SINS OF THE FATHERS

Jerry Harkins

You will not read this in your Sunday bulletin but, until the Fifth Century, the Christian Church was little more than a diverse collection of local entities united only by the belief that Jesus of Nazareth had been the promised Messiah of the Jews. He was often referred to a the “son of god” but the exact meaning of that phrase remained elusive. The Christian congregations were in touch with one another but there was not even a widely accepted biblical canon until the Synod of Hippo in 393. There was little in the way of dogma although there was vigorous debate over such basic issues as the personhood of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity. What liturgy there was was celebrated mainly in private homes. The Bishop of Rome was just exactly that, the elected leader of a small number of Christians living in a large city who became the principal bishop of the Roman Empire only after that Empire began to decline. Other dioceses, including Alexandria and Antioch and, later, Constantinople, contended on an equal footing with Rome and the language of the church was Greek. The Roman church did not begin to assert global primacy until the middle of the seventh century. It encountered fierce resistance and was not notably successful until the aftermath of the Great Schism of 1054. Finally it did manage to establish supremacy in Europe because the Holy Roman Emperors and other kings feared divisiveness in the face of the threat from Islam. In 1073 Pope Gregory VII issued Dictatus Papae, a claim of absolute papal supremacy in both the spiritual and the temporal realms.

Although the Gregorian “reforms” had several important (mostly unintended) consequences, they came too late to re-establish Roman hegemony. One of the great tragedies of Roman Catholicism has been that it has never acquiesced to this reality. It is also ironic because, in the beginning, the Christian enterprise was nothing if not eclectic. In many places, including Rome, the church was an adjunct of local warlords who treated the papacy as a useful ally or a deadly enemy. The great strength of the church existed on another plane entirely, that of small congregations that gave succor to besieged believers in a new and comforting relationship with the divine. Obviously there were theological similarities but there was no orthodoxy and no heresy until the Roman civil authorities decided to impose a single ideology for their own management reasons. That ideology was under the control of the Emperor.

Constantine I convened the first ecumenical council at Nicea, about 70 miles as the crow flies southeast of Constantinople, in 325, just 12 years after his Edict of Milan had freed Christians from official persecution. The thirty-third Bishop of Rome, Sylvester I, did not attend. It had a lengthy and doctrinally important agenda but the principal issue was the question of whether Jesus was of the same substance as the Father or of only similar substance as the Arians contended. The Arians lost and the Nicene Creed, approved by a vote of the bishops and still recited at every mass, refers to Jesus as “consubstantial with the Father.” After intense debate, the bishops also agreed that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

The Nicene Creed was the first official statement of orthodox Christianity but, like all such documents, it raised as many questions as it purported to answer. For example, in referring to Jesus, it says, “Who, for us and for our salvation, descended from heaven and was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, [born] of the Virgin Mary and became (literally, factus est, was made) human. He was also crucified for us.” The Nicene fathers agreed and modern Christians believe that the horrific suffering and death of Jesus was necessary to “redeem” humanity from the sin of Adam. This belief is based on several ambiguous biblical passages. Moreover, in spite of Nicea, the precise nature of the redemption was not obvious to the Fathers and Doctors of the church who also continued to debate what kind of God would submit himself to such ignominy. It was important to them and is important to modern Christians because the redemption was already replacing love as the core part of the “good news” of the gospels. Control over redemption gave great power to the hierarchs whereas there is no such thing as control over love.

To Catholics raised in the years before Vatican II, sin and a strong inclination toward sin were brought into the world by the disobedience of Adam. His descendents somehow share in his guilt through the mechanism of original sin. Christ “redeemed” us which means that the guilt is absolved even while its consequences remain the central feature of human life.  Sin and the inclination to sin remain with us but now, at least, we are given a chance at eternal salvation. It is not clear how this redemption occurred although Paragraph 517 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Christ's whole life is a mystery of redemption. Redemption comes to us above all through the blood of his cross, but this mystery is at work throughout Christ's entire life.” “Mystery” is the key word. Both the fall and the redemption are problematic—indeed eccentric—ideas but it was the best the dogmatic theologians could do and it has stuck.

The first problem is fatal: Adam’s disobedience was not sinful. Until he ate the forbidden fruit, Adam had no knowledge of good and evil, a knowledge necessary for an act to be sinful but available only to the gods, whoever they were (Genesis 3:4-7). He could only have thought that, if he disobeyed, he would “certainly die” (Genesis 2:18) which is all God had threatened. In fact, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden not to punish them but to prevent them from returning to the tree and continuing to eat its fruit, thereby becoming as “one of us” and living forever (Genesis 3:22-24). If he had known the apple was poisonous, which is precisely what God implied (Genesis 2:17), he would not have eaten it. Of course, he had no concept of poison or death so God’s threat was meaningless to him.

