By Mark Owen - © 2010
Chapter 8 - Like a mighty army, marching every which-way
'There are no evangelists left that offer us any competition now. We've got the field. Back in the late '40s and '50s, Jack Coe, Oral Roberts, O.L. Jaggers and 200 others you know, there were 200 evangelists all praying for the sick, having healing revivals. Now they're non-existent.' - Evangelist AA Allen, quoted by The New York Times in 1970.
We have seen how the Christians in the early era dissented one from the other. There were multiple views of the person of Jesus Christ and just about every other doctrinal issue. But from the time of Constantine and the establishment of the supremacy of the Roman bishops in the 4th century it might appear to the casual reader of history that uniformity of belief was the norm. Not so . . . through the subsequent centuries many dissenters rose and fell - mostly fell, literally, beneath the Church's sword.
And while the Church was consolidating its position in the world, something interesting was stirring in vast stretches of Arabia. A new Prophet had arisen, one destined to rival Paul in his influence upon the history of ideas. While the Islamic revolution was gestating in far-off ai-Makkah (Mecca) and al-Madinah (Medinah) during the years 600-620, in 'civilized' Europe and in the remnants of the Roman Empire the struggle for supremacy continued in the Church. This unrelenting, oftentimes bloody, battle among the followers of 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild' raged through several centuries.
The Church at Rome had by this time asserted its authority in no uncertain manner in the West and although it didn't succeed in the East, from now on it began to assume a dominant role in European affairs. A happy accident of history served the Roman prelates well. The Church at Rome was by now growing stronger and bolder even in the face of persecution or, at times, because of it. But the clerical power-seekers may have had, eventually, to abandon their effort to take charge of the whole Church if it were not for the coming of the Emperor Constantine. His firm rule paved the way for a reassertion of Papal claims. But not without a series of unseemly feuds.
Thus it was that by 313 Constantine had cemented his position not only as sole Emperor of the West but effectually as controller of the situation in the East, where Licinius ruled, having as wife Constantine's sister, Constantina. It was in this year that the Emperor issued the Edict of Toleration which marked a new era for the Church. We should, however, bear in mind that toleration was - and usually is where religion is concerned - a one-way street. Toleration was for the established Church, nobody else.
It is doubtful if the Emperor was ever converted in any meaningful sense of that word but it is fair to note that he did submit to baptism shortly before he died in 337. The year prior to the Edict's proclamation saw the occurrence of that amazing visitation reported on the eve of the battle for Milvan Bridge. According to Eusebius, a somewhat unreliable biographer (how could he think straight weighed down as he was by penitential loads of iron?), Constantine saw the vision of a cross in the sky, bearing the inscription, 'Hoc signo vinces' ('By this sign conquer'). A most felicitous event, one of many that were to shore up the Church's claims through the centuries.
In 323 Constantine went to war against Licinius, whom he defeated and eventually put to death. He now ruled supreme and was managing to keep at bay the barbarians who threatened the empire's frontiers. He chose Byzantium as his capital and in 330 inaugurated the city as the seat of government, under the name Constantinople. The following year saw Constantine committing a dark deed in putting to death his own son, a gallant and accomplished man, Crispus, and his sister, Constantina, along with others, on treason charges.
With the ascendancy of Constantine, in a close alliance with the Church, a new era had indeed begun. The consequences were to be far-reaching and not foreseen at that time. Hitherto the Church had been persecuted by the secular authorities. Now it was being supported by them. It soon made use of this support to impose its own 'orthodoxy' on all and sundry. But more was to come, for in time the secular arm itself was to be dominated by the Church, an altogether unexpected turn of events.
