Basil’s brother went even further. Gregory was moved by the existence of slavery not just to condemn the extremes of wealth and poverty, but to define the institution itself as an unpardonable offence against God. Human nature, so he preached, had been constituted by its Creator as something free. As such, it was literally priceless. ‘Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.’9 This, for his congregation, was altogether too radical, too seditious a perspective to take seriously: for how, as Basil himself put it, were those of inferior intelligence and capabilities to survive, if not as slaves? Unsurprisingly, then, Gregory’s abolitionism met with little support. The existence of slavery as damnable but necessary continued to be taken for granted by most Christians – Basil included. Only when heaven was joined with earth would it cease to exist. Gregory’s impassioned insistence that to own slaves was ‘to set one’s own power above God’s’,10 and to trample on a dignity that was properly the right of every man and woman, fell like seed among thorns.
But there was seed as well that fell on good ground. Lepers and slaves were not the most defenceless of God’s children. Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in their hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state. Sparta, one of the most celebrated cities in Greece, had been the epitome of this policy, and Aristotle himself had lent it the full weight of his prestige. Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents – so much so that it had long provided novelists with a staple of their fiction. Only a few peoples – the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews – had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.
What the implications might be for infants tossed out with the trash was best demonstrated not by Basil, nor by Gregory, but by their sister. Macrina, the eldest of nine siblings, was in many ways the most influential of them all. She it was who had persuaded her brother to abandon the law and devote himself to Christ; similarly, she could be hailed by Gregory as the most brilliant of his instructors. Erudite, charismatic and formidably ascetic, she devoted herself to a renunciation of the world’s pleasures so absolute as to fill her contemporaries with awe; and yet she did not abandon the world altogether. When famine held Cappadocia in its grip, and ‘flesh clung to the bones of the poor like cobwebs’,11 then Macrina would make a tour of the refuse tips. Those infant girls she rescued she would take home, and raise as her own. Whether it was Macrina who had taught Gregory, or Gregory Macrina, both believed that within even the most defenceless newborn child there might be glimpsed a touch of the divine. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Cappadocia and its neighbouring regions, where – even by the standards of other lands – the abandonment of infants was a particular custom, should also have been where the first visions of Christ’s mother had lately begun to be reported. Mary, the virgin Theotokos, ‘the bearer of God’, had herself known what it was to have a baby when poor, and homeless, and afraid. So it was recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Obliged by a Roman tax-demand to travel from her native Galilee to Bethlehem, Mary had given birth to Christ in a stable, and laid him down on straw. Macrina, taking up the slight form of a starving baby in her arms, could know for sure that she was doing God’s work.
Yet Gregory, when he came to write in praise of his sister after her death, did not compare her to Mary. Of good family though she was, born to wealth, she had always slept at night on planks, as though on a cross; and so it was, on her deathbed, that she prayed to God to receive her into his kingdom, ‘because I have been crucified with you’.12 It was not his brother, the celebrated bishop, the founder of the Basileias, whom Gregory thought to compare to Christ, but his sister. Here, in a world where lepers could be treated with dignity, and the abolition of slavery be urged on the rich, was yet another subversion of the traditional way of ordering things. Solid as these hierarchies were, very ancient, and with foundations deeply laid, they were not to be toppled as readily as Gregory might have hoped; and yet, for all that, in his homilies there was an intimation of reverberations that lay far distant in the future. Much was immanent, in the new faith clasped to its bosom by the Roman ruling classes, that they could barely comprehend. ‘Give to the hungry what you deny your own appetite.’13 Gregory’s urging, which to previous generations would have appeared madness, was one with which the wealthy increasingly found themselves bound to wrestle.
Sharing and Caring
In 397, in a village beside the Loire, two rival gangs gathered outside a bare stone chamber where an old man lay dying. It was late afternoon by the time he finally breathed his last; and at once a violent argument broke out as to where his body should be taken. The two groups, one from Poitiers, the other from Tours, both pressed the case for their respective towns. The shadows lengthened, the sun set, and still the dispute raged. The men from Poitiers, agreeing amongst themselves that they would spirit away the corpse at first light, settled down to sit in vigil over it; but gradually all fell asleep. The men from Tours, seizing their chance, crept into the cell. Lifting up the body from the cinders in which it had been lying, they smuggled it out through a window and sped away upriver. Arriving in Tours, they were greeted by exultant crowds. The old man’s burial in a tomb outside the city walls set the seal on a triumphant expedition.
Stories like these, told by people proud of the might of the dead in their midst, had a venerable pedigree.* In Greece, the bones of heroes – readily distinguishable by their colossal size – had long been prized as trophies. It was not unknown for entire skeletons to be chiselled out of rock and abducted. Tombs as well, great mounds of earth raised over the ashes of fallen heroes, had for a millennium been sites of pilgrimage. Julian, even before becoming emperor, and making public his devotion to the ancient gods, had made a point of visiting Troy. There, he had been shown the tombs of Homer’s heroes, and the temples raised to them, by none other than the local bishop. Seeing Julian’s raised eyebrow, the bishop had only shrugged. ‘Is it not natural that people should worship a brave man who was their fellow citizen?’14 Pride in ancestral warriors ran very deep.