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The Rise of Christianity

The victory of Christianity as the official and only tolerated religion of the Empire coincided chronologically with the beginning of the mass invasion of the Germans into the Western Empire. In fact, many of the Germans had been "converted" to Christianity before their invasion of Western Europe. However, mere conversion had not effected any marked transformation of Germanic cultural values. For that a long process of education would be necessary. For example, Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, successfully liquidated by savage force and ruse all possible challengers to his throne. He persuaded the son of a fellow king to assassinate his father, and then arranged the brutal murder of the son. Denying all knowledge of the plot, he persuaded the people to choose him a king in place of the murdered father and son. The Christian bishop who tells us this story comments: "He received Sigibert's kingdom with his treasures, and placed the people, too, under his rule. For God was laying his enemies low everyday under his hand, and was increasing his kingdom, because he walked with an upright heart before him, and did what was pleasing in his eyes." Clovis and his bishop biographer were a long way in spirit from Jesus, the teacher and healer of Nazareth, who had taught a doctrine of brotherly love and peace. It is not surprising, however, that Germans, educated to their own system of values, should have failed to grasp the full Christian message. Clovis, in becoming a Christian, meant to enlist for his designs the protection and support of a god more powerful than those he had hitherto worshipped. Gregory, bishop of Tours, the historian of Clovis' reign, commended all that Clovis did because the king had espoused Roman doctrine in preference to the Arian heresy accepted by many of the Germanic invaders. Neither of them is likely to have thought of trying to practice Christian ethics in the warlike society of the Franks. Christianity itself had changed since the time of its founder. Any major religion takes its shape from a complex set of factors:

1. the teachings of its founders, 2. the interpretation of those teachings by successors, 3. the organization set up for worship and religious discipline, 4. the mental attitudes and traditions of the converts, 5. the conditions under which the religion spreads

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In the case of Christianity, a simple narrative of "what happened" is virtually impossible. Jesus gave his message to Jews, a civilized people living in a highly complex society created by interaction among Greeks, Romans, and oriental peoples on one of the strategic highways of the world. The message was carried to speculative and argumentative Greeks, to disciplined and civilized or enslaved and impoverished Romans, to partially Romanized and civilized Celts in Gaul and Britain, to "the wild Irish," and to other Barbarians outside the boundaries of the "civilized world." Let us begin our tracing of the development of Christianity with the fact that Jesus was a Jew. He taught a way of life and faith grounded in a long-established prophetic tradition of Judaism. He emphasized the love and mercy of God, the love and brotherhood of men of good will, the unimportance of worldly wealth and power, and the comfort and promise of redemption and happiness in a blessed hereafter. Some authorities contend that Jesus may have been influenced in his rejection of success in the world by the Essenes, an ascetic sect of Jews who were in conflict with the Jewish establishment and had withdrawn to retreats in the desert near the Dead Sea, where they practiced an extreme asceticism and a rigid adherence to the ancient law. They lived in hope of an apocalyptic deliverance from the world of the flesh and he devil. These practices and concepts derived ultimately from Persian religious ideas of the 5th and 6th centuries BC. Jesus, in contrast, did not withdraw from the society but went out to teach and preach among the humble and poor, to help and heal the sick and the destitute, in other words, to change conditions in the world as well as to give men hope for a hereafter. He taught the observance of ancient Jewish law but said that the law was made for men, not man for the law. On the whole, the connection with the Essenes is inadequately proved. Most of the Jews did not accept Jesus as the promised Messiah (or in Greek, Christos) who would bring "justice and righteousness from this time forth and for evermore." There were those who thought he was an impostor and subverter of the social order. There seems little in his teaching to threaten either the Jewish or the Roman establishment. Yet, he was arrested and crucified, a common Roman penalty for criminal activities. Then, from the brief, tragic story of his life and mission, his followers created that powerful and enduring myth that became the center and core of Christianity as it spread through the Mediterranean world. Peter, one of the twelve whom Jesus chose as his disciples, and Paul, a convert who had been a persecutor of Christians, made the crucial decision to preach and teach the faith among Gentiles as well as Jews and not to require circumcision or Jewish observances other than the basic ethical teachings of the ancient Hebrews. The carrying out of this decision led to the spread of the religion throughout the Roman Empire and beyond its boundaries in the first great experiment in mass education the world had yet seen. Ancient religions had been public, that is, participated in by all the inhabitants of a city-state or the members of a nation, or they had been "mystery" religions, participated in only by an

