Article Title: How
These Christians Love One Another!
Subtitle: Familial
Love among the Christians of the First Centuries (Excerpts from various books)
Compiler: Christopher
Travis Haun for http://rethinker.net/ekklesia
UpDate: September
2008
Feedback: Please
feel free to send questions, suggestions or constructive criticism to CTHaun[AT]Rethinker[DOT]net
Today very few slivers of what is
commonly referred to as Christian are thought of as loving. And this despite the Lord Jesus Christ making
it very clear to his original disciples that “by this shall all men know that
you’re my disciples: that you love one another.” Love is supposed to be the mark and sign of
the Christian and permeate whatever is truly Christian. Perhaps then the vast majority of that in the
world which touts its self as Christian is not truly Christian then. In the first four centuries of the Christian
churches in the Mediterranean-rimmed world, however, Christians enjoyed such a
strong sense of a loving community. The
pagans in the Mediterranean world may have been living in such a damaged
society that they were attracted to Christianity at least in part because of
its practice of community. - cth
Book Title: The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity
Subtitle: A Sociohistorical Approach to
Religious Transformation
Author: James C. Russell
Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195076966
Date: Jan 1, 1994
Chapter 4: Sociopsychological Aspects of Religious
Transformation
Pages: 81-93
A recent social history of Pauline Christianity by Wayne A. Meeks
provides important insights into the social structure and social psychology of
the early Christian community. He notes
that “the image of the initiate being adopted as God’s child and thus receiving
a new family of human brothers and sisters is a vivid way of portraying what a
modern sociologies might call the resocialization of conversion.” [Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World
of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1983), p.88] Meeks
contrasts the spontaneous, ad hoc nature of the Christian community and its
“regular use of terms like ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ [and] the emphasis on mutual
love,” both of which “reinforce the communitas
of the Christian groups,” with the society “of the world,’” exemplified by “the
closely structured, hierarchical society of the Greco-Roman city.” [Ibid., p.87.] The attempt of the early Christian communities
to emulate and eventually supplant the natural sociobiological relationships of
the family unit and the larger ethnic community contributed to a perception of
them by some non-Christian Roman citizens as “a disruptive social phenomenon
and a danger to the security of the state.”
. . . Robert L. Wilken has examined this fundamental distinction in form as
it appears in Celsus’s critique of Christianity:
“After nearly four centuries of urbanization, there probably existed a
sizable number of residents in most Greek cities who could be classified as
status-inconsistent. As already noted,
it is from this group that Meeks believes the most prominent converts to
Pauline Christianity originated. He
provides possible examples of the psychosocial profiles of individuals within
this group: “Independent women with
moderate wealth, Jews with wealth in a pagan society, freedmen with skill and
money but stigmatized by origin, and so on—brought with them not only anxiety
but also loneliness, in a society in which social position was important and
usually rigid.” Meeks then ask rhetorically: “Would, then, the
intimacy of the Christian groups become a welcome refuge, the emotion-charged
language of family and affection and the image of a caring, personal God
powerful antidotes, while the master symbol of the crucified savior
crystallized a believable picture of the way the world seemed really to work?”
[Meeks, The First Urban Christians, p.191.]
Thus from a sociopsychological perspective,
the early Christian communities were not perceived as a means for social
advancement, but rather as a social refuge and a center for egalitarian
resocialization for those who experienced status inconsistency or cognitive
dissonance. Observing that a theory of
status inconsistency does not of its self explain why Christian converts
“resolved the inconsistency by taking to Christianity rather than to any other
cult,” [Fox, Pagans and
Christians, p.321.]
Robin Lane Fox suggests:
We would do better to view its appeal not
against inconsistency but against a growing social exclusivity. Christianity was least likely to attract the
people who were most embedded in social tradition, the great families of Rome,
the upper families who filled the civic priesthoods and competed in public
generosity for the gods. There were
exceptions, but it was also least likely to attract the teacher and antiquarian
who were steeped in pagan learning. It could, however, offer an
alternative community and range of values to those who were disenchanted by the
display of riches, by the harshness of the exercise of power and the
progressive hardening of the gradations of rank and degree. Only a simple view of human nature will
expect such people to be none but the poor and the oppressed themselves…. On a
longer view, the rise of Christianity owed much to a broader initial change, a
loosening of the civic cohesion of the Greek city-state. Even in the classical city, the citizen had
not been limited to his city’s public cults, but as groups of non-citizens
multiplied through migration from place to place and as tighter restrictions
were placed on the holding of local citizenship, the general connection between
a city’s cults and its citizens had been greatly weakened.” [Ibid., pp.321-22]
Another
factor which often accompanies urbanization and ethnocultural
destabilization and is related to the attractiveness of early Christianity is
the dissolution of the family unit.
