More to the point, though, is that the reviewer is both right and wrong. He's right in the sense that history is indeed not about judging the past in terms of our present-day personal or social standards. It's easy enough, for example, to condemn Victorian English capitalists for their exploitation of labour. It's more difficult is to relate their story with an unprejudiced comprehension of their point-of-view. This is what a good modern historian tries to do.

At the same time, it would be a foolish historian who failed [a] to place the Victorian industrialist in the overall context of subsequent culture and who [b] did not try to work out how the events of the 18th and 19th centuries influenced the generations which followed. It's one thing to dispassionately describe, analyse and interpret historical events non-judgmentally. But a good historian must also observe and highlight how those events have formed us for good or ill.

The central theme of Freeman's book is how the formation of the Christian Church before around 500 ad so changed the Western world that what might be broadly termed "scientific thinking" was prematurely cut down, not to rise again for another thousand years.

I found his thesis compelling. The historical facts of the times - the people, the events, the sources - have been known for centuries. They have not essentially been in dispute since at least the publication in 1776 of the first volume of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (though, of course, many new facts have surfaced and Gibbon's biases have become more obvious).

Gibbon has been largely unacceptable to traditional Christians because he tended to be so scathing about the early Church. Noting, for example, the large number of miracles which were claimed (especially in the Byzantine Church) he wrote

... we may surely be allowed to observe that a miracle, in that age of superstition and credulity, lost its name and merit, since it could scarcely be considered as a deviation from the ordinary and established laws of nature [2].

Shunning the light
Such has been the iron grip of the Church on its members for some two thousand years, that any interpretation of the formative years other than the official one has consistently been discounted. Gibbon and those of similar critical tendencies have been sidelined by Christian authorities. 

Acceptable Church history has as a result been distorted. A myth has been created presenting monolithic and inspired Christian rectitude in matters of truth. A steady stream of divine revelation has been proposed. Church authority has asserted their increasingly accurate perception of absolute truth as they unerringly navigate the choppy waters of unbelief.

Freeman traces the progression of this frame of mind from the first century until the thirteenth, when the works of Aristotle were forbidden as a basis for discussion by students in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris and heretics were increasingly fair game for a vicious ecclesiastical police.

He rightly detects an anti-rational stance characteristic of Christianity from the very beginning. We tend to forget that the earliest representative of Christian thinking is Paul. The Gospels postdate Paul's letters by some twenty-five years. And we perhaps need reminding that he wrote:

For what seems to be God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and what seems to be God's weakness is stronger than human strength (1 Corinthians 1.25).

Freeman's book is about how, in the supercharged atmosphere of theological controversy in the fourth and fifth centuries, this perception triumphed. It was, and is, thought of by the official Church as a "triumph of faith". But when faith comes to be equated with "belief", which is in turn equated with acquiescence in the teachings of the Church, then one must question the value of faith itself. And that is exactly what has happened and is happening to a large majority of those who might once have been counted amongst the "faith-full".

Freeman summarises his thesis:

In the fourth and fifth centuries ... faith ... achieved prominence over reason. The principles of empirical observation or logic were overruled in the conviction that all knowledge comes from God ... Christianity, under the banner of Paul's denunciation of Greek philosophy, began to create the barrier between science - and rational thought in general - and religion that appears to be unique to Christianity.

It has been fashionable of late for some to propose that science was born out of Christian faith, that without the Church the scientific endeavour would have remained still-born. I for one have always been impressed by a singular lack of good evidence for this position. I think Freeman has destroyed it for ever.

Football hooligans
Which is not to say that his conclusion hasn't been evident for some time. Perhaps it is commonplace in academic circles, where similar vital truths tend to remain hidden, sometimes for decades. Freeman illustrates the point when he tells how Gregory the Great was appalled by the conduct of the Council of Constantinople (which approved the Nicene Creed). He likened the bishops to

a flock of jackdaws combining together, a rabble of adolescents, a gang of youths, a whirlwind raising dust under the pressure of air currents, people whom nobody who was mature either in the fear of God or in years would pay any attention ... [3].

I was amused by a modern-day parallel noted by Freeman. A member of the Anglican liturgical commission reported that preparing texts with its members was like "... trying to do embroidery with a bunch of football hooligans ..." [4].

Bishops and monks were not averse to using force to impose their doctrines on opponents, who were often conveniently labelled as heretics. Some gathered armed gangs to beat up opponents. Others used state powers to confiscate property and banish their opponents to the provinces. So vicious was the in-fighting that Constantine and successive Roman emperors had to step in and force the compliance of warring parties.

