in self-awareness. Ironically, although the conflicts they engendered were quickly resolved in favor of a pilgrim mission to Gentiles who would indeed not be called upon to live like Jews, this early zeal for the conversion of new peoples was short-lived. Evangelization inside the boundaries of the Empire clearly did take place—through appeal to existing Jewish communities, with the quiet but fervent aid of certain spiritually-awakened members of the Greco-Roman elite, and in many other fashions about which we know precious little. Evangelization outside the borders, after the initial labors of the apostles, their disciples, and men like St. Mari in Persia, apparently soon became the work of pure accident alone. Occasionally, it was due to the influence exercised upon their masters by especially devout slaves, or by an entire captive and enslaved community that remained stubbornly loyal to its Christian beliefs. We hear something of this sort of “foreign” evangelization in the case of Georgia and among the Goths. But for open expressions of the specific kind of missionary zeal so vibrantly reflected in the writings of St. Paul in the first decades after Christ’s Death and Resurrection, one has to wait for the fifth century and the appearance of St. Patrick—a truly self-conscious and determined pilgrim to a pagan Ireland that was never part of the Roman Empire at all.3
Instead, once the initial clarification imparted by the Holy Spirit and the vibrant enthusiasm of the apostolate of Paul and of Peter to the Gentiles began to wear off, the most fundamental “mission question” seemed to be a quite different one. This was the query concerning whether so much human effort for correcting and transforming souls in Christ ought really even to be expended in the first place. After all, was it not the case that a dramatic appearance of the purifying Spirit, or even the return of the Incarnate God Himself, might lay but a moment away? An event of that magnitude would alter the conditions of human life and action both swiftly and completely. With such a prospect in mind, would it not be the Church’s task simply to prepare those who had already been won to the Gospel for imminent, definitive, earth-shattering change—or final judgment? Why put together superfluous plans for an expansion involving energetic action in novel situations that would never have time to bear fruit anyway?
On the other hand, what if the Millennium or the Second Coming were not to be expected for tomorrow or the day after? What if troubling oneself too much about the time and the place of “the end” were itself a dangerous game, reflecting a presumptuous curiosity that was actually displeasing to Christ; a frivolous sport deadly to the task of making men realize that the Kingdom of God was already at hand? Under those circumstances, guidelines for Christian survival and even for possible expansion might eclipse panicky discussions of when and how to circle believers’ wagons round to await the inevitable cataclysm.
Despite many Gospel supports for this second—and true—position, temptations to believe in the imminence of “something big” that could easily render missionary activity pointless were indulged by many if not perhaps the majority of early Christians. Millennial temptations reached their peak with the movement stimulated by Montanus, a self-mutilated priest of Cybele, who lived in the vicinity of Ancyra in Asia Minor in the second century. After becoming a Christian, both he and his prophetess assistants attracted many believers to a site somewhere in present-day Turkey called Pepusa, there to await the looming arrival of the Holy Spirit. So strong was the appeal of this millenarian Montanism that it even appears to have attracted sophisticated members of the Christian intellectual elite into its ranks.4
Thankfully, the Church—as she must, if she is truly Christ continued in time and destined to make the Kingdom of God a life-changing reality—routed this untenable Montanist onslaught. Explanation of the differences between a Montanist and a non-Montanist vision of Christianity, and the grounds for rejecting the one as heretical and accepting the other as truly faithful to the message of Jesus Christ, made an enormous intellectual impact in the second century. It helped mightily to fuel the growth of Christian theology—the absolutely necessary intellectual component to the telling of a good story about the true story of the Savior. Moreover, that deeper, anti-millenarian, theological meditation then inevitably brought with it a treatment of two other concerns: 1) the practical guidance of Christians more and more expecting to live an entire life in a problematic and potentially hostile environment; and, 2) a better understanding of the nature and structure of the Church responsible for governing the catechesis of that believing population.
The importance of the first of these two tasks needs no explanation. The latter work was required because differences in Church structure seem to have been the rule in the first century. Divergent organization was probably owed to the inevitable problems caused by the Blitzkrieg of the earliest wave of evangelization, the swift disappearance from the scene of the apostolic founders of the new local churches, and the well-known efforts of various opposing groups to destroy or co-opt them. Hence, the existence of base-oriented communities, some where power was firmly in the hands of men we would call “ordained”, and others where it rested with charismatic lay prophets and prophetesses. Hence, also, the simultaneous presence of so-called monarchical churches, dominated by a given Greco-Roman city’s chief priest: a bishop.5
Practical labor on many of these issues had already begun before the Montanist controversy. Much of that work is as unknown to us as most early evangelization. Once the foundations for such practical activity were questioned, however, a more serious theoretical examination of the underpinnings of what might have been a merely “felt” Faith was unavoidable. This inevitably brought with it a more profound realization of the day-to-day consequences emerging from acceptance of the life that comes from Christ and in Christ alone.
Deeper thinkers saw that there could be no accurate guidance of the individual, or better understanding of the nature and character of the Church guiding him, without further investigation of who, exactly, Christ—the ground, model, and “fuel” for all Christian action—actually was. If Christ were somehow an enemy of the material realm, then the proper behavior of the Christian would indeed involve wholehearted flight from the world and from the flesh. If, however, working out one’s salvation were based upon what did, in fact, take shape from the decisions of the early Church concerning Trinitarian and Christological doctrines, a different kind of life affirming the value of Creation would be required.
