A.D. 381

DURING the mid-370s, Epiphanius, the Nicene Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, compiled his Panarion, ‘a medicine chest’ of remedies against heresies. ‘Able but anti-intellectualist, of wide but ill-digested learning and intransigent zeal for “correct” doctrine, inordinately lacking in judgement, tact and charity, but also inordinately venerated for his force of personality, impressive bearing and rigorous asceticism’, Epiphanius was a scourge of heretics.¹ He had the ability to humiliate the diffident and to draw strength from the prejudices and fears of the credulous. Epiphanius assumed that there had once been a pure faith but that it had been sullied, first of all, of course, by the sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden, but later by Hellenism and Judaism. These had their own heretical offspring; in the case of Hellenism, the followers of Plato, the Stoics, Pythagoras and Epicurus. Epiphanius then recorded no fewer than sixty Christian heresies, many associated with the debates over the Trinity, that emerged after the Incarnation. The Panarion is, in fact, one of the best sources for the diversity of early Christian belief. It also documents the growing obsession with heresy. Originally, the Greek word heiresis had meant a choice, in particular the choice of the school of philosophy an individual may have elected to follow. Now, in Christian terminology, it had come to mean a wilful rejection of orthodoxy, and any heretic was subject to the threat of eternal hell fire.

The Church had always prided itself on its apostolic tradition, the doctrine that faith had been handed on in pure form from the teachings of Christ through the apostles and on through a succession of bishops. With the declaration of the Nicene Trinity as orthodoxy, it had now to be assumed that this was the doctrine the Church must always have taught. Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604, claimed that even the patriarchs who lived before Moses ‘knew that one Almighty God is the Holy Trinity’, although he had to admit that there was little evidence that they preached about it. So where did this leave those earlier theologians who had openly preached subordinationism?

The greatest missionary of the fourth century was undoubtedly Ulfilas, who converted the Goths to Christianity in the 340s. He also translated the Bible into Gothic, inventing an alphabet for the purpose. At the time, subordinationism, as later reflected in the Homoian creed of 360, was the dominant belief in the empire, and it was passed on by Ulfilas, himself a convinced subordinationist, to the Goths, remaining a symbol of their identity after it was rejected by the rest of the empire in 381. Thus Ulfilas could never be accorded sainthood because his beliefs had now become heretical. Sainthood was now the reward for correct belief as such, not saintliness in the conventional sense of the word.

A more serious case was that of the third-century theologian Origen (c. 184-254). Born in Alexandria of Christian parents, Origen committed himself to a life of pastoral care and study after the traumatic experience of seeing his father martyred. Although he himself believed in the ideal of celibacy, he accepted sex as a gift of God - not as an instrument of demonic possession, as some of his contemporaries did - so long as it was confined to the needs of procreation. He also believed that couples should be able to remarry after divorce on the grounds that confining their sexuality to a new marriage was a lesser evil than the alternatives. For Origen, the power of God was tempered by his readiness to forgive, and he startled his followers by arguing that Satan was not evil by nature but only because he willed himself to be evil; this will could be overcome by the forgiveness of God. While Origen believed in hell, it was only as a temporary corrective measure before the sinner was reunited with God. It made no sense, he said, to talk of a powerful and forgiving God who could be so easily thwarted by humans that he had to respond with their permanent rejection.²

Origen towered above his contemporaries for the range and originality of his thinking and his optimistic outlook on life. To many he was an intellectual hero: Gregory of Nazianzus believed that he was the greatest mind in Christian history.³ Eusebius of Caesarea, the biographer of Constantine, gave him a central place in his history of the Church, and Jerome described him in his work Famous Men as ‘an immortal genius’.⁴ His output was prodigious and his extensive library remained in Caesarea (in Palestine), where he lived for the last twelve years of his life, for his admirers such as Gregory of Nazianzus to exploit.

