Early Christianity and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo

By John Rao, D. Phil. Oxon.

2023 marks the conclusion of the lectures on Church History that I have been delivering for the Roman Forum in New York City each September to May for the past thirty-one years. Although I am not yet certain what will replace our historical series, I do have a title for this year’s last talk: “My End is My Beginning.” Sadly, I find that title all too appropriate, given that there are so many problems that the Church faces in our own day that parallel those that confronted her in her infancy in the late ancient world. Prominent among such parallel problems is the unification of the contemporary enemies of the Christian Faith in an alliance that is a familiar imitation of the one that wished to crush her from the outset: a union that I like to call “The Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.”

Just as in our own day, recruits for enlistment in this confederation were all too numerous in the infancy of Christianity. Just as in our own day, the ancient prototype of this pestiferous league also had its “media experts,” skilled in developing propaganda campaigns for the anti-Christian cause and rousing the troops to action. Finally, just as in our own day, the arguments of the anti-Christian word merchants actually worked to harm the cause they claimed to serve. For it was only through the construction of the Social Kingship of Christ that the GCSQ and its media guides loathed that the treasures of the civilization of the ancient world might not only be preserved, but also purified of their imperfections and brought to shine in their greatest splendor.

Let us begin this tripartite discussion of our early Christian mirror image by asking who it was that formed its Grand Coalition of the Status Quo. First and foremost, it included all of those endlessly varied religious and social forces in the Roman Empire that proclaimed themselves the defenders of what was solidly rooted in their particular traditions, and therefore spiritually, intellectually, and culturally “sound”—a task that they argued the new, upstart, Christian religion could not possibly undertake.

What I am talking about here are people who would not tolerate the tiniest criticism or disturbance from any source whatsoever that might rock the boat of the “business as usual” beliefs and behavior of their culture: even if that boat-rocking might actually be for the ultimate perfection of the tradition they claimed to love. I will call these stubborn people “mere conservatives” so as to distinguish them from others with an understandable concern for what they best knew and cherished. Perhaps the greatest crime of the new religion in the eyes of all such mere conservatives was its proclamation of a universal mission overriding all narrow parochial traditions for the sake of a purification that they considered to be totally unnecessary. Such a cosmopolitan purgation struck at both pagan Gentile as well as post-Temple Jewish rabbinic sensibilities in different but equally flawed fashions.

Paganism inherently had room for as many natural gods as human spirits might imagine. Moreover, defenders of Roman imperial religious pluralism—just as those of contemporary globalist pluralism—saw that “freedom” for the worship of this superabundance of gods had as one of its chief consequences the “checking and balancing” of their public influence. This then guaranteed that all of the local, ethnic, spiritual “clubhouses” in which the “religious liberty” to worship particular gods was practiced were actually incapable of contesting the overall political designs of the Empire.

A universal religion, one with a hierarchal structure analogous to that of the Empire and claiming to know what was best for the State to boot, was a monstrous competitor for the practical day-to-day exercise of power. That power was the only thing that really counted for the defenders of what was obviously a naturalist “faith.” Educated gentlemen concerned for the proper performance of the pagan rituals handed down by tradition were convinced that these should be kept in their place and not translated into any immoderate religious passion or exaggerated love for their deeper teaching disturbing to the secular “bottom line” from which they benefited.

Meanwhile, panicked post-Temple Judaism was lived out and practiced throughout the diaspora in precisely such a clubhouse atmosphere. Its rabbinic leaders were horrified by a critical Christian cosmopolitanism evoking all too clearly the prophetic teachings that were nevertheless an integral part of the full Jewish tradition; teachings that had had significant mainstream following before the destruction of the Temple. Allowing an upstart Christianity to survive might indeed lead Jews to the conclusion that the new religion actually did perfect a vision of the faith of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses that was really only half complete. The Coalition of mere conservatives therefore gained their full support.

Henry David Thoreau is by no means a hero of mine, but his comment regarding most men leading lives of quiet desperation is right on target. Christ was obviously moved by the thought of these “sheep without a shepherd.” Still, due to the “mystery of iniquity,” most of the men and women composing that unfortunate flock have repeatedly offered a deeply rooted resistance to unexpected troubling of their commitment to their unexamined, sin-driven, dead end routine. They, too, were natural founding members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo alongside the mere conservatives. Christian calls to lift up their hearts obviously entailed attempts to awaken them from their dull-witted naturalist slumber. For such audacity the mob’s instinct was to punish these moralizers severely.

