ROMAN RELIGIONIn an earlier lecture I talked about the Roman Empire as it existed under the organization established by the first

emperor, Augustus Caesar. As a political system it was very successful. It assimilated many peoples with diverse government and diverse cultures into a single world empire. But it also created a kind of spiritual void in the life of its subjects. And that is what I would like to look at today.

The Roman Empire was a period in which all traditional religions of the earlier ancient world went into decline and were replaced by new religious systems. We must begin today by considering the causes of this decline. Traditional religion declined because it no longer served the purposes for which it had originally been developed. The main purpose of ancient religions was to serve as a focus for political and social loyalties.

Each national group, each city, and sometimes even each family had its own religion. You could tell what a person's background was by observing which gods he worshipped. Greeks worshipped Greek gods, Romans worshipped Roman gods, and others worshipped the gods of their own nationality. Religion was in fact a sign of belonging. An individual accepted their gods because all of his fellow countrymen, friends and relatives also believed in them. This was true, for example, of Judaism, the Hebrew religion, which was a national religion intended only for Hebrews.

With the coming of the Roman Empire, older nationalities and social groupings became less important. National gods were less important because the older political groupings were absorbed into the Roman Imperial state. The establishment of a worldwide peace made it possible for persons to move freely from one place to another, and many people did move to improve their economic condition. An Athenian might end up in Gaul, A Spaniard in the Egypt. When this happened, the individual was separated from his old friends and relatives and from his traditional religion.

One consequence of the up rooting of people was that they no longer had clear-cut rules to live by, no guide for proper behavior. This was not because of the decline of religion. Except for Judaism, no ancient religion provided rules to follow in life. In ancient societies, behavior was controlled by social pressure. You acted a certain way because your friends, relatives, and fellow citizens would reject you if you did not. People who were up-rooted no longer knew how to behave.

At the same time there was a growing feeling that leading an ethical life, behaving in a proper manner, was important. The Greek philosophers argued that a man should be good, and they succeeded in convincing everybody that this was true. But the rules of the philosophers were for well-educated people with logical minds. They did not appeal to the masses.

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Christianity Takes Form

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From Classical to

Medieval

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The Byzantine Empire

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Western Civ. IF

The Imperial CultWhen the old national religions declined, the Romans

tried to create new religion to replace it. This was an imperial religion that would do for the Empire and Rome with the older religions have done for cities and nations.

This imperial religion had two parts. The first part of the religion was the worship of the goddess Roma. Roma was a deity who had been made up to represent the Roman state. The second part of the religion was the worship of the cult of the Emperor himself. It varied in different parts of the Empire. In lands like Egypt, where the rulers had always been considered gods, the Emperor was worshipped as a god. Since the Romans did not believe that men could be gods, people in the Roman areas worshipped the genius of the Emperor instead. The Romans believed that every man had a genius, the spirit that watched over him and kept him from harm. Since everyone wanted the Emperor to be safe, everyone worshipped his genius.

This imperial religion was not really a successful replacement for older religions for several reasons. First, it was purely political. You followed it only to show that you were loyal to the state. It was not a proper religion at all. It did not set forth any ethical rules to live by. Since everybody followed it, it did not give you the feeling of belonging to group.

Mystery Religions Thus, the traditional ancient religions declined, and the

new imperial religion did not provide an adequate substitute for them. As a result the Roman Empire saw the appearance of many new religions. Each different in many ways from those that had preceded them.

The most popular of the new religions are called mystery religions. They were not all exactly alike, but they do tend have some things in common. They contrast sharply with older patterns.

First of all, the mysteries were universal religions. They were intended for everyone who wanted to join, not just members of a particular national group. Often the religion might be dedicated to an old national deity, particularly one from the Near East. One popular mystery religion featured Isis, a traditional Egyptian goddess. But the mysteries also included rites, ideas and myths from many other religions. For instance, Isis was equated with many goddess is for many cultures.

Secondly, the mystery religions were personal religions. You joined one as an individual, not as a citizen or as the member for particular family.

Finally, the mystery religions had one other thing; they had mysteries. To ensure that one worshiped as an individual, the worshiper had to go through an initiation ceremony. By

performing these ceremonies, you became a member of the religion. These were secret. Only persons who were initiated knew what they were. They were like fraternity initiations. Since they were secret, they were called mysteries.

The mystery religions were popular because they help to fill the void in men's lives that the conditions of the Empire created. Accepting a mystery religion made you a member of a new group, not a national but a religious group, the congregation. Mystery religions also gave believers rules to live by. Worshippers of Isis sometimes had to shave their heads; and they were supposed to be good people, although this was not worked out in detail. At any rate worshippers in mystery religions gained new customs to follow, and this gave them a sense of belonging. Membership made you feel important. By going through the mysteries, you became associated with the god of the religion. Greeks and Romans needed this feeling of importance because they could no longer be important by involving themselves in politics.

