Nostalgia for an Early Christian Fanaticism (December 16, 2022, the severed branch)
Ancient and medieval Christians experienced the world in a way that only a few of us can really grasp. I am satisfied that I was once blessed with at least a taste of their righteous zealotry.
Heretics face the consequences of their devilish inclinations (Wikimedia)
Sources:
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854)
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776)
Mark Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648 (2014)
All I wanted for my 17th birthday was the complete set of John Calvin’s Bible commentaries. I still have them stored at my parents’ house. They take up substantial shelving. It is a potential goal of mine to read the entirety of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, though the commentaries might be a longer term project. But why would I bother? What do I have to learn from a 16th-century theologian? In a world increasingly dominated by experts and scientists who demand that I accept their evidence-based conclusions about reality, I want to dive back into the old faith-based mindsets which once consumed me. Not for truth, but for the aesthetic.
Before an acceptance of the modern world diminished my gullibility, a cosmic struggle between the forces of Heaven and Hell raged all around me, and I mourn its passing as I might look back fondly on terrifying ride on a roller coaster. The most ordinary behaviors of human beings had implications for the eternal fates of their immortal souls. Although the scientists have now reduced the human body to the status of a mere animal, we were once temples hosting high-stakes conflicts between Original Sin and the Holy Spirit, between the sensuality of the flesh and the calling toward the chastity of sexual morality. But now, in the boring world of atheism, the human body is just another organism, not designed by God but produced by the chance combination of a particular sperm with a particular egg. As a mere fetus, I was disposable. As an adult, I am a full-grown primate. Where are the demons who once afflicted me? Where are the devils who once lurked in the shadows? In the sense that I might feel satisfied after a horror movie, I am grateful that I had a taste of what the world was like before science eviscerated that non-material reality, reducing the human being to a collection of cells which is accountable to no one after death. The universe looks upon our little planet with complete indifference, and possessing the wrong opinions about the Divine will not result in eternal hellfire. We have lost the ancient Christian sense for the high stakes of sex and thinking, but I still remember it.
I was pleased that I could relate so strongly to the anxieties about orthodoxy in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854). Gaskell comedically captures the proper Christian’s anxieties about salvation and heresy. When the story begins, Margaret’s father, Mr. Hale, is an established parish clergyman for the Church of England in a small village. There, he lives comfortably. The Church provides him with an income and a home for his daughter and wife. But the sudden realization that he disagrees with some element of doctrine in the Church compels him to give up his post. For the sake of his soul, he relocates his family from the countryside to a smoggy industrial city. In the process, he greatly upsets his daughter and undermines his wife’s health, but he knows that even the tiniest opinions matter to God. He takes the ancient martyrs as his inspiration to be willing to make these crucial sacrifices.
He is afraid to tell his wife. He never discusses it with her. Just after resigning his post, he shares his decision with his daughter, whom he tasks with delivering the news to her mother. “Margaret,” he tells her, “I am going to leave Helstone.” Which means they will all be leaving Helstone. Their whole family will lose their home, sponsored by the Church, and depart forever from Margaret’s favorite place on Earth. “But why?” she asks. When he first answers, he references his “doubts,” and Margaret panics, thinking he means “doubts as to religion.” But he clarifies it is not religion in which he doubts, but the Church of England in particular. “Oh! Margaret,” he says to her, “how I love the holy church from which I am about to be cast out!”
Though he never actually explains his disagreement with the Church, he tells his terrified daughter that he has been thinking about Christians in the past who faced similar trials. “I have been reading today,” he says, “about the two thousand who were ejected from their churches [in the 1600s]...trying to steal some of their bravery.” Struggling to process the upheaval her father is about to cause in their lives, Margaret tells him this is “so terrible, so shocking.” To encourage her, he pulls down from the shelf a volume he has been reading in the hopes of gaining the courage he needs to be true to his conscience. He quotes a persecuted Puritan clergyman from a 160 years before his daughter’s time.
“When thou canst no longer continue in thy work without dishonour to God, discredit to religion, foregoing thy integrity, wounding conscience, spoiling thy peace, and hazarding the loss of thy salvation; in a word, when the conditions upon which thou must continue (if thou wilt continue) in thy employments are sinful, and unwarranted by the word of God, thou mayest, yea, thou must believe that God will turn thy very silence, suspension, deprivation, and laying aside, to His glory, and the advancement of the Gospel’s interest…. Thou wilt have little thanks, O my soul! If, when thou art charged with corrupting God’s worship, falsifying thy vows, thou pretendest a necessity for it in order to a continuance in the ministry.”
