The Transformation of Early Christianity from an Eschatological to a Socialized Movement

Our next evidence is the martyrdoms of Lyons and Vienne preserved in a letter quoted by Eusebius. "They (the Christians) endured nobly the injuries inflicted upon them by the populace, clamor and blows and draggings and robberies and stonings and imprisonments and all things which an infuriated mob delight in inflicting on enemies and adversaries."84

"When these accusations were reported all the people raged like wild beasts against us, so that even if any had before been moderate on account of friendship, they were now exceedingly furious and gnashed their teeth against us.

"When he (Bishop Pothinus) was brought to the tribunal accompanied by a multitude who shouted against him in every manner as if he were Christ himself, he bore noble witness. Then he was dragged away harshly and received blows of every kind. Those men near him struck him with their hands and feet, regardless of his age, and those at a distance hurled at him whatever they could seize, all of them thinking that they would be guilty of great wickedness and impiety if any possible abuse were omitted. For thus they thought to avenge their own deities."85

"But not even thus was their madness and cruelty toward the saints satisfied. Wild and barbarous tribes were not easily appeased and their violence found another peculiar opportunity in the dead bodies. For they cast to the dogs those who had died of suffocation in the prison and they exposed the remains left by the wild beasts and by fire mangled and charred. And some gnashed their teeth against them, but others mocked at them. The bodies of the martyrs having thus in every manner been exposed for six days were afterwards burned and reduced to ashes and swept into the Rhone so that no trace of them might appear on the earth. And this they did as if able to conquer God and prevent their new birth; 'that', as they said, 'they may have no hope of a resurrection through trust in which they bring to us this foreign and new religion.' "86

We have in this account a marked advance, as regards the development of the mob mind, over what is found in the martyrdom of Polycarp. Many of the 'crowd' phenomena are indeed the same but the differences are even more striking than the similarities. We find in Lyons no body of Jews or other especially interested persons leading the mob on by manifestations of peculiar zeal and forwardness. When the accounts are compared in their entirety it becomes at once manifest that there is a consistency of attitude, a whole heartedness in the actions of the Lyons mob that is lacking in the case of the Syrmnaens. There is a degree of familiarity with Christian doctrine – especially the doctrine of the resurrection – which denotes a much more thorough permeation of the public mind by Christianity. There may be no difference in the hatred of the two mobs for the new faith, but it had more content in the mind of the Gallic crowd. The degree of thought and pains taken by the Lyonese persecutors – the guards placed to prevent the Christians from stealing the relics of the martyrs, the elaborate efforts to nullify the possibility of a resurrection – the very extent and thoroughness and duration of the persecution are different from anything to be found in the other martyrdom.

The difficulty to be explained – if it is a difficulty – from the point of view of crowd psychology is that there is difference of only eleven years – taking the ordinary chronology – between the two persecutions. It is true that the Lyons persecution is the later, but the difference in the mob behavior is such as might well demand the lapse of a generation had the phenomena been exhibited by the public of the same city. There must unquestionably have been a great difference in the demotic composition of the populations of Lyons and Smyrna; the reference to barbarians in Lyons shows as much, but the behavior of mobs as controlled by the time needed for the focusing and fixation of attention and the development of a disparate universe of discourse is very little effected by difference of demotic composition. It has indeed been suggested by one critic,87 that the persecution at Lyons belongs in the reign of Septimus Severus instead of that of Marcus Aurelius. This would explain away the difficulty, but there seems no necessary reason for adopting this opinion. It would rather appear that there existed peculiar conditions in Lyons and vicinity which account for the fact that the persecution, so far as we know, was confined to that locality and also for the fact that the mob mind was in a maturer state of antagonism to Christianity. Just what these peculiar conditions were, it is impossible to say with entire certainty. However there is at least a very suggestive hint in a paragraph by the greatest modern authority on Roman Gaul88 contained in his well known volume on Ancient France.89 The paragraph is also worth quoting as giving a valuable insight into the psychology of the peoples of the ancient Roman World. "The Roman Empire was in no wise maintained by force but by the religious admiration it inspired. It would be without a parallel in the history of the world that a form of government held in popular detestation should have lasted for five centuries. It would be inexplicable that the thirty legions of the Empire should have constrained a hundred million men to obedience. The reason of their obedience was that the Emperor, who personified the greatness of Rome was worshipped like a divinity by unanimous consent. There were altars in honor of the Emperor in the smallest townships of his realm. From one end of the Empire to the other a new religion was seen to arise in those days which had for its divinities the Emperors themselves. Some years before the Christian era the whole of Gaul, represented by sixty cities, built in common a temple near the city of Lyons in honor of Augustus. Its priests, elected by the united Gallic cities, were the principal personages in their country. It is impossible to attribute all this to fear and servility. Whole nations are not servile and especially for three centuries. It was not the courtiers who worshipped the prince, it was Rome, and it was not Rome merely but it was Gaul, it was Spain. It was Greece and Asia."