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Frieze above from the “Alter of Peace,” a Roman Imperial Cult alter, shows the goddess Roma (center) suckling the young twins, Romulus and Remus, the legen-dary founders of Rome.

ChristianityOf all the new religions that began during the Roman

Empire, one is by far the most important. That religion is Christianity, which gradually spread and became established through the Roman world. Now we should consider quite grew as much as it is why it became so popular.

Christianity benefited from some of the same factors that helped the other mystery religions; and in fact, Christianity is a mystery religion. It is a universal religion intended for everybody. It is intended for the individual; it stresses a personal relationship between worshipers and God. In has ceremonies for the worshipers alone-sacraments such as baptism and communion.

Christianity also had some characteristics that made it different from the other mystery religions. These characteristics also made it far more popular. We must therefore consider them.

The central figure of Christianity was Jesus Christ. He was not the traditional god or mythical figure. He was a real person. He was much easier to identify with, particularly for members of the lower classes. He gave the religions historical basis.

Christianity was a monotheistic, exclusive religion. If you became a Christian, you abandoned all other religions. This was not true of other mysteries. You could worship Isis, the Emperor, Rome, and even traditional gods at the same time. This gave Christians a stronger sense of belonging to a definite group or congregation.

Also, because Christianity developed out of Judaism, it had many more ethical rules to follow. Some mysteries, like the religion of Isis, said you should be a good person; but they did not say how you were supposed to do that. Christianity provided a better guide to conduct, one that was as well developed as those of the Greek philosophers. But you did not have to be a philosopher to understand and follow the rules. Christianity had an appeal for both educated and uneducated people alike.

Finally Christianity had extensive scriptures, religious writings that Christians could turn to that would explain their religion and clarify the rules of belief and behavior. It had the Old Testament taken from Judaism. It soon also came to have

many Christian writings as well.

Roman Religious Tolerance Contrary to popular belief, the Romans were very tolerant

in their actions toward religions other than their own. They recognized all the old traditional national religions, just as they tolerated the traditional laws of their subjects. They did not object to the mystery religions either, as long as they did not interfere with older religions too much.

The only requirement that the government set down was that everyone should accept the Imperial religion, the cult of Roma and Emperor, along with other traditional religious observances. They even made an exception to that rule in the case of the Jews. The Romans realized that the Hebrews could not accept the Imperial religion because their traditional religion was monotheistic. Long before Roman times, the worship of all other religions had been forbidden among Jews. The Hebrews were exempted, therefore, from the Imperial religion as long as they did not seek to convert other people, which they didn't do.

Christianity was a special case, however, and we must look at the Roman policy toward Christianity more closely. Eventually, it became the illegal to be a Christian. A law was passed against it under Nero (possibly around 75 A.D). The reasons were political. The emperors thought that the Christians were subversive and opposed to the state. Like Judaism Christianity was monotheistic, and Christians did not accept the Imperial religion. Unlike Judaism, however, Christianity was new and evangelical; Christians wanted everybody to become a Christian and to renounce the Imperial religion.

The laws against Christianity did not mean that there was widespread arrest

and execution of Christians, at least not immediately. In 112 A.D., the second of the Good Emperors - Trajan (98 -117), wrote a letter to one of the governors in the provinces outlining procedures to be followed in dealing with Christians. He said that anyone accused of being a Christian must worship in the Imperial cult or suffer the penalty of death. But he instructed the governor to ignore the Christians unless some private citizen brought charges. This was the standard procedure. Because of this policy, action was taken against the Christians only on rare occasions.

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Jesus as “the Good shepherd,” Rome, 3rd century A.D.

Persecution of Christians was usually sporadic and geographically spotty. Christians might be persecuted in one city, say, in Gaul, for a year or so; and 50 years later they might be persecuted in a city in Asia Minor. By 250 A.D., Christians had become more numerous; after that date, persecution was more common. One emperor, Decius (249-251), tried to wipe Christians out everywhere, but his rule was very short and he was not successful. In general the persecution of Christians was carried out only at remote intervals. But it was still not easy to be a Christian because many in the general population did not like. They were very different, and people shunned them socially.

In general, what we can say, then, about the new religions that cropped up in the Roman Empire, is that they came into existence to provide Romans citizens with a feeling of belonging, to provide them with rules of conduct to guide and judge their lives by, and to fill the void left by the loss of other social and national groupings and religions under the larger context of the Roman Empire.

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In an earlier lecture I mentioned that one of the mystery religions that grew up in the first century of the Roman Empire was Christianity. I probably don’t need to say here that it became the most important of the mystery religions. Few of you are members of the Mithra cult or the cult of Isis, but a lots of you are, at least nomi-nally Christians. So, I’d like to spend this lecture talking about the formation and early development of Christianity.

