From its birth, the Church worked to overthrow tyrannies and establish societies of justice. But it did this in a manner unlike any other revolutionary movement. It did not attempt to defeat tyranny at its own game, becoming the biggest and baddest social power around: another political force or ideological faction raising armies and winning elections. If it did, it wouldn’t really be radical at all. It would be another aspect of the world. Rather, Christianity has always redeemed politics by surpassing it, fulfilling it beyond itself. It defeats violence through peace and not with more powerful violence.
My mother always told me that it was rude to discuss either politics or religion in polite company.[1] Ruder still, to discuss them both together. Generally speaking, we are allowed to have political opinions. We are also allowed to have religious convictions. But it seems unreasonable, and vaguely un-American, to assert that one is relevant to the other; extremist, even Islamist, to assert that our political problems are really, deep down, religious problems. I think we all understand why this is the case: to assert that proper politics is tied directly to proper religion raises some serious problems for our self-conception as Americans, considering our particular culture of religious pluralism. So, according to my good mother’s standards, what I am going to say will sound very rude. But I think our society has arrived at such a degree of crisis that it might be time to start being a bit rude, if not in the contemporary sense of “offensive,” at least in the more archaic sense of “rough and unfinished.” We must return to the rough and obviously religious beginnings of our culture in order to re-assess it and its political agonies.
From its birth, the Church was politically radical. It worked to overthrow tyrannies and establish societies of justice. But it did this in a manner unlike any other revolutionary movement. It did not attempt to defeat tyranny at its own game, becoming the biggest and baddest social power around: another political force or ideological faction raising armies and winning elections. If it did, it wouldn’t really be radical at all. It would be another aspect of the world. Rather, Christianity has always redeemed politics by surpassing it, fulfilling it beyond itself. It defeats violence through peace and not with more powerful violence. This is not to say that Christianity leaves the tyrannies of the world alone. When I say it defeats them, I mean that literally, concretely—Christianity brings tyrants to their knees.
A central piece of Christ’s teaching was the declaration that the “kingdom of God is at hand.” The phrase “the kingdom of God” appears eighty times in the New Testament and with such central, structural significance that it may be said to be what the New Testament is “about.” That the kingdom of God was at hand was meant quite literally. To understand this, we need to understand who the recipients of this kingdom are: that is, who we are. We are rational beings whose rationality is a participation in the rationality of God himself, the creator of the cosmos. We are made to partake in the truth of things, to live in a truth that goes beyond ourselves and beyond what we know. Man knows the truth only in humility, only within the recognition that what we know is not the whole truth and that our ordering of the things of our world occurs within or beneath the more fundamental ordering of all things by God. As St. Thomas Aquinas remarked, it is impossible for man himself to know the nature of even a single gnat.[2] Participation in the truth requires that we look up to that which is beyond us and receive, as a gift, the coherence of a world whose ultimate nature escapes us. We are not masters of the truth but children participating in the life of their father. This is profoundly humbling.
After the fall, mankind attempted to set itself up as the source of order: of true and false, right and wrong, just and unjust. Instead of looking up in humility, we looked down in pride—ordering the world beneath us. This was an attempt at self-liberation; instead of being under a greater law, we would fashion ourselves as the source of all law. But it resulted in slavery because it resulted in fear. We have all seen children “play adult.” Perhaps we have even seen the fear that results when this playful attempt crosses over into the real: the child who would be “like Mom” by cutting the vegetables suddenly feels the sharpness of the blade; the child who would be “like Dad” by driving the car screams in terror when he actually starts it. In both cases, the reality of the world strikes the child as something more complicated than he can understand and more powerful than he can master.
When men play God, something like this happens. It feels good so long as one can maintain the illusion, but when reality breaks in, man’s weaknesses and inadequacies reassert themselves as horrifying and unnatural. Rather than merely indicating man’s natural, primordial need for Divine help (for a child can enjoy that his parents come to support him where he is lacking), these relative inadequacies are now understood as signs of man’s failure to be “like God.” Where once he appeared as a “helped man” he now appears as a “failed god,” having taken the divine position of ordering the world without possessing the capacity to do so.
Divorced from the love and mind of God, the world becomes a place of frightening powers. The storms are powerful. The animals are powerful. Hunger is powerful. Disease is powerful. But most frightening of all is the power of other men. In such a situation, people try to control the world, which means to control each other—to dominate. They try, through violence, to ape the Divinity, but divinity nevertheless eludes them. They are trapped in unrelenting anxiety, which produces conflict, which culminates in large, centralized efforts to control the overpowering universe: culminates, that is, in the temple-based, slave states of antiquity. Pagan kingdoms—ruled by god-men.