Reading the passage aloud to his horrified daughter, Mr. Hale “gained resolution for himself, and felt as if he too could be brave and firm in doing what he believed to be right; but as he ceased he heard Margaret’s low convulsive sob, and his courage sank down under the keen sense of suffering.” He then explains that he was even recently offered another position within the Church of England, but he would have had to make “a fresh declaration of conformity to the liturgy.” He wrote to the bishop, informing him he would be resigning over this disagreement. And the bishop, Mr. Hale admits, tried his best to convince him to stay on with the Church. But Mr. Hale refused, insisting that his resignation was final.
He was willing to compromise the standard of living for his entire family over a minor doctrinal disagreement. Perhaps that is the true faith which Jesus asks of his followers, or at least Mr. Hale might have thought so. “If anyone comes to me,” Jesus says in Luke 14:26, “and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
One might think that Margaret would merely be upset about the enormous inconvenience and dislocation which her father is causing in her family’s life on Earth. And she is. They hardly have the money to afford an apartment where they are moving. Their standard of living is doomed to plummet. But it is not just that. Margaret and her father live in a universe where the wrong doctrine has eternal implications, adding weight, significance, and purpose to the formation of the most basic opinions. After Margaret tells her father she hopes God will restore Mr. Hale to “His Church,” meaning the Church of England, the minister mutters to her that “the martyrs and confessors had even more pain to bear - I will not shrink.” Margaret is left thinking of her father as a “schismatic” and a “heretic,” led away from the true Church by “tempting doubts” and “delusion.” She references to him that he could end up “forever separated” from her and her mother, perhaps an allusion to Hell.
But who is the real heretic? Margaret or her father? Gaskell never specifies exactly which part of the Church of England’s liturgy is so upsetting to the minister. It would hardly matter if she did, because both parties would remain confident that the other’s soul was the real one in jeopardy. It’s the same fear I sense in the voices of concerned Evangelicals who have asked me over the years if it’s really true I am not a Christian anymore. They are not angry with me. They are not hateful. Nor are they intolerant. I know they love me. But they are genuinely afraid, because they still live in that world where human beings matter so much that our opinions about unverifiable religious conjectures are of great concern to God. Yet the Evangelicals of our time still lack the even more obsessive faith of the Christians from nearly two thousand years ago.
In the really early days of Christianity, there were theologians like the unfortunate Nestorius, who was briefly the bishop of Constantinople. His hatred for heretics was greatly in excess of Margaret’s loving fears for her father and family. Hoping to impose his doctrinal opinions upon the rest of the Roman Empire, Nestorius came to the emperor with a humble plea: “Give me, O Caesar! Give me the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you in exchange the kingdom of Heaven. Exterminate with me the heretics, and with you I will exterminate the Persians.” (Gibbon)
Nestorius was at least as confident as either Margaret or her father that he knew the truth. But oh, how tragic for the poor Nestorius that he adopted an interpretation of the nature of Jesus which contradicted the Nicene Creed. That meant he and all his followers were eventually condemned as heretics. Turned occasionally into refugees over the coming centuries, remnants of Nestorian Christians would end up fleeing as far away as China. Yet, given what they would have done had they been the ones to prevail in the Roman Empire’s great theological conflicts, it is difficult to feel very bad for them. Instead, I remember them for the purifying zeal they shared with their own persecutors. Like Margaret and her father, I was never able to join Nestorius in wishing death upon my theological enemies. I merely worried for their well being, just as certain Christians do today for mine.