The founder of Christianity was a Jew named Jesus of Nazareth who lived in the first half of the first century A.D. Most of his life is obscure. Jesus, himself, never wrote anything down, so what we know of his life comes from the writings called the Synoptic Gospels – the New Testament books of Matthew, Mark and Luke. All of them give accounts of some part of the life and teachings of Jesus. All of them were written after his death, in order to preserve his teachings as the first generation of Christians were dying out.

Modern scholars disagree to some extent as to the main teachings of Jesus, but a few of them are clear. The most clear part of his teaching is a moral message. Jesus taught that God required a new moral awareness among his followers. He insisted that how people treated each other was more important than simply following the rites and customs of worship – he told people to work and play well with others. He elevated good human relations over strict compliance with the religious rules and rites of the Jewish religion and the law. He hinted that people who accepted his teaching and behaved accordingly would be rewarded in the next life. He may also have preached that he either represented the fulfillment of prophesy – the Messiah of Jewish tradition – or that he was the herald of God’s intervention into human affairs. As a result of his teachings, especially his de-emphasis on Jewish law, Jesus was arrested, tried and executed. We know all of this because of the writings of three individuals who compiled what we call the Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark and Luke.

The very earliest accounts of the life of Jesus are lost to us. Biblical scholars, studying the books of the New Testament that we have believe that there were works on the life of Jesus that were written before the Synoptic Gospels that Mark, Matthew and Luke used as a source for their works. These writings are called the “Q Gospels.” [Quelle = “source” in German] Each of the authors of the Synoptic Gospels have a slightly different story, or perhaps I should say, lay somewhat different stresses on their story of Jesus and his message. So, let’s look at each of them.

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Christianity Takes Form

Synoptic Gospel WritersThe Gospel of Mark is probably the earliest written

Gospel. It was written around 63 A,D., probably in Rome. Mark is thought to have been a follower of the Apostle Peter. Mark was apparently writing primarily for a Greek-speaking audience; he makes no reference to Jewish law or practice. Mark’s story is less a narrative than a series of anecdotes in which he describes Jesus, his words, person, and even gestures in great detail. His gospel lacks elements that are standard in the other gospels. He makes no mention of the virgin birth, and many scholars believe that the verses in Mark that describe the resurrection were added at a later date.

The author of the Gospel of Matthew is traditionally ascribed to the Apostle Matthew the Tax Collector, but most modern scholars are unconvinced that this is the case. The Gospel was most likely written between sometime between 65 and 75 A.D. Matthew’s gospel is largely synthetic, that is he seems to have borrowed heavily from the “Q Gospel,” from Mark, and from other works on Jesus. He was probably writing for Jewish Christians in Palestine. His work is full of illusions to the Old Testament, and Jesus as the fulfillment of prophesy. Matthew argues that Jesus is the Messiah of Jewish prophesy.

The Gospel of St. Luke was written just before 70 A.D., quite probably under the influence of St. Paul. Luke acknowledged that he was not an Apostle and was not an eye-witness to the life of Christ. He claimed to have investigated everything carefully and to have written an orderly account from the sources. In other words, Luke was an historian. Luke wrote his account for gentiles, that is for non-Jewish readers, especially Greeks. His Gospel stresses Jesus as a healer, a helper of the oppressed, a sufferer for others. One scholar wrote that the Gospel of St. Luke is the Gospel of “the outcast, the Samaritan, the publican, the harlot, and the prodigal.”

St. Paul But, even with the written words of the Gospel writers,

its possible that Christianity would never have been much more than a splinter cult of Judaism without the intervention of Hellenized Jewish administrator named Saul. He was born in Tarsus around 5 a.d. He was an administrator in Jerusalem, and after about 30 a.d. he worked tirelessly to persecute Christians. Around 35 a.d. he was on his way to Damascus to arrest some Christians when he had a profound conversion experience. He was baptized, changed his name to Paul, and became a Christian missionary, first in Asia Minor, then Greece, and finally Rome. In 50 a.d. Paul attended the first church council, and there he argued that

the message of Christianity was not just for Jews, but for everyone. He also convinced Jewish Christians that the Jewish laws need not apply to non-Jewish Christians.

Paul’s letters to the various churches were actually the first published works of Christianity. They set many of the doctrines of the early Church outside of Jerusalem. His works also summarize Christian beliefs. He made Christ’s death and resurrection the central event of the religion. He downplayed the notion of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, and focused on Jesus’s promise to reward Christian belief and faith with salvation and eternal life. He portrayed Christ as an intermediate between humans and God. Importantly, Paul stressed that Christianity was not an extension of Judaism. A number of the leaders of the Church at Jerusalem believed that before one could be a Christian one had to be a Jew. Paul argued that Christianity was a completely new religion and anyone could be one. Paul was a Roman citizen, and when arrested for his faith, he demanded to be tried as a Roman. He was taken to Rome and treated well for about two years, but finally executed during Nero’s persecutions in about 64 a.d.

