07-30-2007, 09:55 AM
Constantine takes Christianity to a state religion; Destruction of Pagan Rome.
The final triumph of Christianity owes to political considerations, and as a first step the Church would adopt many of the ceremonial observances of ancient Rome. When the Christians had increased in numbers and formed a considerable party, the political equations changed. Now a contender to the throne could find support among them and use their services. The church would thus emerge victorious. It would not be content with merely taking political control of Rome, but also inherit its haughtiness, exclusiveness, pride...and much worse as we shall see below.
The critical turning point was the reign of Emperor Constantine, initially Augustus of the western empire. In a crucial battle to gain control of the Roman empire, Constantine used a Christian symbol as his banner to gain the support of the Christians in the war. Constantine soon saw that it would be to the empire's advantage if it could harness the zeal of the Christians and turn it to support of the imperial government. A la the position of the secularists of today's India, he pretended that he did not fully appreciate that Christians rejected all other gods. In 313 AD, he issued the "Edict of Tolerance" which legalized Christianity throughout the empire.
Constantine became both Christianity's patron and champion. He gave the bishop of Rome imperial property where a new cathedral, the Lateran Basilica, would rise, and provided for the building of churches across his part of the empire.
All the state financing thus provided to the bishop of Rome was with the expectation that the Christian lobby would support him as Emperor. Further in order to control "barbarians" and prevent them from destroying the Empire, Constantine encouraged the clergy to convert them to pacifist Christians. Private sacrifices to the gods were prohibited, and only the church would have this privilege. He would embark on construction of churches on a scale much grander than the Christians had built so far. He granted the Christian clergy special privileges. He allowed people to will their property to the church. He exempted the clergy from taxation, military service and forced labor, as was the case for priests of other religions. (An unforeseen result was rush of wealthy men joining the clergy, to claim tax exemptions. In 320 AD Constantine would correct this by making it illegal for rich pagans to claim tax exemptions by pretending to be Christian priests.) Under pressure from the clergy he appropriated the day Sunday of Sol Invictus, the Sun god of the prevalent Mitra tradition, and declared it the official holiday for Christianity. Sacred days of the Pagans would no longer be holidays. He claimed his success as being an indication of favor from the Christian god, and likewise attributed the failures of those recent emperors who had harrassed the Christians.
But in a far more dangerous move, he virtually allowed the clergy to run the state. Members of the Christian clergy were given the status of imperial administrators, they became essentially government bureaucrats. He vested Christian bishops with the authority and power of judges, against whom there would be no appeal. Secular and ecclesiastical law now became one. The church community, "Ecclesia", now became the body of the state. Under Constantine's successors the Church would push this unity to seamless perfection. As a result, paganism and heresy were synonynous with treason; their ideas were not merely spiritually wrong, but more seriously were acts against the state.
With this reciprocity, the Church grew wealthy and powerful. Corruption followed power to the clergy and it was so rampant that internal and external rebellions broke out. To suppress this opposition the church fathers looked to every avenue to control the congregations and resorted to violence and coercion. This was a key motive in their arguments for a central authority and a strong leader. This would consolidate the institution of Papacy, with the Pope at the helm of affairs, with a hierarchical set up of archbishops and patriarchs. A new definition of sin was developed and a mode of repentance would be laid out. We shall visit later the doctrines of "papal infallability" and "manifest destiny".
Meanwhile, the emperor in the east, Licinius, grew fearful of the respect that Christians in his realm had for Constantine. He expelled Christians from his household and executed a few bishops. In 323 AD, Constantine and his army entered Greece. Then he drove another wave of Goth invaders north and back across the Danube River. Although Constantine was still in what was officially the Western half of the empire he was close enough to the east to concern Licinius. We also mention controversies arising in fundamental interpretations of Christianity in the church played a role in exacerbating the situation (see the Arian controversy in the section on the Greco-Roman Divide below). Licinius attempted negotiations with Constantine, which failed, and war erupted. In late 324 AD, Constantine's forces defeated those under Licinius, and Constantine became Augustus of the whole empire. He had publicly promised to spare the life of Licinius, but nevertheless had him subsequently executed by strangulation.
