This is a series of posts seeking to follow the prompt set forth by David Bentley Hart in his recent lecture posted to his Substack, Leaves in the Wind. I have not linked every single scriptural text for the sake of length.
The monastic tradition both preserved the apocalyptic urgency of the original Jesus Movement in the new situation of Christendom but, with some exceptions, eventually succumbed to the institutional interests of the empire. The monachoi took to eremitical, cenobitic, and later urban forms of life from the third century over the course of the rise of imperial Christendom, during which Christianity was becoming popular, legal, and established. It is not exaggerating to say that the logic behind their adoption of the monastic way of life lay in the calculus that if the empire would no longer crucify them, then the only way to fulfill Christ’s command was to head for the desert and crucify themselves, leaving behind the life of the world for the life of heaven. Monastic spirituality tended to eschew the worldly materialism of the eschatologies popular with the New Prophecy and represented in, say, John’s Apocalypse in favor of a “vertical,” “realized” eschatology in which this life was seen as a cosmic war between heaven and hell for the fate of the human soul; their agonism and distrust of the material life of the ordinary human being as spiritually suspect both put them into conversation with the gnostic movement, the literature of which was to a large degree composed and used by Egyptian monastics (and monasticism is really one of the signature contributions of Egypt to the Christian oikoumenē, among its many other contributions to the world more generally), and into a wider stream of ancient ascetical ambivalence or even antipathy for worldly comfort and bodily experience in the ancient world. The sources of this line of thinking can be traced to Second Temple Judaism, the Jesus Movement, and the New Testament, certainly: riffing off of the biblical analogies that connect God, angels, and priests by ritual purity and abstention from sex and death, which in turn fueled the belief of some Early Jews and of Jesus and Paul among them that the life of the resurrection would be a celibate life without marriage, sex, or procreation, and taking seriously Jesus and Paul’s strict demands for the married and sincere recommendation of celibacy, poverty, and radical obedience to divine commands, the monastic tradition was a way of keeping the severity of the politics of resurrection alive in a context where the gospel was being propagated in large part by way of diluting its demands into something publicly palatable for the Roman world. In theory, the chastity, poverty, and obedience of monastics showcases the lifestyle Christ commands in the Gospels and models for all Christians the Way of following Jesus, even for the married (with certain qualifiers). Monasticism also offered an alternative, countercultural lifestyle for a late antique world where marriage, marriage rights, strict gender roles, and the maintenance of economic, social, and political legacy through the institution of the family dominated life, providing a means of self-determination for plenty of women and men who wished for freedom from the strictures of Roman culture as they knew it. What resulted was a remarkably fruitful cultural output. Ancient Christian monasticism has, in a word, produced some of the hallmark ideas, practices, texts, sayings, stories, models, legends, and myths that have populated the Christian imaginarium for the better part of two millennia, from St. Moses of Egypt letting the sand run out of his basket so as not to have to judge his brother to the visionary reinterpretation of Jacob’s Ladder as a path of heavenly ascent blocked by intercepting demons to wandering monks hosting angels, meeting devils, hanging out with animals, and running away from the popular attention they drew from pilgrims. Monastics have contributed most of the signature thinkers of the later Christian tradition—Origen, the Cappadocians, Chrysostom, Evagrius, Augustine, Maximus, Eriugena, and John Damascene were all monastics or adjacent—and their way of life continues to provide fundamental moral exempla to Christians around the world, from St. Antony the Great to Abba Pambo to St. Mary of Egypt to St. Makrina the Elder. Monastics have also been famous voices of dissidence in Christian history, sometimes but not always vindicated by the wider Christian community and its institutions, and they were often at least reported to have kept alive in Christianity a charismatic tradition of miraculous power to the discomfort of the institutional hierarchy. In some monasteries, cities, and churches, monks were also responsible over the course of late antiquity and the Middle Ages for the preservation, editing, and transmission of classical literature and learning, though they were also responsible on other occasions for its destruction. It would be false to pretend, however, that the monastic tradition was exclusively a form of resistance to Christianity’s mainstream institutionalization. Instead, monasticism, even in its theoretical substance as a way of continuing the evangelical life of the Kingdom to come in the present world, became a multifaceted tool of Christendom. Whatever its original logic, the eventual restriction of episcopal candidates to monastic pools served to turn monasteries into places to groom for positions of wealth and power in the Christian empire; the encouragement to presbyters to abandon wives and embrace the monastery surely left many women bereft of lifelong partners and friends, often enough in elder years of vulnerability and increasing awareness of death (but also, sometimes surely, even in youth); the elevation of monastic life over-against married life has effectively led to a legacy of elite privilege, power, and high self-regard for a small class of people at the expense of the historic Christian majority of married layfolk and clerics (including the eventual exclusion of married folks from the priesthood altogether in the Catholic West); the system has also served to disproportionately favor men, who even as monastics continued to access positions of ecclesiastical and worldly power throughout Christendom’s history. We should also acknowledge that some portion of monastics have always entered unwillingly, as a result of having few prospects elsewhere, and that the number of monastics who have historically transgressed the obligations of chastity, poverty, and obedience is not small. Formal asceticism has often been a ticket for entry to the world of ecclesiastical power and influence masking a life spent doing the same things most of the population has done since the beginning of human history. When this has been done with adult consent, from the contemporary vantage, we may find that the undermined vows offend less, reflective as they are of the systematization of what was originally a momentary charism in the lives of the Desert Fathers and Mothers quickly becoming imposed on the wider Christian populace; but as we now know, monastic sexual activity has also included no small degree of non-consenting adults and, horrifically, children. Monasticism has also been a way of avoiding, successfully or unsuccessfully, sexual orientations deemed deviant by Christendom on supposedly biblical grounds: the temptation to seek power through it is perhaps intelligible from this perspective, as a psychological pathology conditioned by repression, at least for some. It is also because monasticism was so prevalent in Christianity that celibacy was largely sublimated or eschewed by Judaism and Islam (though there were notable exceptions).