Early Difficulties During the next 2 centuries Christianity expanded in

spite of, perhaps even because of, occasional persecution by Roman authorities. [explain about process of persecution] As its membership grew, a number of problems began to surface. One was theological. The many writings of the early Christians were unclear as to the nature of Christ and his relationship to God. One group of early Christians – the Gnostics – believed that no perfect being could inhabit a physical (imperfect and mortal) body. So, they denied the possibility of the Trinity, and argued that Jesus had never really been a human being. Other Gnostics argued that the mortal imperfect Jesus was not divine, had only been touched by God at some point before he began his ministry. I should point out that the Gnostics generated a large body of scriptural texts (nearly 20) that were not accepted by mainstream Christians.

Then in the mid-200s, a church leader named Cyprian created a new idea of church leadership. He argued that Jesus had given the Apostles authority over the church, and the apostles had passed their authority on to the chief elders of each church. So, each church had one chief elder who had authority over that church. This idea is called the “apostolic succession.” These chief elders, bishops, had authority over the doctrines of their own church, and in the early 300s they began to meet in councils and make policies for all the churches.

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Over time, the bishops of the churches in the largest cities like Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and, of course Rome, became more important, and in the Western Empire, the Bishop of Rome became the most important of all. These bishops began to dominate councils of churches and influence important decisions. So, over time the Christians became more organized and more hierarchical in terms of church authority. Now, this didn’t stop heresy, but it did give Christian worship more organization, and it went a lot further to define what was and was not orthodox Christian doctrine. This was good because the Church had other heretical movements that it had to deal with in the 4th century. I’d like to look briefly at two.

Donatism The first is called Donatism. During the persecution of

Christians by the emperor Diocletian (303-311), the Bishop of Carthage found himself in a dilemma. If members of his flock were arrested under suspicion of being Christians, they were required to make an offering to the emperor’s statue. If they refused they were executed for their faith. If they made the offering, they were released. The Bishop reasoned that, if Christians were killed because they refused to make a gesture, their refusal was essentially suicide, which is a sin. They were not required to deny their faith, only to make an offering for the welfare of the emperor. The Bishop ordered his congregation and priests to make the offering and avoid death. But some of the Christians believed that he Bishop’s order was wrong, and that priests who conformed to it and escaped martyrdom were traitors to the church and sinners.

In 311, just at the end of the persecutions, the Bishop died. There was an election for a new bishop, the conservatives – the ones who disagreed with the order – lost. They decided to protest the election and chose as their leader a priest named Donatus. Donatus argued that any priest who had escaped death by making an offering to the emperor was sinful and tainted. He argued that the holy sacraments were invalidated if performed by any priest who was tainted by sin, any sin. A bad man can’t be a good priest! Now this opened up a real can of worms! How can anyone know if a priest has committed a sin? This Donatist heresy was so destructive that it was referred to the Emperor Constantine in 313. Constantine was not a Christian, but he agreed to hear the dispute and render a verdict. His verdict was that Donatism should be rejected. But the contention quietly brewed in the Church for the next century or so. Finally, it became moot when the church accepted the notion of original sin as doctrine. Under this doctrine all men share the sin of Adam, and are thus born sinful. Since

everyone was tainted by original sin, sin must not invalidate the sacraments as all priests are sinners.

Arrianism The second is an Eastern heresy called Arianism. It is

named after its founder Arrius. The Arians believed that God, and God only, was a perfect unity – eternal, omniscient, unchanging – the One. Jesus had none of these traits; as a mortal he could not be the Father & the Son at the same time. So, Jesus, according to the Arian argument could not have divinity. He could only be a sort of prophet, a mediator between God and man. As you can imagine, this caused a serious rift in the Eastern Church. Mainstream Church leaders argued that Christ, the Son, had always existed with God, and his translation to earth through the virgin birth had been a miracle, and the fulfilment of prophesy. But many Eastern Christians preferred Arianism, and some missionaries who went to work among non-Christian Eastern German and Slavic tribes were Arian, and converted these groups to Arian Christianity. As we will see, this will be important later on.

Creating a Definitive Body of ScriptureOne last important factor that helped to create a unified

Christian Church that took place in the 4th century was the creation of the New Testament. Now, up until the middle of the 300s, there were lots of Christian writings in circulation. The Synoptic Gospels, remember Matthew, Luke, Mark, were widely accepted. The letters of Paul and some of the other Apostles were around and widely accepted. But other works that held more heretical beliefs were also in circulation. There were Gnostic Gospels and Epistles, there were some fairly questionable collections of the "sayings" of Jesus, there were other controversial works as well, all claiming the authority of scripture. In 382, the pope commissioned a noted Christian scholar named Jerome to produce a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments to be the standard version for Christians everywhere. He revised the Gospels of the New Testament, and delivered them to the Bishop of Rome in 384. Next, he began to translate the Old Testament from Greek into Latin. It was a painstaking and difficult task, which Jerome completed in 405. He then translated the various other books of the New Testament.

