The Help in Ages Past

By Mayo Mohs

A HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

by PAUL JOHNSON

556 pages. Atheneum. $13.95.

"A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts," Paul Johnson writes. Johnson is an Orwellian socialist deeply concerned for liberty, a dyspeptically progressive Roman Catholic, former editor of the left-wing British journal New Statesman, and a believer with a passion for accuracy. He has written a literary rarity, a highly readable, deeply learned, thoroughly fascinating account of 2,000 years of Christian history.

There are plenty of contemporary resonances, of course. Does anyone still believe that the hippies and gurus and Woodstocks of the '60s were anything new or unusual? Consider the medieval Pied Piper from Bourges, who called himself Christ and gathered an ecstatic following that then presented itself to the Bishop of Le Puy, its members "stark naked, leaping and somersaulting." The response was summary: the leader was "killed on the spot."

The sellers of Lockheeds have nothing on ancient bishops anxious to peddle a doctrine. For years around the turn of the 4th century, the Mediterranean basin was torn by a dispute about the necessity for divine grace in man's salvation. The bishops of North Africa, led by St. Augustine, insisted that human beings could do nothing without divine help. Pelagius, a theologian from foggy Britain come south to preach reform in Rome, believed that man is born spiritually free. God's grace may give him a push, but essentially he can find his own way to heaven. Augustine's writings were crucial in labeling Pelagius a heretic. Still, the bishops needed some temporal muscle to run the heretics into exile. Accordingly, these churchmen who believed in the deep corruptibility of man sent some 80 fine Numidian stallions to bribe key cavalry officers into support of their cause.

Total Society. Augustine, indeed, is a thorn in Johnson's side. For Johnson sees Christian history largely as a pendulum, swinging between the repressive "total society" envisioned by Augustine and the individualistic, more private Christianity espoused by Pelagius and like-minded successors--particularly the great irenic humanist of the early Reformation, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The political analogies are not coincidental. Johnson believes that men can be self-governing. He sympathizes with the views of Erasmus and Pelagius. Indeed, he argues, the essential optimism of such humanists is closer to the message of the Apostle Paul than the deep pessimism of Augustine, who relegated most people to what he called the massa damnata--"the damned mass."

The author delights in turning history on its head in smaller matters too. T.S. Eliot notwithstanding, he makes a strong case against the 12th century martyr of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket, whom he sees as a willful, grandstanding prelate who egotistically courted martyrdom. Becket, he says, "did no service to Christianity." Flouting popular myth, Johnson points out that the great medieval cathedrals were generally not the work of inspired volunteer artisans but of skilled hired hands, who sometimes went on strike and had to be chided for goofing off. He clears Alaric and his Goths of the charge that they destroyed Rome. The great city was ravaged, he writes, not by the barbarians in A.D. 410, but through imperial plundering in the 6th and 7th centuries by Byzantine Emperors Justinian and Constans II. Johnson also challenges the once popular thesis--of Max Weber and R.H. Tawney among others--that Calvinism helped nurture capitalism. In staunchly Calvinistic Scotland, Johnson notes, capitalism was long stifled. What did launch capitalism, he argues, was the decline of churchly power--whether in Calvinistic or Catholic states.

Johnson is master of the arresting detail, the vivid personality sketch. In an evocative little essay on St. Ambrose, the Roman magistrate who became Bishop of Milan in 373, he pauses to note Augustine's surprise when he found that Ambrose could read silently to himself--a rare skill in the ancient world. Discussing the opening of the Council of Trent, the great 16th century Catholic assembly that began the Counter Reformation, he observes how Christoforo Madruzzo, the host bishop, opened the meeting with a 74-dish banquet and 100-year-old wine. After dinner, Madruzzo led off the dancing with ladies.

Johnson's history is much more than a collection of vignettes. He stresses the integral role that Christianity played not merely in European society but specifically in its economy. From the 9th to the 14th centuries, it was the monks of the great monasteries, particularly the Cistercian houses, who drained the swamps of Europe and cleared its for ests, thus creating thousands of square miles of arable land -- and laying the foundations of Europe's prosperity. Christianity left some less fortunate legacies too. The ferocity of the Crusades, observes Johnson, "fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture" from which it has yet to recover.

There are gaps in Johnson's book, some obviously by design. He disdains to rerun the story of Henry VIII's war with the papacy over his divorce, assuming that most English-speaking readers know it already. At other times, though, particularly in his discussion of more recent times, Johnson's book has some peculiar lacunae. There is not a word about Russian Orthodoxy under the Czars, or under Communism. Nor about pentecostalism, a significant force in American Christianity since the turn of the century and now a phenomenon world wide. He barely touches on the Protestant ecumenical movement.

Such lapses are comparatively minor in an ambitious, magisterial and ultimately positive book. For Johnson demonstrates that Christianity, though it certainly caused enough bloodletting, did help tame the human beast, did offer hope in a landscape of despair. "Without these restraints, bereft of these encouragements," he concludes, "how much more horrific the history of these last 2,000 years must have been!" Given Johnson's grim recital of human frailty, that may seem more like faith than history. But, as he disturbingly observes, the first glimpses of a deChristianized secular future are most dismal indeed.

Mayo Mohs

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