Throughout this period debate continued as to the exact nature of the Christian revelation. From one end of Christendom to the other now one view, now another, was preached, taught, received, denounced, discarded, forgotten. 'See how these Christians love one another,' had once been said of the followers of the Nazarene. One would be hard pressed to speak thus of the 4th century Christians. The newly acquired physical power of the reigning party was soon directed against those with whom it differed. Such were the Arians. Theirs was a very influential doctrinal system and could well have become 'standard' or orthodox Christianity were it not for the fact the Emperor backed its critics, banishing the dissident bishops, along with Arius. (Poor Arius may have been, like all religious people, deluded, but his views - which need not bother us unduly - may have, in fact, been closer to the real truth than those who banished him.)
For the first time in Church history the civil arm had aided in the imposition of ecclesiastical order. In the years ahead, in the name of doctrinal purity and order, priests, nuns and even bishops were degraded, flogged and imprisoned if they stepped out of line. In 384 CE the first blood of an alleged 'heretic' was shed when Priscillian, Bishop of Avila, and a teacher of Gnostic and Manicheist views, was beheaded by the secular power at the insistent demand of the bishops. What a harbinger of joy this Christian religion was proving to be!
Meanwhile in the pure ranks of orthodoxy corruption had taken firm hold of the clergy. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria (412-444) paid over huge bribes (of the order of several hundred thousand dollars in today's terms) to gain preferment. Bishop George of Cappodocia entered into his see with an armed escort (a not uncommon event, incidentally) as his rule was imposed by the State on a reluctant and ungrateful people. George, however, proved to be so perverse and cruel in his actions that he was eventually lynched by a pagan mob. A predecessor in the same see, Gregory, had also arrived with an armed retinue and instituted a persecution of incumbent bishops, priests and 'consecrated virgins' who suffered the usual floggings and imprisonment at the hands of their fellow-churchmen.
Another group of fanatics, the Donatists, contended that anyone baptized by an 'unworthy' cleric (by which they generally meant one who didn't agree with them) had to be re-baptized because their first baptism was invalid. (Re-baptism still occurs today when, for example, Anglicans become Baptists.) These zealots seized the churches of opponents by force and physically attacked bishops and priests opposed to them. One group in Africa, known as the Circumcellions, roamed around the countryside armed with clubs, curiously called Israels, belabouring all and sundry in the name of their Christ-god. They turned tenant against landlord, debtor against creditor. It was with great delight that they would force a rich man to run before his own chariot while his servant took his place in the conveyance.
Christian fanaticism knew no bounds. I should interpose at this point that we have little certainty as to the truth or otherwise of many of the tales from those far-off days. But there were probably germs of truth to be discerned in the wonders, just as there are germs (but only germs) of truth in the New Testament documents. So we get to meet amazing characters like Simeon Stylites who, along with other preachers in the early Christian era, had the funny habit of perching high up on pillars. I suppose they were closer to heaven that way! From his lofty perch some 20 metres above the earth Simeon Stylites is said to have preached sermons and settled disputes.
In his later years he tended to favour women hearers. One day, after searching for her son over a period of twenty-seven years, Simeon's own mother arrived at the saint's door. Though the poor woman wept and prayed outside for three days he refused to see her. According to his biographers she died there of a broken heart (as his father was said to have done when the saint first took leave of his home and hearth and his senses; he never would take his medication!). Upon learning of his mother's death the good Christian gentleman emerged from his room, wept some pious tears, consigned his mother's soul to heaven with a prayer, and returned to his devotions. His followers murmured admiringly. Well, that's how the story goes.
Some of the hermit-saints went about naked, crawling along the ground like wild beasts, covered only in their own matted hair. In Syria and Mesopotamia there was a sect known as the Grazers, who lived in the open air, ate neither flesh nor bread and subsisted only on grass like cattle. Most of the stories of the early saints recount similar themes. Dirty bodies, unwashed from one year to another, existing on minuscule diets, living and sleeping in ordure, and, in many cases, subjecting themselves to lengthy periods of standing. One of the saints reportedly lived on his feet for three years straight. (We may need to treat with some degree of scepticism the stories of feats of endurance. Medicos say that dangerous physical effects result from prolonged standing.)