While no dogmatic assertion is justified, it does not, perhaps, exceed the limits of reasonable inference to suppose that the existence of this noted center of Emperor worship in the immediate neighborhood of Lyons may account, in part at least, for the especial hatred of the populace of that city for persons who refused to sacrifice to the Emperor and also for the maturity of their feeling against the Christians, who were as far as we are aware, probably the only persons who refused thus to sacrifice. This stray bit of evidence is admittedly not conclusive. It is offered merely for what it may be worth. There is evidence that by the middle of the second Century popular opinion was sufficiently inflamed against the Christians to render the administration of justice precarious because of mob violence. Edicts of Hadrian and Antonius Pious specifically declared that the clamor of the multitude should not be received as legal evidence to convict or to punish them, as such tumultuous accusations were repugnant both to the firmness and the equity of the law.90

This attitude seems to have persisted with relatively little change for about a century. During this period the official 'persecutions' were neither numerous nor severe. From the very few scattered and incidental references which have alone survived regarding the mob feeling of the time, we can assert no more than that it was an exasperated one, likely to break out upon provocation but under ordinary circumstances more or less in abeyance. On the whole it was undoubtedly more violent at the end of the period than at the beginning.

Fortunately from the middle of the third Century onwards we have a fairly continuous history of a single 'public' (Alexandria) which is lacking before this time. The Alexandrian populace were noted for their tumultuous disposition, but we have no reliable account of their behavior towards the Christians until the time of Severus, 202 A.D. In the account given by Eusebius of the martyrdom of the beautiful virgin, Potamiaena, it is stated that: "the people attempted to annoy and insult her with abusive words." As however the intervention of a single officer sufficed to protect her from the people on this occasion, the public sentiment cannot have been inflamed to any alarming extent. If we may trust Palladius, her martyrdom was the result of a plot of a would-be ravisher and in any case it was not the product of any spontaneous popular movement.

In the period between 202 A.D. and 249 A.D. a well developed tradition of hatred and violence grew up in the popular mind. We have no record of the steps in the process but the extant accounts of the Decian and Valerian persecutions in Alexandria leave no doubt of the fact. These persecutions can only be called 'legal' by a violent stretch of verbal usage. They were mob lynchings, sometimes sanctioned by the forms of law, but quite as often without even the barest pretense of judicial execution. They were quite as frequent and as savage in the later part of the reign of Philip, as in the time of Decius. They were not called forth by any imperial edict – they preceded the edict by at least a year and were of a character such as no merely governmental, legal process would ever, or could ever, take on. Mobbing Christians had become a form of popular sport, a generally shared sort of public amusement – exciting and not dangerous. The letter of Bishop Dionysius makes this very clear. To quote: "The persecution among us did not begin with the royal decree but preceded it an entire year. The prophet and author of evils to this city moved and aroused against us the masses of the heathen rekindling among them the superstition of their country and finding full opportunity for any wickedness. They considered this the only pious service of their demons that they should slay us." Then follows a long list of mob lynchings of which we take a single specimen: "They seized Serapion in his own house and tortured him and having broken all his limbs, they threw him headlong from an upper story."91 "And there was no street, nor public read, nor lane open to us night or day but always and everywhere all them cried out that if anyone would not repeat their impious words, he should be immediately dragged away and burned. And matters continued thus for a considerable time. But a sedition and civil war came upon the wretched people and turned their cruelty toward us against one another. So we breathed for a while as they ceased from their rage against us."92

