The Revolution of the Soul
By: Steven Gambardella
Tags: Christianity, Philosophy, History, Self, Psychology

Perhaps the first known depiction of the crucifixion — probably from around the year 200 — is a blasphemous graffito that was scratched on a wall in Rome. It shows Jesus of Nazareth on the cross with a donkey’s head, and a cartoonish figure praying beneath him. The inscription reads: “Alexamenos worships his god”. Alexamenos is the butt of a joke, or perhaps the victim of a deadly accusation.

Inverted Values

Christian values were an inversion of Roman values. Christian virtues included embracing poverty, altruism, and pacifism (“turning the other cheek”), these would have been absurd to the Romans. To be a good Roman was to understand the importance of authority, to be loyal to the state and the emperor, to strive for wealth and pay taxes to fuel the Roman war machine.

For the early church, there were no specially-built churches and certainly none of the riches that you’d find in western churches today. Christians were mostly made up of the poor and the marginalised: slaves, immigrants and the lowest classes of Roman citizens.

Some rich Romans, like Perpetua, converted to Christianity. Archeologists have found burial sites with Christian symbology. But the archaeological evidence is always going to be weighted to the rich, who owned property and therefore leave a bigger archaeological footprint. We can assume that most Christians were poor.

Despite their poverty, the history of early Christianity is replete with astonishing stories of selflessness. Christians gave what alms they could, and shared food and shelter.

In Roman society, where there were very little means of contraception or abortion, it was acceptable (though not encouraged) to “expose” unwanted newborn children — in effect, leaving them in the wild or in rubbish tips to be dismembered by wild animals.

Christians would collect exposed babies and raise them as their own as an act of altruism. To Christians, human life has a supreme dignity that only the choice to sin can tarnish. To Romans, life was cheap.

The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the nineteenth century, described Christian ethics as “slave morality”. To Nietzsche, there was a successful revolution for the slaves and the poor. The resentment towards the ruling Roman classes, who followed the principles of a pagan “noble morality”, manifested itself in the moral system of Christianity which slowly transplanted paganism.

For Nietzsche, Christian morals were essentially “sour-grapes” made into a system of values. Where the Romans prized sensuousness and power, Christianity prized bodily-denial and pity. A religion that rose from below had inverted noble Roman values.

St Paul is said to have been struck blind on his way to persecute Christians in Damascus. When he regained his sight, he converted to Christianity himself. Painting: Conversion on the Road to Damascus by Michelangelo Caravaggio, 1601 (source: Wikipedia)

Saint Paul the Revolutionary

Early Christianity was initially a cult only open to Jews. It was a new and revolutionary understanding of the providence of Yahweh, the one and only God of the Israelites. Christians claimed that a working-class preacher from Galilee, a backwater province in Roman-conquered Judea, was the Jewish messiah — “anointed one” — prophesised to bring independence to the Jewish people and rule by the authority of God.

This was a controversial and deadly claim to make. Jesus himself had been executed for sedition in the most humiliating way the Romans had at their disposal — crucifixion. How could a dead man — a dead criminal — be the savior of the Jewish people?

One of the Jews who had converted to Christianity was well-heeled and had the privilege — rare among his people— of being a Roman citizen. Paul (formerly Saul) of Tarsus took the revolution a step further.

Saint Paul was formerly a persecutor of Christians but claimed to have converted when he saw a vision of Christ, who commanded him to spread Christianity.

Paul asserted that anybody in the world could be a Christian, not just Jews. Jesus Christ was not just the savior of Jews, Paul stated, but the savior of everybody in the world that believed in His message.

This doesn’t seem revolutionary now, but at the time it was astonishing. Saint Paul, as we now know him, had the idea that people were the same. No matter how rich you were, where you were from or what culture you were a part of, you were the same in the eyes of God as everyone else.

In an ancient world obsessed with particularities and social hierarchies, Saint Paul evoked not only generality but the universal.

This radical leap of reason reveals the philosophical heritage of Christianity, which originates with the ancient Greeks. While more materialist Greek philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism were popular among the Romans at the time of St Paul, the Christians took inspiration from Platonism.

Plato was a follower of Socrates, and both philosophers believed in the idea that a soul within us would survive our physical death. The soul (anima in Greek) was not a new idea, there is evidence of belief in the soul dating back to ancient Egypt, and likely to have been pervasive in prehistoric times.

