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Category: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

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Catholic Church Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 113


 Editors’ note:To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translationof Volume I.

The Catholic ‘children emperors’

‘These sovereigns followed the examples of the great Theodosius’. —Cardinal Hergenrother, Church Historian

‘The emperors were also pious Catholics’. —Peter Brown

‘The world is sinking’. —St Jerome

 
The division of the Empire: two forced Catholic states emerge

The year in which Augustine was named bishop (395), Emperor Theodosius I died in Milan. Clerical leaders had repeatedly incited him against the ‘pagans’, Jews and ‘heretics’, and saints Ambrose and Augustine had glorified him. Already in the 5th century, ecclesiastical circles gave the nickname of ‘the Great’ to this man who could pour blood like water. After his death, the Roman Empire was divided between his two sons. The Empire of the West disappeared in 476, while that of the East, as the Byzantine Empire, lasted until 1453.

From the times of this division, no other monarch ever brought the Empire under his command. In Constantinople, Arcadius (395-408), of seventeen years of age, ruled over the East, which remained a gigantic territory: all that would later be Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor with the Crimean peninsula, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Lower Libya and Pentapolis. In Milan, Honorius (395-423), eleven years of age, ruled over the West, which was even larger and richer but politically not as important as the East.

Both ‘emperors’, taught by the Church and famous for their piety, continued the religious policies of their father. If Theodosius had fought alone against ‘heresy’—one of the main targets of his attacks—with more than twenty provisions, his sons and successors supported Catholicism with a multitude of new laws. They favoured the Catholic Church legally and financially; increased their possessions, dispensed the clergy from certain jobs, some taxes and military service. Thus the State of Catholic confession terrorised more and more those who had a different faith, although the adepts of Greco-Roman culture would continue to exist, even in high positions.

It is true that in primitive Christianity hatred of the mundane was widespread; that in the New Testament the State is called ‘great whore’ and ‘horror of the Earth’, and that the emperor was considered a servant of the devil. However, since Paul there was also a sector prone to the State, a sector that consciously adapted to the circumstances and that imposed itself, little by little.

In the East and in the West, the Christian government centres presented the same image: ceaseless palace intrigues, struggles for power, crises of ministers and murders. The Catholic ‘children emperors’—Arcadius, Honorius, later also Valentinian III and Theodosius II—lacked independence. They were crowned nullities unable to make decisions, surrounded by a swarm of greedy courtiers, high dignitaries, Germanic generals and, also, eunuchs.

And as often happens in times of ‘decadence’, we cannot overlook some of the women of the imperial house; behind them was an intriguing clergy. The bishops also continued to mingle in the affairs of the officials; already during the 4th century and still more in the 5th, they usurped their faculties. They managed above all to extend the scope of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the episcopalis audientia, the episcopale iudicium, the ‘arbitral functions’ of the bishops.

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Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Julian (novel) Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Libanius Literature Science

Christianity’s Criminal History, 112

Editor’s note: Here we see once again some passages on the historical Libanius: a central character in Gore Vidal’s Julian. What Deschner says here about Libanius is splendidly novelized by Vidal in the very final paragraph of his novel.

To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 

The Western world darkens more and more

Culture was highly esteemed in the 4th and 5th centuries. It was one of the legacies of antiquity and enjoyed an ‘almost religious veneration’ (Dannenbauer). Still in the year 360 a law of the emperor Constantius could declare that education was the supreme virtue. And really many noble families of that time, Gallic and Roman, were consecrated to it and particularly in the bosom of the Senatorial proceedings.

But they were already simple custodians of the culture, to which they did not enrich. And everywhere there were circles and social forces of a very different kind, even in the highest positions. The Christian king Theodoric the Great was no longer able to write his own name on the documents: neither could most of the Christian princes. Theodoric wrote the four letters LEGI (‘I read it’) by means of an aureus mold expressly forged for him. The instruction of the Goth children was practically forbidden by him, since, as he seems to have said, he who trembled before the master’s blows would never know how to despise the cuts and rushes of the sword in battle.

