The Secret Doctrine

[The following is Episode 8 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

For three days and three nights, the old woman had been kept imprisoned in the cold, dark room, weakened from hunger, parched by thirst, and finding only fleeting relief from the pain that wracked her body during those brief moments when she drifted off to sleep.  But now she could hear the deafening echoes of footsteps, a warning that her tormentors were returning.  She knew that they would be bringing fresh accusations against her, and new methods of torture.  She thought that she was beyond fear, and beyond pain, and only suffered from a feeling of bitter loneliness, and despair.  The door to her tiny prison opened, and the three men entered, one of them wearing the collar of a priest.  He was the silent one, the one who studied her with cold, unfeeling eyes as his two companions barked at her with insults masked in high-sounding words: blasphemy, necromancy, sorcery.  She did not know which of her neighbors had brought these inquisitors upon her, or what stories they had told.  But the accusations rang in her ears.  Her evil eye had sickened children, killed cattle, rendered men impotent, and caused stillbirths.  She had been seen cavorting with the devil in nightly ceremonies, with people whose names were unfamiliar to her.  Her body, so her accusers said, bore the mark of the devil, and they proved it by sticking long pins into the mark, to prove that she felt no real pain.  But she could no longer feel pain.  Her thumbs had been crushed with screws in tiny vices, her arms pulled from their sockets after being tied behind her back as she was lifted from the ground, and her body had been stretched on the rack.  And still, after three days, she had not confessed.  But now hope had abandoned her.  As the sickening smell of hot sulfur filled her nostrils, the last bit of her resolve melted away.  She admitted that she had signed a pact with the devil, in blood, and had sacrificed infants as a demonstration of her loyalty.  At night, she had flown to distant cities, to celebrate infernal masses with other witches.  And she admitted that many of these were people known to her, and gave the inquisitors their names.  As she finished, she saw, for the very first time, a smile cross the lips of the silent priest.  The smell of sulfur subsided, and for the first time in three days she felt a sense of peace, in the midst of her despair.  As she followed her confession with a plea for forgiveness, she knew that she would be granted a humane death.  Her inquisitors would allow her to die before her body was committed to the flames.

            In the centuries following the age of King Arthur, Europe would undergo a series of transformations that would be as profound as they were cataclysmic.  From the ruins of the old Roman Empire, German warlords would build a new civilization.  Tribal chieftains evolved into noblemen, the most powerful of these, such as Charlemagne, would become kings, and from the kingdoms that they ruled emerged the countries that are familiar to us today: England, France, and Spain.  By the year 1000 AD, society was separated into three distinct groups, the priests and monks, who tended to be the only persons with a real education, the knights, and the peasants, who made up about 90% of the population.  These peasants were literally bound to the land on which they worked, and most lived on the edge of famine.  There was no economic life to speak of, trade was limited to essentials and a few luxury items for the nobility, and cities and towns were just beginning to emerge as centers of commerce.  By the twelfth century, improvements in farming techniques led to better nutrition, and many peasants were able to free themselves from the nobles to whom they had been bound.  It was this age that first saw the rise of the bourgeoisie, or middle class, and free labor.  Even the nobility underwent a sort of refinement, and both nobles and knights subscribed to the Arthurian ideal of courtly love.  The Church as well, which had often succumbed to corruption in the centuries after Constantine, underwent reforms initiated from both within and without.  New monastic orders were formed, practicing an austere version of Christianity that sought to restore the apostolic zeal of the original followers of Christ.  And local lords set about appointing pious abbots and priests to serve their subjects.  There were even attempts to reform the papacy itself, with mixed success.  It seemed that Europe was well on the road to restoring, or even surpassing, the civilization that it had replaced, but in the thirteenth century, its people would face a series of devastating setbacks.  Famine struck around the year 1290, brought on by climate changes that brought cold weather, torrential rains, early frosts, and soil exhaustion due to the improved farming techniques.  This time of troubles persisted for decades, and it’s estimated that from the two-year period between 1315 and 1317 alone, the population declined by as much as 10%.  As a consequence of this, many people fled to the cities, hoping to find relief there.  But in 1348 a new disaster spread across the European continent, the Black Plague, and it was at its deadliest in crowded, urban areas.  For the next one hundred and fifty years, the plague would hit at regular intervals, generally about every ten years, ultimately destroying one-half to two-thirds of the population of Europe.  And during this same time period, the continent was wracked by a bitter, one hundred years war between England and France, as well as uprisings by the peasants, who could no longer tolerate being perennial victims to both natural and man-made disasters.  A final casualty of these calamities was European commerce, and the collapse of its banks brought down the entire economy of Europe, reversing all of the gains that had been made in the last two and a half centuries.

            Naturally in troubled times, people turned to religion.  And the Christian faith held out a particular promise that had resonated with its suffering adherents since the days of the first apostles.  This was the prophecy that after a time of troubles, Christ would return to establish God’s kingdom of the elect.  In fact, it was apparent that the earliest Christians, including St. Paul, and probably Jesus himself, believed that this coming of the last judgment would happen very soon, even within a generation of Jesus's lifetime.  But as years, and then centuries, passed, this hope in an imminent second coming became less fervent, and both the leaders of the church and their followers allowed themselves to become involved in more secular concerns, until the apocalyptic catastrophes of plague, famine, and war upset the relative peace and safety of their world.  Many Christians observed that the onset of this time of troubles occurred around a thousand years after the time of Jesus, and recalled a passage in the book of Revelation, a graphic account of the last days of the world, which says that after being bound in chains for one thousand years, the devil would be released for a time to wreak havoc on the earth, before his final defeat by the powers of righteousness.  The Church, in fact, attempted to use this growing spirit of millenarianism, by channeling it against a powerful rival, the Moslems, followers of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.  In a series of military crusades begun in 1095, Christian armies attempted to capture or liberate lands under Islamic rule, with the city of Jerusalem being a particularly important objective. But after two hundred years, these crusades produced few tangible gains, and by the end of the thirteenth century even the city of Jerusalem itself was once again under control of the Moslems.

            And the Church found that it also had to contend with internal rivals, as well.  From the earliest centuries of the Christian religion, there had been heresies, or beliefs held by certain groups that were considered incompatible with the central doctrines endorsed by church leadership.  In the earliest days of Christianity, when its followers faced persecution from the government of Rome, it was thought by their leaders that too much diversity in belief would threaten their very survival.  Only a universal, or catholic, church, which was based upon consistent and coherent beliefs, could endure and not be fragmented beyond recognition in the face of resistance.  And after the Church became the state religion of the empire, tolerance for radically different beliefs was even more reduced.  While there may have been less of a perceived need for conformity, there were now much more effective measures for ensuring it.  One of the earliest heresies was Gnosticism.  The Gnostics, with their belief that the material world, and the human body, were inherently evil, and that salvation could only be attained by acquiring special knowledge, by withdrawing from the world, and by renouncing worldly desires, was opposed by the Church in the second century.  The Ebionites, a Christian sect that probably traced their origins to the Jerusalem followers of Jesus’ brother James, were also banned as heretics in the earliest centuries of Christendom.  With the rise of millenarian feelings after 1000 AD, new alternative approaches to Christian worship were explored by many individuals who were dissatisfied with the traditional practices of their time.  Some of these, such as the mystics Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Frances of Assisi, were eventually embraced by the Church as examples of Christian piety, and Bernard actually did much to stir up popular support for the Church’s crusades.  Others were bitterly, and violently, opposed.  In the late twelfth century, a wealthy French merchant named Peter Waldo, after hearing a passage from one of the Gospels, was moved to give away his possessions to the poor and become a traveling preacher.  His followers translated the bible from Latin into French so that it could be read and understood by the general population, questioned the power of the priests and abuses of Church authority, and opposed the taking of human life under any circumstances.  The Church responded by excommunicating Waldo and declaring his followers heretics, burning many of them, and driving others into hiding.  Around the same time, another sect known as the Albigenses believed, like the earlier Gnostics, in a dualistic universe, with the material world being fundamentally evil, and that the task of the soul was to liberate itself from the bonds of the world and of the flesh.  The strictest adherents abstained from sex and marriage, and from eating meat.  When efforts by the Church to contain this movement and bring its followers back to more accepted beliefs and practices met with violent resistance, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against them.  The sword of the Church, which had traditionally been turned outward, against the Moslems, was now turned inward, against peoples who believed themselves to be pious Christians.  It is said that when a soldier asked how it would be possible to tell a true Christian from a heretic in this new kind of holy war, his leader said, “Kill them all.  Good knows his own.”

The Three Ages of Joachim of Fiore 

            One of the principal catalysts of the new messianic spirit was actually a church abbot named Joachim of Fiore.  Near the end of the twelfth century, he believed that he had discovered, in the passages of the Bible, a key to determining when the next great age of God would arise on the earth.  The first age, he explained, which roughly corresponded with the events described in the Old Testament, was that of the Father, the second, which consisted of the rise of Christianity, up to Joachim’s time, was the Age of the Son.  But there would be a third and final age, he said, the Age of the Holy Spirit, in which there would no longer be a need for wealth, property or shelter, and the institutions of both Church and state would pass away.  Joachim predicted that this third and final age would come by the year 1260.  His predictions created a growing fervor and renewed hope among Christians, who wanted desperately to believe that Paradise was coming soon.  Many believed that Frederick II, king of the Germans and later holy Roman emperor, would usher in the new age.  Frederick was generally regarded as an enlightened ruler, and respected by many for his open defiance of the Pope, which had caused him to be excommunicated many times.  He had taken Jerusalem in a successful crusade in 1228, and had been eventually declared king of that city.  For those who no longer believed that the true spirit of Christianity resided in the official Church, Frederick was seen as the perfect divine agent of its purging.  And although Frederick died in 1250, ten years before Joachim’s predicted coming of the third and final age of creation, this did not deter his supporters.  Many believed that he would return from the dead as a kind of earthly messiah to usher in paradise.  For centuries afterward, the Church found itself having to contend with, and burn, “Savior Fredericks”, men who claimed that they were the Emperor Frederick II incarnate, come back to save the world.

