A talk to Queens' College Classical Society
In the renaissance basilica of St Augustine in Rome stands the shrine of the Madonna del Parto, before which expectant mothers pray. According to ancient tradition (which in Rome roughly equates with urban myth) this shrine predates Christianity, and originally represented Agrippina holding in her arms the infant Nero. Just one of countless examples in the eternal city of Christianity appropriating the remains of classical Rome, often explicitly so, as in the name of Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor’s titular church, Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
The nonchalance and comfort with which modern Catholicism inhabits the ruins of classical structures in Rome dulls the vehemence and polemics of the question first posed by Tertullian: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Was not the victory of the Cross won at the price of the despoiling intellectual, artistic and literary culture of ancient Roman and Greek civilization? Moreover, was it not the rise of Christianity itself that brought about the end of ancient Rome, and the advent of the dark ages that endured until the rediscovery of classical values in the renaissance and enlightenment?
I see two questions being posed here, one historical and one theological, and inasmuch as I (a faded classicist who has not darkened the pages of a Loeb text for many years) am qualified to answer either, I will attempt to deal with both.
THE HISTORICAL QUESTION
Edward Gibbon, whose History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is still the starting point for any discussion of the fate of Roman civilization, famously laid much of the blame for the Fall of Rome at the altar of Christianity. Never one to mince his words, Gibbon discerned a loss of civic virtue among Roman citizens, who, under the influence of the Christian God and his priests, were less inclined to involve themselves in the health of the worldly state, fixing their eyes instead upon the kingdom to come. Gibbon is always worth quoting, so here he is:
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.
Alongside a moral decline, commentators note that the upstart new religion also engaged in an aggressive and devastating vandalism of classical values and monuments. Hostile to the intellectual and cultural life of pagan polytheism, Chrisitans embarked upon a systematic despoilation of the Greek and Roman civilisation. Constantine and his son Constantius began the destruction of pagan sites and images, but it was Emperor Theodosius, heavily influenced (probably) by St Ambrose, who in 389 began a wholesale persecution of Hellenistic religion, banning non-Christians from public office, converting ancient Roman holidays into workdays, disbanding the Vestal Virgins and closing Temples. His final refusal to restore the Altar of Victory in the Roman Senate signalled symbolically the end of the pagan world.
These restrictions were at least cloaked with the dignity of law, but worse was afoot; Christian mobs ransacked pagan centres of learning, and, (if the film Agora is to be believed) burned the Library at Alexandria, before turning upon the eminent pagan philosopher Hypatia and, at the instigation of St Cyril of Alexandria, tearing her to pieces.
There is no question that Christian destruction of classical temples, images and texts was on a huge scale. With the fervour of new adherents to any rigorous system of belief, Christians saw their task as one of saving the world for Christ; as with all revolutionaries, the past, its culture, literature, philosophy, was hostile territory. Taking the opening words of Christ’s ministry, “Repent, turn away from evil” as their cue, they sought to enforce the salvation of their fellow men and women by removing the causes of evil. The law of Theodosius decreed that “in all places and all cities the temples should be closed at once, [so that] the opportunity of sinning be taken from the wicked.” St Martin of Tours, in the 370s century, was an enthusiastic destroyer of Temples and would immediately construct a church on their ruins to sanitize and sanctify the spot, while in 529 St Benedict, founding the monastery of Montecassino, destroyed the statue and altar of Apollo that stood there. Christianity was the conqueror of the pagan world, vividly proclaiming the truth of Psalm 33: “The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to naught.” It is notable that in modern Italy at Christmas time, the famously elaborate Christmas cribs are often depicted amid the classical ruins, the narrative being of the birth of the Saviour has vanquished the pagan world.
Yet there are caveats: while many temples were closed and desecrated, others were in fact rescued by being turned into Churches. You need only think of the most complete Temple to have survived from Classical antiquity, the Pantheon in Rome. The Parthenon survived largely intact atop the Acropolis (until an explosion in the seventeenth century) because it was converted into a church of the Virgin. The Maison Caree at Nimes, the ancient temple of Gaius and Lucius, survived as a Church. The Cathedral of Palermo is an intact Greco-Roman Temple. And there are other examples: the Baths of Diocletian in Rome endured as the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli; and we all know, even if we think we don’t, the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Miranda in the Roman Forum, preserving the pronaos of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. The cross did not always vanquish the Eagle; sometimes they shared a roost. Chrisitanity sometimes sought to baptise, rather than banish, a pagan shrine, transforming its deities into Christian saints.