Similarly, if Christ loathed the material world, His Church would be obliged to flee from the thought of her own physical organization. She would inevitably become a much more inward and purely spiritual force, her “body” being nothing more than a symbol for the future heavenly community of Christians. On the other hand, the more that one accepted the idea that Christ was a real man with a real body pleasing to a God who loved and wished to redeem His physical Creation, the more a Church possessing a material structure analogous to His own would be appreciated. With this appreciation would also come greater concern for the unity of that body with its source in Christ, His apostles, and the episcopal successors chosen directly through the election of the latter; a confirmation of the need for the existence of a monarchical Church of the kind already mentioned above. With it would emerge also a more profound interest in that Church’s cohesive bodily union, and a greater outrage at the thought of “dividing Christ”—whether this might be through laity and priests separating themselves from their chief priest—the bishop—or bishops cutting themselves off from their fellow shepherds.
Furthermore, one could not focus on the exalted nature of the Incarnate Word and the magnificence of His redemptive sacrifice without thinking both of the horrible human flaws calling forth that Incarnation and that Redemption in the first place as well as the urgent need to deal with them now that the Kingdom of God was definitely “at hand”. This meant that deeper study of Christ and Christ’s Church intensified a consciousness of a continuing battle with sin in the daily life of individuals; a battle that would not be brought to a swift and happy conclusion by the imminent end of the world as a whole. Such battle awareness also fed the spirit of militant “crusade” against whatever personal and social behavior assisted a spirit of sinful indulgence and thereby mocked the graciousness and patience of God’s redemptive action.
In sum, historical efforts to grasp the character and demands of the Christian mission soon merged together with many other profound questions: What must the individual do to live his daily life properly? How should the Church guiding him be structured? Who was the Christ of history and what was the “body” He left behind? What was the nature of the sin calling forth the Incarnation and the terrible sacrifice of the Word made flesh? How extensive was damage caused by rejecting God’s plan for man? How and with what tools might that damage be repaired? And, finally, what kind of spirit of urgency and crusade on the part of both individual and society was needed for effective damage control?
Under the impact of such queries, Christian thinkers gradually saw that believers were called to a much deeper and laborious transformation of the inner and the outer man than anything envisaged by the rituals of the Mosaic Law. Guidance of this transformation meant nothing less than the creation of a comprehensive system of Christian education; a Christian paideia that had to be as well organized as that secular paideia held in honor by the elite of the Greco-Roman world. And the attempt to promote such a paideia in a closed society that already thought that it had all the answers that it needed to live life properly entailed demonstrating that it possessed the hallmarks that the outside world expected from a respectable educational program: an ancient pedigree; a set of documents that its students must consult; and accredited teachers to interpret just what it was that these documents signified.
Formation of a Christian paideia of this sort was the work of the men we call the Greek, Latin, and Syrian Fathers. Systematic study of their labors is the task of Patrology, a term popularized by Johannes Gerhard in his book, Patrologia, of 1653. Patrology is divided into examination of a variety of writers: the Apostolic Fathers, namely, those who had direct contact with either the Twelve or St. Paul and lived through the beginning of the second century; the Apologists, much of whose defense of Christianity was inspired by the battle against the Millenarians and Montanists discussed above; and, finally, the Ante-and Post-Nicene Fathers, whose line continues down to the time of St. John of Damascus (c. 676-749), and whose teachings best explain to us the whole of the maturation process characterizing the entire imperial age. It is important to note, in passing, that some of the truly great men whose meditations are crucial to an understanding of the growth of a Christian paideia—impressive figures like Tertullian (c.160-c.220), the first of the major African thinkers, who apparently became a Montanist—are denied the title of “Father” because of their association with heretical ideas or groups. Such theologians, despite their enormous significance, are, for better or for worse, commonly referred to merely as “ecclesiastical writers”.6
Christian proof of their possession of a body of sacred texts representing the fulfillment of a vision more venerable than anything Greek or Roman—the creative program of a God existing before and outside nature, and first revealing Himself to the acceptably ancient Jews—was already offered by the time of the Apologists. But everyone agrees that the third century was the era of the Great Leap Forward in the full creation of this Christian paideia, both in the Greek and Latin-speaking parts of the Empire. It was in the 200’s that the Catechetical “School” of Alexandria began seriously to function, gaining its most famous representative in Origen (c. 185-253): a passionate, Achilles-like “thinker of Christian thoughts and doer of Christian deeds” long overdue for poetic celebration on the part of modern Catholics. This student of Plato and Neo-Platonism was the creator of ecclesiastical Greek. His work was to be of overriding influence not just in Egypt, but also—due to his lengthy sojourn in Caesarea (232-244) and the achievements of the students who came to learn from him there—in Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor as well. It was really only through Origen’s labors that the language and categories essential to discovering and explaining most basic and complex theological questions—even his own manifold errors of genius—were developed.
Hostile reactions to the vibrant Origen were inevitable, with gifted opponents rapidly becoming active in the very same regions that were influenced by this theological giant. One highly important center of criticism of Origen eventually emerged in Syria and its great metropolis, Antioch, although his opponents were active everywhere, Egypt included. Their greatest venom would be felt centuries after this brilliant theologian’s death, when he was no longer capable of defending himself against assault. Attacks upon him were often uncharitable and sometimes highly dangerous theologically in their own right, about which more anon.
