The Western Tradition

The story of the Roman Empire can be simply told. The two centuries that opened with the emperor Augustus were a time of peace and prosperity.

There were crazy emperors and murderous emperors and murdered emperors, but the empire marched on. The Mediterranean was full of ships. The roads were safe.

The borders were well guarded. But Greco-Roman civilization seemed so stable, in fact, that it was taken as the ultimate structure of the world.

History was no longer a process, but the record of how civilization got to be so stable and perfect. And politics were not about how things should go, but how things should be kept the way they were. The third century, however, was a time of trouble, of war, of civil war, until the reign of Diocletian from 284 to 305, which was a period of reorganization and reconstruction.

For nearly another century, there was relative peace, but after that, everything went to pieces. The economy cracked. The provinces were invaded by barbarians.

Rome itself. Rome itself was sacked. And in 476, Romulus Augustulus retired to the country, the last emperor to rule from Rome over the western part of the empire. And so the end came just about five centuries after the Battle of Actium and the beginning of the Peace of Augustus. It was a remarkable run. As Edward Gibbon, the 18th century, historian wrote, instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it subsisted so long.

The real turning point came not in the fifth century, but way back in the second and third centuries, when Rome realized that she was mortal.

And when the calm confidence of an earlier age lapsed into something more anxious, more uneasy, increasingly decadent.

You can chart the change in the portraits of the emperors. This is a bust of Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117, and who was one of the best emperors Rome ever had. He seems to have grown old with a sense of humor and a certain skepticism. Fifty years later, however, emperors, just like their subjects, looked sad or worse.

This is a portrait of Marcus Aurelius, a stoic who ruled from 161 to 180. He was an excellent emperor, but one who seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. From that time on, the emperors range from sad to worried, as in this portrait of Decius, to brutish, like the emperor Caracalla, or to simply insane, like the young Commodus, son and successor of Marcus Aurelius, who rejected the rationalism of the stoics and invoked the protection of every oriental deity in the book.

Cybele, the great mother from Asia Minor, Mithras from Persia, Isis from Egypt, and any other god who promised salvation or immortality. So, in the course of one century, the Romans shifted from confidence and stability to anxious uncertainty. And their view of the world shifted as well, especially in religion and philosophy.

Back in the second century B.C., when Rome first became open to Greek ideas, the philosophy that became popular was Stoicism.

You remember that for the Stoics, the basis of morality was conformity with nature, not only one's truly human nature, but also that of the divine world order. The wise man perceived true nature and true order and conformed to them.

The Romans adapted this to their needs by emphasizing self-mastery, temperance, courage, dedication.

But they also learned the universal humanitarian ideas of Stoicism. And their limited original notion of virtu, as manliness in the service of the state, this was enlarged and enriched.

The old parochial morality was broadened into a new humanism.

Men like Cicero tried to apply humanism to the practical problems of political and social life. Born in 106 B.C., Cicero, shown here, was a Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher until his outspokenness against Mark Anthony, and Octavian got him killed. It was in the name of a more humane philosophy that the Stoic Seneca became the tutor and then the counselor of the young emperor Nero, until Nero accused him of conspiracy and ordered him to take his own life. And it was Stoic philosophy that helped justify a princeps like Augustus, a first citizen, that is, who would be the wise and virtuous protector of the state.

The Stoics had transformed the Platonic notion of a philosopher-king into the idea that all men were equal in essence, but not in ability or virtue. There were a few superior souls like Augustus who had pressed through to lighter knowledge, and these alone could conceive and carry out what was good. And many of the reforms of Augustus reflected this conception of the exceptional man, a man with a mission who set out to reestablish and secure the balance and harmony of the world that were threatened by excess and corruption.

Hence Augustus's efforts to restore the old moral virtues, to reaffirm traditional marriage, to reestablish old religious practices and the religious rituals of old Rome this incidentally is a shrine in a sacred landscape, to train and to hone a ruling elite based on Greco-Roman humanism, whose values would still be taught in school in the 19th and 20th centuries. But this Augustan restoration which lasted a long time, ultimately proved precarious because it depended on exceptional individuals to handle an immense and overwhelming task, the governing of an empire. And these outstanding individuals were not always available. The restoration was also shaky because the culture that was offered to, or rather imposed upon, the lower classes by Augustus, this clashed with a brutishness and irrationality that was common among the lower classes.