Moreover, it is far from true that Churches were built over classical shrines. Most early Christian communities shunned classical temples because of their associations (and their unsuitable shapes), and rather raised their shrines over the sites of martyrdom of early Christian figures. The giant Basilicas of St Peter and of St Paul in Rome were built on the site of cemeteries, that of Saints Giovanni and Paolo is built over the private house where the two martyrs lived, while the Basilica of Sta Maria in Trastevere is built on the site of a Cavalry barracks where there seems to have been a house church. Given the needs of the worship of Christ, in fact, Christian churches were more often adapted from the basilica, or audience hall, of a prominent man’s domus.
What of the Gibbon’s subtler argument, that it was Christian mysticism and other-wordliness that destroyed Roman virtue and civic values? “Here is no abiding city” says Hebrews in the New Testament. Suffering and reversals here not only fit us for heaven, but win us an eternal crown.
The argument has been around ever since Christianity came into contact with Rome; the long dispute in the fourth century over the presence of the Altar of Victory in the Roman senate focussed the fear that the desertion of Rome’s traditional Gods would spell doom for the city. The premonition seemed to come disastrously true when Visigoths sacked Rome itself in 410. This was the 9/11 of the ancient world; it traumatised Romans throughout the empire, and many held Christianity responsible. But Christianity had been labelled subversive well before this; Tacitus says that Nero was able to blame the great fire of Rome upon the Christians in 64 AD because they were generally ‘hated for their enormities’ and were ‘haters of the human race’. Pliny the Younger, in his two famous letters to the Emperor Trajan about Christians, finds their creed subversive, and speaks of their ‘depraved, excessive superstition’, while Trajan in his reply depicts their crime as refusal to worship Roman gods. In 257 AD, the Emperor Valerian singled out Christianity as “self-centred and subversive”, and his words seems to have been vindicated when, in the decades that followed, a series of Christians refused military service, so that, in Gibbon’s words, “the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.” The Christian tendency to shun public spectacles of religion offended Roman sensibilities and, in Gibbon’s words, “dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true, or had reverenced as sacred.”
There was a strong, if imprecise, perception among the citizens of the ancient world that Christianity was undermining the health and blessing of the Roman state. In the wake of the sack of Rome, stung by the accusation that Christianity was both the practical and moral cause of the disaster, St Augustine wrote The City of God. This work aims principally to console Christians that the destruction of the earthly city is of little consequence since they are members of the eternal and heavenly city. Yet Augustine, himself trained in classical schools and familiar with classical authors, does not discount Roman civic qualities or oppose them to Christian virtue. He sees Christian values as present in, and foreshadowed by, the virtues of pagan Rome, and thereby responsible for its success. In Book V he praises the worthy pursuit of glory, honour and power (which for him is epitomised by Cato), which brought pagan Rome to the pinnacle of success. Such felicity, argues Augustine, is attributable to the one true God. While the pagans did not profess him, if nevertheless their pursuit of virtue was so happily recompensed, how much more will the virtuous Christian receive reward? Thus the noble example of the ancient Romans is a spur, rather than a confrontation, to the members of the heavenly city.
Alongside Augustine’s subtle take on Roman virtues, Gibbon and his school may be opposed on other, perhaps surer, ground: he simply got his facts wrong. If we are to speak of a Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (there are, of course, those who refuse to use such terms), there are plenty of other causes alongside, or more compelling than, Christian disaffection, to explain it. For some, such as J.B. Bury, in his History of the Later Roman Empire, stuff just happens. “The gradual collapse of the Roman power (he wrote) was the consequence of a series of contingent events. No general causes can be assigned that made it inevitable.” In assigning causes for the fall of Rome, it is a case of quot auctores, tot sententiae: the disastrous war with the Sassanid Empire, civil wars, barbarian invasions with a too generous extention of Receptio to the immigrants, economic malaise, corruption, lead poisoning, the loss of local taxation by frontier cities, the decline in numbers and effectiveness of regular soldiers – take your pick. It is hard to single out Christianity as a monocause, or indeed, as a cause among others. In fact, argues Bury, Christianity in the West tended to unite, rather than to dissolve, Roman authority, and he makes the point that the Emperor Constantine most likely adopted Christianity as a counterpoint to the centrifugal tendencies that had beset the Roman Empire in the third century.
