The rise of the bishop to local prominence was not
based simply on successful collaboration with his peers, the civic notables.
However it might show itself in practice, the bishop’s claim to act as ‘lover
of the poor’ had edged to the fore a new imaginative model of society. It was a
model that ignored the ancient distinctions between citizen and non-citizen and
between city and countryside. It pointedly brushed aside the ceremonious
dialogue of the civic notables with the urban population, gathered as the
traditional demos in theaters and hippodromes. The care of the poor emphasized,
instead, a very different, more basic form of solidarity. The poor were
nourished not because they were fellow citizens of a specific city, but because
they shared with great men the common bond of human flesh. The rich man was to
treat the beggar who lay ‘like a broken potsherd’ at his door as a fellow ‘son
of the earth.’ The poor man was not a fellow citizen; he was the rich man’s
brother in mortality. ‘He whom we look down upon, whom we cannot bear to see,
the very sight of whom causes us to vomit, is the same as we, formed with us
from the self-same clay, compacted of the same elements. Whatever he suffers,
we also can also suffer.’
Poignant though such appeals to a common flesh might be, the poor were viewed
from a great height. Christian gestures of compassion to the poor served to
emphasize the enduring and vertiginous quality of the chasm that separated the
highest from the lowest classes of society. All men stood before God as the
poor stood before the powerful on earth – as helpless beings, in need of mercy.
To care for the poor was to ‘bow down’ from a distant eminence. It was apposite
that the mosaic pavement of a church building at Jerash should bear the inscription
from Psalms: ‘Bow down Thy ear, O Lord . . . .for I am poor and needy.’ It was
a sentiment which any believer could express. The whole population of Egypt
every year sent up to heaven ‘the groans of the poor’ for the rising of the
Nile. It was as the ‘poor’ that they hoped to gain the ear of a distant God.
A society seen in terms of such stark cleavages could be spoken of, with
increasing appropriateness, in terms of the archaic, pre-civic world of the Old
Testament. The absorption of the Bible by Christians brought the social
imagination of an ancient Near East, that knew nothing of the classical city,
into the fifth-century present. When the monks of Shenoute’s White Monastery
chanted the Psalms, King David himself was said to have stood among them – a
royal figure, dressed in the robes of the emperor. The cry of the poor to the
powerful, that echoed through David’s Psalms, was not out of place in late
Roman Egypt. Civic life was a recent arrival in that ancient land. Contrasts of
wealth and power, reminiscent of another Near Eastern society, as this was
mirrored in the Old Testament, were taken for granted. By using the Bible,
Shenoute spoke a social language that his contemporaries could understand. His
letters of rebuke to governors (unlike his sermons of welcome) were catenae of
citations from the Old Testament. To ignore them was as much an act of
sacrilege as to ignore the voice of the prophets that spoke through them. When
told that he had angered a governor by his parrhesia
[1], Shenoute protested: ‘I have said nothing except what is written
Scriptures, indeed, rather, in the Psalms.’
Increasing recourse to the language of the Old Testament showed that the myth
of the city could no longer veil crushing asymmetries of power. The brittle privileges
and self-respect once associated with the notion of citizenship had slipped away.
Townsmen and peasants alike learned to approach the great on bended knee. Both
categories were equally members of the ‘poor’ by comparison with the power of
their masters. Even justice itself had become a form of almsgiving. When a good
governor was praised, in Christian terns, as philentolos and as philoptochos,
a lover of God’s commandments and of the poor, his power was imperceptibly
invested with more de haute en bas (condescending) quality than previously. He
was not obliged to show praotes,
gentle courtesy, to a select group of men of paideia [2] , as natural
leaders of the community. All classes were equal under him, as recipients of a
compassion modeled on that of the overpowering position of the rich man in
relation to the abject poor. And before the emperor, as before God, all
subjects were poor. On arriving in Constantinople, even a self-respecting local
notable would find himself a ptoches,
a beggar dependent on the favor of the imperial majesty.
Hence the use of a language in relation to the imperial power that echoes the
pathos of Christian appeals for compassion towards the poor increased at that
time. A mystical solidarity was supposed to bind the emperor, despite his
godlike majesty, to all his subjects. He shared with them the common frailty of
human flesh. In the words of advice offered
by the deacon Agapetus to the emperor Justinian, ‘The Emperor is honored
by bearing the image of God, but the image of [mortal] clay has been worked
into this, so that he might learn that he is equal in nature to all other persons.’
Appeals to the shared humanity of an
emperor and those he ruled had deep roots in the political thought of the
ancient world. It was, however, a commonplace that took on a new charge of
meaning in the fifth century. The heavy rhetoric of compassion for the shared
flesh of the poor endowed the theme of imperial power with dramatic overtones.
The emperor was to show sunkatabasis,
condescension, to his subjects, as the rich stooped to hear the cry of the poor
and as God himself had once stooped to join himself, through his Incarnation, to the impoverished flesh of the
human race. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the first generations in which
the inhabitants of the imperial capital had to face the permanent and
overwhelming presence among them of a godlike autocrat were marked, in
Constantinople and elsewhere, by vehement Christological debates (associated
with the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, in 431 and 452) on the precise
manner in which and, above all, on the precise extent to which God had
condescended to join himself to human beings in the person of Christ.