But opposition to Origen, sound or exaggerated, was by no means his opponents’ sole claim to fame. Places like Antioch were to contribute positively to Christian doctrinal and pastoral growth as well, particularly in the realms of philology (the study of written language in its historical context), scriptural exegesis, and homiletic expertise, counting men like St. John Chrysostom among their later, distinguished “alumni” (c. 349-407).
Meanwhile, in Africa, Tertullian, the creator of ecclesiastical Latin, was also active at this time. Despite his apparent conversion to Montanism, Tertullian’s work provided the linguistic framework through which Western Christianity could grow, theologically, eventually finding both points of contact and serious contrast with what was being discussed in the eastern part of the Empire. Third-century Africa offered the Christian world the work of St. Cyprian (200/210-258), Bishop of Carthage, as well. The Africans in general were more interested in discussing the practical problems of living the Christian life in a sinful world than in that final transformation in Christ offered to the blessed in heaven that so captured and stirred Origen’s Platonic spirit. Rome sneezed whenever Carthage caught cold, lending the budding intellectual activity of the Eternal City the flavor--both positive and negative—of the pragmatic African approach in this difficult springtime of theology.
Different though these Egyptian, Syrian, and Afro-Roman emphases might be, their protagonists were united with each other and with early believers in general by one thing that marked them off decisively from the vast majority of their non-Christian counterparts. This was a sense of the immense divide separating truth and error, the need passionately to embrace the first and reject the latter, and the dramatic practical consequences of the either-or choice that lay before man. Once again, it was not an “appropriate explanation of strongly felt desires” that interested them. It was concern for the essence of things—what they really were in and of themselves, and what a life in union with them demanded from mankind in terms of a changed daily behavior—that guided the thought and action of all these heroic teachers and their followers alike. Settling for anything else, for them, was tantamount to introducing tainted meat and sour wine into the banquet of life. It meant wearing blinders while whirling through the magnificent dance to eternal bliss.
Christian Fathers and Church leaders thus began, in differing degrees, to understand that the massive catechetical enterprise they were undertaking underlined the holistic character of all existence. Many of them therefore came to see precisely what was asserted at the beginning of this chapter: that nature in its entirety is a gracious gift of God designed to work harmoniously to fulfill the divine plan. This they understood to be essential to the message of the Savior, along with the need to separate out nature’s true meaning and function from its sinful misuse. Christ’s mission of lifting up the hearts of individuals to grasping and attaining their essential supernatural goal was more and more recognized as one involving a central, positive role for each and every aspect of natural society and the natural world as well.
Such being the case, most Fathers and prelates realized that the need to address day-to-day life inside the Greco-Roman ecumene, and the teachings of the Greco-Roman paideia guiding its governing elite. This growing awareness taught them that alongside the clear evils of classical thought and behavior were real merits reflecting a certain appreciation of the goods of God’s Creation—“Seeds of the Logos”, as the Apologist, St. Justin Martyr (103-165), called them—that they, too, must continue to cherish.
Moreover, it clarified for them the still more astonishing fact that Christians could actually nurture and bring to fruition these non-Christian seeds better than their initial pagan supporters. Their argument in this regard was analogous to that of Plato with respect to the relationship of the rhetoricians to philosophy. Pagans, they insisted, lacked the fullness of divine light, and were incapable of completely understanding even the natural goods they claimed to love, much less of placing them in their proper perspective and hierarchy of importance. What Socratic philosophy was to rhetoric, Christianity was to Greco-Roman Civilization as a whole.
If secular history were in some way also part of God’s initial plan, then, given this truth, Christianity had a second means of indicating a pedigree more ancient than that of Greco-Roman paideia—one that even surpassed its being rooted in the venerable Jewish experience. It could show that all that was natural came from the hands of the “Christian” God and was therefore intended to be Christian from the very outset. It was for this reason that Christianity alone could fulfill the brilliant promise of ancient history for the benefit of both the Church and the as-yet uncomprehending world around her. Christians, as the Apologists already argued, were not only not the enemies of the Greco-Roman ecumene but in fact the sole men who could keep its best and most ancient achievements alive, preventing them from contradicting and destroying one another. They were the only individuals who could truly bring them all, together, to unity and full fruition. It is worth quoting the entirety of the relevant passage in St. Justin Martyr to illustrate this straightforward claim:7
We have been taught that Christ is the firstborn of God and we have declared that he is the Logos, of whom every race of man were partakers, and those who lived according to the Logos are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists, as among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them.
Whatever all men have uttered aright is the property of us Christians. For we worship and love next to God and Logos, that which is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since it was even for us that he became man, that he might be a partaker of our sufferings and bring us healing. For all writers through the implanted seed of the Logos which was engrafted in them, were able to see the truth darkly, for the seed and imitation of a thing which is given according to the capacity of him who receives it is one thing, and quite a different one is the thing itself of which the communication and the imitation are received according to the grace from God.
For whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the Logos. But since they did not know the entire Logos, which is Christ, they often contradicted themselves. And those who by human birth were more ancient than Christ, when they tried to consider and prove things by reason, were brought before the tribunals, as impious persons and busybodies. And Socrates, who was more zealous in this direction than all of them, was accused of the very same crimes as ourselves. For they said that he was introducing new divinity and did not consider those to be gods whom the state recognized…But these things our Christ did through his own power. For no one trusted in Socrates so as to die for this doctrine but in Christ who was partially known even by Socrates, for he was and is the Logos who is in every man.