            Another group inspired by Joachim’s predictions were the flagellants, bands of men who marched from town to town, beating themselves bloody with iron-tipped thongs.  The flagellants believed that this was an act of penitence, and that they were “straightening the path” for the coming new age.  But when they began to claim that it was only by participation in their activities that a person could be absolved from sin, they too drew the unfavorable attention of the Church, and were declared heretics.  And after the year 1260 passed uneventfully, the movement eventually took a darker turn.  When the Black Plague struck in the 1300’s, the flagellants blamed it on the Jews and incited angry mobs to attack them.  Later, they turned their wrath against the local clergy, stoning priests who tried to interfere with their public spectacles, interrupting regular church services, and attempting to confiscate and redistribute church property.  The hysteria of the flagellants reached its peak when one of their leaders, Konrad Schmid, declared himself to be the Emperor Frederick, and urged his followers to sell all of their possessions, abstain from work, and look forward to the last judgment, which he said would be coming in 1369.  But Konrad Schmid would not live to see the great event that he had predicted: he was burned by the church, and those of his followers who escaped a similar fate were left to see his predicted day of judgment pass uneventfully.

The Ten Sefirot of the Kabbalah

            While many heretical and mystical movements such as these met with swift and violent reprisals by the church, others survived, endured, and even flourished.  Although Jews were frequent victims of mob hysteria or the violent acts of overzealous crusaders, in thirteenth century Spain, a form of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah gained widespread adherents among both Jews and Christians.  In the system of Kabbalah, the transcendental and unknowable creator is linked to visible creation through ten hierarchical emanations, called sefirot, and the act of creation itself is explained as a contraction of the Divine being to allow a space for the created, visible, time-bound universe.  Man’s purpose is to “raise holy sparks” by returning the universe to the Creator by practicing repentance.  By fixing the universe, one is fixing one’s own soul, and vice versa.  The elaborate symbolic system which placed special significance upon the Hebrew letters and their numerical equivalence, along with the deeply mystical forms of meditation and contemplation, appealed to those who wanted to seek God with both their minds and their hearts.  In Germany, the theologian Meister Eckhart practiced his own form of mysticism, preaching that God is the only ultimate reality, and that man’s only link with that reality is through the divine spark that resides at the core of his inmost self.  Creatures, as Eckhart often said, are nothings, and it is only by getting past the snares of the outer self into the core of true being that one can find spiritual truth and liberation.  Eckhart’s views brought the unfavorable attention of the Church in 1327, but the stubborn preacher was prepared to stand up for and defend his views in Rome itself.  His appeal was denied, and he did not live long enough to hear the Pope declare that he had been a deceived soul, “sewing thorns and thistles amongst the faithful. . . .”

            As Europe moved into the Renaissance, its peoples developed a renewed interest in, and appreciation for, the great civilizations of the past, particularly in Italy, where ancient monuments and other relics of the old Roman Empire had always preserved a tangible link with that glorious age.  It was easy for these Italians to believe that there had been some time in the remote past where great knowledge had been gained, and secrets discovered, which had been lost in later times.  When the last remnant of the Roman Empire, Constantinople, fell to the Moslems in 1453, refugees from that city flooded into Italy, bringing with them ancient texts written by philosophers and sages from bygone eras.  Italian scholars eagerly translated these texts, and what they read only quickened their desire to find secret doctrines.  The words of the Egyptian priests to Greek visitors two thousand years earlier echoed in their ears, as the priests boasted that they had unbroken records of civilization spanning thousands of years.  The Atlantean dream of a lost Golden Age beckoned, once again.

              

            The search for the secret doctrine followed many paths.  Astrology, which had its roots in the civilization of Babylonia, was a popular pastime in the Renaissance.  Even the Pope had a personal astrologer.  A more subtle and mysterious craft was that of alchemy.  The practice of alchemy originated in Egypt, and was a curious blend of Egyptian artistry, Eastern mysticism, and the Greek philosophic idea that matter is composed of four elements, earth, air, water and fire.  The philosopher Aristotle taught that all things strive for perfection, and this idea became the basis for all later alchemical pursuits.  It was believed that through mastery of the art, one could transmute common elements into more elegant ones, like gold, but also that the human soul itself could be refined and perfected through its subtle techniques.  It was the Arabs who developed and cultivated the practice of alchemy into a truly impressive discipline, and it was through the Arabs that it was introduced into Europe, by way of Spain.  In addition to astrology and alchemy, which were often practiced together, there was a renewed interest in magic.  A book of magic spells, known as the Picatrix, was owned by many Europeans.  While some contented themselves with practicing “white”, or good magic, the art of sorcery, or black magic, also had an appeal to many.  Another ancient discipline, introduced to the Italians by the refugees from Constantinople, was that of hermeticism, based on a set of mystical writings attributed to an Egyptian sage named Hermes Trismegistus, who was believed to have lived at the time of Moses, if not much earlier.  According to legend, the wisdom attained by Hermes, and passed on in the cryptic verses of his writings, transformed him into a god.  We now know that these writings were probably composed in the second or third century AD, but the belief in their early origins gave them a special place of reverence among the Italian scribes who translated them, studied them, and shared them with enthusiastic followers.  All of these doctrines and practices, along with the Jewish Kabbalah and symbolic elements of Christian mysticism, were interwoven into intricate tapestries of new belief systems, and shared among diverse circles of the intellectually curious and spiritually starved upper classes of Europe.  In the centuries that followed, secret clubs and fraternities - generally composed of members of the aristocratic, intellectually gifted, or otherwise well-to-do members of society - devoted themselves to studying esoteric writings, which they believed had been handed down through countless generations from the dawn of civilization. 

Emerald Tablet of Hermes

            While the Church did not condone this new fascination with esoteric doctrines, most of its energies were directed against more conspicuous challenges to its authority.  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was occupied with crushing public heresies, such as the Waldenses and Albigenses, and when its efforts were not completely successful, it organized the Inquisition, that infamous body of holy enforcers, to root out and destroy those who would dare to challenge Christian orthodoxy.  Little tolerance was shown for practices which strayed too far from tradition: even the practice of courtly love, inspired by the stories of King Arthur, was eventually banned as heretical by the Church.  And in the centuries that followed, it turned its attentions toward a new and much more pernicious enemy: the witch.  The belief in witches among the peoples of Europe had been widespread throughout the Middle Ages, but initially the church did not sanction it, contending that such a belief was itself a delusion, planted in the mind of the faithless by the Devil.  But this stance gradually changed, and in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII authorized the Inquisition to use its full powers, including the power of torture, to find and destroy witches.  This same pope commissioned two Dominican monks, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, to investigate just how much of a threat the practice of witchcraft was.  Their investigation culminated in a book, called the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches that became, for the generations that followed, a handbook for detecting, interrogating, and prosecuting witches.  Sprenger himself was responsible for burning more than five hundred witches in a single year. 

            But what caused this public fascination with witchcraft?  For while the Church may have endorsed witch-hunting, the activity would never have become a mass phenomenon without the active support of the general population.  The biggest single cause, in a word, was fear – fear of a changing world.  By the sixteenth century, it was clear to the populations of Europe that their lives were being changed in profound and often disturbing ways.  Gone were the old days of simple peasant life.  And just as the Hebrew slaves who had been freed by Moses had occasionally turned back and yearned for the earlier days when life might have been miserable, but at least was predictable, so the Europeans, who were seeing all of their traditional institutions falling away or becoming transformed in ways that they could not comprehend, looked back with nostalgia on the unpleasant, but simpler days, when a hard-working peasant always knew what the next day would bring.  As the Modern Age came into being, it brought with it a deep sense of insecurity, persistent anxiety, and outright fear.  But persistent, generalized fear becomes unbearable unless it finds an object, a focal point.  While there were, of course, always easy targets for suspicion: Jews, lepers, Muslims, and others on the margins of society, this type of intense, paralyzing fear cried out for a more worthy author.  And the religious peoples of Europe found it in the Devil.

Illustration of the Devil (Medieval Woodcut)

            The Devil as the premier, supernatural agent of evil, the adversary of God, made its way into Judeo-Christian tradition from the Persians, and their religion of Manichaeism, which saw in the universe a primal struggle between the power of light, represented by God, and the power of darkness, represented by Satan.  Satan’s role in the Old Testament had been a curious one, and at times, such as in the book of Job, it seemed that he was actually an agent of God.  But by the Middle Ages his role as an adversary and a near rival to the Creator had become clear, as had his appearance.  In the popular imagination he was now generally depicted as a large, ill-formed, hairy sprite, with horns, a long tail, cloven feet, and dragon's wings.  This was the usual costume of the devil in the early village stage plays put on by local monks that depicted the lives of the saints.

            According to popular belief, the devil and his legions generally preferred to appear to mankind on the evening between Friday and Saturday.  On special days, such as Walpurgis Nacht on April 30, and St. John’s Day, on June 23, he would hold a general meeting of witches and demons, called a Sabbath, just after midnight.  In France and England it was believed that witches traveled to the Sabbath on broomsticks; in Italy and Spain, that they were transported on the devil's back.  A typical account of one of these Sabbaths was like the following:  The devil would appear in the shape of a large he-goat.  He would select a master-of-ceremonies to conduct the affairs of the evening.  Participants were examined for the mark of the devil, after which wild and furious dancing ensued.  Witches also shared tales of the mischief that they had performed since their last meeting.  The formal ceremony would end with a dance of the toads, who then implored the witches to reward them with the flesh of unbaptized babies.  Next, a feast was shared, consisting of disgusting things for most participants, although particularly evil witches were treated with genuinely choice foods and wines.  After the meal, there was more dancing, followed by a mockery of the rite of baptism, and occasionally witches would strip and dance, each with a cat tied around her neck and a second dangling from her body in the form of a tail.  The Sabbath ended when the cock crowed.  Other accounts included tales of sexual orgies, ritual child sacrifice, and cannibalism.

