Homoousion, Homoiousion or Houyhnhnms?

by michael sympson

Even now people are startled at the Dispensation of the Three in One. They keep constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of three gods. Tertullian, Against Praxeas

7/29/2009 Gondola Press Ltd., 13,750 words, all rights reserved

The Presbyter Arius (249 336 AD) was born in Libya in the year before Emperor Decius (249 251 AD) issued his decree that every citizen was obliged, on pain of death, to perform a compulsory sacrifice to the gods, which had to be certified in a written document. Times were bad: sedition, galloping inflation, too many daggers surrounding the man at the helm the regime had issues and scrambled for a haven of cohesion and loyalty. Emperor Decius persecution of ideological enemies was the first of the two empire-wide persecutions entirely orchestrated from the capital there had been local pogroms before yet the theologian Origen (185 254 AD) was there, and he made it a point that only some individuals, on special occasions, individuals who can easily be numbered, have endured death for the sake of Christianity (Origen, Adversus Celsum, book III, chapter 8). Nevertheless the Catholic Church likes us to believe that in those days the Christians had been suffering martyrdom by the hundreds and thousands, even millions, that the church was wading in her own blood, yet Origens testimony is supported by another witness of the period, Bishop Dionysius, who reckoned for a metropolis like Alexandria not only a capital city of two hundred fiftythousand denizens, but at the time the leading patriarchy of Christianity could produce only a total of seventeen martyrs in Decius persecution, of which at least one person was a known criminal (Eusebius, Ecclesiastic History I, 6:41; Hippolyte Delehaye, SJ). To receive recognition as a martyr of the faith not always as one would expect posthumously was for a Christian the Pour le Merit, the Victoria Cross and the Medal of Congress rolled in one. Yet in the real world this amounted to barely more than the accidental exhumation of skeletons on some or other ancient building site to which the local prelate then attached a name and a legend. The Acts of the Martyrs are en-

tirely a work of fiction. And we do know why the death toll was so comparably insignificant. For instance in the diocese of Rome herself, the eloquent deacon Novatian (251 258 AD) opposed the election of Pope Cornelius, calling him the bishop of the the fair-weatherChristians, those who after one or several lapses ask you to be received again in the fold (Optatus, II: 3). Such retractions of renunciations to avoid martyrdom happened more frequent than tradition likes us to believe; in fact it was the rule, giving cause to grudges between entrenched factions and leading to schisms, even if there was no real disagreement in terms of doctrine. Of course the ideologues would beg to differ. Sabellianism or Monarchianism was probably the first unequivocal enunciation of consubstantiality between the Christ and the Father. But there was a dilemma. If the two were of identical substance then God the father must have suffered at the crucifixion just as badly as his son. A Godhead who suffers? This was unacceptable. The Synod of Antioch in 268 AD hurried to anathematize the heresy of consubstantiality. For people who had nothing better to do with their time but get into arguments over some or other arcane wrinkle of theology, a sort of dispensation was needed; a way to extract the Father from the calamities of the Son. The geeky Origen came up with what he considered a good idea: like the Sabellianists he attributed to Christ eternal pre-existence and divinity. Yet he also insisted on distinctions in the Godhead, teaching with equal emphasis a separate essence and the subordination of the Son to the Father, calling him a secondary God, with the Holy Spirit the Logos, the word in the beginning as the begotten mediator between eternal divinity and everything created. He taught that from eternity the Father

had intended to generate the Son, but represented the act as the creation of a secondary substance. Needless to say this opened just another can of worms if the Son is subordinate to the Father, how can he be the Lord? The Adoptionists and Ebionites and other People who still had a life or at least a proper job, could only shake their heads. It seemed to them Christianity was still in the process of reinventing her origins. The epistolary section in that sorry appendix to the Bible which Christians have the temerity to call the New Testament, predates the gospels by about half a century and never draws a reference or recites from the story of Jesus the object of worship was apparently a purely spiritual redeemer and had been worshipped in these circles long before Jesus entered the picture. The Letter of Clement from 95 AD is still blissfully unaware of any of the canonical gospels and even of the Paulina. This is a situation to which oral tradition, the cover it all bandaid of the modern scholar, simply doesnt answer. Instead the gospels began to be circulated during the upheavals of 117 AD when the genuinely poor seemed to rebel against the established churches of the literate freedmen and middle-class burghers who fought their way up the social ladder with hard graft and thrift, living by the principle that who doesnt work shall not eat (2 Thess. 3:10). These protesters introduced to Christian mythology an angry character who for most of his time seemed pissed off with anybody who had one coat more to wear than himself and instead praised the lilies in the field when he didnt swear on family-values and promised to bring the sword. Of the two hours worth of sayings put in Jesus mouth, one hour is devoted to blackmailing the men of means:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, he said, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Mk. 10: 25), and Jesus really meant the eye of a needle. He asked to consider the ravens, they neither sow nor reap, and neither have a storehouse nor a barn, but God feeds them anyway (Lk. 12: 24), but poetic as the lilies in the field may seem, in the end blessing the poor is just a backhanded way of telling off the rich (Mk. 8: 15, 11: 15-19). Who was this Jesus? We dont really know. Our source doesnt make any bones of the fact that there were people standing right next to the event who saw nothing out of the ordinary: no sudden darkness, no corpses walking out of their graves, no earthquake, no eclipse, no Jesus, only the squealing and whooping of a group of Galileans and this guy with hands as large as coal shovels, saying: These are not drunk, as ye suppose (Acts 2: 15). God had raised up Jesus of Nazareth on the third day, Peter continued, and showed him openly, and now listen to this: Not to all the people, but unto chosen witnesses (Acts 10: 41), which has all the hallmarks of a blatant con. One can criticize the gospels as cryptic and contradictory, but underneath the obvious propaganda there emerges a compelling story: Jesus followers must have been an argumentative lot, we are told of disagreements and even indignation at their leader who seemed in no hurry to deliver on his promise: I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father has appointed unto me, that ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Lk. 22: 28-30; Jn. 14: 1-3). Crucifixion was the ultimate ignominy, since everybody was cursed who hangs on a post (Gal. 3: 13; Deut. 21: 22-23; Joshua 8: 29, 10: 2627). As a form of execution it was in practice long before the Romans. In 93 BC a delegation of Pharisees to the royal court of

Syria lodged an appeal against their own king, because King Jannaeus had nailed eight hundred of their compatriots to the cross (Josephus, Antiquities XIII, 13,5). So it didnt make any difference whether the convicted was executed by the Roman Governor or under Jewish law. In either case, even if he were a king of kings (Sanhedrin 9: 8d), those slain by a court of law are not to be buried in their fathers sepulchers, but in a grave by themselves (Numbers 23: 13) and thats exactly the story we are told, with some embellishments of course, to add luster and mystery to the bare bone facts. Only after a suitable period of penance in the penal boneyard, when the flesh has rotted, the family was permitted to collect the bones and bury them at home in their appropriate place (Sanhedrin 6: 6a; 9: 8c, etc.), and thats where we should look for Jesus bones after his disappearance from the records: in the graveyard of his hometown Capernaum. It should be his final resting place even if the story of the trial and crucifixion turns out to be a red herring. His gig was the end of the world or rather the coming of a new era (Mk. 6: 7-8; Lk. 22: 28-30; Jn. 14: 1-3). He promised it to be imminent (Mk. 9: 1; Mt. 16: 28). Under the walls of Caesarea the seat of the Roman governor he instigated a first uprising, yet the people of Galilee refuse to be roused (Mk. 6: 7-8, 11: 21; Lk. 10: 13). The author of John has Jesus begin his public appearance with the incident in the temple turning him into a fugitive from the law. The synoptic Gospels put the scene at the end of his career leading straight to the trials. Jesus could no longer show his face in public. Gone were the carefree days of water turned to wine. In a cat and mouse game with the authorities he kept away from Jerusalem with a lame excuse you go ahead: I will not, for my time is not yet come and only after somebody gave

