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| The Baptism of Emperor Constantine as imagined by Raphael |
At the beginning of the 2nd century CE, Ignatius of Antioch found himself en route to Rome, where he was destined to become one of the first great martyrs of the Christian Church. His joumey as a prisoner was unpleasant, courtesy of the thuggish imperial officers who accompanied him - he compared them to vicious leopards. But Ignatius carved out some time to write letters to the fledgling Christian communities scattered around the Mediterranean. He insisted, over and over again, that they all shared a duty to "be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement". Any who dissented were to be denounced as heretics - people who “mix up Jesus Christ with their own poison like those who administer a deadly dmg in sweet wine". The trouble was that what counted as sweet theological wine in the early years of Christianity was very much a matter of taste.
Christianity didn't fall fully formed from the sky. Debates about doctrine, ritual and the religious books that should be regarded as authentic would rage for centuries; one man's heretic was another's hero. Christianity suffered periods of persecution at the hands of the Román authorities, but its internal divisions were, in their own way, just as damaging. Or perhaps they were simply necessary. It was by codifying mainstream tenets of belief and outlawing certain ideas that a workable concept of orthodoxy emerged.
Pagan observers rather enjoyed the spectacle of Christians engaging in so many squabbles. For the 2nd-century philosopher Celsus, this demonstrated the ludicrous, fragmented nature of the new faith. Christians, Celsus sniped, resembled frogs croaking discordantly in a swamp. And yet heresy also possessed a Creative power. Its existence pushed the Church towards decisions that would shape Christianity for cióse to two millennia.
HOW MANY GODS?
One of the most intriguing - some might say notorious - early heretics was Marcion, a wealthy ship owner from the Black Sea región. During the 2nd century he took the radical step of casting off the legacy of Judaism in its entirety. Only a handful of texts associated with Jesus and his followers were to be regarded as holy, and the Hebrew Scriptures were to be utterly rejected. They were nothing more than deceptions pedalled by a second, wrathful deity who could not possibly be related to the kindly God of the Christian scriptures.
Needless to say, Marcioris talle of a second, evil deity caused uproar in an avowedly monotheistic religión, but he managed to attract an impressive number of followers who happily ignored the fact that he was being denounced by leading churchmen as "the first bom of Satan”. Epiphanius could gmmble that "all the devil's ugliness" was in the "vile minds" of Marcion's followers, but they were not easily discouraged.
Similarly impressive strides were made by the various branches of Gnosticism, which also adopted a dualistic position. The whole material world was the creation of a malevolent demiurge and the true God, the God of the Spirit, had long since abandoned interest in the fleshly realm. Happily, some human beings (a tiny minority) retained a spark of that spirit, and through the acquisition of secret knowledge (gnosis) they could hope to escape the sordid world when they died and look forward to eternal bliss. Christ's teachings offered the route to such enlightenment.
Such ideas were certainly located at the extreme end of the doctrinal spectrum, but the underlying issue of how a god could exist in the material world refused to go away. The so-called Docetists offered an elegant if controversial solution: Christ could not truly have been made of flesh and blood, and if it seemed that he was then this was merely an illusion. This was the beginning of a debate about the relationship between Christ's humanity and divinity that would simmer away for hundreds of years - indeed, it simmers still.
At first such questions only concerned a buffeted Christian minority, but everything changed at the beginning of the 4th century. When Emperor Constantine granted Christianity legal status in 313 CE, through the Edict of Milán, solving such riddles and sustaining Christian unity became a matter of political necessity and social order. The stakes were raised even higher when Christianity was made the empire's only acceptable faith in 380 CE.
A staggering number of Solutions to the so-called Christological problem were proposed and ferocious arguments were unleashed at the early Church Councils. It was not unknown for partisans of clashing theologies to fight in the streets while the leamed clerics hammered out their positions. In cities lilce Antioch, Ephesus and Alexandria - the engine rooms of the early Church at a time when Rome was just a backwater - talle of the nature of Christ was on every Christian's lips. It was impossible, according to Gregory of Nyssa, to buy a loaf of bread or ask for change in a city lilce Constantinople without someone engaging you in Christological debate.