The second problem is equally serious and is the first of several instances of injustice at the hands of the God of Genesis. Only after Adam ate the apple did God extend the punishment to all Adam’s descendents. Why? The answer is known to every Sunday school child: because we somehow “share” in Adam’s guilt. We are born in a state of “original sin” which, of course, is Adam’s sin. The church teaches there is no personal guilt in this, only personal punishment. At the moment of our conception, we are marked as children of Satan and heirs of hell (or limbo). We inherit all the earthly punishments of Adam and Eve—suffering, death, the inclination to sin, and sexual attraction. Eventually, God will explain to Moses (Exodus 20:5), “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” There is no doubt that an all-powerful God has a right to make such a rule but there is also no doubt that it is unjust.

The third problem arises because of the undoubted presence of good in the post-Edenic world. Job, for example, is described as, “…blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8). Job denies he has sinned but explains to his friends that God has a perfect right to strike at him. But again, this is a conundrum. Most later Christian philosophers would say that God cannot commit an injustice because it is contrary to his nature. But God wreaks havoc in the life of Job merely to win a whimsical bet with Satan. He bets that Job will remain faithful to him in spite of a series of grave injustices. And, of course, he wins. Job confesses “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted…My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1-6).

The Christian notion that God sent a redeemer for people like Job who seems to have avoided both sin and the inclination to sin requires some awkward reasoning. A redeemer was not part of God’s covenant with either Noah or Abraham. After the fact, John (3:16) tells us, “…for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that every one who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” So God still loves fallen man and wants him to have eternal life but the price of this gift is the death of God. This absurdity is not something you will find in the Bible. Rather, it is something the early fathers and doctors reasoned to because they wanted to explain a seemingly absurd event, the literal death of the deathless God. They wanted to see the crucifixion not as ignominious but as the ultimate expression of God’s love for us. The crucifixion did not, however, restore the status quo ante by removing evil from the world. If it had, there would be no need for an institutional church holding the keys to heaven.

Theologians have struggled with the distinction between evil and sin without notable clarity. Sin has been defined as, “…an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. It has been defined as ‘an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.’” This is gibberish of a high order. What makes a conscience “right?” Which goods? And why not other goods? Is the perversion sinful or is perversity only the cause of sin? Is it man’s nature to be good that is wounded? And exactly what is the eternal law? How can we know it apart from the fantasies of elderly priests? Adam’s disobedience was clearly an offense against the will of God. Disobedience may, under some circumstances, be evil but he did not know evil. “Evil” is a tricky notion. We cannot be sure that there was actual evil in the world prior to the sin of Adam. The idea of evil was, of course, well established and known to the gods. Many Christians think of Satan as a “fallen angel” and the personification of evil, but this is based on a single subjunctive in the New Testament (2 Peter 2:4), “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment….” Similarly, the snake in the Garden of Genesis is often equated with the devil but there is no suggestion of that in the text. The snake is said only to be “craftier” than other animals. The story of Lucifer and the fallen angels mentioned in the first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) suggests there may have been pre-Edenic evil although the existence of fallen angels or any other form of evil is not at all consistent with the story of the creation itself. Before the creation, there was nothing except God. At the end of creation, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

All the relevant exegesis between the First and Fifth Centuries arose in the context of complex philosophical debates. It is madness to think that a minor act of disobedience should redound to the accounts of all succeeding generations, unless one also wants to think that God’s creative act turned out to be a mistake. There is a hint in the Noah story that God did indeed think he had made a mistake. “The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain” (Genesis 6:5-6). There must have been something wrong—a disposition to sin—in the original plan. Which is precisely the logic that one notices in Paul’s epistles. “Since by man (Adam) came death, by man (Jesus) came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:21). Is Paul saying that man created evil? Thomas Aquinas would ultimately give a brilliant answer by defining evil as the absence of good which implies we do not have to worry so much about its creation. But that would come 800 years too late. Meanwhile, Augustine of Hippo developed a truly fantastical answer of his own.

Augustine began by confronting the most basic question of moral theology: how did evil enter a world created by an all-good God? As a young man, he had been a "hearer" of Manichaeism for nine years and, while he later rejected it, he never fully abandoned its philosophy of evil. He seized upon the sin of Adam, claiming that it unleashed evil in the world very much the same way Pandora unleashed evil by opening the box Zeus gave her. The onrush of evil overwhelmed the Edenic good and the crucifixion merely made the good accessible again.

