Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
The Essenes were organised hierarchically, though their seniority depended on humility. The asceticism of the Essenes was to be the main feature of ordinary Christian life for over a thousand years, though the higher ranks saw no need for it. After 70 AD many Sadduccess joined the new Christian religion and they obviously favoured a proper priesthood with the privileges they considered proper.
The early Catholic Church altered the principle of equality implicit in every man's personal access to god by affirming a new priesthood led by the bishops and eventually by a High Priest called the Pope. A watered down version of the Goddess was admitted via Marianism and the duties and attributes of old gods given to lesser gods called saints. To make sure the populace knew its own position and role, priests were placed in control of their souls, receiving their confessions.
Christians took from the Persian authors of the Jewish scriptures, two concepts previously unknown in the west:
Belief in a patriarchal god, who arbitrarily rewarded people with an eternal after-life in heaven for no other reason than that they believed, created anarchy in the Roman world. It left no place for chosing the right thing, for individual public endeavour, besides accumulating wealth. Wealth was anathema to Jesus and the first Christians who were the Poor Ones who held poverty to be a virtue but it was easy for the developing gentile church to abandon.
Sir James Frazer goes further saying the "selfish and immoral doctrine of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with god and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for" was the cause of the defects of European civilisation. It replaced the classical ideal of individual self-sacrifice for the common good with selfishness.
In 363 AD Julian the Apostate died fighting the Persians and Christians praised God but, it seemed through the retribution of the discarded gods, in 367 AD Britain was lost to the Barbarians. It was won back in 378 AD but the Goths won a huge battle at Adrianople not far from Constantinople. Despite these setbacks, Theodosius made Catholicism the only religion and Christian mobs vandalised Pagan temples and terrorised other Christians they considered heretical for the next quarter century.
In 406 AD the Barbarians overran Gaul and in 410 Britain was again lost this time never to be recovered. The Goths sacked Rome. The internal collapse continued apace, with cities abandoned even when not attacked and the clueless urbanites returning to the land which they then mismanaged. Typically of Catholic clergy, rather than face the practical problems of civilisation, they debated ways of making sure maidens remained virgins.
It was hard for people not to blame the collapse on to Christianity. Pagans noted that the Rome of the Pagan gods had been prosperous but the Christian Rome had been wrecked by fellow worshippers of the Christian God, though they were Arian not Catholic. Augustine felt it necessary to write the City of God in reply.
Throughout the 5th century the Roman Empire continued collapsing, while the Christian clergy and bureacracy still firmly stuck their heads in the clouds. Cyril of Alexandria, an imposing and fanatical ex-monk had an Hitlerian style of persuasion. He stage managed his performances so that his sermons were rapturously applauded by packing sections of his congregations with his monastic pals.
The same monks he turned out as brownshirts against his opponents, as he did against the Pagan philosopher, Hypatia. Cyril was an impressive speaker but Hypatia was more so. She taught in her own academy and attracted large audiences from far and wide. She was the daughter of a mathematician and had all the intelligence and more of her father and was beautiful and glamorous too. The church led by Cyril was not impressed.
She was a Pagan at a time when the church had declared Paganism "unfashionable". Cyril eventually got fed up and in 415 AD arranged for a gang of his monkish thugs to waylay Hypatia in her carriage on the way to her lecturing. They stripped her naked, cruelly abused and murdered her, then destroyed her body by stripping it of all its flesh with sharp tiles or shells and burning the remains in front of Cyril's church.
The church was not interested in knowledge but in ignorance. Hypatia and the doctors of the Pagan schools were too clever. The church obliterated them.