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initiated few who had been properly inducted into the celebration of the rites. Christianity became the greatest of the mystery religions in the sense that baptism and instruction were necessary for introduction to its rights. It kept its social character, speaking a message of hope and comfort for mankind. Moreover it became also an explanation of man's existence and purpose in the world that challenged the best minds of the period. Changes in Christianity occurred, no doubt, because men brought to the religion what they had to give and took form it what they were able to take on the basis of their past experience. Paul, for example, brought to the faith a vast knowledge of Jewish scripture and rabbinical tradition as well as of Greek philosophy. He brought also the ardent of spirit that had made him a great persecutor of Christians, and he brought the testimony of his own conversion. It was he who created a comprehensive theology in which the death and resurrection of Christ, the son of God, given by God for the redemption of mankind, became the culminating event in the world's history. And it was he, in the many pastoral letters he wrote to congregations that he had formed, who introduced the emphasis on the rejection of the world of the flesh and the devil and on the experience of conversion as the highest experience of the Christian. But the disputatious Greeks, Jews, and other oriental converts of the eastern Roman Empire could not accept any one exegesis of the theology of Christianity, particularly not of the difficult problem of Christ's relation to god. How could Christ, being God, be born like any other human baby from the womb of a human mother. Did this in some way affect his divinity? Was God the Father, superior to the Son? did He exist before the Son, and what was the nature of the Holy ghost by whom Mary was supposed to have been impregnated? The controversy over the nature of Christ rose to such a pitch in the early fourth century that Emperor Constantine decided to call a general council of church leaders at Nicea (325) to settle the violent dispute initiated by the teachings of Arius, a priest of the great Egyptian city of Alexandria. He taught that Christ, having been born of a woman, was of a nature subordinate (though still divine) to God. The formula adopted at Nicea is the basis of the creed as recited in many Christian churches today: "We believe in one God, the Father, all-sovereign, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all the ages, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father...." This formula did not, as hoped, settle the question. The followers of Arius continued to teach their heretical doctrine and even took it to the Germans beyond the Roman frontiers, thus creating for Church authorities a doctrinal problem in the education of the Germans to add to the already difficult problem of Christianizing their savage behavior. Paul was not the only highly educated man to become converted to the Christian faith during its early history. As men trained in the schools of Athens, Alexandria, and other great centers of learning became converts, they brought into the faith their knowledge and their methods of

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disputation acquired in these schools. The first four centuries of the Christian era were the age of the so-called Fathers of the Church, the scholars who elaborated a Christian theology in answer to challenges from their former colleagues and who created a Christian literature that became the heritage of medieval men in search of wisdom. During these early centuries also a Christian church came into being, that is, a public institution with an apparatus for spreading the faith, for maintaining its purity, for ordering its worship, and for protecting the faithful against hostile external power. From the beginning when the disciples were left frightened and confused by the sudden loss and departing injunctions of their leader, the central part of remembrance and worship had been the celebration of the mystery of Christ's death and resurrection in a ceremony in which participants partook of bread and wine thought by miraculous transformation to be the body and blood of Christ. The ceremony was thus a communion with the resurrected Christ by consuming the flesh and blood of his incarnation. It was thus a kind of incarnation for the communicants and highly sacred ritual. Only initiates, that is, those instructed and baptized in the faith, could be admitted. Someone was needed to preside over the ceremony. In response to this and also the need for caretakers to control the common funds contributed by converts to the congregations, there emerged officers of the faith: on the one hand, priests and bishops to lead in spiritual matters, on the other deacons to take care of the money and other common property of the congregations. Quite naturally there developed a doctrine of Apostolic Succession. All properly constituted priests were expected to be able to trace their authority back to the disciples, those whom Christ himself had constituted the propagators of the faith. Bishops were the chief among these. They had their seats in the principle cities of the Mediterranean world and, eventually, the west European world. The churches in which they presided were called cathedrals to differentiate them as the higher seats of authority. In the East there were many great cities: Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and from the time of Constantine, his new city, Constantinople. In the West there was the one great city, Rome, the dominant city of the Mediterranean world during the first crucial centuries of Christianity. Not unnaturally, bishops of Rome claimed from early times a pre-eminent power in the Church. Scriptural justification was found in the words of Christ to Peter, the traditional first bishop of Rome:

"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it..."

