THEY met in private rooms or small chapels, and organized themselves on the model of the synagogue.1 Each congregation was called an ekklesia—the Greek term for the popular assembly in municipal governments. Slaves were welcomed, as in the Isiac and Mithraic cults; no attempt was made to liberate them, but they were comforted by the promise of a Kingdom in which all could be free. The early converts were predominantly proletarian, with a sprinkling of the lower middle classes and an occasional conquest among the rich. Nevertheless, they were far from being the “dregs of the people,” as Celsus would claim; they lived for the most part orderly and industrious lives, financed missions, and raised funds for impoverished Christian communities. Little effort was made as yet to win over the rural population; these came in last, and it was in this strange way that their name pagani (villagers, peasants) came to be applied to the pre-Christian inhabitants of the Mediterranean states.
Women were admitted to the congregations, and rose to some prominence in minor roles; but the Church required them to shame the heathen by lives of modest submission and retirement. They were bidden to come to worship veiled, for their hair was considered especially seductive, and even angels might be distracted by it during the service;2 Saint Jerome thought it should be entirely cut off.3 Christian women were also to avoid cosmetics and jewelry, and particularly false hair; for the blessing of the priest, falling upon dead hair from another head, would hardly know which head to bless.4 Paul had instructed his communities sternly:
Women should keep quiet in church. They must take a subordinate place. If they want to find out anything they should ask their husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church. … A man ought not to wear anything on his head in church, for he is the image of God and reflects God’s glory, while woman is a reflection of man’s glory. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man. That is why she ought to wear upon her head something to symbolize her subjection.5
This was the Judaic and Greek view of woman, not the Roman; perhaps it represented a reaction against the license into which some women had debased their growing liberty. We may believe, from these very fulminations, that despite the lack of jewels and scents, and with the help of veils, Christian women succeeded in being attractive, and exercised their ancient powers in their subtle ways. For unmarried or widowed women the Church found many useful tasks. They were organized as “sisters,” performed works of administration or charity, and created in time the divers orders of those nuns whose cheerful kindliness is the noblest embodiment of Christianity.
Lucian, about 160, described “those imbeciles,” the Christians, as “disdaining things terrestrial, and holding these as belonging to all in common.”6 A generation later Tertullian declared that “we” (Christians) “have all things in common except our wives,” and added, with his characteristic bite: “at that point we dissolve our partnership, precisely where the rest of men make it effective.”7 We should not take these statements literally; as another passage in Tertullian8 suggests, this communism meant merely that each Christian would contribute according to his means to the congregation’s common fund. The expectation of an early end to the existing order of things doubtless facilitated giving; the richer members may have been persuaded that they must not let the Last Judgment surprise them in the arms of Mammon. Some early Christians agreed with the Essenes that the prosperous man who does not share his surplus is a thief.9 James, “brother of the Lord,” attacked wealth with words of revolutionary bitterness:
Come, now, you rich people, weep aloud and howl over the miseries that shall overtake you! Your wealth has rotted, your clothes are moth-eaten, your gold and silver are rusted . . . and their rust will eat into your very flesh, for you have stored up fire for the last days. The wages you have withheld from the laborers who have reaped your harvests cry aloud, and their cries have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts. . . . Has not God chosen the world’s poor to possess the Kingdom?10
In that Kingdom, he adds, the rich will wither like flowers under a scorching sun.11
An element of communism entered into the custom of the common meal. As the Greek and Roman associations had met on occasion to dine together, so the early Christians gathered frequently in the agapé or love feast, usually on a Sabbath evening. The dinner began and ended with prayer and scriptural readings, and the bread and wine were blessed by the priest. The faithful appear to have believed that the bread and wine were, or represented, the body and blood of Christ;12 the worshipers of Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras had entertained like beliefs at the banquets where they ate the magic embodiments or symbols of their gods.13 The final ritual of the agapé was the “kiss of love.” In some congregations this was given only by men to men, and by women to women; in others this hard restriction was not enforced. Many participants discovered an untheological delight in the pleasant ceremony; and Tertullian and others denounced it as having led to sexual indulgences.14 The Church recommended that the lips should not be opened in kissing, and that the kiss should not be repeated if it gave pleasure.15 In the third century the agapé gradually disappeared.