In Gaul, apparently, where the school system had flourished from the beginning of the 2nd century until the end of the 4th century, public schools are disappearing over the course of the next century, no matter how much here and there, in Lyon, Vienne, Bordeaux and Clermont there still are schools of grammar and rhetoric in addition to, naturally, the private ones. But all the teachings, at least the literary, served exclusively for the collection of material for sermons and treatises, to deal with the Bible and for the consolidation of the faith. Scientific inquiry was already a thing of the past: it no longer counted or was appreciated. The knowledge of Greek, which for centuries was the requirement of every authentic culture, became a rarity. Even the Roman classics, such as Horace, Ovid and Catullus, were cited less and less.

Libanius, the champion of Hellenistic culture, the most famous professor of rhetoric of the century, complains about the aversion aroused by that profession. ‘They see’, he says, referring to his students, ‘that this cause is despised and thrown on the floor; that does not bring fame, power or wealth but a painful servitude under many lords, parents, mothers, pedagogues and other students, who put things upside down and believe that it is the teacher who needs them. When they see all this they avoid this depreciated profession like a boat the pitfalls’.

In the time of Augustine there are hardly any schools of philosophy in the West. Philosophy is frowned upon, it is a thing of the devil, the original father of all ‘heresy’, and it causes fear to the pious. Even in a centre of culture as important as Bordeaux philosophy is no longer taught. And even in the East, the largest and most important of the universities of the Roman Empire, that of Constantinople, has only one chair of philosophy out of a total of 31.

The knowledge of something that had existed for a long time was lost in almost all areas. The spiritual horizon became increasingly narrower. Ancient culture languished from Gaul to Africa, while in Italy it practically disappeared. The interest in natural science vanished. Also jurisprudence, at least in the West, suffers ‘havoc’, an ‘astonishing demolition’ (Wieacker).

The bishop Paulinus of Nola, who died in 431, never read a historian: a typical attitude of the moment. Whole eras fall in the oblivion, for example, the time of the Roman emperors. The only renowned historian in the late 4th century is Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian. Entire synods forbid the bishops to read ‘pagan’ books. In short: scientific research ceases; experimental testing stops; people think increasingly with less autonomy.

A few decades later no doctor could heal Bishop Gregory de Tours, a man with a mind full of superstitions, but he could miraculously be healed through a drink of water with some dust taken from the tomb of St. Martin.

Only clerics will still read.

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Goethe Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Science Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 111


 Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.

 

Everything a person needs to know is contained in the Bible

Augustine’s intellectual achievements—which are of a theological nature—have been always overrated. With the exception of certain psychological observations, he always wrote under the inspiration of others, and limited himself to ‘converting into a personal experience what he grasped when meditating on the thoughts of others’ (H. Holl). ‘Never in his life did he have the courage to think autonomously’. A historian so enlightening and worthy of being read as H. Dannenbauer is tempted to apply to Augustine the old sentence with which Goethe referred to Lavater: ‘Strict truth was not his. He lied to himself and others’.

Augustine felt genuine addiction for authority. He always had to find shelter under something, to adhere to something: to the Manicheans, to academic scepticism, to neo-Platonism and, finally, to Christianity. In this regard, he only believed in the Bible by virtue of the authority of the Church (which based its authority on the Bible). The authority of the Bible is in turn a guarantee, Augustine thinks, of the truth. What it affirms is true; it is completely infallible. ‘Moreover, Scripture sometimes appears as a criterion of profane knowledge. Of the historical narratives, we should only believe as long as it does not contradict the affirmations of Scripture’.

Already in the time of Augustine both the wealth of knowledge and the quality of education had declined. However, some classical training still counted to the point that, with it, it was possible to make a career in the Roman Empire and get access the high and even the supreme dignities.

The bishop of Hippo had no notion of Hebrew. Also, his knowledge of Greek was flimsy. He could hardly translate Greek texts. He, a rhetor and for several years a professor at several high schools, barely read the Greek Bible.

To the classics, including Plato and Plotinus to the extent that he knew them, and to the Greek Patristics, he read them in a Latin version. And it is likely that most of his quotations were second hand. Only very few come from direct sources: Livius, Florus, Eutropius, perhaps Josephus, but above all Marcus Terentius Varro, the great scholar of ancient Rome, whose Antiquitates rerum humanarum and divinarum (Antiquities of Human and Divine Things) is his only source of information regarding the pagan deities.