Why did pagans sacrifice to their gods? What sense could there be in killing a goat and burning it up? They performed such rites in pursuit of certain rewards or to avoid certain punishments—they killed the goat to get a good crop, for instance. But, of course, killing a goat has no natural causal link to a successful crop, unlike, say, watering or weeding your fields. But that disconnect was the very point of the rite. The rites could only be understood to “work” because a third party, a power that was in neither the goat nor the fields, created a causal link between them through an act of arbitrary will: the will of a god, which was only known through the commands of kings and priests. Sacrificial systems render reason itself suspect. Reason would seem to indicate that watering the field would help the crops … but in a pagan regime, could we be sure? Better check with the priests—maybe it is more important to kill a bull. Even the cycles of the seasons, many pagans came to believe, depended on the performance of arbitrary rites to appease capricious gods—Pharaoh was necessary to make sure the Nile flooded every year. Through paganism, even the ordered world of nature became beset with anxiety, an anxiety that could only be assuaged through submission to the priests and kings who placated the gods through essentially arbitrary rites and mediated their will to the masses.
In this way, the pagan regimes were built on anxiety, on fear. The more fearful their people were of the gods, the more power could be amassed through the rites that placated the gods. The brilliance of the system is that its failure simply makes it stronger. If the rites fail, it is because they were not done properly, or with proper devotion, or because the gods have new demands—and all of these solutions require more power to be devolved to the priests and kings. It is only natural that in many such regimes the kings became worshiped as themselves gods or sons of gods. In the pagan world, all kingdoms were kingdoms of “god,” in a manner of speaking. But this was so in a way that inverted mankind’s original condition. Before the Fall, man had mediated the power of God down and into creation. After the Fall, in the pagan states, the power of men was mediated through the “gods,” through the idols. The gods were mechanisms of domination—systems for the creation of slave states.
The Roman Empire was entering into the final phases of such politics when Christ was born. Caesar Augustus, the first emperor, reigned at the time of the Nativity, and he was acclaimed as divine, as a living god. His divine status was based upon his power. The peace of the empire—that, in fact, rested on the devastating effectiveness of its legions and the terror inspired by its raw power—was thought to flow from him. An assembly of the Province of Asia explained why they observed the occasion of Augustus’s birthday:
Whereas the providence which divinely ordered our lives created with zeal and munificence the most perfect good for our lives by producing Augustus and filling him with virtue for the benefaction of mankind, sending us and those after us a saviour who put an end to war and established all things; and whereas Caesar [Augustus] when he appeared exceeded the hopes of all who had anticipated good tidings, not only by surpassing the benefactors born before him, but not even leaving those to come any hope of surpassing him; and whereas the birthday of the god marked for the world the beginning of good tidings through his coming…[3]
There was a sort of virtue in the Romans that made their empire possible. They disciplined themselves, trained themselves, sacrificed superficial pleasures, and dedicated their lives to something bigger than any one of them. But this thing, this love to which they were devoted, was nothing more than glory, nothing more than the intoxicating exultation of power, which seemed to attain that divine control that man idolatrously sought for himself in the beginning. This was their real god: power itself. Power was divine, and he who wielded power was a god—or at least the son of a god. The emperor was not a god because of some magical ceremony or some secret knowledge. He was a god because he could marshal the force to destroy nations. He held life and death in his hands and meted it out according to his will. This, to the Romans, was divinity. Christ entered as God, savior, and king into a world in which kings were already—in a very different way—“saviors,” “princes of peace,” and gods.
The Roman Empire was stable, but it was cruel and harsh. About a third of the population were slaves—conquered people who lived under continuous military domination. The Empire was organized through a rigid social and political hierarchy violently enforced for the attainment of greater power and glory. Power in the Roman Empire was felt immediately and used unhesitatingly. Power, more than anything else, was what mattered to the Romans. This love underwrote their political order and, through it, their conception of the cosmic order.
Throughout the empire, hundreds of gods were worshiped. Most of these were local, of concern only to the inhabitants of a particular region. Some, such as Jupiter, were a part of the official cult of the empire as a whole. It is important, though, that we do not mistake their gods for smaller versions of God Himself. The pagan gods were power. If the weather had power, it was a god. If the river had power, it was a god. The people understood the power that everywhere affected their lives, demanding their submission, to be aspects of the divine. They worshiped these instances of power, not with the adoration and thanksgiving that Christians have grown accustomed to, but with the overarching purpose of placating the divine power: seeking its favor and mitigating its wrath.
Thus, it seemed obvious to the Romans that the emperor was divine. He had immense power, and power was what it meant to be godlike. The residents of the Roman Empire lived under the power of others, men and gods, to whom they were expected to submit or suffer the swift and pitiless consequences. This produced a certain fatalism—the belief that the course of one’s life is out of one’s hands and is the result of the arbitrary will of others: which leads to despair and fear. Ironically, this fear is the source of the prototypically Roman courage, military ambition, and heroism that a romantic view of the Empire takes as the Roman genius. Rather, the Roman people, whether slaves or free, were scared; their fear produced the desire for power, the drive to amass for one’s self the ability to determine fates, to steal from the gods, to become godlike to others—to achieve glory. This was the circular source of what St. Augustine called Rome’s libido dominandi, its lust for domination.