In 330 AD, Constantine took up residence in his new capital at Byzantium: New Rome. Three years later he returned to Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his taking power there. He continued to hold the office of Pontifex Maximus, and he was still the leader of the empire's pagans, but he refused to take part in the city's pagan rituals. Rome's pagan majority was offended, and Constantine returned to New Rome annoyed. Wishing that his pagan subjects would give up their religious rites, Constantine kept the pagans fearful and cowed as he confiscated from their priests much of the wealth the pagan religions had accumulated, including their sacred icons. He ordered the gold and silver statues of the pagan gods and temples to be melted and to be used for the embellishment of the churches.
So great was his contribution to Christianity that the later day church was to turn him into a mythic figure. In fact, he is often referred to as the thirteenth Apostle. (The papacy, in fact, laid claim to its secular rulership and ownership of central Italy upon a document forged in the 8th century called the Donation of Constantine. The forgery, alleged to have been written by the emperor, gave the church vast lands and secular authority over them, lands the popes would rule until the late 19th century and of which the Vatican City State is the surviving tiny, yet, extremely rich, remnant.)
Empowered thus, the church turned upon the Pagans and the Jews, and unleashed an orgy of bloody destruction.
Anti-pagan laws were enacted. Sacrifices in the temples were prohibited and were punished with death. The altar of the Goddess Victory was removed from the Senate in Rome, although, the senators, most of whom were pagan, were assured of their continued religious rights. Sorcery and divination was outlawed; soothsayers, diviners, astrologers, augurers and magicians were denied the right to practice. The law stated: "let the curiosity to know the future be silenced for all, forever". In its place would stand the Christian dogma that only its God could know anything of the future and only its bible could interpret reality. Various ways of torturing pagan victims were now invented.
There would follow a massacre of pagans and destruction of pagan places of worship, burning of ancient libraries across the Empire. Amongst millions of murders, each one equally tragic, we mention the famous account of the mathematician and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria. On the orders of, the local bishop (Cyril, but according to some accounts by Peter), a Christian mob dragged her from her home and flayed her flesh from her bones with shards of glass and seashells. The Christian leader, Cynegius, demolished a temple-citadel on the Persian border. Scholars believe this was probably the temple of the Semitic Moon-god Sin at the citadel of Carrhae. Another temple that was attacked in this area was that of the Great Goddess of Syria (Dea Syria) at Hierapolis, a city, on the western bank of the Euphrates. In 314 AD The Council of Ancyra denounced the worship of Goddess Artemis. In Dydima, Minor Asia, Constantine sacked the Oracle of the God Apollo and tortured the pagan priests to death. He also evicted all the pagans from Mt. Athos and destroyed all the local Hellenic Temples. In 326 AD, he destroyed the Temple of the God Asclepius in Aigeai of Cilicia and many Temples of the Goddess Aphrodite in Jerusalem, Aphaca, Mambre, Phoenice, Baalbek, etc. In 330 AD, he plundered the treasures and statues of the Pagan temples of Greece to decorate Constantinople (New Rome). In 335 AD he sacked many pagan temples of Asia Minor and Palestine, and ordered the execution by crucifixion of all magicians and soothsayers. The Christians across the empire became more and more violent, taking the law into their own hands, harassing peasants suspected of sacrificing and making offerings to the gods, assaulting and robbing them much like the Nazi gangs that assaulted and robbed Jews in Germany and Austria. The bishops, and their monks, formed gangs that roamed the Egyptian countryside ransacking and looting temples and pulling them down. Throughout Syria and Lebanon the thuggishness of the monks was particularly barbaric.
The position of Jews had also become far more precarious. The Christian victors thought, as the pagans had not, that they had a divine mandate to oppose the Jews, who had now lost many of their rights. They were no longer permitted to live in Jerusalem, or to proselytize. Political measures against the Jews did not immediately follow, but the events did not bode well either for Judaism or for any religion other than Christianity. Eventually even Christians who did not follow the "right kind" of Christianity were to face slaughter, this will be better understood in the section on the Greco-Roman split below.
Summary and consequences:
We have seen in this section Christianity transforming from a mere religion to a political movement that had successfully hijacked a key nation-state in the European setting. Although inheriting a decimated army, a bankrupt exchequer and facing invasions, it would be able to transform into a rigid, self-perpetuating, hierarchical militant nation-state. Its initial strategy was to convert and pacify the attacking barbarians, then manipulate them against each other. Eventually, it would maintain its own army, intelligence, tax structure, and a good hold over international geopolitics. Like a vulture, the Church was able to strengthen itself by feeding off the dead body of the Roman Empire. Rome of the Christian church would have exactly the same reasons that Rome of Caesars had to expand and conquer new lands. There was now an important additional motivation: divine ordination of plunder, loot, murder and rape. The "Doctrine of Manifest Destiny", would sanctify the perpetration of such torture and horror on the non-believers, by claiming that their suffering was anyway God-ordained and well deserved.