Augustine’s scientific and natural training was very weak. Certainly he did not think it necessary to admit the existence of pygmies, of cynocephali, or of people who protected themselves from the sun under their flat feet. He firmly believed, of course, that the diamond could only be broken with the blood of a goat and that the wind from Cappadocia impregnated the mares. He also believed firmly in purgatory. Moreover, he was the theologian who endowed this idea dogmatic entity.

He also believed firmly in hell, being himself the one who depicts it for us as real physical fire, and who teaches that the intensity of heat is governed by the gravity of sins. On the other hand, he does not believe that the Earth is spherical (nulla ratione credendum est, ‘there is no reason to believe that’) even if it had been demonstrated centuries ago.

The natural sciences, according to Augustine, are opinions. The investigation of the world is at the most investigation of a world of appearances. This applies to the theatre as well as to natural science or magic—eagerness for shows, curiosity, that’s all.

Profane knowledge and culture do not have any value for themselves. They only acquire value in the service of faith and have no other purpose than to lead to holiness, to a deeper understanding of the Bible. Philosophy, that in his old age seemed to him ‘subtle charlatanism’ (garrulae argtiae), has no other value than mere help to interpret the ‘revelation’. Everything thus becomes a resource, an instrument for the understanding of Scripture. Otherwise science—any science—is alienation from God.

The curiosity, the eagerness to know always created suspicions in Christianity. Tertullian had already fought it with crudeness and Augustine, more fiercely, attacks almost systematically curiosity and the longing to know, which leads him to anathematize science.

Painting, music and sculpture are also superfluous. Medicine, architecture and agriculture deserve the same judgment, unless they are to be practiced professionally. This bishop saw in the Church the Schola Christi (Christ’s School) and all the sciences outside it were suspect. Ultimately, everything a person needs to know is in the Bible and what is not there is harmful.

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Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Science Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 110

(Iconic image of Tatian)

Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 

Natural Science

Even geometry seemed disgraceful to Christians. Still at the beginning of the 4th century they refused to make bishop the Christian Nemesius of Emesa because he was dedicated to the study of mathematics.

Geometry and other scientific occupations were considered little less than impious activities. The historian of the Church Eusebius attacked these ‘heretics’ with these words: ‘Neglecting the Sacred Scriptures of God they were occupied with geometry; for they are earthly men, they speak earthly and do not know Him who comes from on high. They eagerly study the geometry of Euclid and admire Aristotle and Theophrastus’.

The natural sciences were the subject of particular condemnation on the part of Christian theology. The repercussions of that condemnation lasted for a long time and even led some researchers to the stake. In the usual school education on the natural sciences (and history) did not find a place until very early in the Modern Age. In the very universities they were not imposed as independent disciplines until the 17th century. Already in the last days of the ancient age, medicine experienced a strong decline—except perhaps in Mesopotamia—in favour of the predilection for the occult. The patriarch Severus of Antioch, for example, and also the Armenian Eznik of Kolb insist on the existence of demons in man and reject any attempt at naturalistic explanation by physicians.

Already the apologist Tatian, disciple of Justin, reproves medicine and makes it derive from the evil spirits: ‘Namely, the demons separate with their cunning men from the veneration of God, persuading them to put their trust in herbs and roots’.

These words exude that deep aversion, so typical of the ancient Christians, about nature, the here, and the earthly. ‘Why do people place their trust in the powers of matter and do not trust God? Why don’t you go to the most powerful of the lords and prefer to be healed by herbs?’

In this way medicine as a whole was reduced to diabolical work, the work of the evil spirits. ‘Pharmacology and everything related to it comes from the same workshop of lies’. Analogous is the opinion of Tertullian, who made fun of doctors and researchers of Nature, and that attitude continued throughout the Middle Ages and even later. It was natural for Tatian to have no esteem for science as a whole:

How to believe a person who claims that the sun is an incandescent mass and the moon, a body like the Earth? All these are no more than debatable hypotheses and not proven facts. What utility can research report on the proportions of the Earth, on the positions of the stars, on the course of the sun?