Marta Sordi’s The Christians and the Roman Empire (Routledge, 1999) gives many examples of the way in which the above-mentioned defenders of the existing Roman system, alongside those of post-Temple Judaism, were ready to incite the mob to do its worst. These supposed paladins of social order fully encouraged anti-social disorder where the new religion was concerned. They regularly roused the rabble, which they otherwise oppressed, to violent action against Christian troublemakers who criticized precisely the base, “business as usual” vices of the common man that the elite actually loathed. This was understandable, given that the Establishment ensured its day-to-day control of the multitude by allowing the corruption of a “bread and circuses” lifestyle to thrive. Innately vicious as it was, that mob happily responded to this hypocritical upper class stimulus. In fact, it added its own insincerity to the fraud by sanctimoniously parroting tales uncovering the hideous ceremonies and indescribable orgies that the Christian “superstition” supposedly favored–and only the mob really frequented.

It did so under the guidance of the “media experts” who invented such lies in order to unleash the strength of the despised but undeniably useful rabble. Although these early specialists lacked the advanced technology that makes their heirs today still more formidable, our current word merchants have never improved upon the strategies that their “Founding Fathers” employed. I am speaking here of the strategies of the rhetoricians; the men who were trained in and put to practical use the heavily literary-focused educational program cultivated by the upper classes of classical civilization. These rhetoricians formed not only the elites in the educational, legal, and political realms, but also the “stars” of the entertainment world, both high brow and low, as well.

Our problem here lies in the fact that the rhetoricians, under the name of the Sophists—against whom Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had battled in the Greek “Golden Age” of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ—had come to dominate the entire intellectual domain of the Mediterranean world in the years of extensive empire building from the time of Alexander the Great to Augustus Caesar. What that meant was that they succeeded in equating philosophical wisdom—that uplifting Socratic hunt for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—with the purely rhetorical, Sophist vision.

This vision was concerned solely with “whatever works”; with the perfection of what Plato called a “knack” for finding “appropriate explanations” for justifying the unexamined, base, “business as usual” vices of the existing order of things, all of which seemed to “get things done” with great success. They used their “knack” effectively with everyone from the highest luminaries of the imperial aristocracy—who rewarded these word merchants handsomely for their adulation of the Establishment—to the mob—which swallowed a “wisdom” that blessed those “bread and circuses” that, once again, kept them in a debased contentment with their otherwise subservient status.

During the days of the Flavian Emperors—Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian (69-96 A.D.)—the West witnessed the beginning of its first “Classical Renaissance.” By the second and third Christian centuries, the educated population of the Roman world was totally obsessed with the imitation of the earlier Golden Age of Greece. Its “Renaissance” obsession enhanced the position of the rhetoricians in educational life still further, and, along with it, the Sophist pretention to define and “freeze” forever what was and was not considered acceptable in the hunt for the True, the Good, the Beautiful; what was and was not solidly “traditional” and unchangeable in consequence. Moses Hadas gives a full account of this revival, along with its foibles, in two important works: The History of Greek Literature (Columbia, 1950) and The History of Latin Literature (Columbia, 1952).

Sophist rhetoricians of Plato’s day had already found the Socratic insistence upon a universally valid right to question “business as usual” assumptions that threatened to wreak havoc with the project of “appropriately explaining and justifying whatever works”—to be immensely dangerous. Their clash is well recounted in Werner Jaeger’s magnificent study of Greek Civilization entitled Paideia (Oxford, Three Volumes, 1986).

Nevertheless, later “Renaissance” Sophists recognized in the boat-rocking criticism of the Catholic Church something infinitely more deadly. For not only did this Church make a claim to having a universally significant message analogous to that of the Socratics. She was also supremely confident regarding that message, with many of her members— not just one Socrates—ready to die in its defense. She taught, like Christ, “as one having authority”; not as though committed to a parlor sport for sophomores. Worst of all, this tightly knit, hierarchical, empire-wide organization was rhetorically gifted in presenting her “story,” using not just the old tools of the trade, but new, “unorthodox,” and yet highly effective modes of literary and vocal expression of Jewish and Christian origin as well.