Christianity's emergence as the empire's dominant faith was, of course, terrible news for paganism and, with alarming ease, the formerly persecuted became the persecutors. Towards the end of the 4th century, Libanius lamented how Christians would gleefully "attaclc the temples with sticlcs and stones and bars of irori' and indulge in the "tearing down of statues and the overthrow of altars". The Church's duty to put its own house in order was every bit as important, and the nature of Christ proved to be one of the key dividing lines between heresy and orthodoxy. The threat of coerción soon arrived on the scene. As the Theodosian Code of 438 CE put it, heretics were "demented and insane'' and, while they would be "smited first by divine vengeance", they would also encounter "the retribution of our own hand”. A world of meaning, and several centuries' worth of history, were contained within that final, fateful phrase.
Attempts to contain the chaos began almost immediately. In the early 4th century the famous heretic Arius sought to sepárate the Father and the Son. Pinning down Arius' ideas is triclcy - hardly any of his writings survive - but he appears to have suggested that the Father was the true God while Jesus, albeit as glorious a figure as might be imagined, was the Father's creation - a subordinate being. They were not of the same substance. This flew in the face of dominant ideas about the equality and one-ness of the three elements of the Trinity and, at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, this orthodoxy was enshrined in the council's famous creed. Christ was from the true God and of one substance with the Father. Earlier, Constantine had hoped that quelling debate would suffice: "It becomes us," he had said, "to checlc loquacity on such topics." But he had quickly realised that the full force of imperially sponsored pronouncements was required. As for Arius, he was banished and, according to a delighted Saint Ambrose, he received appropriate comeuppance when one day he fell headfirst into a lavatory "besmirching those foul lips with which he had denied Christ".
It is important to stress that Arius was not a wild-haired maverick but rather an accomplished theologian. The logic, which he pushed too far, derived from a widespread determination to emphasise Christ's human aspect. This was in many ways understandable in the walce of all those Gnostic and Docetist ideas about Christ not being part of the material world. Moreover, if Christ's sacrifice was to have any meaning then surely he musí truly have suffered as a man would suffer. The nails had to hurt when they were hammered in.
At the same time, however, figures like Arius set off alarm bells and a theological backlash was all but inevitable. Some thinkers spent much more time stressing Christ's divine attributes, with the Monophysites insisting that Jesus had a single, entirely divine nature. The idea that he had possessed a human soul or consciousness was, they said, preposterous. A figure such as Nestorius, meanwhile, would find himself in choppy waters after arguing in the 5th century that it was possible to identify two entirely distinguishable persons in Christ.
By 451, the endless debates forced the Church to enforce a robust if somewhat confusing solution. At the Council of Chalcedon it was declared that Christ had been both fully human and fully divine and that his two natures had been joined in a metaphysically unique way, joined in what was termed the hypostatic unión. Some followers of the faith hailed this move as a timley masterstroke, while many others thought it was a desperate fudge.
CLIFF-LEAPING AND ICON-SMASHING
Establishing a new religión was about more than fine points of theology. How Christians worshipped, how they behaved and who should lead them towards salvation were questions that added to the heretical muddle. A strain of asceticism always managed to surface within Christianity, and as early as the 2nd century the Montanists, with their prophetesses, called for abstinence and radish-based diets and were deemed to be taldng their moralising to heretical extremes. Alongside ridicule, they endured exorcisms and the destmction of their shrines.
