An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Christianity

Jesus: from nationalist rebel to defector god

Judea had been a theatre of fighting and atrocities for centuries when Jesus, a nationalist rebel as many before and after him, campaigned for the restoration of ancient Israel, and claimed the throne of King David. He gathered a crowd, was hailed as the new messiah, seized Jerusalem and fought his way to the temple. But the resurrection failed already after a few days. Once more a messiah had brought a short-lived eruption of hope, followed soon by slaughter and disillusion. Jesus and his men fled to their base in a grove of olive trees East of Jerusalem. After being under siege for a night, he ordered his companions to put down arms. Those unable to flee were arrested. Jesus was taken to court and executed with some of his lieutenants.536

After a few days the rumour spread that his grave was found empty. To his Jewish followers this meant that he was after all the ultimate messiah, risen from the underworld to lead the struggle of Israel to the final victory:

the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. 537

This was what Yahweh had pledged in a vision of Ezekiel:

Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind [..] breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. 538

The Roman army destroyed Jerusalem a few decades later, and it became clear that the ‘exceeding great army’ had forsaken. Victory was not at hand.

During the next century, Christianity became one of those mysterious novel sects that appealed to Roman citizens. The gospels were (re)written to turn the rebel into a Stoic pacifist, and the Jewish nationalist into a friend of Rome: following the gospels that survived up till today, the Jews had betrayed Jesus in the olive grove, and had sold him to the Jewish Sanhedrin, his greatest enemy. The Jews had shouted for his execution and had left him alone in his final suffering. The Romans on the contrary had found no evil in him, had washed their hands of his death, and never fought him by arms - they had even quenched him on the cross. Jesus himself had urged his Jewish followers to love their Roman enemies.

Paul and Clement

Paul of Tarsus was born in Turkey as a Roman citizen of Jewish descent. Educated in both Jewish and Roman philosophy, he recycled the scattered dreams about the kingdom of David into the Stoic imagery of a permanent presence of the godhead

not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own [Stoic] poets have said, for we are also his offspring.539

But there was a difference. Contrary to the all-pervading Stoic deity, the presence imagined by Paul leaned to an age old, popular presence with a spiritist flavour: Christ wandered around, mostly invisible, sometimes showing his glory on a special occasion or to special people. The others could only believe what was recounted by those privileged witnesses, or try to discern reassuring tokens in the course of things.

Christ materialized on various occasions. On one such occasion, Paul of Tarsus wrote to doubtful followers in Corinth, more than five hundred people saw him simultaneously. John the Evangelist counts three occasions immediately after his death. Following Luke, Christ once asked his followers ‘Have ye here any meat?’ and enjoyed a meal, conveniently showing that he was not just a chimera.

But only a few were satisfied with a kingdom lead by a ghost, and many still hoped that at any moment Jesus would gather the faithful and direct them towards the terrified enemies of Israel: after David and Cyrus, Jesus must be the anointed, in Latin the Christus, of the time. Even Paulus, often presented as the founder of esoteric Christianity, directed his followers ’into the patient waiting for Christ’.540

In the second century CE, at about the time of the composition of the gospels, the prophet Montanus and his retinue of female seers preached that the return of Christ was immanent. Following the gospel of Mark, the first words of Jesus in public were: ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’,541 Montanism astounded crowds with magic and ecstatic display and soon spread from Gaul to North Africa and Spain to become the common brand of Christianity:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.542

Towards the end of the century Montanus led thousands of his followers into the Turkish valley of Pepuza to look out for the descend from heaven of the new Jerusalem. Nothing happened, and in the aftermath of this disillusion the majority of Christians lost all hope for an immanent return of Christ to chastise the heathens.