Christ was born into a Jewish culture that was fearfully subjected to this Roman Empire. In this context, his declaration that the kingdom of God was at hand and that he was the Son of God was radically subversive. Christ, for example, told a parable about the kingdom of heaven in which he said that it was like a king who was holding a marriage feast for his son. He sent out servants to invite the guests, but instead of coming, the guests abused his servants and even killed them. This made this king angry, and he destroyed the guests with his army and sent his servants out to invite strangers (see Matt 22:1–14). Now, the meaning of this parable is clear: God is the king and Christ is His son; the Jews had been invited to the king’s feast—to his kingdom—and had rejected him. God would therefore destroy them and move His kingdom to another people.
This was a direct threat to the survival of the status quo, not some spiritualized story with no immediate “political” consequences. Christ was talking about being the king of the Jews. The Pharisees recognized this immediately and responded to Christ’s parable by asking Him if it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, as if to say, “Oh, you’re a king are you? And are you such a king as to go up against the real king, Caesar?” Jesus responds, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the money for the tax.” They bring him a tribute penny, and he continues, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They reply that it is Caesar’s, and Christ responds, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (see Matt 22:18–21). This exchange is more complicated than it might at first appear. On its obverse—the heads side—the penny bore the image of Tiberius, the current emperor, with the inscription “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus”—Caesar, son of god. On its reverse—the tails side—it had an image of the queen mother as the goddess Peace. The coin was struck for the very purpose of maintaining the power of a god-king. It was itself an idol, and its dutiful payment was a form of submission, even worship. Christ attacks this directly.
He looks at the penny and sees it for what it is: merely the mechanism, the property, of the man called Caesar. Like all idols, it is merely the work of human hands, fashioned of silver and cast by men. There is nothing divine about Caesar’s power. The coin is an empty boast. Give it, therefore, back to its owner, but do so not with the worship for which it was made, but as a pitiful nothing. Give worship to the true God, the true king. Give to the true king what is his. And what is his? Just a couple lines later, Christ tells us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:37–39). What is left for Caesar? His worthless little coin and his absurd claim to be a god.
This was sedition. Christ’s assertion that He was the Son of God who had come to establish a kingdom was clearly rebellious. Such treason formed the basis of Christ’s trial. The Jews brought Christ before Pilate with the charge that he claimed to be the king of the Jews and the Son of God. In the political-theological world in which they lived, these claims amounted to the same thing. So, Pilate asks Christ, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
Jesus answered, “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world.” Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (John 18:36–38).
Christ confused Pilate. To Pilate, as a Roman, kingship simply was worldly power. To not have an army was to be no king at all. Christ’s assertion that he is a king and that he does not fight for worldly power because his kingship is not from the world—not from below but from above—was nonsense. Christ explains that his power is based in truth.
Now it is very tempting to read this as some sort of spiritualized dodge of the implications of Christ’s kingship, as if Christ were saying, “Don’t worry. I don’t mean that kind of king. You worldly kings have nothing to worry about.” But this is wrong.
Again, mankind was created to live in the truth of God. Man’s ability to understand the world and so order it through his rationality—his true power, we might say—was dependent upon his humbled, upward looking, reception of the truth of God. This reception of the truth, which becomes mediation of the truth into the world, was the manner in which mankind had been created to have dominion and to subdue the earth—to be true kings. This kingship—which we might call a kingship of truth or of reason—was perverted through the fall into fear and domination. What we got instead was the construction of the pagan states with their ritual systems and extrinsic, closed law codes that divinize men.
Christ restores truth through the internal conversion of hearts—He rules men not from below, but from above, not through fear, but through truth. However, this does not leave the power of the world alone. Men who live in the truth are no longer living in the order of fear.[4] What the order of fear promises but can’t ever really deliver is peace, and peace is exactly what is fulfilled in the regime of truth. Members of Christ’s kingdom are not less powerful than the subjects of Pilate’s kingdom; rather, they are more powerful, here, now, and in this world. What is more, members of Christ’s kingdom are unilaterally no longer members of Caesar’s kingdom. They are no longer subject to his power because they no longer live in the world of anxiety and fear that his power depends upon. Christ’s kingdom of truth undoes the very foundations of the worldly kingdoms.
The power of the god-king is the power of the liar: his claim is that peace comes only through violence, from below. Men restored to truth through grace, however, are not subject to the power of lies. They can have peace without Caesar. This is a more radical rebellion than any army could have mounted. Far from leaving them alone, the establishment of Christ’s kingdom destroys the very logic of the pagan kingdoms. None of this makes sense to Pilate because he doesn’t have a concept of truth that is distinct from power. He is a Roman through and through. Power is truth. Truth is nothing more than power. It is therefore, considered separately, a useless category, and the realistic man can dismiss it with a shrug: “What is truth?” So to Pilate, Christ seems insane.