Then there were the Adamites, or Adamians, a sect with Gnostic tendencies, whose members lived naked 'like Adam' in an attempt to return to man's innocent state before the Fall. Some say that they abstained from all sensual gratifications but it appears more likely that they used their doctrinal posturing to indulge in some of the pleasures of the flesh. They were said to practise coitus reservatus, i.e., intercourse without orgasm, delighting in the pleasures of foreplay. They first arose in the 2nd century and rejected marriage as well as clothing but in time possibly degenerated into a worse moral state than those they railed against. They may have practised self-flagellation in private as a form of mortification. A similar sect was to arise in a later era.
These 'saints' were in truth psychiatric cases, fit to be locked away! The amazing penances they submitted to may have been intended as acts of religious faith and contrition; rather we must surely see them as acts of mad men and mad women, sick in mind. The reports of the lives of the saints through the ages make amazing, even, one might say, nauseating reading. Indeed, reading their histories is like reading an interesting text dealing with sexual aberrations. The sum-total of deviance certainly challenges anything that arose from the fertile imagination of the maligned Marquis de Sade. There is one difference: Sade was no hypocrite; he did not claim such activities as religious devotions.
What can we make of the saints who licked up the vomit from hospital floors? Or - an action so ghastly I hesitate to mention it in polite company - who licked out the putrefying sores of lepers? Yes, these things did happen! These 'saints' were indeed sick, even, one might say, deranged people! But let us never forget that they were by-products of the distorted antihuman and aberrant sexual morality of the Christian religion. And what do we say of the pious actions of the saints who mortified the flesh - a constantly reiterated phrase that occurs endlessly through their histories?
Mortification is the term used to describe the process whereby the Christian brings under control the human body so that it becomes more centred on spiritual verities; well, that's the theory. From the time of the early Church the saints and fathers developed a morbid attachment to their mortification shenanigans. The practices eventually became widespread and through the centuries, especially during the Middle Ages but even into our own times, hundreds of thousands of nuns, monks and even dedicated lay people inflicted many kinds of discipline upon themselves, all avowedly intended to curry favour with the Lord. Well, he is a bloodthirsty tyrant, after all, as can readily be seen in some passages in the Old Testament.
I have myself read many of these uplifting biographies; a sort of literature of religious 'porn'; quite a good read sometimes. In the many published lives of the saints one will find - when the biographer is inclined to write of the more intimate matters - accounts of mortification. The preoccupation with pain and suffering often began at an early age. Good Catholic children were brought up on an almost exclusive diet of the lives of sick saints and morbid martyrs so it is not surprising to find them emulating their heroes and heroines. We are told that St Elizabeth, a 14th century Portuguese queen, began demonstrating her piety at an early age. As an eight-year-old she practised mortification by whipping herself, as well as fasting and keeping vigils.
St Catherine of Sienna, who lived out a brief life of some 33 or so years of self-induced suffering in the 14th century, was so caught up in her unnatural (for a healthy child) religious ecstasy that at the age of seven she saw a vision of Christ and his Apostles (who appeared, curiously, in the form depicted in the art of her day! Well, are we surprised?) and thereafter was absorbed in mystical experiences. Eventually she came across the interesting idea of flagellation. It was an era when members of the Flagellant sect went about whipping themselves in public to please the Lord. And she had read of the early saints and martyrs and of their mortifications. Soon the little girl began whipping herself with a small cord. Then she gathered about her a devoted band of other small girls, who met secretly and enjoyed whipping sessions on their bared backs. Catherine directed operations, how many prayers should be recited and how many blows inflicted. (What a pity YouTube hadn't been around then; it would have been a fascinating scene!) Eventually she entered a nunnery, where full opportunity would be given to practise whatever mortifications she desired.