Second and third century Sophists took it for granted that anyone with common sense could see that only “haters of mankind” would rock the boat of their peaceable kingdom. Unfortunately, however, mob riots against the Christians had not been sufficient to halt their progress. Horrifying to say, significant numbers of the lower classes in parts of the Empire were even converting to the new Faith. Therefore, Sophists of great educational, legal, and political clout now also called for more organized State action to crush this incomprehensible but growing inanity. Such Sophists included the greatest rhetorical luminary of the times—a man now almost totally unknown: Marcus Fronto (c.100-170), Marcus Aurelius’ tutor and close friend. He stirred up and supported that otherwise admirable emperor’s persecutions, as other word merchants did those of subsequent “mere conservative” rulers such as Decius (149-151) and Valerian (253-260).

But there was another, even more troubling threat to the domination of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo: the conversion not just of some of the rabble to the enemy ranks, but also members of the imperial aristocracy as well. Such conversions actually began from the very outset of Christian evangelization, and might well be explained by the fact that those who possessed every “treasure” that the “only imaginable order of things” could offer knew best just how empty and meaningless its treasury really was.

Knowledge that even members of the imperial aristocracy had been won over to such impassioned madness proved that Christianity was not only detestable in theory and practice, but also a kind of disease that was “catching.” Sophists had discovered already at the time of the Golden Age that there were other weapons in the rhetorical armory beside those of preposterous lies and searing mockery of the “loser” existence to which anyone whose vision of the need for a substantive correction of “whatever works” condemned himself. One such supplementary weapon was the “silent treatment.”

Application of the “silent treatment” was especially effective during the time of the Sophist Renaissance, when the means of communication were much more firmly in the hands of powerful rhetoricians than in the Golden Age. On the one hand, refusal to talk about the very existence of one’s enemies could prevent them from ever entering into the consciousness of as yet uninfected upper class minds. On the other, it also sent out a clear signal to anyone tempted by a religion that was so vile that it could not even be spoken of in polite society that he would be socially liquidated by the word merchants should he join the Christian ranks. It is interesting to note that if we depended on many of the influential rhetoricians of this era for our understanding of the spiritual life of the Empire, we might actually conclude that there was no such phenomenon as Christianity that was active in it at all! In fact, such Sophists tried to conjure away the barbarian threat in the same manner, thus demonstrating that unwillingness to deal with new steps in the dance of life can be deadly to one’s physical as well as spiritual health.

Rhetoricians were also active in encouraging the Great Persecution under Diocletian (284-305), who, in one sense, fulfilled the logic of the mere conservative position by completing and intensifying an already “traditional” divinization of the imperial protector of the unchanging existing order of things, thereby rendering all that this Man-God willed untouchable. But Diocletian’s mere conservatism was not orthodox in its political willfulness. It actually involved making certain radical changes, the most important of which was a completion of the process of replacing the educated imperial aristocracy that had not been able to handle the manifold crises of the mid to late third century by a new military elite. This new elite was ready to follow its commander-in-chief wherever he might lead them: even, by the time of Constantine (306-337), into alliance with the Christian camp itself.

But here, too, the Golden Age had bequeathed Sophists yet another weapon with which to defend naturalist “business as usual”: rhetorical deconstructionism. We have seen that these enemies of the Socratic hunt for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful had already managed to have their own “knack” for protecting uncorrected belief and behavior generally recognized as being the approach of “real philosophy.” Sophists drew the conclusion that the Church, despite her newly established legal status, might also be tamed and diverted from her substantive, universal, corrective mission.

One highly effective way of assuring this was by dulling her awareness of her own emasculation; by telling “a good story with a happy ending” about the full conversion of the Empire to Christian beliefs and action, all the while that its foundation vision and related behavior remained unaltered. Their sabotage could be better promoted through an outwardly enthusiastic embrace of the institutions and the language of their “fellow Christians,” now co-opted for their own quite different purposes. Use of Christian media would block immediate suspicion of their motives, as they, in practice, supported and reinforced the spirit and standard operating procedures of ancient pagan institutions and ingrained custom.

The fact that there were emperors, civil servants, and rhetoricians who could go about their customary work while masquerading as believers, or even actually convincing themselves that they represented a rhetorically enlightened as opposed to a vulgar, mob-like Faith, was, of course, at least partially due to failures of perception or courage on the part of good willed Christian leaders of Church and State. Many of these men desperately wanted to believe the “good story with a happy ending” and could easily identify what seemed to be a number of serious reasons for embracing its false teaching.