The purely scientific explanations do not count anymore. Those people who, in the 4th century, were looking for a geophysical explanation of earthquakes (instead of considering them caused solely by the wrath of God!) were inscribed in the list of ‘heretics’ by the bishop of Brescia.

Since the supreme criterion for the reception of the scientific-natural theories was that of its degree of compatibility with the Bible, science not only stagnated: the very knowledge accumulated since time immemorial was discarded. The prestige of science waned to the same extent that the Bible ascended.

The theory of the rotation of the Earth and its spherical shape goes back to the Pythagoreans of the 5th century BC. The Christian Church renounced this knowledge in favour of the Mosaic story of creation and the biblical text preaching that the Earth was a disk surrounded by the seas. European students did not know about its spherical figure until a millennium later, in the High Middle Ages, through the Arab universities of Spain!

Lactantius defames natural science by calling it pure nonsense. The Doctor of the Church Ambrose reproves it radically as an attack on the majesty of God. He is not interested in the least about the question of the position of the Earth. That is something without any relevance for the future. ‘It is enough to know that the text of Sacred Scripture contains this observation: He suspended the Earth on nothingness’. St. Ambrose’s notion of natural philosophy is illustrated by the heartfelt affirmation that ‘the gospel according to John contains all natural philosophy’.

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Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Name of the Rose (novel)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 109

Editor’s Note: The spirit of Jorge of Burgos

There are two ways to learn about the history that the school hid us. The most enjoyable is to read novels like Julian by Gore Vidal, located in the 4th century AD; the other to study arid scholarly treatises by dissenters like Karlheinz Deschner.

What Deschner says below (to contextualize it see the English translation of his first volume) reminded me Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, which by the way differs a lot from the movie starring Sean Connery. I refer to the character Jorge of Burgos, one of the oldest monks in the abbey: the gatekeeper who took care that the Greco-Roman wisdom in one of the greatest libraries of Christendom never reached the popular mind. Deschner wrote:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Just as Christians are scarce among intellectuals—for, in general terms, the more a person knows, the less he believes—also in the 4th century it was still the case that the new religion reaped its most diminished successes among the scholars and the aristocrats.

The followers of the old faith among these social strata continued to consider, in their great majority, Christianity as a faith for coalmen, as a religion of people of little faith, totally incompatible with ancient science. But the Church needed precisely the scholars. That is why at that point, too, it thoroughly reviewed its thinking and began to open up to those who until then it had quarantined or even fought. And since the new religion was a good starting point for a career, the proceres and the scholars were now driven to conversion.

Soon the time came when the bishopric seats were almost exclusively covered by people from the upper layers. At the turn of the 5th century, the Greco-Roman world enters a slow agony. The representatives of the Christian cultural milieu ended up being clearly superior to the ‘pagans’ that still remained, if we do without Ammianus Marcellinus. This happened, naturally, using the means of the ancient culture, which, at least partially and with enough reluctance, was bequeathed to the Middle Ages.

This development is certainly in opposition to the basic teachings of the New Testament: the Gospel was not announced to the wise or the learned. On the other hand, it had been a long time since Christianity had taken a decisive step to leave the Jewish world of Jesus and the apostles. Paul himself was already a Roman citizen and the son of a Hellenistic city. And Judaism itself was already Hellenised for centuries, so that Christianity was absorbing more and more the wisdom of the Greco-Roman world, becoming a typical hermaphrodite.

Until the 6th century the new religion did not have a school of its own. It is true that Christians hated the classical heritage, but they did not create their own school or make any attempt at it: they lacked all the requisites, the very foundations for it, and they also found it impossible to compete with them.

There was a widespread maxim, advocated by both Tertullian and Pope Leo I: Christians must certainly appropriate worldly knowledge, but never teach it. The Statuta Ecciesiae Antiqua [statutes of the ancient Church] only allowed lay people public teaching with a special authorisation and under ecclesiastical control.

Later, knowledge and culture were tolerated as a kind of necessary evil, turning them into an instrument of theology: ancilla theologiae.

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Evil Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 108


 Editors’ note:

‘One cannot solve the Jewish question without first solving the Christian Question’, said commenter Devan in the previous thread.