The Greek, Syriac, and Latin traditions of Nicene Christianity facilitated the gospel’s transmission geographically and culturally, the intellectual development of the growing Christian community, and also the breakdown of Christendom’s doctrinal coherence. The lingua franca of Achaemenid Persia was Aramaic; that of Alexander the Great’s empire was Koine, “Common” or “Public” Greek. For this reason, Jesus and the apostles would principally have utilized these languages in daily speaking and literacy (when applicable), though the scholarly demonstration that Mishnaic Hebrew was a spoken language must mean that a Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew was spoken in Jesus’s time and region and therefore bodes well for the idea that he may have known and used it in different contexts, or even probably did. But from at least the mid-to-late first century onwards, the primary language in which the Jesus Movement and Early Christianity functioned in was Greek, and its theater of operations was a Mediterranean and Near Eastern world still more culturally Hellenistic than Roman. Judaism had, by the time of Christianity’s earliest literary and intellectual outline as a separate tradition, been engaging with Hellenism both in Judea and in the Diaspora for nearly four centuries prior, and had learned to express itself in Greek: the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt, the adoption of Koine by Jewish communities in Syria-Palestine and abroad, the formation of the Hasmonean Dynasty as a Hellenistic petty kingdom, the coinage of Ioudaismos as a Hellenistically-inspired reformation of Judean identity, the adoption of the Mosaic Pentateuch as a written politeia, a formal constitution for the Jewish ethnos, the use of Greek art, architecture, and symbolism in the Jerusalem Temple, in synagogues, in other public spaces, the use of Greek philosophy to articulate Judaism in Greek by thinkers like Aristobulus, Philo, and the author of Wisdom of Solomon—all of these showcase a diverse Judaism fully engaged with the Greek world long before and long after the rise of Christianity. In this sense, the early development of a Christian intellectual and liturgical tradition whose primary matrix was Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic does not signal the abandonment of a “Hebraic” faith in favor of a “Hellenic” one. Conversely, when Christianity did, sometime in the first three centuries, take root in the Syriac world of Aramaic-speaking Near Eastern peoples on the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire, from which a different tradition of hymnography, hagiography, scriptural exegesis, poetry, liturgy, and philosophy arose, it was often virulently anti-Jewish despite its otherwise superficial cultural continuities with Jewish forebears in the Jesus Movement and contemporary Jews in Diasporic metropoleis such as Babylon (e.g., calling priests rabban; calling Jesus Yeshua; etc.). But it would be wishful thinking, or special pleading, to pretend that the Hellenic linguistic theater of the gospel’s presentation did not reorient the Jesus Movement’s kerygma and the politics of resurrection from the very beginning of Jesus’s proclamation in Greek as christos, huios tou theou, and Kyrios. Here, a vanishingly subtle ambo is visible: on the one hand, the Movement was still professing Jesus in Greek to Greek-speaking Jews and non-Jews as Jewish messiah, royal son of the Jewish God, and the recipient of the Jewish God’s own Divine Name, Yhwh, usually substituted in the Septuagint for Kyrios; on the other hand, both because these very concepts in Jewish messianism were derived from an ancient Judahite royal mythology shared in common with the Near Eastern superpowers of Egypt and Mesopotamia and, by proxy, with other Bronze Age cultures to which they were connected before Israel and Judah came into being as people groups and independent states, and because the audiences Jewish and non-Jewish were inundated with myths, legends, fables, and philosophical tales about kings, divine emperors, demigods, heroes, and lord and lady deities from the Greco-Roman tradition, the apostolic preaching certainly evoked a specific portraiture for a first-century audience of a Mediterranean deity, as M. David Litwa has argued. Moreover, in Litwa’s estimation, the New Testament shows literary effort to appropriate the tropes of these deities and heroes in its’ authors multifaceted presentations of Jesus already. From earliest days, then, the gospel in Greek was a message audible to non-Jewish ears in the categorical terms of Greco-Roman religions, in which Jesus contended with traditional deities, demigods, heroes, and deified emperors, including the reigning Caesar, for the categorical power of domination as true Lord (Kyrios) of the universe. Greek also supplied the principal philosophical