Bishops of Rome did not always find it easy to enforce this doctrine of the Petrine Succession on a vast and rapidly growing church. But there was a historical logic in it which could be a source of strength to bishops of Rome like Leo I in the 5th century and Gregory I at the end of the 6th. Persecution of Christians by the Roman authorities encouraged the spread of the faith and a

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change in its emphasis. "The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church." A cult of martyrs developed and even those who had not the heart for martyrdom themselves revered local martyrs, and believed in the miracles reported of them in their lives and of their relics after death. For simple and uneducated people, these martyr-saints supplied the place of older deities who had been credited with magical powers and gave them something closer than a remote majestic God and his crucified Son with which to meet the terrors and trials of the world. Roman persecutions were not just haphazard and irresponsible, although they were certainly atrocious. The crux of the problem as it became clear in the early second century, in the reign of Trajan (98-117), was that the Christians were uncivic in spirit. They intolerantly refused to take part in the public worship of the old gods that was part of the civic duty of Roman citizens. Owing to the secrecy of their central rites, open only to initiates, wild charges could be made against them of sacrificing children, drinking their blood, and the like. Persecutions continued with increasing severity until at the end of the reign of Diocletian (303-305) a last all-out effort was made to exterminate the Christians and destroy the Church. This failed, and Diocletian’s successors then embarked on a policy of toleration. In the Edict of Milan (313) they declared:

"...we decided that....it was right that Christians and all others should have freedom to follow the kind of religion they favored...."

By the end of the 4th century, the triumph of Christianity was so complete that Emperor Theodosius (379-395) adopted Christianity as the exclusive religion of the Empire by issuing an edict requiring:

"...that all the various nations which are subject to our clemency and moderation should continue in the profession of that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter...."

With the end of persecution there emerges a new type of Christian leader and a new mode of Christian life. The kudos that had formerly gone to the martyr-saints was transferred to the hermits and monks, who, having withdrawn to the solitude of the desert a wilderness, had succeeded in conquering the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil by self-imposed austerities and constant prayer. Monasticism had started in the third century in the eastern Mediterranean region as a movement of individuals in flight from the corruption of the cities to the peace of the desert. Notable hermits like St. Anthony (250-350?) were sought out by imitators. The large number who desired to emulate these first hermits necessitated the organization of communities in order to maintain discipline. The monastic movement became more social in character. Monks and nuns lived in communities apart from the world, but they prayed together and practiced the Christian virtues of love, humility, and obedience in their relations with one another. St. Benedict (480-543), who formulated the monastic rule that became the model for all others in the West, did not reject life or social values. He thought of the monastery as a school for the

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teaching of the true Christian life. An abbot was to be chosen by the monks themselves, the older and wiser heads carrying the greatest weight. Once chosen, he was to have an absolute paternal power. Yet he was to exercise this power with humanity, sanity, and humility before God. The novice, or candidate for the monastic life, had to give up the pleasures and pains of sexual love, taking a vow of chastity before entering the community. He was to have no personal property, not so much as a knife or pen, and he was to obey the abbot and senior brothers in all humility. Eating and sleeping were restricted to limits balanced between the body's subordination to the spirit and its natural animal needs. The monk was to divide his time among prayer, labor for the community, study and meditation. The monastery became his home and his family, and he was not to leave except on permission or order of the abbot. In relation to earlier laxities and other rules, St. Benedict's was moderate, sensible, and deservedly triumphant in Western Europe. St. Benedict did not directly enjoin study as a necessary part of monastic life, although he did encourage reading for his monks. Yet, inevitably, because the monasteries were sanctuaries from the hazards of the world and because many who became abbots were learned men, the copying and reading of books became part of the monastic life.

Christianity as a Cultural Revolution

When Christianity came to the Roman Empire it performed perhaps one of the most significant cultural revolutions in the history of the West. In general, Christian values stood directly opposed to those values of classical thought, that is, of the Greco-Roman tradition. This tradition taught that man ought to seek the good life today, here in this world, in the present world, and for the Romans, that meant the Empire. Christianity taught that our earthly existence was merely a preparation for life after death. Our life on earth was temporary, a stopping off point before the journey into eternal life. The visible world was a world of exile. We are all held as prisoners in Plato's Cave.