The central issue of the Christology of the period was how to combine fellow
feeling with the exercise of absolute power. In the words of Pope Leo,
Christians must think of the joining of the divine and human in the person of
Christ in such away that ‘the bending down of compassion” does not imply a ‘failing
of power.’ A God incapable of suffering and raised above his creatures in
inaccessible majesty had bent down to earth. In the person of Christ, he had
freely identified himself with human flesh. He had become a fellow ‘son of the
earth,’ a kinsman of the human race. He had taken on human flesh in the womb of
the Virgin Mary. Mary’s human flesh, first taken from her womb and nourished in
Christ through long sucking at her breast, bound God to humanity. ‘What action
could be more humbling to the emperor of the universe than to come freely to
share in the poverty of the flesh?’ This shared flesh was the one, frail hope
of all Christians: ‘Look only at the cause of His mercy, the body He borrowed
from us./ Learn the cause of His favor, His hunger and thirst like our own.’
The early Byzantine icon of Mary as Mother of God, with the infant Christ
seated in majesty on her lap, as if still bound to her womb, receiving, as a
gentle reminder of human kinship, the touch of her hand upon his knee, was an
image which conjured up a poignant wish for solidarity. If God and humanity could
be seen to be bound together in so intimate a manner, by the shared flesh of
the Virgin and her child, then the invisible tread of fellow feeling for a
shared human flesh that linked the emperor to his subjects and the rich to the
poor might yet prove as strong. In this way, the Christological controversies
of the fifth century centered obsessively on the nature of the sunkatabasis, the awesome condescension
of the God stooping to identify himself with the abject poverty of the human
condition.
We can sense, in the charged issue of God’s condescension through the incarnate
Christ, the impalpable weight of a whole society’s deepest hopes and fears for
its own cohesion. In a world more deeply divided than before – between rich and
poor, the weak and the powerful – a sense of the shared frailty of the human
flesh offered, at least, the lost common denominator of solidarity. The emperor
and the powerful must observe that minimal restraint upon their actions. As a
result, the language of power in early Byzantium came to be suffused with the
melodramatic tones of a contemporary Christological debate, whose most serious
agenda had been to spell out the exact mode of God’s identification with human
nature and, so, the extent of his openness to his distant human subjects. Shenoute,
for instance, would tell the story of the Passion of Christ with tears steaming
down his face.. In great sermons and letters of rebuke, he wrote to the
powerful that they also should learn to bend as Christ had bent: they also must
forgive the insubordination of their inferiors and must show mercy to the poor,
to petitioners, and to their own servants.
In doing so, Shenoute, and many like him, used the high-pitched language of a
high-pitched society. God remained the Emperor of Heaven, and the emperor was
very much God on earth. His bending was all that more stunning because it was
so very rare. It was a power wielded, now, with sunkatabasis, with condescension. Sunkatabasis assumed an imperial office in the cliff face of majesty.
It lacked the overtones of a discrete and low-key appeal to a common mode of
deportment, based on a common upper-class culture. The emperor no longer
yielded to the philosopher because he shared with him the same restraints
imposed by an elegant and ennobling paideia.
He yielded to his bishops and to holy men because even Christ had yielded, to
become a man like those he ruled. Swathed in majesty, the emperor made plain,
not that he shared with his upper-class subjects, but rather, that despite all
appearances to the contrary, he shared a common humanity with all Christians.
It was with an image of Christ-like
imperial power, destined for a long future in the Christian Middle Ages, that
we can end this book. We have entered a different world from that with which we
began, among the men of paideia of
the fourth century A.D. The changes that we have described are vividly summed
up in Coptic legends of the later fifth century. In these we see the emperor
and the exercise of his power refracted into bizarre postclassical shapes.
In a conflation of the story of the Riot of the Statues at Antioch with that of
the massacre of Thessalonica [3], we learn that Theodosius I had once wished to
burn the city of Siut (Lycopolis) to the ground because of a riot in the
circus. The terrified citizens flocked to their local hermit, John of
Lycopolis. His advice as hardly a surprise. They must stage a good adventus for the imperial commissioner.
‘When he arrives, go out to meet him, bearing the Gospel and crosses, swinging
incense-burners and carrying branches of palms and olives. Keeping moving
before him until you have brought him close to the city.’ Then the commissioner
was to be led to John, to pay a governor’s visit of respect to a holy person,
before his final entry into Siut.
Everything passed off successfully. John healed the commissioner’s son and
reminded him that ‘we are all in need of the mercy of Christ.’ The commissioner
agreed to report back to Constantinople. But just to be certain, John set off
for the capital. He arrive instantly, in a cloud of light that hovered over the
imperial consistorium. John’s hand
emerged, giving the sign of blessing to the emperor and proffering a petition.
Only when the petition was duly subscribed (as Theodosius II had subscribed the
petition of the bishop of Syene) did the hand withdraw and the cloud head back
to Egypt. The emperor’s judgment was all that a new age could desire: the
circus and all pagan places of public assembly were to be destroyed, but the Christian
city, grouped around its churches, was to remain. Such a legend reflected the
dreams of persons for whom ‘a positive relationship with the center’ had
remained a matter of vital importance, but in whose hearts the ancient city had
been allowed to die.
It is by following such themes, from the fourth into the fifth century A.D., that
we can begin to recapture a little of the scale and the excitement that goes
under the deceptively simple title of the rise of Christianity in the later
Roman Empire.
[1] in rhetoric, parrhesia is candid speech, speaking freely. It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.
[2] paideia; system of education and training in classical Greek and Hellenistic (Greco-Roman) cultures that included such subjects as gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, music, mathematics, geography, natural history, and philosophy. The mutual acquisition of such an education formed a bond of friendship and a manner of interactive ceremony among the elites of the Roman Empire.
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