Isn’t it truly pathetic that, the only ones who want to defend the white race in the world, continue defending the religion that weakened the Aryan race against the Jews?

I recently said in this blog that we need to restore the WDH Radio Show in another platform to avoid further censorship. I’m not going to lie, but my original idea was to call that show ‘White Nationalist Critic’ precisely to expose, day by day, the pronouncements of those WNsts still circumscribed in the Judeo-Christian ethics that is killing the fair race.

To mention the case of my previous entry, Counter-Currents suffers a kind of ‘schizophrenia’, as Andrew Hamilton once said referring to this webzine of Greg Johnson (Hamilton had in mind the etymological sense of divided mind). Such divided self would be the central theme of what I wish to be the content of my radio show. But for this I need a regular collaborator to reopen that show with its original name, ‘White Nationalist Critic’.

Certainly, one cannot solve the Jewish Problem without first solving the Christian Problem. If the white race is extinguished, ours would be at least the testimony in the spoken word (besides the texts of this site) that denounces these pseudo-knights of the 14 words, unable to apostatize from Judeo-Christian ethics.

Below, an abridged translation of a passage from Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. (For context read the translation of Volume I.)

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Hence, Augustine has harsh words about Greco-Roman shows when compared with Christian shows. Instead of being enthusiastic about the charioteer of the circus, we must turn our eyes to God, who, like a good charioteer, restrains, so to speak, human vices. Instead of admiring the tightrope walker, you have to put our eyes on Peter walking on the water. In a nutshell: instead of theatre and poetry, Augustine advises studying the Bible.

The greatest of the Fathers of the Church insulted as few did the Greco-Roman spectacles, even though he is the only one among them that also has positive words about them. Sometimes he casts true cataracts of repulsive reproaches against the shows of the adversaries. In a single passage of The City of God Against the Pagans Augustine harshly rebuked the celebration of a festive ceremony by Cicero to appease the gods.

Nonetheless, Augustine himself with conjuring arts also presented Christians with eternity as a wonderful spectacle. He sees radically eclipsed all the shows of the Hellenes by the spectaculum of the Last Judgment, by the universal apocalyptic theatre of the Christians. The tragic actors and the pantomime performers will represent the most calamitous of the roles in that last and unwanted performance.

What a spectacle for us, Tertullian says, will be the next coming of the Lord… What a spectacle will be the one that unfolds there! What things will provoke my admiration, my laughter? What will be the place of my joy, of my rejoicing? What would it be like to be able to see so many powerful kings there, who were said to have been admitted to heaven, to sigh in the depths of the darkness and justly accompanied by Jupiter and his witnesses?

How many procurators, persecutors of the name of the Lord will be consumed in flames more horrible than those with which they made atrocious derision of the Christians!

How will those wise philosophers burn in the company of their disciples who are persuaded that God does not take care of anything, to those who taught that we do not have a soul or that the soul will not return to the body at all—or in any case not to its anterior body!

Yes, how they will burn with their own students and ashamed at their sight!

What will it be like to see also the poets appear and tremble, against all foresight, before the tribunal of Christ and not before that of Rhadamanthus or of Minos?

And the tragic actors will then deserve to listen carefully to their ears, namely to listen to the lamentations for a misfortune that will be their own. It will be worthy to contemplate comedians even more weakened and softened by fire…

Contemplating things like that and rejoicing in them is something that neither praetors, consuls nor quaestors, nor even the priests of idolatry can offer you, no matter how generous their generosity. And, nevertheless, all these things are present in our spirit and, to a certain extent, we contemplate them already thanks to faith.

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Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 107


 Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.

 

The theatre, ‘The temple of the devil’

Almost unanimously (with very few exceptions, such as those of Victorinus of Pettau and Gaius Marius Victorinus), the Fathers of the Church denigrated the spectacles: this constituted an important component in their anti-Hellenic polemic. The shows really reflected to them all the iniquity of the Greco-Roman world.