Origen was the first major exegetist, or interpreter, of the Bible. In one of the finest intellectual achievements of the third century, he began by putting together the different Greek versions of the Old Testament so that discrepancies could be ironed out. (He always believed that the Hebrew text was superior to the Septuagint, its Greek translation; he was one of the very few Christians with the learning to read it.) In his comments on the biblical texts, Origen championed the use of allegory; he accepted that a literal reading of the text must have some value, but greater study and prayer would always lead to a deeper moral and spiritual meaning. The story of Adam and Eve, for instance, could be interpreted symbolically as the story of the fall of mankind from grace. When they left the Garden of Eden in ‘coats of skin’, this should be seen as an allegory for their taking on material bodies. This creative interpretation could override textual problems, as can be seen in Origen’s treatment of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple. The synoptic gospels all place this episode just before the Passion; John, in contrast, includes it early in his account of Jesus’ ministry. Origen accepts that John is historically inaccurate but justified in his revised chronology because he is aiming to show that the Church needed purification: it is ‘a spiritual truth in historical falsehood’.⁵ With regard to the lack of references in the gospels to Jesus’ divinity, Origen argued that a literal reading certainly presented Jesus as human but that his divinity within would be revealed by prayerful study of the texts, which in itself would be aided by the divine Word. He scorned those who argued for a more literal interpretation of the Bible by suggesting, for instance, that one should believe that God had physical attributes, such as eyes and hands, as the Old Testament accounts attested. For Origen, God was on a plane far above the human world. He also argued that one should not take the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgement at face value. It is a sign of his intellectual range that he drew on the works of the finest medical mind of the second century AD, the pagan Galen, to argue that the human body is always in flux and after death takes on a new ethereal form; it is in that form that it will rise at the Last Judgement.⁶ This sophisticated theology won Origen many admirers among the more intellectual Christian thinkers. He made it possible for there to be genuine arguments over the meaning of texts and so helped preserve the possibilities of freedom of debate within theology. But he also had his critics. More conservative minds were unsettled by his creative scholarship and ability to think originally about theological issues. ‘The stupidity of some Christians is heavier than the sand of the sea’ was Origen’s riposte.⁷

For Origen, God was pure spirit, beyond time and space, and the very source of goodness. He had created a large number of souls who were endowed with reason and free will. Some of these, however, had drifted away from him. Those who remained close to the Creator might be ensouled as angels or stars; those who drifted further might appear in human bodies. Origen did not despise the material world: God had created it to provide a home for fallen souls before they were reunited with him. Unlike Augustine, who was to teach that man was so heavily weighted with sin that he could never regain the grace of God through his own efforts, Origen believed that the soul had powers of reason and free will that it could harness to move towards God. In this he was drawing on Plato’s concept of an ascent through reasoned thought to a fuller understanding of the Forms and ‘the Good’.

Epiphanius had been born in Palestine, and in 393, now an old man, he returned home to extirpate the Origenist heretics he believed flourished there. His chief target was the worldly and confident Bishop of Jerusalem, John, who was reputed to have subordinationist sympathies, but he started his campaign by sending a band of monks to confront two of the most important intellectual figures of the region. The scholar Jerome lived in a monastery in Bethlehem, where he practised a rigid asceticism and worked on his Latin translation of the Bible; Rufinus, less ascetic and more measured in his scholarship, was settled in a monastery on the Mount of Olives. The two men had been friends since childhood and both were known for their support of Origen. Jerome’s use of Origen’s commentaries on the Bible was such that scholars have been able to reconstruct lost works of Origen from Jerome’s plagiarism.⁸ Rufinus was more of an independent scholar, and had studied the master for six years under Didymus the Blind, the famous scholar of Alexandria, who also admired Origen.

When Epiphanius’ monks arrived, Rufinus barred the gates of the monastery to them and told them that they would be driven off with cudgels if they persisted in trying to enter. The welcome the rebuffed monks received from Jerome was very different. An isolated and often embittered man, Jerome had come to Bethlehem to work on his translation of the scriptures after his obsession with sexual asceticism had aroused such distaste that he had been forced to leave Rome. (He had been secretary there to Pope Damasus in the 380s.) He was known for his vituperative responses to anyone who challenged his ideas. The more notorious examples of his invective that have survived include an assault on one Jovinian, who had been unwise enough to argue that the married state was preferable to the celibate, and on a certain Vigilantius, who had deplored the credulity with which relics were venerated.