The labor involved in bringing about a transformation in Christ can be imagined with reference to rhetoric and the exalted role assigned to the manipulation of words by Greco-Roman paideia. If this were already a difficulty for the Socratics, what could be more representative of the seemingly unnatural old skin into which the new wine of transforming Christian Faith and Grace now had to be poured? Here was a discipline whose historical development led to a limitation of human horizons to the concerns of the moment alone, and prohibited use of the data of life as a springboard for grave and long-lasting meditation. Here could be found a force that had historically encouraged an obsession with that petty, changing stuff of existence that, from the Christian standpoint, was intrinsically unhealthy—a source of psychological illnesses aiding sinful man’s penchant for fleeing from the exalted and permanent to the vulgar and ephemeral. Here, in the theories of the rhetoricians, one found guidelines for preventing the individual and society from ever gaining insight into their specific mistakes, much less correcting them and conceiving a destiny more elevated and fulfilling than the passions of the moment indicated. Through their guiding principles one obtained instructions for prohibiting the hunt for a medicine which would cure individual and social sickness and nourish a healthier and ultimately much more satisfying life on earth that was also of immense assistance to one’s passage to eternal bliss. Here, in short, was a recipe for burial in familiar custom deadly to any kind of pilgrimage through life, both literal and figurative.
Still, this totally unacceptable rhetorical spirit was passed down together with the potentially valuable rhetorical skills that Plato himself had not only come to appreciate but also to recognize the need for philosophy to understand and perfect. Yes, any attempt to “dive into” a rhetorical discipline dominated by an evil spirit was dangerous. Yes, the daily experiences one generally had had with this, as with all the pillars and institutions of ancient life, were negative, repellent ones. But we have already recounted how Christ Himself sat down to banquet with men that “proper society” had solid rational grounds for studiously avoiding…when His purpose was to convert them. And we have already repeatedly indicated that He Himself cultivated rhetoric to be able to tell all the varied kinds of people inhabiting the world a good story about His true story.
Ironically, similar difficulties could emerge even when contemplating use of that Greek Socratic philosophical thought that was highly critical of ancient rhetoric and its obsession with the power of mere words. For how far, really, might one travel down the Platonic pathway praised and developed by Origen and his disciples in Alexandria and elsewhere, with their exploration of some of the Academy’s more fanciful themes? Had this not led them into certain speculations concerning reincarnation and universal salvation deemed destructive to the substance of the Faith by everyone who remained free of the Platonic spell? Moreover, was it not possible that such a philosophizing of belief created exaggeratedly simplistic hopes for the ease of transformation in Christ? Perhaps Origen’s Platonic-inspired and high-minded dreams of divinization in heaven obscured a sound estimation of the more mundane but fundamental problem of how to awaken Christian men to fight the relentless temptations of sin coming from the immediate world around them—not to speak of the real possibility of their eternal damnation.
On the other hand, was it not possible that failure to follow in Origen’s direction would also risk a serious loss—the loss of the broader and more complete picture of the connection of the Old and New Testaments necessary for a proper understanding of the call to the transformation of nature and the deification of the individual? It was this connection that emerged so grandly from the application to Scripture of the allegorical, Platonic, Alexandrian method. Such a failure could throw Christianity into the hands of enemies of Origen from the rival school of Antioch. And at least some of the students of this “anti-Academy” cultivated a literal scriptural exegesis that pulled supernatural spiritual concerns down to that purely earthly realm of linguistic and historical analysis so easily manipulated by the ancient rhetoricians for their own arbitrary, uninspiring, and basically naturalistic “business as usual” purposes.
If rhetoric and philosophy were potentially troublesome, what about the petty, practical difficulties emerging from the painful effort to confront the gamut of customs taken for granted by one’s pagan neighbors at each and every moment of daily life within the Greco-Roman ecumene? What would the practical effect of hunting for “Seeds of the Logos” among these practices actually be? Would it not entail an opening to the influence of powerful, ingrained beliefs and modes of behavior that might actually subvert and ultimately destroy the Christian ideal that was supposed to transform them? Was it not better to flee from such dangers for once and for all? A model for a flight of this kind was certainly close at hand. One could embrace the life of renunciation of the world advocated by those teachers of the monks of Egypt and Syria, active from the late 200’s onwards: men like St. Antony (c. 251-356), whom we call the Desert Fathers.