The Father of the Church Salvian of Marseilles, who in the 5th century considered the visit to spectacles by Christians a crime and also sought to know that God hates these amusements, informs us that when an ecclesiastical festival coincided with the games, most of the spectators were sitting in the theatre. The suaviludii (fans of shows) used all kinds of arguments to defend theatre attendance and their censors tried to refute them. At the indication, for example, that there was no express prohibition in Sacred Scripture, Tertullian replies with Psalm I, 1, ‘Avoid the meetings of the ungodly’.

The theatre happened to be a domain of the devil, of the evil spirits, and the ‘Fathers’ almost whipped it up, giving it attributes such as ‘immoral’ (turpis), obscene (obscoenus), ‘repulsive’ (foedus) and many other similar epithets. It was, however, ‘very infrequent’ the case that the theatre was attacked because of its—still then current—cultic meaning, the veneration of the gods. In this sense, only Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the Syrian bishop Jacob did it; and Sarug (451-452), who stated that ‘Satan tries to restore paganism through comedy’. All others demonized the theatre for reasons of an almost exclusively moral nature.

The Philippic of Tatian Oratio ad Graecos, an authentic invective against Greek culture, gives us an idea of the poisonous bile that those paladins of the anti-dramaturgy of primitive Christianity were spewing. The actor appears in it as

boastful and dissolute ruffian without restraint, who as soon as he looks with sparkling eyes as he moves waving his hands, delirious under his clay mask, it assumes the role of Aphrodite, followed by that of Apollo… And such a scoundrel is applauded by all!

Many pious ‘Fathers’ saw how the vices penetrated the hearts of the spectators through their eyes and ears as if they were open windows. According to St. Ambrose (introibit mors) ‘death will penetrate through the window of your eyes’ and the stage choir is ‘lethal’. For Jerome, theatrical music also threatens morals. Moreover, the very critical mention of representations was sinful, said Salvian. Even married women, according to Augustine, ‘take home new knowledge’ learned from that ‘lascivious bustle’.

It was necessary to wait for Theodosius I so that, in 392, the careers of cars were prohibited; a prohibition that in 399 was extended to all the spectacles during Sundays, but with so scarce success that in the year 401 the Synod of Carthage requested that the measures already adopted were intensified.

The Church, since Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, considered attendance at shows incompatible with Christianity, and ended up strictly prohibiting it to priests and laymen in the III and IV Council of Carthage, threatening the transgressors with excommunication. The bishop of Rome, Eusebius, did not allow the performance of comedians even in the banquets of homage.

The First Council of Arles denies the charioteers and all the theatre staff permission to receive Communion while they are holding shows. The VII Council of Carthage prohibits all actors in 419 from filing complaints against clerics. If an actor, a ‘flute of Satan’ (Jacob of Sarug), wanted to convert to Christianity, the old ecclesiastical constitutions and the councils generally demanded the abandonment of his profession.

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Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 106


 Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.

 

The hostility to classic culture in early Christian Latin writers

The fact that also ecclesiastical authors imbued with philosophy disqualify or hate the latter is something that is revealed in Marcus Minucius Felix and Tertullian, within the Latin Patristic.

Minucius, a Roman lawyer, who ‘rose from the deep darkness to the light of truth and wisdom’ when he was old enough, fully connects, as regards his dialogue Octavius, probably written around the year 200, with Greco-Roman culture and especially with Plato, Cicero, Seneca and Virgil. However, he abhors most, if not all of it, and especially everything that tends to scepticism. Socrates is for him ‘the crazy attic’, the philosophy itself ‘superstitious madness’, enemy of the ‘true religion’. Philosophers are seducers, adulterers, tyrants. The poets, Homer included, thoroughly mislaid the youth ‘with lies of mere seduction’, while the strength of Christians ‘is not based on words, but on their behaviour’.

Also Tertullian, authentic father of western Christianity (called founder of Catholicism because of his enormous influence on theologians such as Cyprian, Jerome, Augustine; for the Trinitarian doctrine, Christology and doctrine of sin and grace, baptism and penance), mistreats the Greco-Roman culture. And certainly he, who despises the simplices et idiotae does not stop from judging that, when that culture approaches the truth, it is due to chance or plagiarism. Tertullian, in fact, goes back to Moses for the totality of Greek science!

