Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia
Bedford/St. Martin's, Oct 3, 2002 - 609 pages
Religious Reform: From Persecution to Conversion
Traditional belief required religious explanations for disasters. Accordingly, Diocletian concluded that the gods' anger had caused the third-century crisis. To restore divine goodwill, he instructed citizens to follow the traditional gods who had guided Rome to power and virtue: “Through the providence of the immortal gods, eminent, wise, and upright men have in their wisdom established good and true principles. It is wrong to oppose these principles or to abandon the ancient religion for some new one. Christianity was the new faith he meant.
Blaming Christians' hostility to traditional religion for the empire's troubles, Diocletian in 303 launched a massive attack remembered as the Great Persecution. He expelled Christians from his administration, seized their property, tore down churches, and executed them for refusing to participate in official religious rituals. As often, policy was applied differently in different regions. In the western empire, the violence stopped after about a year; in the east, it continued for a decade. So gruesome were the public executions of martyrs that they aroused the sympathy of some polytheists.
Constantine changed the empire's religious history forever by converting to the new faith. He chose Christianity for the same reason that Diocletian had persecuted it: in the belief that he was securing divine protection for himself and the empire. During the civil war that he fought to succeed Diocletian, Constantine experienced a dream-vision promising him the support of the Christian God. His biographer, Eusebius (c. 260-340), later reported that Constantine had also seen a vision of Jesus' cross in the sky surrounded by the words “In this sign you shall be victor.” When Constantine triumphed over his rival Maxentius by winning the ballte of the Milvian Bridge in Rome in 312, he proclaimed that God's miraculous power and goodwill needed no further demonstration and declared himself a Christian emperor.
After his conversion, Constantine did not outlaw polytheism or make Christianity the official religion. Instead, he decreed religious toleration. The best statement of this new policy survives in the Edict of Milan of 313. It proclaimed free choice of religion for everyone and referred to the empire's protection by “the highest divinity”--an imprecise term meant to satisfy both polytheists and Christians.
Constantine wanted to avoid angering polytheists because they still greatly outnumbered Christians, but he nevertheless did all he could to promote his newly chosen religion. These goals called for a careful balancing act. For example, he returned all property seized during the Great Persecution to its Christian owners, but he had the treasury compensate those who had bought the confiscated property at auction. When in 321 he made Lord's Day a holy occasion each week on which no official business or manufacturing work could be performed, he called it “Sunday” to blend Christian and traditional notions in honoring two divinities, God and the sun. To adorn his new capital, Constantinople, he respected tradition by holding the office of pontifex maximus (“chief priest”), which emperors had filled ever since Augustus.
Christianizing the Empire
Constantine's brilliantly crafted religious policy of toleration and compromise set the empire on the path to Christianization. The process proved to be slow and sometimes violent. Not until the end of the fourth century was Christianity proclaimed the official religion, and even thereafter many people long kept worshiping the traditional gods in private. Christianity eventually became the religion of the overwhelming majority in the empire because it solidified its hierarchical organization, drew believers from women as well as men of all classes, assured them of personal salvation, nourished a strong sense of community, and offered the social advantages of belonging to the emperors' religion. The transformation from polytheist empire into Christian state became by far the most influential legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity to later history.
The Spread of Christianity
The empire's Christianization provoked passionate responses because ordinary people cared fervently about religion. It provided their best hope for private salvation in a dangerous world over which they had little control. In this regard, polytheists and Christians held some similar beliefs. Both assigned a potent role to spirits and demons as ever-present influences on daily life. For some, it seemed safest to ignore neither faith. For example, a silver spoon used in the worship of the polytheist forest spirit Faunus has been found engraved with a fish, the common symbol whose Greek spelling (ichthys) was taken as an acronym for the Greek works “Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Savior.”
The differences between polytheists' and Christians' beliefs far outweighed their similarities. People debated earnestly whether there was one God or many and about what actions the divinity (or divinities) performed in the human world. Polytheists still participated in festivals and sacrifices to many different gods. Why, they asked, did these joyous occasions not satisfy Christians' yearnings for contact with divinity?