We have now reached the third and last part of my argument: the inability of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo under the guidance of its professional propagandists to respond to what is indeed truly valuable in the “conservative” spirit, thereby preserving anything really solid in the traditions that it claimed to defend. For this is a task that only the hated Catholic enemy could undertake successfully. Having already said all that we need to with respect to post-Temple Judaism and its rejection of its own prophetic, universal-minded heritage, let us conclude our study by focusing on who actually does and does not preserve what is best in the classical imperial “tradition” alone.

Robert Wilken, in The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (Yale, 1995), gives us a number of indications of the legitimate concerns of conservative defenders of classical culture. The great physician, Galen (129-200/217) articulated an alarm that Christian adoration of a God freely choosing to create the universe brought an arbitrary “willfulness” into an ordered cosmos that had been freed from the crudities of the most vulgar pagan myths through the work of generations of sophisticated Greco-Roman philosophers. Slightly later, Celsus (second century), in a critique called The True Word that we know primarily through the response of Origen (c. 185-c. 253), expressed a common, understandable complaint that Christians, with their eyes fixed on eternal salvation, could never shoulder their share of the burdens of a public life providing an ordered existence that benefited them as well as everyone else. Finally, returning to the rhetoricians in general, one cannot dismiss as entirely frivolous their literary pride in the achievements of the Greco-Roman world and their fear that the domination of a popular religion dependent upon Hebrew modes of expression and the simplicity of the Gospel language might bury the beautiful written and spoken word forever.

Defenders of Christianity, from the Apologists through the Greek and Latin Fathers, eagerly addressed complaints of this kind, demonstrating both the inner contradictions of the arguments of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo as well as the ever-stronger commitment of the Church to the use of the Classical Tradition she was accused of destroying, and for the successful defense of the Faith itself. Alongside the works cited above, Werner Jaeger’s Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Harvard, 1961) illustrates the historical development of this process. Julian the Apostate, who utilized every Sophist tool, from lies and mockery to deconstructionism in this attempt to reintroduce paganism during his brief reign as emperor (360-363), recognized the importance of this union of Christianity and classical culture, and tried to apply a version of “silent treatment” here as well. He prohibited the Catholic faithful from any involvement in natural educational studies.

In the interest of bringing this lengthy article to a swift conclusion, we can only briefly sketch some of the Christian arguments dealing with this matter below, beginning with Galen’s critique. He misses the heart of the Christian message: the unchanging and innate truth, justice, and love at the center of God’s plan. He also ignores what has been noted above: namely, that the justification of an earthly order presided over by a God-Emperor actually did require precisely the sort of willful divinity that many philosophers reproved and that the Christians were the first to abhor. And yet this was the very order that Galen, whatever his personal self-delusions about its true nature might have been, actually participated in and accepted as unquestionable. Moreover, the esoteric, magical, and low-brow pagan beliefs and practices that he claimed philosophers had rejected were being given a strange new lease on life by the finest of the late ancient philosophical “hunters for the highest God”: the Neo-Platonists, who were also to be found among the most influential rabble rousers and convinced proponents of organized State persecution.

State persecution brings us to some of the most telling of the Christian critiques. The Apologists pointed out that the sole reason for their apparent lack of participation in government was the pagan sacrifices that active public life required them to make. Beyond that, however, they insisted that the Empire only remained alive and strong because of the prayers and the moral strength of Christian believers. It was their Faith alone that gave to the concept of “public order” the respect for truth and morality that it needed to become both substantive and effective in securing the “common good” than acceptance of “whatever works.”

Slightly later, Tertullian (155-220) demonstrated that Roman Law absurdly betrayed its great strengths in dealing with the Faith. The State openly admitted that supposed Christian crimes were non-existent. Then it pursued a legal policy of torturing believers not for the purpose of confessing their non-existent crime—that of belonging to a peaceable religion—but for the purpose of getting them to admit that they were innocent of the charge of being members of the harmless Church.

Later still, St. Augustine’s (354-430) complaints in the City of God about pagan behavior at the time of the barbarian invasions indicated that Christians could not see how the painfully obvious, self-serving libertinism of pagan Roman “patriots” was a blessing for the State in any way whatsoever. It left a miserable impression on his fellow Africans, eager to commiserate with them, that the only thing that pagans fleeing from the Gothic Sack of Rome were interested in when arriving in Carthage was what shows were playing in the theaters and which actors were in them.