And rationality sat uneasily on the upper classes as well, so when hard times came, it proved a veneer easy to discard.

Augustus tried to introduce an ascetic, elitist philosophy, good for the brightest and best. These men were told that public service was their duty, and that power had to be exercised only to good ends, and then with moderation. But the religious rituals were too businesslike, too cool for hot periods, and the philosophy was too demanding for normal people. So when security collapsed, and the economy broke down, danger and death were more on their minds and in their art. Stoicism was replaced by new ideas and new aspirations.

What most people wanted as times grew hard was something more personal, more accessible, and they expressed this by saying that they wanted salus.

A word which originally meant simply physical health, but which came to mean the health of the soul, that is, salvation.

Stoic humanism might be good for a philosopher like Seneca, but the psychotic emperor Nero did not want to be told what to do, and Seneca's stoicism came in handy when Nero asked him to commit suicide. A century later, stoicism led Marcus Aurelius to write his Meditations, but his son and successor Commodus was a crazy lout, less interested in inner fortitude than in magic salvation.

By that time, Roman culture was running hard just to stand still. Respectable citizens were trying to plumb the great unknown by way of seances like this one, emperors prayed for miracles to get them out of tight spots, and ordinary people relied on religious charms, astrologers and soothsayers, and lots of amulets.

If you're caught in an air raid and the bombs are falling, you know that virtue or wisdom or strength make no difference and you pray for divine intervention.

That's what happened as the second century slipped into the third and the fourth. In politics, in thought, in the arts, the realism and naturalism and the sense of perspective that were part of a rational attitude to nature and the world, these gave way.

The more disorder grew, the less relevant rationality seemed. The more the empire cracked, the less self-discipline and self-reliance seemed to work. The more doctrines of salvation offered a promise of escape, which brings me to Christianity. There are three things we have to bear in mind when we look at early Christianity.

First, the cultural context of a Hellenistic world all around it. Second, the Jewish sources of the new creed and the Jewish influences on it.

And third, the changes in the contemporary world between the first century when Christianity was born and the fourth century when it was recognized by the Roman state. In other words, the ways in which the world affected Christianity and the ways in which Christianity affected the world. If we begin by looking at the dominant Hellenistic culture of the ancient world, we find that it had been deeply infiltrated by Orientalism, especially as regards religion.

This, for example, is a Roman figure clad in Egyptian clothes. And this is a scene from one of the mystery religions, or from a Gnostic cult, claiming to offer access to Gnosis, or knowledge of spiritual mysteries.

These cults were most popular among women and among the lower classes for whom they had been greatly simplified and vulgarized.

They were not new, but their importance in the Hellenistic Greco-Roman world was new.

Speaking in general terms, we might describe that world as skeptical, tolerant, and materialistic.

This, for example, is a pillow merchant doing business in the marketplace. But it was above all, perhaps, a cosmopolitan world in which, under Roman rule, tribes and races intermingled within the same empire.

In the midst of this, only the Jews really kept their identity and their uncompromising Semitic outlook.

The word Semitic, remember, refers back to the Semites, a people who moved from the Arabian desert into Mesopotamia more than 2,000 years before Christ.

The Hebrews were Semites. And so were the people we now call Arabs. The Jews, especially, were children of an idea, the idea of Jehovah, a God of supreme universal significance and power, but with whom they had a particular, unique, and exclusive relationship.

It was this idea that kept them alive as a people through years of trial and tribulations, alive and also jealously aloof from other religious influences in the world around them. Although Hellenistic influences affected the Jews as they affected everybody else, they affected them first in a contrary fashion, by making them resist assimilation, by stirring their nationalism, and by forcing them to reconsider and reform their religious attitudes and their ethics.

In the year 175 B.C., Antiochus IV, who ruled Syria and Palestine, started a campaign designed to unify his realm by wiping out competing religions and traditions.

And so he prohibited circumcision and dietary laws, which were central to Judaism. The Jews, of course, refused to give up their religion, their traditions.

They refused to worship Antiochus IV as a god, to subordinate their religion to the state. The friction got worse, until it finally erupted in the bloody Maccabean revolt of 164 B.C. That was so bloody and murderous that even today, the French slang for corpse is Maccabee. These are coins struck by the new Maccabean rulers.