Equally incomprehensible to polytheists was belief in a savior who had failed to overthrow Roman rule and been executed as a common criminal. The traditional gods, they insisted, had bestowed a world empire on their worshipers. Moreover, they pointedly argued, cults such as that of the goddess Isis, after whom the worried Egyptian letter writer had been named, and philosophies such as Stoicism insisted that only the pure of hear could be admitted to their fellowship. Christians, by contrast, embraced the impure. Why, perplexed polytheists wondered, would anyone want to associate with sinners? In short, as the Greek philosopher Porphyry (c. 234-305) remarked, Christians had no right to claim they possessed the sole version of religious truth, for no doctrine that provided “a universal path to the liberation of the soul” had ever been devised.
The slow pace of religious change revealed how strong polytheism remained in the fourth century, especially at the highest social levels. In fact, the emperor Julian (r. 361-363) rebelled against his family's Christianity—hence he was known as Julian the Apostate--and tried to impose his philosophical brand of polytheism as the official faith. Deeply religious, he believed in a supreme deity corresponding to the aspirations of Greek philosophers: “This divine and completely beautiful universe, from heaven's highest arch to earth's lowest limit, is tied together by the continuous providence of god, has existed ungenerated eternally, and is imperishable forever.” Julian's restoration of the traditional gods ended with his unexpected death while invading Persia.
The Christian emperors succeeding Julian undermined polytheism by slowly removing governmental support. In 382, Gratian (r. 375-383 in the west), who had shunned the title of pontifex maximus, took the highly symbolic step of removing from the Senate house in Rome the Alter of Victory, which Augustus had placed there to remind senators of Rome's success under its ancestral religion; he also took the practical step of cutting off public funding for traditional sacrifices, Aurelius Symmachus (c. 340-402), a polytheist senator who held the prestigious post of prefect (“mayor”) of Rome, objected to what he saw as an outrage against Rome's custom of religious diversity. Protesting eloquently against the new religious conformity, he argued: “We all have our own way of life and our own way of worship...So vast a mystery cannot be approached by only one path.”
Christianity replaced traditional polytheism as the state religion in 391 when the emperor Theodosius (r. 379-395 in the east) succeeded where his predecessors had failed: he enforced a ban on polytheist sacrifices, even if the private individuals paid for the animals. Following Gratian in rejecting the emperor's traditional role as chief priest of the state's polytheist cults, he made divination by the inspection of entrails punishable as high treason and ordered that all polytheist temples be closed. But many shrines, such as the Parthenon in Athens, remained in use for a long time; only gradually were temples converted to churches during the fifth and sixth centuries. Christian emperors outlawed whay they perceived as offensive beliefs, just as their polytheist predecessors had done, but they lacked the means to enforce religious uniformity. Non-Christian schools were not forced to close—the Academy, founded by Plato in Athens in the early fourth century B.C., endured for 1340 years after Theodosius' reign—but Christians received advantages in government careers. Non-Christians became outsiders in an empire whose monarchs were devoted to the Christian deity.
Jews posed a special problem for the Christian emperors. Like polytheists, Jews rejected the new official religion. Yet they seemed entitled to special treatment because Jesus had been a Jew and because previous emperors had allowed Jews to practice their religion, even after Hadrian's refounding of Jerusalem as a Roman colony after putting down a fierce revolt there (132-135). Fourth0century and later emperors imposed legal restrictions on Jews. For example, they eventually banned Jews from holding government posts but still required them to assume the financial burdens of curiales without receiving the honor of curial status. By the late sixth century, they barred Jews from making wills, receiving inheritances, or testifying in court, increasing the pressure on Jews to convert.
Although these developments began the long process that made Jews into second-class citizens in later European history, they did not disable their faith. Magnificent synagogues continued to exist in Palestine, where a few Jews still lived (most had been dispersed throughout the cities of the empire and the lands beyond the eastern border). The study of Jewish law and lore flourished in this period, culminating in the learned texts known as the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds (collections of scholarly opinions on Jewish law) and the scriptural commentaries of the Midrash (explanation of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible). These works of religious scholarship laid the foundation for later Jewish life and practice.
Christianity's official status attracted new believers, especially in the military. Soldiers now found it comfortable to convert and still serve in the army. Previously, Christian soldiers had sometimes created disciplinary problems. As one senior infantryman had said at his court-martial in 298 for abandoning his duties, “A Christian serving the Lord Christ should not serve the affairs of this world.” Once the emperors had become Christians, however, soldiers could justify military duty as supporting Christ.