vocabulary and inflected morphological precision requisite for the formation of the distinctively Christian philosophical/theological tradition: many of the questions and answers we often deem essential to thinking Christian in the tradition are only phrased as they are and seen as they are by virtue of the cultural, linguistic, and philosophical outlook of Greek-speaking Late Antiquity. Syriac-speaking Christianity inherited much of its theology from the Greek tradition, but once it had done so, the possibility of miscommunication in the ongoing coinage of terminology was ensured. This is why both West and East Syriac Christians share the Council of Nicaea with Greek and Latin speakers, but the Christological Controversy broke the Christian East: though the debate over whether Christ’s hypostasis or prosopon was the site of union for the two physeis or ousiai of abstract “divinity” and “humanity” was hatched and first carried out in Greek between the catechetical academies of Antioch and Alexandria and their representatives, the diversity of nomenclatures and theories across Greek, Syriac, and a crescent Coptic made for a tricontinental conversation past one another which lasted three centuries until the rise of Islam froze the divisions in more or less their current state. The philological problem that very few academic theologians of late antiquity and the middle ages knew all the relevant languages needed for the debate was only half the issue; the other half was that the theological tradition in Greek and its close dialogue partner in Syriac was happening across imperial boundaries. Rome had a vested interest in the outcome of the debate and, ultimately, the uniformity of doxa that it would guarantee. But Syriac Christians of East and West lived on the unstable Eastern border of the empire: Rome expanded to its furthest reaches ad orientem under Trajan in 117 CE, briefly encompassing the provinces of Assyria and Mesopotamia before a policy reversal under Hadrian saw the Romans retreat further West to the sea in view of the difficulty of exercising convincing authority in Mesopotamia and Eastern Syria. Roman-Parthian and Roman-Sassanian warfare meant a continually fluctuating border gaining and losing the Syriac jewel cities of Edessa, Nisibis, and Babylon, as well as the new Sassanian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The linguistic and political divide was also aggravated by the major geographic expansion and missionary success of the East Syriac Church, which saw its (misnamed but reappropriated) “Nestorian” Christianity find a home along the regions and languages of the Silk Roads in Central, South, and East Asia; West Syriac tradition also filtered into South Asia by way of trade with the Indian subcontinent. Though the Christianity of the empire called itself “ecumenical,” of or pertaining to the “whole inhabited world,” far more Christians looked to the Nestorian catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon than to any patriarch of the Byzantine Pentarchy until the 14th century CE. It is not just that most Asian Christians would have disagreed with their putatively heretical or schismatic status (they did affirm Chalcedon, if not Ephesus); they would not have spoken the Greek necessary to care. A Latinate Christianity existed and began to flourish across this large expanse of time, but was increasingly distant from the nuances of the Eastern debates as knowledge of Greek gradually dissipated in Italy and Western Europe; Latin, in turn, declined in the East, where it had never been spoken widely beyond the ranks of the military and the provincial government, following the capital’s movement to Byzantium. Yet Latin became a crucial component of Romanitas in Western Europe and North Africa from the third century onwards: for more than a thousand years, Latin bound together the Christians of Italy, France, Spain, Britain, Ireland, and Germany as otherwise warring, deeply diverse members of a common civilization. From the Eastern Christian perspectives, of course, this “Western civilization” of Christian Europe—caveat lector, for such terms have myriad problems and are so often employed for causes that Christian history itself ought to undermine our gullibility towards—was a marginal phenomenon on the edges of the civilized world. That we today habitually read the bulk of Christian history, thought, and language through the lens of Latinate Christianity is a historical oddity, conditioned by a skewed vision in the aftermath of the transformation of Eastern Christian societies into the mosaic of Islamic caliphates, empires, and sultanates. Late antique and medieval Christian pluralism ensured both that the gospel of Jesus became a multicultural religious force as well as that Christendom did not have exclusive auctoritas over the politics of resurrection.