He and his soldiers, therefore, mock Christ, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!,” putting a crown of thorns on His head, and clothing Him in a purple robe. Pilate then tries to give Him back to the Jews because he doesn’t see a threat in Him. They answer, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God” (John 19:7). We are used to reading this from the Jewish angle, as a charge of blasphemy. We need to see it from the Roman angle as well. St. John tells us that this charge frightened Pilate. Sons of gods were, after all, kings. Caesar himself was the son of a god.
Nevertheless, Pilate sees no actual power in Christ and so tries again to release Him. The Jews cry out, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend; every one who makes himself a king sets himself against Caesar” (John 19:12). This is the decisive charge. The Jewish leaders connect the dots in no uncertain terms: Caesar’s power is as a son of god. This man claims to be the son of the God of the Jews. Therefore, this man claims to be a rival king. The Jewish leaders were advancing Rome’s own political theology against Christ. They were asserting that he was a threat to Caesar as a rival king, as a rival son of God. What is more, Pilate now sees that He is more than merely an isolated, crazy claimant. He did seem to have some sort of social power. He did enter Jerusalem to adoring crowds not long before and now His presence was provoking an angry mob. Could it be that Pilate at this point suspected that Christ might, somehow, actually be who He claimed to be? Could it be that Pilate sensed that Christ really was a king, even if a strange and unconventional king? Pilate was a good Roman, after all, and the Romans believed in god-kings—both their own and those of other nations. “Pilate said to them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’ Then he handed him over to them to be crucified” (John 19:15–16).
What is a king? The son of a god. Who is Caesar? The son of a god. Who does Christ claim to be? The son of a god, and so a king. Who then is the chief priests’ and the Pharisees’ god—is it any longer the Jewish God, or is it the Roman?[5]
The chief priests and the Pharisees were committing an extreme form of idolatry—indeed, the most extreme in the Bible. They were the custodians of the Divine Law, of the very Law of God that he had given them as their king.[6] The Pharisees recognized throughout Christ’s mission that He was a threat to the self-enclosed nature they had given this Law. They had come to pervert the Divine Law in such a way that it no longer strained to reach beyond its own confines, to make contact with its Creator. In their hands, the Law had become a self-enclosed mechanism of social control that was operated by the elites. It had become a mechanism of power. It had become no different in its operation, ultimately, from the law of Pharaoh or the law of Caesar.
The final apostasy was to assert that the breaking of the Divine Law was identical to the breaking of the law of Caesar, that it was, in effect, Caesar’s law; that he was the divine lawgiver, the true king; that rendering to God what was God’s and rendering to Caesar what was Caesar’s were the same thing—because Caesar was God. This is exactly what the elites do. In order to defend their own power, the Jewish authorities, ironically, made themselves slaves to other men. They made Caesar their god. This is the tragic paradox of sin and fear. Slavery to the drive to amass power always leads, ironically, to slavery to other men. This is the dynamic of all politics after the Fall and without Christ.
The Romans crucified Christ as the king of the Jews. This is what Pilate wrote on His cross. It was the justification for the execution. In killing Christ, Pilate sought to destroy the independence of Israel and absorb them into the Roman world definitively. In order to have Christ killed, the Pharisees and priests gave Pilate what he wanted. They acknowledged Caesar as the son of god and king of kings. The quest for power, the lust for domination, leads inevitably to slavery.
In the Crucifixion, the Romans unleashed all the power that they had. They tortured and killed Christ. The kings of the world only have such violence, such external power over bodies. Had Pilate and Christ’s accusers been right about the world, this would have worked. If raw physical power is what characterizes the sons of gods, the Cross would have robbed Christ of this status. Death is the ultimate moment of powerlessness, the ultimate moment of defeat. The onlookers understood this, saying “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross….” and again “He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him….” (Matt 27:40–43).
But rather, Christ dies. Christ defeats the power of the sons of gods in a totally unexpected way. Christ defeats this power by passing through it, by dying and being resurrected. When He rose from the dead, He was not a ghost or a spirit that the forces of the world could safely ignore. Instead, His body was raised. The thing that the kings of the world dominated—his body—escaped their grasp. The Resurrection is the final undoing of the power of fear because it trumps fear with hope. If the Resurrection is real, what purchase does fear have left? Can those who hope in the resurrection be ruled by the law of fear? Isn’t it instead the case that, ironically, the instrument of fear, the cross, becomes itself a symbol of hope? This is the great reversal, the political revolution, that Christ initiated. The Cross and the empty tomb render Caesar and so the gods powerless.
This was Good News. It was the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Christianity spread quickly. Estimates of its rate of growth are incredibly difficult to make. However, it seems that by the year 250, about two percent of the Roman population was Christian. This might not sound like much, but it was actually around two million Christians. Fifty years later, eleven percent of the population was Christian. In fifty more years, by the year 350, that number was fifty-seven percent. In a short period of time, Christianity went from a small sect to a faith that could claim the majority of the empire, including the emperors themselves, as members. Why? How?