Witches' Sabbath (Painting by Goya, 1798)

            Now stories like these about the gatherings of witches have some familiar undertones.  They resemble in some respects descriptions of the ancient pagan celebrations in honor of the god Dionysus.  And their more sinister aspects, involving tales of sexual debauchery and cannibalism, actually echo the stories told about the secret practices of Christians by conservative Roman folk in the first centuries of Christianity.  And just as the Romans moved swiftly and brutally to ferret out and destroy these wicked followers of a crucified Jewish rebel, so the Church used all of the techniques at its disposal to expose and destroy the followers of Satan.  The use of torture was a particularly effective method for extracting admissions of guilt from suspected witches.  Victims who confessed under duress and then recanted their confessions would be tortured again, until they repeated or expanded upon their self-incriminating testimony.  The methods used to extract these confessions were as gruesome as they were varied.  Three popular techniques included the strappado, in which a victim's hands were bound behind their back, a rope was tied to their wrists, and they were lifted off the ground (often with a weight attached to their bodies), the rack, and the thumbscrew.  But interrogators did not settle for these.  A contemporary critic who lived during the height of the witch craze, Johann Matthaus Meyfarth, summarized the variety of horrible techniques of interrogation that he had witnessed:

I have seen the limbs forced asunder, the eyes driven out of the head, the feet torn from the legs, the sinews twisted from the joints, the shoulder blades wrung from their place, the deep veins swollen, the superficial veins driven in, the victim hoisted aloft and now dropped, now revolved around, head undermost and feet uppermost.  I have seen the executioner flog with the scourge, and smite with rods, and crush with screws and load down with weights, and stick with needles, and bind around with cords, and burn with brimstone, and baste with oil and singe with torches.  In short, I can bear witness, I can describe, I can deplore how the human body is violated.

Suspected witches who cooperated during their interrogation would have some small consolation in the fact that they would be strangled before their bodies were burned at the stake.  "Unrepentant" witches, on the other hand, were usually burned alive.  But their families had to endure their own brand of suffering, over and above the grief of losing a loved one.  Relatives of a condemned witch were required to pay for the interrogation, the execution, and the banquet that the judges held after the burning.

            So how many people were victims to this cruel mania that swept across Europe during the Middle Ages?  Conservative estimates place the death toll at around 100,000 persons, but the total number could be as high as nine million.  It is safe to say that hundreds of thousands of people probably lost their lives because they were accused of being witches.  And who was the typical victim of this mania?  Most of the persons accused of witchcraft were women, generally older women, and usually of a lower economic class than those who charged them with the crime.  The accusers were just as likely to be women as men, and often they were related through marriage to the accused.  The expression, still common in modern times, that “my mother-in-law is a witch” could lead to fatal consequences hundreds of years ago.

            But did witches actually exist, and were there genuine nefarious activities that led to the wave of fanatical witch persecutions that engulfed much of Europe?  It is almost certain that many ancient traditions that were practiced in distant ages survived after the rise of Christianity.  Traditional Celtic beliefs, like those that made their way into the legend of King Arthur, for example, held certain days of the year, such as the summer solstice, in high regard, as well as certain places as sacred.  Celtic religious practices included the building of bonfires, and special ritualistic observances that honored the agricultural mysteries of death and regeneration.  Could these have been labeled as witchcraft?  Or was it simply mob psychology that accounted for this great tragedy – paranoid, overzealous persons, bitter at some misfortune that they had encountered, who vented their rage by singling out some eccentric old woman as the cause of their troubles?

            There is an even more cynical explanation for the witch craze.  During the centuries after the fall of Rome, when new nation states were coming into existence in Europe, a power struggle ensued between the kings of these new states, and the Pope.  And during this time, society itself was in a state of upheaval, as the general population contended with both natural catastrophes, such as the Black Plague, and man-made ones, such as war, exploitation, and corruption.  The general population was caught in the middle of these disasters, but had it risen up in unison against them, the results could have been catastrophic for the powers that be, both the kings and the Pope. 

          

Martin Luther

            There is no finer example of this than in the most successful and enduring revolt against the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation.  When the German theologian Martin Luther began his principled protest against what he identified as abuses of the Church in the sixteenth century, he successfully gained the support of the local German nobility.  Like St. Paul, Luther limited his radicalism to questions of theology, while continuing to respect local power structures.  By doing so, he ensured that he would be sponsored and protected by the local secular leaders, who were themselves locked in a power struggle with Church authorities.  But when one of Luther’s disciples, Thomas Muntzer, tried to use the Lutheran protest as a springboard to challenge all authority, by orchestrating a militant peasant revolt, Luther himself condemned the movement, labeling the peasants, “murdering, thieving hordes”.  And although Muntzer believed that God had guaranteed him victory in his struggle, in the end his movement would be violently crushed, and he himself beheaded, by a nobility that would not tolerate such flagrant and militant resistance to their authority.  But this same nobility defended Luther as he pressed his challenge against the authority of the Church, and in so doing created a new and independent branch of Christianity.

            Ironically, the witch craze would be just as widespread in Protestant nations as in Catholic ones.  Clearly, it was not a delusion peculiar to the Catholic Church that had caused this phenomenon.  And here is where the more cynical explanation for witch-hunting comes in.  In their methods of interrogation, local inquisitors always insisted that a suspected witch provide names of other witches.  The system guaranteed a steady supply of suspects.  And by exposing these growing lists of suspects and convicts to the general public, the local powers, whether secular or ecclesiastical, convinced the struggling masses that their problems and miseries were not caused by the state or by the church, but by a conspiracy of witches.  Witch executions were a form of popular entertainment, not unlike the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.  It is ironic that Christians, who had been responsible for bringing an end to these gladiatorial games and other brutal excesses of Roman society because of their violence, were now either actively or implicitly supporting a new public spectacle, just as bloody and gruesome, which turned the eyes of the people away from the real causes of their suffering. 

            As the witch mania began to subside, the people of Europe found renewed hope in the rise of modernity.  The magic of astrology and alchemy gave way to the sciences of astronomy and chemistry.  The religion of Christianity now offered real choices to its adherents.  A new world had also been discovered and laid bare, offering the promise of new hopes and new opportunities.  But the Europeans who visited and colonized the new world could not completely break free from old attitudes, perceptions, and prejudices, as evidenced by the Salem witch trials in the late seventeenth century.  And it was not just attitudes about witchcraft that made their way onto American soil.  Preconceptions about race would also infect the colonists from Europe, attitudes that would threaten to destroy and sabotage the great hopes and dreams that they brought with them across the Atlantic Ocean.

King Arthur

[The following is Episode 7 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

After the great city of Troy fell to Greek invaders, Aeneas, a Trojan prince, fled with his family to the distant land of Italy, and placed his hopes on a new destiny for his people, in a new country far from the smoldering ruins of his homeland.  Those of his descendants who remained in this new land would live to fulfill that destiny, in the founding of the city of Rome.  But not all would remain in Italy.   A child was born in the new royal household of the Trojans, his father a prince named Silvius, his mother a niece of Aeneas’s wife, Lavinia. Before his birth an oracle predicted that he would cause the death of his parents, and that after wandering in exile he would someday rise to greatness.  The oracle’s unsettling predictions would prove to be true all too soon: the child’s mother died in giving birth to him, and when he reached his teens, a tragic accident with a bow and arrow would leave his father dead, an unintended victim of his deadly aim.  Being cast out of Italy by his angry relatives, the young man traveled to Greece, the land of his ancestor’s enemies, and there found that many Trojans were living in bondage, suffering slavery as the final humiliating price of their defeat.  The young man rallied his kinsfolk to revolt, and although his band of ex-slaves was greatly outnumbered, in a final assault against the king’s armies that was as cunning as it was bold, the Trojans massacred the Greek forces, and took the king himself as hostage.  In return for his freedom, the king offered the young man his own daughter’s hand in marriage, and a fleet of ships with which the Trojans could find freedom in a new land, far away from the bitter and vengeful malice of the Greeks.  In a dream, the goddess Diana told the young Trojan to take his ships westward, beyond the setting sun, to an island in the sea that had once been occupied by giants.  She promised him that the new land would be a second Troy, that he would father a race of kings there, and that its kingdom would one day have dominion over peoples and countries spanning the entire world.  The man was named Brutus, and the island that he and his followers settled upon would bear the stamp of that name.  It was called Britain, in his honor, and true to Diana’s prediction, his descendants would reign as kings over a nation that would someday hold the entire world in its sway.  But long before Britain would make its mark in the world, the relatives of Brutus in Italy would create their own empire based in Rome.  And after centuries of rule, as the empire of Rome began to shake and totter in the face of German invaders at its outer reaches, a young king in Britain would make his own stand against these invaders, facing them in a series of desperate conflicts on the island itself.  While the Germans would eventually carry the day, the heroism of this British king and his fellow warriors in holding them back would become the stuff of legend - the legend, in fact, of King Arthur.

            Of all of the legendary heroes of history, Gilgamesh, Theseus, Achilles, and Moses, there is probably none who has been more romanticized, and whose story has been so often retold in so many different ways, than King Arthur.  This fabled ruler of Britain, who was supposed to have lived in the late fifth or early sixth century, still has throngs of devoted fans to this day.  And in many respects the legends about the manners and traditions of his court made him and his fellow knights, with their code of chivalry, “role models” for European courtly life centuries later.  But did King Arthur really exist, and if so, what part of the legend is based in fact, and what is just poetic fancy?

            To understand the role that a historic Arthur would have played in Britain, around 500 A.D., we have to return to Rome, and trace its fate after the rise of emperor Constantine and his establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the empire.  In fact, the reign of Constantine in the early fourth century marks in many ways the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire, a connection that would not be lost to many pagans who would later link the rise of Christianity with the fall of Rome.  Besides the establishment of a new official religion, Constantine also introduced another major change to the empire: he moved its capital from Rome to a new, more central location in Byzantium, in present-day Turkey.  By the end of the fourth century, the empire would be permanently divided, between an eastern one with its capital in Constantinople, the city founded by Constantine, and a western one with its capital still in Rome.  And in 410, Rome would be overrun and sacked by barbarian invaders led by Alaric, king of the Visigoths.  This disaster was the signal event that prompted many pagans to declare that the traditional gods were punishing the people for deserting them, and adopting the strange, new faith of Christianity.  The charge would inspire the famous Christian bishop and early Church father, St. Augustine, to write a book called The City of God, which was his defense of Christianity against the pagans.  The pagan gods, he contended, with their amoral and fickle ways, were never worthy of allegiance to begin with, as was the moral god of the Hebrews.  And in his book, Augustine actually refined the argument of St. Paul that a spiritual allegiance to God does not necessarily contradict an allegiance to an earthly state, and that Christians, with their otherworldly aspirations, were no threat to the safety of Rome.  But he went further, saying that the earthly city of man will pass away, but the city of God is eternal, and to find membership in it should be the most important hope and concern of any human being.  In fact, the city of Rome recovered from Alaric’s attack, but its salvation was only temporary.  In 476 it would see its last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, surrender the throne to a rebel German general, who in turn surrendered it to the Ostrogoths in 493.

