Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (50 page)

One aim of this programme was to place a new emphasis on the role of Peter rather than the joint role of Peter and Paul in the Roman past. Moreover, it was in Damasus's time that Peter came to be regarded not merely as the founder of the Christian Church in Rome, but also as its first bishop.
¹³
Ironically, it was actually a North African bishop, point-scoring against his local Donatist opponents by stressing the North African Catholics' links to Rome, who is the first person known to have asserted on the basis of Matthew 16.17-19 that 'Peter was superior to the other apostles and alone received the keys of the kingdom, which were distributed by him to the rest'; yet significantly it was in the time of Damasus that this thought occurred to the North African, some time around 370.
¹⁴
All this promotion of Peter was not merely for the pope's greater glory; it was a conscious effort to show that Christianity had a past as glorious as anything that the old gods could offer. The faith adopted by Constantine and his successors was no longer an upstart, but could be a religion fit for gentlemen.

Damasus performed one other great service for Western Latin Christianity. In 382 he persuaded his secretary, a brilliant but quarrelsome scholar called Jerome, to begin a new translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin, to replace several often conflicting Latin versions from previous centuries. Like the saintly Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome is not a man to whom it is easy to warm, although he certainly had a powerful effect on various pious and wealthy ladies in late-fourth-century Rome. One feels that he was a man with a six-point plan for becoming a saint, taking in the papacy on the way. After Damasus's death Jerome abruptly relocated to Palestine, though the precise reasons for his departure from Rome have now somehow disappeared from the record. Soon afterwards, he wrote of his recently interrupted career in Rome: 'the entire city resounded with my praises. Nearly [
sic
] everyone agreed in judging me worthy of the highest priesthood [that is, the papacy]. Damasus, of blessed memory, spoke my words. I was called holy, humble, eloquent.'
¹⁵
An earlier venture to seek holiness with the fierce ascetics of the Syrian desert had not been a success, and after Jerome's withdrawal from Rome he spent his last years in a rather less demanding religious community near Bethlehem. There he continued with the round of scholarship which was his chief virtue, together with bitter feuding, which was not.

Jerome produced an interesting and important spin on the scholarly task which he enjoyed so much. Traditionally it had been an occupation associated with elite wealth, and even in the case of this monk in Bethlehem it was backed up with an expensive infrastructure of assistants and secretaries. Study and writing, he insinuated, were as demanding, difficult and heroically self-denying as any physical extravagance of Syrian monks, or even the drudgery of manual labour and craft which were the daily occupation of monastic communities in Egypt. He elaborated the thought with a certain self-pity:

If I were to weave a basket from rushes or to plait palm leaves, so that I might eat my bread in the sweat of my brow and work to fill my belly with a troubled mind, no-one would criticize me, no-one would reproach me. But now, since according to the word of the Savior I wish to store up the food that does not perish, I who have made authenticity my cause, I, a corrector of vice, am called a forger.
¹⁶

The long-term result can be seen in the curiously discrepant portrayals of Jerome in medieval art (Spain especially bristles with examples, thanks to the devotion of the powerful and wealthy Spanish monastic order later named after him, the Jeronimites). Either he is portrayed in a lavishly equipped study, as a scholar absorbed in his reading and writing, or he is a wild-eyed hermit in the desert - precisely the career at which he had failed. In either case he is very often accompanied by a lion, who has actually arrived in the picture by mistake, thanks to a pious confusion of names, probably by medieval Western pilgrims in the Middle East. They would have been told of a popular Palestinian hermit-saint called Gerasimos, who had actually lived a generation later than Jerome (Hieronymus). Gerasimos's spectacular feats of ascetic self-denial attracted to himself the pre-Christian story of a good man who removed a thorn from a lion's paw and won its long-term friendship - or maybe indeed a lion had grown fond of the wild holy man. Lions apart, if Jerome had not been so successful in his campaign for sainthood, and in persuading future writers that it was as much of a self-sacrifice for a scholar to sit reading a book as it was for St Simeon to sit on top of his pillar in a Syrian desert, it might have been far more difficult for countless monks to justify the hours that they spent reading and enjoying ancient texts, and copying them out for the benefit of posterity. Ultimately the beneficiary was Western civilization.
¹⁷

