This is how the critics of early Christianity mocked our predecessors in the faith, as welcoming slaves, women, and children. But what were the factors that prompted this assessment?
To respond to this question, let’s see the way this mockery was articulated. A second-century eclectic philosopher, Celsus, considering things from the vantage point of androcentric and hierarchical societies, such as the Greek and the Roman ones—societies which, above all, praised the intellect (Gr. nous, a masculine noun) and the virtues (Lat. virtus, the quality of manhood)—found it disturbing that Christians challenged the known elitist customs. Christians were egalitarian, having one Father and one Teacher (Ephesians 4:1-5; Matthew 23:8-12), whose children and students they all were, and did not discriminate against people based on age, education, gender, and social standing (see Maximus the Confessor, The Mystagogy 1). According to Celsus, who obviously was interested in exaggerating the situation,
Even the more intelligent Christians preach these absurdities. Their injunctions are like this: “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils. But as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone childish, let him come boldly.” By the fact that they themselves admit that these people are worthy of their god, they show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonourable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children. (Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians 4)
Celsus’ book is lost to history, but many of its parts were copied and refuted by Origen of Alexandria, a tremendous Christian intellectual, scriptural interpreter, and saintly teacher of the third century (by the way, the passage quoted just above is found in Origen’s Against Celsus 3.44-49). What matters, here, is the critic’s testimony that the early Christians welcomed all, educated and uneducated, slaves and free, men and women, children and aged—and indeed people of all walks of life and backgrounds. After all, Paul stated with utmost clarity, long before Celsus and Origen, that all who are baptised in Christ are “clothed in Christ,” namely, are God’s children, and that as such “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28). In the light of Celsus’ mockery, Christians did shun all discrimination, welcoming all. In turn, the Romans considered slaves, women, and children subhuman beings; accordingly, these categories had no full social rights and could not aspire to play prominent roles. Important for my purposes, here, is that the early Christians did not discriminate against what the Romans considered marginal categories. Against the ancient traditions who considered both slaves and women lesser humans, Christianity made room for slaves and women, acknowledging their humanity.
I am addressing this topic because contemporary Christianity, at least in its Orthodox iteration, is the very opposite of that egalitarian, nondiscriminatory outlook and reality. As Philip K. Dick kept repeating, The Empire Never Ended. Roman androcentric views are up and about in Orthodox Christianity, which is a religion, indeed—with all the hideous connotations of this concept, which the early Christians shunned as an expression of all the spiritual and social ills of the ancient world—made for men, especially powerful men, sometimes intelligent men, sometimes educated men. And I wonder, as an Orthodox clergyman of some intelligence and education but of no power, how did we end up becoming a patriarchal religion of male dominance and feminine subservience?
Would an early Christian be somehow swept away through time and space, from, say, the second-century Mediterranean zone to any part of the Orthodox Commonwealth in the twenty-first century, s/he would find Christianity unrecognisable. And it’s not because we are sophisticated; we actually are not; we are just monkeys wearing silly clothes and buttoning at our electronic gizmos. It’s because we happily go by without realising the monstrosity of what we preach as Christianity when it is not. Far from it. We, the Orthodox, and many others like us, are the Empire. We are a religion, an androcentric religion that abandoned “the weightier matters of the law—justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23). A religion that knows nothing of loving your neighbour more than oneself (see John 13:34-35). And we are the product of historical anomalies that began in the fourth century, when a clever Roman Emperor, Constantine, played Christian to fool the mighty Christian men of his time who readily embarked on the process of transforming Christianity into an appalling imperial religion.
This was so shocking for the early Christians that, when the paternalistic ideas of the Empire were embraced by the church authorities—in that fated fourth century—the best of them began to flee into the wild in order to maintain the ethos of the Gospel. Yes, yes, when Constantine supposedly granted “freedom” to the church, the best of Christians fled the Empire and its ecclesiastical lackeys to establish a “new city,” monastic, in the desert. Athanasius of Alexandria intimates this in his Life of Saint Antony without a straightforward acknowledgment that people did not flee only because they were seeking Antony; like Athanasius himself on occasion, they were seeking refuge from the Empire and its ecclesiastical flunkeis. True, as the fifth-century author Neilus the Ascetic notes in his Ascetic Discourse, very soon the same dark powers corrupted the monastic world, which eventually put on the imperial mantle of hierarchy and authority and did all the mad stuff that isn’t Christ’s Gospel, such as developing an androcentric and misogynist cast of mind. But even so, the noblest representatives of that “new city” (think of Amma Sarah’s fourth saying, that she is a woman by nature, not in regard to her mind, and Maximus’ passage referenced earlier) were still able to remind their contemporaries of the true Gospel ideals of equality as God’s children, regardless of age, background, education, gender, or status. They did so all through the Byzantine era, against all odds, albeit less and less people listened to them. The last prophetic voice was Symeon the New Theologian’s, well, until our time, when more and more voices for the Gospel and against the Empire are being heard.
What matters is that we haven’t always been what we have become, a space where women and the poor have no welcoming place, no shelter, no voice. No wonder, recently, the officialdom of the Romanian Orthodox Church—where I belong by upbringing and canonical order—acknowledged the holiness of several groups of saintly men, with no holy women in sight. Not even the saintly wife of one of the saintly men that were acknowledged as such just a few days ago seemed worthy of praise, against the conviction and the testimony of her holy husband… And so, no, Celsus dear, we are no longer a religion of salves, women, and children. We’ve become a religion of men, old and educated men—men of some standing in the hierarchical and androcentric echelons of the Empire we audaciously call Christ’s church. We’ve become your religion, Celsus dear.
Acknowledgment: This essay is based on a discussion the author and a few others had during one of “Saint Gregory’s Evenings,” held from 2022 to the middle of 2023. The closing passage includes, however, a reference to very recent developments, in July 2024.
25 July 2024 © AIOCS
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