By his death in 420, Jerome had created the Vulgate Bible, which is still the standard Bible in use by Roman Catholics. Jerome was very careful when he chose the writings that would go into the Bible. He excluded works that had any hint of Gnosticism or any other heresy, and with very few exceptions, he rooted out verses of the

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acceptable books that might give heretical impressions. The important thing is that Jerome produced a standard, acceptable orthodox Bible which further helped to define Christianity as a universal religion.

So, what's it all mean? Well, we can say that during the 3'd and 4th centuries, Christianity became more universal, better defined as a faith, and far better organized as an international universal religion. This was to be very important in the next centuries, as the

Church would be one of the most stable, powerful and important institutions in the West.

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In the last few lectures, I have been discussing the great changes that took place in gov-ernment and religion during the Roman Empire. I have followed the story to the 400s when the western part of the Empire was overrun by barbarians. These events were par-alleled by great changes in the outlook and thought of Greek and Roman civilization.

By the late 400s the outlook of the ancient world had been replaced by a new, medieval view of life. The development of intellectual life in the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages is my subject for today.

The most important trend in thought during the Roman Empire was a growing disgust for the material world and the physical side of man and a growing concern with the supernatural and the human soul. This marked a momentous change in traditional attitudes. Most ancient peoples were originally very much like us. They were concerned with the practical problems of surviving and prospering in everyday life. This was especially true of the Romans.

Their main goal was to be successful politicians and rulers. Their favorite philosophy was Stoicism, which taught them how to make the world better. It was a practical philosophy. They were proud of their political success. The poet Virgil had said that the Romans were such good rulers that their Empire would last forever. But during the Empire, the Romans became disillusioned and gradually lost this practical, optimistic outlook. It became impossible for most men to succeed in politics because control over politics and political life steadily fell into the hands of the emperor and the bureaucracy. In the 200s, Rome suffered great political problems that killed the old Roman optimism. The perfect Empire no longer worked, and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.

These problems convinced most people in the Empire that the material world of nature as a whole was imperfect and corrupt. They became extremely pessimistic. This pessimism is reflected in the conception of the physical universe that almost everyone in the Empire came to accept. The universe was thought to be made up of seven spheres, one inside another. Each sphere contained one of the seven known planets, and the Earth was in the very center.

Men were struck by how different things seemed to be in the outer spheres from the way they were on earth. The planets moved in regular, unchanging patterns that could be described by mathematical laws. They seemed perfect and eternal. Thus arose the idea that the perfect, eternal place was up in the sky somewhere, literally in heaven. This idea was held by many pagans as well as Christians. In contrast, life here on earth was always confused and changing. This had to be the worst place in the universe. They called it the sublunar world, the world below the moon.

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From Classical to Medieval

NeoplatonismThis pessimistic attitude toward the material world led

philosophers to offer new ideas about how men should act and the goals of action. Most earlier philosophers, such as the Stoics, believed that men could improve the world through virtuous action. But if the world was hopelessly evil and corrupt, this was impossible. Thus Stoicism lost popularity. By the 200s, it had disappeared and been replaced by a new philosophy. Many men helped create the new philosophy, but the most important was Plotinus (d. 270). The philosophy of Plotinus is called Neoplatonism (new Platonism) because he used many of Plato’s ideas.

But there were many major differences. Plotinus argued that all things in the world come from a perfect, unchanging unity, which he called The One. The world was created from The One in a series of separate stages. First, The One forms a blueprint for the world of nature similar to Plato’s world of ideas. From this blueprint comes the purposes of individual things that Aristotle had argued for. The purposes impose themselves on pure matter to shape the form and development of things in the natural world. Each stage depends on and is inferior to the stage that comes before it. The most perfect stage is The One; the least perfect is matter, which forms the world of nature. From this comes Plotinus’ view of man. Since the human body is made of matter it is basically imperfect. But the human mind is similar to the higher stages because it is capable of reason. Men must try to bring their minds into closer contact with the higher stages by studying, using reason, and contemplation. If they do that, they will be wise and virtuous. But unlike Plato or the Stoics, Plotinus did not think that men could use wisdom to improve the world. The world was made of matter and imperfect. Nothing could change that. This wisdom of Plotinus was an inner, spiritual quality. It was valuable only for the persons who had it.