As often happens, the results of the revolt went well beyond the practical issues that set it off. And in this case, the chief result was mainly that in resistance, the Jewish religion survived as a distinct and very self-conscious belief.

If Antiochus had succeeded, if Judaism as such had died out, neither Christianity nor Mohammedanism in the form they actually took would have existed.

But as it happened, the persecutions and the fighting produced a sort of revival of Judaism, partly as a nationalistic manifestation, partly as a search for consolation. War was hell, life was hell, and so just to make up for it, the Jews started to think of heaven.

They took over ideas of immortality from the Gnostics, and they did this partly to encourage themselves and their friends not to bow to Antiochus and to the Syrian gods. Look at it this way. If you had to choose between sticking to Jehovah and being burnt, or worshipping a barbarian god like Baal and staying alive, you could take comfort and fortitude from the fact that if you were burnt, you would be rewarded afterwards in eternity, which is a long time. On the other hand, if you broke your contact with Jehovah, life was short, and you would be very sorry afterwards. The Hellenistic influence, which was rejected by the Jews when he tried a frontal attack, was, however, going to affect Jewish thought in more subtle ways through the ethical developments of Pharisaic philosophy.

The Pharisees were a religious sect given to piety, earnest prayer, strict observance of Jewish law, but also to interpreting the law of Moses in the context of changing situations.

Jewish observance in general centered increasingly on reading the law and the scriptures in the synagogue, discussing them, interpreting them.

This was a habit which led people to think for themselves and to listen to others around them who were developing notions to be found less in the scriptures than in current thought. Belief in an immortal soul, in angelic spirits, in personal resurrection, in free will reconciled with predestination. So with one ear to Hellenistic culture and another to their inner voice, the Pharisees were going to evolve most of the socially significant ideas which have since come down to us in the New Testament.

The Sermon on the Mount is a perfect reflection of early Pharisaic doctrine. For those of you who know it, here is a passage that may sound familiar.

Love ye one another from the heart, and if a man sin against thee, speak peaceably to him, and in thy soul hold no guile.

And if he repent and confess, forgive him. But if he deny it, do not get into a passion with him, lest catching the poison with thee he take to swearing, and so sin doubly. And if he be shameless and persist in wrongdoing, even so forgive him from the heart, and leave to God the avenging. This passage was written by Jewish scholars over a century before the birth of Christ. It comes from the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, which was written between 109 and 107 B.C., and which later proved extremely popular with St. Paul and was probably known to Christ as well. Now, obviously, we cannot understand Christianity unless we realize that it was the product of this long development and interaction of thought and religion within and upon the Jewish people.

Jesus, after all, was a Jew and probably a rabbi who followed Jewish law.

And Christianity was first preached by Jews to Jews as a sort of reformed Judaism. Jesus won a considerable following.

He was a great leader among Jews, especially among the poor, until his success provoked the hostility of the Jewish establishment, which did not find it difficult to convince the Roman governor that Jesus was a dangerous radical. So the Romans put him to death in Jerusalem probably in 30 A.D.

But it's important to realize that from the first, Christianity claimed to be not a break from, but the continuation and the fulfillment of the great history of the Old Testament, which promised a Messiah, a Redeemer, who would make Israel and the Jewish people triumph over their enemies. Other Christians inherited a lot of things from the Jews, including the Semitic sense of world order, the sense of worthlessness, and the conflict between body and spirit.

And they took over, too, the typically Jewish vision of a blinding, all-powerful God above, and the abject condition of man below, with his overwhelming sense of sin and a passion for salvation. But this salvation could not come from anything.

Man could do, as the rationalist Greeks might have argued, but only from God, or, as St. Paul later put it, from faith in God, which in Christian terms is simply faith in the reality and value of Christ's sacrifice.

However, there is one thing to remember about all this. At the beginning, in order to be a Christian, you had to be a Jew.

There was no thought of separateness in Christian communities, which were merely reformed religious groups within a Jewish community.

We shall see how this changed, and why, in our next program.