The hope for an apocalyptic uprising was lost, and the way was cleared for more pragmatic, real life tactics to arrive at the new kingdom. Montanist preachers were slandered with charges of immorality, madness and suicide; Saint Epiphanius as well as Saint John of Damascus assured that they had sacrificed children and made bread with the blood of murdered infants. The Montanists were eradicated from history, and the church took the road of power politics. It was now taught that Jesus had ascended to heaven after wandering on earth for forty days. Clement of Alexandria, a fierce enemy of the Montanists, used some exegetic acrobacy to create a doctrine more consistent with the new pretensions. Not Jesus, but the church itself was the earthly presence of God:

that the living church is the body of Christ (for the Scripture, saith, “God created man male and female”; the male is Christ, the female the church,)543 and that the Books and the Apostles teach that the church is not of the present, but from the beginning. For it was spiritual, as was also our Jesus, and was made manifest at the end of the days in order to save us. The church being spiritual, was made manifest in the flesh of Christ [..] If we say that the flesh is the church and the spirit Christ, then it follows that he who shall offer outrage to the flesh is guilty of outrage on the church.544

Two centuries earlier Saint Paul had written to the Christians of Rome:

to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. 545

Clement turned body in Christ - the Christians united under Christ’s blessing – in body of Christ, and distorted a plea for humility into an proclamation of arrogance and a license for repression.

This was a new phenomenon in history. Clerks had always been sacred in some way, either as collaborators of sacred kingships, or as an autonomous temple organization. Bureaucracies, because their link with power and thus, in the ancient world-image, with divinity, had always had some sacred flavour, but never before a bureaucracy had equated itself with a god. This was the bureaucracy Constantine would find at his disposal one century later.

The morals of the Christians the same as those of the heathens

The differences between the classic piety and the Christians were not about which good deeds must be done, but about which party did them better. The famous Seneca, a Stoic born in Spain at about the same time as Jesus was born in Palestine at the other end of the Roman Empire, wrote about what we call today ‘Christian virtues’ while building a career at the imperial court. Church leaders boasted that Christians were the best citizens, because they feared hell fire. Their way led to the best conduct, but the standards of conduct were those common to all right-thinking Romans. Christian writers attacked the public games – like all other entertainment - for their diversion from prayer. When the victims were Christians and the executioners heathens, the killings were criticized. But Saint Augustine, who criticized the games as frivolous, had Christians thrown before the lions himself when they did not agree with the official creed,546 and still in the fourteenth century, during the height of the Christian civilization, deadly bull games were held in the Coliseum of Rome.547

Church leaders evolved to respected citizens, and were only at intervals mistrusted for the fanatic zeal typical for all fresh, fast growing ideologies. As fundamentalists often do, they benefited from the open-minded intellectual atmosphere in the Roman Empire to propagate their creed, but worked at the same time towards a Christian kingdom in which other religions would be forbidden.

Eventually the Christian severity attracted traditionalist minds that were shocked by the modernity inevitably on the rise in the worldwide Roman Empire. Clement of Alexandria, in the second century CE, was appalled by outlandish novelties – the ones Plato had already feared - more than by injustice. The similarity with the Jewish upheaval about Greek hats is striking. Many times provincial xenophobia finds its place in the ideology of a fresh civilization.

Clement would have been intensely shocked if he had known that some Biblical patriarchs wore earrings:

And let not their ears be pierced, contrary to nature, in order to attach to them ear-rings and ear-drops. For it is not right to force nature against her wishes.548

He fulminates against ‘women who are crazy about stupid and luxurious purples’, because those purples ‘inflame the lust’. But it turns out that rather the exoticism than the colour itself is hideous:

Tyre and Sidon, and the vicinity of the Lacedaemonian Sea, are very much desired; and their dyers and purple-fishers, and the purple fishes themselves, because their blood produces purple, are held in high esteem. But crafty women and effeminate men, who blend these deceptive dyes with dainty fabrics, carry their insane desires beyond all bounds, and export their fine linens no longer from Egypt, but some other kinds from the land of the Hebrews and the Cilicians.549

Clement summons the female sex to bid farewell

to embroidery of gold and Indian silks and elaborate Bombyces, which is at first a worm, then from it is produced a hairy caterpillar; after which the creature suffers a new transformation into a third form which they call lava, from which a long filament is produced, as the spider’s thread from the spider. For these superfluous and diaphanous materials are the proof of a weak mind, covering as they do the shame of the body with a slender veil.550

Men, furthermore, should not wear long robes (soon Jesus was going to be depicted wearing one), while women should hide their ankles. Never doubt arose that this might just be wasting energy on occasional local customs: the Platonic arrogance of one ideal world does not allow such doubts. To Clement there was only one god, and this one god wanted all people to act in the way of Clement’s little neighbourhood, up till the most ridicule details.