The mob broke loose against the Christians again the following year, but there is no object in cataloguing the grewsome exhibitions of crowd brutality. It is evident that what we have in this account is no exhibition of political oppression by a tyrannical government, but a genuine outbreak of group animosity which had been long incubating in the popular mind. All the phenomena which are characteristic of fully matured public feeling are found complete; circular interaction, shibboleths, sect isolation devices and the rest. When public feeling has developed to such a degree of intensity as this, the accumulated sentiment and social unrest must of necessity discharge themselves in some form of direct group action. This direct action however may take the from either of physical violence or, under certain conditions, of some sort of mystical experience; conversion, dancing, rolling on the ground, etc. In exceptional cases the two forms are combined. An illustration of this latter phenomenon is given by Bishop Dionysius in this same letter; "In Cephus, a large assembly gathered with us and God opened for us a door for the word. At first we were persecuted and stoned but afterward not a few of the heathen forsook their idols and turned to God."93 It is necessary to mention perhaps the largest, and certainly the most dignified and respectable crowd that is to be met with in connection with this persecution – that of Carthage on the occasion of the martyrdom of Bishop Cyprian. We find here neither rage on one side nor unseemly exaltation on the other. Pagans and Christians alike behaved with decent seriousness at the death of that famous man who was equally respected by all classes of the population. But martyrs of the social eminence of Cyprian were very rare, and orderly behaviour in such a vast multitude as witnessed his end was still rarer.

To return to the populace of Alexandria. The long peace of the Church which intervened between the persecution of Valerian and that of Diocletian witnessed in Alexandria, as elsewhere, a great growth of Christianity in numbers, influence, and wealth. It would perhaps be going beyond the evidence to say that in this interval, the majority of the population of the city were won over to the new faith, but it is certain that the number of Christians became so great as to intimidate the pagan portion of the people. The Alexandrian mob was still very much in evidence but it gradually ceased to harrass the Christians except under the most exceptional circumstances. The dangers of such action became so considerable and the chances of success so problematical that we find a period when a practice of mutual forbearance governed the behavior of the hostile groups.

The study of crowd psychology presents no more impressive contrast than that exhibited by the people of Alexandria during the Diocletian persecution compared with their behavior during that of Decius. In the last and greatest of the persecutions, in the most tumultuous city of the empire, the mob took no part. Like the famous image of Brutus, it is more conspicuous by its absence than it would be by its presence. The persecution was a purely governmental measure officially carried out by judges and executioners in accordance with orders. In one obscure and doubtful instance we are told that the bystanders beat certain martyrs when legal permission was given to the people to treat them so. In another case we are told that the cruelty of the punishments filled the spectators with fear. These are the only references to the public that occur in the long and minute account of an eye witness of famous events extending over a considerable number of years. Both before and after this period the mob of the Egyptian metropolis exhibits the utmost extreme of religious fanaticism. During this period that mob had to be most carefully considered by the government in other than religious matters. But as a religious power it did not exist. Had the persecution of Diocletian happened a generation earlier it could have counted on a very considerable degree of popular support, had it happened a generation later it would have caused a revolt that could only have been put down by a large army. Happening at the precise time it did, it provoked no popular reaction at all.

This strange apathy is not peculiar to Alexandria. Practically without exception the authentic acts of the martyrs of this persecution are court records taken down by the official stenographers in the ordinary course of the day's work. They are dry, mechanical, and repetitious to a degree. They exhibit, in general, harrassed and exasperated judges driven to the infliction of extreme penalties in the face of a cold and skeptical public. One imperial decree ordered that all men, women, and children, even infants at the breast, should sacrifice and offer oblations, that guards should be placed in the markets and at the baths in order to enforce sacrifices there. The popular reaction in Caesarea is thus recorded: "The heathen blamed the severity and exceeding absurdity of what was done for these things appeared to them extreme and burdensome."94 "He (the Judge) ordered the dead to be exposed in the open air as food for wild beasts; and beasts and birds of prey scattered the human limbs here and there, so that nothing appeared more horrible even to those who formerly hated us, though they bewailed not so much the calamity of those against whom these things were done as the outrage against themselves and the common nature of man."95