But a life of monastic renunciation was not without its potent dangers either. Ascetic emphasis upon the hard individual labor required to avoid hell and become transformed in Christ could be a recipe for despair for the average man. Moreover, it could blind a monk puffed up by the virtuous character of his flight from urban centers of imperial corruption to the deeper sins of the individual heart, with personal pride at the top of the list. It could also conceivably divert attention away from the urgent need to change that sinful and oppressive pagan society that most people would never have the slightest chance to escape from anyway. This society might at any moment strike violently even at the splendid isolation of the monks themselves. Besides, the life of renunciation might hide the truth that the monk in his monastery could also develop attachments to place and routine similar to those experienced by men still active in “the world”, and that these needed to be crushed with a similar fervor. Then again, historical events would soon indicate that a number of heroes of the life of renunciation were regularly tempted to “cash in” on their reputation for holiness. All too many of them used their air of sanctity among believers as a tool for becoming active participants in political and social affairs. Wandering about the Empire, they sought and gained the unsavory but all too
familiar rewards that “nature as is” could give in the form of worldly power and fame.8
Meditation upon such topics also brought with it questions regarding whether or not the idea of fighting sin and “working out one’s salvation”, either through flight from the world or participation in it, placed too great an emphasis upon man’s freedom as opposed to the grace required to make the individual pleasing to God. Perhaps, some thinkers argued, the doctor’s aid was everything and the patient’s cooperation insignificant. Perhaps that agmen called the Church was meant only for those who recognized that they were personally incapable of offering anything useful either to themselves or to her communal march through history by means of their own labor, and that they were merely passive recipients of her supernatural gifts. And then again, even if individual cooperation did play a role in this enterprise, just how many times could a man who was either in or out of the world leave the path of rectitude, return to a life of sin, and still be welcomed back to take a fresh and credible part in the Christian enterprise? Maybe the fruits of transformation in Christ were intended only for athletes of the Faith who never broke rank after enlistment, with weaklings cashiered mercilessly, thrust into the outer darkness to live out the rest of their hopeless existence.9
C. The Mystical Body of Christ and the Sacred Imperial Order
In short, each reflection emerging from the basic question of how to function in a world that might not imminently be approaching its end brought still further and often deeper considerations along with it. Inexhaustible these might indeed seem, even without asking how the individual Christian and the Church as a whole might maneuver successfully through the minefield presented by the most powerful “Seed of the Logos” in their ancient environment—the Greco-Roman polis. This institution was by nature disposed to treat any independent-minded individual or society with deep suspicion. It had already proved to be an obstacle to philosophical hunters of the logos, with the execution of Socrates being the preeminent case in point, as underlined by St. Justin Martyr. The polis of a pagan society with only a natural frame of reference had to be troubled by the proclamation of a supernatural institution that transcended local and ethnic boundaries. It had to be especially disturbed when such an institution also possessed a body and structures more and more parallel to its own administrative organs and legions. Moreover, the Roman State’s metamorphosis during the first centuries of the Christian era looked, at least in theory, as though it would strengthen its hostility to another body in its midst—namely, the Mystical Body of Christ.
Let us examine this Roman political transformation in some detail, by first noting that the imperial order as created by Augustus took the form of the tightrope-walking act that we call the Principate (from princeps senatus, first man of the Senate, a traditional title held by Octavian). This was a Bonapartist mélange whose proper functioning required the active collaboration of the highly conservative senatorial-equestrian oligarchy in Rome, along with its aristocratic equivalent in the provinces. It sought to rule through as many of the old republican forms as possible and thus hide the truth that the real backbone of the system was the support that the commander-in-chief, the imperator, could always count upon from the army. Tricky and occasionally explosive as the imperial organism from the very outset clearly was, its correspondence to an existing historical need meant that it basically managed to work for two centuries and more: an impressive achievement for any temporal structure whatsoever.10
Armed force as the real mainstay of the regime finally became obvious in the course of the third century, due to succession squabbles, the impact of Persian and barbarian incursions, disastrous economic disruption, and other unsettling contemporary developments. By the time the situation was brought under control again in the 270’s, the Roman State was transformed into that quite different institution that historians refer to as the Dominate. This name came from the increased work and quasi-totalitarian clout given by it to the emperor and his central governmental organs. The Dominate did what it did—namely, dominate—openly and unabashedly. Its taxes and other exactions made the innate aspiration to omnipotence of the Roman State under both its republican as well as its imperial forms infinitely more vivid to its subjects than anyone had previously dreamed possible. Under its sway, the power of the older aristocracy, in Rome and in the other cities of the Empire, was considerably weakened. New men, often from lower classes, replaced the representatives of the venerable, conservative elite. The latter sometimes grudgingly cooperated with the Dominate. If not, they retired to indifference on their vast country estates, where many members of an overtaxed and conscripted peasantry sought potential refuge under their still powerful protection from the crushing demands of the new State authorities.11
Christian problems with the Principate stemmed chiefly from the government’s erratic approach to this novel religion. Officially, Rome labeled Christianity a superstition along the lines of the ancient cult of Dionysius, thereby suggesting that it was potentially capable of encouraging the vicious anti-social behavior associated with the Bacchae. In practice, this translated into a basically friendly indifference, punctuated by periods of persecution, generally brought on by non-governmental groups insisting upon the reality of Christian political and moral vice. Writers from the Apologists onwards took the State’s general unwillingness to hunt down believers whom it did not really deem to be serious disturbers of the peace as a major proof that Roman Law might itself be another “Seed of the Logos’; a valuable natural tool whose evils merely reflected the illogical or sinful actions of individuals failing to live up to its innately more sensible and noble principles. Still, victims of the Principate there were, and the Acts of the Martyrs joined the accounts of the heroic deeds of the monks of the desert and the paideia of the Church Fathers in enriching the variety of the good stories told about the true story, its progress, and its tragedies in the imperial era.
