Part 3 of the Augustine vs Empire series
By Matthew Ehret
In the last installment of this series, you were introduced to the dominant mystery cults of the Persian and earlier Babylonian Empire that seeded themselves into Athens, and Roman territories transforming each civilization into Marcher Lords of a very ancient evil.
In this third installment, we will explore the emergence of Christianity amidst the early phases of the Roman Empire’s emergence as the new marcher lord of Babylon.
The Rise of Christianity
Amidst this moral rot and decadence, the new ministry of Jesus was just beginning in the Roman satrapy of Palestine. But it was something that the Roman Empire was more than happy to ignore, as it appeared in Roman eyes to be just another one of many messianic Jewish cults that would arise from time to time.
Unlike the countless other Jewish messianic sects that came and went, this new movement led by Jesus of Nazareth did not disappear the way the Romans had presumed it would. Instead, it grew quite fast.
In the first century AD, Rome was relying on an ever-increasing use of slavery which fed the decadent city centers of Rome. The Roman population was fed blood sports, gladiator matches, and nearly non-stop festivals to keep them placated, drunk and docile. Orgiastic Festivals were increasingly becoming hegemonic in the urban city centers, while the outskirts of the empire were constantly being looted and abused as lower caste satraps.
During the forty years after Christ is killed, the two monotheistic groups in Rome: Jews and Christians, were systematically attacked by the authorities, but rarely at the same time since Rome’s policy typically aimed to building animosity between the two Abrahamic groups – rarely missing an opportunity to amplify resentment and division between them.
Under the perverse emperor Caligula who ruled from 37-41 AD, an edict was passed demanding all synagogues to host statues of the emperor as a god and all Jews were commanded to pay sacrifices. Predictably, the majority of the Jews refused, and in response, their properties were confiscated all over the Roman Empire.
From Caligula to Nero
Under Caligula, thousands of Jews who refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods were massacred. This set the stage for the first of the three Roman Jewish wars that took place between 66-135 AD resulting in the destruction of the Kingdom of Judea that had been managed as a Roman satrap, the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in 70 AD under Emperor Titus and the failed Simon Bar Kochba revolt in 135 AD leaving over a million Jews dead.
Under Caligula, the Christians were not yet targeted for annihilation. However, that changed with the rise of the infamous Emperor Nero who ruled from 54-68 AD. It is at this time that the Committee of 15 revealed to Nero that the Sibylline Books demanded Christianity to be labelled an “illegal cult”. Those who refused to abandon their faith would be considered traitors to the state and would face persecution, confiscation of property and in many cases death. Despite a few respites, these anti-Christian persecutions would continue over the ensuing two and a half centuries.
The primary crime of the new Christian movement was its rejection of the Roman Pantheon of Gods, and its acceptance of only one God with a unifying moral code. The moral code of the Christians made no space for the acts of “holy profanity” and deviancy promoted by the initiatory rites and rituals of the pagan cults of Isis, Mithra, Diana and Cybele.
With Jesus’ new movement with its emphasis on grace, forgiveness, and health of the soul over the pleasures of flesh, the polytheistic debauchery, endemic in the mystery cult practices and bread/circus culture faced a mortal threat. Mystery Cults were clearly recognized as unholy by the new movement, and a healthier way of living in harmony with God was suddenly made available to everyone. Christians held firm to the concept that there was actually only one God which is both finite and infinite, mortal and immortal, transcending the created world and but also alive within.
This new idea met a deep spiritual thirst. As Jesus outlined in the Gospels, the true God is not one of vengeance, or hedonism. It is a God of Grace, Goodness and Reason. But there are certain conditions upon which that grace can express itself which is directly tied to how each person choses to live, and where they place their faith.
And that was not compatible with the dominant Roman pantheon, and thus the high priesthood decided that it needed to be destroyed. However, that is easier said than done.
Nero needed to have an excuse. He needed to polarize the Roman public against the Christians somehow. Working with his Mithraic Praetorian Guard, Nero launches a major false flag and sets fire to much of his own Rome, famously playing his beloved fiddle. He then blamed it on the Christian “terrorists.”