That was the universe for the ancient Christians of the Roman Empire in the centuries before Constantine’s conversion, and it is no wonder that they themselves became great persecutors once they controlled the empire. The ancient Christians truly internalized the implications of their religion. Utterly confident of their own immortality, they were so certain of their place in God’s plans that they were willing to die rather than renounce Christ. They needed to maintain this resolve lest they slip into the ubiquitous temptations of the pagan world around them. The early Christians lived in a satanic culture, saturated by demon-worshiping heathens, and they needed to constantly be on guard to protect their salvation. Even the most basic participation in traditional community events jeopardized the future of their souls. To them, not even the most trivial action was meaningless in the context of the struggle between God and the Devil for influence over society, including over its rituals, customs, and morality. Neither the spread of a false version of Christianity nor the continuation of demon worship - which is how they characterized other religions - could be permitted once the true Christians assumed power. That is because the pagan deities who infused public events in the ancient Mediterranean were not simply fictitious inventions of human culture to be “tolerated” under the pretense of “freedom of religion.” They were actual demons, and the pagan carnivals thus paid active homage to the Devil and his legions. Would God really favor a society that allowed the actual Devil free rein among the populace? As usual, Edward Gibbon describes the mentality best in a passage of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
[The Christian] considered the most trifling mark of respect to the national worship…as a direct homage to a demon, and as an act of rebellion against the majesty of God. In consequence of this opinion, it was the first but arduous duty of a Christian to preserve himself pure and undefiled by the practice of idolatry. The religion of the nations was not merely a speculative doctrine professed in schools or preached in the temples. The innumerable deities and rites of Polytheism were closely interwoven with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public or private life; and it seemed impossible to escape the observance of them without at the same time renouncing the commerce of mankind and all the offices of amusement and society. The important transactions of peace and war were prepared or concluded by solemn sacrifices in which the magistrate, the senator, and the soldier were obliged to preside or to participate. The public spectacles were an essential part of the cheerful devotions of the Pagans, and the gods were supposed to accept, as the most grateful offering, the games that the prince and people celebrated in honor of their peculiar festivals. The Christian, who with pious horror avoided the abomination of the circus or the theater, found himself encompassed with infernal snares in every convivial entertainment…. Every art and every trade that was in the least concerned in the framing or adorning of idols was polluted by the stain of idolatry; a severe sentence, since it devoted to eternal misery the far greater part of the community which is employed in the exercise of liberal or mechanic professions…. Even the arts of music and painting, of eloquence and poetry, flowed from the same impure origin…. Apollo and the Muses were the organs of the infernal spirit; Homer and Virgil…celebrate the glory of demons…. Even the common language of Greece and Rome abounded with familiar but impious expressions which the imprudent Christian might too carelessly utter, or too patiently hear…. The condemnation of the wisest and and most virtuous of the Pagans on account of their ignorance or disbelief of the divine truth seems to offend the reason and humanity of the present age. But the primitive church, whose faith was of a much firmer consistence, delivered over without hesitation to eternal torture the far greater part of the human species.
Even if the Christian’s delusional conception of reality might entail quite a bit of misery, there’s a romantic allure to the constant struggle for purity and righteousness. Faith was truly alive at the time, and when the pagans persecuted the Christians, it was because they feared the wrath of their own gods. For the Christian, every little choice throughout the day was of cosmic significance, reassuring the believer that his life really mattered to God, so much so that the Creator of the universe took a particular interest in which festivals the Christian attended.
Although my modern sentiments could not truly rival those ancient Christians, I came close to that kind of worldview as a devout Calvinist in modern America. As Gibbon would describe it, “the heretics and the demons lurked in ambition to surprise and devour the unhappy wanderer,” and I had to constantly fortify my mind against ungodly cultural influences. The whole of American society, ostensibly majority Christian but poisoned by feel-good health-and-wealth gospels, seemed contaminated by false versions of God. Liberal gods, I mean. Mere idols crafted by heretical progressive Christians who did not want to follow the Bible as it is but rather the Bible as their fallen natures wished it to be. Popular music normalized and even encouraged premarital sexual relations, while Hollywood movies and bestselling novels lifted up problematic characters for whom Jehovah was irrelevant. Even schools seemed to threaten true faith. Science classes undermined students’ belief in Creation. By promoting safe sex, health classes communicated to children that it was okay to fornicate out of wedlock. School libraries included books like Harry Potter, encouraging teens to practice witchcraft. The Internet was increasingly flooded with porn. Scantily clad girls were walking around in tight-fit clothing and bikinis. The occasional pop song even celebrated female masturbation.
To be a true believer in modern America was to be assailed on all sides by demonic forces seeking to encourage sin, heresy, and even outright apostasy. The modern demons did not come in the form of pagan gods. They came rather as scientists, musicians, actors, porn stars, and authors. The fear of them is what drove me to isolate myself for several months in a solemn monkhood, during which I often dreamed of reading Calvin’s great works, stemming as they did from the 1500s, a much wiser time than my own. The stakes in my struggle to insulate myself from modern culture by locking myself away with my theological books were similar to those faced by the early Christian monks as Gibbon would describe them.
[Even in the monastery,] superstition still pursued and tormented her wretched votaries. The repose which they had sought in the cloister was disturbed by a tardy repentance, profane doubts, and guilty desires; and while they considered each natural impulse as an unpardonable sin, they perpetually trembled on the edge of a flaming and bottomless abyss. From the painful struggles of disease and despair, these unhappy victims were sometimes relieved by madness or death…. It was their firm persuasion that the air which they breathed was peopled with invisible enemies; with innumerable demons, who watched every occasion and assumed every right to terrify, and above all to tempt their unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism, and the hermit whose midnight prayer was oppressed by involuntary slumber might easily confound the phantoms of horror or delight which had occupied his sleeping and his waking dreams.