Despite such episodes, and the diatribes of preachers calling their congregations to perfection, we may accept the old belief that the morals of the early Christians were a reproving example to the pagan world. After the weakening of the ancient faiths had removed their frail support from the moral life, and the attempt of Stoicism at an almost natural ethic had failed with all but the best of men, a new supernatural ethic accomplished, at whatever cost to the free and dissolvent intellect, the task of regulating the jungle instincts of man into a viable morality. The hope of the coming Kingdom carried with it belief in a Judge who saw every act, knew man’s every thought, and could not be eluded or deceived. To this divine surveillance was added mutual scrutiny: in these little groups sin could with difficulty find a hiding place; and the community publicly reprimanded those members who had violated the new moral code with insufficient secrecy. Abortion and infanticide, which were decimating pagan society, were forbidden to Christians as the equivalents of murder;16 in many instances Christians rescued exposed infants, baptized them, and brought them up with the aid of the community fund.17 The Church forbade with less success the attendance of Christians at the theater or the public games, and their participation in the festivities of pagan holidays.18 In general, Christianity continued and exaggerated the moral sternness of the embattled Jews. Celibacy and virginity were recommended as ideal; marriage was tolerated only as a check on promiscuity and as a ridiculous means of continuing the race, but husband and wife were encouraged to refrain from sexual relations.19 Divorce was allowed only when a pagan wished to annul a marriage with a convert. The remarriage of widows or widowers was discountenanced, and homosexual practices were condemned with an earnestness rare in antiquity. “So far as sex is concerned,” said Tertullian, “the Christian is content with the woman.”20
Much of this difficult code was predicated on the early return of Christ. As that hope faded, the voice of the flesh rose again, and Christian morals were relaxed; an anonymous pamphlet. The Shepherd of Hermas (ca. 110), inveighed against the reappearance, among Christians, of avarice, dishonesty, rouge, dyed hair, painted eyelids, drunkenness, and adultery.21 Nevertheless, the general picture of Christian morals in this period is one of piety, mutual loyalty, marital fidelity, and a quiet happiness in the possession of a confident faith. The younger Pliny was compelled to report to Trajan that the Christians led peaceful and exemplary lives.22 Galen described them as “so far advanced in self-discipline and . . . intense desire to attain moral excellence that they are in no way inferior to true philosophers.”23 The sense of sin took on a new intensity with the belief that all mankind had been tainted by Adam’s fall, and that soon the world would end in a judgment of eternal punishment or reward. Many Christians were absorbed in the effort to come clean to that dread assize; they saw a lure of Satan in every pleasure of the senses, denounced the “world and the flesh,” and sought to subdue desire with fasts and varied chastisements. They looked with suspicion upon music, white bread, foreign wines, warm baths, or shaving the beard—which seemed to flout the evident will of God.24 Even for the ordinary Christian, life took on a more somber tint than paganism had ever given it except in the occasional “apotropaic” appeasement of subterranean deities. The serious temper of the Jewish Sabbath was transferred to the Christian Sunday that replaced it in the second century.
On that dies Domini, or Lord’s Day, the Christians assembled for their weekly ritual. Their clergy read from the Scriptures, led them in prayer, and preached sermons of doctrinal instruction, moral exhortation, and sectarian controversy. In the early days members of the congregation, especially women, were allowed to “prophesy”—i.e., to “speak forth,” in trance or ecstasy, words to which meaning could be given only by pious interpretation. When these performances conduced to ritual fever and theological chaos, the Church discouraged and finally suppressed them. At every step the clergy found itself obliged not to generate superstition, but to control it.
By the close of the second century these weekly ceremonies had taken the form of the Christian Mass. Based partly on the Judaic Temple service, partly on Greek mystery rituals of purification, vicarious sacrifice, and participation, through communion, in the death-overcoming powers of the deity, the Mass grew slowly into a rich congeries of prayers, psalms, readings, sermon, antiphonal recitations, and, above all, that symbolic atoning sacrifice of the “Lamb of God” which replaced, in Christianity, the bloody offerings of older faiths. The bread and wine which these cults had considered as gifts placed upon the altar before the god were now conceived as changed by the priestly act of consecration into the body and blood of Christ, and were presented to God as a repetition of the self-immolation of Jesus on the cross. Then, in an intense and moving ceremony, the worshipers partook of the very life and substance of their Saviour. It was a conception long sanctified by time; the pagan mind needed no schooling to receive it; by embodying it in the “mystery of the Mass,” Christianity became the last and greatest of the mystery religions. It was a custom lowly in origin25 and beautiful in development; its adoption was part of the profound wisdom with which the Church adjusted itself to the symbols of the age and the needs of her people; no other ceremony could have so heartened the essentially solitary soul, or so strengthened it to face a hostile world.I
The eucharist, or “blessing” of the bread and wine, was one of the seven Christian “sacraments”—sacred rituals believed to convey divine grace. Here, too, the Church used the poetry of symbols to console and dignify the life of man, to renew at each step in the human odyssey the fortifying touch of deity. In the first century we find only three ceremonies conceived of as sacraments—baptism, communion, and holy orders; but already, in the customs of the congregations, the germs of the rest were present. It was apparently the practice of the early Christians to add to baptism an “imposition of hands,” whereby the apostle or priest introduced the Holy Spirit into the believer;28 in the course of time this action was separated from baptism and became the sacrament of confirmation.29 As the baptism of adults was gradually replaced by the baptism of infants, men felt the need of some later spiritual cleansing; public acknowledgment of sin passed into private confession to the priest, who claimed to have received from the apostles or their episcopal successors the right to “bind and loose”—to impose penances and pardon sins.30 The sacrament of penance was an institution capable of abuse through the ease of forgiveness; but it gave the sinner strength to reform, and spared anxious souls the neuroses of remorse. In these centuries marriage was still a civil ceremony; but by adding and requiring her sanction the Church lifted it from the level of a passing contract to the sanctity of an inviolable vow. By the year 200 the laying on of hands took the added form of “holy orders,” by which the bishops assumed the exclusive right to ordain priests capable of administering the sacraments validly. Finally the Church derived from the Epistle of James (v, 14) the sacrament of “extreme unction,” or last blessing, by which the priest anointed the sense organs and extremities of a dying Christian, cleansed him again of sin, and prepared him to meet his God. It would be the shallowest folly to judge these ceremonies in terms of their literal claims; in terms of human encouragement and inspiration they were the wisest medicaments of the soul.