Christian Adaptation of Neoplatonism It may not be immediately apparent, but this

conception was not very different from many Christian ideas. Christ had taught that the inner condition of the soul was more important than external action, and many later Christians, such as monks, scorned the body and the world. In fact, there was only one major difference between philosophical ideas and Christian ideas, as Plotinus himself pointed out. Philosophical truth was based on reason and logical argument. Christian truth was based in part on divine revelation. This kept strict pagan philosophers from accepting Christianity, but it did not prevent Christian

thinkers form reading and using Greco-Roman philosophy. In fact, there were some semi-philosophical ideas in Paul’s letters and in other New Testament books, especially the Gospel of John. There was no reason why philosophy could not be used to explain some Christian teachings – so long as it did not come into conflict with basic orthodox ideas. When Christian theologians used philosophy in their religious writing, they used primarily Neoplatonism. It dominated more abstract Christian theology from 200 to 1200.

St. Augustine & Christian Thought In fact, it was a Christian writer at the end of the

Empire who pulled together the various trends of imperial thought and used them to express for the first time in complete form the outlook that was to characterize the Middle Ages. He was St. Augustine (d. 430). Augustine was originally a pagan and a student of Neoplatonism, but he eventually converted and became a bishop in North Africa. In 410, Rome was captured by the Visi-Goths, and many pagans blamed this disaster on Christianity. To refute this charge, Augustine wrote his most famous book, The City of God. In it, he argued that all earthly states are imperfect and must eventually fall. Romans were wrong to think that

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Illuminated page from City of God shows St. Augustine writing

above, and the City below.

the Empire would last forever. Thus politics or any other activity designed to make this world better or stronger will ultimately fail. For that reason, such activities are relatively unimportant. The only perfect state is the city or kingdom of God, which is in heaven. Men should try to prepare themselves to be good citizens in that state. That is what is important. Life in the world of nature is important because it is in that life that men gain or do not gain the knowledge of God that will allow time to be saved.

They may gain that knowledge in three ways. On their own, men must study the scriptures and the teachings of the Church. They also learn from personal experience and from the exercise of reason. But these two things are not enough. Unlike the philosophers, Augustine thought that the soul of man, as well as the body, was tainted with imperfection. He is the chief author of the Doctrine of Original Sin. Thus the soul of man cannot achieve knowledge of God by its own efforts. God himself must confer grace on those to be saved. For our purposes, the major idea here is that life in this world is chiefly a preparation for life in the next. In the Middle Ages, salvation was the underlying aim of almost all human activity.

Decline of Intellectual Activity After Augustine, original

intellectual activity in Western Europe declined rapidly as a result of the collapse of the Empire politically. We must look at the Early Middle Ages, which were culturally bleak. The political conditions that came with the fall of the imperial government in the 400s destroyed the institutions that had supported the traditional civilization of Greece and Rome. The cities of Western Europe declined steadily in population and in numbers in the early part of the Middle Ages. They were the primary targets of barbarian attack because most of the material wealth in the Empire was located in them. Once the Germanic kingdoms were established, civil war and banditry disrupted trade and cut the cities off from one another. The threat of attack and the decline of trade forced city-dwellers to flee to new lives as farmers or monks in the countryside.

Roman schools of rhetoric and law were located in the cities and supported by the city governments. When the cities disappeared, formal higher education also came to an end. Some educated men fled to their rural estates or to

monasteries. They were able to pass some of their knowledge to others, but it was difficult because they were so isolated. Limited intellectual activity continued in the 500s and 600s, but it became more and more restricted over time.

One sign of the decline of learning was the disappearance of knowledge of the Greek language from Western Europe. Until the late Empire, educated Romans had all been virtually bilingual – they knew Greek as well as Latin. But by the 300s, knowledge of Greek had begun to become rarer for various reasons. Augustine, who was a very well educated man, knew very little Greek at all. The fall of the Western Empire cut ties with the East and put and end to knowledge of Greek altogether. Between 400

and 1400, we know perhaps a half dozen intellectuals who read Greek. This meant that Greek learning in philosophy, science, and other scholarly subjects was accessible to westerners only in Latin translation. These translations were not very numerous. Until the end of the Middle Ages, for example, only one of the twenty-six major works of Plato was available in Western Europe.

The few educated men in Western Europe perceived that the great learning of Greece and Rome was slipping away. Thus, the main effort of intellectuals after 400 was to preserve as much as possible. A representative figure was a man named Boethius (d. 524). He was a Roman, but he served as a minister for one of the Ostro-Gothic kings of Italy. He was finally

executed for political reasons. He knew Greek, and he set out to translate Aristotle and Plato into Latin. Unfortunately, his death kept him from finishing. He was only able to translate two basic works of Aristotle on logic. It was not very much, but it was the only writing of Aristotle known in Western Europe until about 1200.

Monastic Preservation Another man who had great indirect influence on the

preservation of learning was St. Benedict of Nursia (d. 543). He came from a wealthy Roman family, but he eventually turned to religion. After he had tried to be a hermit monk for a short time, he decided to found a monastery in central Italy.

