7. Living Like Angels

The lasting impression left by the early church membership is one of social diversity. Yet it went with an ideal of human equality: in Christ, taught the Christians, all were equal and the distinctions of rank and degree were irrelevant. In church meetings, educated people had to sit as equals among other men's slaves and petty artisans. On both sides, the tensions were already evident in the churches of the Apostolic age.

While belittling rank, Christians also taught the vanity of worldly competition: the "love of honour" which propelled pagan cult and civic life became "vainglory. " These contrary values had their appeal, but they were not without consequence. It is the fate of groups who claim to abolish competition that they invert it and cause it to emerge elsewhere. In early Christianity, there was an obvious field to which competition could be transferred. If Christians were socially equal, spiritually they were acknowledged to be more diverse. The sayings of their Gospels already implied a double standard of achievement and understanding. "If you would be perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect . . ."; in matters of conduct, the sky, it seemed, was the limit. Paul's letters had already recognized a distinction between a first- and a second-class Christian achievement, and as time passed, the gap increased. All Christians faced the same final test, but while the majority hoped only for a modest pass, a few aspired to congratulated honours. Christianity gave scope for this boundless perfectionism, while keeping in touch with those who aspired to much less. In pagan philosophy, there had been one ideal for the supremely wise and virtuous, another for persons of lower capacity, but philosophers were rare and the supremely wise were rarer still. Among pagans, no supernatural rewards and punishments attached to the ethic of perfection, and nothing in their religiousness required it as a life long ideal. We have seen how Christianity extended Scripture and theology to a very wide range of persons. There was a further innovation. It brought the tensions and evasions of a double standard into the experience of every Christian man and woman.

The effects were visible in the very structure of each church community. If the years of preparation were one part of the faith's appeal, they also promoted divisions of merit and progress. By C. 300, there were novice "hearers" as well as the "catechumens," who were receiving instruction before baptism.' There were also good and bad catechumens: Tertullian complains of Christians who used the interval before baptism as an excuse for concerted sinning, their final fling; the acts of the first councils after Constantine consider the same problem, and the further problem of catechumens who do not attend church for a long while and suddenly turn up, demanding baptism. The catechumen's official period of two to three years' preparation was variously spent, it seems. The baptismal rite was preceded by repentance of sins and frequent exorcism, giving an important role to the churches' retained exorcists. After baptism, Christians had only one last chance of forgiveness. Even so, the history of forgiveness had been a history of falling barriers whose every collapse was resisted but never regretted subsequently. First, all Christians were granted the second chance; then the second chance was extended to deadly sins, to adultery and to lapsing or pagan observance during persecution. Practice varied locally, but the second chance became attached to a ritual of fasting, weeping and humiliation.

Around 200, we see it in North Africa, where the idea of a pure Christian Church was strong: Tertullian describes how "Christian sinners spend the day sorrowing, and the night in vigils and tears, lying on the ground among clinging ashes, tossing in rough sackcloth and dirt, fasting and praying. "' Sometimes a penitent adulterer found himself "led into the midst of the brethren and prostrated, all in sackcloth and ashes ... a compound of disgrace and horror, before the widows, the elders, suing for everyone's tears, licking their footprints, clasping their very knees . . . " By the mid-third century, grades of sin and penance had begun to be defined, varying from a few weeks' correction to a lifetime of entreaty. In a church of the 250s, several classes of Christian were to be found: inside were gathered the virtuous and the minor sinners who were banned only from communion; outside waited the "standing" sinners in the porch and the serious cases who were required to grovel and ask for their brothers' prayers as they went in and out of tile building." If we miss this weekly evidence of the group's inner divisions, we will miss the flavour of' early Christian life. Whose turn would it be next? God alone could forgive, the Christians believed, and he could forgive anything in his mercy; meanwhile, prayer by the assembled Christians and restoration to his Church were near-guarantees of his pardon. The process gave ordinary Christians a role and importance beside their priests: they, too, could intercede with God, causing the sinners to beg abjectly for their assistance. It is disputed whether sinners were obliged to make a public confession, but one passage in Origen implies that they were, and two of Bishop Cyprian's letters assume such statements, once from Christians who had lapsed during persecution, once from Christian "virgins" who had lapsed in the bedroom. Personal sins became fascinating public knowledge. In the 450s, Pope Leo I considered public confession an "intolerable habit," evident among Italian bishops. In many churches. it seems, it had long been recognized, linking shame and group solidarity to healing through humiliation.'