In their terror and ignorance, the Roman populus gave their support to Nero’s anti-Christian persecutions. Soon, thousands of Christians were arrested and thrown into gladiator arenas to be eaten alive by starving beasts in front of massive crowds. Featured in the painting below, you can see the perimeter of the Roman arena set with “Roman candles”. Roman candles were torchlit fires set ablaze on the bodies of oil-drenched Christians tied to wooden poles which would keep the Coliseum lit alongside tormented screams all through the nights for months on end.
As gruesome as this frenzy of killing was, it turned out to be surprisingly counterproductive for Nero and the cults.
The population of Rome became increasingly ashamed by the courage of those Christians who met death with solemn piety, and slowly, the population began to break from their bloodlust and hedonistic conditioning.
The games became less and less popular, and instead of watching the destruction of Christianity, ever larger numbers of Roman subjects, including members of the military, political class, and nobility alike began converting to the new faith. The new faith recognized no caste, and made no differentiation whether someone was a king, a nobleman, or slave.
For the first time, the “mysteries” were not merely for those initiated few who achieved an irrational state of ‘gnosis’, but were accessible to literally everyone, due to the fact of humanity’s common heritage as having been made in the living image of the Creator. In Paul’s letters to the Romans, the message of the universality of the truth written on the hearts of all people…
“For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness”
[Romans 2:13-16]
Additionally, the type of sacrifices which the god of the Christians demanded was like nothing ever before seen. No animal, no human or monetary sacrifice was expected in this new faith… for what need does God the creator of all have of anything? After his child died for the sins of humanity, no other sacrifice would be necessary. Now the only sacrifice expected would be acts of goodness and charity.
As Paul says to the Hebrews:
“There is no eternal city for us in this life, but we look for one in the life to come. Through him, let us offer God and unending sacrifice of praise. Keep doing good works and sharing your resources, for these are sacrifices that please God.”
Even if someone was born long before Jesus, the universal laws of Justice and Truth which Jesus taught were not created at any point in time, but are, by definition, universal. This is why Paul noted that following the law written on our hearts and conscience means everyone can be saved. This is a concept which Augustine also utilizes in his writings extensively.
The Persecutions Continue
The anti-Christian persecutions launched by Nero subsided over the ensuing decades, but re-emerged periodically over two and a half centuries.
Under the Emperor Domitian, the persecutions were relaunched in 90 AD, and under Trajan they came back again from 98-117 AD.
In 161 AD, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a high priest of the Cult of Mithra relaunched the anti-Christian persecutions, and from 202-211 AD Septimanus Severus did the same.
A short respite occurred from 244-249 AD under the first Christian emperor ‘Philip the Arab’ who favored the Christians but were restarted again under the cruel Emperor Diocletian.
The persecutions finally ended in 312 AD with the death of Diocletian. When Emperor Constantine took power in 311, the Edict of Toleration was passed recognizing Christianity as movement to be tolerated. Christianity was officially recognized as a sanctioned religion with the Treaty of Milan of 313. To get a sense of the growth of Christianity from this point forward, in the year 300 AD, there existed approximately 5-6 million members, yet by 350 AD it had grown to at least 33 million!
In 324, the first ecumenical council in Nicaea is held in order to sort out the many different theories and practices of Christian doctrine held by the numerous factions of the church. This event resulted in the first agreed-upon consensus about the nature of Jesus the son, God the father, Creation, and the Holy Spirit. This consensus became known as ‘the Nicene Creed’.
The Council of Nicaea (325 AD)
The highly fragmented movement made a major victory with the Nicaean Council, which created a central core doctrine and ability to carry out coordinated action. Before Nicaea, the movement was a highly decentralized and infiltrated movement with many gnostic pseudo-Christian cults like that created by Simon the Magus which sought to destroy the new movement from within.[5]
The Nicene Creed stipulated that the central doctrine of Christianity would be the faith that all mankind were made in the living image of God (Imago Viva Dei) and had the mandate to participate in creation (Capax Dei). This doctrine was a major departure from the norms of all pagan cults which tended to reduce humanity to the status of wildlife under various types of nature worship rituals. The Christian doctrine generally, and the Nicene creed specifically, placed humanity on a divine pedestal as steward of nature instead, with many higher moral responsibilities to both be fruitful and multiply.[6]
While the political power gained through the successes of the Council of Nicaea ensured Christianity’s survival, compromises were made over the course of the coming centuries by church leaders who agreed to infuse already existent Pagan rites such as the veneration of angels and dead saints (begun in 374 AD), the establishment of sacred meals (called Sacraments) into the Christian practice (begun in 394 AD), and the worship of Mary begun in 431 AD. Many ceremonies utilized by the cults of Mithra were also infused into Christianity such as the treatment of “Sun” day as holy and the decision to celebrate Jesus’ birthday on December 25.