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For this monastery, he wrote a set of rules to govern the organization and every-day activities of the monks. They were so popular that they were adopted by most other western monasteries. One feature of his rules was that the monks had to be kept busy all the time to keep them from falling into sin. One thing they were to do was to copy manuscripts. It was through the efforts of Benedictine monks that any of the great books of ancient times were preserved at all.

In this work of preservation generally, so much had to be done that only the very slimmest intellectual ties were maintained with the civilization of the ancient world. To save time, men passed on books that covered the widest possible range of learning. Much of what was kept were only textbooks. As such, they were very general and very elementary as a rule. They did not delve very deeply into most subjects. Since medieval thinkers occupied all their time in preservation, they had little chance for original research or original thought. They placed an unduly high value on the limited learning of texts. Despite the efforts to preserve ancient culture, the early Middle Ages became increasingly dark intellectually.

In this lecture, I have been trying to make one basic point. What we call the decline and fall of Rome represented more than just a change in government in Western Europe. It marked a significant break in the line of civilized development in two ways. To take the more obvious way first: adverse conditions determined that a great part of the intellectual tradition of Greco-Roman civilization would be lost. Men in the Middle Ages generally knew less about ancient life and ancient thought than we know today, and our own knowledge is more limited than we would like. Just as important, however, is the fact that many of the basic assumptions of Greeks and Romans had already been discarded or radically altered well before the Roman Empire itself ceased to exist.

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A few lectures ago I talked about the German penetration of the Roman Empire. We saw that the barbarians came in and established several weak kingdoms in the western part of the Empire. With this development, Roman government came to an end in the West, but it continued to exist in the East for another thousand years.

Historians often call this surviving state the Byzantine Empire because the capital was in Constantinople, which had previously been known as Byzantium. But the people who lived in it never called it anything but the Roman Empire, and they always thought of themselves as being Romans.

In the beginning, it roughly consisted of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, but in a thousand years of history, it periodically grew and shrank. The Empire had its greatest extent under the emperor Justinian (527-565). His armies re-conquered large territories in the West. They destroyed the kingdom of the Vandals in North Africa and brought that land back under Roman control. More important, they recaptured Italy from the Ostrogoths. The Byzantines ruled Italy for nearly a century.

But for most of the Middle Ages, the Byzantine rulers were mainly concerned to protect the territory they had in the eastern Mediterranean. In this region, they had two principal groups of enemies. In Europe their enemies were the Slavs. The Slavs were the last great group of Indo-European barbarians to appear. The Slavic languages include Russian, Polish, and various others.

In Asia, the main enemies of the Empire were the Moslems. I will be looking at them in later lectures. Together these enemies continued to whittle away at the Eastern Roman Empire through the rest of the Middle Ages. But for most of the period, the eastern Romans were able to hold on to Greece and Asia Minor, which represented the heartland of their Empire. These regions had many different peoples, but the dominant language and culture were Greek, as it had been in Roman times.

The governments of the Eastern Empire kept the organization created for the Roman world by Diocletian and Constantine in the 300s. The Byzantines believed that the office of emperor had been created by God to care for mankind and protect Christianity. But the man who held the office was theoretically still an elected official. In practice, the ruler normally chose his own successor after consulting with the Senate of Constantinople. This Senate had been created by Constantine in imitation of the old Roman Senate. It was made up of the main leaders of the civil administration of the Empire. Occasionally, however, emperors were assassinated or overthrown by civil war. Then, it was usually the army that decided who the new ruler would be.

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The Byzantine Empire

But however the ruler was actually chosen, his name would be proclaimed to the people of Constantinople, who would cheer and clap. Their applause symbolized the election. Once on the throne, the emperor was an absolute monarch, who controlled all aspects of government, just like the Roman emperors from Diocletian on. He wore the old purple robes and crown, and men had to bow down in front of him and touch their foreheads to the floor. He was referred to by the Greek title autocrator, autocrat, and sometimes he was even called basileus or king.

Now, you should remember that Diocletian had greatly enlarged the Roman imperial bureaucracy. The Byzantine rulers used this large, powerful administration to help them in running the government. The system worked because the East escaped the great collapse of civilization that hit Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. The Byzantine Empire continued to have many large, populous cities. In the cities, trade and industry remained strong, and the ancient educational institutions still operated with only minor changes. Justinian closed the schools of pagan philosophy because they taught ideas inconsistent with Christianity, but the schools of rhetoric and law still taught these subjects as before. The cities provided wealth to support the large bureaucracy, and the schools trained educated people needed to keep the bureaucracy operating efficiently. As a result, the Eastern

Roman Empire was the best organized state in Europe through most of the Middle Ages.

If the Empire had a weakness, it was the army. Because they were wealthy, the emperors often hired foreign mercenaries to fight for them instead of drafting their own subjects. The mercenaries were professional soldiers, so the army was generally well organized and effective against enemies. But it was not as large and not always as loyal to the state as a citizen army would have been.

