Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (53 page)

He went on to present the analogy in a different form, with the persons of Father, Son and Spirit corresponding to three aspects of the human mind itself: respectively memory, understanding and will - in the same way, these were 'not three substances, but one substance'.
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For Greeks, this 'psychological' image of the Trinity ultimately proved unacceptable, largely because Augustine coupled with it a particular understanding of how the Spirit as love or will related to the other persons of the Trinity. We should note his description of memory and understanding - and so Father and Son - as 'embraced, while their enjoyment or their use depends on the application of will'.
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Since the first formula of Nicaea in 325, the relationship of Son to Father had been described like that of physical son to parent: 'begotten' of the Father. The Spirit was not 'begotten' of the Father, and the word which had come to be chosen to define the Spirit's relationship to the Father was 'proceeding'. Augustine naturally did not want to challenge that, since 'proceeding' has a good biblical basis in a pronouncement of Jesus on the Spirit in John 15.26. But like anyone discussing the Trinity, he was faced with the way in which the language of 'proceeding' emphasized the lack of congruence between the Persons of the Trinity. Father and Son are necessarily defined by their interrelationship, but the name 'Spirit' seems to derive its individual character from its own nature, without association. Father and Son relate to each other in a different way from their joint relationship to the Spirit.

This thought raised the same problem faced by many other theologians of the late fourth century, in justifying the equal rather than subordinate status of the Spirit within the Trinity (see p. 219). Augustine decided that it would be wise to preserve the Spirit's equality by asserting that the Son participated in the Spirit's 'proceeding' from the Father. Had it not been the resurrected Jesus Christ, Son of God, who had said to the disciples, 'Receive the Holy Spirit' (John 20.22)? Through this double procession from Father and Son, the Spirit represented to humanity 'that mutual charity by which the Father and the Son love one another'.
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Those who read Augustine later would nevertheless notice that the Nicene Creed of Constantinople of 381 said only that the Spirit 'proceeds from the Father'. Should this not be extended, on Augustine's analogy, to say that the Spirit 'proceeds from the Father
and the Son
'? Although there were respected Greek theologians who had used similar language to Augustine about double procession, the question came to split the imperial Church: we will see that while the West eventually agreed that this alteration should be made to the Creed, the alteration became a matter of high offence in the East (see p. 350). Augustine's reputation among Greeks suffered accordingly.

Modern Western readers may find it hard to understand Greek anger over the Augustinian view of the Trinity, while finding Augustine's view of human nature more difficult to condone, particularly if one reads the increasingly harsh later phases of his writings against the Pelagians. What we need to remember is that Augustine's bleak view of human nature and capabilities was formed against a background of the destruction of the world he loved. In one of the greatest disappointments ever experienced by the Church, the Western Roman Empire of the 390s, which had promised to be an image of God's kingdom on earth, disintegrated into chaos and futility. Augustine himself died in 430 during a siege of his beloved Hippo by the Arian Vandals, who captured all North Africa and bitterly persecuted the Catholic Church there for sixty years. He stands between the Classical world and a very different medieval society, sensing acutely that the world was getting old and feeble: a sense which did not desert Western Europe down to the seventeenth century.

EARLY MONASTICISM IN THE WEST (400-500)

It was hardly surprising that the sudden sequence of great power and great disappointment for the imperial Church in the West inspired Western Christians to imitate the monastic life of the Eastern Church. Among the first was Martin, who became one of the most important saints in Western Latin devotion. An ex-soldier like the Egyptian pioneer Pachomius, he abandoned his military career in Gaul (France) to live a life apart from the world. Around him, probably in the year 361, there gathered the West's first known monastic community at what seems to have been an ancient local cultic site in a marshy valley, now called Liguge; it was near the city of Pictavia (now Poitiers), which was already the seat of an important bishopric. Archaeological traces still remain of Martin's first community buildings at Liguge, treasured by the monks who, after many vicissitudes, have returned to this place so resonant in the story of the religious life.
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Not long afterwards, in 372, Martin was one of the first ascetics anywhere in the Church to be chosen as a bishop, in the Gaulish city far north of Poitiers called Civitas Turonum (now Tours). While bishop, he still lived as a monk, and his second monastic foundation near Tours was destined to fare rather better than Liguge in its later monastic history: as Marmoutier, it remained one of the most famous and ancient abbeys in France until its near-total destruction in the French Revolution.