It therefore comes as a surprise that when Epiphanius’ monks were ushered in, Jerome agreed at once that he would abjure Origen’s works. It was a climbdown that is hard to explain. Jerome had travelled with Epiphanius to Rome on one occasion, and there may have been a friendship he did not wish to jeopardise; or he may have distinguished between Origen’s exegesis, which he himself had plagiarised, and Origen’s dogma, which he was ready to reject. Yet one feels that the answer lies somewhere in Jerome’s desperate insecurity and emotional isolation. He simply could not risk being labelled unorthodox and so was all too ready to submit to his visitors’ bullying

In September 393, Epiphanius himself arrived in Jerusalem for the so-called Dedication Festival, which drew in monks and bishops from all over the Christian world. When John allowed him to preach, the old man launched into an abusive attack on Origen which was clearly aimed at the Bishop of Jerusalem. Jerome was also there, and his account describes John and his clergy grinning like dogs, scratching their heads, nodding to each other and referring to Epiphanius as a silly old man.⁹ Eventually John sent his archdeacon to shut him up. Epiphanius had gone far beyond the bounds of good behaviour in using a host cathedral to denounce its bishop. John retaliated a few days later by preaching a sermon in which he undermined his visitor by setting out his own Christian faith in such an orthodox fashion that Epiphanius had to accept that there was nothing heretical in it. This seems to have deflated Epiphanius, and he sought sanctuary with Jerome before retiring to a monastery at Besanduc, near his birthplace, that he had founded many years before. His attack on John had failed, but he had managed to push Jerome and the Bishop of Jerusalem into opposing camps.

One result was that Jerome’s monastery at Bethlehem refused to have anything to do with the local clergy who remained loyal to John. At Besanduc, Epiphanius received a visit from Jerome’s brother Paulinus; astonishingly, he seized the man and consecrated him as a priest to serve Jerome’s monastery in Bethlehem. This was an outrageous intrusion on John’s prerogatives and John retaliated by excommunicating the members of Jerome’s community, forbidding any contact between them and the diocese’s clergy. Epiphanius returned to Cyprus, from where he wrote a furious letter to John saying he should have been only too glad to have had extra clergy found for him and demanding that he repudiate the heretical views of Origen, which he listed in detail. John, realising by now that he was dealing with someone who was seriously deranged, wisely refused to reply. Not to be deterred, Epiphanius sent copies of his letter to all the Palestinian monasteries, urging them to sever their ties with John. Epiphanius had now succeeded in creating a state of civil war in John’s diocese.

If Epiphanius lacked any sense of judgement, Jerome proved as bad. His monastery too had received a copy of Epiphanius’ letter to John, which was written in Greek. One of Jerome’s guests, Eusebius, from Cremona in Italy, could not speak the language and Jerome offered to provide him with a Latin translation, in which he embellished the letter to make it sound even more offensive than it was. Jerome’s abusive comments littered the margins. In a farcical turn of events, the translated letter then somehow disappeared from Eusebius’ desk and found its way back to John and Rufinus, who spotted the embellishments to the translation. Anxious to protect his own reputation in the west, where he feared he would now be regarded as a heretic, John let his supporters in Rome know what Jerome had done. Jerome replied with the weak argument that translators should always seek out the sense of a work rather than just make a literal translation, and this was no more than he had done.

It was to his credit that John realised that a compromise had to be found. He suggested that Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, should mediate. The first attempt was disastrous, because Theophilus sent as his representative one Isidore, a priest who had already written to John and Rufinus supporting their stand against Jerome. A leaked copy of the letter had reached Jerome, and he refused to accept its author as a conciliator. Theophilus persisted. A letter John sent him showed that the bishop was eager to defuse the issue, and a carefully worded letter sent by Theophilus to Jerome avoided placing any blame on him. Just as Christ had been humble and the scriptures had preached brotherly love, so too Jerome should seek peace with his bishop. Jerome’s reply is another illustration of his intense social isolation. Grateful for the attention, he submitted to Theophilus’ request. ‘Let him [John] be as he used to be when he loved me of his own choice... If he shows himself like that, gladly I hold out my hands and stretch my arms to him. He will have in me a friend and a kinsman, and will find that in Christ I am as submissive to him as to all my Christian brothers.’¹⁰ It is one of the few moments when one feels compassion for the cantankerous old scholar. Some of the details of the reconciliation that followed are obscure, but it did take place. Paulinus was welcomed as a member of John’s clergy and the excommunication was lifted from Jerome’s monastery. Jerome and Epiphanius no longer attacked John for Origenist heresy.