Besides this, there was Jerome's immediate and spectacular scholarly triumph: along with a fleet of biblical commentaries, he constructed a Latin biblical text so impressive in its scholarship and diction that it had an unchallenged place at the centre of Western culture for more than a thousand years. This Vulgate version (from the Latin
vulgata
, meaning 'generally known' or 'common'), was as great an achievement as Origen's work in producing a single Greek text a century and a half before (see pp. 150-52). Undeniably Jerome's Vulgate was a work of Latin literature, but there was nothing much like it in Latin literature which predated the arrival of Christianity. That was the problem for Damasus and his new breed of establishment Christians. They wanted to annex the glories of ancient Rome, but they had no time for the gods who were central to it. All through the fourth century arguments simmered between traditionalist aristocrats and Christian emperors, bishops and government officials about the fate of the historic and ancient statue of Victory which stood with its altar in the Senate building in the Forum of Rome. The statue and altar were removed by imperial order in 382, then a decade later the statue alone was only temporarily restored in the brief usurpation of Eugenius. This was in every sense a symbolic conflict and its resolution in Christians' favour coincided with Theodosius's imposition of a monopoly for Christianity after Eugenius's fall. Once the statue of Victory had gone from their midst, the senators took the hint: nearly all of them joined the Church with telling rapidity.

A RELIGION FIT FOR GENTLEMEN (300-400)

A Christianity fit for the Roman aristocracy now came to terms with aristocratic values, while doing what it felt necessary to modify them. Roman noblemen valued 'nobility' or 'distinction': so much for the Virgin Mary's
Magnificat
, celebrating the mighty being put down from their seats. The Roman elite also put a positive value on wealth, unlike the wanderer Jesus, who had told the poor that they were blessed and told a rich man to sell all he had. Churchmen squared this circle by encouraging the rich to give generously out of their good fortune to the poor, for almsgiving chimed in with their own priorities: bishops were aware of the advantages to themselves and to the prestige of the Church in general of being able to dispense generous charity to the poor. Augustine of Hippo, whom we will meet as the prime theologian of this new era in the Western Church, made an adroit appeal to aristocratic psychology in one of his sermons when he said that the poor who benefited could act as heavenly porters to the wealthy, using their gratitude to carry spiritual riches for their benefactors into the next life.
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Other preachers and biblical commentators brought their own glosses or enrichments which went beyond such socially conventional rhetoric, into territory more problematic for a great nobleman. Christian talk of almsgiving often portrayed the poor who received charity not simply as porters but in much more intimate ways: as the children or friends of the givers, fellow servants to that higher master in Heaven, God himself, or even as the humble Christ himself. Preachers also often showed themselves aware that St Paul had said that those who did not work should not eat, but they delicately contradicted the Apostle by massing alternative texts or explaining that Paul's hard-headed remark concerned those poor healthy enough to work.
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The Church would also have to decide what it should keep from the literary culture so prized by wealthy and distinguished Romans. There was predictable hostility to such literature as the raunchy novels of Petronius or Apuleius, but Christians could not and would not dispense with that icon of Roman literature from the age of the first emperor, the poetry of Virgil. This was after all one of the most potent links between Rome and Greece, since Virgil's monumental epic poem told of the wanderings of Aeneas, both refugee from the Greek siege of Troy and ancestor of the founders of Rome. Elite culture was unthinkable without it. Luckily the great Augustan poet could be pictured as foretelling the coming of Christ in one of his Eclogues, where he spoke of the birth of a boy from a virgin who would usher in a golden age. Constantine I or his speechwriter had already noted this in one of the Emperor's very first speeches to Christians after his conversion to the faith. That was Virgil's passport to a central place in medieval Western Christian literature, symbolized by his role as Dante's guide through the underworld in the great fourteenth-century poem
Inferno
.
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Dante's homage was anticipated in the fourth century by a conscientious Christian senator's daughter. Her resoundingly aristocratic name, Faltonia Betitia Proba, proclaimed her ancient lineage, but she was also blessed with a good education and a pride in the Roman past. She took it upon herself as a labour of love to meld together little fragments of Virgil's poetry into a sort of literary quilt (
cento
in Roman usage), using her quotations to retell the biblical stories of the Creation and the life of Christ. Jerome, stern biblical purist, was not impressed, but others, maybe in imitation of her, played this literary game in Christian interests.
²¹