Meeks cites Franz Bomer to the effect that
“the religious solidarity of the familia in old Roman agrarian society gave way under
pressures of urbanization.” The
destabilization of family life was reflected in the larger community of the
town or city. As the levels of family
and civic solidarity declined, the high level of group solidarity present within
the local Christian communities became more apparent and attractive. The reputation of “brotherly love” among Christians would certainly
have had some degree of appeal for spiritual and culturally alienated
individuals. . .
John
Ferguson, in his study The Religions of
the Roman Empire, concurs:
Wherein then lay the appeal of Christianity? It was first in the personality of the
founder. . . . It was secondly in the way of love revealed, in the witness of
community (koinonia), in a fellowship which took in
Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women, and whose solid practicality in
their care for the needy won the admiration even of [critic] Lucian. “How these Christians love one another!” was
a respectful affirmation. [The Religions of the Roman Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1970), p.126.]
The
significance of early Christian social solidarity was noted earlier in this
century by Pierre Batiffol, who wrote that, “We must, indeed, attach a great
importance to the social solidarity which it established among all its
members,” and claimed that “nothing in Christianity impressed the pagans more
than the love of Christians for one another.” Although messianic hopes and apocalyptic
fears had somewhat subsided by the middle of the second century, the
fundamentally world-rejecting world-view expressed by these attitudes endured,
albeit in a more secular form. Not only did Christianity offer
its faithful the eternal benefits of redemptive salvation through Jesus Christ,
but, as Fox has noted, “in cities of growing social
divisions, Christianity offered unworldly equality.” [Fox, Pagans and Christians,
p.335.]
In his History of Religious Ideas, Mircea Eliade also considers the
factors which contributed toward the expansion of Christianity. His observations are remarkably similar to
those of Meeks, Fox, Ferguson, Batiffol, Latourette, and Murray:
"The causes of the final triumph of Christian preaching
are many and various. First of all were the unshakable faith and moral strength
of Christians, their courage in the face of torture and death--a courage
admired even by their greatest enemies.... Furthermore, the solidarity of the
Christians was unequaled; the community took care of widows, orphans, and the
aged and ransomed those captured by pirates.
During epidemics and sieges, only Christians tended the wounded and
buried the dead. For all the rootless
multitudes of the Empire, for the many who suffered from loneliness, for the
victims of cultural and social alienation, the Church was the only hope of
obtaining an identity, of finding, or recovering, a meaning for life. Since there were no barriers, either social,
racial, or intellectual, anyone could become a member of this optimistic and
paradoxical society in which a powerful citizen, the emperor's chamberlain,
bowed before a bishop who had been his slave.
In all probability, neither before nor afterward has any historical
society experienced the equivalent of this equality, of the charity and brotherly
love that were the life of the Christian communities of the first four
centuries." [A History of Religious Ideas, vol.2, p.413.]
Additionally,
in his study The Cult of the Saints,
Peter Brown has noted: “The
church was an artificial kin group. Its
members were expected to project onto the new community a fair measure of the
sense of solidarity, of the loyalties, and of the obligations that had
previously been directed to the physical family.” . . . The work which deals most exclusively
with this subject is E.R.Dodds’ Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety.
Dodds suggests that Christians in the period between 161
and 313 may have interpreted the prevalence of war, pestilence, and economic
instability as an eschatological prelude to messianic and apocalyptic
expectations. The communal and
transcendent aspects of early Christianity are likely to have been attractive
to those urban inhabitants of the Roman Empire whose existence was fraught with
loneliness, fear, and despair. Featuring
greater organizational stability and solidarity than other religious or
philosophical groups, Christianity
offered the alienated individual, without regard to sex, ethnicity, or
socioeconomic status, membership in a caring community, together with the hope
of bodily resurrection. The high degree
of Christian solidarity in the midst of widespread social anomie is thought by Dodds to constitute a “major cause, perhaps the strongest
single cause, of the spread of Christianity.” [Dodds, Pagan and Christian, p.12.]