I was impressed by the careful and thorough way in which Freeman makes a vital point about how the fires of controversy were fuelled. I suspect that many of us have been under the impression that the bishops and theologians of the times were motivated by a holy desire for truth, seeking ways of expressing their ineffable experience of God. That may have been true for some. But most of us don't realise that when Constantine made the Church the Roman Empire's official religion at the Council of Nicaea in 325 the clergy - and particularly the bishops - became what we would today call civil servants.

He harnessed the energies of the young Church and its hierarchy in two main ways:

[a] Money was poured directly and indirectly into Christian coffers, by tax exemptions, for example. The clergy became dependent on state money. When battles, both doctrinal and physical were fought the conflicts were as much about cash and patronage as anything else. Heresies - by which was meant the opposition - threatened bank balances as much as they threatened convenient political compromises.

[b] As soon as the bishops had been brought on board at the Council, the Emperor began pouring huge sums into a building program. First, churches and holy sites which had been damaged or destroyed during past persecutions were restored. Second, new money went to new shrines and buildings. They became symbols or the new State-Church alliance, just as pagan temples had once symbolised harmony between Emperor and gods.

In short, what had been the case for the pagan system now became the case for the Christian Church. An established church became the norm for the Empire and remained so in both West and East until the European Reformation and beyond. This explains why those who fought doctrinal battles did so with such energy. Their livelihoods and their power-bases depended upon winning. Those who lost could be both banished and impoverished.

In effect, many of the the so-called "once and for all" doctrines held up to us as God's revealed truth were forced on the Church by Roman emperors who needed unity to ensure the stability of the state. As Constantine said, "What I wish, that must be the measure." This is, I suspect, an unpalatable conclusion for those who hold up the creeds and other Christian teachings as non-negotiable statements of absolute truth.

Virgin and whore
One of the more powerful Christian myths is that of the holy monk and nun. These, so goes the myth, are dedicated souls who give up fame, family and fortune to serve the needs of the poor and the sick. Powering their sacrifice is the dynamo of regulated worship.

Whatever the later truth, the initial motivation of monasticism turned out to be corrupt in the deepest sense of the word. That is, sex as a holy aspect of God's creation was twisted and crippled in service of a God totally unlike the Father served by Jesus of Nazareth.

At more or less the same time as the Church was grabbing its worldly riches from the oppressed masses of the Empire via State patronage, there were those who treasured Jesus' call to poverty. There was a huge contrast, writes Freeman, between

... the new wealth of the church, exemplified by one of the greatest and most costly building programmes in European history, and the complete renunciation of wealth by the many individual Christians who sought refuge in asceticism.

It was not the poverty itself which turned out to be corrupt, but the reasons for being poor. The roots of the corruption are to be found in Plato, who maintained in his Phaedo that the body

fills us up with lusts and desires, with fears and fantasies of every kind and with any amount of trash, so that really and truly we are never able to think of anything at all because of it.

Those who were able to withstand self-imposed rigours of hunger and deprivation were, so the tale went, on their way to a purification from these terrible infections of the soul. They were preparing for the infinite rewards of heaven. This, it's plain, was not service in poverty of the poor, but self-serving for spiritual gain.

Such were the fanatics of early Christendom, men who thought nothing of invading and destroying holy pagan sanctuaries, sacred to many over centuries. In the words of one Eunapius, a neo-Platonist philosopher:

... it was seen as a work of piety to despise the divine: for any man of that time dressed in black and ready to demean himself in public possessed a tyrannical power.

An aspect of the ascetic fanaticism was the adoption by many women of vows of perpetual virginity. This was a radical rejection and reversal of traditional social values, held dear in the ancient world.

Paradoxically, it allowed women to break away from the ancient stereotype of the randy, weak female who had to be kept in purdah to guard her virtue. It also gave rise to the cult of the Virgin Mary. As Freeman notes:

Once the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity had been accepted as unassailable it was possible for Augustine ... to develop the argument that Jesus had been born of a virgin so as to escape the taint of sin.

And so arose the "... dichotomy between virgin and whore, allowing no acceptable expression of female sexuality in between." The subservience of women was guaranteed for the next thousand years, sealed by the neurotic, hate-filled teachings of Augustine of Hippo who taught that sin is passed from generation to generation through the sexual act.

Freeman's book is crammed full of fruitful insights such as these, most presented in an easy yet profound way. Like most good writing, it may not please academics. But for the lay person is should prove a rewarding and enlightening venture into the complexities of the history of the early Church.

One word of caution, however. Freeman's thesis that Thomas Aquinas brought the neo-Platonic bias of the Church to an end doesn't ring entirely true. It's true that Aquinas used his formidable powers to attempt to harmonise Aristotle with revelation. Freeman fails to notice that though he tried, Aquinas didn't succeed.
________________________________________________
[1] R A Markus in The Tablet, 14 September, 2002
[2] The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 28.
[3] The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, R Hanson, 1988
[4] The Independent, London, 29 November, 2000

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