The Donatists of North Africa, who emerged in the 4th century, met with a similar fate. The memory of persecution under the Romans was still very much alive, and the Donatists were unhappy with the fact that clerics who had succumbed to pressure from the authorities - handing over sacred texts, maldng sacrifices to pagan gods - were now tending to Christian flocks. Surely it was appropriate to rid the Church of such craven tumcoats. North África was rapidly tuming into a powder keg and Byzantine rulers couldn't tolérate such a threat to social order.
In 345 CE, imperial envoys were despatched to calm the waters, but they only succeeded in provoldng riots. In response, one of the envoys, Macarius, had ten Donatist-leaning bishops flogged, and it is reported that one of them, Marculus, was thrown from a cliff top. Other tales tell of Donatists being consigned to a ship weighed down with sand.
The Donatist episode was of pivotal importance. It marked the moment when a culture of intemecine violence was embedded in the Christian worldview Saint Augustine would have preferred a peaceable solution to the Donatists' heretical challenge but, he insisted, they were simply too stubborn and determined. Augustine explained that the Donatists were behaving abominably, "casting lime and vinegar into the eyes of our clergymen" and cutting out the tongues of priests who did not meet their stringent ethical standards.
It is difficult to know whether this was accurate reportage or rhetorical exaggeration, but Augustine's logic was clear enough: when faced with radical dissent, it was perfectly acceptable for the Church to use coerción. This, Augustine argued, was really an act of charity, helping people who could not heal themselves, just as the physician would offer extreme treatment to a roaring madman or the father would chastise his errant son. This would become the prevailing Christian approach to heresy for more than 1,000 years.
BYZANTIUM CONFRONTS HERESY
Heresy in the West ticked along during the next few centuries, and a fair few controversies caused panic. When the British monk Pelagius informed Román crowds in the 5th century that original sin did not exist and that humanity was perfectible, no few eyebrows were raised. It was, however, in the territories of Rome's successor, the Byzantine Empire, that heresy continued to provoke the most uproar.
Old arguments about the nature of Christ dragged on, and outright military conflict replaced angry disputes in the chambers of Church Councils. The Paulician movement set up its theological stall in 7th-century Armenia, revisiting the idea that Christ had never been a real man. The Paulicians, who spread far and wide through Anatolia, adopted a dualistic position and reputedly even found time to despise the symbol of the cross because it emphasised the human suffering of Jesus: they "heap it down with a thousand insults," as one contemporary explained.
More alarmingly, the Paulicians took up arms, establishing fortified towns in places like Tephrike (Divrigi in present-day Turkey) and even aided and abetted Islamic forces when they launched raids against Byzantine territory. By the 9th century, the Paulician general Chrysocheres was attacking towns like Nicaea and Nicomedia, and, in 867, he even managed to capture Ephesus. This was heresy in full military mode.
Thousands of Paulicians would be killed by imperial authorities, and war with the Byzantines in 871-72 ended in the Paulicians' defeat. They were banished to the west to the borders with the Bulgar Empire, but it is likely their curious dualistic beliefs influenced the emergence of the Bogomil movement, which created headaches for the Byzantines from the lOth century onwards.
An equally disruptive movement emerged in the 8th century. Christians had long debated the valué of religious images of Jesus, Mary and the saints. Were they useful sources of instruction and devotion or were they little more than idols that had become objects of worship in their own right? The Byzantine Emperor Leo III knew his mind on the issue and would have agreed that there was something offensive about painters attempting to portray the "incomprehensible and uncircumscribable divine nature of Christ".
Byzantium was an icon-loving civilisation, but men like Leo believed the excessive adoration - kissing images, ascribing miracles to them - was intolerable. In 726 he ordered the destruction of icons in the imperial palace, and across the empire religious images were "consigned to the ñames". His successor, Constantine V, went further, blinding painters who continued to produce icons.
In 787, the empress Irene lifted the ban on religious images and declared that iconoclasm was a heresy. The respite was short-lived, however, and in 815 Leo V resumed the anti-icon crusade. The stories from this era are deeply disturbing. Some icon-painters were made to spit on their works, but the artist Lazarus, who refused to comply, was tortured until his "flesh melted away along with his blood". He recovered and retumed to work, for which transgression red-hot irons were pressed into the palms of his hands.