Daily bread versus temple feasts

Religion in ancient societies had a highly public function, and was focused around carnivals, processions and temple feasts.

In the third century CE, the Roman Empire was still for a large part a temple economy. The temple supplied and served the community. Wealthy citizens were under incessant pressure to donate to the temples, who distributed the gifts in sacred feasts. As inflation escalated many of those citizens were forced to the brink of ruin. At the same time constant warfare made that ever more feasts evolved to expensive imperial propaganda, not very useful to a deprived population.

The Christian alternative to those pompous feasts was a daily meal of bread and wine, and the success of Christianity grew when the population of the bankrupt Roman Empire chose for the certainty of daily bread above the dwindling festivals.

The Christians saw themselves as a chosen elite, and gathered behind closed doors. Novices and sinners were locked out and wailed loudly before the entrance, as a form of imposed penitence. To the Christians the classical gods were dangerous demons, whose evil works could only be invigorated by taking part in their festivals. Resentment of those practices by the other citizens was inevitable.

Homer had called bread the food of men, because gods nor animals eat bread. Galen testifies that it was common knowledge among Greek and Roman scholars that bread changed into human blood, and that this human blood eventually forms our senses. Without bread, there is no human nature.

In the story of the Passover Jesus celebrated his last supper with his followers in Jerusalem. In the magical re-enactment of this supper -the Eucharist - and in the Roman gospels, the slaughtered sheep was omitted, and the unleavened bread was preserved and became Jesus’ body. The gospel of Philip, found at Nag Hamadi, reads:

Before Christ came, there was no bread in the world, just as Paradise, the place were Adam was, had many trees to nourish the animals but no wheat to sustain man. Man used to feed like the animals, but when Christ came, the perfect man, he brought bread from heaven in order that man might be nourished with the food of man.

The preached sobriety of the Christians was no pretext, but perfectly lined up with reality. Since incessant warfare fuelled inflation, ever more people in need chose Christian bread above the classic festivals with always more pomposity and always less to eat. Simultaneously ever more aristocrats chose to turn their back to the official religion before they went bankrupt. Justin Martyr, one of the first upper class citizens switching camps, quoted Isaiah in his defence, with Yahweh saying:

the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls I do not desire. For who hath required this at your hands? But loose every bond of wickedness, tear asunder the tight knots of violent contracts, cover the houseless and naked, deal thy bread to the hungry.551

But wealthy converts had to deliver one way or another: Christian leaders sent spies after candidate members, and youth squads did not hesitate to dispose of cheaters. The Acts of Apostles relates about Ananias and his wife, who sold their land but had only handed in part of the revenue. Both paid with their lives:

Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? And after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? Why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.552

A few hours later his wife Sapphira ignorantly arrived at the get-together of her new social circle. The young thugs disposed of her as they had disposed of her husband.

The heathen part of the Roman population, anxious to preserve the decaying temple economy to which they had always turned to overcome hard times, experienced the Christian evasion much as deprived people today feel about tax dodgers. It was taken as a malicious deathblow, sometimes even as the essential cause of the decline of the classical ways of life.

Constantine: in search of a war god equal to enemy magic

In the fourth century CE, Christian politics started to pay off. Constantine the Great murdered five or more of his relatives, including one of his wives and his oldest son, and collaborated with German tribes of the Christian creed to submit Rome. The Christian tradition says that Constantine became a Christian because of a vision, but this is an interesting misreading of the source. Eusebius, the biographer of Constantine who knew him in person, clearly writes that Constantine chose the Christian god out of war tactics.