Professor Eugene Weber's continuing journey through the history of Western civilization. Last time, we ended at the dawn of Christianity, when Christ and his disciples were preaching to their fellow Jews a sort of reformed Judaism. Where the long tradition of the Hebrew prophets promised the coming of a Messiah, who would establish the kingdom of God on earth, Jesus seems to have preached that there would be no kingdom, but instead a day of judgment coming very soon, when the wicked would be punished and the righteous rewarded. And so the message was, abandon all sin while you still have time.

This was definitely a departure from orthodoxy, but even so, there was no thought of separateness in Christian communities until, that is, St. Paul came along.

Paul was a Roman citizen born in the city of Tarsus in Asia Minor. He was a rabbi and a Pharisee, in other words, a very pious Jew.

And as a pious Jew, he persecuted Christians, whom he regarded as heretics and a menace to Judaism.

But around 35 AD, five years after the crucifixion of Christ, Paul had a vision on the road to Damascus. And he became convinced that Jesus was the Son of God.

Here is a 15th century version of Paul's conversion. Paul turned out to be the great organizer, the great public relations manager of the young faith.

And in effect, he made Christianity competitive with other religions. He enlarged its scope by recruiting outside the restricted group of people who obeyed Jewish law.

He admitted non-Jews without asking them to be circumcised first, and without insisting they respect the ritual laws, especially the laws concerning food.

He probably did it because he was in a hurry. The end of the world was coming, and you couldn't quibble over trifles.

But it's worth remembering that Paul and his like were able to spread Christianity because of Roman roads and Roman peace, as well as his skill and the religion's appeal.

It was Rome that linked the Mediterranean world together. Equally important was the Koine, the Greek's common dialect, which spread from east to west, making all the Mediterranean a bilingual world where traveling men could make themselves understood everywhere.

St. Paul wrote to the Romans in Greek, and until early in the 3rd century AD, the language of Christian liturgy in the church of Rome was Greek.

It was also into Greek that the Hebrew scriptures had been translated two centuries before Christ.

That extremely important translation was finished in Hellenistic Alexandria with its great Jewish community. It was called the Septuagint, from the Latin for seventy,

because there were supposed to have been seventy translators. And so it was ready for early Christian missionaries when they began to carry their message through the world.

In the synagogues, which you could find in Hellenistic cities like this one, Dura and Ropos, the translations of the Hebrew scriptures were read and studied.

And I don't think the early Christian church would have gone very far, or Paul either, without the Septuagint and the synagogue, and without writing the New Testament in the Greek Koine from the very beginning. So here you have a crucial interconnection of factors.

First, the conquests of the Roman Empire which unify the Mediterranean world. Second, the Hellenistic creation of a common speech for this world.

Both were preconditions for the advance of Christianity. However, as time went on, the Jews became increasingly hostile to Christians, and the Christians also became more and more hostile to the Jews. To the Jews, the Christians were heretics.

To the Christians, the Jews were willfully blind to what was so evident and so evidently holy. And so Christianity separated from Judaism.

It left the fairly straightforward path of Jewish religious thought, and, moving westward along both shores of the Mediterranean, it started to appeal to a new public and to develop a theology of its own. This advance of Christianity was spurred in the second half of the first century by a great Jewish rising against Rome and a wave of anti-Semitism that swept over the East about the same time.

But then the Roman general Titus put down the uprising and sacked the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.

This is the Roman procession with the spoils of Jerusalem. At this point, the Christians were still pretty much a Jewish sect, and they were emotionally affected by the humiliating defeat.

But then two things happened. On the one hand, a lot of Christians were left with an abiding hatred of secular power. On the other hand, as you can tell from this coin with the inscription Judea taken captive, established Jewish communities and the power of Orthodox Jewish religion temporarily collapsed, so the Christians found it easy to leave. It was easier to break free.

The earthly Jerusalem had been destroyed, so that now the ideal version could be better projected into heaven without having to worry about real nations and real governments.

The result of all this can be found in the suggestion made by Origen, a Christian teacher who lived in Alexandria in the third century.

Origen wrote that Christians should not take part in the government of the state, but that their only concern should be the divine nation, that is, the church.

Some churchmen went even further, denying the world and their own bodies, which in the dichotomy between spirit and flesh came out a poor second.

They gave away their property, they fasted, they flagellated themselves, and Origen advocated complete chastity, probably had himself castrated.

If the church had heeded Origen, its story would have ended there. But fortunately, St. Paul suggested it was better to marry than to burn.