him the all clear he made the travel, yet not openly, but as it were in secret (Jn. 7: 8-10). His own relatives didnt think much of him (Mt. 13: 55-58) the parents, four brothers and two sisters (Mk. 6: 3), his cousin John the Baptist and an aunt, his mothers sister (Mk. 3: 31-35, 6: 4; Mt. 13: 5558; Jn. 2: 4). There may have been a wife. Our source has Jesus read from the Torah in the synagogue (Lk. 4: 19), which, I am told, in those days was permitted only to married men. The usual extended family one should think all the more remarkable that these people disappear from the radar the very moment Jesus himself has disappeared from the records. That should be unusual. Normally a member of the family and not this Peter, Jesus enforcer, should have step up to the helm and lead the congregation if there ever had existed a Jewish Jesus movement, which I doubt. There is no evidence for any of this. With his reputation at stake the synoptic evangelists make Jesus issue instructions to acquire arms and prepare for another uprising (Mt.10: 34; Lk. 12: 49, 22: 38, 21: 24, 22: 38; Mk. 11: 15-19). In the scenario of John the incident at Caesarea would have been the last desperate throw of the dice yet John doesnt even mention it. After a carefully choreographed entry into Jerusalem (Mk. 11: 1-11) the motley band started a riot on the temple precinct. If Jesus really had said, is it not written, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations, but you have made it a den of robbers (Mk. 11: 15-19), it would have been true to his agenda. The trade of sacrificial animals was of course part of the religious observance itself. (Even Buddhists did the same thing although they didnt slaughter the animals but set them free to accrue good karma.) Yet Jesus was more concerned with the booths of the moneychangers sitting under the bleached out

marquee at the wall that later should become the Waling Wall. In the Roman domain every major shrine, including and especially the great temple in Jerusalem, acted as the ancient equivalent of our high-street banks, offering loans, keeping individual safe deposits and facilitating the transfer of large sums on letters of credit, services that contributed to the welfare not just of the rich. For the man praising the lilies in the field this meant nothing, less than nothing. So, not surprising, the people in Jerusalem refused to rise, as the Galileans had refused at the time when the disciples were sent out to rouse them. The Council prepared for vigorous action (Reimarus, Fragments by an Anonymous Writer). Whether Jesus ever said something like this or not, the statement does make sense as the war cry of the disenfranchised and genuinely poor living as refugees after the events in 114 117 AD when Emperor Trajan had invaded Iraq. In the end Jesus is made to realize that god is not the kind of ally you should put your trust in (Mk. 15: 34). All that sounds about right. No inconsistency here, except that neither to the trials nor at the crucifixion we hear of any witness who could have given us the details. It all is made up and tied in with the usual mythology. As late as in the fourth century AD, the intrigued Saint Jerome visited the still flourishing shrine of the Phrygian Tammuz, a deity of death and rebirth, located in Bethlehem, the alleged birthplace of Jesus. Barely a coincidence! To maintain this subliminal association with the time honored myth of resurrection from the netherworld the narrator went so far as alleging a Roman census under Augustus (at a time when the Romans still didnt hold this kind of jurisdiction over Judea) making Joseph drag his poor pregnant wife from their home in Capernaum all the way to Bethlehem. In the real world of course the census

taker didnt ask you to travel from your current residence to your place of birth. Besides, Joseph had other things on his mind. Word in the streets had it that Mary carried the child of Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, a Roman soldier, garrisoned only four leisurely walking hours away from Capernaum. Later, in 9 AD, Panteras unit was transferred to Germany as replacement for Varus lost Legions. His tombstone can still be seen in the museum at Kreuznach (Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, XIII, 7514 and Dessau, Inscriptiones selectae, 2571). Subsequently, the mainstream Christian from the first and second century thought of Jesus as a man like everybody else, who became the chosen Son under the sign of the dove only after his baptism, because he had been walking honorably in holiness and chastity (Hermas, The Shepherd, Harnack Dogmengeschichte; Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). If we go by the most ancient fragments of the Gospel according to Luke it is obvious enough. John the Baptist, holding the head of Jesus under water announces in the name of God: You are my Son, today (sic!) I have begotten thee (Lk. 3: 22); possibly the exact words spoken every time the Baptist was dunking somebody into the River Jordan. In our current editions today is edited out of Luke; a divinity bestowed on Jesus only as a bonus later in life would make the savior merely the most potent saint in the calendar. At the end of the second century the retelling of old stories significantly blurred the dividing line between divinity and human form of the savior; yet the custodians of tradition claimed perhaps even really believed that they only restored the teachings of their forefathers according to the word in the beginning. The problem was, they couldnt agree which word that was supposed to be. For the Gentile Churches of the Good Shepherd

the resurrection was a purely spiritual event anyway, the carnal aspect was carried into the fold much later. To resolve the dilemma the Docetists embraced a compromise, a duality in the nature of the Christ, the idea that his mortal persona was merely a mask for the indestructible divinity of his true nature. The man dying on the cross was just an effigy; the kiss of Judas was the token that divinity withdrew from its mortal frame, while the real Jesus looked on from a distance, laughing at the spectacle: Never have I suffered in any way, nor have I been distressed. And this people has done me no harm (First Apocalypse of James, 19; Second Treatise of the Great Seth; Apocalypse of Peter, VII, 3: 81; Koran 4: 157-158). In 186 AD a Bishop of Rome saw an opportunity to stir up more trouble and gain brownie points with his parishioners. He allegedly excommunicated the Adoptionist Theodotus of Byzantium in 186 AD. An early example for alternative history. Not only had a bishop in Rome no jurisdiction over Theodotus or anybody outside of his see, but at the time there were actually two churches and two bishops in Rome, again not as the consequence of a schism or differences in their faiths, but representing two different ethnic groups: the earliest founders of a church in Rome, the expatriates from Greece and Syria with Greek as their language of liturgy, and the churches these immigrants had planted among the indigenous Romans who listened to sermons in Latin. Gradually the animosities between immigrants and natives assumed the form of a theological squabble over guess what the true nature of Christ. The news spread to the bishops in distant Gaul who felt compelled to intervene in the affairs of the Roman see in 178 AD (Eusebius, Ecclesiastic History, V: 3), reprimanding the newly elected Pope Victor I for his divisive attitude. Allegedly the squabbling factions

called on Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna for arbitration (Eusebius, Ecclesiastic History, V: 23ff). This never happened. Polycarp was already dead for fifteen years; his correspondence with Pope Victor I is a forgery a pseudoepigraph in the highfalutin terminology of theology; normal people call it lying the two had lived a generation apart. Victor is the first Roman bishop on record who styled himself the successor of the Apostle Peter, claiming primacy even over the mother church of the immigrants. The bishops of the great patriarchies in the East and in Carthage had a good laugh! Twenty years later, a visitor from Africa, Bishop Hegesippus of Carthage drafted for his own uses a list of bishops in the city of Rome (Eusebius, Ecclesiastic History, V: 3). He knows nothing of Peter, neither that he ever came to Rome nor gave up his apostolate to become the bishop over perfect strangers. As for Theodotus, we only know for sure that somebody in the Eastern hemisphere of the Roman Empire did indeed anathematize his writings as heretical. This was the situation into which the young Arius was raised before he received his higher education in Antioch. He became a tall and handsome man, with a downcast brow and winning manners, leaving quite an impression on the ladies. Yet despite of all the animosity from the hands of his Catholic orthodox biographers, there is not a single voice accusing him of inappropriate conduct. His teacher was the Presbyter Lucian, who also instructed Eusebius of Nicomedia. Lucian made a profound impression on the young Arius; the church historian Harnack has called him the Arius before Arius. It was the period when the tetrarchs ruled the empire. I once assisted to an archaeological dig in former Yugoslavia, not very far away from the ancient residence of the Roman

emperor Diocletian. In his days Emperor Diocletian (244 311 AD) had the reputation of a real life sorcerer, a character that could have stepped out of J. K. Rowlings novel. Diocletian was the son of slaves laboring on a farm in modern Croatia. The estate belonged to the Roman senator Anulinus. For whatever reason, the master took a shine to the boy and set him free. Diocletian enlisted in the Roman army and steadily rose through the ranks. He became an initiate in the cult of Mithras, the ancient equivalent of the Free Masons, and endured savage beatings before been left for dead in the snow as part of the ritual, awaiting the reunion with his animal-spirit and the return from the netherworld to the living. The cult pervaded all senior and many of the subaltern positions in the army. In 274 AD the young flag officer was transferred to Gaul and associated with a mysterious woman Victoriana the mother of the camps. She used to tour the armies stationed in Gaul, her son was the usurper Victorian 269 271 AD. The soldiery venerated her as a kind of female Merlin. When Diocletian met her, the old woman (actually we dont know whether she was an old woman) prophesied that he would assume the purple after he killed the boar. His moment came when during a campaign in the Balkans a thunderbolt struck the incumbent emperor. The armies called for elections, put up poll booths and canvassed their candidates. During the proceedings, Diocletian noticed the Praetorian Prefect Aper (the name means the Boar). The man was patiently waiting for his turn at the dais, to defend himself against charges of murder and sodomy. In stunted silence the assembled soldiery watched Diocletian grab a hunters javelin and kill the man on the spot. Diocletian was duly acclaimed emperor and set out to change the world.