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church?, asks Tertullian, referring to Solomon. If a Christian believes, he no longer wants anything that goes beyond that faith. ‘For this is the first thing we believe: hence there is nothing else that we should believe beyond our faith’. He calls Plato, whose importance for ancient Christianity is barely possible to ponder, ‘spice with which all heretics spice’. He stigmatises the questions about the physical world as impious. By expressly referring to Jesus and Paul, he strongly disapproves of science and art: human teachings of evil spirits, pure tingling for the ears, rejected by the Lord and described by him as madness. ‘We, on the other hand, who read the Sacred Scriptures, are in possession of universal history from the very beginning of the world’. Typical Christian modesty!

At the beginning of the 4th century, Arnobius mounts an attack against classical culture with a controversial writing that covers seven books, Adversus gentes. This happened at the urging of his bishop. His work had to depict, in the metropolitan sceptic, the sincerity of his conversion. Of course, Arnobius does not know well that Christianity in whose defence he writes. He barely quotes the New Testament and mentions Jupiter much more often than Christ.

Arnobius condemns not only all the myths about the gods, but also mythological poetry. With the same resolution he rejects the pantomime, the dramatic and the musical representations linked to the mysteries. He condemns all the conceptual constructions of the Greco-Roman religion and the art where these are embodied. Moreover, he considers all worldly professions to be worthless, any human activity whatsoever. It should not be surprising, then, that this new-birthing Christian, out of respect for the Sacred Scriptures, despises almost all of science, rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine.

Latin paleo-Christian literature closes ranks more unanimously than the literature in Greek versus classic culture. Dramatic poetry is totally disqualified for religious and moral reasons, as the epic in most cases; also rhetoric, which is usually considered harmful. Philosophy by itself cannot provide any authentically true knowledge. For these authors, Christianity constitutes the only security, the full truth.

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Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 105


 Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 

The hostility to the classic culture of the first Greco-Christian writers

We already showed above how decidedly, with what resolutely rude expressions, Tatian, the ‘philosopher of the barbarians’, the self-proclaimed Herald of Truth, about the year 172 and against everything that had rank and renown in Greco-Roman culture vilified philosophy, poetry, rhetoric and the school.

The writer Hermas inserts at the very beginning of his jibe of the non-Christian philosophers the words of Paul, ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God’ without allowing another truth to prevail than that of the Gospel. In a rather coarse way, ignorant of any deep and superficial sense, Hermas describes philosophy as ‘lacking in foundation and utility’, of ‘pure adventurous, absurd, chimerical and abstruse speculation’, even though he only knows his victims through mere readings of compendiums.

The same with the majority of Christian authors. Ignatius of Antioch, a fanatical adversary of Christians from other orientations to his (‘beasts with human figure’) and first in using the term ‘catholic’, repudiates almost the entire teaching school, and any contact with Greco-Roman literature, which he apostrophises as ‘ignorance’, ‘foolishness’, its representatives being ‘rather lawyers of death than of truth’. And while he affirms that ‘the end of time has come’, ‘nothing of what is visible here is good’ and sarcastically asks, ‘where is the boasting of those who are called wise?’, he affirms that Christianity has overcome all this and has ‘eradicated ignorance’. He is considered ‘one of the great peaks of early Christian literature’ (Bardenhewer).

Towards 180, Bishop Theophilus of Antioch decrees in his three books Apologia ad Autolycum (Apology to Autolycus) that all the philosophy and art, mythology and historiography of the Greeks are despicable, contradictory and immoral. Moreover, he rejects in principle all worldly knowledge and refers to the Old Testament praiseworthy, ‘lacking in science, shepherds and uneducated people’. Incidentally, Theophilus, who did not become a Christian and a bishop until he was an adult, owed his education to the classical world. That world whose representatives, of course, ‘have raised and continue to falsely pose the questions when, instead of speaking of God, they do it about vain and useless things’; authors who, not possessing ‘an iota of truth’ are all of them possessed by evil spirits. It is evident, then, that ‘all others are in error and that only Christians possess the truth, having been indoctrinated by the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the prophets and announced everything in advance’.