Being convinced, however, that he needed some more powerful aid than his military forces could afford him, on account of the wicked and magical enchantments which were so diligently practised by the tyrant, he sought divine assistance. [..] He considered, therefore, on what god he might rely for protection and assistance.553

Those who ‘had marched to the battle-field under the protection of a multitude of gods, had met with a dishonourable end’, while the Christian god had given many manifestations of his power and delivered military victories. Only after the calculated choice of an efficient war god, Constantine got a vision about a new corresponding standard for his troops, and somewhat later chose the Christians for his new bureaucracy, rather than the decomposing establishment.

In the Arian vision of Constantine and his soldiers (as later in Islam), Christ had been a prophet. The Catholics however took it literally that Christ was the Son of God. Expressed in the physics of late antiquity, Christ had to be of the same substance as the Lord of the Hebrew Bible in order to be equally divine. There was nothing unusual in claiming a divine nature for a revered human: many emperors in Asia and Rome had assumed the same prerogative before. For centuries the formula had been used as a strong claim to absolute power, and Constantine, although less candidly, had similar pretensions.

To make Jesus Christ the Son of God was only the application of plain classical imagery, but, since the Catholics saw themselves as the heirs of Jesus Christ, his deification worked for the Church equally, and boosted the latter’s moral and political position.554

In the course of the first decades of the Christian empire, Arianists and Catholics persecuted each other alternatively in the old tradition of biblical fratricide, while Constantine, god’s chosen and a divine emperor himself, tried to reconcile them. Simultaneously the Christian emperor tried to wipe out a third Christian fraction, the Donatists of the African province, a faction derived from the former Montanists, who questioned the open collaboration of the Christian prelates with imperial power.

Saint Augustine throws Christians before the lions

To understand Christianity as the root of Western ideology, one must however not look at Jesus, Paul or Constantine, but at Augustine.555

Saint Augustine was born in Africa in 354 CE. His father worshipped the classical gods; his mother was a Catholic. At the age of eighteen, he bought himself a concubine, to ‘let off his juvenile urge’. He used the woman for fifteen years but had only one child, a boy. A wealthy social relation of his father patronized his studies as an orator. This patron sympathized with the Manichean religion, and Augustine did the same. The chief imperial representative in Africa, the Carthaginian proconsul Symmachus, was a devotee of the art of poetry. Augustine went to Carthage, wrote his only poem ever and soon frequented the highest circles of the African province.

When Symmachus was promoted to prefect of Rome, he arranged the twenty-nine years old Augustine a position in the vicinity of the imperial court. Augustine departed for Italy, leaving his patron ignorant, and before weighing the anchor disposed of is mother, who wanted to come with him, but was sent to a chapel to pray for a safe passage.

In Milan, Augustine witnessed the vicious struggle for imperial support between the Catholics and the classical religion. The Catholics demanded a ban on all other religions; the other party wanted to give the Catholics a place among equals. In this dispute the orator Symmachus represented the senate while his nephew, the bishop Ambrose represented the church. Symmachus addressed the emperor with an urgent plea:

We ask, then, for peace for the gods of our fathers and of our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road; but this discussion is rather for persons at ease. We offer now prayers, not conflict.556

Ambrose replied with firm circular reasoning:

Let God himself, who made me, teach me the mystery of heaven, not man, who knew not himself. Whom rather than God should I believe concerning God? How can I believe you, who confess that you know not what you worship?