Christianity first appeared as yet another mystery religion or mystery cult. For many mystery cults, salvation was to come from a person's association, through a mystical rite, with a hero who had conquered death. Jesus was one such hero. He claimed the faith of his followers because he had risen from the dead. Unlike other mystery cults, however, salvation for the Christian required rituals, mysteries and sacraments. It required a moral life as well. Jesus was also an historical figure -- he was a real man, not some mythical hero as other mystery cults had taught.

From about 100 to 337, the Church in the Empire remained an illegal and persecuted sect. Still, the Church succeeded in adding to its numbers. It also developed a coherent body of theological and administrative opinion. By the early 4th century, the Christian faith had penetrated much of the world of the Roman Empire: it was the largest single religion within the Empire. The reasons for this growth are diverse. For instance Jewish communities were scattered throughout the Empire and Christians moving from community to community could

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preach their ideas in Jewish synagogues. The Christians also inherited the sacred writings of the Jews with the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament (written in Hebrew). And following the Council of Nicea in 325, the twenty-seven books of the New Testament (written in Greek) were also available. Christianity also held out the promise of man's ultimate salvation, that the meek shall inherit the world.

Christian and Jew alike, however, were persecuted for their failure to follow the Roman civil religion. This religion asked for public loyalty to the state, to the genius of Rome, and to the traditional pantheon of Roman gods and goddesses. Christian and Jew refuse to make this concession. As a result, they became the objects of hatred and contempt among the largely pagan population. The number of persecutions was relatively small but even the death of one person had wide significance for this person became a martyr. This was an unintended consequence of Roman persecution. The martyrs became important because they had died holding true to their faith. We have images in our minds, mostly provided by Hollywood, of Christians and Jews being thrown to starving lions in the circus, or being tied to stakes and burned alive. The fact that many of them never cried out as they were about to die a horrible death must have impressed many in the audience. How these people could not suffer at the hands of a merciless death, they asked themselves. Their god must be a powerful one -- their faith must be one without parallel. And so, the martyrs stood as supreme symbols of faith and integrity.

The conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century was a political and psychological event. He tried to bring the Christian church into government affairs at Constantinople. This was a typically Roman notion: don't dominate, accommodate. By the 330s, for instance, Constantine extended complete freedom of worship to all Christians, he returned confiscated property, he allowed the church own property without paying taxes. Although Constantine made Christianity the favored religion of the Empire, it did not become an established or formal religion until 391, the year in which the emperor Theodosius (c.346-395) outlawed heresy and closed all Roman pagan temples.

Christian intellectuals, or theologians, within the Roman Empire now quickly embarked on elaborating a systematic theology. In other words they had to create a body of beliefs to which all Christians would accept. They also developed a systematic government within the church. They believed themselves to be, as had the Jews before them, a community of people united by faith as well as by discipline. This sense of unity among them became the foundation for two things: (1) a constitution of the church, which set down laws and determined authority; and, (2) dogma, that is a collection of fixed opinions based on the authority the church.

However, there were those people who developed their own sects within the church: the heretics. Fortunately for the church, the various heresies which appeared in the first three or four centuries after the birth of Christianity forced the church to define its theology even more rigidly. In a sense, dissent within the church led not to its dissolution, but to its further strength and authority. In fact, Christianity would have become something quite different without heresies. As St. Paul said, "there must also be heresies." There were many heresies within the

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early church. Some heretics such as the Gnostics believed that mastery of special knowledge would assure man of salvation. Jesus was a real man for whom redeeming powers had come from above. He was neither divine nor the son of God. For the Gnostic there are two gods: one is knowable, the other is not. The universe is a prison -- we are trapped inside our physical bodies. The only salvation is knowledge, gnosis (inner, divine illumination). There were Gnostic schools, sects, writings, teachers, myths and churches. In general the Gnostic felt a home sickness for a lost paradise, knowable only through special knowledge.

The significance of such heretical doctrines, and the Gnostics are only one among dozens of heretical sects, was that their appearance served to strengthen the church. The church as also strengthened when it defined its canon of sacred writings: the Old and New Testament. The church also declared that the age of divine inspiration had come to an end, in order to quiet the claims of an ever-growing number of prophets.