Vexations from the transformed system were potentially much more substantive. The Dominate’s divinization of the State, represented most vividly by “emperor worship”, was more rigid under its aegis than through the earlier Augustan settlement. Its rough army spirit and an accompanying willingness to appeal to force to clear away all obstacles in its path were more blatant, allowing for much more consistently brutal policies than under the Principate. Anything was possible with such a patent justification of the rights of brawn. On the other hand, the new men replacing a conservative civilian aristocracy filled with the pompous self-assurance of the old paideia brought with them a “pilgrim” willingness to experiment with society and social beliefs. This, too, could ultimately lead to anything. But that “anything” also perhaps included an opening to the Church more positive in character than the mere toleration she often experienced in the Principate centuries.12
Unquestioning acceptance of benevolence on the part of the new imperial government would have been foolhardy. Signs of friendship for Christianity arising from the Dominate could, after all, be the product of ignorance or purely willful opportunistic considerations. They might reflect a failure to understand what the new Faith really entailed in the way of changed human political and moral behavior. They could therefore be founded solely or chiefly upon a conviction that a legalized Christianity might prove to be somehow useful, so long as its spiritual energy could be channeled to the service of the openly totalitarian system under construction, which maintained an underlying, unchanging acceptance of “nature as is”.
Still, a gruff dismissal of marks of State benevolence would mean rejection of the help of a natural tool that St. Peter and St. Paul themselves had both praised and exploited for the benefit of evangelization. Cooperation with the imperial authorities would offer obvious and immense assistance to the transformation in Christ of those public “spaces” so crucial in the work of taming open temptation to individual sinful behavior. Moreover, it would be a gratuitous insult to the role that the imperial government had already played at most times and in most places in providing protection for the Christian population from the animosity of demagogues and mobs. Support for a “libertarian” vision in the Greco-Roman ecumene would have been tantamount to unleashing forces ensuring the unregulated slaughter of the believing population.
As with all other natural phenomena, the only proper and realistic approach that the Church authorities could take under such circumstances would be the admittedly difficult one of grateful but cautious acceptance; the kind of attitude that would gain for her the advantages the State could provide while saving her the freedom to criticize its innate pagan flaws and its individual human abuses. Openness to the friendship of the State flowed automatically from acceptance of the teaching of the Word about the value of all the tools of created nature. But the fullness of that teaching required that the Church retain the ability to criticize, correct, lift up, and transform the State in Christ, harmonizing its mission together with that of other natural forces that she alone could appreciate fully and place within the proper hierarchy of values. As always, a pilgrimage spirit open to the risks of the dance of life necessarily had to work together with a complete docility to the Word, both supernatural and natural. This need could not help but fuel a yet more militant hunt for a still more profound knowledge of who that Word made flesh actually was, how the Church that mystically continued His body in time had to be structured to reflect His true character, what, exactly, she was called upon to teach for the salvation of the individual and the guidance of the world in which he danced his way to sanctity, and how, precisely, Christians could put that teaching and the medicine of grace to practical use—in union with the imperial Roman State.
D. The Grand Coalition of the Status Quo
Men of all classes hungry for more out of life than the unquestioned gratification of immediate passions and the “appropriate explanations of strongly felt desires” justifying such indulgence were clearly ready to listen to the message of the Mystical Body of Christ. These included members of the governing elite itself, who, possessing all that could be owned on the natural plane, were perhaps more aware than any other group in the Greco-Roman ecumene of the inability of the existing system to satisfy the demands of the human mind and heart. Many honest seekers of wisdom from every strata of society could see that non-Christian philosophical “wise men” spoke to them ultimately only as representatives of different and narrow “schools of thought”—some decent, some cynical, but all ultimately crippled by an inert and smug society’s practical treatment of the hunt for truth as a frivolous parlor sport. All such schools of thought were active because none really was willing or able to exclude the others, thereby reflecting that terrible, deeply rooted, and paralyzing sense of “going nowhere” that a world sealed off from the full embrace of its Creator inevitably must display.
Religious wisdom transcending philosophy was required to break out of this crippling straitjacket. This explains why the “hunt for the highest God” gained more and more active participants, especially as the fortunes of the Empire tumbled in the third century, A.D. The Church, with her supernatural, authoritative, “final word” on God and man, eagerly offered these spiritually hungry truth hunters a tantalizing game that was quite different from anything they had previously encountered in the jungle of Hellenistic life. She did not “suggest”. She knew. She made it clear that she knew. And her followers were ready to die in defense of that patent and life changing knowledge.13
From the standpoint of anyone willingly wrapped up in the familiar ancient rhetorical cocoon, however, the militant attack of the Incarnate Word could only mean that a revolutionary Monster had entered into their eternally frozen but peaceable kingdom. This Christian beast rejected the very idea of “closure” for closure’s sake. Yes, it did tell men that they had to “move on”, but not under the old rules; certainly not by merely accepting existing natural conditions as unalterable givens. Instead, it informed them that they had to “move on” by bringing the Kingdom of God into all the closed calculations of the existing Establishment, thereby transforming the entirety of life in Christ. If the Socratic hunters for the higher “logos” wreaking havoc with “the appropriate explanation of strongly felt desires” were already dangerous, the agmen we call the Mystical Body of Christ, with its universal, popular “touch”, endowing it with the capacity for telling a good story about a true story, was infinitely worse.
For this crime the Church-Monster had to be destroyed. Hence, the emergence of a powerful but internally tense alliance dedicated to the maintenance of the existing order of things that I should like to call the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo. Although never a completely conscious union, either now or later, this force would eventually come to include in its ranks all men and women who, for immensely varied reasons, were contented with the old rules of “closure” and were repelled by boat-rocking rabble-rousers who would not allow men to “move on” to “get the job of real life done”.