In his public career, Martin retained enough of his soldierliness to emerge as a notably aggressive campaigner for the elimination of the traditional religion still strong in rural areas of western Europe such as his. His ministry, played out against formidable opposition, was clearly dramatic. The outlines of it are now luridly obscured by a biography created by his fervent admirer Sulpicius Severus, who had not known Martin particularly well, but built on his fond memories of their meetings to produce a picture of a man with sensational powers. Martin, for instance, had on one occasion undermined a tree sacred to old gods, then stood in the path of its fall, but forced it to fall elsewhere by making the sign of the Cross. The audience loved it and, as a result, 'you may be sure salvation came to that region', Sulpicius said with satisfaction.
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Perhaps a less miraculous explanation of such triumphs in the face of conflict is to be found in Martin's evident ability to fascinate young aristocrats from important Gallo-Roman families, which resulted in his drawing them into the religious life. In other situations we know of complaints that the monastic life deprived society of the public duties which noblemen were expected to perform, but the accretion of powerful friends cannot have done Martin's campaigns any harm. Sulpicius proudly pointed out that many of them went on to take up new public responsibilities, as bishops.
⁶¹

People who had known Bishop Martin rather better than Sulpicius Severus were infuriated by his exuberant stories, but their opinions were drowned out in the course of time by the wild popularity of Sulpicius's book, which addressed the same spiritual market as Athanasius's
Life of Antony
. A story told by Sulpicius gave Western Christianity one of its most frequently used technical terms: chapel. Martin was said to have torn his military cloak in half to clothe a poor man, who was later revealed to him in a dream as Christ himself. The cut-down 'little cloak',
capella
in Latin, later became one of the most prized possessions of the Frankish barbarian rulers who succeeded Roman governors in Gaul (see pp. 323-5), and the series of small churches or temporary structures which sheltered this much-venerated relic were named after it:
capellae
. Thus the West gained its name for any private church of a monarch, and later just for any small church. What Sulpicius had achieved was a strident assertion that the Latin West could produce a holy man who was the equal of any wonder-worker or spiritual athlete in the East - yet another building block in the growing edifice of Western self-confidence. More than a millennium later, in 1483, a little boy was born on St Martin's day in north Germany, so he was given the name of the much-loved saint. His surname was Luther and he also left something of a mark on Western Christianity.
⁶²

Perhaps without the example of the country missions undertaken by Martin Luther's patron saint, north Germany would not have become Christian. Bishop Martin's work excited those who sought to preach their faith in similar areas where city life was either decaying or had never existed, and it can be no coincidence that now a number of individuals began taking missionary initiatives beyond Gaul and even beyond the empire. A common thread was that they had spent time in Gaul or even in Rome. North of the furthest imperial frontiers in Britain, an ascetic called Ninian established a mission around 400 in what is now south-west Scotland, reputedly building a church in stone, such a rare sight in the area that it was called the 'White House',
Candida Casa
. Ninian or one of his early successors dedicated this church in honour of Martin the Gaulish bishop, who had only very recently died; the site at Whithorn is still marked by the rather stolid ruins of a medieval cathedral, and it was probably the first Christian outpost north of Hadrian's Wall.
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Much would follow in Ireland and Scotland which blew Christianity back across the North Sea into northern Europe (see pp. 333-44).