The most significant development was that of a formal government within the church. Bishops became church leaders and had authority over priests who in turn presided over the faithful followers. This political structure gave the Christians a stable form of government no other mystery religion had ever enjoyed. Church government even rivaled that of the Romans state, at least until Christianity became the favored religion under Constantine. The number of bishops in the early Church was never large, so bishops had authority over large areas of territory. And there were some cities, such as Rome and Alexandria, which claimed superior authority over all others. Eventually, a bishop of Rome became the head of the Church and took the title "papa" or father and would eventually call himself Pope. By 300 then, the church had assumed all the characteristics that would be preserved down through the Middle Ages: a form of government, a theology, sacred books, rituals, martyrs, saints and of course, the faith of its believers.

Throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, Christian thinkers -- the Church Fathers -- were constantly trying to systematize theology. To do so, they were forced to use the learning and literature of the Greco-Roman tradition. Still, they thought this tradition was full of lies and indecencies. What they learned or borrowed from classical culture were two things, actually techniques. The first was the art of exegesis, a form of criticism in which an author undertook a line by line critique and interpretation of a written work. Exegetical studies became grand commentaries on the books of the Old and New Testament. The second technique was the art of rhetoric, that is, the art of style, presentation, and composition. The significance of this cannot be overlooked for it was through the Church Fathers that many of the texts of Greece and Rome were passed forward from generation to generation. In this way, the Judeo-Christian tradition became accommodated to the Greco-Roman tradition.

These texts -- Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, Homer, Virgil and others -- were preserved, copied, and passed on because the Church Fathers felt they would be useful in Christian theology as well as in Christian education. The Church Fathers brought Christianity to all of educated Europe. This was accomplished because the Old Testament had been translated from Hebrew to Greek and the New Testament was written Greek as well. These two texts existed

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prior to the Church Fathers of the fourth and the centuries, but their commentaries on these texts were of equal importance because they allowed Christianity to reach even more people.

Equally effective in the general diffusion of Christian ideas and Christianity in general was the monastic movement. Those Christians who joined monasteries were attempting to live a life of "ascetic ideals." The individual who lived by such ideals fled from the world in order to devote himself to worship. By denying oneself earthly or material pleasure the monks became the heroes of Christian civilization because they were the visible examples of man's faith in the Word of God.

The man who went off by himself to live and worship as a hermit found that he could not do it alone. What was needed was a community of worshipers and so by the 5th century the idea of the monastery gained a powerful appeal in the west. In Ireland, entire clans and tribes adopted the monastic life. They elected an "abbot," a lay person who lived at the monastery and who managed all contact with the outside world. Irish monks traveled throughout the Continent, founding monasteries along the way.

Of the monastic movement in general, however, it is the name of St. Benedict (c.480-c.543) of Italy who brought order to the monastic movement. Benedict drew up a rule for the monastic communities which were based on needs and functions. The constitution he developed endowed the abbot with full authority -- he was elected for life could not be replaced. Part of the Benedictine Rule was that all monks were to say prayers at regular intervals of the day and night. All monks were also required to labor -- this gave labor the dignity the Romans had denied.

Benedict established twelve, small monastic communities during his lifetime, the most important located at Monte Cassino, near Naples. The monks influenced nearly every aspect of early medieval life. They were the most successful farmers. They managed large estates and set examples for good farming practice. They were also the most literate and learned people. They organized "scriptoria" or writing offices where they copied manuscripts -- both secular and religious -- and decorated or "illuminated" manuscripts. European kings and princes recruited monks as officials and nearly all administrative records of the period were written by monastic scribes.

The monasteries were important because their communal organization allowed the monks to cope with the problems of the age while at the same time they became heroes of Christian civilization. They escaped from the disorder of their times but not individually. Rather, monastic communities, such as Monte Cassino, gathered together these devout monks. Some would work in the fields, others in the bakeries, and still others would tend to the wine presses. But the ascetic temperament taught the monks to save and invest in the future. By denying themselves luxuries or by not consuming immediately all that they produced, the monks had considerable economic success.

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Saving for the future made sense to the Benedictine monk. Saving also fitted well with their ascetic ideal of self-denial in a world of material pleasures. During the seventh and eighth centuries, the Celtic (Irish) and Benedictine monasteries played a vital role in the Christianization of the former Roman Empire. But over time, they ceased to be communities that fostered any sort of deeply personal religion. At their worst, they were subject to exploitation by the lay abbots. At their best, they became spiritual communities which existed to serve the interests of their aristocratic founders.