But the immortality of the human soul was by no means as common an idea in the ancient world as it is now. Christianity absorbed the idea of the eternally living soul from the Hellenistic (Greek-speaking) world from which it emerged.

There’s no explicit evidence that Platonism inspired Jesus himself or the earliest Christians, but Platonic ideas were pervasive in the Roman Empire from Judea to Britain. Because of the conquests of Alexander the Great, first century B.C.E. Judaism was heavily influenced by Greek culture and customs. Historians refer to “Hellenistic Judaism” as the dominant spiritual and intellectual climate among Jews at the time.

Whether or not the soul lived on after death was a matter of debate between the Sadducee and Pharisee sects of Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth preached that the soul would survive death and that those who followed him would live on in an eternal “Kingdom of God”.

It was the idea of the soul, unconstrained by material things, that gave Saint Paul the notion that all people are the same. Our particularities such as our status and our appearance, health, and origin are all material: just a messy vesture on a pure soul. He wrote:

“We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.”

In philosophical terms, this is known as dualism: the idea that the body (all your purely physical traits) and your mind/spirit/soul (your personality, your reason and judgement) are separate.

When we strip away all those things, when the soul is considered apart from the body, Saint Paul believed it will be the same as all other souls.

He wrote in a letter to the Galatian Christians:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man,

there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

We would be judged by God not by status or wealth but the decisions we make. Even private thoughts could be judged by God. Morality was disembodied. Those who were good would live in an eternal paradise, and those who were bad would be tormented forever.

Socrates reasoned that the soul is alive before birth and would live on after death. Plato believed that the soul transmigrates into other bodies after death. Both believed in a perfect world of pure forms that was transcendent over (but existing parallel to) our imperfect world.

Saint Paul had a different idea. He wrote that a perfect world was coming to triumph over the corrupted, imperfect world and that those who did good works would be resurrected in that world. A person’s soul is not alive before the person but has the chance to be resurrected on a perfect Earth after the last judgement.

Saint Paul’s idea was the catalyst Christianity needed to survive. His vision of a universal religion open to anybody to convert to allowed Christianity the flexibility to grow fast throughout the well connected Roman Empire.

That idea, combined with the promise of a better life after death (on the condition of believing), and the warning that the Roman Empire would soon be shattered, meant that Christianity spread like wildfire, particularly among the poor and downtrodden. Christian churches sprang up all over the Mediterranean preaching the coming end of the world.

Official Religion

By the fourth century, the religion had converted many in the ranks of the Roman army. Constantine, a pagan emperor fighting a civil war, was supposedly inspired by a vision and a dream on the eve of the decisive Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. The sun, he claimed, formed a cross shape and the words “in this sign you will conquer” came to him.

He ordered his soldiers to paint the Chi-Rho sign (the first two Greek letters of “Christ” superimposed) on their shields. With Constantine’s victory secured, Christianity had been validated. The Edict of Milan followed in 313, which promised that Christians would be protected from persecution by pagans.

Whether Constantine had a real vision, or that he simply took a pragmatic measure to motivate his Christian troops, it seemed that the religion had finally become tolerated as equal to other religions.

Constantine himself only converted to the religion close to the end of his life. Every Roman emperor after him (apart from Justinian, who lasted a mere two years on the throne) followed him into the faith. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Roman civic buildings — basilicas — where many Christians had previously been sentenced to death, were converted into churches. Pagan holidays morphed over time into Christian holidays: Saturnalia, Rome’s sacred gift-giving festival held at the time of the winter solstice, became Christmas. Paganism slowly died out, transplanted by the monotheistic religion.

The global march of Christianity was underway. While the religion faltered in the Medieval period as Islam ascended, the economic and military rise of post-Renaissance Europe fuelled the religion’s growth. Missionaries spread the Gospel — meaning “good news” in Greek — to all corners of the world as European nations built their empires.

Christianity has simply become the norm, but in the process has lost the most radical aspects of early Christianity. The “official” status of Christian churches, with their vast reserves of property and money, sit uncomfortably with the revolutionary values espoused by Jesus of Nazareth and the early Christians.

The belief in the immortal human soul is common in our age but does not inspire the same levels of reckless self-sacrifice that the early Christians embraced, a recklessness that astonished and frightened Roman society.

Despite the officialdom of Christianity in the west, it remains the most persecuted religion in the world in real numbers. While Christianity is safely practiced in Europe and America, there are thousands of Christians in jail around the world. Those people are both condemned and comforted by their belief in their immortal soul.

Thank you for reading. I hope you learned something new.