Sometimes modern historians bemoan the conversion of the empire, as if Christianity were some foreign force that had come from without and destroyed a vibrant, tolerant, and beautiful civilization, replacing it with ignorance and superstition. In this telling, conversion to Christianity was a sort of fraud or ruse through which a civilization that had once been happy, joyful, and truly alive was tricked or coerced into misery, into replacing its dancing with judgmental and rigid morality, into surrendering philosophical curiosity and rigor to close-minded dogmatism. This modern telling is profoundly wrong. Christianity was not a foreign force that invaded and conquered Roman paganism. Christianity arose within the empire and it spread through the empire as pagans converted by the millions. Christianity was something the people of the Roman Empire did, not something that happened to them. It was as a Roman movement that Christianity became a movement of world-historical significance. So, the question is: why did the Romans leave paganism and become Christians? Why did they choose Christ instead of Pilate?
We have already answered this question. Christianity proposed a different way to peace. Christianity proposed that the universe, rather than being a cosmos of chaos that had to be put in order by violent power, was the creation of a single, loving God and that it had been made by Him for peace and harmony and subsisted in this peace: that it really was only to the extent that it enjoyed what St. Augustine called the “tranquility of order.” It was not violent power that provided order in this universe. Rather, violence was what tore its harmony apart. Rather than being the source of order, violence was the source of disorder. This was a radical inversion of the pagan understanding—an inversion, however, that could nevertheless explain the pagan conceptual world. Christianity explained paganism to itself in order to show pagans another way.
Christ made it possible for the primordial order of love to re-penetrate and reorder human society. The early Christians enacted this reordering immediately among themselves. They lived in common, sharing all things. The weak and needy were given more, and the strong and prosperous gave more. They lived as if they were one body, feeling each other’s joys and pains.[7] They believed that all people were called to this sort of life and that all people, even women and slaves, were capable of achieving true freedom by developing the virtues that grace makes possible. The contrast with pagan society could not have been starker. Christians became known by their love, as Christ had commanded them. The Didache, an important Christian document from around the year 100, exhorts the early Christians: “Do not hate anyone—but reprove some, pray for others, and love still others more than yourself.”[8] Their love was the cause of their profound unity.[9] Unity in faith and charity was the antidote to the suffering of pagan society. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote of faith and love: “This is the beginning and end of life: faith is the beginning, love is the end. And the two together in unity are of God; all other things that lead to nobility of character follow [from them].”[10]
To a world of fear, Christianity offered salvation. This was a salvation that did not merely await one in heaven, but that started in this life, in the society of peace called the Church. This salvation flowed into the Church through Christ in His sacraments, especially the Eucharist.[11] As Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “For when you frequently gather as a congregation, the powers of Satan are destroyed, and his destructive force is vanquished by the harmony of your faith. Nothing is better than peace, by which every battle is abolished, whether waged by those in heaven or by those on earth.”[12]
The Church offered the pagans something very different from mainstream society. It provided a stable, peaceful society of order and unity that was an inversion of the pagan understanding. And yet, it held together—it worked. This is what drew the attention of the Romans. It was literally amazing to them.
In Christ, things had changed. Real peace became possible because of the hope that flowed out of the Cross and Resurrection. When we love, we expose ourselves. We trust—and when we trust, it is quite possible that we will be betrayed and more or less guaranteed that we will be hurt. But love doesn’t attempt to build systems of checks and balances, systems of power to ensure that the one we love doesn’t have the power to hurt us. On the contrary, loving is the handing over of our power to the other—it is making oneself vulnerable—because it is the submission of power to truth. This is madness in a world of struggle for survival. This is madness in a world of crosses without resurrections. Love becomes a possible foundation of social order exactly because the fear of death is no longer the final variable determining human action; rather, another layer is added: resurrection—and so hope arises, which brings the fear of death up into itself and renders it secondary and capable of being overcome.
This is what attracted the millions of converts to Christianity—it was also why the pagan rulers sought to stamp out Christianity. Indeed, early persecutions of Christians were more on account of the threat that their “bottom up,” self-governing, and yet peaceful communities posed to hegemonic order than on account of Christians’ “odd” religious claims or observances.[13] The Roman authorities didn’t always know (or necessarily care about) what the Christians believed, but they nevertheless saw the social threat of their real communities. They could tell that Christianity provided a real alternative to their fearful, domination-based way of life, and this disturbed them. The reason for the conversions and the reason for the persecutions is the same.
Indeed, over the next hundred years, the Christians grew in numbers and became increasingly obnoxious to the pagans. The pagans may have been mistaken about the details of Christianity, but they were right to see Christianity as a threat to their order. Christianity really did undermine paganism and the political and economic systems that were integral to it. And the Christians knew what they were doing. They did not teach that the pagan gods weren’t real: they taught that they were wicked demons in league with vicious men, whose real power was present everywhere there was violence and fear.[14] Christians would not worship the gods, not because they were fake—as if Christianity were some sort of rationalist project—but because they were devils and depraved men. The Christians taught that God was the creator of all and that all that was good and true, even in paganism, was fulfilled only in Christianity. Nothing that was good was really “pagan.” As St. Justin Martyr remarked, “Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians.”[15] This was very aggressive.