The main sources of Christianity's appeal were its religious and social values. Christianity offered believers a strong sense of community in this world as well as the promise of salvation in the next. Wherever they traveled or migrated, they could find a warm welcome in the local congregation (Map 6.2). The faith also won adherents by performing charitable works—in the tradition of Jews and some polytheist cults—especially for the poor, widows, and orphans. By the mid-third century, for example, Rome's congregation was supporting fifteen hundred widows and other impoverished persons. Christians' practice of fellowship and philanthropy was enormously important because people at the time had to depend mostly on friends and relatives for help; state-sponsored social services were rate and limited.
Scholars continue to debate the role of women in early Christianity, but it is clear that they were deeply involved. Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa and perhaps the most influential theologian in Western history, eloquently recognized women's contribution to the strengthening of Christianity in a letter he wrote to the unbaptized husband of a baptized woman: “O you men, who fear all the burdens imposed by baptism. You are easily bested by your women. Chaste and devoted to the faith, it is their presence in large numbers that causes the church to grow.” Some women earned exceptional renown and status by giving their property to their congregation or by renouncing marriage to dedicate themselves to Christ. Consecrated virgins and widows who chose not to remarry thus joined large donors as especially respected women. These women challenged the traditional social order, in which women were supposed to devote themselves to raising families. But even these sanctified women were excluded from leadership positions as the church's organization evolved into a hierarchy more and more resembling the mail dominated world of imperial rule.
The most crucial boost to Christianity's expansion came form its constructing a leadership hierarchy of mail bishops, who replaced early Christianity's communal organization in which women could be leaders. Bishops had the authority to certify priests to conduct the church's sacraments, above all baptism and communion—rituals guaranteeing eternal life. Bishops also controlled their congregations' memberships and finances; much of the funds came from believers' gifts and bequests. Over time, bishops replaced curiales as the emperors' partners in local rule, deciding which towns received imperial subsidies. Regional councils of bishops exercised supreme authority in appointing new bishops and settling the doctrinal disputes that increasingly arose. The bishops in the largest cities became the most powerful leaders in the church. The main bishop of Carthage for example, oversaw at least one hundred local bishops in the surrounding area. But it was the bishop of Roman who eventually emerged as the church's supreme leader in the western empire. The eastern church never agreed that this status entitled the bishop of Rome to control the entire Christian world, but his dominance in the west won him preeminent use there of the title previously applied to many bishops: pope (from pappas, Greek for “father”), the designation still used for the head of the Roman Catholic church.
The bishops of Rome identified a scriptural basis for their leadership over other bishops in the New Testament, where Jesus speaks to the Apostle Peter: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church....I will entrust to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:18-19). Because Peter's name in Greek means “rock” and because Peter was believed to have been the first bishop of Rome, later bishops there claimed that this passage recognized their direct succession from Peter and thus their supremacy in the church.
Competing Visions of Religious Truth
Christians urgently disagreed about what they should believe. The church's expanding hierarchy struggled to create uniformity in belief and worship to ensure its members' spiritual purity and to maintain its authority over them. The bishops clashed over theology, however, and Christians enver achieved doctrinal unity.
Disputes flared over what constituted orthodoxy (the official doctrines voted in by councils of bishops, from the Greek for “correct thinking”) as opposed to heresy (dissent from official thinking, from the Greek for “private choice”). After Christianity became official, the emperor was ultimately responsible for enforced orthodox creed (a summary of beliefs) and could use force to compel agreement if disputes became serious that they provoked violence.
Questions about the nature of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—seen by the orthodox as unified, co-eternal, and identical divinity—caused the deepest divisions. Arianism, for example, generated fierce controversy for centuries. Name dafter its founder, Arius (c. 260-336), a priest from Alexandria in Egypt, this doctrine maintained that Jesus as God's son had not existed eternally; rather, God the Father had “begot” (created) his son from nothing and bestowed on him his special status. Thus Jesus was not co-eternal with God and not identical in nature with his father. This view implied that the Trinity was divisible and that Christianity monotheism was not absolute. Arianism found widespread support, perhaps because it eliminated the difficulty of understanding how son could be as old as his father and because its subordination of son to father corresponded to the norms of family life. Arius used popular songs to make his views known, and people everywhere became engrossed in the controversy. “When you ask for your change from a shopkeeper,” one observer remarked in describing Constantinople. “he harangues you about the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you inquire how much bread costs, the reply is that 'the Father is supeiror and the Son inferior.'”