These procedures were grim, and Christians could make use of them only once. It is clear from Tertullian that many Christians disregarded them altogether and preferred to keep their sins to themselves and God.' Others took them discreetly elsewhere. Martyrs, as we shall see, had the spiritual power to give a swift remission: around 200, while writing for rich Christians, Clement recommended that they should adopt holy individuals from among the poorer "brethren" who could pray and advise them as "friends of God." How could a civic notable be seen grovelling on a church path? The richer Christians could keep their own adviser in their household, and in Clement's view, the adviser need not even be a priest. Nonetheless, the idea of one, and only one, repentance was still generally accepted.

These gradations helped to compound the quality of a Christian church. If there was only one chance after baptism, was it not wiser to put off baptism and continue sinning meanwhile?" In the fourth century, the problem explicitly worried Church leaders, as Christians delayed full commitment until their deathbed. Delay was all the easier because of the humane Christian view that a novice or apprentice should not be denied early baptism if he seemed about to die. In the third century, the full scope of this manoeuvre does not seem to have been appreciated. Tertullian still saw the problem to lie in the opposite direction, in the habit of baptizing infants. "Why," he complained, "should the age of innocence hasten to the forgiveness of sins? If the burden of baptism is understood, its reception will be feared more than its delay.--- He could not have written ill this manner if the cunning postponement of baptism were widespread in Christian life. The practice of infant baptism was not without critics, but many churches accepted it and the hard facts of life encouraged them. As infant mortality was so miserably high, parents had a good claim that a baby should be baptized before its probable death: the point is made clearly in Latin inscriptions in the later Christian Empire.

Time, and this practice, added to the divisions between Christian believers. In the third century, Origen had some hard words for the snobbishness of Christians who had a long family history of the faith: they were worse if they could point to a bishop or dignitary in their ancestry." They felt superior to newly made converts, yet these people had renounced much and endured two or three years' teaching before baptism. Their religion was very much alive and perhaps, in their turn, they would look down on Christians who had merely been baptized as infants. Infants had made no choice, and perhaps the faith did matter less to many of them later.

These divisions in the churches' membership are the setting within which the overachievers belonged. There is always a place for aims and ideals which are difficult, and Christianity was particularly able to satisfy those who respond to a life of difficult struggle. In this chapter and the next two, they will loom large. Are they really Christians, we may wonder nowadays, recoiling from their self-mortification, their visionary tours of heaven and hell, their eager anticipation of martyrdom? Yet they could cite texts in the Gospels to support their ideals. The extreme forms of Overachievement were not approved by many of their contemporaries, but the values which underlay them were Christian, nonetheless. At first sight, they may seem to resemble ideals in pagan ethics: are they, then, proofs of a continuity between pagan and Christian ways of life?

These questions are easier to study because they lie on the surface of so much early Christian literature. Not only did the overachievers attract polemic and approval from fellow Christians: they helped to multiply the texts which supported their own practice. Their methods were very simple: where no authority existed, they invented texts and ascribed them to authors who never wrote them.

It is possible to put this practice in context and draw distinctions between its types. In the Hellenistic age, Jewish authors had already availed themselves of this literary form: the Christians were merely one more group in the field. Like their Jewish contemporaries, they lacked the critical concern for history and its sources which would have excluded these fabrications. There were a few doubters, but some very notable believers: despite its critics, wrote Tertullian, the Book of Enoch (composed c. 150 B.C.) must be genuine, as Enoch had lived in the days before the Flood. "

Narrative fictions tended to name no author, the "Acts of Peter" or the "Acts of Thomas," whereas bogus letters of discipline and "revelation" tended to claim a false authorship, the "Apocalypse of Peter" or the "Teaching of the Apostles. " In either case, the deceit had one primary aim: success. By withholding his name, the writer lent authority to texts which had none. The practice was not insignificant when the texts discussed points of religious conduct. It had begun promptly, characterizing several of the New Testament's epistles and, on one view, some or all of the Gospels themselves. However we try to justify the authors' practice, at bottom they used the same device: falsehood.

In the churches, the strict regard for authority and the growing respect for "orthodoxy" gave added point to this type of invention. It was also propelled by the interests of overachievers. These authors wished to support their behaviour by texts of a spurious authority, and if we look at the contents, we can see the conduct which they specially commended. Nobody wrote in this style on the surrender of riches or on support for the poor. Perfectionist texts described other qualities: virginity, visions and martyrdom. Despite initial appearances, each brings Christian practice into a contrast with pagan society. Each has remained central to Christian piety ever since: we can explore them one by one, beginning with Christian teaching on sex and its suppression.