The Sack of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths: 410 AD

            The empire had actually been under siege for centuries, contending with barbarian invaders attacking from many fronts.  Around 100 B.C., the Roman general Marius fought off an attempted invasion of Italy by the Cimbri and the Teutons, and in 50 B.C. Julius Caesar fought and subdued the Suevi in Gaul.  The Goths, who had originally come from Sweden, plagued Rome and its holdings as early as the third century A.D., when they plundered the city of Athens and then threatened Italy itself over the next one hundred years.  Around 370 A.D. the Goths split into two separate tribes, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and it was the Visigoths who would, after invading Greece, turn their wrath upon Rome in 410.  The Vandals were another persistent enemy of the empire; in 439 AD they took over Rome’s holdings in Africa, and looted and plundered ships sailing in the Mediterranean Sea, linking their name forever with random acts of violence and destruction.  And from the east, the empire faced the wrath of the Huns, an Asian horde, who under their famous leader Attila attacked Gaul and Italy, beginning in 451 AD.  In their expedition against Gaul, the Huns enlisted the aid of the Ostrogoths and Vandals, but were resisted by the combined forces of Rome’s legions and the Visigoths.  The battle that ensued was one of the bloodiest in ancient history, and although Attila and his forces lost, he returned a year later to threaten Rome itself.  It was only a personal appeal from Leo the Great - bishop of the city - that saved it from being sacked again.  A similar appeal from the bishop three years later would spare the lives of the Roman people from an attack by the Vandals, but he could not spare the city itself from being plundered by the barbarians.  And in 477 AD, the Vandals attacked the city again, which by then had already fallen under the control of barbarian rebels.  But it was the Ostrogoths, under the leadership of Theodoric, who would eventually bring Rome and the entire Italian peninsula under their rule in 493, the year that marks the end of the Roman Empire in the west, and the beginning of the Dark Ages for Europe. 

     
            Who were these Germans, that brought an entire empire to its knees?  To the Greeks and the Romans, they were uncivilized savages, and their strange customs were both fascinating and terrifying to the citizens of the empire.  While a good Roman wife, for example, might bear one or two children for her husband, it was observed that the German wife would have several, and it soon became apparent that while the Roman population was barely maintaining itself, the German population was exploding.  The German men were renowned for their savagery, but so were the women.  It was a popular belief that a German warrior, retreating from a battle, would have to face the vengeful and possibly deadly wrath of a wife who had been shamed by his cowardice.  For such a soldier, it required less bravery to stay on the battlefield than to leave it.  And while the Greeks and the Romans enjoyed wine as their drink of choice, the Germans preferred a bitter-tasting alcoholic beverage which they called “ol” (ale) made from fermented barley or wheat and other herbs.  It was reported that in nightly gatherings, when the men enjoyed drinking large quantities of this brew, what would begin as an orderly social event would descend into an out-and-out brawl.  This must have been shocking behavior to the wine-drinking Greeks and Romans, whose own drinking parties would produce only spirited, invigorating conversation, or in the most extreme cases, perhaps an orgy.  The growth of population, and the pressure of other migrating hordes from beyond the empire, continuously impelled the barbarians to search for new land to occupy, and when the Romans realized that they could no longer keep them out, they tried to find ways to use them, or at least to control them.  Barbarian tribesmen were inducted into the legions as auxiliaries, and veterans were rewarded with grants of land within the empire.  It was a practical, but ultimately shortsighted, solution to contain the German menace.  Ironically, after Rome fell to the barbarians, it was probably one very subtle but important thing that caused the Germans to ultimately become preservers rather than destroyers of much of Roman culture.  By the time they had overrun the empire, they had themselves been overrun by the message of St. Paul.  They had become Christians.

Gothic Warriors

            The island of Britain had been inhabited, in prehistoric times, by a people called the Picts, who in turn endured waves of invasions by another people known as the Celts.  It was Julius Caesar who first attempted to bring the island under Roman rule, in 54 B.C., but it was not until nine years later that it became an imperial province.  And resistance to Roman domination continued, prompting the Roman emperor Hadrian to construct a 70-mile wall across the island, to keep the most violent rebels, the Caledonians, north of the wall in Scotland.  For two hundred years, the Britons lived peacefully as subjects of the empire, benefiting from the technological advances and cultural influences bestowed upon them by the Romans.  But by 300 A.D., as the empire faced mounting threats in other regions, its legions began to pull out of Britain, and when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, its armies withdrew completely, leaving the islanders to fend for themselves.  Over the next two hundred years, the civilization established by the Romans in Britain disintegrated, while the islanders had to contend with their own hordes of Germanic invaders, the Angles and the Saxons.

            The earliest historical records of what actually happened in Britain during that time are very scarce.  We know that in 410 A.D. – the same year that Rome was attacked by the Visigoths – the Britons appealed to the empire for help in holding back an invasion of the Saxons.  Rome’s reply was that the Britons would have to defend themselves, and apparently they did.  The Saxons were repelled, but only for a time.  More appeals to Rome for help against the barbarians came during the years 430 to 454 A.D.  After that time, local princes on the island made the problem even worse when they hired Saxon mercenaries to protect their interests.  Flooding that occurred in the Saxons’ European homeland prompted them to seek a new place to settle in Britain, but they did not stay content in the plot of land given to them by their overlords.  In the violent conflict that ensued, the Britons would rally behind a local hero to save them from the invaders.  In the great battle of Mount Badon, which happened around the year 485, this hero rallied his people to a great victory over the Saxons, and as a result of this victory the German invasion was held off for another fifty years.

            But who was this hero?  The earliest surviving account of this conflict with the Saxons, written by a man named Gildas in 540 AD, says that the champion of the Britons was one Ambrosius Aurelianus.  Gildas never refers to this man as a king, but does say that he had Roman ancestors.  Two hundred years later, Saint Bede, a historian, also described the battle of Mount Badon and identified Ambrosius as its hero, now a king.  Arthur’s name, and his link with the battle, first appears around the year 800, in a history called The Annals of Wales, and some years later in an account by Nennius called the History of the Britons, in which twelve battles against the Saxons are described, under the leadership of Arthur in alliance with the kings of Britain, the final battle being the one at Mount Badon.  In the Cambrian Annals, written by an anonymous Welsh writer around 950, Arthur is again mentioned as the victor at the battle of Mount Badon.  This account goes on to describe the death of Arthur and one Medraut at the Battle of Camlann in 537.  And finally, in William of Malmesbury’s Exploits of the English Kings, written in the early twelfth century, the names of Ambrosius and Arthur appear together.  Arthur is credited with assisting Ambrosius in his victory over the barbarian invaders, and is also honored for his victory at the battle of Mount Badon.

Arthur at the Battle of Mount Badon

            But while Arthur’s name shows up relatively late in the historical accounts of Britain, he had apparently become a folk hero among the Welsh and other Celtic peoples of Britain very early on, appearing in poems, ballads, and tales that were recited by the natives and passed on from generation to generation.  Already in these accounts, Arthur has a supernatural aura, and the tales of his exploits are tinged with magic.

            In 1139 A.D. the Arthur of history and the Arthur of legend were thrown together for the very first time in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Histories of the Kings of Britain.  Geoffrey claimed that his history was a translation of an earlier work written in the Welsh tongue, but evidence of that earlier work has never been found.  And like Plato’s story of the lost land of Atlantis, Geoffrey’s history was regarded by many as a tall tale, even in his time.  Nevertheless, it enjoyed wide popularity after its publication.  Geoffrey himself was of Celtic descent, and in an age in which Celtic pride was reasserting itself, the story of Arthur’s valiant defense of Britain against the German invaders, whose descendents in Britain now treated the Celts with condescension, must have struck a sympathetic chord.  What’s more, the island had fallen to foreign invaders in recent times once again.  In 1066, less than one hundred years before the publication of Geoffrey’s history, Norman invaders from France, under William II, conquered the land and established William as its new king.  It’s probably no coincidence that Geoffrey traced the history of Britain’s early rulers back to the Trojans, since Norman royalty believed that their own ancestry also had ties to Troy.

            Geoffrey of Monmouth gives us the first full-blown account of the story of Arthur’s life, complete with Merlin, Guinevere, and Mordred, an enchanted sword, and many of the other features of the Arthurian legend that would survive in all later versions.  In his story, the direct line leading to Arthur begins with Constantine – not the Roman emperor, but a nobleman who was called upon to lead the Britons as their king and protect it from barbarian invaders after Rome abandoned the island.  Constantine rallied his people to victory against the barbarians, but was assassinated soon afterward by one of their spies.  After his death, the oldest of his three sons, Constans, was set up as a puppet ruler by the evil Vortigern, who pretended to be a trusted counselor to the young king, but secretly wanted the crown for himself.  Vortigern had Constans assassinated, and rose to the throne, but then he made a fatal mistake.  In an effort to secure his tenuous hold over the island, Vortigern enlisted the aid of the Saxons, and invited them to send soldiers to his kingdom and even to settle there.  Vortigern would come to realize that the Saxons were not his protectors, but his conquerors, and that he was in imminent danger of losing his own life at their hands.  In desperation, he consulted his magicians for advice on how to protect himself from the invaders, and they advised him to build a strong tower where he could flee and find refuge if all of his other fortresses fell.  But when his masons found that they could not establish a foundation for the tower at the site that he had chosen, because with each attempt it would sink into the earth, Vortigern consulted his magicians again.  This time they advised him to seek out a boy who had no father, and to make of him a human sacrifice whose blood, when sprinkled on the mortar and the stones, would make the foundation firm.  Messengers were dispatched throughout the kingdom to find such a boy, and after searching the island, they produced one, whose mother was the daughter of a king, but who apparently had no earthly father.  His name was Merlin.  But Merlin proved to be more than a match for the magicians who had called for his death.  After being presented to the king, Merlin so impressed him with his knowledge and his boldness that his life was spared, and he was retained as a court prophet, although his prophecies did not bode well for Vortigern.  Merlin predicted that Vortigern would soon face vengeance at the hands of Constans’ two younger brothers, Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon, and the very next day Aurelius arrived on the shores of Britain and rallied the people to his cause.  Vortigern fled to a tower, but died as the forces of Aurelius set it to the torch.