Christian burial was the culminating honor of the Christian life. Since the new faith proclaimed the resurrection of the body as well as of the soul, every care was taken of the dead; a priest officiated at the interment, and each corpse received an individual tomb. About the year 100 the Christians of Rome, following Syrian and Etruscan traditions, began to bury their dead in catacombs—probably not for concealment but for the economy of space and expense. Workmen dug long subterranean passages at various levels, and the dead were laid in superimposed crypts along the sides of these galleries. Pagans and Jews practiced the same method, perhaps as a convenience for burial societies. Some of the passages seem purposely devious, and suggest their use as hiding places in persecutions. After the triumph of Christianity the custom of catacomb burial died out; the crypts became objects of veneration and pilgrimage; by the ninth century they had been blocked up and forgotten, and only accident discovered them in 1578.
What remains of early Christian art is for the most part preserved in the frescoes and reliefs of the catacombs. Here, about 180, appear the symbols that were to be so prominent in Christianity: the dove, representing the soul freed from the prison of this life; the phoenix, rising out of the ashes of death; the palm branch, announcing victory; the olive branch, offering peace; and the fish, chosen because the Greek word for it, i-ch-th-u-s, formed the initials of the phrase lesous Christos theou uios soter—“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.” Here also is the famous theme of the Good Shepherd, frankly modeled on a Tanagra statue of Mercury carrying a goat. Occasionally these designs catch a certain Pompeian grace, as in the flowers, vines, and birds that decorated the ceiling of St. Domitilla’s tomb; usually they are the undistinguished work of minor craftsmen corrupting with Oriental obscurity the clearness of classic line. Christianity was in these centuries so absorbed in the other world that it had little interest in adorning this one. It continued the Judaic aversion to statuary, confused imagery with idolatry, and condemned sculpture and painting as too often glorying in the nude; consequently, as Christianity grew, plastic art declined. Mosaic was more popular; the walls and floors of basilicas and baptistries were inlaid with tesselated foliage and flowers, the Paschal Lamb, and pictures from the Testaments. Similar scenes were carved in rough relief on sarcophagi. Meanwhile architects were adapting the Greco-Roman basilica to the needs of Christian worship. The small temples that had housed the pagan gods could offer no models for churches designed to enclose whole congregations; the spacious nave and aisles of the basilica lent themselves to this purpose, and its apse seemed naturally destined to become the sanctuary. In these new shrines Christian music inherited diffidently the Greek notation, modes, and scales. Many theologians frowned upon the singing of women in church, or, indeed, in any public place; for a woman’s voice might arouse some profane interest in the ever excitable male.31 Nevertheless, the congregations often expressed in hymns their hope, thanksgiving, and joy; and music began to be one of the fairest adornments and subtlest servants of the Christian faith.
All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, and nations; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ’s victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story, and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming Kingdom, and of endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the insoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace.
So molded to men’s wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness. Nearly every convert, with the ardor of a revolutionary, made himself an office of propaganda. The roads, rivers, and coasts, the trade routes and facilities, of the Empire largely determined the lines of the Church’s growth: eastward from Jerusalem to Damascus, Edessa, Dura, Seleucia, and Ctesiphon; southward through Bostra and Petra into Arabia; westward through Syria into Egypt; northward through Antioch into Asia Minor and Armenia; across the Aegean from Ephesus and Troas to Corinth and Thessalonica; over the Egnatian Way to Dyrrhachium; across the Adriatic to Brundisium, or through Scylla and Charybdis to Puteoli and Rome; through Sicily and Egypt to north Africa; over the Mediterranean or the Alps to Spain and Gaul, and thence to Britain: slowly the cross followed the fasces, and the Roman eagles made straight the way for Christ. Asia Minor was in these centuries the stronghold of Christianity; by 300 the majority of the population in Ephesus and Smyrna were Christians.32 The new faith fared well in north Africa: Carthage and Hippo became leading centers of Christian learning and dispute; here rose the great Fathers of the Latin Church—Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine; here the Latin text of the Mass, and the first Latin translation of the New Testament, took form. In Rome the Christian community numbered some 100,000 by the end of the third century; it was able to send financial aid to other congregations; long since it had claimed for its bishop the supreme authority in the Church. Altogether we may count a fourth of the population in the East as Christian by 300, and a twentieth in the West. “Men proclaim,” said Tertullian (ca. 200), “that the state is beset with us. Every age, condition, and rank is coming over to us. We are only of yesterday, but already we fill the world.”33