The second fact that undermines Gibbon’s thesis is that if we are to speak of a fall of the Roman Empire, then we can only speak of a fall of half the Empire. The Eastern half continued, of course, for another thousand years, and that Empire was avowedly Christian. This is not, in Gibbon’s eyes, to attribute to the Eastern Roman Empire any nobility. He considered that the Byzantines presented “a dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity, nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes.” Yet this decadent, decaying civilization lasted a further thousand years, all the while professing the Christian religion. I would respectfully suggest that any political system that takes a thousand years to decay cannot be without some virtue and sense of civic duty, as indeed more recent historians have judged.
Early Christianity certainly boasted its fanatics who interpreted the scriptural message of Christ in a way that seemed to demand the expunging of the pagan world. But this was not a necessary Christian creed and there is nothing intrinsic to Christianity which demanded the end of the Roman Empire and its Greco-Roman culture. Indeed, the general order, relative peace and ease of communication that were enjoyed by the inhabitants of the Roman world seemed to have been appreciated by the early Christians, and they benefitted greatly from it: St Paul certainly made use of the network of cities, good roads and safe shipping lanes of the Roman world to spread the Gospel of Christ. Christianity may have been one of the factors that distracted the Empire, but it is equally arguable that Christian Romans were no less brave, fought no less valiantly, contributed no less civic-mindedly, and indeed prolonged the world of ancient Rome beset by other, less amicable, forces.
THE THEOLOGICAL QUESTION
So much for the historical question, which has the benefit at least of being circumscribed and to some extent verifiable .The second, speculative, question is to what extent Christianity itself can be open to the culture of classical antiquity. What, in truth, is the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem? This is a vast question, and so I intend to manage it by looking briefly at four famous Christian thinkers: Paul, Augustine, Jerome and Erasmus.
There is an explicit example in the bible of an attempt to introduce Christianity to Greek philosophy, when St Paul preached at the Areopagus, the legal and cultural hot-spot of ancient Athens (Acts 17:16-34). Paul, aware of the intellectual calibre of his audience, based his argument on the need to know what one worships. But if here Paul here seems at happy to talk to the Athenian philosophers on their own terms, an earlier comment in this episode is revealing. The author of Acts says (in an aside) that the Athenians – he singles out Epicurean and Stoic philosophers – “spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new”. The world of Greek philosophy is, for the Christian author, seen as a craving after novelty rather than truth. The Christian, on the other hand, does not embark upon an open investigation. St Paul makes clear that the end of the search can only be Christ - and this distinguishes the worlds of Christianity and classical learning. Christianity is a religion of revelation. The search is ended. It is a search which must, indeed, make use of reason, and which can employ philosophical methods to demonstrate the truth of its claims, but it is not speculative in the way that Classical philosophy was. To Plato’s or Aristotle’s question “What is truth?” Christ answers, “I am the truth.” For Paul, this set up an opposition which was insurmountable. “The Greeks seek wisdom (he said), but we preach Christ crucified.” This is folly to the gentiles – it does not stand the test of their philosophy – but God sets their wisdom at naught by raising up that which appears foolish. That is the strength of the Gospel (1 Cor 18-31). Accordingly, Paul warns the Corinthians, do not be ensnared by philosophy rather than Christ (Col 2:8).