It is said that St Edmund (Rich), Archbishop of Canterbury in the 13th century, so deprived himself of sustenance that his hair dropped out and his beard withered. He spent so much time on his knees in prayer that they were reportedly as hard as the soles of his feet. The notable St Bernard of Clairveaux (12th century) fasted so often that he was eventually quite unable to determine any flavour in what he ate; it is said that water was the only liquid he could taste. Some forms of mortification were extreme. Saints stood on one leg for long periods or lived with worm-infested wounds all over their bodies. Some slept in the open in all weathers. One, Lady Etheldreda, third Abbess of Romney, mortified her flesh by leaving the abbey at night and standing naked in a stream of icy water while she recited the Psalms.
A great many wore the hairshirt underneath their outer garments, to add mightily to their discomfort. St Douceline of Digne wore a hard shirt made from pigskin next to her skin. Eventually, as it was never taken off, the flesh grew over it and when it was finally removed by force the skin was torn away with it. In the film The Devil is a Woman (1975) the nun, played by Glenda Jackson, is shown strapping a belt of thorns tightly about her bare waist. There is nothing fictional in this particular activity. This, or some similar adornment, was quite likely to be the habitual mode of dress of many religious in the Christian Church through the centuries. Almost universal in some eras was the wearing of cords and chains tightly bound about the body beneath the garments. One saint not only wore a girdle of knotted cord but an iron hoop about her body as well. As was the case with many, the cord cut deeply into her flesh and it was said that worms bred in the deep grooves.
Whipping as a form of self-discipline is very frequently recorded. Whipping was, of course, often imposed as a penance through many centuries, when it was inflicted by another, or on oneself. Within the nunneries the small whip known as The Discipline was employed by the nuns on their own bodies. One nun delighted in being made to stand in front of her fellows, hands tied, while she was whipped. She must have been an exhibitionist as well as a masochist! A portrait of St Aloysius shows him standing by a table upon which is a crucifix, a skull and a whip. Entirely appropriate symbols, for Christianity is a religion of misery and death.
An Australian Catholic candidate for sainthood, Mother Mary McKillop, who went to South Australia in 1826, was one of those hardy nuns who whipped herself and wore a spiked chain-link mortification belt next to her flesh. Her personal whip and the chain were still on show at the North Sydney convent of her religious Order (St Joseph's) until some time before 1993 when, as the ceremony of her beautification approached, they both mysteriously disappeared from the display devoted to the nun. Evidently there was some embarrassment about such articles! Well, it did make the place look a bit like a King's Cross B&D parlour.
Some Catholics were surprised in 2010 when a Vatican official reported that the late much-loved Pope John Paul 2nd whipped himself from time to time. Monsignor Slawomir Oder said that both before and after his elevation to the high office the Pope engaged in self-flagellation.
Many means were employed to beat the body into submission. Dominic Loricatus thrashed his with a birch rod; St Dominic, founder of the Dominican Order, used an iron chain; Gaulbert employed a knotted leather thong; and others employed nettles and thistles. Another saint beat himself with whatever was near at hand - including pokers and fire-tongs. St Bridget disciplined herself with a bunch of keys. She must have been a timid soul.
The stories of self-imposed cruelties abound throughout history. After St Catherine of Sienna (the child beater) died a chain was found wound tightly about her waist, embedded in her flesh. St Ammonius tortured his own body with a red-hot iron until it was said to be burnt all over. Christine of St Trond (1150-1224) was said to have laid herself in a hot oven, fastened herself to a wheel, had herself stretched on the rack, and hung upon a gallows beside a corpse. On one occasion she had herself partly buried in a grave. Some think she suffered from sexual hallucinations. She certainly suffered from something unnatural, as indeed did all these psycho cases.
Christine Ebner cut a cross in the skin over her heart and tore off the bleeding flesh. St Margaret Marie Alacoque cut her own breast, inscribing in her person the sacred name of Jesus. When the scars started fading she burnt his name into her flesh with a candle. Another holy woman, St Mary Magdalene dei Pazzi, had the merry habit of rushing into a garden, rolling in a bed of thorns and then returning to the convent and whipping herself. She also enjoyed dropping hot wax onto her own skin (so that's where the S-M aficionados got the idea!) and on one occasion had a novice stand on her face and whip her! St John of the Cross licked out the sores of lepers. He described this activity as 'pleasurable'. St Rose drank a bowl of human blood, newly drawn from a diseased patient.