By the early 9th century, monasticism had ceased to be a vocation for the few. Instead, it became a highly influential way of life and was intertwined with large and wealthy houses involved in the day-to-day life of the early medieval countryside. At the same time, the purpose of the monastic order was transformed. The monks had turned away from the pursuit of personal salvation and instead, they began to intercede with God, on behalf of the rest of society. The role essentially became a clerical one and they became a professional class of clerics who administered the welfare of society. To become a monk by the 9th century required professional competence and commitment -- apparently gone was personal sanctity. The monastic ranks became filled not with those people interested in personal perfection, but with the children of aristocratic patrons, who believed they and their families would be closer to God if they built and maintained monasteries on their property. So the monks began to conceive of themselves as the "soldiers of Christ," striving to preserve the well-being of the clergy and faithful, the king and his kingdom. By the 11th and 12 centuries, a series of great monastic reforms swept across Europe and new monastic orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans did much to restore the original vigor and vitality of the early monastic movement. Monasticism was vital to the spread of Christianity in the early Middle Ages. But it was characteristic of these orders to fail to maintain their vitality and purpose. This was in large part due to the injection of aristocratic ideals.

The Church Fathers: St. Jerome and St. Augustine

There were many ways in which Christianity was made more popular among Roman pagans. For instance, early mystery cults made the Romans more prepared to accept something like Christianity once it made its appearance. The Roman persecutions of Jews and Christians had the unintended consequence of producing a vast and well-known list of saints and martyrs. The Jews had also allowed Christians to use their synagogues. The conversion of Constantine in the early 4th century certainly had an effect on the growth of Christianity. Furthermore, Jesus was a real man, not some mythical figure or hero -- he commanded the faith of the dispossessed. And monasticism provided a religious outlet for those men and women who abandoned Rome and the material world. The monks became the heroes of Christian civilization. And evangelicals seemed to be everywhere spreading "good news."

Christianity was also a religion of the written word. It was a religion of the book. The Jews gave the west its oral history in the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, written in Hebrew. And by the end of the second century, Christianity had the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, written in Greek. By the 5th century, complete editions of the Old Testament and New Testament were rare, bulky and expensive. What was usually printed were sections of the

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Bible: the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) and the book of Psalms, and the first four books of the New Testament (the Gospels), the Epistles of St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles.

What we need to take into account is the relationship between the church and classical culture. By the 4th century, it is correct to speak of a Christian literature that had developed around the interpretation, reinterpretation and commentary of the Old and New Testament. The relationship between the church and classical culture was tenuous at best. Christianity had the effect of making a synthesis between the Hebrew and Greco-Roman intellectual traditions. Christianity absorbed Hebrew monotheism and retained the Old Testament as the Word of God. As Christianity evolved, however, it also absorbed various elements of Greek thought -- and such an absorption helps to explain why Christianity succeeded in converting more people of the of the world of Late Antiquity.

To many of the early Church Fathers, classical philosophy was erroneous for the simple reason that it did not emanate from divine revelation. It was secular and pagan. The early Church Fathers complained that whereas Greek philosophers may have argued over words, Christianity possessed the Word, true wisdom as revealed by God. So, the early Church Fathers believed that studying Greek thought would contaminate Christian morality and promote heresy. For the early Church Fathers, there would be no compromise between Greek philosophy and Christian revelation. The early Church Father, Tertullian (150-225) once wrote that "with our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our faith that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides."

However, there were other Church Fathers who defended the value of studying classical literature and philosophy. The classical Greeks could aid in the moral development of children because the Greeks, though pagan, still embraced a virtuous life. Knowledge of Greek thought helped Christians to explain their beliefs logically and enabled them to argue intelligently with critics of Christianity. It was Clement of Alexandria (c.150-220) who brought reason to the support of faith by trying to make Christianity more intellectually respectable. As Clement once wrote in his Stromata (Miscellanies), "thus philosophy acted as a schoolmaster to the Greek, preparing them for Christ, as the laws of the Jews prepared them for Christ."

Using the language and techniques of Greek philosophy, Christian intellectuals changed Christianity from a simple ethical creed into a theoretical system. From this "Hellenization of Christianity," theology was born. Christ was depicted as the divine Logos (reason) in human form. Roman Stoicism was incorporated into the belief that all are equal and united in Christ.