Paul’s confrontation between the gospel and Greek philosophy was to be diluted rapidly, as the Church spread and began to draw many of its leaders from among those who had been educated in Greek philosophy and classical literature. Intuitively, churchmen such as Origen and Ambrose of Milan sought to incorporate Hellenistic philosophy within the Christian message, and even to see it as a platform for theology, so that Clement of Alexandria could write:
"Philosophy has been given to the Greeks as their own kind of Covenant, their foundation for the philosophy of Christ ... the philosophy of the Greeks ... contains the basic elements of that genuine and perfect knowledge which is higher than human ... even upon those spiritual objects." (Miscellanies 6. 8)
Augustine of Hippo, you will recall, was a teacher of rhetoric, and so familiar with the works of the classical authors. In his Confessions, he wrote “when I read those books of the Platonists I was taught by them to seek incorporeal truth, so I saw your ‘invisible things, understood by the things that are made’ ”.[1] By Platonists, he means what we call neo-Platonists, but his story illustrates the strong inroads made by that last flourishing of Hellenistic philosophy into the early years of Christian theology – “not that the same words were used, (he said in the Confessions) but precisely the same doctrine was taught, buttressed by many and various arguments”[2] Although the neo-Platonic ‘One’, stands apart from Being, in somewhat splendid isolation, its completeness and self-sufficiency was influential on Augustine’s journey from Manichaeism to Christianity. Plotinus’ view that we can only connect to the ‘One’ by ascending to it through virtue was formative of Augustine’s view of the ascent of the soul, and of his rejection of his debased former life in order to find God. Yet in this very rejection of his unworthy behaviour, Augustine also saw condemned his enjoyment of pagan classical texts. Platonism, he recognised, in its very similarity to Christianity, made it a danger. Augustine’s goal was now Christ, and scripture was now his choice of reading; he recommended, for example, the Apostle Paul for rhetorical study rather than classical texts. It is true that he intended this instruction for specialised groups, but it shows a trend to see all pagan literature as subordinate to, and summed up in, the bible.
A trend especially marked in St Jerome, who discovered in the biblical texts all he needed - “ a Horace, a Catullus, an Alcaeus”.[3] St. Jerome's scruples are well demonstrated by his dream in which angels scourged him while saying: "Thou art not a Christian, thou art a Ciceronian".[4] Jerome found fault (he found it easy to find fault) with ecclesiastics enjoying themselves too much in the reading of Virgil.[5] Yet he also lamented the loss of classical learning in general, “How many people know Plato's books, or his name? Idle old men on the corners hardly recall him.”[6] Jerome was not so much concerned with destroying pagan literature, as using it in a way fruitful for Christianity. In a startling image (taken from the book of Deuteronomy) he says:
“If you desire to marry a captive, you must first shave her head and eyebrows, shave the hair on her body and cut her nails, so must it be done with profane literature, after having removed all that was earthly and idolatrous, unite with her and make her fruitful for the Lord.”
Augustine, on the same line, uses another Biblical allegory: the Christian who seeks knowledge in the pagan authors resembles the Israelites who despoil the Egyptians of their treasures in order to build the tabernacle of God. For both Augustine and Jerome, whatever is good in the literature of antiquity comes originally from the Sacred Books. In his "De doctrina christiana", St. Augustine explained how pagan classics lead to a more perfect apprehension of the Scriptures, and are an introduction to them. For this reason, Augustine says, it is important for biblical scholars to know Greek. In this sense St. Jerome, in a letter to a professor of eloquence at Rome, recommends the use of profane authors in educating Christians, but always bearing in mind the subordinate role of the classics.[7] In sum, the great Christian thinkers neither dared nor were able to do without classical teaching. Rhetoric continued to be used to make points for Christianity. Ennodius, deacon of Milan, inveighed against the impious person who carried off a statue of Minerva, and himself wrote Greek verse. Even the Emperor Theodosius, scourge of classical paganism, did not dare to exclude pagan authors from the school curriculum.
It was not Christianity itself, or even Christian theology, that did for the classics in the Middle Ages, but Christian asceticism, which developed a strong objection to secular studies, as indeed to any activity or enjoyment not strictly derived from Christianity. The warrior saint Martin of Tours thought learning was unnecessary, Gregory the Great condemned the study of literature by bishops, and even the Rule of Benedict countenanced only sacred reading.