By 843 the iconoclastic controversy was over and Byzantium retumed to its icon-rich patterns of worship. The memory of the turbulent period persisted though. Under Theodora, the empress who brought back the icons, her patriarch could be spotted at public functions, "his lips mutilated by the iron of the iconoclasts” and obliged to "hold his jaw together with bandages".
The many battles over what counted as true belief demonstrated that those who mled the theological roost were willing to take drastic measures to stamp out opposing ideologies. This was just one aspect of a faith that could soar artistically and inspire the richest devotions, and Christianity certainly held no monopoly when it carne to demonising its renegades. But, so far as heresy was concemed, a pattern had been set.
More than a millennium after Christianity emerged as a state-sanctioned faith, the Jesuit Francis Coster described heretics as "the filthy dregs that flowed through the outhouse". Christians had been thinking in such terms for a very long time. Back in the 5th century Vincent of Lerins had made it all sound so very straightforward. The Christian was expected to conform to what had been believed “everywhere, always, and by everyone". Unfortunately, no such precious theological commodity had ever existed.
CIRCUMCELLIONS: THE CLUB-WIELDING HERETICS
4th-and 5th-century North Africa was home to some particularly zealous heretics.
The Donatist movement was the cause of many headaches for the self-styled arbiters of orthodoxy, but the so-called CircumceUions received a particularly bad press. If we are to believe the terrible stories (and caution is required here), these rural bands wandered around the North African countryside seeldng martyrdom and beating up anyone who offended them. They were, Augustine wrote, "men most notorious for their outrages", which allegedly included attacldng imperial troops and dragging wealthy landowners from their carriages. For Filastrius, bishop of Brescia, they were a "death sect" composed of men who sought martyrdom by any means possible. They would throw themselves from diffs and rooftops, drown themselves, and ask perfect strangers to stab them in the belly in order to achieve what they regarded as a holy death. We must wonder, however, if the tales are accurate.
Every writer told more or less the same stories about the CircumceUions, which either signáis accuracy or reminds us that creating caricatured bogeymen was a useful strategy for those who wanted to quash dissent in the North African Church. Augustine was clear on the matter: there truly were "rough and most audacious slaves of demons" causing havoc. The historian must wonder if the rhetoric outstripped the reality. We’U likely never know.
THE HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE OF THE GNOSTIGS
Studying the strange beliefs of the Gnostics was largely a matter of guesswork - until an extraordinary discovery in 1945.
Picture the scene: a peasant and his brothers head off to caves near the town of Nag Hammadi in search of special soil they use to fertüise their crops. They come across a large earthenware vessel, smash it open, and out tumble ancients manuscripts. It tumed out that these texts - 52 in all - were genuine artefacts of the heretical Gnostic movement. A few fragments of Gnostic writing had been found before, but this was one of the largest scholarly windfalls in the history of theological study. The texts - often puzzling - included the altemative Gospels of Thomas and Philip, sayings attributed to Christ that never made it into the official New Testament, and musings on creation, salvation, the soul and ritual behaviour. Prior to this discovery we had to rely on hostile accounts of Gnostic beliefs. Suddenly, the Gnostics were able to speak for themselves.
The Nag Hammadi texts only represent one variant of Gnosticism - a movement (if that is the right word) that carne up with many different visions of a universe defined by darlmess and evil and of routes back to a purer realm of the spirit. One does not have to accept Gnostic ideas (some are, to say the least, quirky) in order to find them fasdnating. Perhaps there is another cave somewhere containing a handful of texts that managed to survive the early Church's campaign to bum all the Gnostic writings it could find.
Written by Jon Wright in "Heretics and Holy Wars",All About History, Future PLC, UK, excerpts pp.14-19. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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