The Story of Christianity

by David Bentley Hart

Above all, Christ gave imaginative shape and dimensions to the Kingdom he proclaimed by requiring that his followers forego vengeance, bear the burdens of others, forgive debts, share their goods with the poor, and love their enemies, and by forbidding them from passing judgment on others for their sins. He also insisted that his disciples keep company with the most despised members of society, including even tax collectors, Samaritans and harlots.

By his death, Christians believed, Christ had paid a ransom that redeemed all of humanity from bondage in the household of death. In later centuries, especially in some of the theology of the Western churches, this language of ‘ransom’ would sometimes be confused with the idea of a price paid to God as the due penalty for human guilt. But in the New Testament, and in the doctrines of the early Church, the metaphor was more properly understood as referring to the fee necessary to buy the freedom of slaves from a slaveholder (in this case, death and the devil).

This, then, appears to be the Gospel’s final word upon the new life that is given at Easter: that with it comes the possibility of seemingly impossible reconciliation, the healing of wounds that normally could never be healed, and the hope of beginning anew precisely when all hope would seem to have been extinguished.

Without question, the greatest city of the ancient Mediterranean world was the Egyptian city of Alexandria, founded in 332 bc by Alexander the Great and ruled by the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies from the time of Alexander’s death in 323 bc to the death of the last Ptolemy, Cleopatra VII, in 30 BC, when Egypt was absorbed into the Roman empire. For many centuries, it was the principal home of Hellenistic science and scholarship, a city where Pagan, Jewish and Christian intellectual culture flourished, and where ideas from India, Persia, Africa and Europe ceaselessly intermingled. It was also the most violent city of its age.

It is not an exaggeration to say also that Augustine bequeathed to later Western theology almost the entirety of its conceptual grammar, its principal terms and distinctions and its governing themes. In his later years, he established a pattern of theological reflection on sin and on the relation between divine grace and human freedom that definitively shaped all subsequent Western theology. In a very real sense, Western Christianity is Augustinian Christianity.

Had it not been for the monastic institutions established by Benedict and others, with their libraries and scriptoria, the cultural devastation of Western Europe consequent upon the decline of the Western empire would have been complete. As the West was progressively sealed off from the high civilization of the Eastern Christian world, and knowledge of Greek became scarce in the West, the only institution that could boast any continuity with the culture of antiquity was the Church. In the sixth century, the Christian philosopher Boethius (c.475–524) undertook to shore up such fragments as he could against the darkness by producing translations of all of Plato and Aristotle, as well as commentaries upon them, and by preparing manuals of music, mathematics, geometry and astronomy. His grand project, however, was only partially complete when it was rather abruptly curtailed by his execution at the hands of the Ostrogoth king of Italy, Theodoric (d.526), on spurious charges. Thereafter, it was almost exclusively the labour of monks that preserved anything of classical Western literature and learning from the general ruin.

The great dogmatic debate of the fourth century concerned the divinity of Christ; the great dogmatic debate of the fifth century (and after) concerned his humanity. Or, rather, it concerned the unity of his Person, and the relation of the divine to the human within that unity. And this, as it happened, would prove to be the most contentious doctrinal dispute in Christian history prior to the Reformation, and the most divisive. In addition to giving rise to a host of newer, more precise theological formulae, the ultimate effect of these ‘Christological controversies’ was a fragmented Church.

By the beginning of the sixth century, the Roman West was no more. Of Latin imperial civilization there now remained only a few moribund institutions, a few noble houses, an indigenous peasantry and an occasionally beleaguered Church. Over the course of the sixth century, however, much of the ancient Christian Roman world was briefly reunited – and even to a certain extent revitalized – through the efforts of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (483–565) and his formidable wife Theodora (c.497–548).

We often tend to think of ancient and medieval Christendom principally as Roman and Byzantine (or Catholic and Orthodox) with only a few scattered ‘Oriental’ communions at the margins. But, in the early Middle Ages, the largest (or, to be more precise, most widespread) Christian communion in the world was the Syrian Nestorian Church, also called the East Syrian or Assyrian Church, or (more simply) the ‘Church of the East’.