The medieval era is not quite the wasteland of classical antiquity that is usually assumed, but neither was it a garden. The influence of Plato on scholastic theology is clear, but original texts had disappeared, and along with them, the knowledge of Greek. Aristotle fared a little better, with most of his works being available in Latin by the twelfth century. There were also available a range of early Christian scholars, such as Tertullian, Ambrose and Boethius, and classical authors such as Cicero and Seneca, who knew Greek philosophy well and discussed it in detail. But on the whole original classical texts were either rejected as morally degrading, or were unavailable.
The Renaissance, with new access to classical sources, emphasised the power of human reason to understand human nature and our place in the natural order without necessary reference to divine revelation. Antiquity became the measure of all things. This as often as not drew the ire of the institutional Church; but we must not forget that many of the greatest humanist figures were themselves Churchmen. Pope Pius II, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, even your great alumnus Erasmus, were sons of the Church. The school that pioneered the place of classics in the curriculum was that founded at St Paul’s Cathedral by Dean Colet. And of course Dante insisted that Virgil accompany him through the underworld; in purgatory he meets the Roman author Statius, who had secretly become Christian – not through reading the Gospel, we note, but through reading Virgil.
Where Dante boldly christianises a classical Roman author, Erasmus was keen to let the Classics speak for themselves. Of course, like all humanists of his age, Erasmus romanticised antiquity, but he also saw it as supplying a methodology, an education. He scoffed at the notion that classical authors could not be used in Christian education. If you reject classical learning because it is pagan, he said, you must also reject other skills developed in classical times: metalworking, painting, agriculture and other useful arts.
For Erasmus, the study of Classical authors was not only a training in style, but also in virtue; in one of his early dialogues he wonders whether he can refer to ‘Saint Socrates’. In this, he demolished the medieval argument that pagan authors were necessarily immoral. He noted that many Christian authors were probably in hell, and that one widely read Father, Origen, was a known heretic. Yet Erasmus had no intention of setting the classics against the Church. What the Church condemned, he said, was the misuse of ancient texts: to the untutored, they were dangerous and had to be handled with respect. The reader must take care not to imbibe ‘pagan morals along with pagan writings’ and the poets, especially in their love texts, must be read allegorically.[8] In the end, the classical authors were of use only in as much as their teaching squared with Christian teaching, as Erasmus shows in a telling passage:
The beginning of wisdom is to know thyself, a saying that antiquity believed to have come down from heaven and that found such acceptance with the great authors that they considered it to be the epitome of all wisdom. But this teaching would have little authority for us if it did not accord with the Scriptures.[9]
Erasmus had harsh words for Italian humanists who sought to read the Classics on their own terms, without reference to Church doctrine. This was pomposity and idolatry, for the lessons drawn from Classical figures could be tailored to any situation without the guidance of Christian revelation. Have Cicero in one hand, yes, but have the bible in the other.
Erasmus saw in the virtuous figures of the pagan world an example of nobility and honour, an example that was, read in the right way, of profit to the Christian disciple in living the Gospel. Erasmus himself considered that his own classical training had equipped him for his labours for the Church. He had learned Greek in order to translate the Bible, and this opened up for his a world of thought and literature. This, in the end, was the ultimate justification of classical studies; God had himself sent the classical pagans to prepare the way for the Gospel. But in appreciating this, the Christian scholar had to steer a course between beauty and truth, not neglecting the latter for love of the former.
It was a difficult, and sometimes self-contradictory, task, and one which the Church has struggled with throughout the ages. Perhaps it was only formally resolved fifty years ago, in the Second Vatican Council, when the Church proclaimed as Godly whatever is true, good and worthy even in those who worship shadows and images, or who have never heard of Christ. An endorsement, finally, of Erasmus’ view: the world of classical antiquity is to be treasured and enjoyed, for its virtue, its beauty, its grandeur and its brilliance are all glimpses of the glory of God.
Fr Mark
[1] Confessions 7:20
[2] Confessions 7:9
[3] Epist. 30
[4] Epist. 25
[5] Epist. 21
[6] (Migne [1844–64], vol. 26, col. 401B.)
[7] Epist. 85
[8] Erasmus, Handbook 30-33; On the Method of Study 683-687.
[9] Erasmus, Handbook 40
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