If Proba's work was ingenious, the lyric poetry of Prudentius (348-
c
. 413) might be said to be the first distinguished Latin verse written in the Christian tradition but not intended for the Church's liturgy; some has nevertheless been adapted into it as hymnody. Many will know Prudentius's majestic celebration of Christ's Incarnation which has become the hymn 'Of the Father's heart begotten, ere the world from chaos rose'.
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That celebration of Jesus Christ as 'Alpha and Omega' is also a celebration of the Christ of the Nicene Creed, one substance with the Father. Prudentius, like Constantine's adviser Bishop Hosius, like Pope Damasus and the Emperor Theodosius, was a Spaniard. Spain (Hispania) was a bastion of resistance to attacks on the decisions of the Council of Nicaea, and the Latin-speaking Hispanic elite had a long tradition of deep pride in Roman institutions and history, back to the great second-century Spanish emperor, Trajan, and beyond.

That pride shines through the poetry of Prudentius, which he revealed in a single collection at the end of a distinguished career which had taken him to being a provincial governor. He entered the argument over the Senate's statue of Victory, urging Rome to celebrate its successes in war, hanging the trophies of victory in the Senate House, but to 'break the hideous ornaments that represent gods thou hast cast away' - so the empire's glorious history was beautified, not distorted, by jettisoning the falsehoods of the old gods. Yet Prudentius also wrote admiringly of Christianity's great enemy the Emperor Julian (see p. 217), paying generous tribute in his boyhood memory of a 'brave leader in arms, a lawgiver, famous for speech and action, one who cared for his country's welfare, but not for maintaining true religion'.
²³
His most extended work was his
Peristephanon
, a roll call of Christian martyrs, singing of their terrible deaths and the places where pilgrims could now pursue their cults. Damasus's verse creations of a Roman and Christian history were put in the shade. In all Prudentius's verse, whose Latin has the sonorous clarity of some great monumental inscription on one of Rome's ancient buildings, there is not one mention of the new Rome, Constantinople.

Provincial administrators did not only become Christian poets; increasingly, they or their relatives became bishops, taking with them the mitres which were part of the uniform of officials at the imperial Court in Byzantium. The Church, particularly after the terminal crisis of the Western Empire in the early fifth century, became a safer prospect than the increasingly failing civil service for those aspiring to serve or direct their communities; often Roman noblemen would become bishops because they saw the office as the only way to protect what survived of the world they loved. Their prime role model came from the late fourth century, in the form of the imperial governor who became Bishop of Milan: Ambrose. Brought up a Christian but very much a gentleman, he was the son of the Praetorian Prefect (Governor-General) of the vast imperial province which included the modern France, England and Spain. This great aristocrat predictably embarked on a military career, equally predictably ending up as governor of the Italian province whose capital, Milan, was the chief imperial headquarters in the West.

Here, in 373 or 374, matters took an unexpected turn. The Christian population gathered to choose a new bishop and were bitterly divided between Nicenes and supporters of the Homoean compromise (see pp. 216-17). That is interesting proof that Christian communities still had genuine choices of leadership to make even in a key strategic city, but it also meant that the occasion threatened to turn into the sort of murderous riot which had marred Damasus's election as pope. Ambrose came along at the head of a detachment of troops to keep order and, as he was delivering some crisp military sentiments to the crowd, a child's voice pierced the church: 'Ambrose for Bishop!' It was the perfect solution; the mob took up the shout.
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Consecrated bishop after an indecently hasty progress through baptism and ordination, Ambrose proved a remarkable success, at least in political terms. He was ruthless in dealing both with the opponents of Nicaea and with a series of Christian emperors. It was an extraordinary transformation of fortunes for Christianity that a man who might easily have become emperor himself now wielded the spiritual power of the Church against the most powerful ruler in the known world. The Church had come a long way from the days when the Roman authorities had seen it as a minor nuisance.