Still, the unworldly anti-secular ideas of Origen remained influential, and as the Roman Empire disintegrated, churchmen looked on with some detachment.

They exercised their talents in bitter theology, in theological controversies, and in the spread of monastic communities like this one in Greece, cut off from the wicked world, where Christians could concentrate on personal salvation and spend their lives in contemplation and penitence. It can be argued, and it was argued even at the time, that this attitude was a sort of sour grapes, a retreat from the world when the world became too hard to bear, denying earthly values in order to secure oneself against their loss. It can also be argued, however, that when you deny certain values, you are, at least by implication, you are affirming alternative values. But to many people of that time, even this positive aspect looked uncommonly like a negative one. And to understand this, we have to imagine what these early Christians looked like to the respectable property owners of the first three centuries after Christ.

To begin with, many people thought the Christians were crazy or drunk.

The resurrection of Christ and the ascension were incompatible with natural science,

and for a late pagan intellectual to accept the incarnation of God in the human form as Jesus would be like a modern man denying the evolution of species.

He would have to abandon not just the most advanced rational knowledge available, but by implication the whole Greco-Roman culture that had been marked by that knowledge.

But the ultimate accusation was the one that the high priest brings to the Roman governor against St. Paul when he complains, we have found this man to be a pestilent pharaoh. And a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.

And this is the point. These Christians are dangerous. They insist that all men are brothers, that the beggar is as good as the solid citizen, that the slave is equal to his master in essence, if not in fact, since this doesn't prevent Christians from keeping slaves.

All in all, they deny the value of everything society holds dear.

The good shepherd offers salvation, not money, or family, or property, or success, or service to the state.

Leave thy father and thy mother and thy brother and follow me. What good will all this do you if you have lost your own soul?

But what was even worse, the Christians even denied the value of the good shepherd. The final power of the emperor, and the ultimate value and worth of imperial power and imperial justice.

By all means, render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, but there's a limit to what belongs to Caesar, and this means that for the Christians, there is a higher power than the state.

There is an ultimate good or aim which may not be the ultimate good or aim of the state. And if that aim, God's aim, clashes with that of Caesar, there is no doubt about whom the Christian must follow. Think for a minute of the revolutionary character of such ideas being spread around a society where material values reign supreme, ideas which found particular favor with the proletariat, especially around the ports and the Levantine cities.

It's a society where gods, like Diana here, were anthropomorphic with human form and personality, where the emperor was God, where imperial unity called increasingly for religious unity and for the subordination of private opinions to the state.

So Christians were dangerous, and they were subversive.

Because their success threatened not just the state, but the whole established, accepted basis of social life and social values.

When Christ says, my kingdom is not of this world, he means that the world is irrelevant, which challenges every stoic notion of civic duty. When he says, repent, for the kingdom of God is near, the kingdom of God means the end of politics on earth, insofar as you define politics as a reasonable attempt to organize human society.

On the other hand, a lot of what the Christians said could have fitted the stoic tradition.

The focus on individual salvation, the heavenly city to which the pure and high-minded aspire,

the rejection of social or national differences, above all the high moral values, they all sounded familiar, or they could be made to sound familiar.

And so, on another level, did the mystic aspect of Christianity and its promise of a special revelation, a special road to salvation, just like the other so-called mystery religions. The cults of Mithras, of Isis, and so on.

But the real secret weapon of the Christians was that they soon developed a tight-knit, disciplined organization that stretched all over the empire.

It all began with the fact that Christians had a book, the Bible, full of potent promises and stories of miracles that bore out the tales attested to by people who were practically contemporaries.

The Christians, being a practical group, meeting and reading and having discussions about the gospels, took advantage of Roman respect for tombs to organize themselves legally as burial societies.

And this is one of their catacombs, their underground burial tunnels. This meant that even when the authorities persecuted the Christians, they generally respected their catacombs, at least until the third century, when the Christians were already pretty well organized.

There was also the fact that while Christianity was just as mysterious as any other mystery cult, it was much cheaper to join.

Initiation as a worshiper of Mithras called for a bull. Initiation into the cult of Isis called for a whole series of gifts and sacrifices.

But if you wanted to worship Christ, there were no initial expenses, and most church meetings were rather like highly emotional Sunday school picnics. It was pleasant, and it was economical.