The metamorphosis of Jesus from kerygma to dogma centered essentialist questions about Jesus at the expense of the functionalist ones at the center of the politics of resurrection. The Jesus Movement from its earliest days seems to have believed that Jesus rose from the dead and to have taken this to mean that he was, at minimum, a deified prophet and, at maximum, a divine or angelic being alongside the Jewish God. As mentioned in the previous entry, the Christian intellectual tradition reiterated the divine, cosmic role of Jesus in the universe of Jewish apocalypticism in a Greek philosophical idiom; doing so was both necessary and appropriate to the late antique context of Early Christianity’s development. Moreover, the question of Jesus’s relationship to God was of issue and interest to the Jesus Movement already in the New Testament texts, and so continued, authentically, to be a point of debate and development for three centuries up to the early ecumenical councils. It is not that Christology qua Christology is an aberrant intellectual tradition. It is rather that the essentialist questions about Jesus’s relationship to God and his relationship to humanity served to reduce his function to conduit of divine grace in the salvation of liturgical deification and, in doing so, to undermine those roles as Prophet, Teacher, and Sage which were most explosively contrary to the emerging synthesis of Christianity and Roman society. Hence the importance of conceptually separating the kerygmatic and the dogmatic Jesus. But, importantly, the dogmatic Jesus also differs from the cosmopolitan Jesus, for whom the former is nevertheless the basis: that is, the premodern reception of Jesus beyond Christianity, in the dissident Christian movements of gnostic schools and Manichaeism, and in the rise of Islam, and the modern existence of a multitude of non-Christian portraits of Jesus. There are many things to say about these other receptions of Jesus, but one is certainly that to some degree they represent those functions of the historical and remembered Jesus of the kerygma elided from the focus of the Church’s dogmatic portraiture. Hence, the gnostic mystagogue Jesus, both orthodox and heterodox, preserves the function of Jesus as spiritual teacher that is eclipsed in orthodox Christology by Jesus’s role in the mysteries themselves; the Christ of the Councils is not the prophetic herald of the Gospels, but the Christ of the Quran is. In the East Syriac Christian world, where Manichaeans and Nestorians both presented Christ in the prophetic and didactic roles represented by figures like Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha, and a variety of bodhisattvas in a dharmic context, such roles for Jesus were also foregrounded once more. These roles for Jesus play an important part in the politics of resurrection because they underline Jesus’s vocation as eschatological prophet from which the original kerygma of “the Kingdom and its righteousness” was first derived, and so are vitally important to think with.
The development of the late antique and medieval Christian liturgies and hieratic priesthoods both emphasized Christianity as a genuine heir of the Second Temple alongside Judaism and later Islam but also served to obscure the nature of power in the earlier Movement and to erect new religious boundaries to the exclusion of Christians themselves. The New Testament primarily casts Jesus in the roles of prophet, royal messiah, and angelic or divine being; when it does invoke priestly categories to explain Jesus, they are generally derivative of these more primary identities, as Jesus fills the role of mobile Temple through his prophetically oriented miracles, or has a special, royal priesthood via David and Melchizedek. But what never comes in the New Testament is a full-blown narrative of replacement or succession of the Jerusalem Temple, which Jesus and his followers venerated for as long as it stood, to Jesus and the eucharistic cult of the early communities. At most, the eucharist is parsed in this earliest literature as an extension of and supplement to the ritual life of the Temple and the local synagogue, not a replacement. In the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction by the Romans in 70, the step from supplement to successor became rhetorically convenient and necessary in the minds of many Early Christians: seeing themselves in rhetorical competition with Judaism, Christians sought to claim succession to the Temple on the grounds of a continued sacrifice just as Jews were reinterpreting the now defunct cult as metaphorically fulfilled by the life of prayer and mitzvot. By the late third century, as the liturgy of the eucharistic banquet itself was changing from a domestic meal held the evening after the conclusion of the Sabbath (havdalah) to a truncated Sunday-morning lectionary and sacramental service, the language of succession also served to justify the newly ascendant hieratic classes of clerical bishops, priests, and deacons as direct analogues to the biblical high priest, kohanim, and Levites. On the one hand, the most basic insight of these liturgical developments was always key to the eucharistic fellowship, at least as Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians: the notion that the meal Jesus instituted on the last night of his life (and/or in his ordinary meal practices throughout his ministry) in some sense conveys the transformative divine spirit (Grk: pneuma) which is God’s life-creating power to raise the dead. The belief that the rites of Christianity in general were deifying, that they offered participation in divine life and power both now and in the eschatological future, is in that sense a strong thread of continuity from the first century onward in the way that virtually all Christians thought about their cult. The Temple-focused elaboration of this theme in the emergent ritual traditions around different practices like baptism and eucharist also served to frame what these rites did in language borrowed from Jewish scripture: just as God had been present and available in the Jerusalem Temple, so now in the actual temples which legally enfranchised and privileged Christians were able to build (in some cases architectural and artistic marvels of the late Roman Empire). On the other hand, the dissonance between these later ritual traditions and the generally communistic, collectivist ethics, key to the politics of resurrection, which Jesus and his early followers practiced is obvious. A Christianity which looked back to the Temple to understand its mystery in an exclusivist way ended up weaponizing the rhetoric of the Temple not only against Jews but also against Christians, as a logic of ritual and moral purity endemic to nearly all ancient religion, including to Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, was now applied to the eucharist in an exclusivist manner, as canonical codes were developed ruling who could and could not commune and under which circumstances, and as these ritual and behavioral standards—in themselves defensible to a degree—were expanded to include a certain requirement of intellectual assent to imperial orthodoxy. Here, the collapse of originally distinct categories into one another served to turn what was originally a practice of radical, Jubilee-inspired solidarity into a practice of exclusion and triumphalism, a religious and psychological weapon of mass destructive power. Perhaps, of course, one could argue that this is what Roman society required to understand the divine significance of the mysteries. But it would be naïve not to see that in the emerging hierocratic form of Christianity the traditional tools of Christian initiation and empowerment were being controlled and administered in small doses beyond a specific subset. Here too, though, it is important to stress that this is a Christian phenomenon, one that should not be simplified or reduced to some repetition of the actual historical situation of the Jerusalem Temple. It is true that the Temple was run by a group of aristocratic priests in cahoots with the Romans; it is also true that the ritual system of the Temple was not generally seen by Jews or by Jesus in particular as an exclusivist burden, even when the administration of the institution was criticized for exploiting the poor or engaging in other kinds of corruption. Even the Essenes, for example, who eschewed the Temple, did so on the proleptic insistence that eventually God would purify or replace it with the true Temple in which they were eager to once more participate. The administration of the Christian cult should be understood similarly: for most Christians, for most of history, nothing on earth has been holier than the Eucharist, and, at the same time, ecclesiastical hierarchies have abused that love with a system of renewed exclusions. So Christianity’s use of the imaginarium of the Temple both created a legacy of artistic beauty in Christian worship that sensually illuminated the central mystery of the Church’s rites while, simultaneously, undermining the egalitarianism and collectivism inherent in those rites.