During the imperial era, the number of participants in this federation was already legion, with the Jewish opponents of Christianity opening the subscription list. Jewish leaders, like the Greeks and Romans, saw themselves as representatives of something old, venerable, and intellectually sound—qualities they in no way attributed to the “new” religion. Despite the great intellectual work done by Jewish inhabitants of cities such as Alexandria, no Platonic-inspired allegorical reading of the Old Testament with worldwide implications was to play a long-term role in their calculations. The Jewish rabbinic establishment condemned Christianity at the so-called Council of Jamnia, soon after the destruction of the Temple in 79 A.D. It also condemned most of its own prophetic history in the process.
One of the new religion’s greatest crimes in rabbinic eyes was that universalism that stood in stark contrast to an ever more parochial post-Temple Judaism. Emphasis upon the evils of that revolutionary universalism was not only valuable for protecting oneself against the prophetic teachings that an open mind would have seen to be an integral part of the Jewish Tradition and a direct road to the Christian vision. It was also useful as grounds for poisoning reactions to the new Faith on the part of pagan populations and the Roman authorities. After all, everyone shaped by a parochial mindset could unite in considering such a cosmopolitan monster to be dangerous—not just Jews.
Following closely behind the Jews came the body of men whom we broadly call the Gnostics. These were people who rejected all thought of the goodness of nature or the possibility that nature’s flaws were susceptible to any correction, whether natural or divine. Judaism, with its parochial vision of a good Creator God, was already a problem for Gnostics. Christianity, in teaching that that God took flesh of woman to redeem His fallen Creation and extend a general offer of an eternal resurrection of wicked bodies, was infinitely more loathsome. Gnosticism was particularly dangerous to budding Christianity through the form given it by the Persian thinker, Mani (c. 216-276). Mani taught his followers to co-opt the new Faith and use its sacred texts and language to instruct men on the need to flee all contact with matter in search of the hidden Gnostic God. Manichean principles were thus rhetorically “deconstructionist” in character, and destined to prove particularly successful in confusing and subverting the beliefs of the proponents of the most nature-friendly force in human history. They provided new and effective guidelines for all who were eager to put obstacles in the path of the life-changing message of the Word because they loathed nature and did not believe that it could be corrected and transformed.14
Violently different from the Gnostics, but equally anti-Christian, were a wide array of pagan opponents from everyday imperial society. Their opposition generally took the shape of a closed-minded and very angry dismissal of the new religion on the basis of the infallibility of tradition and custom alone. In fact, at least to begin with, the bulk of Greco-Roman society seems to have been largely at one in reviling the obstinate Christians as an incomprehensible and alien force, neither pagan nor Jewish, that had to be eliminated from influence over a truly human society. An army of “common sense” crusaders on behalf of the founding customs of whatever the society in question—all of them confirming the raw pagan rejection of Christianity as the enemy of cut-and-dry “business as usual”—thus took the field inside the borders of the Empire.
This included, as one might expect, the tribe of word merchants that was active in both literary and legal spheres. Contemporary rhetoricians, such as the highly admired but painfully pedantic Marcus Fronto (c.100-170), Marcus Aurelius’ tutor and friend, firmly called for political action against a Faith that demanded a substantive correction of personal and community belief and behavior. It is interesting to note that if we depended on many of the great men of letters of this era for our understanding of the life of the Empire, we might actually conclude that there was no such phenomenon as Christianity that was active in it at all. For numerous rhetoricians conducted their anti-Christian campaign without even mentioning their religious opponent by name, horrified as they were to acknowledge the reality of such an offensive intrusion into the Greco-Roman cultural realm. In fact, they tried to conjure away the barbarian threat in the same manner, thus demonstrating that unwillingness to deal with new steps in the dance of life can be deadly to one’s physical as well as spiritual health.15
Also entering the fray were many scholars, scientists, philosophers, and statesmen. Admittedly, some of these expressed perfectly rational grounds for taking umbrage with a Christianity that was itself only just learning how to explain its message in the first place. The great physician, Galen (129-200/217), for example, articulated one common learned apprehension: the fear that Christian adoration of a God freely choosing to create the universe brought an arbitrary “willfulness” into an ordered cosmos that had been freed from the crudities of the most vulgar pagan myths through the work of generations of Greco-Roman thinkers; the fear, in short, that Christianity meant what William of Ockham (c. 1288-c. 1348) and his followers would much later suggest that it taught.16
Of course, these critiques missed the heart of the Christian message: the unchanging and innate truth, justice, and love at the center of God’s plan. They also ignored what has been noted above: namely, that the justification of an earthly order whose divinized princes mirrored the character of the gods actually did require, in practice if not in theory, precisely the sort of willful divinity that many philosophers reproved and that the Christians were the first to abhor. And yet this was the very order that Galen, whatever his personal self-delusions about its true nature might have been, actually participated in and accepted as unquestionable.