The stage was now set for global conquest. By 600 AD Spain, Portugal, France and England would be forcibly converted to Christianity. Ireland fought back longer, but the Irish pagans were subsequently converted by 700 AD. Between 700 and 1000 AD Germany and kingdoms to its East (Aryan Pagans) succumbed. The Pagans of Russia were converted around 1050 AD. Scandinavia the last Pagan land in Europe would fall to Christianity in the 1800s.
But rather early on in this expansion, the Church found itself in a predicament of an altered geopolitics. Hitherto, kings had ruled empires, fought with other kings and conquered a few neighbouring lands. But now, this had been fundamentally altered. The church was no kingdom, although it tried to behave like one, perhaps like an upstart, but a successful one at that. But yet, it perceived its ideological reach as global, which dissolved national boundaries. Its solution to this dilemna was unique. It would create what might be termed a virtual kingdom for itself, today called the Vatican. It would play politics on a much larger scale by maneuvering kingdoms against the other. Each converted kingdom would be controlled by papal representatives stationed along with every converted noble and king.
The rise of islamic jihad would put a check on the activities of the church in the brief interlude of 1050-1500 AD, as would a reorganized Jewish resistance. But the church would not be cowed down. It would push for control of more economic resources and trade routes, opening up the routes to discovery of South Africa, India and the Americas. About 500 million Pagans would be massacred in these lands and property worth trillions of dollars plundered. All this would be legitimized and sancitfied under the doctrines of Papal Infalliability and Manifest Destiny. Much of this wealth would be used in the World Wars, motivated in good part by the church's renewed drive to find the millions of Jews, many living in disguise, among us. These two wars would shatter economies the world over. The church would now turn its attention to cleaning Africa and the remainder of South America, creating wars and terorist movements, propping up dictators etc. Of consequence to us is that India and China and Japan would now be a renewed priority.
The final triumph of Christianity owes to political considerations, and as a first step the Church would adopt many of the ceremonial observances of ancient Rome. When the Christians had increased in numbers and formed a considerable party, the political equations changed. Now a contender to the throne could find support among them and use their services. The church would thus emerge victorious. It would not be content with merely taking political control of Rome, but also inherit its haughtiness, exclusiveness, pride...and much worse as we shall see below.
The critical turning point was the reign of Emperor Constantine, initially Augustus of the western empire. In a crucial battle to gain control of the Roman empire, Constantine used a Christian symbol as his banner to gain the support of the Christians in the war. Constantine soon saw that it would be to the empire's advantage if it could harness the zeal of the Christians and turn it to support of the imperial government. A la the position of the secularists of today's India, he pretended that he did not fully appreciate that Christians rejected all other gods. In 313 AD, he issued the "Edict of Tolerance" which legalized Christianity throughout the empire.
Constantine became both Christianity's patron and champion. He gave the bishop of Rome imperial property where a new cathedral, the Lateran Basilica, would rise, and provided for the building of churches across his part of the empire.
All the state financing thus provided to the bishop of Rome was with the expectation that the Christian lobby would support him as Emperor. Further in order to control "barbarians" and prevent them from destroying the Empire, Constantine encouraged the clergy to convert them to pacifist Christians. Private sacrifices to the gods were prohibited, and only the church would have this privilege. He would embark on construction of churches on a scale much grander than the Christians had built so far. He granted the Christian clergy special privileges. He allowed people to will their property to the church. He exempted the clergy from taxation, military service and forced labor, as was the case for priests of other religions. (An unforeseen result was rush of wealthy men joining the clergy, to claim tax exemptions. In 320 AD Constantine would correct this by making it illegal for rich pagans to claim tax exemptions by pretending to be Christian priests.) Under pressure from the clergy he appropriated the day Sunday of Sol Invictus, the Sun god of the prevalent Mitra tradition, and declared it the official holiday for Christianity. Sacred days of the Pagans would no longer be holidays. He claimed his success as being an indication of favor from the Christian god, and likewise attributed the failures of those recent emperors who had harrassed the Christians.