Reserving for himself the senior position, he established a junta of four co-rulers, the tetrarchs. To cut to size the political weight of the army chiefs, Diocletian halved the personnel numbers of the legions while doubling the total of all these brigades. The empire was carved up into four prefectures, with twelve dioceses and one hundred and two provinces between them. The vicious cycle of fifty years of assassinations and mutinies had come to an end, yet this increase in security came for a price. The bureaucratic fragmentation between four imperial courts instead of one and the doubling of positions for flag officers somehow had to be paid for. The currency devalued even further; the governments attempt to counter inflation by freezing prices on consumer goods created a black market economy. By now Diocletian held the highest office the papacy in the cult of Mithras. His power was absolute. Diocletians charisma inspired an almost religious awe. A junior colleague failed to perform and the angered Diocletian made him run beside his chariot for more than two miles in full regalia, while the troops stood to attention and watched. We are asked to believe that the culprit took the dressing down without resentment. Diocletian married a Christian woman, the sister of Pope Caius (283 296 AD) of Rome. The two had a daughter together. She figures in the Greek Orthodox calendar as a martyr and saint. The emperor himself never became a Christian; nevertheless he was a man of strong religious feelings. The preamble to his marital laws from 295 AD is a long sermon on the hallowed sacrament of marriage; the legislation against the Manicheans, from 296 AD, breathes the spirit of a pagan zealot. The Christian churches, by now already displaying a provocative opu-

lence in basilicas of incrusted marble and gold plated roofing, lived in high hopes surely the big change announced in the prophecies and the arrival of the millennium was imminent. What came was exactly the opposite. In 303 AD, his chief of security informed Diocletian of a plot among his Christian courtiers. The emperor unleashed the last and most severe of all anti-Christian persecutions, noticeable not so much for the number of actual deaths mostly courtiers serving at Diocletians residence but for uncounted deportations and the systematic collection and destruction of Christian literature. In order to confiscate whatever Christian books there were, the bailiffs of Munatius Felix, the flamen (priest), and curator of the colony of Cirta in Numidia (Algeria) knocked on the door of the local bishop, a man decked in silverembroidered robes with a numerous staff of priests, deacons, sub-deacons and undertakers. When questioned, the bishop said all his books had been handed out to the lectors (public readers) in the more distant districts of the diocese; indeed the bookcase of the parish was found empty. Instead, perhaps in an attempt to get the bloodhounds off-track, the sub-Deacon Silvanus volunteered to provide an inventory of all the accoutrements in the church. It was impressive. There were two golden chalices, six of silver, six silver cruets, a silver bowl, seven silver lamps, two candlesticks, seven lamp-stands of bronze, eleven bronze lamps with chains, eighty-two embroidered tunics for women, ditto sixteen for men, twenty-eight veils, thirteen pairs of men's boots, fortyseven pairs of boots for women, nineteen smocks to be worn in the country. Mind you, this was supposed to be a minor see in some remote province. Silvanus especially directed the bailiffs

attention to a silver box and another lamp of solid silver, which was somewhat hidden behind an oil jug, yet it failed to make the hoped for impression. Neither did the bishops opulent dining room in this house of worship for the poor. At last, another sub-deacon produced what the bailiffs were looking for all along a heavy codex. After burning the book in public on the doorsteps to the church, they proceeded without delay to the premises of the lectors. They knew their names and whereabouts from the bishops registrar. Without resisting a certain Eugenius gave up four books, Felix, the mosaic worker, produced five, Victorinus eight, Projectus seven five larger and two smaller volumes and the grammarian Victor not only parted with two codices but handed over unfinished quires and loose leaves which were still with the copyist to form another volume. Some, however, refused to cooperate. Euticius, an immigrant from Caesarea, declared that he had no books and a cursory surge of his home produced no results, but the intimidated wife of his associate Coddeo surrendered the six volumes Euticius had left in her husbands safekeeping (Optatus of Milevis, 370 AD). So in the end, the bishop and his clergy had been more than willing to part with all the books in their possession. What surprises most in this account is the opulence of Christian churches before Nicene even in remote corners of the empire. The Christians were no longer lowlifes hiding in the catacombs if that isnt just another clich of Catholic propaganda. The successor of a lowly fisherman from Galilee dressed in princely regalia and with the haughty airs of a man sitting on a mountain, where the voices from lower down cant reach (Ambrose of Milan) he allowed himself to be carried about in a golden chair. As a symbol of status, the popes retainer held the reins of a pair of sleek horses pulling an empty

chariot. The papal residence was a marvel of late Roman architecture; the holy books on the altar dyed in purple, with gold on it molten into lettering and jewels decking the book cover, could have bought a farm a piece, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying (Jerome). The Roman Chief of Police, Praetextatus wasnt kidding when he said: Make me bishop of Rome, and I will be a Christian tomorrow. The systematic destruction of Christian literature during Emperor Diocletians persecution also created a bottleneck in the tradition of scripture, setting in motion a feverish cottage industry of forgeries to fill the gaps although this was a trade Christians didnt need to learn. As a matter of fact the entire New Testament is a book of pseudo-epigraphs cover to cover. The critic Karlheinz Deschner refers to the fact as part the criminal History of Christianity and I personally see no reason to share the sanguinity of somebody who considers himself and his work as an example for radical criticism but thinks it inappropriate to condemn Christian pseudo-epigraphy for what it is a lie. Not fiction, a lie. Whatever Mr. Detering may think about the quality of the writings included under false names in that sorry appendix to the Bible, which if published under their true name would have remained literary ephemera so the quality isnt that great after all? it takes a theologian to find it OK to falsify history and create incidents and people that never existed. Lets remember that for centuries, the inquisition was going after you with thumbscrews and worse, if you didnt swallow the bate hook line and sinker. How little must have changed since Martin Luther pretended to wonder what harm it would do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church ... a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie. Such lies, the re-

former concluded, would not be against God, he would accept them. Well, I cant speak for God but I can speak for the victims of this tyranny of lies, as well as for their wives and children, whose bones had been broken on the wheel, the bodies burned to cinder and the cinder thrown away for six sous a piece to the hangman. And why? Because you had the temerity of thinking for yourself, or accidentally forgot to kneel to the wafer carried by the priest in a procession. Thoughts to which you never gave utterance, but on inquiry were too honest to deny, would make all the difference between having a life before death or suffer prolonged agony and an untimely exit in the name of some fantastic notion of afterlife. What good could possibly come from that? What good did come from that? A cavalier dismissal of this terror over the minds as ancient history would not only be an insult to the victims, it would sweep under the rug the fact that these practices didnt end because the churches and their theologians came finally to their senses but because the arm of secular law had intervened and put the pulpits in their proper place. In Africa Diocletians persecution gave cause to the Donatist schism. Again a bitter conflict divided those willing to suffer martyrdom and the large crowd of turncoats and fair weather Christians well thats not my terminology, why should anybody die for an idea and risk to have the idea die with him: retreat, regroup and fight another day but not without reflecting again whether it is worthwhile. Use your brains. Donatism became the most persistent and long lasting schism before the arrival of Protestantism and refused to be resolved until the Arabs invaded North Africa. The issue again was martyrdom. To become a martyr was still the shortcut to