His closing discussion which leads to this conclusion is worth
reviewing, for it succinctly presents the classical socioreligious
and sociopsychological environment of early
Christianity—and environment with which the Germanic environment will later be
compared and contrasted:
The
benefits of becoming a Christian were not confined to the next world. A
Christian congregation was form the first a community in a much fuller sense
than any corresponding group of Isiac or Mithraist devotees…. The Church provided the essentials of
social security: it cared for widows, and orphans, the old, the unemployed, and
the disabled; it provided a burial fund for the poor and a nursing service in
time of plague. But even more important, I suspect, than
these material benefits was the sense of belonging which the Christian
community could give. Modern social
studies have brought home to us the universality of the “need to belong” and
the unexpected ways in which it can influence human behavior, particularly
among the rootless inhabitants of great cities.
I see no reason to think that it was otherwise in antiquity: Epictetus
has described for us the dreadful loneliness that can beset a man in the midst
of his fellows. Such loneliness must
have been felt by millions—the urbanized tribesman, the peasant come to town in
search of work, the demobilized soldier, the rentier
ruined by inflation, and the manumitted slave.
For people in that situation membership of a Christian community might
be the only way of maintaining their self-respect and giving their life some
semblance of meaning. Within the
community there was human warmth: someone was interested in them, both here and
hereafter. It is therefore not
surprising that the earliest and most striking advances of Christianity were
made in the great cities—in Antioch, in Rome, in Alexandria.
In his
review of Dodds’s work, Peter Brown concurs that “the
‘Age of Anxiety’ became, increasingly, the age of converts.” . . . From the
previous . . . review of the opinions of Meeks, Fox, Ferguson, Batiffol, Latourette, Murray, Eliade, Brown, and Dodds it may
be concluded that one of
the most significant factors in the expansion of early Christianity appears to
have been its appeal as an alternative community.
=============================================================================================
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc2.v.x.xiii.html
History of the
Christian Church, Volume II: Ante-Nicene Christianity. A.D. 100-325.
100. Brotherly Love, and Love for Enemies.
...No wonder, then, that
in spite of the finest maxims of a few philosophers, the imperial age was controlled by the coldest
selfishness, so that, according to the testimony of Plutarch, friendship had
died out even in families, and the love of brothers
and sisters was supposed to be possible only in a heroic age long passed by.
The old Roman world was a world without charity. Julian the Apostate,
who was educated a Christian, tried to engraft charity upon heathenism, but in
vain. The idea of the infinite value of each human soul, even the poorest and
humblest, was wanting, and with it the basis for true charity.
It was in such an age of universal egotism that
Christianity first revealed the true spirit of love to man as flowing from the
love of God, and exhibited it in actual life. This cardinal virtue we meet
first within the Church itself, as the bond of union among believers, and the sure mark of the genuine disciple of
Jesus.
"That especially,"
says Tertullian to the
heathen, in a celebrated passage of his Apologeticus,
"which love works among us, exposes us to many a suspicion. ’Behold,’ they
say, ’how they love one another!’ Yea, verily this must strike them; for they
hate each other. ’And how ready they are to die for one another!’ Yea, truly; for they are rather ready to kill one another.
And even that we call each other ’brethren,’ seems to them suspicious for no
other reason, than that, among them, all expressions of kindred are only
feigned. We are even your brethren, in virtue of the common nature, which is
the mother of us all; though ye, as evil brethren, deny your human nature. But
how much more justly are those called and considered brethren, who acknowledge
the one God as their Father; who have received the one Spirit of holiness; who
have awaked from the same darkness of uncertainty to the light of the same
truth?... And we, who are united in spirit and in soul, do not hesitate to have
also all things common, except wives. For we break fellowship just where other
men practice it."
This
brotherly love flowed from community of life in Christ. Hence Ignatius calls believers
"Christ-bearers" and "God-bearers." The article of the Apostles’
Creed: "I believe in the communion of saints;" the current
appellation of "brother" and "sister;" and the fraternal
kiss usual on admission into the church, and at the Lord’s Supper, were not
empty forms, nor even a sickly sentimentalism, but the expression of true
feeling and experience, only strengthened by the common danger and persecution.