But in a far more dangerous move, he virtually allowed the clergy to run the state. Members of the Christian clergy were given the status of imperial administrators, they became essentially government bureaucrats. He vested Christian bishops with the authority and power of judges, against whom there would be no appeal. Secular and ecclesiastical law now became one. The church community, "Ecclesia", now became the body of the state. Under Constantine's successors the Church would push this unity to seamless perfection. As a result, paganism and heresy were synonynous with treason; their ideas were not merely spiritually wrong, but more seriously were acts against the state.
With this reciprocity, the Church grew wealthy and powerful. Corruption followed power to the clergy and it was so rampant that internal and external rebellions broke out. To suppress this opposition the church fathers looked to every avenue to control the congregations and resorted to violence and coercion. This was a key motive in their arguments for a central authority and a strong leader. This would consolidate the institution of Papacy, with the Pope at the helm of affairs, with a hierarchical set up of archbishops and patriarchs. A new definition of sin was developed and a mode of repentance would be laid out. We shall visit later the doctrines of "papal infallability" and "manifest destiny".
Meanwhile, the emperor in the east, Licinius, grew fearful of the respect that Christians in his realm had for Constantine. He expelled Christians from his household and executed a few bishops. In 323 AD, Constantine and his army entered Greece. Then he drove another wave of Goth invaders north and back across the Danube River. Although Constantine was still in what was officially the Western half of the empire he was close enough to the east to concern Licinius. We also mention controversies arising in fundamental interpretations of Christianity in the church played a role in exacerbating the situation (see the Arian controversy in the section on the Greco-Roman Divide below). Licinius attempted negotiations with Constantine, which failed, and war erupted. In late 324 AD, Constantine's forces defeated those under Licinius, and Constantine became Augustus of the whole empire. He had publicly promised to spare the life of Licinius, but nevertheless had him subsequently executed by strangulation.
In 330 AD, Constantine took up residence in his new capital at Byzantium: New Rome. Three years later he returned to Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his taking power there. He continued to hold the office of Pontifex Maximus, and he was still the leader of the empire's pagans, but he refused to take part in the city's pagan rituals. Rome's pagan majority was offended, and Constantine returned to New Rome annoyed. Wishing that his pagan subjects would give up their religious rites, Constantine kept the pagans fearful and cowed as he confiscated from their priests much of the wealth the pagan religions had accumulated, including their sacred icons. He ordered the gold and silver statues of the pagan gods and temples to be melted and to be used for the embellishment of the churches.
So great was his contribution to Christianity that the later day church was to turn him into a mythic figure. In fact, he is often referred to as the thirteenth Apostle. (The papacy, in fact, laid claim to its secular rulership and ownership of central Italy upon a document forged in the 8th century called the Donation of Constantine. The forgery, alleged to have been written by the emperor, gave the church vast lands and secular authority over them, lands the popes would rule until the late 19th century and of which the Vatican City State is the surviving tiny, yet, extremely rich, remnant.)
Empowered thus, the church turned upon the Pagans and the Jews, and unleashed an orgy of bloody destruction.
Anti-pagan laws were enacted. Sacrifices in the temples were prohibited and were punished with death. The altar of the Goddess Victory was removed from the Senate in Rome, although, the senators, most of whom were pagan, were assured of their continued religious rights. Sorcery and divination was outlawed; soothsayers, diviners, astrologers, augurers and magicians were denied the right to practice. The law stated: "let the curiosity to know the future be silenced for all, forever". In its place would stand the Christian dogma that only its God could know anything of the future and only its bible could interpret reality. Various ways of torturing pagan victims were now invented.