But even more aggressive was the Christian assertion that Jesus Christ was the only Son of God, a title, as we have seen, that was claimed by the emperor. The Christians insisted that Christ was their king, that he was, in fact, the true king of all men, whether they liked it or not. They refused to worship the emperor because they were already worshiping the true God-king. As one Christian responded under interrogation, “I do not recognize the empire of this world; but rather I serve that God, whom no man has seen nor can see…. I recognize my Lord, the King of kings and Emperor of all peoples.”[16] In the dating provided by one early Christian martyr account, the traditional formula is used; it states: “Now, the blessed Polycarp suffered martyrdom on … the seventh day before the Kalends of May, on the great Sabbath, at the eighth hour. He was taken by Herod, Philip the Trallian being high priest, Statius Quadratus being proconsul” … and here, at the end, where the reigning emperor should have been mentioned, the text reads: “and Jesus Christ being King for ever, to whom be glory, honor, majesty, and an everlasting throne, from generation to generation. Amen.”[17] This is not passivity. This is brazen—a direct insult and a bold provocation.
In the eyes of the pagans, this was not only atheism; it was simple treason. It was also very confusing. As the pagans led St. Polycarp to his death, they repeatedly pleaded with him to offer sacrifice to the emperor, to merely acknowledge him as divine, as Lord. Why wouldn’t he do such a small, meaningless thing, they asked. He responds by insisting that only Jesus Christ is his God and his king.[18] This was baffling. As we have seen, to the pagans, power was divine, and the emperor was obviously powerful. To the pagans, as the emperor killed the Christians, he was at the same time proving them wrong about the kingship of Christ; he was proving that he was powerful and that their god was weak, that he was divine and that their god was nothing. Martyrdom appeared, therefore, insane. This was a re-enactment of the encounter between Pilate and Christ. And the early Christians knew this. Throughout the martyrdom accounts, the martyrs are described as re-enacting Christ’s passion, as participating in His suffering and death at the hands of the Romans, and as having their resurrection to eternal life always before them. The Christians understood exactly what was happening. They understood that fear had been overcome by the courage that only hope makes possible, and they understood that this was the undoing of Caesar.
The early Christians’ arguments with the pagans were often genius in their subversive logic. Tertullian, for example, argued that sacrificing to the gods for the success and prosperity of Caesar didn’t make any sense, because Caesar was clearly the one with real power in paganism. Even the dutiful pagans were more afraid of Caesar than they were of the gods. The gods, Tertullian argued, were less powerful than Caesar. They were below Caesar, under his dominion; ultimately, they were his property. Here, Tertullian was exposing the very heart of the political theology of pagan god-kingship and of the idols that were the mechanisms of pagan power. He seemed to be flattering Caesar, but of course what he was really doing was undermining the pretensions of Caesar’s power and exposing the mechanisms of fear and control through which he maintained it. In a move of subtle genius, Tertullian asserted that Christians prayed to God for the emperor and that they respected him as the highest man, whose authority was given him by the one true God. Tertullian was offering Caesar an office. But it was an office now positioned below the divine and not above it. Rather than the divine being under the dominion of Caesar, rather than the gods mediating the power of man, if Caesar were to have the Christians’ loyalty, he would have to come to understand that things were the other way round, that he was under the dominion of the one true God, that his power could only be the mediated power of God. Caesar’s authority could be real, but he could never have the power of a god-king.[19] Caesar could remain Caesar only if he gave up what the pagans understood by “Caesar.” This idea is clearly a development of Christ’s juxtaposition between rendering to Caesar and rendering to God, and, indeed, Tertullian took up this passage, arguing that to Caesar was owed what bore his image and likeness, the coin, and to God was owed what bore his image and likeness, humanity itself.[20]
We can see, then, why the Roman elites, who had a pretty good sense of how paganism worked, viewed Christians correctly as a threat to the order of the empire. They were not naive. They believed that the world was a world of violence and disorder and that it was only the power of the empire that held chaos at bay. In a world of god-kings, only a god-king could protect order. Within the fallen world before Christ, of course, this was not wrong. In the City of Man, it is true that power rules. Falling back into this belief was the constant temptation of Israel in the Old Testament. Their desire to fall back upon the safety of power is why they exclaimed in 1 Samuel, “No! but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam 8:19–20). But as we have seen, it was this very reality of the rule of power that Christianity undid. In Christianity we can see that it is true, as the pagans maintained, that order must come through a god-king, a man who is a god. The catch is that he must be the true god-king, Christ himself. Christianity undoes paganism by, in a sense, making it real: making it true and not just lies.