The decline of Eastern Christianities and the rise of Western Christianities in the late middle ages forecast the ultimate breakdown of Christendom even while laying the groundwork for its classic iterations in Western Europe. The rise of Islam in the 7th century CE put an end to the fragmentation of the Christian East as a matter of urgent relevance to the Eastern Roman Empire. While centuries of emperors, empresses, patriarchs, and monastics had obsessed over the divisions of the “Nestorian,” “Miaphysite,” and “Chalcedonian” or “Orthodox” parties, seeking to reconcile all Christians under one banner, the rise, popularity, and rapid spread of Islam rendered this goal a pipe dream and saw the gradual demise of the Christian Empire in the East. Christians lived peacefully under a mostly tolerant Muslim majority in North Africa and Asia until the 14th century CE, when Christian antipathy among Muslim rulers led to mass suppression of the Christian community in some Muslim lands. In other cases, though, Christianity was simply outpaced by Islam, which won many of its converts from Eastern Christian communities themselves. In a nutshell, Islam claimed to do to Christianity what Christianity had for centuries claimed to do to Judaism: superseding and rendering obsolete the parent religion, but where Christians were typically loathe to extend some excess of grace to Jews that validated their religion in Christian eyes, Islam somewhat paternalistically acknowledged Christianity and Judaism both as genuinely revealed religions spun from authentic prophets. In many ways, too, Islam retained something of a more raw, vital connection to the world of the Bible than Roman Christianity had ever managed, attached as it was (and is) to the cultures of the Arabian peninsula, looking back to Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) as patriarchal ancestor, and maintaining many of the same or similar ritual and moral purity standards as have always existed in Judaism (kashrut and halal can often be met with the same cuisine, for example). Islam’s malleable intolerance for religious figural art also challenged Byzantine sensibilities in the wake of numerous failed military campaigns to restrain or push back Muslim armies, leading to the iconoclastic crisis, the logic of which was that God was granting victory to Muslims because they were not idolaters as the iconodoules were. When, in 1453, the Ottoman Turks finally took Constantinople itself, the sultan Mehmed II was supposedly inspired by a hadith concerning Muhammad’s beatification of the city’s conqueror; and yet, it would be untrue to say that the Ottoman city of Istanbul (whose name, to be clear, is but the Turkish way of attempting to say Constantinople) had ceased altogether to be a Roman city. Its sultan, its administration, and their culture laid claim to the Roman mantle just as Western Europeans were doing. For centuries, Christian knights from Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and England had been trekking to Muslim-controlled lands—particularly the Holy Land, which the Muslim armies conquered first and early at the end of or shortly after Muhammad’s life—to fight for their “liberation” (really, their reconquista under Latin Catholic control, largely to the detriment of Jews and Eastern Christians) in the Crusades. For just a bit longer than the same span of time, Western societies were being reshaped by the union of new thrones with Christian altars and cultural Romanitas, from Charlemagne’s coronation by the Pope on Christmas Day of the year 800 CE to the dynasty of William the Conqueror from 1066 onwards to a cacophony of Christian princes in what are now Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Byzantine Christianity, in the same time frame, had traveled to the Ukraine and become the dominant religion in the court of Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, beginning a long conversion of the Slavic world (one that usually depended on the prior conversion of rulers and the subsequent subjugation of the people to Christianity as their new faith). Muslim advances into Spain, Sicily, and Southern Italy meant that these areas were both the most volatile for Christian-Muslim relations on European soil but also the most capable of tolerant coexistence (avoiding either a lachrymose account of Christian experience under Muslim rule or a rosy, romanticized image of Convicencia). The reconquest of Spain and the establishment of the Catholic monarchy there meant that, effectively, Western Europe was now a litany of Christian states, city-sized and country-sized, answering to the last remaining independent patriarch of the Byzantine system, and the one geographically closest to them, the Roman Pope. In general, it was a far less hospitable or humane sociopolitical sphere for Jews, Muslims, and Christian dissidents than the Islamic umma was. And even as Western Europe was seeking to preserve Christendom in this social arrangement, its very attempt to do so offered both the terminal diagnosis and the prognosis of the experiment itself: Christendom’s doom was always evident in Christian deafness to Jewish and Muslim witness and unsustainable inversion of the logic of the cross, which is the regula of the politics of resurrection as Jesus preached them.
