Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 3

by Alain de Benoist

 
Christianity, ‘an Eastern religion by its origins and fundamental characteristics’ (Guignebert), infiltrated ancient Europe almost surreptitiously. The Roman Empire, tolerant by nature, paid no attention to it for a long time. In Suetonius’ Life of the Twelve Caesars, we read of an act of Claudius: ‘He expelled from Rome the Jews, who were in continual ferment at the instigation of a certain Chrestos’. On the whole, the Greco-Latin world remained at first closed to preaching. The praise of weakness, poverty, and ‘madness’, seemed to them foolish. Consequently, the first centres of Christian propaganda were set up in Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica and Corinth. It was in these great cities, where slaves, artisans and immigrants mingled with merchants, where everything was bought and sold, and where preachers and enlightened men, in ever-increasing numbers, vied to seduce motley and restless crowds, that the first apostles found fertile ground.

Causse, who was a professor at the Protestant theology faculty of the University of Strasbourg, writes: ‘If the apostles preached the Gospel in the village squares, it was not only because of a wise missionary policy, but because the new religion was more favourably received in these new surroundings than by the old races attached to their past and their soil. The true Greeks were to remain alien and hostile to Christianity for a long time. The Athenians had greeted Paul with ironical indifference: “You will tell us another day!” it was to be many years before the old Romans would abandon their aristocratic contempt for that detestable superstition. The early Church of Rome was very little Latin, and Greek was scarcely spoken in it. But the Syrians, the Asiatics and the whole crowd of the Graeculi received the Christian message with enthusiasm’ (Essai sur le conflit du christianisme primitif et de la civilisation, Ernest Leroux, 1920).

J.B.S. Haldane, who considered fanaticism as one of the ‘four truly important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400’ (The Inequality of Man, Famous Books, New York, 1938), attributed its paternity to Judeo-Christianity. Yahweh, the god of the Arabian deserts, is a lonely and jealous god, exclusive and cruel, who advocates intolerance and hatred. ‘Do I not hate those who hate you, O Yahweh, and do I not rage against your enemies? I hate them and regard them as my enemies’ (Psalm 139:21 and 22). Jeremiah implores: ‘You will give them their due, O LORD, and your curse will be upon them! You will pursue them in anger and exterminate them from under heaven’ (Lamentations, 111, 64-66). ‘Surely, O God, you will surely put to death the wicked’ (Psalm 139:19). ‘And in Your mercy You will dispel my enemies, and destroy all the adversaries of my soul…’ (Psalm 143:12). Wisdom, who personifies the infinitely good, threatens: ‘I too will laugh at your misfortune, I will mock when your fear comes upon you’ (Prov. I, 26). Deuteronomy speaks of the fate that must be reserved for ‘idolaters’: ‘If your brother, your mother´s son, your daughter, or the woman who lies in your bosom, or your friend, who is like yourself, should incite you in secret, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods”, whom you do not know…, you shall first kill him; your hand shall be laid upon him first to put him to death, and then the hand of all the people shall be laid upon him. When you hear that in one of the cities which Yahweh grants you to dwell, it is said that unworthy men have arisen who have seduced their fellow citizens, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods!” which you do not know, you shall inquire, and if you see that such an abomination is true, you shall smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword; you shall consecrate it to extermination, as well as all that is in it. You shall gather all its spoil amid its streets, and burn the city and all its prey in the fire to the honour of the LORD your God. Thus it shall become a perpetual heap of ruins, and shall not be rebuilt…’ (Deut. XIII).

In the Gospel, Jesus says, when they come to arrest him: ‘…for all who take the sword will perish by the sword’ (Matthew XXVI, 52). But before that he had said: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man´s enemies will be those of his household’ (Matthew X, 34-36). He also pronounced the phrase that is the motto of all totalitarianism: ‘He who is not with me is against me’ (Matthew XII, 30).

The early Church will scrupulously apply such slogans. Unbelievers and pagans are subhumans in the eyes of the apostles. St. Peter compares them to ‘irrational animals, born to be taken and destroyed’ (2 Peter II, 12). Jerome advised the converted Christian to kick the body of his mother if she tried to prevent him from leaving her forever to follow the teachings of Christ. In 345, Fermicus Maternus made slaughter a duty: ‘The law forbids, most holy emperors, to spare either son or brother. It forces us to punish the woman we love tenderly and to plunge the iron into her breast. It puts weapons in our hands and orders us to turn them against our closest friends…’

From then on, the evangelical practice of charity will be strictly subordinated to the degree of adherence to mysteries and dogmas. Europe will be evangelized by iron and fire. Heretics, schismatics, freethinkers and pagans will be, renewing the gesture of Pontius Pilate, handed over to the secular arm to be subjected to torture and death. Denunciation will be rewarded with the attribution of the property of the victims and their families. Those who, ‘having understood the judgment of God,’ wrote St. Paul, ‘are worthy of death’ (Romans, I, 32). Thomas Aquinas specifies: ‘The heretic must be burned.’ One of the canons adopted at the Lateran Council declares: ‘They are not murderers who kill heretics’ (Homicidas non esse qui heretici trucidant). By the bull Ad extirpenda, the Church will authorize torture. And, in 1864, Pius IX proclaimed in the Syllabus: ‘Anathema be he who says that the Church has no right to use force, that it has no direct or indirect temporal power’ (XXIV).

Voltaire, who knew how to add up, had counted the victims of religious intolerance from the beginnings of Christianity to his time. Taking into account exaggerations and making a large allowance for the benefit of the doubt, he found a total of 9,718,000 people who had lost their lives ad majorem Dei gloriam. Compared to this figure, the number of Christians killed in Rome under the sign of the palm (a symbol of martyrdom and glorious resurrection in early Christianity) seems insignificant.

‘Gibbon believes he can affirm’ —writes Louis Rougier— ‘that the number of martyrs throughout the entire Roman Empire, over three centuries, did not reach that of Protestants executed in a single reign and exclusively in the provinces of the Netherlands, where, according to Grotius, more than one hundred thousand subjects of Charles V died at the hands of the executioner. However conjectural these calculations may be, it can be said that the number of Christian martyrs is small compared with the victims of the Church during the fifteen centuries: the destruction of paganism under the Christian emperors, the fight against the Arians, the Donatists, the Nestorians, the Monophysites, the Iconoclasts, the Manicheans, the Cathars and the Albigensians, the Spanish Inquisition, the wars of religion, the dragonads of Louis XIV, pogroms of the Jews… Faced with such excesses, we can ask ourselves, with Bouché-Leclercq, ‘whether the benefits of Christianity (however great) have not been more than compensated for by the religious intolerance which it borrowed from Judaism to spread throughout the world’… (Celse contre les chrétiens, Copernic, 1977).