The pagans were not wrong about Christianity’s threat to their world. They were not wrong when they perceived martyrs to be “the destroyer of our own gods”—as one crowd shouted at the Christians.[21] What those who remained pagan were wrong about was the conviction that their world was the only possible world. The acceptance of martyrdom was the demonstration that the Christian had moved into a world that was governed by different rules—by the logic of the Resurrection. The same love that made the Christian society of peace possible, the same willingness to risk the other person, was the basis of martyrdom. The Christian had already accepted the cross in his love of God and neighbor, in his acceptance of membership in the kingdom of God. For most Christians, of course, this cross was experienced only in the little betrayals and struggles of life—but it was real and its acceptance was already the acceptance of martyrdom, even if the Christian was never called upon to make that ultimate display of hope. When the pagans saw the peaceful society of Christians and the courage of the martyrs, they were seeing one and the same thing—they were attracted by the peace made possible by courage. They were seeing Christ himself; Christ was being made real to them in the Church. This is why they converted.
As Christianity spread, so too did the frequency and intensity of persecution. Faced with the slow collapse of pagan society, some factions sought another way in Christianity, while others sought to double down on paganism, to further centralize and divinize power, and to create ever more complete mechanisms for domination and fear. At the end of the 3rd century, Diocletian, a man of remarkable ability, came to the imperial throne. He was determined to strengthen the empire by uniting it under an authoritarian temple-state, with a centralized, bureaucratic administration which redoubled its focus on the empire-wide cults, especially the cult of the emperor. Under Diocletian, the divinity of the emperor was emphasized as the chief conduit through which the will of the gods governed mankind. He went so far, in fact, as to assert that he was Jupiter himself on the throne, incarnated in a man. He demanded to be adored as a god, adorning himself in gold and jewels. Diocletian sought unity in the empire through establishing himself as a man-god above all other gods.
This led, in the year 298, to the Great Persecution. The persecution wore on year after year. During this time, churches were burned and thousands of men, women, and children were killed. One eyewitness, the famous historian Eusebius, witnessed an assembly line of decapitation, writing, “the murderous axe was dulled, and worn out, and was broken in pieces while the executioners grew weary and took it in turns to succeed one another.”[22] In 305, Diocletian abdicated the imperial throne and retired. Shortly after, the persecution came to an end in the West and petered out over the next several years in the East. The pagan empire had done its worst in a last-ditch effort to eradicate Christianity and reestablish the power of the empire. And it failed—a final resemblance to Pilate. Christianity emerged stronger than ever, and in seven short years, there would be a Christian emperor, Constantine.
The rule of the gods was over. The rule of the god-kings, who used the gods as the basis of their power, was over. Constantine eliminated almost all pagan sacrifice in the empire: that is, he eliminated the system of anxiety and fear that underwrote the power of the gods and so of tyrants. It took another hundred or so years before the Empire would be converted through and through, but that was the decisive step. Without sacrifice, without cult, the gods were reduced to fairy-tales. This was a regime change—a revolution, even. The Christian emperors were not gods. Their power came not from below, but from above; they were “Caesar” in only an analogical sense. And the priests did not serve royal power. Rather, the priests made just royal power possible. The gods did not mediate the power of men; men mediated the power of God. Christianity tied human power to a source and standard that it did not control. Only God, ultimately, had perfect power.
An episode that occurred in 390 demonstrates this new reality. The emperor Theodosius suppressed a rebellion in Thessalonica, massacring thousands of people. He returned to Milan where he lived and there attempted to enter the cathedral for Mass. He was met at the door by the bishop, St. Ambrose. Ambrose refused him entry, stating that his great sin forbade him from participating in the sacraments. The emperor was excommunicated. Ambrose pleaded with the emperor:
You are a man, you have met temptation—conquer it. Sin is not removed except by tears and penance…. [T]he apex of your deeds was always your piety. The Devil envied you this, your most outstanding possession. Conquer him while you still have the means of doing so.[23]
Theodosius left, heartbroken, but soon returned, ready to submit to the bishop and to do penance for his sins.
This was a new reality. It was not that the bishop was king. Ambrose could not order Theodosius’s armies into the field. The bishops and the emperor needed each other, and the Christian people needed both. Power was dispersed, and yet it was more fundamentally unified than before because the kingdom found its unity in truth. This is the truth that Christ spoke of to Pilate. Ambrose was not able to impose penance on the emperor because he had his own army, because the saint was more “powerful” than the emperor. Rather, he could impose penance because the emperor bowed to truth, because truth and not power reigned over both the bishop and the emperor. This “bowing to truth” bears the form, always, of martyrdom. As Joseph Ratzinger explained:
In his saying that we must give Caesar what is his and God what is his, Jesus separates imperial power and divine power. He takes the ius sacrum [sacred law] out of the ius publicum [public law] and thereby cuts in two the fundamental constitution of the world of antiquity, indeed, of the pre-Christian world in general. In separating the ius sacrum from the emperor’s ius publicum, he created space for freedom of conscience, at the edge of which every power ends, even that of the Roman god-emperor, who thereby becomes a mere man-emperor and is transformed into the apocalyptic beast when he nevertheless tries to remain a god and denies the inviolable space of conscience. Hence, with this saying a limit is set for every earthly power and the freedom of the human person is proclaimed, which transcends all political systems. For this limit Jesus went to his death: he witnessed in suffering to the limit of power. Christianity begins, not with a revolutionary, but with a martyr. The increase in freedom that mankind owes to the martyrs is infinitely greater than the one that revolutionaries could obtain for it.[24]
Of course, the Kingdom of God in its perfection is the kingdom of the angels and saints in the Church Triumphant. But the Church Militant is the part of this kingdom that sojourns on earth. It is the kingdom in anticipation, in formation, in via, on pilgrimage—the kingdom that still has with it the cross and so has hope in the Resurrection. The kingdom on earth is the kingdom that is built on courage, or valor—the valor that makes a society of love possible by maintaining a constant social openness to martyrdom. As we have seen, the construction of societies of peace, which attracts the world, and the willingness to suffer for the faith, which also attracts the world, are two aspects of the same orientation, that is, of the same hope—and so of the same courage.