Many Christians became so incensed over this apparent demotion of Jesus that Constantine had to intervene. In 325, he convened 220 bishops at the Council of Nicaea to settle the dispute. The majority of bishops voted to crack down on Arianism: they banished Arius to Illyria, a rough Balkan region, and declared that the Father and Son were indeed “of one substance” and co-eternal. So complicated were the issues, however, that Constantine later changed his mind twice, first recalling Arius from exile and then reproaching him again not long after. The doctrine lived on: Constantine's third son, Constantius II (r. 337-361), favored Arianism, and his missionaries converted many of the Germanic peoples who later came to live in the empire.
Numerous other disputes about the nature of Christ fractured Christian unity, especially in the east. The orthodox position held that Jesus' divine and human natures commingled within his person but remained distinct. Monophysites (a Greek term for “single-nature believers”) argued that the divine took precedence over the human and that Jesus had essentially only a single nature. They split from the orthodox hierarchy in the sixth century to found independent churches in Egypt (the Coptic church), Ethiopia, Syria, and Armenia.
Nestorius, who became bishop of Constantinople in 428, disagreed with the orthodox version of how Jesus' human and divine natures were related to his birth, insisting that Mary gave birth to the human that became the temple for the indwelling divine. Nestorianism enraged orthodox Christians by rejecting the designation theotokos (Greek for “bearer of God”) as an appellation of Mary. The bishops of Alexandria and Rome had Nestorius deposed and his doctrines officially rejected at councils held in 430 and 431; they condemned his writings in 435. Nestorian bishops in the astern empire refused to accept these decisions, however, and they formed a separate church centered in Persia, where for centuries Nestorian Christians flourished under the benign tolerance of non-Christian rulers. They later became important agents of cultural diffusion by establishing communities that still endure in Arabia, India, and China.
No heresy better illustrates the ferocity of Christian disunity than Donatism. A dispute arose in North Africa in the foruth century over whether to readmit to their old congregations tohse Christians who had cooperated with imperial authorities and had thus escaped martyrdom during the Great Persecution. Some North African Christians felt these lapsed members should be forgiven, but the Donatists (followers of the North African priest Donatus) insisted that the church should not be polluted with such “traitors.” Most important, Donatists insisted, unfaithful priests and bishops could not administer the sacraments. So bitter was the clash that it even sundered Christian families. A son threatened his mother thus: “I will join Donatus's followers, and I will drink your blood.”
These fiery emotions made it difficult to bishops to impose orthodoxy as religious truth. The council of Chalcedon (an outskirt of Constantinople), at which the empress Pulcheria and her consort Marcian brought together more than five hundred bishops in 451, was the most important attempt to forge agreement. Its conclusions form the basis of what many Christians still accept as doctrine. At the time, it failed to create unanimity, especially in the eastern empire, where Monophysites were many.
No one Person had a stronger impact on the establishment of the western church's orthodoxy and therefore on later Catholicism than Augustine (354-430). Born in North Africa to a Christian mother and a polytheist father, be began his career by teaching rhetoric at Carthage, where he fathered a son by a mistress; he was later befriended by the prominent polytheist noble Aurelius Symmachus after moving to Italy. In 386, he converted to Christianity under the influence of his mother and Ambrose (c. 339-397), the powerful bishop of Milan. In 395, he himself was appointed bishop of Hippo, but his reputation rests on his writings. By around 500, Augustine and other influential theologians such as Ambrose and Jerome (c. 345-420) had earned the informal title “church fathers” because their views were cited as authoritative in disputes over orthodoxy. Augustine became the most famous of this group of patristic (from the Greek for “father,” pater) authors, and for the next thousand years his works would be the most influential texts in western Christianity besides the Bible. He wrote so prolifically in Latin about religion and philosophy that a later scholar was moved to declare: “The man lies who says he has read all your works.”
Augustine's most influential exposition of Christianity's role in the world came in his City of God, a “large and arduous work,” as he called it, written between 413 and 426. The book's immediate purpose was to refute those who expected that Christianity, like the traditional cults it had replaced, would guarantee Christians earthly success. For example, some polytheists asserted that the sack of Rome by Germanic marauders in 410 was divine retribution for abandoning Rome's traditional gods; Augustine sought to reassure Christians that their faith had not caused Rome's defeat. His larger aim, however, was to redefine the ideal state as a society of Christians. Not even Plato's doctrines offered a true path to purification, Augustine insisted, because the real opposition for humans was not between emotion and reason but between desire for earthly pleasures and spiritual purity. Emotion, especially love, was natural and desirable, but only when directed toward Go. Humans were misguided to look for value in life on earth. Earthly life was transitory. Only life in God's city had meaning.