heaven, even after Christianity had become the religion of the state. The entrenched animosity drew blood on both sides the Circumcellions called themselves agonistici (warriors of Christ) and continued to stage suicide missions against the few remaining shrines of the pagan peasantry and after there was nothing left to vandalize, they attacked the cathedrals of the Catholics to provoke martyrdom and death from the hands of already Christian authorities. The ancient sicarii and recent suicide bombings come to mind. After twenty years of rule Diocletian abdicated, the first and only Roman emperor to do so. The dominus et pater noster, laid down his ceremonial garb: the white turban with the glittering crest of Sun and Moon and the flowing silk robe embroidered with the symbols of the Zodiac and the four elements. The son of a slave had come a long way. In his correspondence Diocletian said that he now was finding true happiness in sprinkling his cabbages. The cabbage patch he was talking about was located on the exact spot where his parents had worked the land for their master and it was enclosed by the most magnificent palace of the period, today a UNESCO heritage site. Every day the imperial pensioner studied the livers of sacrificed sheep and chickens; the villagers in the neighborhood whispered of human sacrifices. In 308 AD, Diocletian stepped out of his palace for the first time after retirement. The concord of the tetrarchs was crumbling; his successors began fielding armies against one another. Diocletian ordered them to attend a conference at Carnuntum (Bad Altenburg in Austria). Protected by nothing but his name and his position in the hierarchy of Mithras Bad Altenburg is the place of the most elaborate chapel of Mithras ever excavated Diocletian de-

moted none less than Constantine not yet the Great from an augustus (supreme commander) to a caesar (deputy). Weighing the balance of power between him and the coemperors, Constantine swallowed his pride and followed orders, for now at least, perhaps this was his real reason why he later favored the Christians. Diocletian returned to his clairvoyant chickens; it seems, he knew the exact time of his death in advance. In 311 AD he went to bed to die, leaving wife and daughter to the mercy of his successors. The tetrarch in the East, Galerius issued the first amnesty for Christian deportees followed by Constantines decree two years later. He was already in his sixties when Arius reemerged from decades of obscurity. He applied for an opening as a presbyter in Egypt. Yet in 318 AD, during an informal brief, Arius employer, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, dropped an unguarded remark about the eternity of the Son. Arius asked Alexander to clarify. According to his own understanding, Arius said, if the Father begat the Son, he must be older than the Son, and hence there was a time when the Son was not. In other words, since God had created everything ex nihilo, the Son as well must have his subsistence from nothing (Sozomen, Church History VII: 4). To everybody else that should be common sense but Bishop Alexander disagreed. What started as an apropos remark soon snowballed to a metaphysical dispute. A substantial faction of the clergy liked to agree with Arius. Bishop Alexander felt compelled to summon a conclave in 321 AD, which duly excommunicated Arius for heresy. Yet ideological heavyweights like the bishops Eusebius of Nicomedia, Paulinus of Tyre, Gregory of Bery-

tus, Aetius of Lydda, and Eusebius of Caesarea (the church historian) offered Arius their support. Forced to leave Egypt, Arius sought refuge at the imperial court in Nicomedia (modern Izmit on the Sea of Marmara), still ruled by a pagan coleague of Constantine. Putting his enforced sabbatical to good use Arius publish a book modeled on Platos Symposium, turning the accusation of heresy against his former employer. He called the Patriarch of Alexandria a Sabellianist (Athanasius, Contra Arianos). Before a synod in Palestine, Arius appealed to be reinstated in his former position. The assembly concurred. In the streets, however, common people, often barely literate, came to blows over the most arcane theological arguments. The unrest spread to Anatolia and Greece and caught the attention of the authorities. In 324 AD Constantine finally became what in his opinion he should have been all the time: the sole ruler of the Empire. He had big plans for a new capital on the Bosporus, a second Rome, meant, as a kind of lifeboat, to keep his dynasty afloat should the rest of the empire go under. A vision of foresight, yet for now the plan created the ultimate white elephant, an opportunity to spoil the provinces and feed their marrow to the gaping jaws of the creatures surrounding the emperor (Ammianus). Yet the Christian mob rioting in the streets of Antioch and in the cities of Greece put the project on hold. To end this battle of words and fisticuffs over incomprehensible things, the emperor sent letters to Bishop Alexander and to Arius, advising the two to settle their differences. As should have been expected, neither was willing to listen, so the emperor sent a personal emissary, Bishop Hosius of Cordoba, to mediate a compromise. It was to no avail and Bishop Hosius advised Constantine to

convoke a synod of all Christian bishops in the empire, the first ecumenical council, which he did. Contrary to common perception, Emperor Constantine (272 337 AD) was neither the first Christian emperor, in fact at the time he wasnt a Christian at all, nor was he the first emperor to issue an amnesty. The first Christian wearing the purple was Phillip the Arab (244 249 AD), who had been a Christian since birth. The first amnesty was issued in 260 AD, when Emperor Galienus (253 268 AD) put an end to Decius persecution. In 313 AD Constantines decree followed as the last after the amnesties issued by his pagan colleagues in the East. In 325 AD the emperor presided in person over the Council of Nicene. An assembly of handpicked yes-men, mainly from the churches of the East, was expected, as one of the participants noted, to merely make a show of grave deportment on account of their grey hair (Bishop Sabinus of Heraclea). Nevertheless it came to the usual accusations and recriminations, ending in a violent controversy (Eusebius, Vita Constantine, III: 13). It took all the diplomatic skills of Constantine to establish in this cage of screaming mandrills a unity of sentiment by assisting the argument of each party in turn, (sic!) so as to gradually dispose even the most vehement disputants to reconciliation (Eusebius, Vita). The emperor was assisted in his efforts by his advisor Bishop Hosius a key figure at the council and by the champion of consubstantiality, Athanasius of Alexandria (293 373 AD), himself an absentee at Nicene. He helped from the distance. To muscle dissenters into submission Athanasius dispatched from the monasteries in Egypt unwashed bands of hooded thugs, armed with baseball bats. In 328 AD Athanasius was rewarded for his services with the most prestigious of the patriarchies after it had become vacant, the papal chair of Alexandria.

We know what Emperor Constantine himself was thinking: Even if by chance somebody should get it right, there is no way anybody else could possibly see the truth in it, he said (Socrates Scholasticus, I: 7). After the conclave the sheer number of openly disagreeing bishops did not fail to make an impression on Constantine and the emperor made conciliatory gestures to dissenting clerics; the Synod of Tyre in 335 AD even deposed the emperors enforcer at Nicene, Bishop Athanasius, of his chair in Alexandria, while the emperors sister, Constantia, arranged for the aged Presbyter Arius he was in his eighties by then an audience with her brother. Hardly a coincidence! The Patriarch in Constantinople perceived this as an affront; in all but word, the emperor seemed to repudiate what is generally presented as his own concoction, the creed of Nicene. So when after his return from the audience with the emperor, Arius stopped by in the Hagia Sophia and begged to be admitted to communion, the Greek cleric in his outrage slipped the old man a poisoned wafer. The next morning, Arius was found lying dead in the street. Soon after, Constantines doctor informed his patient that he, too, were only days away from meeting his maker. Constantine called for an Arian bishop to administer the baptism. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt has charged Constantine with nurturing quarrels for the sake of quarreling. It kept the clergy occupied and away from interfering in politics. What really mattered for the emperor at Nicene was not so much the formula of the creed but bringing together all these controversies under one roof. As far as Constantine was concerned, he wanted administrative unity, one church over one realm under one emperor. That was the trinity he had in mind.

The crucial issue for Constantine was reform: in every town and city the residing bishop was to be held answerable to the metropolitan in the capital. Before and after Nicene, Alexandria held top position in the league table of patriarchal chairs, closely followed by Constantinople and Carthage, while the see where we hear the term Christian for the first time, the once predominant church of Antioch, due to inner dissent, was rapidly losing prestige. The absence of the Roman bishop at Nicene is an indication for the lowly status the Roman See still held. So, for no better reason than that the most prestigious among the ecclesiastic patriarchates supported unmitigated consubstantiality, Emperor Constantine blackballed the assembly into accepting the theological formula of Jesus being the son, consubstantial and existing as the word of the father from eternity before he was made to incarnate in the flesh. Most bishops at the council didnt understand this, or paid lip service without believing it (Socrates Scholasticus, II: 2, 5, 16), yet for Constantine the formula of Nicene was not only a matter of administrative convenience: it flattered the imperial ego! To appreciate the peculiar flavor of consubstantiality one should remember that it was a heathen who presided over the conclave at Nicene, a man who as a young officer of the guard had participated in Diocletians persecution of the Christians and who owed his rank and rise to power to his initiation in the cult of Mithras. His coins proclaim Constantine as the son of the highest god, the Deus Sol Invictus. Consubstantiality would elevate Constantine himself to the rank of a god. After Constantine had passed away, his sons, the defender of Nicene Constantine II, and the two proponents of Arius creed Constants I, and Constantius II were left to slug it out who should succeed to the purple.