But if you wanted to, and you probably did want to, you could give alms to the church. By the third century, the church had become rich.

Alms giving was a judicious transfer of capital from this world to the next, a sort of fire insurance.

These contributions and legacies accumulated in the hand of the bishops and were devoted almost exclusively to charity and not just for Christians either.

You can imagine what a tremendous lever of power this Christian charity must have been as the imperial Roman organization disintegrated, as misery increased, as the great cities crowded with starving poor, as men were thrown out of work or off their lands by barbarians or nobles or tax collectors. And the Christian bishops who controlled the arts were often the only honest men around, or the only honest, powerful men around.

The provincial governors and other magistrates were mostly blue-blooded ninis, appointed for a year or two to act as the figurehead of an ill-paid and hence corruptible staff.

And so, in the third century, the bishop stands out as a permanent figure in his town, dedicated to his job, to his flock, and responsible only to God.

And then by the next century, he also offers something everybody wants, a free, quick, uncorrupt settlement of lawsuits by arbitration. And this is sought by pagans and heretics as much as it is by Christians.

So the church became a force to be reckoned with until by the fourth century it was officially reigned.

That happened after yet another civil war between rivals to the throne of the empire ended with the victory of Constantine, who enlisted the support of the Christians against his chief opponent, his opponent who worshipped Sol Invictus, the invincible son, as most soldiers did then.

Constantine, who was emperor from 306 to 337, was given to visions and conversions he had shifted from one god to another before.

This time, however, a vision told him that the sign of the cross would bring him victory. And so he put the cross on his banner and on the shields of his soldiers, and it worked.

In 312, Constantine defeated his chief rival, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge near Rome.

And soon after this, his Edict of Milan granted full toleration to the church and freedom of worship to all Christians.

It also established an alliance between the Christian church and the Roman state that was going to last a very long time.

Within a few decades, tolerance for Christians turned into the right for Christians to be intolerant of any other faith or church, and to tear down temples like this temple of Artemis in Jordan.

Around 400, public paganism was suppressed, the temples were closed everywhere, the statues broken up, often by Christian mobs, and the proud inscriptions proclaiming the unshakable alliance of cities and their gods were carted away to pave the public highways.

For the Jews during this period, there were pogroms, organized massacres, which enlisted the anti-Semitism of the urban Greeks in the cause of God.

For the pagans, there was the closing of the schools, the closing of temples, persecution, sometimes lynchings, as happened with Hypatia, a distinguished lady of Alexandria who went in for philosophy and mathematics.

As described by Edward Gibbon, the historian who didn't like early Christians very much, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanely butchered by a troop of savage, merciless fanatics.

Her flesh was scraped from the bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.

The just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts. That is what Edward Gibbon describes it.

By the time this happened in 415, the Christians were reserving most of their passion for fighting each other, and they invested far more fury and energy in persecuting fellow Christians than they did in hurting non-Christians, especially as non-Christians were becoming ever more scarce.

What you get now is the clash of groups holding strong views on things like diet, marriage, property, clothing, which could and often did lead to violence.

Above all, you get doctrinal discord about the Trinity, the union of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, which is a difficult concept anyway, and especially about the nature of Christ himself. Is Christ a man who becomes God?

Is he a God who temporarily becomes a man? Is he a God who is God and man at the same time?

And is he equal to God the Father, or subordinate, as a son should be? This may sound like hair-splitting, but a lot of blood was shed, and a lot of people suffered for each of these views. Rival doctrines also became associated with this region or that.

They became part of what we might call a national or tribal identity.

For example, the city of Constantinople stood for a Christian God who combines two natures in one. Alexandria stood for one nature only.

From then on, when one province or people or political party fought another, it would very often be as orthodox against heretic on behalf of one doctrine or another.

As long as Christians had been part of an alternative society, their shrines had been harbors in a world ruled by demonic powers.

But now, the alternative to society had become the society. The shrines proclaimed the greatness of God and of his church, and they also provided arenas where battles between Christians could be fought out. The Christian himself, had been an athlete in Christ, committed to a wrestling match, an argon, as the Greeks called it, a match against evil and darkness and his own lower nature. Now that the churches were full, he could wrestle against those whose idea of truth, especially Christian truth, was different from his own. And this was to bring centuries of conflict.