In a much later era, we have the story of the Blessed Theophane Vénard, a Frenchman, born in 1829. The child was, like so many others, obsessed with religion from an early age. By the time he turned 13 he was keeping himself apart from his school-fellows and living an ascetic, i.e., masochistic, life. A master noted, in midwinter, chilblains on his hands and feet and told him to warm himself before a fire. The boy refused, commenting: 'The missioners you were talking to us about last night, sir, suffered much more than this!' He loved reading the stories of earlier saints and martyrs, especially of their childhood experiences of pain and suffering. All of this must have prepared him well for what was to come many years hence when in China he faced the horrors of the Boxer uprising and the cruelties imposed upon the foreign devils. Only the Chinese and Japanese could match the Christians for cruelty.
The procession of Christian masochists numbers in the tens of thousands. A relatively recent example is seen in the life of an Irishman, the Venerable Matt Talbot (1856 to 1925). A Catholic writer, Joseph A Glynn, wrote The Life of Matt Talbot (1934) after carefully investigating the man and especially his fasts and mortifications. This candidate for beatification from an early age fasted regularly, usually in secret. Sometimes he had no more than a cup of tea and some dry bread. Rarely did he eat meat or anything very substantial. His obsession was so great that on one occasion, when given some buttered bread, he carefully scraped off the butter and ate the bread, without comment. Talbot slept on a plank bed, with a wooden pillow. Summer and winter he was covered with one half-blanket, to which he added, in extreme weather, some old sacks. 'The effect of the wooden pillow', wrote his biographer, 'was that in later years his face became numbed and his hearing impaired.'
But the chief torment he inflicted upon himself was the common one among the saints - wearing chains. It is believed he did this for some 14 years prior to his death, keeping them on day and night, even when sleeping on his plank bed. Talbot did not advertise this fact and it was known only to close friends, although he often recommended the practice to inquirers. Some took up the suggestion. His own addiction began after reading the book of the Blessed Grignon de Montfort. It is fortunate that a particular document has been preserved which describes in some detail the body of Talbot after his death. I use the term 'fortunate', although it certainly makes for unpleasant reading, nevertheless it serves the purpose of demonstrating the lengths to which this form of self-torture drove people. It is an official hospital document, signed by two attendants:
On Sunday, June 7th, 1925, a dead body was brought in the Corporation Ambulance to Jervis Street Hospital. On the body being identified, it proved to be Mr Matt Talbot and when we undersigned undressed the remains we found chains, ropes and beads on the said body. Around the middle of his waist were two chains and a knotted rope. One chain we took to be an ordinary chain used as a horse trace, and the other a little thinner. Both were entwined by a knotted rope and medals were attached to the chain by cords. Both were deeply imbedded in the flesh and rusted.
Also on the left arm was found a light chain wound tightly above the elbow, and on the right arm above the elbow a knotted cord. On the left leg a chain was bound around with a cord below the knee, and on the right leg, in the same position, was some heavy knotted cord. Around his neck were very big beads and attached to same were a great many religious medals. Some of the medals were as big as half-crown and others were ordinary sodality medals.
(Signed) - Charles Manners, Laurence Thornton.
Talbot gave a great deal of time to prayer, being known for spending as long as seven hours kneeling, quite erect, on bare knees. They had been made bare by the simple expedient of cutting slits in his trousers-legs. It was also stated that his eyesight had been affected by his habit of passing through the streets with eyes fixed on the ground, neither looking at nor reading anything around him. Thus lived one of the saintly men of the modern Church.
In the daily life of nuns and monks mortification was practised in a hundred tiny ways. Restrictions on food, renunciation of simple pleasures, the very act of confessing to the priest. For example, in one convent it was the practice on occasions for a nun to move about the tables on her knees with a 'begging bowl' into which the other nuns would spoon soup from their own dishes, out of which they had already eaten. When the bowl was filled the nun would be expected to eat the whole of the contents.