Stonehenge: A Gift from Merlin?

            After driving off a large remnant of the Saxons on the island, and subduing many others, Aurelius sought to erect a monument to commemorate the bravery of his soldiers.  He sent for Merlin, and the young wizard told of a ring of huge stones in Ireland, used for religious rites, which had magical properties.  The stones had been moved to Ireland from Africa by a race of giants many years earlier, Merlin explained, and now he proposed to bring them into Aurelius's realm.  Aurelius had laughed at Merlin as he began to recount this story, but he would later discover that this was no idle tale.  Merlin recovered the stones, astonishing the men who accompanied him to Ireland as he lifted them effortlessly with the aid of his magic, and later set them up at the site chosen by Aurelius in Britain, the site that is known as Stonehenge today.  Aurelius Ambrosius soon met his own end after falling ill, when a Saxon spy, disguised as a doctor who had come to treat the illness, poisoned him.  The crown of Britain now passed on to the youngest of Constantine’s sons, Uther Pendragon.

            Uther continued his brother’s rout of the Saxon enemies, winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Mount Damen.  But in a victory celebration in the town of London, Uther’s courage and heroism would give way to baser instincts.  One of his allies in the battle had been the Duke of Cornwall, and at the celebration, Uther became enthralled with the Duke’s wife, Ygerne, showering her with admiration and unseemly attention.  The Duke, annoyed at this spectacle and fearful that he would lose his wife to the covetous desires of the king, withdrew from the court in the company of his wife.  Enraged at this insult, Uther collected an army and pursued the Duke back to Cornwall.  The Duke, who was more concerned about his wife’s safety than his own, put her up in Tintagel castle, which seemed to be impregnable to outsiders.  And Uther, unable to restrain the passion that he had for Ygerne, appealed to Merlin to help him find a way to reach her.  Through Merlin’s magic, he assumed the appearance of the Duke, and gained access to Tintagel castle, and to Ygerne.  The real Duke met his death at the hands of Uther’s armies in another castle, while in Tintagel, Ygerne believed that she had been reunited with her husband.  It was during this time that Uther and Ygerne conceived a child, the future King Arthur.

            Uther Pendragon would meet his own end the same way that his brother Ambrosius had, through poisoning at the hands of Saxon spies.  At the news of his death, the Saxons who had remained in Britain urged their relatives from Germany to join them, since they believed that with the king gone there would no longer be a champion to rally the Britons in defense of the island.  In desperation, the bishops bestowed the crown upon the king’s son, Arthur, though he was only fifteen years old.  He proved to be a more than worthy successor to his father.  With his sword, Caliburn, forged in the Isle of Avalon, he led the fight against the Saxons, until they were again driven off the island.  But Arthur did not settle for defensive victories.  After marrying Guinevere, a noblewoman of Roman ancestry, he led his armies in wars of conquest against Ireland, Iceland, Gaul, and eventually in a war of revolt against Rome itself, after emissaries of the empire demanded that Britain resume paying a tribute to the empire that had been levied against it since the days when Julius Caesar ruled.  Although Arthur’s army would be victorious in this war against the empire, the victory would yield the seeds of his own doom.  For while he had been away on the continent, his traitorous nephew Mordred, in whom he had entrusted the care of Britain, had entered into an adulterous affair with Queen Guinevere, and had declared himself king.  Arthur returned with his army to face Mordred, who had enlisted the aid of the Saxons, Irish, Scots, and Picts in his cause, and the two opponents met at the River Camlann in 542 AD, where Mordred met his death, and Arthur was mortally wounded.  Arthur passed the crown on to his cousin Constantine, and was carried off to the isle of Avalon, to be treated for his wounds.

King Arthur, Mortally Wounded

            That’s it – the earliest written account that gives us a complete story of Arthur’s origins and accomplishments, by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1136 AD, nearly a thousand years ago.  Geoffrey’s version, in addition to giving us the first fully formed story of Arthur’s life, also introduces other features of what would become the Arthurian legend.  We are told that his knights were famed for their bravery, and descriptions of his court are livened by the simultaneous spectacle of pomp and ceremony, religious devotion, and military tournaments.  Courtly love finds its first expression in this tale, as the women of noble rank only show affection to knights who prove themselves in battle.  And many of the knights who would be immortalized in all of the later Arthurian stories appear here, such as Arthur’s nephew, Gawain, and Sir Kay.   But other features of the legend would only arise in later accounts, such as Merlin’s role as Arthur’s tutor, the sword in the stone, the round table, Arthur’s evil sister, Morgan le Fay (who in earlier versions was merely a healer and enchantress unrelated to Arthur), and many of his other principal knights, like Lancelot, Percival, and Galahad.  About half a century after Geoffrey’s history of Arthur appeared, the lyrical poems of French writer Chrestian De Troyes would add color and substance to the tale.  In these poems, we learn of the knights’ quest for the Holy Grail, the cup that Christ drank from during the Last Supper.  And in these poems we find the tragic love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Arthur’s trusted knight, Lancelot.  Two hundred years later, in 1485, the legend would find its fullest expression in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’ Arthur. 

Knights of the Round Table

            In many respects, the saga of King Arthur and his battles is not unlike the saga of the Trojan War, in which Greek forces fought valiantly against a foreign power that dared to offend their honor.  Both of these sagas seem to have a basis in fact, alluding to real conflicts that occurred in the distant past, that have been embellished and glossed over with mythic and supernatural imagery, exaggerated deeds of valor, and struggles of literally epic proportions.  But in the case of Troy, while we know that the tale survived in poems or songs that were recited over succeeding generations, it is only the final version of these retellings that has survived, as two epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, supposedly composed by a person who may be semi-mythical in his own right: the blind poet Homer.  So we can never tell exactly where history ends, and fantasy begins, except by looking at archaeological ruins to get a hint of what may have actually occurred.  In the case of Arthur, however, we can get at least a sense of what part of the legend is based on facts, and what part on myth.  The earliest historical accounts all seem to agree that a great battle, or series of battles, occurred between the native Britons and invading German tribes around the time that Arthur supposedly lived.  And while Arthur’s name does not appear in the earliest versions of these accounts, it does appear very early on in Welsh poems.  Geoffrey of Monmouth almost certainly relied on the earlier histories for his own version, and it is very likely that he drew from these Welsh poems, as well as other native legends or tall tales, for the more fanciful part of his story.  The other heroes and events of Arthur’s tale probably came from a variety of sources.  Both Mordred and Merlin appear in histories older than Geoffrey’s; and in an account written by Nennius around 800 A.D., while Merlin’s mother claims that her child has no mortal father, Merlin himself says that his father was in fact a Roman consul.  Many of the knights who appear in the court of Camelot were probably introduced from other folk religions or legends: Gawain, for example, a Celtic sun god, Lancelot, a Gaelic sun god, and Parsival, the Welsh hero Peredur; and Arthur’s evil sister, Morgan le Fay, could be an incarnation of the Celtic war goddess, Morrigan, or the Welsh mother goddess, Modron.

            What is it about Arthur’s legend that makes it so compelling, and so fascinating to readers and listeners, even now, some fifteen hundred years after this hero supposedly lived?  What is the source of its power, and what has been its relevance to the generations that continue to preserve it?  A key to this question’s answer is the reality of life, both in Arthur’s day, and in the days of those who chronicled his life.  We know that in the years preceding Arthur’s birth, the empire of Rome collapsed, succumbing to waves of Germanic invaders, just as the island of Britain itself was fending off incursions from the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, German tribes that were endeavoring to establish a new homeland there.  In the centuries that followed, the conquering Germans established kingdoms of their own on the ruins of the Roman Empire.  One of the most notable of these was Charlemagne, who was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by the pope in 800 A.D.  The fact that Charlemagne allied himself to the Pope is a testament to the fact that the one institution which survived, unscathed, after the fall of Rome, was the Christian Church.  Every other relic of the great Roman civilization crumbled, sending Europe into a time called the Dark Ages, or the Gothic Era, as it was contemptuously labeled by Italians centuries later during the Renaissance.  The Roman roads, which had criss-crossed the European continent, fell into disrepair, and the great cities went into decline.  Agricultural productivity also declined, as fields and estates fell into the hands of local kings, who bestowed them upon powerful nobles as rewards for faithful service.  These “nobles” were little more than well-armed thugs, who treated the serfs who worked their lands with contempt, and offered them only a share of the food that they cultivated for their overlords.  But by the time of Geoffrey’s age, in the twelfth century, towns and cities began to re-emerge as centers of commerce, farming techniques were improved, and roads were reconstructed.  Serfs were actually able to accumulate some wealth, and a rising commercial class came into existence.  Meanwhile, the nobility developed a new sense of social pride, based upon ancestral lines, and a code of conduct, called chivalry, that defined their relations with each other, with women, and with the other members of their society.  Chivalry literally means “horsemanship”, and the code had a particular bearing on the behavior of the warrior class, the knights, demanding that in addition to bravery they exhibited a gentle personality towards those with whom they came in contact.