Symmachus fought a lost battle. Augustine tried to find favour with bishop Ambrose - without success. He now called for his mother, who swiftly came over and located him a girl in the Catholic elite, suitable for marriage in two years. Her family requested however that Augustine should discard his concubine, which he resolutely did: the woman must pledge to live in sexual abstinence for the rest of her life, and was locked away in an African convent. Her fourteen-year-old son remained with his father, but soon became ill and died the next year, after he had also suffered the passing away of his grandmother. Augustine never shed a tear for the death of his mother, a peculiarity he attributed to his firm believe in the hereafter. The death of his son is not mentioned in his Confessiones. Augustine confided to his best friend that he was unable to live without sex, and bought himself a new slave girl. He was at last baptised by Ambrose on Easter 387 CE, but the wedding never took place, and the doors of the Roman upper class remained closed. Augustine returned to Africa.

In 391 CE he was ordained priest to become spokesman for the bishop of Hippo Regius, a Greek who did not speak the local language nor Latin. While blamed by the populace for being a careerist, and accused by the primate of Africa of having an affair with the wife of the bishop of Nola, Augustine was backed by powerful friends in the African elite. Several of them, including at least one bishop, were secret agents for the emperor.

After being a clergy for only four years, Augustine was indeed appointed bishop of Hippo. The African church now revived the persecution of the Donatists and finished the work of Constantine with terror and bloodshed. Those heretics had deserved the same terrible fate as the accusers of Daniel in the Bible, by accusing the Catholics of collaboration with the persecutors. Yahweh had halted the lions before the righteous Daniel, but not before his accusers and their families:

And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den.557

Augustine defended that Christians had the duty to demand assistance from Christian emperors against the enemies of Christ in order to ‘save’ the heretics, and one possible way of assistance was the circus:

For the Donatists met with the same fate as the accusers of the holy Daniel. For as the lions were turned against them [..] many of them have been, and are daily being reformed, and return God thanks that they are reformed, and delivered from their ruinous madness. And those who used to hate are now filled with love. 558

A few years after those words were published, Augustine received an anonymous letter begging to moderate persecution, because ‘no one should be compelled to follow righteousness.’559 Augustine discovered who the writer was and answered with an open letter to a man named Vincentius, called with some sarcasm ‘his brother dearly beloved’. We can only imagine the terror when Vincentius, either the true writer of the anonymous letter or not, received what came close to a dead warrant:

Save yourself therefore, my brother, while you have this present life, from the wrath which is to come on the obstinate and the proud.560

The letter accused Vicentius of heresy, called him perverted, and reminded him of the succeeding imperial decrees that ‘the property of those who were convicted of schism and obstinately resisted the unity of the Church should be confiscated’.561 The most frightening, Augustine exclaimed that ‘the lions now be turned to break in pieces the bones of the calumniators.’562

Augustine stressed that God wished one universal - ‘Catholic’ - church, obeyed by all nations. This was in his view already accomplished, but was put at risk by dissenting Christians. Persecution of those heretics was therefore God’s wish. Not the mere coercion must be considered, Augustine writes to Vincentius, but whether the coercion is good or bad:

not that any one can be good in spite of his own will, but that, through fear of suffering what he does not desire, he either renounces his hostile prejudices, or is compelled to examine truth of which he had been contentedly ignorant; and under the influence of this fear repudiates the error which he was wont to defend, or seeks the truth of which he formerly knew nothing, and now willingly holds what he formerly rejected. Perhaps it would be utterly useless to assert this in words, if it were not demonstrated by so many examples. We see not a few men here and there, but many cities, once Donatist, now Catholic, vehemently detesting the diabolical schism, and ardently loving the unity of the Church; and these became Catholic under the influence of that fear which is to you so offensive.563

In line with the biblical tradition of fratricide, more Christians died in this persecution by other Christians than in the Great Persecution of Diocletian, all for their own salvation - a perspective taking the meaning of Christian love to a new height.