There are enormous problems with Augustine’s analysis. What kind of God would create a humanity inherently opposed to his will? The modern word sociopath does not seem blasphemous in this context. And, of course, if evil is the natural condition, how does good come into the world? Christians conclude that good comes from the merits of Jesus through baptism, citing John (3:5) to the effect that “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” But why is baptism good? Well, because it was created by God and it imparts God’s grace. But God created everything. In the vast array of creation, is only baptism good? The circularity of the logic is truly impressive but typical enough of an advocate reasoning to a foregone conclusion. In any event, the doctrine of original sin quickly became an integral part of the “deposit of faith.”

By the early Fifth Century both Rome and the Christian church were in turmoil and, in some ways, already in decline. The barbarians were at the gates of Rome and there was open rebellion in Britain. By 404, even the so-called Western Emperor, had to be removed to Ravenna and in 410, Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome itself. Both church and state retreated and paganism became resurgent in much of Europe.

Meanwhile, the subtleties of theological discourse had never reached the ends of the earth. The new faith spread to Ireland long before St. Patrick or his predecessor Palladius arrived in the Fifth Century. Presumably it migrated from Roman Britain. At the time, the Irish were still practicing a vigorous Druidic spirituality. The English evangelists, in all likelihood, would have been Romanized Britons with their own albeit less current Druidic heritage. In Ireland, the two religions merged in ways both superficial and profound. Celtic mythology was translated into Christian iconography, Celtic practices were adopted whole cloth. Brigida became Bridget but kept her whole repertoire of miracles. Christianity became simpler, more personal. In the place of great philosophical debates about the triune god of Nicea, the Celts simply taught that all gods are one god. There were no codes or creeds and not much in the way of liturgy. Small isolated communities simply inbreathed the simplest teachings of the Christians, interpreting them as seemed most useful. You can feel the difference by reading the stories. Roman hagiographies of the early middle ages told stern, didactic morality tales of heroic sacrifice and horrific martyrdoms. The Irish, on the other hand, were gentler, more entertaining. We learn of Brendan and his crew celebrating Easter on the back of a whale they thought to be an island. Bridget stops a battle by conjuring up a mist that makes the enemies invisible to each other. She prays for a long list of favors and offers heaven a lake of beer in return. Patrick negotiates special dispensations for the Irish with God through a chorus of angels who laugh at his requests and are properly shocked when God grants some of them.

Celtic Christianity was comforting, not threatening. Its greatest proselytizer was not Patrick but Pelagius who was born in about 354—the same year as Augustine and eighty-seven years before Patrick began his mission in Ireland. He was a Celt, whether British or Irish is not certain but probably the latter. Certainly, at the beginning and end of his career, he was an itinerant Irish monk. He came to Rome around 400 and was appalled by what he saw as the decadence of the Christian community. He began to preach what he must have thought of as revival. He probably considered Augustine and Jerome dissidents. His original dispute with them was over matters of discipline and did not become theological until they attacked him as a heretic.

To someone only two or three generations removed from Druidism, Augustinian Christianity must have seemed perverted and demented. The Mediterranean theologians had no sense of metaphor, mythic grandeur or esoteric intuition. They confused truth with meaning and zealotry with faith. They quibbled over trivia. What had been polite discussion before the Edict of Milan soon turned into bitter disputation because the spoils of victory meant power, and power trumped mere theology. Consider, for example, the comic opera “interdict” of England between 1208 and 1213. King John, widely regarded as the worst monarch in English history, rejected the church’s choice of the Subprior Reginald as successor to the deceased Archbishop of Canterbury. His choice was Bishop de Grey of Norwich but Pope Innocent III rejected both candidates, appointing his own man, Stephen Langton, to the see. When John threatened death to anyone who accepted Langton, the Pope, with the help of the English barons, placed England under an interdict which meant that all the churches were closed and no sacraments or other liturgies were available in England for periods ranging from one to five years. John gave in and prostrated himself to Innocent as his liege lord. The barons, feeling empowered by being on the winning side, forced John to sign the Magna Carta but the Pope, seeing the threat to his new vassal’s power and thus his own revenues, excommunicated them and pronounced anathema on the document. Unlike John, Innocent III is widely regarded as the greatest Pope of the Middle Ages but his achievements involved principally his own secular power. He instigated the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, both dismal failures, and the Albigensian Crusade which was successful in the extermination of tens of thousands of unarmed Cathar heretics.