The Gallantry of Medieval Knights

            By Geoffrey’s time, much of the land of the Britons had become the land of the Angles – “Angle-Land”, or England – and it had been ruled by Saxon kings for over two hundred years until a new wave of invaders, the Normans, conquered the island in 1066 AD.  And although Geoffrey and his fellow Celts might have taken some satisfaction in this, seeing in it a turning of the Wheel of Fortune as the old invaders were overrun in turn by new ones, for the Anglo-Saxons, the event must have been seen as catastrophic.  It is ironic, then, that they probably drew a different sort of inspiration in Arthur’s story.  Just as the ancient Sumerians, after seeing their land conquered by Sargon, took heart in the story of their ancient hero Gilgamesh, and the Hebrews, during their times of troubles, found comfort in the stories of Moses and King David, so the English could look back to the ancient hero Arthur, who so valiantly defended their land against an earlier wave of conquerors.  But the irony, of course, is that these enemies of Arthur were their own ancestors, the Germanic invaders now permanently established on the island.

            The story of Arthur and his court also has another parallel to a legend that we have looked at: the story of the ancient kingdom of Atlantis.  Here again we see the yearning to believe that there was a golden age, half-forgotten in the distant mists of the past, where a society reached the summit of power and glory before a tragic downfall.  And like Atlantis, Arthur’s kingdom was like a beacon, guiding those of later generations who revered it on a path of return to glory.  While chivalry and courtly life in Arthur’s era may have been a myth, it became a reality in Europe by the twelfth century, defining a code of conduct for the warrior class that was supported by the Church, the one institution that had survived the catastrophes which had befallen the old Roman Empire.  The religious mysticism that permeated so many of the Arthurian tales, in particular those involving the quest for the Holy Grail, inspired the Christian population, both rich and poor, to find meaning in their lives through devotion to a higher ideal, continuing a trend to greater piety that had already been underway in the centuries after Arthur’s death.  But as the growing power of the Church led to internal corruption, and conflicts with the secular power of the European kings, the religious zeal of the general population began to express itself in new and unconventional ways.  The Church itself tried to harness this religious devotion to attain very worldly ends, as a weapon against kings who dared to challenge its power, and against foreign enemies, through the launching of Crusades.  But there were other enemies that would soon occupy the energies of the Church – the pagan, the heretic, and the witch.

Caesar and Christ

[The following is Episode 6 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

            In the centuries between 1600 and 1200 B.C., two great conflicts occurred that would be forever remembered among civilizations and peoples up to modern times, their sagas being told and retold in dramas, plays, poems, and religious texts written in many languages, and recited in many lands.  The Hebrews, under their leader Moses, would defeat the powerful Egyptian empire in a bold slave revolt that gave them a new beginning, and a new destiny.  And the Greeks, led by Agamemnon, Menelaeus, Odysseus, and others, would bring down the kingdom of Troy, a rival sea power that dared to offend the honor of their people.  But each of these victories resulted in new challenges, new trials and tribulations that had to be faced in order to ensure a complete and lasting success.  Moses led his people through the desert for forty years before bringing them to their homeland, and almost none of those who had left Egypt with him would live to cross the River Jordan into that land.  Odysseus would lead his own men through strange and hostile waters for ten years before returning to his own homeland of Ithaca, and, like Moses, none of those who began the journey in his company would survive to join him there.  Moses was guided and protected by the desert God of the Hebrews; Odysseus relied upon the support of the Greek goddess, Athena.  And while two great nations would spring from the victors in these conflicts, Israel and Greece, the losers, too, would remain to make a mark upon history.  Egypt continued to be a great power for centuries after the Hebrew slave revolt.  But the survivors that fled from the ruins of fallen Troy would create a new kingdom in a distant land, a kingdom so powerful that it would rise to conquer the Greeks, the Israelites, and the Egyptians alike.  The name of this new empire, mightier than any that had risen before it, was Rome.

            According to Roman legend, it was Aeneas, a prince of Troy’s royal family, who founded its kingdom.  Aeneas, like the Greek hero Achilles, had a mortal father and a goddess for a mother.  His mother was none other than Aphrodite, one of the principal goddesses of the Greek and Trojan pantheon.  Aeneas had fought bravely in the Trojan War, but after the fall of Troy, as the invading Greek armies ransacked the city, he fled with his son and aged father.  Like Odysseus, and Moses, Aeneas and his comrades endured much wandering before arriving at what would become their home, on the shores of Italy, and like these other two heroes, he faced conflict with hostile adversaries even after he arrived.  After defeating his principal enemy, a native king, Aeneas married the daughter of another king, of Latium, and through her fathered the Roman race.  Rome itself was believed to have been founded centuries later, in 753 B.C., by Romulus and Remus, twin sons of the virgin princess Rhea Silvia, a descendent of Aeneas.  Her father had been a king, who had been deposed by his evil younger brother Amulius.  Amulius had tried to eliminate any future rivals by forcing Rhea, the king’s only daughter, to become a priestess, but when she fathered twin sons with the god Mars, Amulius was forced to resort to more desperate measures.  He tried to have his infant nephews murdered by having them thrown in a basket into the Tiber River.  The boys were saved, nursed, and protected by a she-wolf, until they were discovered by a shepherd and brought up by his wife.  When they reached manhood, they confronted and overpowered their evil uncle, and restored the throne to their grandfather.  The brothers then left to found a new city of their own, Rome, and after the death of Remus, Romulus became its sole ruler.  And according to legend, Romulus was eventually carried up to heaven by his father, the god Mars, and was himself worshiped as a god by later generations.

Romulus and Remus Reared by a She-Wolf

            Seven kings ruled Rome over a period of about two and half centuries, beginning with the legendary Romulus and ending with Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, a tyrant who was overthrown in 510 B.C.  After this revolution, the Romans began a social experiment that would result in one of the most memorable and glorious ages in history, the rise of the republic.  In a previous episode, we encountered similar experiments that had been undertaken by the Greeks, in Athens, Sparta, and other city-states.  Solon and other reformers had established democracy, or rule by the people, as the form of government for Athens.  Now one very interesting question – but one that is very rarely asked, even today . . . especially today – is what the difference is between a democracy and a republic.  We Americans have a Democrat Party and a Republican Party, and may believe that they are fundamentally – or at least superficially – different in their philosophies and platforms, but most of us don’t see a particular link between the name “Democrat” or “Republican” and what makes each party stand for what it does.  Are these merely different names for the same thing?  “Democracy” means, in its literal translation from the Greek, “rule by the people”, while “republic”, on the other hand, literally translated from its Latin roots means, “the public thing”.  The Greek philosopher Plato wrote a classic book on politics, the title of which is generally translated into English as “The Republic.”  Ironically, in this book, Plato suggests that the most perfect form of government would not be one ruled by the people, or a democracy as his fellow Athenians knew it, but rather one ruled by those most capable of leading – a kind of dominant caste made up of “philosopher-kings”.

The Roman Senate

            Whether the Romans had something like Plato’s ideal in mind when they created their “republic” is not clear – probably the most important thing on their minds at the time was to prevent the rise of future tyrants like the one they just deposed.  We’ll see in a moment that if this was their goal it was eventually doomed to fail, but not before the republic produced centuries of greatness for Rome.  In place of a king, the new republic was headed by two chief executives - or consuls, as they were eventually called - that were chosen annually by their peers.  The two leaders were advised by a council of elders, known as the senate, an institution that had survived from the earlier age of kings.  While the formal power of the senate was limited, its members held office for life, and their advice was highly respected.  But while this new form of government was more democratic than the one that had been overthrown, in its earliest years its effectiveness was marred by a deep social division that had existed among the Romans for centuries.  There were two classes of free citizens in Rome: patricians and plebeians.  The patricians, aristocratic land-holders, enjoyed both wealth and privilege, while the plebeians rarely had wealth, and were completely excluded from participating in political affairs.  This eventually led to violent dissension between the two classes, until the plebeians successfully gained rights and privileges comparable to the patricians.  In part because of this struggle, new offices were created that exercised special powers in the government, including two quaestors to help the consuls manage financial affairs, two censors responsible for overseeing moral issues, and a number of tribunes whose function was to protect and represent the rights and interests of the plebeians.  In 445 B.C., intermarriage between patricians and plebeians was recognized by law, and in 367 B.C., Rome’s highest office, the consulship, was opened to the plebeian class.  Within the next one hundred years, the political distinctions between the two classes had all but disappeared, and the republic became truly democratic.  And yet, while these formal class distinctions disappeared, there continued to be a conspicuous rift between rich aristocrats, who could now be found among both patricians and plebeians, and the poorer general population, who came to be known as the populares.  This growing gap between rich and poor would contribute to the eventual downfall of the Roman republic.

            But while the republic was evolving, Rome itself was growing, mainly through a series of wars with neighboring Italian peoples.  Rome’s strategy for growth was as cunning as it was effective, relying upon coalitions and alliances among friendly neighbors, which were directed against those who were less friendly or openly hostile.  Those who cooperated with Rome were granted full or partial citizenship, while those who resisted faced conquest.  By 264 B.C., the entire Italian peninsula was under Roman control.  With Italy in check, the growing Republic turned its attentions outward, entering into a struggle with Carthage, a great seafaring nation on the coast of Africa that had control of the Mediterranean.  The war would last for more than sixty years, and would nearly lead to disaster for Rome as the brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal led an invading land army – with 26,000 troops and 60 elephants - across the Alps from the north.  But the tide of battle turned when the Roman general Scipio Africanus invaded Carthage with an army of his own, forcing Hannibal to return to face him.  Hannibal was defeated, and Carthage surrendered.  Sixty years later, the Romans destroyed the city of Carthage itself, burning it down and salting the earth so that nothing could grow in its soil, because they could no longer even tolerate the existence of this former powerful enemy and continuing potential rival.  Meanwhile, other great powers fell under the outward-directed onslaught of the Roman legions.  The Macedonians, under King Philip V and later his son Perseus, heirs to Alexander the Great, fought and were defeated by Rome’s forces, and in their wake much of Greece also succumbed to Roman domination.  The province of Spain became an occupied territory, and much of what had been the empire of King Antiochus III of Syria was surrendered to Rome after his defeat at the hands of its armies.