The one thing to be said of this type of mob mind is manifestly that it is transitional. The pendulum has swung through exactly half its arc and for the brief instant presents the fallacious appearance of quiescence. How transitory this quiet was on the part of the Alexandrian mob is evidenced by the history of Athanasius. That great statesman conciliated and consolidated public opinion in Egypt. Backed by this opinion he practically cancelled the power of the civil authorities of the country and negotiated as an equal with the emperors. For the first time in more than three centuries the will of the common people again became a power able to limit the military despotism which dominated the civilized world.

The re-birth of popular government in the Fourth century through the agency of Christian mobs is the most important preliminary step in the growth of the political power of the Catholic Church. A study of the mobs of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and other great cities shows beyond question that the political power of the Church had its origin in no alliance with imperial authority, but was independent of and generally antagonistic to that authority. The history of these Christian mobs lies outside the limits of our study but it is worth while in the case of the Alexandrian populace to give two or three brief extracts illustrating the final steps of the process which changed a fanatically pagan mob into an equally fanatical Christian one. What we have to consider is only the last stage of an evolution already more than half complete at the time of the Nicene Council. Under extreme provocation and certain of imperial complacency at their excesses, the pagan mob during the reign of Julian indulged in one last outburst against the exceedingly unpopular George of Cappadocia who had been forcibly intruded into the seat of Athanasius. To quote the Historian Socrates: "The Christians on discovering these abominations went forth eagerly to expose them to the view and execration of all and therefore carried the skulls throughout the city in a kind of triumphal procession for the inspection of the people. When the pagans of Alexandria beheld this, unable to bear the insulting character of the act, they became so exasperated that they assailed the Christians with whatever weapons chanced to come to hand, in their fury destroying numbers of them in a variety of ways and, as it generally happens in such a case, neither friends or relations were spared but friends, brothers, parents, and children imbued their hands in each others blood. The pagans having dragged George out of the church, fastened him to a camel and when they had torn him to pieces they burned him together with the camel."96 In this account we see the last expiring efforts of the pagan mob movement. Any mob movement collapses rapidly when it turns in upon itself, and the evil results of its violence react immediately upon the members of the mob. By this time it is evident that the number of Christians in Alexandria was so large that any public persecution of them brought serious and unendurable consequences upon the populace generally. Then the movement ended.

But in the two centuries or more that the pagan movement lasted, a contrary Christian mob movement had been developing along the same general lines as the other. This movement, being later in its inception, came to a head correspondingly later and reached its crisis under the patriarch Cyril. Its violence was first directed against the Jews whom the Christians appear to have hated even more than they hated the pagans. The Jews were the weaker and less numerous faction opposed to the Christians and as the Pagans seem to have liked them too little to support them against the Christians, it is not surprising that the Christian mob, which had pretty well reduced the political authorities to impotence, should vent its rage against the Jews and their synagogues. "Cyril accompanied by an immense crowd of people, going to their synagogues, took them away from them and drove the Jews out of the city, permitting the multitude to plunder their goods. Thus the Jews who had inhabited the city from the time of Alexander were expelled from it."97

Sometime after the expulsion of the Jews, the Christian mob, now directing its spite against the rapidly disappearing paganism, perpetrated perhaps the most atrocious crime that stains the history of Alexandria – the murder of Hypatia. This beautiful, learned, and virtuous woman, 'the fairest flower of paganism' is one of the very few members of her sex who has attained high eminence in the realm philosophical speculation. She enjoyed the deserved esteem of all the intellectual leaders of her age – Christian as well as pagan – and to the latest ages her name will be mentioned with respect by all those speculative thinkers whose respect can confer honor. Socrates describes her murder as follows: "It was calumniously reported among the Christian populace that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home and dragged her from her carriage; they took her to the church called Ceasareum where they completely stripped her and then murdered her with oyster shells. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron and there burned them."98