Just as in the East, the new monastic movement caused tensions and problems. A good deal of Jerome's troubles in Rome stemmed from his fervent promotion of asceticism among his aristocratic Roman patrons, provoking particular public hostility when one of his spiritual protegees, a young lady called Blesilla, apparently died as a result of fasting and generally excessive spiritual rigour. Jerome also aroused anger by a hostility to sex and even marriage which far exceeded even the general early Christian prudishness about sexuality. He and the Greek philosopher Pythagoras were jointly credited with a particularly chilling sentiment by one much-read later author, Vincent of Beauvais, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar who wrote the most widely esteemed compendium of knowledge of the high Middle Ages: 'One who loves his wife rather eagerly is an adulterer . . . all love for another man's wife is indeed shameful, but so is excessive love for one's own wife'.
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Jerome was nevertheless able to draw on support from the general Christian assumptions of his day to rout theologians who felt differently. First, it was Helvidius, who took the plain meaning of scripture to say that Jesus patently had brothers and sisters, so therefore his mother, Mary, had enjoyed a normal family life rather than remaining perpetually virgin. It was then the turn of the kindly former monk Jovinian, who became repelled by ascetic practice - 'a new dogma against nature', he called it - and insisted that any baptized Christian, married, celibate or just single, had an equal chance of getting to Heaven.
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By leading the campaigns to label these two for posterity as theological deviants, Jerome took a significant step in the long process, particularly pronounced in the Western Church, by which the celibate state came to be considered superior to marriage.

A more short-term tragedy was the debacle surrounding the efforts of Priscillian, a Spanish aristocrat, to establish his own form of the ascetic life. Such has been the embarrassed obfuscation around his career that it is not easy to recover what Priscillian actually believed, although it is likely that his rejection of the world went beyond mainstream ascetic preoccupations into some form of gnostic dualism. He certainly split the Spanish Church into opposing camps. Even so, it was not an encouraging precedent for later Christianity when, in 385, the usurping emperor in Gaul, Magnus Maximus, took over an ecclesiastical case against Priscillian; in an effort to build up support in the Christian establishment, Maximus had the ascetic leader and some of his close circle executed for heresy, the first time that this had happened within the Christian community. He was burned at the stake, the only Western Christian to be given the treatment which the pagan Emperor Diocletian had prescribed for heretics until the eleventh century. It is to Bishop Martin's great credit that he furiously protested against this act of tyranny, and to express his continuing disapproval, in a species of reverse miracle or sanctified work-to-rule, he announced that his spiritual powers were diminished by his own association with the crime, however marginal that had been. '[I]n curing the demoniacs, he took longer than he used to do,' Sulpicius noted, with uncharacteristic scrupulousness.
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Eastern and Western monasticism combined fruitfully in the monk John Cassian, who began his monastic life in Bethlehem around 380 and was then much impressed by the ascetic life of Egyptian monks when he moved to live with them. His subsequent writings are peppered with references to his time in Egypt, which may have lasted for as long as fifteen years. The turbulence of ecclesiastical politics in the Eastern Churches brought him west to Rome in 404 and thence (perhaps because of the sack of Rome six years later) into the comparative security of south-east Gaul, where the ancient port of Massilia (now Marseilles) still flourished. Here he founded new monastic communities, perhaps with a conscious agenda of improving on monasteries such as those founded by Bishop Martin of Tours - Cassian's writings do not suggest a great admiration of Sulpicius Severus's biography of Martin, and they also contain the distinct suggestion that Gaulish monks did not like getting their hands dirty.
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Cassian in fact became a controversial figure in the Western Church. His mentor in earlier years had been that great spiritual writer and monk who was increasingly a source of controversy, Evagrius Ponticus (see pp. 209-10); in other words, Cassian was an enthusiastic Origenist, with all that implied in an optimistic outlook on human capacity to cooperate with God and grow in the spiritual life. Cassian was aware that Evagrius's name was already suspect, and it is notable for its absence from his spiritual writings, but they develop an Evagrian theme of 'purity of heart' as the goal of monastic endeavour. Unlike another favourite term of Evagrius, 'passionlessness' or 'serenity',
apatheia
, which quickly aroused hostile criticism from Jerome among others, this was a safely biblical phrase, but it is clear from Cassian's writings that the aim of purifying the heart, like the aim of stripping out the passions from human consciousness, was to lead on to a union with the glorified, resurrected Christ. The vehicle for this was a life of unceasing prayer and contemplation.
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Since Cassian's teaching and example inspired enthusiasm among the growing monastic communities of Gaul, the inheritance from Origen (not for the last time) provoked a confrontation with the theology of that great Westerner whose call to serve his Church had led him to turn away from monastic life: Augustine. The issue was the extreme version of predestination which had appeared in Augustine's writings in the later phases of his conflict with Pelagius.