It is quite understandable, on the natural level, that concerned pagans would wonder why something that struck them as totally “new” should be so swiftly accepted to the detriment of what was old and venerable. And as we have seen, the Apologists took this complaint seriously as early as the second century, responding to it in innovative and convincing ways. Moreover, the fear that Christians, with their eyes fixed on eternal salvation, were not shouldering their share of the burdens of a public life providing an ordered existence that benefited them as well as everyone else, is by no means an eccentric one. Many Greco-Roman critics uttered this latter complaint, including the most famous early enemy of the Christians, Celsus, the great contemporary of the Apologists, in a work called The True Word. Irritation over a Christian failure to participate in the life of the State also may explain a number of the fitful persecutions under the Principate, such as that of the Emperor Domitian (81-96), who severely punished suspected believers among civil authorities for their manifest dereliction of duty.17
Early defenders of Christianity eagerly addressed complaints of this kind, pointing out that the sole reason for their apparent lack of participation in government was the pagan sacrifices that active public life required them to make. Beyond that, however, they insisted that the Empire only remained alive and strong because of the prayers and the moral strength of Christian believers. It was their Faith alone that gave to the concept of “public order” the respect for truth and morality that it needed to become both substantive and effective in securing the “common good”.18 In fact, as St. Augustine’s complaints about pagan behavior later indicated, Christians were unconvinced that the painfully obvious self-serving opportunism of actively participating Roman “patriots” was a blessing for the State in any way whatsoever.19
Still, one finds even in more serious pagan arguments a strong tone of exasperated resentment over the intensity and sheer audacity of the Christian project. Educated gentlemen concerned for the proper performance of the pagan rituals handed down by tradition were just as convinced that these should be “kept in their place” and not translated into any “immoderate” religious “passion” or “exaggerated” love for their “deeper teaching”. Such a passion and love could enter into all aspects of an ordered life where everything had already been hung securely on its accepted peg, move its comfortable furniture around, and thereby become terribly divisive and disruptive. Christianity brought such divisive and disturbing passion into daily existence. And the fact that this Faith was taught by fishermen and slaves thinking that they actually had something to add to the study of God and man undertaken by respectable members of society made the “uppity” character of its revolutionary enterprise still more repellent. Knowledge that even members of the senatorial aristocracy had been won over to such impassioned madness proved that Christianity was not only detestable in theory and practice, but also a kind of disease that was “catching”.20
In short, the idea that the foundations of Greco-Roman life could be re-examined and corrected was blasphemous in the extreme. The idea that members of one’s own class would engage in such a re-examination along with the men who washed their feet, mined their minerals, and could not even physically look “upwards” at their superiors without impudence was nauseating. Even those finest of the late ancient philosophical “hunters for the highest God” that we call the Neo-Platonists wanted to rid themselves of this overly-zealous and messy Christian army that shook the pillars of the ecumene and introduced the lower orders into the closed fraternity of acceptable thinkers. It was sad if not surprising that a number of Neo-Platonists were to be found among the most convinced and influential proponents of State persecution.
Finally, ordinary men, always terrified by the potential consequences of thinking, and fearful lest satisfaction of their customary pointless or lewd appetites and entertainments be disturbed by an exhortation to avoid sin and strive for higher rewards, stormed the recruitment centers of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo. Personally vicious though they often were, they were nevertheless the first to believe that the Christian “superstition” involved hideous ceremonies and indescribable orgies. In their moral outrage, they provided the bulk of the troops for the anti-Christian riots that periodically took place in the era of the Principate. They would, perhaps, also have been the chief members of the parallel, mass, pagan “church” that the Emperor Julian (360-363) “the Apostate” sought to create during the Dominate, in imitation of and for the purpose of opposing the Christian agmen.
Interestingly enough, the actions of Julian, as well as those of earlier persecutors such as Decius (249-251) and Valerian (253-260), indicate that the highest representatives of conservative, cultivated, Greco-Roman society themselves often became “ordinary men” where the Christians were concerned. Such “traditionalists” were ready to accept the most absurd of the pagan superstitions anathematized by gentlemen like Galen and prepared to unleash the most frenzied mobs in their repeated efforts to mobilize every otherwise disliked “friend” to block the militant Christian advance. Even the Jews were cultivated in this regard, as was demonstrated by the Emperor Julian’s abortive attempt to please them by reconstructing the Temple, thereby giving the lie to the Christian vision of a New Covenant permanently replacing the Old.21
Our Grand Coalition of the Status Quo thus obviously contained numerous internal contradictions and weaknesses. Its varied members can be compared to so many “Soviet Unions” and “United States of Americas”, temporarily linked together in a “United Nations Alliance” for the purpose of a world war against a common foe. Still, these disparate groups remained ever poised to fight out irreconcilable differences should their joint combat someday cease. Jews were on their guard against pagans; Gnostics against a State that was itself a central loathsome feature of an intrinsically evil nature. One group of rhetoricians supporting a particular “appropriate explanation of desires” useful to the established authorities was girded to oppose colleagues who might be paid to militate for another set of passions on behalf of a differing group of willful masters. Neo-Platonists unwilling to see their philosophy manipulated purely to serve ornamental purposes could chafe under a deadening rhetorical domination preventing Reason from completing its own hunt for the anti-Christian logos of things. “Practical” men who saw the “thinkers of great thoughts” as “losers” might be ready to jettison the intellectuals at the first moment their boring speculations interfered with their own common sense, pragmatic activity. Have-nots, envious of the people who had “made it” in imperial society, could easily rise up against the existing elite should their momentary alliance prove successful in putting believers to flight, thereby giving them time to satisfy the fullness of their own uncontrollable libido.