A travelling Christian, of whatever language or country, with a letter of
recommendation from his bishop, 67 was everywhere hospitably
received as a long known friend. It was a current phrase: In thy brother thou
hast seen the Lord himself. The force of love reached beyond the grave.
Families were accustomed to celebrate at appointed times the memory, of their
departed members; and this was one of the grounds on which Tertullian opposed second marriage.
The
brotherly love expressed itself, above all, in the most self-sacrificing
beneficence to the poor and sick, to widows and orphans, to strangers and
prisoners, particularly to confessors in bonds. It magnifies this virtue in our
view, to reflect, that the Christians at that time belonged mostly to the lower
classes, and in times of persecution often lost all their possessions. Every
congregation was a charitable society, and in its public worship took regular collections
for its needy members. The offerings at the communion and love-feasts, first
held on the evening, afterwards on the morning of the Lord’s Day, were
considered a part of worship. To these were added numberless private charities,
given in secret, which eternity alone will reveal. The church at Rome had under
its care a great multitude of widows, orphans, blind, lame, and sick, whom the deacon Laurentius, in the
Decian persecution, showed to the heathen prefect, as
the most precious treasures of the church. It belonged to the idea of a
Christian housewife, and was particularly the duty of the deaconesses, to visit
the Lord, to clothe him, and give him meat and drink, in the persons of his
needy disciples. Even such opponents of Christianity as Lucian testify to this
zeal of the Christians in labors of love, though they see in it nothing but an
innocent fanaticism. "It
is incredible," says Lucian, "to see the ardor with which the people
of that religion help each other in their wants. They spare nothing. Their
first legislator has put into their heads that they are all brethren."
This
beneficence reached beyond the immediate neighborhood. Charity begins at home,
but does not stay at, home. In cases of general distress the bishops appointed
special collections, and also fasts, by which food might be saved for suffering
brethren. The Roman church sent its charities great distances abroad. Cyprian of Carthage, who,
after his conversion, sold his own estates for the benefit of the poor,
collected a hundred thousand sestertia, or more than
three thousand dollars, to redeem Christians of Numidia, who had been taken
captive by neighboring barbarians; and he considered it a high privilege
"to be able to ransom for a small sum of money him, who has redeemed us
from the dominion of Satan with his own blood." A father, who refused to
give alms on account of his children, Cyprian charged with the additional sin of
binding his children to an earthly inheritance, instead of pointing them to the
richest and most loving Father in heaven.
Finally, this brotherly love expanded
to love even for enemies, which returned the heathens good for evil, and not rarely, in persecutions and public misfortunes, heaped
coals of fire on their heads. During the persecution under Gallus (252), when
the pestilence raged in Carthage, and the heathens threw out their dead and
sick upon the streets, ran away from them for fear of the contagion, and cursed
the Christians as the supposed authors of the plague, Cyprian assembled his congregation, and
exhorted them to love their enemies; whereupon all went to work; the rich with
their money, the poor with their hands, and rested not, till the dead were
buried, the sick cared for, and the city saved from desolation. The same
self-denial appeared in the Christians of Alexandria during a ravaging plague
under the reign of Gallienus. These are only a few
prominent manifestations of a spirit which may be traced through the whole
history of martyrdom and the daily prayers of the Christians for their enemies
and persecutors. For while
the love of friends, says Tertullian,
is common to all men, the love of enemies is a virtue peculiar to Christians.
"You forget," he says to the heathens in his Apology, "that,
notwithstanding your persecutions, far from conspiring against you, as our
numbers would perhaps furnish us with the means of doing, we pray for you and
do good to you; that, if we give nothing for your gods, we do give for your
poor, and that our charity spreads more alms in your streets than the offerings
presented by your religion in your temples."
