The Church did not approve of such excesses; perhaps she sensed a fierce pride in these humiliations, a spiritual greed in this self-denial, a secret sensualism in this flight from woman and the world. The records of these ascetics abound in sexual visions and dreams; their cells resounded with their moans as they struggled with imaginary temptations and erotic thoughts; they believed that the air about them was full of demons assailing them; the monks seem to have found it harder to be virtuous in solitude than if they had lived among all the opportunities of the town. It was not unusual for anchorites to go mad. Rufinus tells of a young monk whose cell was entered by a beautiful woman; he succumbed to her charms, after which she disappeared, he thought, into the air; the monk ran out wildly to the nearest village, and leaped into the furnace of a public bath to cool his fire. In another case a young woman begged admission to a monk’s cell on the plea that wild beasts were pursuing her; he consented to take her in briefly; but in that hour she happened to touch him, and the flame of desire sprang up in him as if all his years of austerity had left it undimmed. He tried to grasp her, but she vanished from his arms and his sight, and a chorus of demons, we are told, exulted with loud laughter over his fall. This monk, says Rufinus, could no longer bear the monastic life; like Paphnuce in Anatole France’s Thaïs, he could not exorcise the vision of beauty that he had imagined or seen; he left his cell, plunged into the life of the city, and followed that vision at last into hell.44
The organized Church had at first no control over the monks, who rarely took any degree of holy orders; yet she felt responsibility for their excesses, since she shared in the glory of their deeds. She could not afford to agree completely with monastic ideals; she praised celibacy, virginity, and poverty, but could not condemn marriage or parentage or property, as sins; she had now a stake in the continuance of the race. Some monks left their cells or monasteries at will, and troubled the populace with their begging; some went from town to town preaching asceticism, selling real or bogus relics, terrorizing synods, and exciting impressionable people to destroy pagan temples or statuary, or, now and then, to kill an Hypatia. The Church could not tolerate these independent actions. The Council of Chalcedon (451) ordained that greater circumspection should be used in admitting persons to monastic vows; that such vows should be irrevocable; and that no one should organize a monastery, or leave it, without permission from the bishop of the diocese.
2. The Eastern Bishops
Christianity was now (400) almost completely triumphant in the East. In Egypt the native Christians, or Copts,* were already a majority of the population, supporting hundreds of churches and monasteries. Ninety Egyptian bishops acknowledged the authority of the patriarch in Alexandria, who almost rivaled the power of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. Some of these patriarchs were ecclesiastical politicians of no lovable type, like the Theophilus who burned to the ground the pagan temple and library of Serapis (389). More pleasing is the modest bishop of Ptolemais, Synesius. Born in Cyrene (c. 365), he studied mathematics and philosophy at Alexandria under Hypatia; to the end of his life he remained her devoted friend, calling her “the true exponent of the true philosophy.” He visited Athens and was there confirmed in his paganism; but in 403 he married a Christian lady, and gallantly accepted Christianity; he found it a simple courtesy to transform his Neoplatonic trinity of the One, the nous, and the Soul into the Father, Spirit, and the Son.45 He wrote many delightful letters, and some minor philosophical works of which none is of value to anyone today except his essay In Praise of Baldness. In 410 Theophilus offered him the bishopric of Ptolemais. He was now a country gentleman, with more money than ambition; he protested that he was unfit, that he did not (as the Nicene Creed required) ‘believe in the resurrection of the body, that he was married, and had no intention of abandoning his wife. Theophilus, to whom dogmas were instruments, winked at these errors, and transformed Synesius into a bishop before the philosopher could make up his mind. It was typical of him that his last letter was to Hypatia, and his last prayer to Christ.46
In Syria the pagan temples were disposed of in the manner of Theophilus. Imperial edicts ordered them closed; the surviving pagans resisted the order but resigned themselves to defeat on noting the indifference with which their gods accepted destruction. Asiatic Christianity had saner leaders than those of Egypt.* In a short life of fifty years (329?–379) the great Basil learned rhetoric under Libanius in Constantinople, studied philosophy in Athens, visited the anchorites of Egypt and Syria, and rejected their introverted asceticism; became bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, organized Christianity in his country, revised its ritual, introduced self-supporting cenobitic monasticism, and drew up a monastic rule that still governs the monasteries of the Greco-Slavonic world. He advised his followers to avoid the theatrical severities of the Egyptian anchorites, but rather to serve God, health, and sanity by useful work; tilling the fields, he thought, was an excellent prayer. To this day the Christian East acknowledges his pre-eminent influence.
In Constantinople hardly a sign of pagan worship remained. Christianity itself, however, was torn with conflict; Arianism was still powerful, new heresies were always rising, and every man had his own theology. “This city,” wrote Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyassa, about 380, “is full of mechanics and slaves who are all of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf.… you are told that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, the Son was made out of nothing.”47 In the reign of Theodosius I the Syrian Isaac founded the first monastery in the new capital; similar institutions rapidly multiplied; and by 400 the monks were a power and a terror in the city, playing a noisy role in the conflicts of patriarch with patriarch, and of patriarch with emperor.
Gregory Nazianzen learned the bitterness of sectarian hatred when he accepted a call from the orthodox Christians of Constantinople to be their bishop (379). Valens had just died, but the Arians whom that Emperor had set up were still in ecclesiastical control, and held their services in St. Sophia. Gregory had to house his altar and his congregation in the home of a friend, but he called his modest church by a hopeful name—Anastasia (Resurrection). He was a man of equal piety and learning; he had studied in Athens along with his countryman Basil, and only his second successor would rival his eloquence. His congregation grew and grew till it was larger than those of the official basilicas. On the eve of Easter, 379, a crowd of Arians attacked the Anastasia chapel with a volley of stones. Eighteen months later the orthodox Emperor Theodosius led Gregory in pomp and triumph to his proper throne in St. Sophia. But ecclesiastical politics soon ended his tranquillity; jealous bishops proclaimed his appointment invalid, and ordered him to defend himself before a council. Too proud to fight for his see, Gregory resigned (381) and returned to Cappadocian Nazianzus, to spend the remaining eight years of his life in obscurity and peace.
When his indifferent successor died, the imperial court invited to St. Sophia a priest of Antioch known to history as St. John Chrysostom—of the Golden Mouth. Born (345?) of a noble family, he had imbibed rhetoric from Libanius, and had familiarized himself with pagan literature and philosophy; in general the Eastern prelates were more learned and disputatious than those of the West. John was a man of keen intellect and sharper temper. He disturbed his new congregation by taking Christianity seriously, condemning in plain terms the injustices and immoralities of the age.48 He denounced the theater as an exhibition of lewd women, and as a school of profanity, seduction, and intrigue. He asked the opulent Christians of the capital why they spent so much of their wealth in loose living, instead of giving most of it to the poor as Christ had commanded. He wondered why some men had twenty mansions, twenty baths, a thousand slaves, doors of ivory, floors of mosaic, walls of marble, ceilings of gold; and threatened the rich with hell for entertaining their guests with Oriental dancing girls.49 He scolded his clergy for their lazy and luxurious lives,50 and their suspicious use of women to minister to them in their rectories; he deposed thirteen of the bishops under his jurisdiction for licentiousness or simony; and he reproved the monks of Constantinople for being more frequently in the streets than in their cells. He practiced what he preached: the revenues of his see were spent not in the display that usually marked the Eastern bishoprics, but in the establishment of hospitals and in assistance to the poor. Never had Constantinople heard sermons so powerful, brilliant, and frank. Here were no pious abstractions, but Christian precepts, applied so specifically that they hurt.