Nevertheless, Augustine wrote, secular law and government were required because humans are inherently imperfect. God's original creation in the Garden of Eden was full of goodness, but humans lost their initial perfection by inheriting a permanently flawed nature after Adam and Eve had disobeyed God. The doctrine of original sin—a subject of theological debate since at least the second century—meant that people suffered from a hereditary moral disease that turned the human will into a disruptive force. This corruption required governments to use coercion to suppress vice. Although desperately inferior to the divine ideal, civil government was necessary to impose moral order on the chaos of human life after the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. The state therefore had a right to compel people to remain united to the church, by force if necessary.
Order in society was essential, Augustine argued; it could even turn to comparatively good purposes such inherently evil practices as slavery. Social institutions like slavery, in his view, were lesser evils than the violent troubles that would follow if disorder were to prevail. Moreover, it was Christians' duty to obey the emperor and participate in political life. Soldiers, too, had to follow their orders. Torture and capital punishment, however, were ruled out because the purpose of secular authority was to maintain a social order based on moral order.
In City of God, Augustine sough to show a divine purpose, not always evident to humans, in the events of history. All that Christians could know with certainty was that history progressed toward an ultimate goal, but only God could know the meaning of each's day's events. What could not be doubted was God's guiding power:
To be truthful, I myself fail to understand why God created mice and frogs, flies and worms. Nevertheless, I recognize that each of these creatures is beautiful in its own way. For when I contemplate the body and limbs of any living creature, where do I not find proportion, number, and order exhibiting the unity of concord? Where one discovers proportion, number, and order, one should look for the craftsman.
The repeated I in this passage exemplifies the intense personal engagement Augustine brought to matters of faith and doctrine.
Next to the nature of Christ, the question of how to understand and regulate sexual desire presented Christians with the thorniest problem in the quest for religious turth. Augustine became the most influential source of the doctrine that sex automatically enmeshed human beings in evil and that they should therefore practice asceticism (self-denial, grom the Greek askesis, meaning “training”). Augustine knew from personal experience how difficult it was to accept this doctrine. In fact, he revealed in his autobiographical work Confessions, written about 397, that he felt a deep conflict between his sexual desire and his religious philosophy. Only after a long period of doubt, he explained, did he find the inner strength to pledge his future chastity as part of his conversion to Christianity.
He advocated sexual abstinence as the purest choice for Christians because he believed that Adam and Eve's disobedience in the Garden of Eden had forever ruined the original harmony God created between human will and human passions. According to Augustine, God punished his disobedient children by making sexual desire a disruptive force that humans could never completely control through will. Although he reaffirmed the value of marriage in God's plan, he added that sexual intercourse even between loving spouses carried the melancholy reminder of humanity's fall from grace. A married couple should “descend with a certain sadness” to the task of procreation, the only acceptable reason for sex; sexual pleasure could never be a human good.
This doctrine ennobled virginity and sexual renunciation as the highest virtues; in the words of Jerome, they counted as “daily martyrdom.” Such self-chosen holiness earned women benefits beyond status in the church: they could , for example, demand more education in Hebrew and Greek to read the Bible. By the end of the fourth century, virginity had become so significant for Christian virtue that congregations began to demand virgin priests and bishops.
The Beginning of Christian Monasticism
Christian asceticism reached its peak in monasticism. The world monk (from Greek monos, “single solitary”) described the essential experience of monasticism: men and women withdrawing from society to live a life of extreme self-denial imitating Jesus' suffering, demonstrating their devotion to God, and praying for divine mercy on the world The Earliest monks lived alone, but soon they formed communities for mutual support in the pursuit of ascetic holiness (see Map 6.2).
Polytheist and Jewish ascetics, motivated by philosophy and religion, had long existed. What made Christian monasticism distinctive were the huge numbers of people it attracted and the high status that monks garnered. Leaving their families and congregations, they renounced sex, worshiped frequently, work the roughest clothes, and ate barely enough to survive, aiming to win an inner peace detached from daily concerns. They reported, however, that they constantly struggled against fantasies of earthly delights, dreaming of plentiful, tasty food more often than of sex.
The earliest Christian ascetics emerged in the late third century in Egypt. Antony (c. 251-356), from a well-to-do family, was among the first. One day he abruptly abandoned all his property after hearing a sermon based on Jesus admonition to a rich young man to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor (Matt. 19:21). Forsaking his duty to see his sister married, he placed her in a home for unmarried women and spent his life alone in barren territory, demonstrating his excellence through worshiping God.