The ongoing life of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Roman Empire, and Babylon, its experiences of suffering and persecution at Christian hands, and the growth of its legal and intellectual traditions, together with the rise of Islam, posit perennial challenges to the triumphalism of Nicene Christianity. In all of this empire-building and preserving, Christian powers in the West did not pause to consider the providential challenge that Judaism and Islam offered to their tradition with any great seriousness. Judaism’s flourishing endurance and resilient creativity in the face of centuries of Christian imperialism gave the lie to Christendom’s self-understanding as the Kingdom of God come on earth as it is in heaven and therefore vindication of the truth of Christianity itself. Jewish continuity has always been a source of deep perplexity and anxiety for Christians as a result: Christians, for their part, have done their best since the first conversion of the empire to assimilate or suppress Jewish communities, both formally and informally, while Jews have developed forms of resistance discourse against Christian hegemony that remain features of the Jewish experience (not always consciously recognized) to this day, from Kol Nidre to Nittel Nacht (or its less polemical adaptation in the American Jewish pastime of Chinese food and a movie on Christmas Eve). Fundamentally, the Christian-Jewish relationship raises the distinct possibility that Christians have misunderstood or misconstrued Jesus’s significance to the degree that they have ignored the details of his life, his teaching, and his death: for just as Jesus died a Jewish martyr at the hands of the Roman occupation, so Christians, in taking up the Roman mantle, have inflicted nearly incalculable suffering on Jewish communities in their sphere, officially and unofficially, physically and psychologically, for many centuries. If any community has participated the sufferings of Christ consistently for the last two millennia, and can authentically claim to have made the politics of resurrection the ethos of their community at large, it is easily the Jewish people, and not the Christian Church, that can do so. Conversely, Islam raises another distinct possibility: not of Christianity’s delusion, but of the incomplete character of its revelatory quality. Historically, Jews have projected their resentment of Christian persecution into a fictional narrative of Jesus’s life that appears in texts like the Toledot Yeshu and the Bavli: it is only historically recently that Jewish scholars have taken Jesus seriously as an authentic Jewish teacher of the first century, as a faithful shomer of the Torah, as a martyr for the cause of Jewish independence, and even, in the conclusion of one Orthodox Jewish theologian of the 20th century, as a resurrected, deified prophet vindicated by God so that the nations could turn to ethical monotheism in his name. But Islam has concurred with Christians in general since its origins that Jesus was both a true prophet of God and Israel’s messiah, believes in his virginal conception and birth, and addresses him with titles drawn from Christian scripture, like Word and Spirit of God. Islam, like Christianity, has traditionally professed that Jesus will return at the end of the world to preside over a worldwide messianic kingdom, albeit an Islamic one (at least in the mainstream Sunni tradition). But Islam has also, like some Christian thinkers (Clement of Alexandria comes to mind) but unlike the mainstream position of the imperially sanctioned Church, placed Jesus into a stream of prophets that encompasses the whole history and geographic breadth of humanity, and posited Jesus as a forerunner specifically to the Prophet Muhammad. It is here that objective analysis becomes difficult, as there is a deep divide between the traditional sirrah of the prophet and the contemporary academic reconstruction of his life and his earliest Movement that commands the most respect in the Western academy. From the traditional Muslim perspective, such “Western history” is intentionally deconstructive and disrespectful, while from the Western perspective, it is simply to apply to Islam the same standards that scholars of religion apply to Judaism, Christianity, and any other religious tradition. But I would also suggest that the revisionist history of early Islam, if anything, deepens the theological challenge that Islam poises to Christianity rather than defangs it, since the picture we get in this account is, in many respects, what Christianity theoretically should have been: a Pan-Abrahamic, multiethnic community of people under the leadership of a charismatic prophet, broadly encompassing and crossing “orthodox” and “heterodox” boundaries, encouraging collectivist social principles, awaiting a returning, messianic Jesus, going up to Jerusalem and attempting a restoration of its center of cultic worship in preparation for the kingdom (see, e.g., Stephen Shoemaker). Proto-Islam’s universalism, apocalypticism, and populism must have scared the Byzantine world at least to some degree because the unconscious memory that this is what Christianity itself had originally been was triggered by this community of submitters. Moreover, though Islam on this reading ultimately underwent the same fate of institutionalization and standardization by political authorities in the aftermath of its earliest days, as well as in-fighting between dissident groups, it also proved remarkably malleable and agreeable to the numerous cultures of Africa and Asia both because of its internal universalism and because of its external shared similarities to Eastern Christianities that were already resident in those places. When Syriac-speaking Christians were happy to translate classical literature into Arabic and serve in Muslim administrations, and sometimes to become Muslims, the clarity with which they felt that Islam was the natural successor to the religion of their birth must have been blinding. Christians, Muslims, and Jews often shared holy sites, holy men and women (leading to the curious phenomenon that some saints are shared by Eastern Christians and Muslims and their original religious identity is not always clear), and holy practices, and at the point of Islam’s zenith, it surely had at least as good a claim as Christianity to be the true successor