Hannibal's Army

            But Rome’s growth as a world power actually had a pernicious effect on its own people.  With victory and conquest came the influx of wealth, and slaves.  The upper class became richer, and their new opulent lifestyles led to arrogance, greed, and a decline of the simple Roman virtues that had once been the core and foundation of this society.  And there was no “trickle down” effect from the affluent down to the common laborers.  In fact, with slave labor now abundant, the peasant farmers found that they could not compete with the large, sprawling agricultural estates owned by the aristocrats and manned by free labor.  As smaller farms disappeared, the working class dwindled, and in its wake was a mob of poor, unemployed, angry and disillusioned citizens.  It was inevitable that despair would give way to violence, and the threat of outright civil war between rich and poor.  Attempts to resolve the problem through political and social reform failed.  Two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, both met their deaths when, as tribunes, they attempted to alleviate the condition of the poor by passing laws that would help restore small farms and create jobs for the masses.  As the specter of a complete social breakdown grew more ominous, and as it became clear that the problem could not be solved through the mechanism of government, another faction entered the fray, the military.

Marius and his Republican Legion

            As a result of Rome’s continuing wars of expansion, a new, professional class of soldiers came into being, led by powerful generals who enjoyed the complete loyalty of their troops.  The generals offered Rome’s citizens security from foreign invasion, the maintenance of internal order, and the promise of the wealth of spoils gained in war, or lifetime employment, or both, to those who had the privilege of serving in their armies.  It was natural that Rome should turn to these men in times of distress, even when the cause of this distress was not from a foreign enemy.  And in this deeply divided society, with a wealthy but increasingly nervous class on the one hand, and a desperate and impoverished one on the other, each viewing the other with hatred, fear, and suspicion, it was also natural that each class would seek to find its own champion in one of the generals.  The first champion of the popular class was Marius, the first champion of the aristocrats, Sulla, and these two generals would divide their time between fighting external enemies and competing with each other for control of Rome.  For a time, Marius and his army held sway, and, along with a political ally, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, would rule Rome with a reign of terror, massacring senators and members of the wealthy class who had opposed them.  But after Marius’s death, Sulla returned with his troops, taking control of the city, declaring himself dictator, and publishing his own list of enemies and outlaws.  Sulla’s tactics, while less violent than those of Marius, were just as pernicious: one of his methods of vengeance was the confiscation of an enemy’s lands, which would then be made a reward for faithful service to his soldiers – who generally made very poor farmers – or abandoned outright.  As a consequence, Rome, which had once had a thriving agricultural economy, became dependent on grain imports from foreign countries to survive.

            By the time of Sulla’s death, the Roman republic had become a sham, and the government was under the control of the powerful, whether this power came from military might, wealth, or the ability to sway the masses.  In 59 B.C., might, wealth, and ingenuity were each personified in three men who together would rule Rome as a triumvirate: Pompey the Great, renowned for clearing the Mediterranean Sea of pirates and for his conquests of lands in the east, including Syria and Judea, Crassus, an immensely wealthy man who gained his fame in putting down a slave rebellion led by the gladiator Spartacus, and a young, ambitious, clever, and immensely popular politician named Julius Caesar.  These three continued to pretend that they were lawfully holding political office, first with Caesar serving as consul, and later Pompey and Crassus, and each, when not in Rome, having military commands over foreign provinces, at the head of large armies.  Caesar used his army with great success, conquering the land of the Gauls, in Western Europe, but Crassus proved to be less skillful in managing an army than he was in managing his wealth.  In a military campaign against the Parthians, in the east, his army was badly defeated, and Crassus was killed.  The alliance between Caesar and Pompey, which had always been an uneasy one, now broke down.  When the Roman senate, under Pompey’s leadership as sole consul, ordered Caesar to either disband his armies or be declared a public enemy, Caesar turned his armies toward Rome, crossing a small stream called the Rubicon that had been the lawful boundary of his province, while uttering that immortal line, “The die is cast”.  In addition to the great military skill that he had acquired during his wars in Gaul, Caesar still had the wiles of a clever politician, and as his armies advanced through Italy, the moderation that he showed to all who fell under their sway won him new allies.  Entire legions of soldiers joined his cause, and many cities willingly opened their gates upon his approach.  When the two opposing armies joined in battle on the plains of Pharsalus, in eastern Greece, Pompey’s armies were crushed, and Pompey himself fled to Egypt, with Caesar in pursuit.  Pompey died in Egypt, but at the hands of an assassin, not Caesar’s, leaving Caesar as the uncrowned king of the Roman world.

Julius Caesar

            The rest of Caesar’s story, of his romance with Cleopatra, his death at the hands of Brutus, Cassius, and other senators, and the avenging of his murder by Marc Antony, his friend, Marcus Lepidus, a former lieutenant, and Gaius Octavius, his grand-nephew, is well chronicled in the histories and dramas of later centuries.  During the short time that he had ruled, he had been a benevolent dictator, perhaps even an enlightened one, but his rule did seal the doom of the Roman Republic.  The new governing triumvirate of Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius would also break down, and in its wake only one man would remain to hold the reins of power.  This was Caesar’s nephew Octavius, later given the honorary title of Augustus by a senate that still pretended to hold the reigns of power over an imaginary republic.  Augustus Caesar also maintained this fiction, allowing all of the old republican offices to remain, but tacitly keeping all of the most important powers to himself.  He called himself “Imperator” – or “emperor” in our language - but in his time the word was much less ostentatious – or odious  - meaning only that he was commander-in-chief of all of Rome’s legions.  Nevertheless, it was indeed an empire that Augustus and his successors controlled – a world empire that included Greece, Egypt, Europe, and a tiny province named Judea.  And it was during Augustus’s reign that a child would be born in Judea who would be destined to create a world empire of his own.

            After its conquest by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., the land of Palestine continued to be controlled by foreign powers, beginning with Alexander’s Macedonians, followed by the Egyptians, and then the Syrians.  When the Syrian king, Antiochus IV, attempted to destroy the Jewish religion in 168 B.C., the people revolted and regained their independence under the leadership of the Maccabees.  But the successors of this priestly family proved to be almost as despotic as the former foreign overlords, causing a break-up of the nation into rival factions.  The Romans, under Pompey, gained control of Palestine in 63 B.C. when one of these factions appealed to him for assistance.  Palestine was made part of the Roman province of Syria, and the province was divided into separate districts for administrative purposes, including Judea, Samaria, and Galilee – three names that would be forever remembered among practitioners of the new religion that would spring up there under Roman rule.  The first governor of Judea was Herod the Great, whose father, a descendant of the Maccabees, had been a collaborator of Pompey during the Roman general’s invasion of Palestine. 

            At first, life under Roman rule was peaceful and not oppressive.  Even as it moved into its imperial phase of government, the Roman attitude towards religion continued to be one of qualified toleration.  Its subjects could freely worship any god of their choice and practice any form of religious worship, whether the religion was one that had been established in their native land, or one that was encountered either in or beyond the empire’s borders after joining the Roman family of nations.  In fact, in the Roman Empire there was a proliferation of gods, goddesses, cults, and religious practices that came from many different nations, and spread throughout the land with the movements of the peoples that practiced them.  Even the Romans themselves fell under the sway of a foreign religion – that of the Greeks – and came to identify their traditional gods with deities in the Greek pantheon.  The Roman goddess Juno was identified with Hera, Rome’s Jupiter with Zeus, Mars with Ares, and so on.  Mystery cults, originating from Greece, Persia, and other lands, also flourished.  The empire was literally a marketplace of religious ideas.  Rome’s attitude of toleration was only abandoned if it was perceived that the practitioners of a religion posed a threat to the established order.  And it was here that the Judeans eventually ran into trouble with its conquerors.

            According to the Jewish historian Josephus, who lived during the first century of the Roman empire, among the various sects that existed in Judea, three of the most significant ones were the Sadducees and Pharisees, immortalized in the New Testament, and a more mysterious and otherworldly sect known as the Essenes.  The Sadducees, while tending to adopt a more cooperative attitude to the foreign powers that ruled over Judea, were more orthodox and traditionalist in their religious attitudes.  Many of their members claimed direct descent from Zadok, King Solomon’s high priest.  They did not believe in the immortality of the soul and resurrection after death.  But it was the Sadducees who acted as temple priests, officiating over traditional religious ceremonies.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, were of a more nationalist and independent spirit, and some may have had strong sympathies with resistance movements against the foreign powers that controlled their land and its people.  However, unlike the Sadducees, they had adopted some rather untraditional beliefs, such as the resurrection of the body after death, a future day of judgment, and eternal punishment for evildoers.  The Sadducees seemed to have lived up to the bad reputation that they have been saddled with in the New Testament, with their self-righteous behavior, obstinate dogmatism, and frequent displays of contempt for others outside their circles.  But the Pharisees as a class were unfairly portrayed.  As the spiritual forefathers of the Jewish rabbi, or teacher, they were friends of open, reasoned discourse, careful study, and the search for truth.  In the days of the Maccabees, the Sadducees and Pharisees had often been in open conflict with each other, but by the time of the Roman Empire, they had settled into an uneasy coexistence.  The Essenes were a much more militant and puritanical sect, who believed in the imminent approach of the Messiah, who would usher in a final conflict between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness”.  They practiced an austere, monastic existence, living in remote, closed communities away from the cities, in the desert and on the shores of the Dead Sea.

Crassus Plundering the Temple

            The renewed strivings of the Jewish citizens of Palestine for independence had been provoked by the greed and brutality of Roman generals, governors, and soldiers who occupied the land.  Crassus, the Roman general who had been part of the first triumvirate with Caesar and Pompeii, may have gained much of his wealth by looting Jerusalem’s temple treasures.  And thousands of Jewish farmers were driven into ruin because of the empire’s heavy taxes.  Those who could not pay were often compelled to sell members of their own family into slavery.  And those who dared to resist faced that most odious Roman punishment, crucifixion.  It was from the ranks of the dispossessed farmers that a new breed of Jewish revolutionary was born, the Zealot, or Sicarii.  Their numbers grew to the thousands, forming a permanent guerilla band that harassed the Roman armies and kept the land in a permanent state of turmoil.  Most of the Judeans, of course, did not choose the path of violent resistance, but in the face of a growing struggle with what was perceived to be an evil empire, the messianic spirit grew among the masses, and with it, that belief – already held by the Essenes – that a new age was about to come into being, in the wake of one final, apocalyptic war.  And with this belief, there was the hope, and often the expectation, that a deliverer would appear to lead the ranks of the just in this final conflict.