Nearly half the Roman army, the flower of the troops, lost their lives in this civil war: fifty-two thousand men. Constantius II (337 361 AD) came out of the melee as the last man standing, but the borders of the empire, denuded of defenders, had become an open invitation to every invader. Under Constantius rule no less than nine synods continued to anathematize the formula of Nicene. The reinstated Bishop Athanasius was expelled from Alexandria for a second time in 339 AD. A kangaroo synod in Rome in 340 AD repealed the decision only to provoke the synod of Antioch in 341 AD to hand down a stern condemnation of the presumptions of the Roman see (Sozomen, III: 6-10; Socrates Scholasticus, II: 8, 15; Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos). The Synod of Serdica (modern Sofia) in 342 AD was meant to engineer some kind of reconciliation between the factions. It not only failed spectacularly, it cemented the divisions, in millo conscientiam tuam debo praeter ire (Socrates Scholasticus, II: 29; Hilary, Theodoret, II: 15, 9). Disillusioned, a mere handful of Italian bishops gathered in Milan, the administrative center of the West, in 346 AD, to make a last stand for the creed of Nicene. They achieved exactly the opposite; the next bishop ordained on the chair of Milan was Auxentius (355 374 AD), a militant Arian. The four councils held at Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia) between 347 and 359 AD asserted the orthodoxy of the Arian faith, preparing the ground for the ecumenical Synod of Rimini in 359 AD. At last Emperor Constantius II seemed to score his homerun. After seven months of arm-twisting and browbeating, the emperor achieved universal acceptance of Presbyter Arius doctrine that the Son has a beginning and was made of things not yet existing and therefore we were not made for Him, but He for us, when it was the pleasure of God. Therefore the Father was as invisible to the

to the Son and known as imperfectly by the Son, as God is to us (Arius, Letters). The dream of one state, one religion and one ruler seemed to be at Constantius fingertips. He issued decrees to the dissenters to surrender their churches and hold their gatherings only outside of the city walls (Socrates Scholasticus, I, 2: 27, 38; Sozomen, I, iv, 21). Constantius nephew, the emperor Julian the Apostate (331 363 AD), before he turned his back on Christianity, was brought up as an Arian Christian himself, he even held ecclesiastic office as a lector. In his letters Julian describes the effects of his uncles decrees: Many were imprisoned, persecuted and driven into exile. By the droves so called heretics were massacred, particularly at Cyzicus and Samosata. Everywhere in Paphlagonia, Bithynia, Galatia, you could see entire towns and villages laid waste (Emperor Julian, Letters LII). Unwilling to put his name to the condemnation of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, the Roman Bishop Liberius (352 366 AD) suffered arrest and deportation (Ammianus, XV: 7; Socrates Scholasticus, II: 37, IV: 29; Sozomen, IV: 11, VI: 23). It is said, a whole gaggle of rich Roman matrons voluntarily followed him into exile in Bulgaria. As his replacement, Emperor Constantius appointed Bishop Felix II (355 365 AD). After three years the browbeaten Liberius condemned Athanasius after all and was allowed to return and resume his office. By imperial decree both contenders were supposed to jointly hold the chair. Consubstantiality, however, still found some support among clerics with Latin as their first language. In 360 AD Bishop Hillary of Poitier returned from a period of exile in Phrygia where he had learned of the creed of Nicene as something entirely new to him (Hilary, de synodis 91; Haller, The Papacy I). Fired up in his zeal, he went to debate the concept with the Arian Bishop of Milan. Polite but firm, two sentinels accompa-

nied Hilary to the gates of the city and sent him on his way back to France. He came to the melancholic realization that every year, nay every month we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries. We report what we have done, we defend those who repent; we anathematize those whom we defended. We condemn either the doctrine of others among ourselves, or our own among others; and tearing one another to pieces, we have been the cause of each other's ruin. It was not entirely his fault. The language of theology in the East was, and still is Greek, yet in Italy, France and Africa the knowledge of Greek was in rapid decline. Niceties about the divine substance got lost in translation. Basil the Great (330 379) made the blunt remark that you Romans just lack in sufficient instruction and therefore are easily duped in theological matters. When St. Basil belabored in eight long paragraphs the difference between substance and hypostasis (Basil, Letters XV: 4), the Latin translation managed with two short paragraphs on essentia and subsistentia. Subtle distinctions between consubstantiality identical with the Father (homoousion) and substantiality similar but different from the Father (homoiousion) only managed to cause another shipwreck of pious peace (Ambrose of Milan, Letters LVI). Again there was blood in the streets. In Antioch no less than three bishops vied for the crown of orthodoxy by decrying the most miniscule differences in the interpretations of their antagonists. Some five thousand people perished when Emperor Valentinian I sent in his troops to restore order. On another occasion more than three thousand people were left dead in Thessalonica. In 380 AD, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory of Nazianzen (330 389 AD), observed with a sigh that the capital was full of mechanics and slaves who are all profound theologians and preach in the shops and in the

streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, Gregory said, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing. Apparently all these mechanics and slaves were zealous Arians; the creed of consubstantial trinity was about to go extinct. Then the indomitable Ambrose of Milan (340 397 AD) came to the rescue. He was the son of the praetorian prefect of Gaul and had received an excellent education before he studied the law (J.R. Palanque, Saint Ambroise et lEmpire Romaine, 1933). At a young age already the governor of Northern Italy, Ambrose was in the vicinity when the Arian bishop Auxentius of Milan passed away. Some diehard adherents to Nicene overheard the anti-Semitic Ambrose calling the deceased Auxentius worse than a Jew and lobbied for his election. In 374 AD Ambrose was rushed within a week through baptism, taking holy orders and the ordination as Bishop of Milan. During the next five years, steering in the teeth of the waves, Saint Ambrose confronted the Arian faith first in his own diocese and then gradually extended his influence to Spain, Gaul, the North of Italy and the territories on the Danube. Ambrose convoked synods, ordained new bishops, and when seeing fit overruled decisions from the Episcopate in Rome. If he was to make headway with his plans for an empire-wide unity under the creed of Nicene, he needed a power base from which he could impress the prestigious patriarchates in the East. Sometimes this created confusion. Traditionally the Patriarchate of Carthage kept good relations with the see in Rome. In the controversy over the Spanish heretic Priscillian a proponent of stern asceticism who found a devoted following in

Spain and France two parallel synods, one in Rome and one in Milan invited the same delegation from Carthage to do the same thing on both assemblies. Priscillian was duly condemned and both councils issued decrees, apparently from the same stencil. Contemporary sources, without so much as mentioning the pope of Rome, referred to Ambrose as the first of the bishops in Italy. Not really a surprise, the Roman pope Damasus (366 384 AD) was too much of an embarrassment to be mentionable and his see in constant disarray. According to the deacon Ursinus, Pope Damasus trusted not so much in brotherly love, but in the brawn of retired gladiators, mule drivers and undertakers. One hundred and thirty-seven people had lost their lives in his election (Ammianus, XXVII, 3: 11-13). His way with women earned Damasus the nickname auriscalpius matronarum, the ladies ear-tickler. Twice he was arraigned to answer charges of misconduct: in 374 AD before a tribunal of his Episcopal peers, and in 378 AD before the court of Emperor Gratian (359 383). In the synod of Rome from the same year that is in his own diocese the pope made himself conspicuous with his absence. A bishop from Sicily had more standing with the conclaves in the East than this Successor of Peter, a notion, still not fully assimilated yet. The anonymous chronicler in the Codex Ambrosianus gives a brief on the history of the church in Rome without ever mentioning Peters name. There was little unity in the Roman see and the factions went through an unending cycle of anger, indictments, disagreements, separations, violence, war, dissolution, reunion and precarious peace (Pope Damasus). The entrenched followers of Novatian, the pure, carried on the ancient conflict, and welcomed with open arms Donatist refugees from Africa.