Christian politics is not just worldly politics with a different ideology. Christian politics is the politics of peace and hope and not of fear and violence. Christianity does not opt out of politics. It is not quietistic or pacifistic or apathetic or detached. Christianity squares up to the powers of the world—to mocking and violent neighbors, to the cheering mobs in the colosseum, to Pontius Pilate, to Diocletian—and risks love. This is heroic valor. And in this valor, we both build communities of true peace and undo systems of unjust power. We free ourselves from the domination of the gods that are the powers of the world and from the men who claim to control those gods because we have a courage that both undoes their power and builds the foundations for a different order.
This is why tyrants try to destroy communities of love—because they fear the valor that both creates them and that flows out of them. As St. Thomas Aquinas explained:
For tyrants hold the good in greater suspicion than the wicked, and to them the valor of others is always fraught with danger. So, the above-mentioned tyrants strive to prevent those of their subjects who have become virtuous from acquiring valor and high spirits in order that they may not want to cast off their iniquitous domination. They also see to it that there be no friendly relations among these so that they may not enjoy the benefits resulting from being on good terms with one another, for as long as one has no confidence in the other, no plot will be set up against the tyrant’s domination. Wherefore they sow discords among the people, foster any that have arisen, and forbid anything which furthers society and co-operation among men, such as marriages, banquets, and anything of like character, through which familiarity and confidence are engendered among men…. It thus results that when rulers, who ought to induce their subjects to virtue, are wickedly jealous of the virtue of their subjects and hinder it as much as they can, few virtuous men are found under the rule of tyrants…. [M]en, brought up in fear, become small-spirited and discouraged in the face of any strenuous or manly task.[25]
More than anything else, tyrants fear communities of love rooted in truth—our families, our churches, our networks of friends. From these, courage emerges. When modern society abandoned Christianity, what we really abandoned was these communities. We have tried to destroy the family. We have often turned the Church into a self-help club. We have minimized the ontological reality of the sacraments. We have chosen TV and social media over friendship. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that the pursuit of wealth is fine. We have chosen comforts over struggle. We have chosen not to risk love anymore. This is a turning away from the Kingdom of God and toward the kingdom of the enemy.
Should it then surprise us that the gods and their kings have returned? Our world is again a world of tyrannical, and so superstitious, power. It is sometimes hard for us to see this because we use different words than the ancient pagans did, but the gods have returned. Fear again reigns—people again fear large, impersonal forces whose will is mediated to us by those in power. People again seek rewards through ritualized submission and are again horrified by those who won’t. While this reality has been on clear display through the COVID years, it did not originate in 2019, and it is most certainly not limited to the particular cult of the virus, focusing on health, that has grown up within the pandemic. There are other cults, such as that of the market and the quest for wealth, that of so-called science and the quest for immortality, that of what passes for “justice” or “equity” but is really the assertions of a fickle mob manipulated by baiters. All of these, sociologically, are gods: human power that is alienated from its source and turned against the very people who make it up—inducing fear and so submission. Self-interest, with a desire for power on the part of the elite and a desperate scramble for security on the part of the atomized (and thus weak) masses, is rebuilding the type of servile regime that Christianity had once undone.
This should not scare us. Christianity has faced this before. But our ground for hope is not limited to the fact that the Church is experienced in such things. Rather, Christianity is literally for this sort of situation. Christ’s Cross and Resurrection, the very heart of the Gospel, undid a world of this sort. But for us to do it again, we have to remember that the crucifix is the central symbol of Christianity for a reason. We must be willing to take up our crosses and follow Him. This is the valor, the courage, that will produce the societies of peace that will shock the neo-pagans as well as the willingness to suffer that will confuse them and render them powerless. Suffering for love is how victory is won. We must again render to God what is God’s. And what is that? As Christ tells us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:37–39). Christianity is the only solution to mankind’s problems. And love of neighbor and love of God is Christianity. Such love is the solution to our political problems. All other efforts will fail.
How’s that for mixing politics and religion?
Republished with gracious permission from New Polity (Issue 3.1/Winter 2021).
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics as we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