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It is clear that the Church Fathers became Christian intellectuals and theologians. Christian theology became even more popular when the Church Father, St. Jerome (c.342-420), translated the Old Testament and New Testament into Latin. He accomplished this around 400, just ten years after Theodosius had declared Christianity to be the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Jerome grew up in Italy, studied at Rome, was baptized and served as a personal secretary to the Pope. Throughout his life, he remained an admirer of Cicero, Virgil and Lucretius and he defended the study of Latin literature by Christians. He lived for a while as a hermit in the desert near

Antioch. After becoming a priest, he visited Palestine and studied the Scriptures in Constantinople. He eventually became secretary to Pope Damascus and an advisor to a group of men and women drawn to the ascetic life. He left Rome and established a monastery near Bethlehem. He wrote lives of the saints and promoted the spread of monasticism. But his Latin version of the Bible -- known as the Vulgate or common version -- was a major achievement, for Jerome's version of the Bible became the standard version for the next ten centuries, in other words, right down to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

The most important of all Church Fathers was Augustine of Hippo, better known as St. Augustine. He was born in North Africa and 354 and died at the age 76 in 430. His father was a pagan, his mother a Christian. He was, then, the product of a mixed marriage. He loved his mother dearly, a fact which partially explains his later conversion to Christianity. He was educated at Carthage in North Africa, and very quickly yielded to earthly temptation. At the age of eighteen, he took a concubine or mistress and together they had one child, a son. It was at this time that Augustine was attracted to the heretical teachings of a man called Mani (216-276), who believed that one God could not be responsible for both good and evil. So, there had to be two gods. Such an opinion, of course, is heresy. In 387, and under the influence of men like St. Jerome, and his mother, he became a Christian.

In 399, Augustine was elected Bishop of Hippo, one of the intellectual centers of North Africa. Hippo was also the focus of a lively debate on numerous theological issues. In a certain sense, late 4th century Carthage was similar to the intellectual environment of Athens 1000 years earlier. In other words, Carthage was flooded with new ideas. Augustine spent more than thirty years combating heresy, writing commentaries and interpretations of Christian theology. He wrote the first autobiography in western history, The Confessions. His most important work, however, is The City of God, a massive book written between 413 and 426. The City of God was written to show that it was God's plan that Rome would fall and that Christianity was the salvation of mankind. In other words, according to St. Augustine, history has direction; history has meaning -- the unfolding of God's grand plan.

St. Jerome

St. Augustine

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In The City of God, Augustine brings together the sacred history of the Jewish people, the pagan history of the Greeks and Romans, and the Christian expectation of future salvation. He quotes Herodotus, Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, Aristotle, the Old Testament, the New Testament as well as the interpretations and commentaries of the Church Fathers.

The City of God contrasts two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. He taught that the City of Man -- that is, Rome -- was evil and destined to decline and fall. Augustine saw this with his own eyes. In other words, he was not looking back into history; he was looking at his own present. The City of God was invisible -- it was not of this earth. It was otherworldly. The chosen or the elect -- the true Christian -- should recognize that earthly existence was little more than an illusion. Furthermore, there was a higher reality beyond Rome. That higher reality was the City of God. It was only in the City of God that the chosen would find their final resting place. If any of this sounds like Plato and the Allegory of the Cave, then you are on the right track. Augustine studied Plato -- he was a neo-Platonist. He combined Christianity with Plato's higher reality of Ideas and Forms. In the end, what Augustine accomplished was nothing less than a synthesis of Christianity and classical humanism.

Of course, Augustine did not believe that Christ, by his death, had opened the door to heaven for every soul. Most of humanity remained condemned to eternal punishment -- only a handful of souls had the gift of faith and the promise of heaven. People could not overcome their sins -- moral and spiritual regeneration came only from God's grace, and it was God who determined who would be saved, and who would be damned (the notion of predestination would appear again, with greater force, during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century). Although Augustine's influence was impressive, the Church rejected his idea of predestination, that only a small number of people would find salvation. Instead, the Church emphasized that Christ had made possible the salvation of all. With Augustine, the human-centered outlook of classical humanism gave way to a God-centered world view. The fulfillment of God's grand design became the chief concern of human endeavor.

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The Communities of the Gospels

Historians' approximations of the areas in which each of the four New Testament gospels were used.