Themselves unmolested, the grandchildren of Novatians parishioners took pride in their steadfast forebears and continued drawing a line between them and the lesser Christians in the Roman church. The controversy over the creed of Arius didnt help. Altogether four bishops called themselves Pope of Rome at the same time. The man calling the shots could only be the Vicar of Christ at the imperial court in Milan, a man of more consequence for the course of history than Jesus Christ himself. Milan was the residence of Emperor Gratian and his teenage son and co-emperor Valentinian II, both with a vested interest in holding their own against the otherwise undisputed primacy of Constantinople. Unlike most of their subjects the two adhered to the creed of Nicene. Bishop Ambrose could count on their support. The mother of Valentinian II, on the other hand, remained faithful to the Arian creed. She couldnt stand the sight and smell of the unshaven Ambrose. Ambrose saw the time come to approach the emperor in Constantinople, for we (sic!) are grieved that the fellowship of Holy Communion between the East and West is interrupted (Ambrose of Milan, Letters XIV). The approachable Emperor Theodosius I was not insensitive to the pleasures of the table and the eunuchs on his staff repeatedly caused a scandal. Theodosius seemed a man of few ambitions; it was difficult to seize him up. Remembered as an able general, the Spaniard had been recalled from retirement to rescue the empire. Theodosius could think on his feet when things became critical; but in between it was difficult to rouse him from his apathy. Nevertheless, in the larger scheme of things, he was the kingpin. Ambrose pulled him over by dangling the carrot that his reign might have the additional glory of

having restored unity to the Churches (Ambrose of Milan, Letters XIV). Under the constant prodding and coaxing of the Bishop in Milan, Theodosius slowly developed to a Catholic hardliner and even an anti-Semite. So after test-running their proposition on the synod of Antioch in 379 AD, the delegation of prelates from Milan took passage to Constantinople and paid their respects to the emperor. As expected, Theodosius had an open ear for their petition his correspondent in Milan had prepared him well. On February 27, 380 AD, according to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, Emperor Theodosius wrote it into secular law that every Christian was to believe in the one deity of the father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians (Codex Theodosianus XVI.1.2). Christians who had the temerity of begging to differ were branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their gatherings the name of churches, since they are foolish madmen. February 27 is the official birthday of Catholicism. The Catholics entered the scene with a minority coup, a bid for power in an already Christian state, comparable to the Bolsheviks October revolution in Russia, which, as we remember, was not a revolution against the Tsar, in fact not a revolution at all, but merely a coup overthrowing the socialist government of Alexander Kerensky. Even in their outer appearance the Lenin of 380 AD and the man from 1917 show remarkable similarities, if the mosaic in Ravenna is anything to go by. For the people affected, the Jews, the dissenters, the educators, the scientists and the artists, the consequences were about the same in both instances: persecution, reeducation, torture, deportation and even death. Under the new law of Feb-

ruary 27, the legislator threatened that the heretic will suffer the punishment which authority, in accordance with the will of heaven, shall decide to inflict (Codex Theodosianus XVI.1.2). Nobody thought of it yet, but the Inquisition was already looming on the horizon. The criminalization of homosexuals, the denial of a franchise for women and the intrusive surveillance of the marital bedroom, not to mention the unrelenting campaign against proper hygiene even brushing your teeth was considered offensive are Catholic specials thrown in to make Catholicism even more special. In the churches of the East and two thirds of the empires populace resided in the East the new law caused an outcry. In Antioch the Christians overturned the statues of the emperor and fought his soldiers in the streets. It took the young Bishop Chrysostom all the powers of his exceptional eloquence to prevent a massacre. Another native of Antioch, the Gentile publicist Libanius (314 394 AD), although himself not a Christian, took issue with this evil law by a sacrilegious legislator (Libanius, Autobiography). For Christian and Pagan alike, the last remnants of choice in your beliefs had been taken away. Accosted by rioting mobs, often with prominent figures of the eastern Episcopate leading from the front, Emperor Theodosius bore the brunt of the riots. He began to feel as if he had been had, as if he was made to rubber-stamp something that was really not worth the trouble. Theodosius and his advisors in Constantinople sought for ways to appease the Episcopate in the East. On January 10, 381 AD, the second ecumenical synod after Nicene gathered, first in Constantinople and then a few months later in Antioch. On the agenda were a few tweaks to the creed of Nicene, barely more than relabeling it the conclave was allowed to make an omelet but not to break the egg. Despite the

hotheads in his council Emperor Theodosius kept his cool, he would not allow wrecking the work of ecclesiastic unity, which he and not this presumptuous Italian prelate already had written into law. His only concession to the assembly was not to invite even a single Bishop from the territories west of the Aegean Sea. This was stretching the semantics of ecumenical, but nobody cared to notice. Except for Ambrose, that is. The bishop of Milan took this as a personal affront; and he was right. But what could he do? Should he do anything? After all there was nothing in the decrees of Constantinople that would change in substance the laws of 380 AD. The Catholics were here to stay. Apparently that was not good enough for this arrogant prelate. This was the Vicar of Christ speaking; even an emperor better did as he was told and when he was told. Ambrose summoned his bishops to Aquileia in 383 AD. In the presence of Emperor Gratian an assembly of little more than thirty bishops dutifully declared nil and void whatever had been decided by ten times that many of their colleagues in Constantinople. Against the advice of his wife Gratian allowed himself to get suckered in and invited Emperor Theodosius to visit a synod in Rome next year. The date collided with the schedule of Emperor Theodosius for another conclave in Constantinople. Instead of him or any of the bishops from the East, three emissaries delivered a piece of mail. In this letter Theodosius rejected the invitation as unbecoming and then continued to lecture the brethren from the West that all the decisions made in Constantinople were legal and inviolate and the presence of any cleric from the West at the proceedings simply had been unnecessary. And that was that. Emperor Gratian was left with an

uncomfortable choice. The thing he could not afford was an open break with Constantinople. Least of all over an issue everybody seemed to agree upon. So he left it to Saint Ambrose to control the damage. It didnt amount to much, something like the epistolary equivalent of Bart Lancasters grin in the film Vera Cruz, before he would shoot somebody. If anything, Bishop Ambrose was a past master of the art of getting even. No longer in a huff he was again his icy self, the way people knew him when they entered the zone of submissive hush in his study. Seated in front of an open Bible, the prelate seemed to scan the pages without saying a word, without even moving his lips. Ambrose is the first man on record who read, or pretended to read, in silence. The people around him shuffled their feet with respectful little coughs. Ambroses eyes kept running over the page, noted Saint Augustine always the keen psychologist, and after waiting for a long time in silence we used to go away. We supposed that in the hubbub of other peoples troubles, he would not want to be invited to consider more problems. We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself (sic! Augustine, Confessions Book VI). So Ambrose waited. He waited for almost ten years. He waited until 390 AD. Then, in Thessalonica, a popular race driver got himself arrested on charges of raping the wife of a soldier. The mob in the arena demanded the charioteers release, killed the injured soldier and dragged his body through the streets. Emperor Theodosius called in the army, things got out of hand, and 6,000 civilians were massacred. The news traveled through the empire and created general consternation, exactly what Ambrose had been waiting for all this while. By penalty of excommunication he summoned (sic!) the em-

peror to Milan. Theodosius the Great had a choice: he certainly could find some or other bishop, in fact a whole gaggle of bishops, if need be, who in case of an excommunication would gladly have taken his side, but this could only create another schism, and this after the emperor himself had put his name to the laws decreeing unity of church and empire. Ambrose knew this. In full public view of all the people in the cathedral he made Theodosius kneel in sackcloth before him to receive his penance. Dressed beneath his status, with stubbles on his chin, the emperor was made to wait for the gesture of reconciliation. Ambrose was on the summit of his powers. Yet the emperor should have seen it coming. In 385 AD, the local bishop of Callinicum (modern Raqqa) in Syria was seen to take the lead in an act of vandalism against the local synagogue. Emperor Theodosius despite his flaws a good-natured person, was outraged and demanded an inquest. Yet Ambrose of Milan sent him a memo. In his correspondence with the emperors, Ambrose combined threats and blackmail with allegations, innuendo and solicitous interpretations, giving us a master-class in how to blackball even the high and mighty into submission. The prelate of Milan knew full well that his memo was about to set a legal precedent: it set in motion the wheels of European antiSemitism for millennia to come. Ambrose begins with a thinly veiled threat: I have never been in such anxiety as at present, since I see that I must entreat you to listen with patience, for, if I am unworthy to be heard by you, I am unworthy to offer the Eucharist to you (sic!), as well. You are now involved in the risk of my silence (sic!), but silence and dissimulation on my part would not set you free. I am obeying the commands of God, speaking out of love for you. As the holy Apostle