Grace

The theoretical works of Augustine are built on four stands which are consistent with his acts and have influenced the Medieval and Atlantic civilizations.564

The first stand is the pernicious human nature. If Adam had not succumbed to sexual temptation, man still could have moved his penis by free will, like his arm or his tongue. Now for punishment the movement was involuntary and driven by lust. Humans are born less than beasts, because human babies are more helpless than newborn animals. Even suckling longing for the mother breast are sinful. Because of their nature all people must burn in hell for eternity, unless saved by divine grace. When scientists replied that eternal burning was a physical impossibility, Augustine brought up that fire salamanders live in volcanoes without injury – an at the time generally accepted fact, also testified by Aristotle and Pliny. And he had tasted himself the cooked meat of a peacock, still edible after one year – a minor remark, that yet caused the peacock to become the Christian symbol of resurrection.

Augustine agreed with the scholars of his time that the tie between body and soul collapses under severe pain, but assured that God would make this tie much stronger in hell.

The second stand is God’s arbitrariness. God is completely free to save by his grace whoever he chooses, if and when he wants to, just as he is completely free to create doomed beings whenever he likes to do so. Believers, devoured by fear and chased and possessed by demons, could do nothing but pray, praise and beg for mercy, and endure the works of the Great Irresponsible in every misfortune or setback. Only in late medieval times Thomas Aquinas toned down this stand by declaring that God had enough grace for everyone, and only refused it to the wicked – a point of view later attacked by Calvinists and Jansenists.

The third stand - stemming already from Clement of Alexandria - is that God has a body of flesh and blood, and that this body, the Catholic Church, is the executor and the administrator of God’s saving grace. Consequently, excommunication is at once banishment from the hereafter and a casting into hell fire. Saint Peter, the first pope and symbol of the authority of the Catholic Church, possesses the key to heaven. Still in 1943 CE, Pope Pius XII insisted on this dogma.

The power of the Catholic Church to wash off sins - as God and his church were free to do, with no strings attached - had tremendous consequences. In a time when there was no absolution for sins yet, Augustine fulminated against heretics who defended that renegades could be baptised again. In his Confessiones Augustine, thinking of his own christening, continually thanks God for washing away all his sins, and for putting a stop to new ones.

City of God

Augustine did not write religious books with omission of the material world. Modern European scientists invented the split between religion and science much later to fend off religious repression. Until that time it was impossible to explain divinity without explaining nature. The City of God treats natural history, psychology and politics next to theology. Pygmies, hermaphrodites, Cyclops and Siamese twins (Augustine had once the occasion to observe one) were humans only if they descended from Adam. That people could live at the bottom side of the earth with their feet upwards was nonsense. Humans could really leave their natural element earth and go to heaven, because birds have also earthly bodies and yet can fly. Christ’s ascension to heaven was possible in the same manner as iron cases float on water. Augustine was clearly not familiar with the work of Archimedes, who lived seven centuries before him, and presumably did not know that iron cases float because they are hollow – otherwise his argument would imply that Jesus had ascended to heaven as a sort of inflated balloon.

But the essence of the City of God was the imagery of the two cities taken from The Book of Revelation. The earthly city is Babylon, ‘the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’, ‘a woman drunken with the blood of the saints’. Throughout history, this city appears in many forms, of which the latest was the Roman Empire.

The heavenly city is Jerusalem, ‘prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’, descending from heaven:

Her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; [..] and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones.

This city was now the Catholic Church. It had a floor on earth and a floor in heaven: both had always been geographical locations in one world, the difference was purely hierarchical. On both floors, the faithful live with body and soul - a fusion of the Middle Eastern resurrection with the Egyptian immortality.

Christians had for a long time believed in the immediate return of the Christ to establish a new kingdom, bringing victory and pleasure to his followers. As disillusion spread, the church had replaced the dream of a Christian revolution with Christian pragmatics. Augustine combined the dream of a heavenly kingdom with this new realpolitik: the Christ needed not to return, because already a few days after his dead he had lent his power to the church, the new kingdom with its bureaucracy, anathemas and advantages. Because the Catholic church ruled all nations of the earth, the heavenly city was realized here and now.