Even the laity get caught up in this madness. According to legend, St Patrick prayed at the summit of Croagh Patrick, a 765 metre peak overshadowing Westport, County Mayo, Ireland, for the 40 days of Lent. On the last Sunday of July each year vast crowds of devout Catholics (60,000 was the figure recorded in one year) of all ages climb to the summit for a penitential Mass, some with feet bloodied from struggling barefoot up the slopes. Incidentally Patrick was not, as is so often falsely claimed, the one who brought Christianity to Ireland. In 431 Pope Celestine 1st sent a Bishop Palladius to Rome to bring such Christians as were already there into the embrace of Rome. Patrick was sent out a year later, which seems to indicate the first appointment didn't work out. Many legends swirl around the figure of Patrick, including the fact that he is credited with driving all the snakes of Ireland into the sea, where they drowned!
In the remains of the Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla, Mexico, now transformed into a museum, there are on view some implements of mortification once used by the nuns who lived there. Hanging on the walls of what was the Mother Superior's cell are heavy chains with which the nuns whipped themselves. There are also leather straps employed on other occasions to subdue the flesh. A waxworks-type figure of a nun depicts the day on which she took the veil. She is naked beneath a black hairshirt covering her body. She kneels before a crucifix upon which hangs the figure of Christ, his agony clearly depicted. The nuns who once entered this convent were never allowed out again (this was often the case in most convents in times past) and when they died they were buried in the cellar. The convent was suppressed by the Mexican Revolution in 1857 but continued a secret existence, entered by a carefully hidden door, for almost 18 years before being discovered, during which time novices continued to join and nuns subjected themselves to the rigourous mortifications of the institution.
As late as in the 1950s a description of life in a Carmelite nunnery indicated that the nuns slept on beds comprising a sack of straw over hard boards, and had no linen sheets. They sat upon hard straight-backed chairs. They arose at 5.30 in winter and 4.30 in summer and worked until 11 pm. Probably the worst postural position was that of kneeling in prayer, a lengthy procedure, the nun having to kneel without any support at all while holding an office book before her eyes. Still at this time physical discipline was being employed, the order falling back on a literal interpretation of the admonition of St Paul: 'I chastise ['bruise' or 'buffet' in some translations] my body and bring it into subjection, lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.' (I Corinthians 9:27)
The nuns employed The Discipline, already mentioned, which they applied in a communal flagellation session in the choir at night, accompanied by the chanting of the Miserere. An interesting aspect of this penitential whipping is that it is considered not only a means of subduing the flesh but also as a means of aiding the souls still struggling in Purgatory. St John of the Cross was a fierce self-whipper. On one occasion he was exhausted from fatigue and illness and asked permission of the Prior, Padre Antonio, to take his evening meal a little earlier than normal. But after he had eaten he felt he had done wrong in giving in to the weakness of his flesh, so went to the Prior and and asked permission to accuse himself of a fault in the presence of the whole company of the Community. When the friars had gathered for their meal John entered the refectory with bared shoulders and carrying the whip. He then knelt down, and scourged himself vigorously as he confessed his faults.
The close connection between religious discipline and suppressed sexual desire is clearly evident in an incident involving St Edmund, Bishop of Canterbury (England). The bishop claimed, that while a student in Paris he was pursued by a beautiful young woman who apparently aroused sexual desire within him. The priest eventually called the woman to his study and, under the pretext of administering penitential flagellation, whipped her body until it was a mass of weals. It is interesting to note that in periods when priests commonly administered the whip to penitents more often than not it was was a female parishioner! Of course, the priests took good care to brainwash their fair parishioners. St Chantal said: 'One must bear the lashes of the whip which our good Lord gives us, and kiss the verges [French implement of correction, similar to the birch] tenderly, for he strikes us out of love.' Or lust!