Paul says, whos teaching you cannot controvert (sic!): Whether asked or unasked for, be prompt to reprove, entreat, and rebuke with all patience and doctrine. In the cause of God whom will you listen to, if not to the priest, at whose greater peril sin is committed? A report was made by the commander of the armies in the East that a synagogue had been burnt, and that this was done at the instigation of the local Bishop. You gave command that the accessories to the incident should be punished, and the synagogue be rebuilt by the Bishop himself. Are you not afraid this prelate might oppose you with a refusal? You will then be obliged to make him either an apostate or a martyr, either of them equivalent to persecution. I think you can see where this is going. Suppose the said Bishop had indeed kindled the fire and gathered the crowd, in order not to lose an opportunity for martyrdom: would he not say why not do what will not find a reward in heaven if it remains unpunished? Suppose he declared that he set fire so not to leave a place where Christ is denied. If you think the Bishop to be firm, dont make a martyr of a firm man; if you think him vacillating, avoid causing his fall, for he who causes the weak to fall carries a heavy responsibility. But let it be granted that no one will bring the Bishop to book, for I have asked this of Your Grace, and although I have not yet read that this edict is revoked, let us notwithstanding assume that it is revoked (sic!). What if there are some timid officials who already offered to restore the synagogue at their own costs; or if the commander of the East already has ordered it to be rebuilt from the funds of Christians? Then Your Majesty will have an apostate general, and to whom will you then entrust your victorious standards (sic!)? Shall, then, a place of unbelief be made out of the spoils of the Church? Shall the patrimony, which by the favor of Christ had been gained for Christians, be transferred to the treasuries of unbelievers? We read that in the old days the spoils from defeated enemies were used to build temples and idols.

Shall the Jews write this inscription on the front of their synagogue: The temple of impiety, erected from the plunder of Christians? But, perhaps, it is the cause of law and order moving you. Which, then, is of greater importance, law and order or the cause of religion? There is, then, no adequate cause for punishing the burning of a building, much less since it is a synagogue, a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a den of thieves braying like donkeys when they pray, condemned by God Himself. For this is what we read, when the Lord our God speaks by the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah: And I will do to this house which is called by My Name as I have done to Shiloh, and I will cast you forth from My sight, as I cast forth your brethren, the whole seed of Ephraim. And do not pray for that people, do not ask mercy for them, for I will not hear you. So God himself forbids intercession on behalf of the Jews. Shall I remind you how many churches the Jews had burnt in the time of the Emperor Julian? The two at Damascus, one now scarcely repaired at the costs of the Church not of the Synagogue the other still in ruins? Churches burnt at Gaza, Ascalon, Berytus, and no one has demanded punishment. What of the basilica in Alexandria, burnt by heathen and Jews? It was never prosecuted; shall the Synagogue not enjoy this privilege as well? The judge was ordered not to merely report the deed, but punish it, and to demand the return of the money chests carried away. This is a town with barely anything, what great possessions could possibly be carried away from a Synagogue there? What could these scheming Jews possibly have lost by the fire? These are dissimulations by the Jews, and how can they not refrain from calumny, having calumniated Christ himself? Will you allow the Jews to triumph over the Church of God? Allow the Synagogue to rejoice in this sorrow to the Church? If so, the Jews will add to their solemnities the memory of their triumph over the people of Christ. And what will Christ say to you afterwards? I have chosen you, the youngest of your brothers, to

rise from a private man to become emperor, I conferred victory on you, and this is how you pay me back? Now the legal clincher: Jews reject that they themselves are bound by Roman law and yet they seek redress by invoking this law? Where were those laws when they were the ones to set fire to our churches? If Emperor Julian did not permit restitution for the injury done to the Church because he was an apostate, will Your Majesty permit redress for the injury done to the Synagogue, because you are a Christian? Since the Church shut out the Synagogue, why is it that again the Synagogue should exclude the servant of Christ from the bosom of faith? The gods (sic!) shall avenge the injury done to them on their own. So, who is to avenge the Synagogue? Christ, whom they slew, whom they denied? Will God the Father avenge those who do not receive Him since they do not receive the Son? At this point Ambrose is done with the subtleties and brandishes his ultimate weapon: Should I fail to enjoy Your Majestys trust, by all means call together those bishops whom you think fit, and let it be discussed, but what am I supposed to say, if it is discovered that your authorities endorsed Christians to be slain? How am I supposed to explain it? How shall I excuse it to those bishops? I, have done what could be done consistently with honor to you, that you might rather listen to me in the palace, lest (sic!), if it were necessary, you should listen to me in Church (Ambrose of Milan, Letters XL). For Ambrose it was a homerun Emperor Theodosius decided not to test the saints resolve and complied with all his demands. Immediately the Christian ayatollahs closed ranks with Ambrose. In 404 AD St. Chrysostom (347 407 AD) in his eight antiJewish homilies Adversus Judaeos, lashed out against everything

Jewish, bitching that many people hold a high regard for the Jews and consider their way of life worthy of respect. This is why I am hurrying to pull up this fatal notion by the roots. To him the synagogue was a place where a whore stands on display. Yet the synagogue is not only a whorehouse it is a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals. This is why Christ said ask for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them and slay them before me (Orationes VIII, Adversus Judaeos, Sermons 1 and 2 in reference to Lk. 19.27). In Africa, St. Augustine, as usual, could barely hold his water when it came to endorsing an atrocity: Judas is the image of the Jewish people. They bear the guilt for the death of the savior, for through their fathers they have killed the Christ. Does the reader have any idea how many Jews have lost their lives over this kind of rhetoric even before Hitler? So when in 415 AD another doctor of the church, the bishop and saint Cyril of Alexandria, after quite literally washing his hands in the blood of the Gentile philosopher Hypathia (350 415 AD), thought how swell it would be to be remembered as the one who kicked the door shut after the last Jew leaving Alexandria, he called in the army to raided the Jewish quarters. The soldiers raped the women and looted homes and synagogues. The capital of Egypt once had housed the largest Jewish community in the empire and at the time some forty thousand Jews were still living there. West and East began to drift apart. In 617 AD, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius ordered all Jews under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine Empire to be forcibly converted. Many went into permanent exile. Some expatriated to Spain others to the German Rhineland. Little did they know! In the meantime there were changes in the city of Rome! The patriarchs of Alexandria and Constantinople began loosing

ground in the struggle for prestige and authority. In Alexandria the Christian rule increasingly assumed the appearance of a totalitarian police state. Pope Dioscorus I of Alexandria (444 454 AD) has received the appellative the Great and is still venerated as a saint in the Coptic Church. In real life this former secretary of Cyril of Alexandria, was a merciless dictator who following the example of the Apostle Peter in Acts (Acts 5: 1-11) surrounded himself with a guard of religious brown-shirts, browbeating into submission every opposition in his see. His misconduct became too much even for the Catholic Church. The synod of Chalcedon deposed Dioscorus of his chair in 451 AD. He died in exile on some godforsaken island where the mail arrives only once a year. Meanwhile in Rome a new pope was elected, Pope Siricius (384 399 AD), the good personal friend and protge of Ambrose. The skeptics expected the man in Milan to completely absorb the Roman thunder. To everybodys surprise this didnt happen. The missives of the new pope were full of we decree and it is our will. A Spanish delegation merely asked for his opinion and Siricius answered with regulations and laws (ordinatio, constitutum) and even referred to the ordinance of the apostolic see (decreta, statuta sedis apostolicae). For Siricius the haughty airs came naturally. Condescending to the request as the head speaking to his limbs, he put papal decrees on an equal footing with the canons of the ecclesia, something, he explained, every bishop from now on was required to observe. Pope Siricius and later another admirer of Ambrose, Pope Innocent (402 417 AD) got the Roman papacy on a new footing and launched the Roman catholic project on its long march to world dominion. Employing every trick in the book, the Roman