Such is the truly miserable existence that has defined the lives of millions over the centuries. But for aesthetic purposes, I am glad that I experienced it. Because even if that kind of faith makes life in the world quite difficult, it also fills the soul with a sense of eternal purpose. It puts the trials of the imperfect world around the Christian into perspective. Immortality is a certainty, and rather than being purely material, the epic reality of the Christian universe might seem far more thrilling, epic, and even magical than the millions of empty years dreamed up by the likes of Charles Darwin. The world around us does not really matter; we are only passing through it. Everything we do here is mere preparation for the eternal life to come. Gibbon:
The ancient Christians were animated by a contempt for their present existence, and by a just confidence of immortality, of which the doubtful and imperfect faith of modern ages cannot give us any adequate notion…. The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events. They felt, or they fancied, that on every side they were incessantly assaulted by demons, comforted by visions, instructed by prophecy, and surprisingly delivered from danger, sickness, and from death itself by the supplications of the church.
That’s a dying mentality which most American Christians today cannot truly access, especially not the progressive ones. They will never be able to experience reality like the early Church Fathers did. They pick and choose from their religion. They see no contradiction between devotion to God and pleasure in the world. Rich Republican Evangelicals have no issues serving both God and money. The liberals among them treat the Creation story as a mere allegory for a scientific theory, and they laugh at the idea of eternal consequences for the sexual sins which they no longer accept as wrong. They don’t read the Bible, they don’t fear God, they hardly even believe there is any such thing as Satan. They freely engage in premarital sex, take drugs, get shit-faced, skip church on Sunday, and even pray to God to support their favorite sports teams. At worst, their religion is nothing more than one more cultural identity in a world of moral relativity and spiritual uncertainty. Unlike the early Christians who killed one another over minor questions about the Trinity, many modern Christians are so decadent that they hardly even have a firm grasp on what the Trinity is, let alone an inclination to kill people who have a different opinion about it.
I did not overlook that murderous tendency of my old hero John Calvin. I knew all about how he burned the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus alive when he was calling the shots in Geneva. His victim’s crime resided in the same type of disagreement which drove Nestorian Christians from the Roman Empire. Going further than they did, that awful heretic was sinful enough to outright deny the fact of the Trinity. For that, Calvin ensured he burned alive. Other Christians told me that this was one thing about Calvin they didn’t really like. But if we cannot countenance murdering people for having slightly different interpretations of the Bible, it is because we no longer have the absolute faith in Scripture which assures us that those who disagree with us are agents of Satan. I am nostalgic for that time, I suppose, as if it were a terrifying haunted house which I couldn’t help but visit in childhood.
Although he would have burned them alive too, Calvin was lucky enough to live contemporaneously with the great religious upheavals of Münster, about which I recently read in Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648 by Mark Greengrass. Could those disturbances happen today, in modern Germany, or even in modern America? A baker from Haarlem, Jan Matthys, decided he was “the true Enoch, the Prophet foretold in Revelation.” Two of his followers soon arrived in the German city of Münster. There, they announced the coming of the Apocalypse, proclaimed themselves Elijah and Enoch, and renamed Münster as the New Jerusalem. Around 15,000 of their own followers soon joined them from the Netherlands in a “flight from Egypt” to “the land of Canaan.” Jan Matthys himself managed to rebaptize a majority of the Münster population before partially taking over the city council. Practically overnight, Greengrass describes them as having created a new society involving “communal ownership of commodities,” “publicly directed labor services,” a throne for the New Jerusalem, and the destruction of churches housing idolatrous images. Lutherans and Catholics alike were expelled from the city. Representatives of the New Jerusalem soon arrived in Amsterdam, where they ran through the streets naked to proclaim “the naked truth about what was happening in Münster.” Only after a long siege was Münster recaptured by the forces of order. The leaders of the movement were “publicly tortured with red-hot irons, their bodies suspended from the tower of St Lambert’s church in cages, which remain there still.”
It seems impossible that an entire city in Germany could be consumed by that kind of hysteria today. What would be the modern German reaction to people running naked through the streets, proclaiming themselves to be Old Testament prophets? Would they have any chance at taking over a city’s government and fomenting that kind of religious fanaticism among the population? I doubt they could even find such success in America. The world as a whole, though, is perhaps not as safe as it seems. Similarly deranged religious lunatics have managed to subdue entire societies even in our own times, beheading people for subscribing to different interpretations of their holy texts. I wonder sometimes if the world will ever be completely free from that kind of threat. Or do my own sympathies for executions of heretics, which I felt even as a teenager immersed in modern American culture and science, testify to an inclination toward religious fanaticism which lurks in some primitive part of human nature? Even if it is just a product of human culture, I somehow look back nostalgically and even enviously upon the butt naked streakers of Münster and Amsterdam. Those frolicking nudists experienced the world in a way I never can. But from a purely aesthetic perspective, I am glad I at least lived with a version of those passions.