to the religion of the prophets. Muslims have, after all, held the holiest stretch of land on earth for Abrahamists—the Temple Mount or Noble Sanctuary which hosts the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock—for longer than the span of time in which both Jewish Temples stood on it combined. Islam also integrated more successfully than Christianity finally did into the Silk Road world where Christians had otherwise made profound inroads and strides in inculturation: this is why, in the Punjab region of northwest India, there are several centuries during which the lines between Hindu and Muslim seem to blur in the lives of different saintly individuals, poets, and philosophers, until at last Sikhism emerges as both fusion and independent successor to the interplay of the two. Intellectually serious Christians cannot ignore the perspectives and accomplishments of either Judaism or Islam, and for the most part, they have not: Christian philosophers in the high middle ages quoted liberally from Maimonides and Muslim philosophers like Avicenna, and Eastern Christians studied with Muslims and other religious thinkers in the multi-confessional spaces carved by Muslim rulers for exactly that purpose. Judaism, on the one hand, serves as a perennial reminder to Christians that Christendom is a false arrival on the Way, that the politics of the Christian city are not themselves the politics of resurrection in the City of God, and that Jesus’s own messianic proclamation of the Kingdom remains bifurcated between the cross and the empty tomb, still awaiting the clarion call of the archangel at which the dead will rise and peace will finally reign. And Islam, on the other, serves as a continual reminder to Christians that their own tradition spun from Jesus’s prophetic legacy is but one among many possible interpretations, their own Abrahamic universalism is not the only or even most successful of its kind. Christians may reign with Jesus in heaven (Eph 2:6), but on earth, we are still walking with him on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24), and on that road we find that there are many fellow Wayfarers trekking alongside us. This is exactly the uncertainty, the finitude, and the itineracy that Christendom could never tolerate—and therefore the weakest point in its intellectual scaffolding.
The lingering irresolution of Christianity’s apocalyptic gospel in the midst of a continuing world order laid the groundwork for the Renaissance and the birth of “early modernity.” If Judaism and Islam represent the two primary dialogue partners with premodern Christianity about the success or veracity of Christianity’s own claims to ultimacy, then the eventual rise of humanism, secularism, and “modernity,” which requires more definition and qualification than this particular post has room for, showcase Christianity’s own divided mind about the ultimate ethical credibility of its claims. On the one hand, the humanist tradition of classical antiquity was deeply shaped by the impact that Judaism and Christianity made on Greco-Roman mores: in a world that exposed infants on cliffsides, used and abused women, slaves, and disenfranchised foreigners, often left the sickly and injured poor to their mortality, and looked down on the homeless and the migrant, the belief that every human being was created in God’s image and likeness (Gen 1:26-28) and, for Christians, that this image had been renewed in dignity by the incarnation of the Word as Jesus Christ (Jn 1:14) served to democratize those ideals that were otherwise praiseworthy in the Greco-Roman ethical tradition: cardinal virtues like prudentia, fortitudo, iustitia, and temperantia; reciprocity in charis and fides; the value of amicitia; the importance of wonder, of inquiry, of critical thinking, of observation, study, reflection, and analysis, of natural science and philosophy; of piety; of the human being as the microcosm, as kin to the gods. If it sounds like Greece and Rome already believed in the dignity of humankind, that’s because they did; what Judaism and Christianity did was not so much to convince the Roman world of the value of humanitas as that more people were human than the Romans were accustomed to acknowledge. Christian humanism, however, contended on the other hand with Christianity’s own penchant for absorbing the older, hierarchicalist Roman values, as well as its weaponization of ignorance in the service of power. Christians often tell a story about their relationship to classical knowledge that goes something like this: classical antiquity produced a wealth of literature, and medieval Christianity preserved it for the present. That’s true, as far as it goes, but it leaves out the important detail that Christians also destroyed quite a bit of the ancient world: from pagan temples in Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt, to classical literary works in Alexandria, to venerated shrines and tombs, to celebrated public centers, Christians often broke down much more of antiquity than they preserved, and what is preserved is often curated according to their interests. That is at least part of why we have so little of Epicurus and so much of Plato, none of Porphyry’s Against the Christians and yet so much of Cicero. I do not mean to belabor the point too much: premodern Christians, after all, often recycled the things that they broke, as any casual observer in a Roman Church might notice in the classical columns borrowed for the nave, sometimes built on the site of a pagan temple or house, or simply repurposed an existing structure, like the Athenian Parthenon. And Christians can hardly be faulted for preserving hard-hitting polemic at their expense (would pagans have preserved the New Testament, for instance?). But the point remains that the energies of a Christian humanism competed in late antiquity and the middle ages with the energies of an anti-intellectualist, binary Christian triumphalism that tended to wield the power of the state against ideas and practices deemed dissident from orthodoxy. That is why the genuine outpouring of Christian humanism in the premodern world tended to happen at times of limited state control of Christian intellectuals and of wider sea changes in the stability of Christendom. The birth of the Western university, the rediscovery of classical antiquity in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in