The main check on the power of the emperor and his administration was that he had to conduct government according to the law. The law that was used was based on the Roman law. Justinian took special pains to see that traditional Roman law would be preserved. At the start of his reign, he ordered a group of legal scholars to draw up the famous Code of Justinian. They collected all the earlier Roman laws still in force and arranged them systematically according to subject. They also collected selected passages from the works of the jurisconsults. Finally, they wrote a textbook based on their earlier work to be used to train lawyers in the imperial law schools. This work preserved the Roman law in the East and also put it into a convenient form that was passed back to Western Europe later on. This was the major contribution of Byzantium to European civilization.

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The Byzantine Empire at the

height of its expansion under the

rule of the Emperor Justinian

(ruled 527-565). The Byzantine

Empire went a long way toward

preserving Roman civilization,

although its language and culture

were Greek.

Byzantine Church & StateNow I want to give special attention to one last

institution of the Byzantine Empire. That institution is the church. Christianity was the official religion of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the relationship between the church and state was very close. Because the emperors believed that God had created their office, they regarded themselves as the ultimate rulers of the church. They claimed the final power to enforce religious decisions.

Now, emperors might consult with Church leaders on religious matters and allowed councils to settle many issues, but the final power always rested with him. Church leaders sometimes disagreed with the emperor’s decisions and tried to resist them. But the ruler was powerful enough to control the Church in the area that he ruled. Thus, the Eastern Church had what is called Caesaro-papism, a system in which the emperor headed the Church.

Among the leading churchmen, power was divided. Remember that the Council of Nicea had given special authority to four men – the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Three of these men ruled areas that were in the East. The practice eventually grew up of calling them patriarchs. They regarded the Bishop of Rome, the pope, as senior in prestige, but they did not agree that he had any jurisdiction over them. The patriarchs considered the pope to be only the first among equals. They claimed to have independent religious powers in their own areas, subject only to the Emperor.

During the 300s, a fourth Eastern bishop grew in importance and joined the others. He was the Patriarch of Constantinople. Because he was the bishop of the second capital and later the only capital of the Empire, it was inevitable that he would become a major leader in the Eastern Churches. But the emperors prompted the growth of his authority because his position in the capital made him easy to control and an ideal agent for carrying out their religious policies. The other patriarchs grumbled about this, but imperial support made the patriarch of Constantinople the chief cleric in the East.

At first, the Eastern Church was not a separate entity. It was part of one universal Christian church along with the Church of Rome and other Western churches. I now want to discuss the relations between the leaders of the Eastern Church and the pope. As joint leaders of Christianity, the emperor, the patriarchs, and the pope tried to cooperate in defining, protecting, and promoting orthodox beliefs. But over time, cooperation became harder. The churches in the two parts of the Roman Empire had slightly different traditions, and they

occasionally disagreed about matters of religious practice and even about minor matters of belief. But these questions were overshadowed by the larger issue of who should have the greatest influence in making religious decisions. Under the Petrine Theory, the popes regarded themselves as the leaders of Christianity. Over time, they insisted on having a stronger and stronger role in deciding religious disputes. But the emperors considered the pope merely another patriarch. They felt that it was their duty to make the final decision. These two views were bound to come into conflict.

Iconoclasm The first really serious clash over this issue arose in

connection with a movement initiated in the Eastern Church known as iconoclasm (742-842). Iconoclasm means the breaking of images. As Christianity grew in the Roman world, paintings and statues of Christ, Mary, and the saints were used to decorate churches. These images gradually became the objects of religious veneration. Some Eastern Christians considered the growing importance of this practice as idolatry. After all, the Ten Commandments had forbidden the making and the use of graven images.

In 726, the Emperor Leo III (717-741) issued a decree banning all images from Christian churches and ordering their destruction. The images had strong support among the mass of Christians, and many resisted the edict. But the patriarchs simply accepted the decree and tried to enforce it as rigorously as possible. Leo’s policies continued off and on under some of his successors until 842, when the rulers finally gave in to popular discontent and abandoned them.

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The print at right shows Byzantine “iconoclasts” painting over pictures of Christ and pulling down an alter crucifix from a church.

But the issue had seriously damaged relations between the East and the popes. The emperors had tried to enforce iconoclasm in Rome too, which they had nominally ruled since Justinian’s time. But the Lombard attacks had weakened imperial power in Italy, and the popes steadfastly resisted the policies of the Iconoclastic emperors in Italy and the West. This was the first major papal challenge to imperial religious authority, and it marked the beginning of a series of disputes over Church leadership that lasted 200 years. These disputes ended in 1054 . They ended because Rome and the East made a final break with each other that still continues today. The two halves of the Church split apart with the leaders of each part claiming that they represented true Christianity.

The Churches of the East formed what have now come to be called the Orthodox Churches, principally the Greek Orthodox Church. The Church of the West became what we call the Catholic Church, from which the Protestant churches broke off later on.

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