There would follow a massacre of pagans and destruction of pagan places of worship, burning of ancient libraries across the Empire. Amongst millions of murders, each one equally tragic, we mention the famous account of the mathematician and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria. On the orders of, the local bishop (Cyril, but according to some accounts by Peter), a Christian mob dragged her from her home and flayed her flesh from her bones with shards of glass and seashells. The Christian leader, Cynegius, demolished a temple-citadel on the Persian border. Scholars believe this was probably the temple of the Semitic Moon-god Sin at the citadel of Carrhae. Another temple that was attacked in this area was that of the Great Goddess of Syria (Dea Syria) at Hierapolis, a city, on the western bank of the Euphrates. In 314 AD The Council of Ancyra denounced the worship of Goddess Artemis. In Dydima, Minor Asia, Constantine sacked the Oracle of the God Apollo and tortured the pagan priests to death. He also evicted all the pagans from Mt. Athos and destroyed all the local Hellenic Temples. In 326 AD, he destroyed the Temple of the God Asclepius in Aigeai of Cilicia and many Temples of the Goddess Aphrodite in Jerusalem, Aphaca, Mambre, Phoenice, Baalbek, etc. In 330 AD, he plundered the treasures and statues of the Pagan temples of Greece to decorate Constantinople (New Rome). In 335 AD he sacked many pagan temples of Asia Minor and Palestine, and ordered the execution by crucifixion of all magicians and soothsayers. The Christians across the empire became more and more violent, taking the law into their own hands, harassing peasants suspected of sacrificing and making offerings to the gods, assaulting and robbing them much like the Nazi gangs that assaulted and robbed Jews in Germany and Austria. The bishops, and their monks, formed gangs that roamed the Egyptian countryside ransacking and looting temples and pulling them down. Throughout Syria and Lebanon the thuggishness of the monks was particularly barbaric.
The position of Jews had also become far more precarious. The Christian victors thought, as the pagans had not, that they had a divine mandate to oppose the Jews, who had now lost many of their rights. They were no longer permitted to live in Jerusalem, or to proselytize. Political measures against the Jews did not immediately follow, but the events did not bode well either for Judaism or for any religion other than Christianity. Eventually even Christians who did not follow the "right kind" of Christianity were to face slaughter, this will be better understood in the section on the Greco-Roman split below.
Summary and consequences:
We have seen in this section Christianity transforming from a mere religion to a political movement that had successfully hijacked a key nation-state in the European setting. Although inheriting a decimated army, a bankrupt exchequer and facing invasions, it would be able to transform into a rigid, self-perpetuating, hierarchical militant nation-state. Its initial strategy was to convert and pacify the attacking barbarians, then manipulate them against each other. Eventually, it would maintain its own army, intelligence, tax structure, and a good hold over international geopolitics. Like a vulture, the Church was able to strengthen itself by feeding off the dead body of the Roman Empire. Rome of the Christian church would have exactly the same reasons that Rome of Caesars had to expand and conquer new lands. There was now an important additional motivation: divine ordination of plunder, loot, murder and rape. The "Doctrine of Manifest Destiny", would sanctify the perpetration of such torture and horror on the non-believers, by claiming that their suffering was anyway God-ordained and well deserved.
The stage was now set for global conquest. By 600 AD Spain, Portugal, France and England would be forcibly converted to Christianity. Ireland fought back longer, but the Irish pagans were subsequently converted by 700 AD. Between 700 and 1000 AD Germany and kingdoms to its East (Aryan Pagans) succumbed. The Pagans of Russia were converted around 1050 AD. Scandinavia the last Pagan land in Europe would fall to Christianity in the 1800s.
But rather early on in this expansion, the Church found itself in a predicament of an altered geopolitics. Hitherto, kings had ruled empires, fought with other kings and conquered a few neighbouring lands. But now, this had been fundamentally altered. The church was no kingdom, although it tried to behave like one, perhaps like an upstart, but a successful one at that. But yet, it perceived its ideological reach as global, which dissolved national boundaries. Its solution to this dilemna was unique. It would create what might be termed a virtual kingdom for itself, today called the Vatican. It would play politics on a much larger scale by maneuvering kingdoms against the other. Each converted kingdom would be controlled by papal representatives stationed along with every converted noble and king.
The rise of islamic jihad would put a check on the activities of the church in the brief interlude of 1050-1500 AD, as would a reorganized Jewish resistance. But the church would not be cowed down. It would push for control of more economic resources and trade routes, opening up the routes to discovery of South Africa, India and the Americas. About 500 million Pagans would be massacred in these lands and property worth trillions of dollars plundered. All this would be legitimized and sancitfied under the doctrines of Papal Infalliability and Manifest Destiny. Much of this wealth would be used in the World Wars, motivated in good part by the church's renewed drive to find the millions of Jews, many living in disguise, among us. These two wars would shatter economies the world over. The church would now turn its attention to cleaning Africa and the remainder of South America, creating wars and terorist movements, propping up dictators etc. Of consequence to us is that India and China and Japan would now be a renewed priority.