Here, then, was authority such as even a Roman or a Persian aristocrat might appreciate. Although bishops tended to shun the silks and jewels beloved of the upper classes, the coarse wool of their robes could not disguise the fact that they too, like any great magnate, dealt ultimately in patronage. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”59 This injunction of Christ’s, while not always followed to the letter, had nevertheless inspired among Christians a tradition of charity that was capable of providing bishops, the men who administered its fruits, with immense reserves of largesse. In city after city, the Church had come to constitute not merely a state within a state but something altogether more exceptionaclass="underline" a welfare state. In a world where there were few safety nets for the destitute, or the widowed, or the sick, this might serve to endow the local bishop with an often brilliant aura of holiness—and holiness, to the Christian people, spelled power. Much, in turn, was bound to flow from this. With power, a bishop could impose discipline upon his flock; and with discipline, the Church could maintain itself as something truly universal—as “catholic.” Three centuries on from the lifetime of Christ, and there was nothing that would have borne a surer witness to the glory of His triumph over death, and to the workings of the Holy Spirit, than a Christian people who stood as one.
Certainly, as their propagandists never tired of pointing out, there was nothing in all the bewildering kaleidoscope of idolatrous cults that could remotely compare with the sense of common identity that most Christians did authentically share. That did not mean, however, that the Christian people enjoyed a perfect unity. Far from it. The world remained a realm of sin, and the body of the Church, as that of Christ had been upon the cross, was racked and twisted by the tortures inflicted upon it by the wicked. Not everyone who laid claim to the name of Christian was necessarily willing to acknowledge the authority of a bishop. “Beware of false prophets,” Christ Himself had warned, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves.”60 Food for thought—for how to tell a sheep from a wolf disguised inside a fleece? Writing in Carthage, a famous and wealthy city in North Africa, a Christian philosopher by the name of Tertullian had proffered some helpful advice: “It is the sources and the originals of the faith which must be accounted the truth.”61 Nothing was to be reckoned authentically Christian, in other words, that could not be traced, generation back through generation, to the time of Christ Himself, and of His first followers, the apostles. If this was true for doctrine, Tertullian argued, then so also was it true for priests. Any bishop who stood in a line of succession from one of the original apostles served as the heir of a Christian who had been blessed by the hands of the Son of God. What better pedigree than that? “For, undoubtedly, it preserves what the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God.”62
A clinching display of logic, it might have been thought—except that other Christians too could play the same game. Formidable and peerless though the organisation of the self-proclaimed “catholic” Church might be, it was not alone in looking back to the primal origins of the faith to sanction its doctrines. Indeed, there was a sense in which the very efforts of its servants to carve a straight path through all the wilds of potential belief—an “orthodoxy”—served only to open up alternative routes. The existence of a linked network of bishoprics across the span of the known world reflected an understanding of Christ’s teachings that had been shaped, above all, by Pauclass="underline" an understanding that viewed the Church as a body universal, defined by faith rather than law, and ablaze with “the power of the Holy Spirit.”63 All these presumptions, however, might readily be challenged. Why, for instance, should the Church not remain what it had been back in the very earliest days of its existence: a pure body of the elect, small to be sure, but untainted by the outside world? And how was it, if the Torah were a matter of sublime irrelevance, as Paul had taught, that Christ Himself had so emphatically stated the exact opposite: “till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished”?64
Even this, however, was not to touch upon the profoundest, the most dizzying, the most perplexing question of alclass="underline" what precisely was the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Christ, and of Christ, the Son of God, to His Heavenly Father? Once again, it was Tertullian—never one to shirk a challenge—who provided the most widely accepted answer. God, he explained, was Three: Father, Son and Spirit. Likewise, these three aspects of the divinity—the creator, the redeemer and the inspirer—were One. A paradox, of course—but one that Tertullian, who had not been expensively schooled in the subtleties of Greek philosophy for nothing, saw as expressive of the very essence of the divine. God, who was Three in One, and One in Three, was best thought of, he explained, as a Trinitas—a “Trinity.”
Yet even Tertullian, despite the triumphant swagger with which he had made his case, had been under no illusion that he had proved it: “The mystery stays guarded.”65 Which was putting it mildly. Any number of slippery issues still remained to be pinned down. If God were truly One, for instance, did that mean the Son was not, as His title implied, subordinate to the Father but in every way His equal? The tendency in orthodox circles was increasingly to answer “yes”; but the fact that this implied a Son who was no less eternal than His own parent, an apparent illogicality that had worried Tertullian himself, ensured that there were plenty of Christians who scorned to agree. This, of course, in a Church where there were few means of enforcing a specific orthodoxy other than by exhortation and argument, they were perfectly at liberty to do; and it ensured that the spectrum of Christian beliefs held by the Christian people, rather than narrowing as time went on, came instead to embody a quite bewildering range of shades. It was all very well for the likes of Tertullian to argue that an impregnable mystery lay at the heart of the faith; but there were many Christians who found it difficult to leave the matter simply at that. Too much was at stake. The irreducible message of the Christian faith—that God, through the agency of Jesus, had somehow intruded into the mortal fabric of human flesh—raised as many questions as it answered, not only about the essence of the divine but about who precisely Jesus might have been. Equally God and equally man: such, three hundred years after the crucifixion, had come to be the favoured orthodoxy among the leaders of the Church. But it was not the only one. There were some Christians who argued that Jesus had been completely divine, with not a trace of the human about him. There were others who claimed that his body had provided a mortal shell for the heavenly Spirit, which was presumed to have descended upon him during his baptism, and abandoned him before he died on the cross. There were still others who insisted that Jesus had been the adopted Son of God—flesh and blood, like any other man, but no less the Christ for that. Not a permutation of beliefs, in short, but some group of Christians, somewhere, might choose to subscribe to it.
And it was precisely this range of opinion—hairesis, in Greek—that drove those who wished to affirm a single orthodoxy to distraction.c Of course, every Christian sect liked to imagine that its own understanding of Christ constituted the way, the truth, the life; but it was the self-proclaimed “catholic” Church, by virtue of its sheer scale, which had the most weight to throw around. The most to lose as well if it did not. Painstakingly, over the course of the centuries, it had set itself to the formidable task of clearing any number of doctrinal booby-traps from the feet of the faithful. Understandably, then, its scholars and leaders had little patience for those who would sabotage such a project. Christians who rejected the Church’s authority were increasingly viewed not as fellow travellers but rather as souls lost upon crooked paths, agents of error who had wilfully chosen to abandon the one, true road of orthodoxy—as “heretics.” Nothing they touched so sacred or so precious, but they would attempt to sabotage it. “For their behaviour is exactly like that of someone who, when an exquisite mosaic of a king has been fashioned by a great artist out of rare stones, takes the mosaic completely to pieces, and rearranges the jewels, and puts them back together to make the image of a dog or a fox—and a poorly executed one at that.”66