Apart from Tatian, Ignatius and Theophilus of Antioch, also Polycarp and the Didache radically repudiate ancient literature. The Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Barnabas and the Letters to Diognetus do not mention it. The Syrian Didascalia (complete title: Catholic Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles and Holy Disciples of our Redeemer), falsified by a bishop, says: ‘Get away from all the writings of the pagans, for what have you to do with foreign words and laws?… What do you miss in the word of God, that you throw yourself to devour those stories by pagans?’

Only the Father of the Church Irenaeus and the ‘heretic’ Origen, among Christians who write in Greek during the first centuries, lend almost full recognition to all branches of knowledge. However, Irenaeus disapproves almost the totality of Greek philosophy, to which he does not grant a single true knowledge. And Origen, who precisely makes very wide use of it, rejects the rhetoric as useless. All the Greco-Christian writers agree, however, on one point: all place the New Testament far above all the literature of Antiquity.

Categories
Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Matthias Grünewald

Christianity’s Criminal History, 104


 Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 

The great Christian ideal:
The inversion of Greco-Roman values

Already at the end of the 4th century and only in the desert regions of Egypt, there were apparently 24,000 ascetics. They were buried in subterranean places, ‘like the dead in their graves’, they dwelt in huts of branches, in hollows with no other opening than a hole to creep up to them. They squatted like troglodytes on large rocks, on steep slopes, in grottos, in tiny cells, in cages, in dens of beasts and in trunks of dry trees, or else they were placed on columns.

In a word, they lived like wild animals because Saint Anthony, the first Christian monk known to history, had ordered ‘to lead an animal life’: a mandate that also the so often praised Benedict of Nursia adopted in his rule. And according to the currency of the ancient ascetics, ‘the true fast consists of permanent hunger’ and ‘the more opulent the body, the more minute the soul; and vice versa’. They limited themselves to picking out a grain of barley from the camel dung with their fingers, remaining, for the rest days or even whole weeks, in total abstinence.

Surely we should not always give credence to what the Christian chroniclers wrote. Some of these saints did not even exist. Some of these stories are of analogous nature of the ‘ancient Egyptian novels adapted to new ideas’ (Amélineau). Other stories, despite their propensity for hyperbole, are touching. Macarius of Alexandria, for example, kills a horsefly on a certain day and punishes himself. For six months he lies on the ground from which he would not move, in a wasteland ‘in which there are big gadflies like wasps, with stingers that pierce the skin of boars. His body is in such a state that when he returns to his cell they all take him for a leper and only recognise the saint by his voice’.

Whatever the degree of veracity of these stories, from them it clearly transcends everything that influenced, mislead and annoyed the Christians of that time and those of subsequent centuries: the sublime ‘ideal’ by which they had to abide. Those lunatics were idolised, celebrated, consulted and they and their peers passed for saints.

The Temptation of St. Anthony
by Matthias Grünewald.

Anthony wandered from one hiding place to another along the Libyan desert, attracting other anchorites, attracting demons and angels, having full visions of lascivious women, earning more and more the fame of sanctity, of the ideal (Christian) hero. Towards the end of his long life his stature literally grows, with so many miracles and visions, to enter heaven.

In relation to all this, the Vita Antonii (Life of Anthony) of that old forger that was Athanasius, exerted a most than nefarious influence. Written in Greek towards 360 and promptly translated into Latin, it became a popular success; even more, a paradigm of Greek and Latin hagiography.

And it is quite possible that, as Hertling praises, this fable of Anthony has been ‘one of those books that decide the fate of humanity’, since, according to Hartnack, ‘no other written work has had a more stunning effect on Egypt, Western Asia and Europe ‘that that despicable product which emerged from the pen of St. Athanasius the Great’, ‘perhaps the most fateful book of all that have ever been written’. That work is ‘the ultimate piece responsible for which demons, miracle stories and all kinds of goblins found their accommodation in the Church’ (Lexicon of Concepts for Antiquity and Christianity).

Throughout those centuries, most authors of primitive Christianity resolutely reject Greco-Roman culture, philosophy, poetry and art. In the face of all this, they maintained an attitude of profound distrust, of declared hostility: an attitude determined both by the resentment and the anti-Hellenic hatred of the more or less cultured Christians.