prelates resorted even to barefaced counterfeit: the socalled Constantinian Donation. We may not know the forgers identity, but we know who commissioned the scriptorium in St. Denis to produce the counterfeit; it was Pope Stephen II (715 757). He needed the document to inveigle the Carolingian king to share territories he had conquered from the Lombards as a quid pro quo for the pope bestowing on Charlemagne the brand-new title of Roman Emperor of the German nation. This was only a foretaste for things to come: In 1204 the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, Pope Innocent III and the Doge of Venice conspired in the final solution for Constantinople, by then still the largest and most cosmopolitan metropolis outside of China and Iraq. In the night before the final assault, the Christian mob inside of the walls, burned, looted, and smashed to smithereens the last vestiges of Hellenistic art and learning. The monumental statue of Athena the last composite statue of its kind was overturned and hacked to pieces because she seemed to beckon over the wall to the besiegers. The next day, on Friday, April 13, 1204, the Christian mob from outside the walls breached the defenses and proceeded to rape twenty thousand Christian women. Thus the great schism between East and West seemed resolved. One must admit it was not exactly what the Pope had in mind. Innocent III did not order murder for personal gain or out of human wickedness, but what always is worse, in the name of principle and ideals. He ordered atrocities with the serene conscience of a man who believes to know that he is doing the right thing, that killing is actually the merciful option. For sixty years Latin Kings held on to what was by now only the empty shell of a once great city, before Constantinople returned to her rightful owners and the status quo ante on the

ideological front was restored. As it turned out, the Arian Lombards and the Prophet Mohammed, of all people, would lend a helping hand to the ascendancy of the Roman popes. When the Lombards conquered Milan in 569 AD, making it again a citadel of Arianism, the Catholics of the period must have perceived this as a setback, but in actual fact the patriarchate at Milan never recovered from this loss of clout. It ended all rivalry between the patriarchs in Rome and Milan. And when in 641 AD the camel corps of the Muslim general Amr bin Al-Aas paraded through the streets of Alexandria and finally Sultan Mehmet II annexed Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 Rome became the head of Catholicism by default. Nothing of this could have been achieved by the efforts of the Roman prelate alone. In fact most of the time these clerics were preoccupied with more pressing matters. When the Dark Ages were at their darkest the Roman papacy changed hands as the ultimate prize in the feuds between Romes noble houses. Long before the dawn of the Renaissance, incestuous prelates passed on Peters chair as their private estate to first cousins and to the sons they had sired with their own daughters. They were leading armies into battle and hired foreign mercenaries with no regard for their faiths to fight their private wars. Every war foreign powers have fought on Italian soil, said Machiavelli (1469 1527), had been instigated by the popes and these foreign hordes have done everything to keep Italy lowly and divided. In 955 AD the worst of the lot even by the standards of a Renaissance pope, the sixteen-year-old Pope John XII started his reign of gambling, hunting and philandering in the name of Jupiter. Yes you heard the man Jupiter. How between all

this carousing, chasing of game in the forests and of skirts in the brothels the successor of a fisherman from Galilee found the time to expand the Vaticans territories is everybodys guess. But he did and he was rewarded for it. On October 963 AD the German king Otto I paid Rome a visit at the head of his army and endorsed in a still existing document all papal acquisitions. Or so we are told. Ottos grandson, Emperor Otto III, later was adamant to denounce the document as a forgery, neither the first nor the only of its kind. For the moment the papal legate duly conferred on Otto I the crown of Roman Emperor of the German Nation, while Pope John XII himself recuperated his sacred person in the amenities of the red light district in Tivoli. This was a bit too rich, even for the Dark Ages. In absentia the pope was charged with incest, infidelity (sic! to his wife!), blasphemy and pagan apostasy. Each and every charge had substance. Soon after John XII died a sudden death with his cock in the mouth of a lady of loose morals. So we shouldnt be surprised to see Arianism appearing to absorb the initial blow of the Catholic coup. It remained the faith of the Germanic nations in central Europe, Spain, Northern Italy and even Africa; the Arian monarchs closed down the Catholic churches and deported the priests. Only after a long period of temporizing King Clovis (466 511 AD) made up his mind and ordered his people to convert wholesale to Catholicism. This slowly shifted the balance. Almost a hundred years later, in 589 AD, the Gothic king Reccared I (586 601 AD) ordered the mass-conversion of his Spanish subjects and convoked the 3rd Synod of Toledo. The assembled bishops passed harsh new laws against homosexuals and drafted a program for the forced conversion of

the Spanish Jews. Up until then the Jews in Spain had done well for themselves and their prosperity made them an object of envy. The prospect was grim: the synod decreed the confiscation of Jewish property and the enslavement of the owners. Yet the Gothic nobility remained divided; there were uprisings. The leader of the opposition, the bishop Athaloc, earned himself the reputation of being a second Arius. King Reccareds army routed the insurgents, but the bishop Sunna of Mrida, picked up the Arian colors for a second rebellion. He, too, was defeated and sought exile in the Islamic (sic!) Mauretania. Undeterred Bishop Uldila and the queen dowager went for a rematch. The dissent lingered on, unresolved. For the Arab marshal Tariq ibn Ziyad, this state of the affairs in Spain opened his window of opportunity. In April 711 AD the Arab general landed on the Spanish shores with a small reconnaissance force. Many Jews and the Arian diehards welcomed Tariq as a liberator. Under the Aegis of the Arabs, Arianism enjoyed a second lease of life. Bishop Migetius preached that the second person of the Trinity did not exist before the Incarnation pure Arianism all but in name. In 782 AD the war of harsh words between Arians and Catholics caused Archbishop Elipandus of Toledo to ally himself with the theologically savvy Bishop Felix of Urgel ( 818 AD). Asserting a double aspect in the Son one by generation and nature, and the other by adoption and grace the two bishops sought to find a compromise, quoting innumerable texts from scripture. They drew their terminology adoptio, homo adoptivus, ouios, thetos, from patristic literature and the Mozarabic liturgy. Bishop Felix argued, that the epithet Natural Son of God could not be predicated to the Man Jesus, who was begotten by temporal generation, inferior to the Fa-

ther. Consequently Pope Hadrian charged Elipandus and Felix with blasphemy and referred their case to the Synod of Frankfurt. The council duly condemned the two. Bishop Felix retracted and spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Lyon. This seemed to conclude the Haeresis Feliciana. While placed under surveillance, says the chronicler, Felix showed all the signs of a sincere conversion. His final hour would have passed as genuine penitence, had his confessor not found among his papers a definite retraction of all former retractions. The heresiarch Elipandus, too, died in his error. Nowadays the formula of Nicene has become the common denominator across the creeds. In 1553 the reformer and protestant ayatollah Calvin condemned a fellow refugee from the Inquisition, the Spaniard Michael Servetus (1509 1553), to burn at the stake. An infamy for which Calvin shall be remembered forever! Servetus was a physician, the first European to describe the pulmonary circulation. If only he would have resisted publishing a theological treatise in which he rejected the prevalent Christian doctrines: original sin, infant baptism and consubstantiality. In a Catholic country this could mean only one thing, a slow roasting at the stake. So Servetus fled to Geneva as a safe haven. All the ayatollahs of Protestantism Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli and Huss hurtled head over heal to express their support, yet not for the victim, but for Calvin. And the story doesnt end here: Richard Wright (1764 1836) was a Unitarian minister and the itinerant missionary of the Unitarian Fund, a missionary society he established in 1806. It took an act of parliament to assert his right to think differently from the ecclesiastic establishment. Again it has been written into the law (secular law) what one is allowed to think.

The Doctrine of the Trinity Act from 1813 (sometimes called the Trinitarian Act) is meant to amend the Blasphemy Act from 1697 in respect of its Trinitarian provisions. The act passed in July 1821 and was also variously known as the Unitarian Relief Act granting toleration for Unitarian worship, as previously the Act of Toleration from 1689 had only granted toleration to those Protestant dissenters who accepted the Trinity. Today, biblical Unitarianism identifies the Christian belief that the Bible teaches God as a singular person the Father and that Jesus is a distinct being.