This conflict had only occurred because an orthodoxy had been proclaimed to which earlier thinkers, long since dead, were now expected to conform. An opening had been provided for unscrupulous men such as Epiphanius to exploit to the confusion and upset of all. With the rejection of Origen, one was also, of course, rejecting the tradition of free and creative scholarship of which he was such an excellent example. If Epiphanius had not intervened, scholars would have been able to continue to study Origen’s works, drawing out their treasures and ignoring what they felt unable to support, just as any scholar does of his forebears. Although Origen continued to find his supporters, he was finally condemned as a heretic at the Council of Constantinople in 553.¹¹

If Origen had been restored to the status he deserved, then so might have been his belief that a forgiving Father would hardly condemn human beings to eternal hell fire. Greek and Roman religion placed relatively little emphasis on the afterlife; it was concerned with life in the here and now. This did not preclude speculation on whether the soul survived as an independent entity, as Plato had argued, or a discussion on the nature of the underworld (Hades), but Christians gave far greater prominence to life after death.¹² Their powerful emphasis on reward or punishment was a significant development. There were of course references in the gospels to suffering in the hereafter for those who rejected God, but early Christians had rarely mentioned hell. Instead they concentrated on the rewards of their faith in Christ. According to The Shepherd of the Roman Hermas, written in about AD 140, all Christians would go straight to heaven. Others, such as Tertullian, writing some fifty years later, distinguished between martyrs, who would be rewarded in heaven, and the rest, who would remain in a waiting place underground until the Last Judgement. There are only very few references in other texts to a hell where burning takes place, and at the time Origen was writing, ideas of the afterlife were still centred on rewards for Christians rather than punishment.¹³

An important development is recorded in On Mortality, written by Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, in 252. Plague had broken out in Carthage and Cyprian makes the astonishing assertion that it should be welcomed because Jews and pagans would now be thrown into hell more quickly while Christians would likewise be speeded to heaven. This can be seen as a seminal moment when, in contrast to earlier Greek tradition, disease was no longer regarded as something to be approached through observation and analysis in the hope of a cure, but rather something to be placed in the wider context of divine reward or punishment for one’s beliefs.¹⁴ On Mortality also makes clear that hell is now seen to be a place where non-Christians will go as a matter of course.

In the fourth century, the age of mass conversion and major controversy, the belief emerges that even Christians can be sent to hell. In the bitter debates over the Trinity, each side regularly condemned the other to everlasting punishment - as Palladius did for Ambrose in the passage already quoted (p. 110). But the most ominous shift in emphasis took place during the long life of Augustine (354-430). At the start of his theological development, when he still believed in free will and reason, Augustine argued that it was only through a conscious rejection of God that anyone could be condemned to hell. But later, when his concept of original sin gripped his ever more pessimistic imagination, he taught that no one could escape the wrath of God unless God chose to save them; if God’s grace was not forthcoming, they would surely burn eternally. In the last chapters of his City of God (completed before his death in 430), Augustine seems to revel in the punitive and unforgiving nature of his Creator: ‘The whole of mankind is a “condemned lump”; for he who committed the first sin [Adam] was punished, and along with him all the stock which had its roots in him. The result is that there is no escape for anyone from this justly deserved punishment, except by merciful and undeserved [sic] grace; and mankind is divided between those in whom the power of merciful grace is demonstrated, and those in whom is shown the might of just retribution.’ He goes on to suggest that ‘there are many more condemned by [divine] vengeance than are released by mercy’. In other words, the majority of humankind is destined to burn in hell.¹⁵ Augustine could provide little evidence in favour of this bleak vision, but it was accepted by the Church almost without debate and became embedded in orthodox Catholic belief for centuries to come.

The condemnation of Origen was thus a profound loss to Christianity. Not only did Augustine’s extreme theology make nonsense of the concept of a loving and forgiving God, but the threat of hell was now used to manipulate obedience. In the tortuous theological discussions of the fourth and fifth centuries, when the boundaries of orthodoxy were constantly shifting, each side was ready to exploit their opponents’ fears. Theodosius was shrewd enough to include the threat of divine punishment for those who defied his decrees. But no free debate can take place if the participants risk being condemned to eternal suffering for suggesting ideas that Church or state might then denounce as heretical.¹⁶