            And it was in the midst of these troubled times that Jesus of Nazareth was born, that central figure of the Christian faith, who would spend his short life preaching, healing the sick, and gathering a band of devoted followers who would carry on his inspiring message of hope, redemption, and universal love long after he had departed.  We are of course back once again in uncomfortable territory as we attempt to look at the origins and influence of Christianity with the eye of an impartial and detached observer, because Christianity continues to be a dominant force in our culture and civilization, and has been for nearly two thousand years.  But just as we did with the Jewish Tanakh (Christian Old Testament), we have to say from the start that the Christian New Testament, in the version that survives today, is not without its contradictions and inconsistencies.  We are provided, for example, with two genealogies of Jesus, one from the gospel of Matthew, the other from the gospel of Luke, which are supposed to demonstrate that he is a direct descendant of King David, in accordance with earlier biblical prophecies about the Messiah.  And while the thoroughness of these genealogies is not unimpressive – the one in Luke traces Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Adam – they are inconsistent with each other.  Even worse, they trace the link to King David through Joseph, but as the gospels tell us, Joseph was not even Jesus' actual father.  The accounts of his birth in Matthew and Luke also differ in the details.  In Matthew’s version, Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt, after Joseph is warned in a vision that Herod intends to kill the child, but according to Luke, the couple returned directly to Nazareth, where the child was brought up.  But when it is remembered that the earliest gospel was probably written forty years after Jesus’ crucifixion, we can perhaps forgive some discrepancies in the tales of his life.

Jesus Giving the Sermon on the Mount

            And what was the message and mission of Jesus during his lifetime?  He railed against religious hypocrisy, pride, and an excessive adherence to the letter of the law, if it is being violated in spirit.  He said that the two greatest commandments were to love God with all one’s heart, and to love one’s neighbor – even if that neighbor is a stranger or enemy.  He cautioned against the snares of wealth, and pride, and getting caught up in the mundane cares of this life.  In his parables, he compared the blessed to a crop yielding a good harvest, or servants enriching their master through the skillful management of his investments, while the wicked were plants that had failed to sprout, or servants who had failed to increase the wealth that had been left in their care by the master.  His teachings and his parables portray a loving God, capable of forgiveness, but also committed to justice.  Each human being has an opportunity to serve God, and provide an abundant return to the Creator by following Christ and obeying his teachings, but for those who reject this offer, God in turn will reject them in the final day of reckoning.

            But to understand how the legacy of Jesus and his teachings led to modern Christianity, we must understand the persons who tried to shape that legacy, and principal among these were two who, while both claiming to have seen a personal vision of Christ, had never been his followers during his lifetime.  One of these was James, who is identified as the brother of Jesus in the New Testament.  Now this in itself became something of a problem for latter-day Christians, after Mary’s role as the virgin mother of God grew in importance.  To many Christians, it is unacceptable to believe that Mary ever had conjugal relations with her husband – that her virginity was permanent – and that Jesus could never have had natural siblings.  James is explained away as a cousin, a half-brother, or perhaps just a very close friend.  And it is probably for this reason that James has become something of a shadowy figure in modern Christianity, although in the book of Acts and in the epistles it is clear that his role as a leader of the new movement was initially a pivotal one.  James was a member of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, and in his eyes the followers of Jesus were still Jews.  Some have suggested that the Jerusalem Christians may have even been part of the resistance movement against Rome, and point out that a name like Simon Zelotes, one of the original apostles, hints at a revolutionary undertone.  But while James and his supporters may well have been sympathetic to the enemies of Rome, it is doubtful that they were ever anything but pacifists.  Their hope was in the kingdom of God to come, when the wrongs of this world would be righted, and evil conquered for all time.  James’s authority over the followers of Jesus was unquestioned in Jerusalem, but ultimately his vision would yield to that of a very powerful rival, the apostle Paul. 

                                                          Missionary Journeys of St. Paul

            Paul had been born outside of Judea, in the city of Tarsus, in the southwestern coast of what is today the country of Turkey.  It is not unlikely that during his time there he had been exposed to many of the other religions that flourished in the Roman Empire – the mystery cults, like that of Dionysus, which celebrated the death and rebirth of a god - and the Persian belief in a divine struggle between the powers of good and evil, truth and falsehood.  Paul was a Roman citizen, but by his own account a faithful Jew, trained as a Pharisee.  Like James, Paul believed in the resurrection of Jesus, in his imminent return, and in the Holy Spirit, that divine comforter bequeathed by Jesus to his followers, which empowered them to heal the sick, cast out demons, prophesize, and speak in tongues.  But in just about all other matters of faith they were diametrically opposed.    His vision of the new Christian movement was one that would include gentiles as well as Jews, even if this meant discarding many of the traditions and requirements that defined what it meant to be a Jew.  For Paul, Rome was not the enemy, and to be a faithful citizen was not a contradiction to being a good Christian.  The political struggle in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea was not his struggle.  In fact, given Rome’s policy of tolerance toward religious sects that did not embrace political opposition to the empire, it is very likely that Paul’s followers went to great lengths to set the Christian movement apart from other Jewish sects by emphasizing the Christian’s unquestioning allegiance to Rome, “giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”.  Was Paul then an agent of Rome, a collaborator with Roman authorities or perhaps their puppets among the Sadducees and other ruling families in Judea, sent to subvert this new movement, as some of his fiercest critics suggest?  Anyone who reads Paul’s writings with an unbiased eye must come away convinced that he was sincere in his religious convictions.  He may have been an opportunist, in many ways, but his ultimate end was the successful establishment of the new faith.  One senses from reading the story of his adventures, and his own epistles, that he was not always the easiest person to get along with, and that it might have been easier to love him at a distance than to like him up close.  He himself admitted that he could make a poor impression in person, and to convey his message he relied heavily on his writing, and on emissaries like Timothy and Titus to speak on his behalf to the new congregations that were forming throughout the empire.  Did Paul attempt to create a new religion out of an artificial synthesis between the Judaism of his heritage and the religions prevalent among the Greek-speaking peoples of the Roman Empire – twisting the sayings of a Galilean prophet to suit his ends?  Many of his critics would have us believe this, but Paul’s own actions and writings suggest otherwise.  He was opposed to what he perceived to be an excessive ritualism and adherence to the law in Judaism, but he just as strenuously opposed the Greek idea of initiation, passing through a series of stages or degrees to develop a better understanding of and closer connection to the divine.  For Paul, conversion was a simple, single act, that required no further stages or revelation of deeper mysteries – it was faith, not knowledge or endurance or ritual, which led to salvation.  Paul may have been pragmatic, and political, but he was also a radical.  The passion of his convictions, the power of his thought, and his eloquent defense of the simple virtues of faith, hope and charity survive in the thirteen short letters of his that are now part of the New Testament.  And his legacy is nothing short of remarkable, when one realizes that on any Sunday morning, in just about every city in the civilized world, there are at least a dozen churches or meeting places where passages from the writings of this irascible Jewish tentmaker are read out loud, expounded upon, and tapped as a source of ongoing inspiration.  That is a fame and posterity that would be beyond the wildest dreams of any writer, philosopher, poet, or prophet - of any age.

St. Paul Preaching at Athens

            But if it had been a conscious decision of Paul’s followers to try to secure the existence of the new movement by distancing themselves from the Jews, the result was less than successful, and would lead to terrible consequences.  In the eyes of the Romans, the early Christians were just another Jewish sect, and their leader, Jesus, a claimant to a crown that could only be perceived as subversive to the empire.  Only Caesar was the supreme ruler, and there could be no king of Judea who was not Caesar’s vassal.  The fact that Jesus’ brother, James, became his successor in the new movement must have made it seem even more obvious to the Romans that this was an attempt to create a new dynasty, a line of kings linked by a common family.  According to early church history, after James’s death the Romans systematically hunted down and killed every known relative of Jesus.  Clearly, this was no idle threat to them.  Meanwhile, Jerusalem fell to Roman armies, and its temple was destroyed.  While members of the new Christian faith were persecuted and martyred throughout the empire, within Palestine, the Judeans would once again see a foreign power attempt to destroy their national identity, as Roman legions decimated the land, and crushed the last remnants of revolt.  Both Jews and Christians would survive, and their respective faiths would evolve and develop in the crucible of persecution and social ostracism.  But for the Christians, the struggle would end in 313 AD, when a Roman emperor, Constantine would choose the Christian cross as his standard of battle, and accept the Christian faith as his religion.  Within a few generations, Christianity would become permanently established as the official religion of Rome.  And Rome’s emperors would be just as thorough and unforgiving in rooting out the perceived enemies or rivals of Christianity, as it had been centuries earlier in trying to root out the Christians themselves.  The Christian religion now had a church hierarchy, and an official canon of books to make up its own bible.  And by this time, any negative reference in these books to the Romans, or Roman leadership, or the abuses of the empire, had been removed.  In its place, a new villain, a new enemy had been inserted, the Jewish scribes, Pharisees and high priests, and, by implication, the Jews themselves.  Moses had created a new religion by leading a revolt against the Egyptian Empire; Christianity had secured a permanent existence not by revolting against, but by enduring the Roman Empire, and through its endurance, conquering it.  Yet for the Christians, this new Promised Land would be a blessing and a curse.  For the many that followed the simple teachings of Jesus, and the inspired verses of Paul, faith, hope, charity and a vision of a universal brotherhood realized itself in the families, farms and simple villages that abounded with the faithful.  On the other hand, the new power of the church gave free reign to the ambitious, the prejudiced, the hateful, and the ignorant, allowing them to persecute with an unbridled violence those who they branded as enemies of the elect: the pagan practitioners of the old Greek and Roman faiths, the Christian heretics, and the Jews.  But while Rome’s power was great, it was not unlimited.  At the reaches of its territory, a new power was growing in strength, threatening to bring down the empire itself.  These were the Germans: the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Saxons.  And in a remote island at the fringes of the empire, a Celtic chieftain, loyal to Rome, would find fame and immortality in taking a last stand against the German onslaught.  His name was Arthur.