Monasticism appealed for many reasons, but above all because it gave ordinary people a way to achieve excellence and recognition. This opportunity seemed all the more valuable after Constantine's conversion and the end of the persecutions. Becoming a monk—a living martyrdom—served as the substitute for a martyr's death and emulated the sacrifice of Christ. Individual or eremetic (hence hermit) monks spared no pains in securing fame. In Syria, for example, “holy women” and “holy men” attracted great attention with feats of pious endurance. Symeon the Stylite (390-459) lived atop a tall pillar (stylos in Greek) for thirty years, preaching to people gathered below his perch. Egyptian Christians believed that their monks' wondrous piety made them living heroes ensuring the annual flooding of the Nile, the duty once associated with the pharaohs' divine power. Exceptionally famous ascetics exercised even greater influence after death. Their relics—body parts or clothing—became treasured sources of protection and healing. Expressing the living power of saints (people venerated after their deaths for their special holiness), relics gave believes faith in divine favor.
The earliest monks followed the example of Antoy in living alone. In about 323, Pachomius in Upper Egypt organized the first monastic community. This “cenobitic,” or “life in common,” monasticism—single-gender settlements of men or women bringing monks together to encourage one another along the hard road to holiness—dominated Christian asceticism ever after. Monasteries were often build close together to divide their labor, with women making clothing, for example, while men farmed.
All monasteries imposed military-style discipline, but they differed in the harshness of their austerity and contact with the outside world. The most isolationist groups arose in the eastern empire, but the followers of Martin of Tours (c. 316-397), an ex-soldier famed for his pious deeds, founded communities in the west as austere as any eastern ones. Basil (“the Great”) of Caesarea in Asia Minor (c. 330-379) started in a different tradition: monasteries serving society. He required monks to perform charitable deeds, leading to the foundation of the first hospitals, attached to monasteries.
A relatively mild code of monastic conduct became the standard in the west, influencing almost every area of Catholic worship. Called the Bendictine rule after its creator, Benedict of Nursia in central Italy (c. 480-553), this code prescribed a daily routine of pryer, scriptural readings, an manual labor. The rule divided the day into seven parts, each with a compulsory service of prayers and lessons, the office. Unlike harsher codes, Benedict's did not isolate the monks from the outside world or deprive them of sleep, adequate food, or warm clothing. Although it gave the abbot (the head monk) full authority, it instructed him to listen to what every member of the community, even the youngest monk, had to say before deciding important matters. He was not allowed to beat them for lapses in discipline, as sometimes happened under other, stricter systems. Communities of women, such as those founded by Basil's sister Macrina and Benedict's sister Scholastica, usually followed the rules of the mail monasteries, with an emphasis on the decorum thought necessary for women.
The thousands of Christians who became monks from the fourth century onward joined monasteries for social as well as theological reasons. Some had been given as babies to monasteries by parents who could not raise them or were fulfilling pious vows, a practice called oblation. Jerome once gave this advice to a mother about her daughter:
Let her be brought up in a monastery, let her live among virgins, let her learn to avoid swearing, let her regard lying as an offense against God, let her be ignorant of the world, let her live the angelic life, while in the flesh let her be without the flesh, and let her suppose that all human beings are like herself.When she reaches adulthood as a virgin, he added, she should avoid baths so she would not be seen naked or give her body pleasure by dipping in the warm pools. Jerome enunciated traditional values favoring males when he promised that God would reward the mother with the birth of sons in compensation for the dedication of her daughter. But he also said, “[As monks] we evaluate people's virtue not by their gender but by their character, and deem those to be worthy of the greatest glory who have renounced both status and riches.”
The monasteries' prickly independence threatened the church's hierarchy. Bishops resented devoted members of their congregations withdrawing into monasteries, not least because they bestowed their gifts and bequests on their new community rather than on their local churches. Moreover, monks challenged bishops' authority because holy men and women earned their special status not by having it bestowed by the church's leaders but through their own actions. At bottom, however, bishops and monks did share a spiritual goal—salvation and service to God. While polytheists had enjoyed immediate access to their gods, who were thought to visit the earth constantly, Christians worshiped a transcend God removed from this world. Monks bridged the chasm between the human and the divine by interceding with God to show mercy on the faithful.
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