Islam is not merely a spiritual philosophy or ethical teaching, but a political order as well. There is no division between religion and state in Islamic thought, and Muhammad was not only a prophet, but a ruler. Thus, upon his death, it was necessary to find a successor (in Arabic, a caliph): not, of course, to his prophetic office, which was unique, but to his role as sovereign of the umma (the Islamic community).

Even as the Abbasid dynasty was presiding over the first great flourishing of Islamic civilization, a new empire was arising in the Christian West – one that would not endure nearly so long as the caliphate, perhaps, but that would lay the foundation for the political culture, laws, customs and achievements of western medieval Christendom. This was the empire of the Franks, the Carolingian empire, so named because its founder was the Frankish king Karl der Grosse (c.742–814): in English, Charles the Great; in Latin, Carolus Magnus; in the French of his time, Charlemagne. At its height, the Carolingian empire embraced almost all of continental western European Christendom, from west of the Pyrenees to east of Bavaria (as far as Moravia, if one includes tributary nations), and from Rome to the north of Saxony.

By the 11th century, the Byzantine and Latin halves of the Catholic world were to all intents and purposes separate entities, not only politically and culturally, but also ecclesiastically. For centuries the Eastern and Western Churches had been drifting ever farther apart, and behaving not simply as two rites within a single communion, but as rivals to each other – even though formally they still belonged to one Church. The ‘official’ date of the Great Schism that divided the ancient Catholic Church into the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches is 1054: in that year, full communion between the sees of Constantinople and Rome was broken and – perhaps somewhat unexpectedly – never again restored. That said, communion between the Eastern and Western Churches was not entirely abrogated until much later, and then only by a very gradual process.

Viewed as a whole, the Crusades were a sporadic undertaking, and largely pointless. Their chief function, it sometimes seemed, was to provide an outlet – in an age when the population of Western Europe had drastically increased – for the energies of the fading warrior caste of the last Western barbarians. They did, however, rather contrary to the intentions of the crusaders, establish a generally stable – if intermittently bloody – cultural and mercantile contact between Western Christendom and the civilizations of the East, both Byzantine and Islamic. This allowed for a certain degree of fruitful cultural and intellectual interaction between East and West.

Between 476 and 800, no one in the West could lay claim to the imperial title for himself. The only emperor there was resided in Constantinople, and his rule in the West – outside of the exarchates established under Justinian – was acknowledged only as a kind of legal formality (if it was recognized at all). For a thousand years, however, from 800 to 1806, the imperial dignity of Christian Rome was claimed by a single institution in the West: the Holy Roman Empire (which was never Roman, not always an empire and only rarely holy).

The Roman empire of the West came to an end in the fifth century; but the Roman empire – as a continuous legal, cultural and political institution – persisted in the East for another millennium, and its capital, the ‘New Rome’ of Constantinople, was the seat of Roman emperors into the age of gunpowder and cannon; the last of them died only four decades before the discovery of the Americas.

From the time of the rise of the Islamic caliphate to the early modern period, Christendom was ever more strictly confined to Europe, and Christianity was largely a European faith, with a few isolated and often beleaguered outposts to the South and East. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, Christianity became a truly global faith, spreading to the South, West and East. In part, this happened by way of colonization of the newly discovered Americas, and in part by way of missions. And among the Christian missionaries of the age, the most remarkable were the Jesuits.

One of those historical myths that enjoy popular currency, even though they cannot survive the scrutiny of serious historical study, is that, at the dawn of the Christian era, there was a thriving Hellenistic scientific culture that Christianity – through some supposed hostility to learning and reason – methodically destroyed; and that this Christian antagonism to science persisted into the early modern period – as is evident from Galileo’s trial in Rome – until the power of the Church was at last broken, and secular faculties of science began to appear. This story is impossible to reconcile with the historical evidence, ancient, Medieval, or modern. It misrepresents the characters both of Hellenistic science and of early Christianity, as well as that of Medieval intellectual culture; and it entirely belies the fascinating reality that, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics unchallenged since the days of Aristotle.

The rise and fall of Deism was part of that larger cultural movement traditionally called the ‘Enlightenment’, the chief tenet of which was that human reason possesses the power not only to penetrate to the natural laws underlying the world, but to determine the nature of a just society, to advance the cause of human freedom, to discover the rational basis of morality and to instill moral behaviour in individuals and nations.