The key to understanding almost all significant papal actions down to the present day is power. Power was the motive behind Pius IX’s absurdist proclamation of the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 and Paul VI’s disastrous encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. It is thought Paul wanted to change the teaching on contraception and that his own commission had given him a decent if not perfect basis for doing so but the Curial Cardinals were able to persuade him such an action would weaken the power of the papacy forever. Innocent III was in fact promoting the best candidate in 1208 but his only motive was to assert his supremacy, both spiritual and temporal, over the king. Like Caligula, he would have appointed his horse to the job if he thought it would enhance his power. Like all Popes, Innocent, Pius and Paul were heirs of the ambitions and fears that bedeviled the church as the result of what might be called the disputes of the fathers. The earliest Christians had no thought of building a great timeless institution. They expected Christ to return imminently. Saint Paul told them, “We shall not all die but we shall all be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51). With this mindset, they had no use for the underpinnings or the structures of a formal enterprise. Thus, when it became apparent that Christ had been misunderstood about the end times, they had to transform Christianity. In the second, third and fourth centuries, the church was blessed and cursed by numerous leaders—the fathers and doctors—who were brilliant and scholarly disputators. To them, Christianity’s meaning was ambiguous. It consisted mainly of oral traditions and various writings of uncertain authority. They believed, incorrectly, that the evangelists had been eye witnesses to the events they reported but they knew that most of the sources, including the most important ones like Saint Paul, were derivative accounts based on fading memories. They also knew that the sources were inconsistent, often contradictory. Moreover the core documents were not philosophical tracts. The gospels, except for parts of John, were more of the nature of folk tales, simple, direct, homely and, most problematic, metaphoric. Their material was inherently unsuited to institution building and they felt they had to convert it into something grander, a vast, tightly woven tapestry of philosophy regarding issues both greater and more trivial than any addressed by Jesus. They also abhorred the uncertainty they encountered in the sources. It was a weakness in the competition with other religions some of which were backed by the brutal police power of the state.

Faced with these difficulties, the fathers and doctors did what intellectuals are wont to do: they theorized, interpreted and explicated, often brilliantly but rarely in disciplined consonance with the texts. Read the letters of Saint Jerome on virginity, the homilies of Saint Basil, the apologetics of Tertullian, the inventor of the doctrine of the Trinity who later became a Monatist heretic, the dialogues of Gregory the Great or the didactics of Irenaeus of Lyons. Some are interesting, some are boring, but they are all disputatious. Agreement eludes them; persuasion is less important than dominance. They stake out every conceivable position on an issue as though they are engaging in argumentation for its own sake. Over time, the issues became narrower and more specialized and the debates turned captious; more heat and less light were generated by increasingly arcane subjects. The church was still more than seven hundred years from executing people for heresy but the arguments were ferocious. Jerome and Augustine, who were actually quite close on most matters, seemed to despise each other. Parties were formed and, as the fortunes of power ebbed and flowed, they excommunicated each other with abandon. Pelagius, the ascetic critic of Roman excess, was excommunicated and later acquitted at least twice.

Ultimately, senior churchmen abandoned theological disputation in favor of power politics. For a thousand years, they grasped for more control over the minds and purses of princes and serfs. They amassed vast wealth and displayed it with shameful ostentation. Ecclesiastical appointments were called “benefices” because they came with income streams based on rents, taxes and the right to sell certain indulgences. Popes and bishops of major sees were expected to maintain both conscripted and mercenary armies, contract alliances, wage wars and conclude peace treaties. These things did not go unnoticed. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries an influential group of Franciscan friars attempted to call the church back to Christ-like poverty. The Popes, ruling at the time from Avignon in the south of France, at first temporized, then threatened and finally had a small number of Franciscans burned at the stake. Around the same time, Jan Hus in Prague and John Wycliffe in England preached heretical doctrines including the belief that the church should embrace poverty. Both were burned although Wycliffe had been dead of natural causes for thirteen years before his body was exhumed for burning on the order of Pope Martin V.

The Reformation did nothing to reform the church but was instead met with the Counter Reformation which culminated in the Council of Trent (1545-1563), a sad and regressive attempt to freeze history and doctrine–to restore the status quo ante. Except for a handful of small events and the fresh air allowed in during the short reign of John XXIII, the church has become progressively more sclerotic since Trent. Since John’s death in 1963, we have witnessed a second Counter Reformation aimed at interpreting away the decrees of the Second Vatican Council and returning to the anti-modernist teachings of Trent and Vatican I. It seems certain to succeed as conservative popes proclaim conservative doctrines and appoint conservative bishops all the while proclaiming themselves not conservative at all but only faithful to unchanging and unchangeable truth.