Prudentius (348-c. 413) summed up the arguments of the faithful in his famous response to the pagan Symmachus (340-402)—a major practitioner of the Sophist “silent treatment”—over the latter’s lament regarding the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate. Rome, Prudentius said, could only finally come to understand the true and universal mission that the Providence of God had prepared her to fulfill under Christian auspices. Through her Christian change of heart and soul, this international empire now could work together with a Church called to the evangelization of the entire world for the greater glory of God and the salvation of all nations. St. Ambrose (339-397)—Church Father, Bishop of Milan, distinguished member of the imperial aristocracy, and great patriot—summed up the commitment of Christians to the Empire when he said that the most important indication of Rome’s majesty was the fact that she had had the greatness of heart and soul to recognize her need to convert to Catholicism.

In turning to the classical literary achievement, let us first note that Plato, one of the greatest of rhetoricians despite his root and branch critique of Sophism, believed that the Sophist rejection of thought in favor of a complete focus on “whatever worked” made it impossible for anyone actually to define and understand the discipline which the orator or writer was practicing. Moses Hadas confirms his judgment.

Hadas was scathing in his criticism of the Sophists of the first Classical Renaissance, whose heroes and public were more concerned for imitative and yet ultimately pedantic grandstanding than any substantive meaning to the arguments that they made. Fronto, he complained, was never excited by anything other than a misplaced comma that he could find and condemn in a competing Sophist’s work. Yes, Hadas concluded, the style that the Christians brought with them was indeed different, but its spiritual animation gave a new life to Greek and Latin Literature. And men like Prudentius, who was a poet by profession, gave evidence of the fact that they appreciated and could master the old styles as well.

In the final analysis, the reason why members of all classes, from the highest to the lowest, converted to the new religion was that they came to realize that the message the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo was peddling was circular in character, blessing an existence that would never change and whose meaninglessness could never be uncovered, examined for its flaws, and corrected. Upon realizing this truth, they saw that they had an either/or choice before them. It was either Faith in the Christian God—and the Socratic Reason that became allied with it—for the betterment of nature as a whole; or Faith in the Gnostic argument that the universe as a whole was totally evil and meaningless, inspiring only flight from its embrace. Ironically, the burial in nature alone favored by the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo must move a man with a mind and a soul either to demand something more from natural life than “whatever works” in order to understand it or execrate the idea of working within its boundaries at all.

Nothing conserves what is best in each and every diverse tradition in God’s glorious Creation better than the religion of the Word Incarnate. Nothing purges each of these cultures of what actually prevents them from fulfilling their innate strengths, taking them to unexpected, grace-filled heights, better than Catholicism. Nothing hurts the cause of the individual, society, culture, and nature in general than the naturalist “mere conservatism” of what in truth is ultimately a nihilistic force, an enemy of mind as well as soul; a tool for subjecting everyone to the triumph of the strongest wills, whose victory is followed by their own self- destruction as well.

Our contemporary Grand Coalition of the Status Quo is composed of the same kind of forces as its ancient counterpart: a hypocritical, oppressive elite that needs to encourage the vices of a debased, corrupt rabble to maintain its subservience and to rouse in action against the Christians and thinking men in general who alone can topple it. Despite its immediately revolutionary impact, it remains “merely conservative” in its insistence that the long dominant naturalist commitment to “whatever works” must guide human life, and no effort be made to step back, judge, and correct what might actually be working for unacceptable demonic purposes. It has fulfilled the inherent willful logic of an approach that justifies “whatever works” by divinizing fallen man and demanding obedience to his godly wishes. It employs all of the same weapons as its ancient counterpart did—an appeal to raw power, lies, mockery, the silent treatment, and deconstructionist of the true Christian message with the help of traitors in our own midst. It differs only in employing these in a more technologically skillful and a more debased manner than its predecessor. It is, in its venomous opposition to the message of the God-Man, the true “Hater of Mankind.” Let us pray with deep hope that the inner tensions of this sick alliance bring it down before it may wreak yet greater havoc with whatever remains of civilized life. After all, we brought it down once before already.

Image source

MEDALLION: Dietrich.Klose, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Konstantinsmedaillon.jpg

COLUMNS: Sarah Woodward, www.worldhistory.org/image/948/architectural-column-orders/