Christian crowd sentiment when hardly yet at its full power was deprived of its original object of animosity by the collapse of paganism. Being under the psychological necessity of expressing itself, this mob feeling happened to take as shibboleths some current theological catchwords. The subsequent history of Alexandria and other great cities presents therefore the strange scene of rival sects disturbing public order and profoundly agitating vast throngs of people in a struggle over the most abstruse and recondite metaphysical concepts. For the sake of clear thinking it is necessary for us to remind ourselves that these concepts are merely weird garments fortuitously snatched up to cover the nakedness of a profound social and economic revolution.

The above sketch, imperfect as it is and full of lacunae due to the inadequacy of the primary source material, is yet perhaps complete enough to enable us to summarize the chief steps in the process of the socialization in its aspect of a crowd movement. We have seen that this crowd movement, like all others, had its origin in social unrest due to shattered private and community ideals. The customary forms of expression being inhibited or repressed, the balked disposition experienced an organic demand for new stimulation. This new stimulation was sought in various ways; aimless or practically aimless travelling or local wandering, local disorder and agitation, increase in crime – and insanity. Gradually this unrest focused itself and public attention became fixed on Christianity. By the process of circular interaction, the so-called 'vicious circle', public sentiment increased in intensity, the name 'Christian' became a shibboleth. When applied to an individual it let loose upon him the pent up emotion of the mob – an emotion or unreflective rage and anger. By the further process of idealization or sublimation, using the terms in their technical sense, the populace came to believe that Christianity was the great and superhuman (daemoniac) source of all evils; earthquakes, disease epidemics, famine etc. Seeking release for psychic tensions which were not understood and largely subconscious, they found it in a reversion to the oldest of the 'releasing instincts' that of hunting. The primary thing about the persecutions is that they were man hunts. The cruelty exhibited, while also serving as a tension release for mob feeling, is psychologically a secondary form of such release – though a very old form. The discharge of the accumulated public sentiment and of the severe social tensions produced group action of two kinds: (a) Direct action: tearing the victim in pieces, gathering wood to burn him, striking him with sticks, stones, etc. (b) Expressive action, taking the form of shouts, cries and ejaculations which became customary and traditional, 'Christianos ad leones.' The very methods of lynching became ceremonial and even ritualistic. The beasts were first choice, then burning and then other forms in descending scale. The narrow range of the mob mind is illustrated by the closeness with which it adhered to contemporary judicial methods of punishment. The most obvious method of killing, and one which had the advantage of enabling a great number of people to see what was going on, the method of hanging, which is in such common use by mobs of our day, does not seem to have been employed by the ancient crowds – at any rate its use was rare in the modern form, strangling. There are some cases of hanging naked women by one foot. Expressive action also took the form of wild and fantastic legends of cannibalism, child murder and such like. The crisis of this pagan mob movement came about the middle of the third century. The Decian persecution appears to have been 'popular' in the strict etymological sense of that word. The persecution of Diolection, though the most severe, seems to have had no great force of pagan public sentiment behind it. That sentiment was not hostile; it was neutral. The populace did nothing to hinder the measures of the government and it did nothing to help them. In another generation the pagan movement had spent itself. This analysis of the pagan mob sentiment against the Christians is applicable mutatis nominibus, to the Christians' mob movement against the pagans and to the movement of the 'orthodox' Christians against the 'heretics.' Perhaps we should say here, in defense of human nature, that these mob movements were not due to human depravity; they were, in strict literalness, diseases, epidemics of nervous disorder induced by pathological social conditions. Before any persecuting attitude became habitual to the pagan populace pagan common sense had exhausted argument, persuasion, expostulation and every other intellectual device. Only after reason and religion (in the pagan sense) had been employed in vain; only after long exasperation at a hopeless situation, when absolutely nothing else could be done, was popular violence aroused. Social conditions being what they were, traditional mental attitudes common to pagan and Christians alike required that something be done and mob action was the last desperate alternative to the admission of a new intellectual concept.