The
organized congregational charity of the ante-Nicene age provided for all the
immediate wants. When the state professed Christianity, there sprang up
permanent charitable institutions for the poor, the sick, for strangers,
widows, orphans, and helpless old men. The first clear proof of such institutions we
find in the age of Julian the Apostate, who tried to check the progress of
Christianity and to revive paganism by directing the high priest of Galatia, Arsacius, to establish in every town a Xenodochium
to be supported by the state and also by private contributions; for, he said,
it was a shame that the heathen should be left without support from their own,
while "among the Jews no beggar can be found, and the godless Galilaeans" (i.e. the Christians) "nourish not
only their own, but even our own poor." A few years afterwards (370) we
hear of a celebrated hospital at Caesarea, founded by St. Basilius,
and called after him "Basilias," and
similar institutions all over the province of Cappadocia. We find one at
Antioch at the time of Chrysostom,
who took a practical interest in it. At Constantinople there were as many as
thirty-five hospitals. In the West such institutions spread rapidly in Rome, Sicily,
Sardinia, and Gaul.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc2.v.ii.html
The
church of this period [the second and third century] appears poor in earthly
possessions and honors, but rich in heavenly grace, in world-conquering faith, love,
and hope; unpopular, even outlawed, hated, and persecuted, yet far more
vigorous and expansive than the philosophies of Greece or the empire of Rome;
composed chiefly of persons of the lower social ranks, yet attracting the
noblest and deepest minds of the age, and bearing, in her bosom the hope of the
world; "as unknown, yet well-known, as dying, and behold it lives;"
conquering by apparent defeat, and growing on the blood of her martyrs; great
in deeds, greater in sufferings, greatest in death for the honor of Christ and
the benefit of generations to come … as well as affection; for theirs was the
fervor of a steady faith in things unseen and eternal; theirs, often, a meek
patience under the most grievous wrongs; theirs the courage to maintain a good
profession before the frowning face of philosophy, of secular tyranny, and of
splendid superstition; theirs was abstractedness from the world and a painful
self-denial; theirs the most arduous and costly labors of love; theirs a munificence in charity, altogether without
example; theirs was a reverent and scrupulous care of the sacred writings; and
this one merit, if they had no other, is of a superlative degree, and should
entitle them to the veneration and grateful regards of the modern church. How
little do many readers of the Bible, nowadays, think of what it cost the
Christians of the second and third centuries, merely to rescue and hide the
sacred treasures from the rage of the heathen!"
The condition and manners of the Christians in this
age are most beautifully described by the unknown author of the "Epistola ad Diognetum" in
the early part of the second century.
"The Christians are not distinguished from other men by
country, by language, nor by civil institutions. For they neither dwell in
cities by themselves, nor use a peculiar tongue, nor lead a singular mode of
life. They dwell in the Grecian or barbarian cities, as the case may be; they
follow the usage of the country in dress, food, and the other affairs of life.
Yet they present a wonderful and confessedly paradoxical conduct. They dwell in
their own native lands, but as strangers. They take part in all things as
citizens; and they suffer all things, as foreigners. Every foreign country is a
fatherland to them, and every native land is a foreign. They marry, like all
others; they have
children; but they do not cast away their offspring. They have the table in common,
but not wives. They are in the flesh, but do not live after the flesh. They
live upon the earth, but are citizens of heaven. They obey the existing laws,
and excel the laws by their lives. They love all, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown, and
yet they are condemned. They are killed and are made alive. They are poor and
make many rich. They lack all things, and in all things abound. They are
reproached, and glory in their reproaches. They are calumniated, and are
justified. They are
cursed, and they bless. They receive scorn, and they give honor. They do good,
and are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice, as being
made alive. By the Jews they are attacked as aliens,
and by the Greeks persecuted; and the cause of the enmity their enemies cannot
tell. In short, what the soul is in the body, the Christians are in the world.
The soul is diffused through all the members of the body, and the Christians
are spread through the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, but it
is not of the body; so the Christians dwell in the world, but are not of the
world. The soul, invisible, keeps watch in the visible body; so also the
Christians are seen to live in the world, but their piety is invisible. The
flesh hates and wars against the soul, suffering no wrong from it, but because
it resists fleshly pleasures; and the world hates the Christians with no
reason, but that they resist its pleasures. The soul loves the flesh and
members, by which it is hated; so the Christians love their haters. The soul is
inclosed in the body, but holds the body together; so
the Christians are detained in the world as in a prison; but they contain the
world. Immortal, the soul dwells in the mortal body; so the Christians dwell in
the corruptible, but look for incorruption in heaven. The soul is the better
for restriction in food and drink; and the Christians increase, though daily
punished. This lot God has assigned to the Christians in the world; and it
cannot be taken from them."
The community of
Christians thus from the first felt itself, in distinction from Judaism and
from heathenism, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the city of God
set on a hill, the immortal soul in a dying body; and this its impression
respecting itself was no proud conceit, but truth and reality, acting in life
and in death, and opening the way through hatred and persecution even to an
outward victory over the world.