At the last judgement, the bodies of the deceased will rise and join the living, and all will be rid of distortion and disease. Children, and abortions ‘if they have a soul’, will rise as adults, and women will be women. The latter is not as obvious as it seems: in late antiquity many scholars asserted that there was no place in heaven for sinful vaginas, and still in Medieval times Cathari believed a woman had to reincarnate as a man first. But Augustine argued that the female organ was going to renew its beauty in such a manner that it would not arouse lust, but would incite praise of God’s mercy and wisdom.

Whatever can be said against Saint Augustine, he did love women.

The all-mighty Church is the body of the all-mighty God

In the numerous theological disputes of the first centuries CE, Christian leaders seemed to behave, at first sight, like difficult, nitpicking logicians, torturing and killing over words.565 However, this smokescreen hides plain and simple politics of power.

Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople was convicted, at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, for his position that the earthly Jesus Christ was only human, not divine. And twenty years later Eutyches, a monastic superior also from Constantinople, was convicted at the Council of Chalcedon for teaching that Jesus Christ was only divine, not human.

The Catholics firmly held that Christ was fully divine and at the same time fully human, undivided. The Roman emperors had presented themselves to their public as divine humans, but this had been rather superlative pomposity than well-considered philosophy. To an intellectual of late antiquity the catholic viewpoint might have been disturbing, but it was the only doctrine ensuring the highest political power to the church, the earthly beneficiary, even the new body of Christ.

The Catholic Church claimed nothing less than divine power. Leo, the bishop who presided the Council of Chalcedon, proclaimed himself pontifex maximus, a title until then only used by the emperor. Only four centuries later, with the coronation of Charlemagne, diplomatic relations with Huns, Germans and Franks paid off, and the Holy Roman Empire would become reality. From that time Leo is known as Pope Leo I the Great.

The standpoint of Eutyches, known as ‘monophysite’, only survived among the Egyptian Copts and the Syrian Jacobites.

The conviction of Nestorius was hailed by incited masses in the streets of Ephesus as a promotion of the Virgin Mary, who could now rightfully be called Mother of God. Since prehistory, Mother Idols had played a major role in popular religion, and the temple of her Roman descent Artemis (Diana), erected in this very city, had been one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Still today Catholics believe it is the birthplace of the Virgin Mary.

The Nestorians fled to Iraq and Iran, and their escape saved antique knowledge from the immanent closing of the European mind for many centuries. An important part of this knowledge was harboured in the famous school of Mesopotamian Edessa, where it underwent strong Persian influence. When this school was closed down by the Roman emperor, the Persian king welcomed its transfer to Nisibis, a town which had switched borders nine times in a few centuries, once every fifty years on the average.

Later Nestorians set foot on India, and became the founders of an important movement in China.

Later this essay will illustrate how the Nestorian heritage had an effect on, separately, the emergence of medieval Islamic science and of modern European science.

Once Catholic power was established, mobs of Christians destroyed pagan shrines, looted temples and attacked Synagogues and Jews everywhere.

The new patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, who had already played a major part in the conviction of the Nestorians, organized mobs of monks and other faithful to burn temples, libraries and synagogues. The town prefect was murdered when he protested, an act of faith the monks were canonized for. In 412 CE, the same mobs tortured the famous philosopher and astronomer Hypatia to death. Socrates Scholasticus wrote:

they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.566

The medieval Suda recounts that Hypatia was a beautiful woman:

one of her students fell in love with her and was unable to control himself and openly showed her a sign of his infatuation. Uninformed reports had Hypatia curing him of his affliction with the help of music. The truth is that the story about music is corrupt. Actually, she gathered rags that had been stained during her period and showed them to him as a sign of her unclean descent and said, “This is what you love, young man, and it isn’t beautiful!” He was so affected by shame and amazement at the ugly sight that he experienced a change of heart and went away a better man.

By replacing music by vulgar swearing, the Christian Suda recuperates a scholar applying a Pythagorean musical therapy for the same ideology that killed her - the Platonic-Christian aversion for the human body.567

Cyril of Alexandria, who organized so many gruesome pogroms, torturings and killings, is today a saint in both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church.