Europe, and the ethos of later Christian scholars like Erasmus (1466-1536) all contributed to a flourishing of a Christian humanism dedicated to open-minded learning, deep thinking, and reformist tendencies in relationship to Christian institutions. Erasmus’s own life also coincided with one fruit of this Christian humanist impulse in the birth of the Protestant Reformation, at a time when the statist collectivism of Western Christendom had allowed rampant corruption in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the political elite. Whatever one thinks of the theology of Martin Luther, John Calvin, or Huldrych Zwingli—I confess here that I have mostly distaste for them and their intellectual descendants, though for different reasons in each case—that the Reformation was born from the sense that Christendom had reiterated an oppression against the spiritual and moral dignity of ordinary Christian believers is undeniable and its essential critique unavoidable enough that Catholicism would, over the course of about 500 years, gradually concede the point. Ever since, Christian humanism has been a matter of competition between Christians of the emergent communions—“Roman Catholicism,” “Eastern Orthodoxy,” “Protestantism,” whatever other abstractions we might wish to adduce—as scholars, theologians, and clerics of each tradition seek to claim the intellectual high ground in conversation with one another and an increasingly literate public on the basis either of genuine learning or of feigned learning (or even just gesturing in the general direction of the learned); so too for ethical holiness or its pretense. Christian humanism proved a destabilizing force for Christendom also because its primary object was not really Christian doctrine so much as the dignity of the human experience itself. The point must often be stressed in contemporary conversation that the thinkers of the Renaissance and several (but not all) of very early modernity were in fact practicing Christians because in many cases their interests were not primarily theological: they were poets, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, inventors, painters, singers, statesmen, financiers, culinary geniuses, lovers (of women and men, often enough), talented warriors, knights, assassins, generals, and savvy diplomats, traders, merchants, and students of the world. Christian humanism is not so much a distinct species as it is humanism happening in the Christian world, and the ecstasy of partial separation of the appropriate uses of mind and body from by then ancient religious strictures allowed the space within which “secularism,” which also requires heavy definition and qualification that this already overlong post lacks the time for, could flourish. The scientific, economic, social, and political revolutions of the Enlightenment era, including the American and French Revolutions, marked the formal beginning of the end for the confessional archipelago of Christendom, though its ghost continued to haunt the new republics, constitutional monarchies, and other arrangements in various subtle ways, often all the more so to the very degree that Christianity was seen as a demon to be exorcised or a child’s plaything to be discarded. These developments cannot be reduced to the power of Christian humanism “run amok,” as though they were purely intellectual experiments gone wrong: intellectual trends tell us something about how Christendom disintegrated into the international order created by classical liberalism, in the variety of both its prewar and postwar iterations, but they do not tell us everything. Yet the tension of Christianity’s humanistic ethics in the politics of resurrection, the way of organizing human life around the life-giving power of a God who will raise executed, falsely accused criminals from the dead and restore oppressed nations, proved uncontainable in a social organization that required maintenance of the ordinary concerns of states to survive. It is here that the rushing river of Christian revelation, scattered into the Delta of individual communions, seems to regather its tributaries and to reach a common canyon, through the narrow ravines of which all must now pass at a much slower pace.
Continuandum in partem quartam.
I have two critiques, both of which are minor and have more to do with rhetoric than with scholarship:
First, the Christian claim that the Church preserved the culture of the classical world was itself a response to a widespread belief (the "academic consensus" well into the 20th century!) that Christianity had willfully and deliberately destroyed ALL classical knowledge (the "myth of the Dark Ages"), and only in the Renaissance did secular freethinkers redicover the classical heritage that Christians had done their best to wipe out. This belief may be old hat in the narrow halls of academia, but it's a live myth in the broader culture. Additionally, the Christian counter-claim is not just that Christians did preserve many classical texts, but that those texts would likely have perished during the Early Middle Ages had they not been preserved in monasteries, and given the enormous social disruptions that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, that's a very plausible claim.
Second, having read basically everything on APD, I've noticed that your sympathy for classical culture and Roman cosmopolitanism often leads you into what strikes me as special pleading for the virtues of Roman culture (at least, pre-Christian Roman culture). The offending passage in this case was the one relating to humanism in the Roman Empire. Claiming that th Romans had an implicit (if narrowly exclusive) humanism just waiting to be democratized by Christianity seems to give a society whose very functioning rested on brutal hierarchies far too much credit. If the claim that "the Jim Crow South already believed in the dignity of humankind," and the African-American Civil Rights Movement "did was not so much to convince the [American South] of the value of humanitas as that more people were human than the [white supremacists] were accustomed to acknowledge," sounds like bizarre special pleading (and I think it does), then the same goes for the original argument. Every brutal empire belives its patrician class are humans with dignity; the Romans deserve no special credit in that regard.