The creation of Popes based in the Vatican dubbed ‘Holy Fathers’, and edicts of celibacy for Hierophants, and a myriad of other rites were infused into Church practice over the coming centuries were not found anywhere in the Gospels.
In The Strategic Significance of Ecumenical Negotiations[7], the modern Platonic philosopher Lyndon LaRouche (1923-2019) delivered the following insight into the battles at Nicaea and the strategic importance of the Nicene Creed:
“The formal history of the doctrine is this. The defense of the principled features of the doctrine, for both Judaism and later for Christianity, was first elaborated to the best of our present knowledge by Philo Judaeus of Alexandria. The most concise statement of the doctrine occurs in the opening verses of the New Testament Gospel of St. John, as reaffirmed with emphasis by the Nicene faith, inclusive of the Roman Catholic version of the Nicaean Credo.
All Western Christianity is founded on the elaborated defense of this doctrine by St. Augustine.
In Eastern Christianity, the top-down control of the church apparatus by the cult-linked Roman Imperial oligarchy, from the evil Emperor Constantine through the Emperor Justinian and others, limited the defense of Christianity to principally the Platonic faction of the Greek-speaking world, those forces identified over centuries to the present date by their defense of the teaching of the classical Greek associated with the span from Homer into Plato. The prolonged control of the leadership of the Eastern Church by pseudo-Christian cultists, typified by Patriarch Gennadios during the 15th century, caused a cleavage between the Western and Eastern churches, a cleavage defined by the cultist pseudo-Christian’s rejection of the perfect consubstantiality of the Trinity…
The affinity of the Eastern Platonic Fathers to the subsequent doctrine of St. Augustine is to be found in the decrees and resolutions of the first two Ecumenical Councils, of Nicaea and Constantinople, which produced two basic tenets of Christianity, the Nicaean Credo, a liturgical affirmation of faith in the Triune God; and the broader body of doctrine, known as the Nicene faith, which, independently of liturgical forms, affirms the incarnated Christ to be consubstantial, or homoousios, with God the Father. The Eastern Platonic Fathers, always a minority, had to struggle at all times against the authority of the Emperor and simultaneously against the numerically overwhelming Egyptian and related cults whose main effort centered in challenging under various guises, the homoousios, or consubstantial nature of the Christ; some cult-heresies asserted Christ to be only divine and not human, others only human and not divine, some both divine and human but whose divine nature is distinct from that of the Father, or from that of the Father and the Holy Spirit; in this vast mess of cultist challenges to Christianity, the most severe menace for a long time was the cult of Sabellians who asserted Christ’s exclusively divine nature, complementing the Arian heresy, similar to modern “Liberation Theology”; the ordinary bishops who assembled at Nicaea and Constantinople to condemn the Arian heresy, generally feared that admission of the homoousios clause would open the floodgates of the Sabellian heresy. It took the exceptional efforts of three outstanding Platonist Fathers, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. John Chrysostom, to enforce, by means of maneuvers and compromises, the homoousios doctrine.
Part of the compromise was the omission of the Filioque from the liturgical credo of the Eastern Church, i.e., the declaration that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son (Filioque in Latin). St. Augustine and the Western Fathers, struggling at the outskirts of the Empire to bring barbarian tribes into civilization, could not afford to make such a compromise on penalty of seeing their evangelizing work fail; the practical issue concealed behind consubstantiality, homoousios, and its corollary matter of the Filioque, was: how to draw man into civilized life by inspiring him to strive to become “godlike” through imitation of the incarnated Christ, the God-Man who is homoousios, consubstantial of God.
The Roman Imperial aristocracy at Constantinople, with the Emperor at its head, retaliated by launching a systematic struggle against Platonism throughout the Eastern Empire. It is most precise to say that what is popularly derided as “Byzantine politics” was founded during the 313-529 period as a high-level epistemological warfare between Platonism and Aristotelianism.
Under Emperor Theodosius I of the Western Empire and Gracian of the Eastern Empire, Christianity was officially made the state religion after the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD.
Of course, people can criticize the Nicene Creed and say, “oh, it’s a corrupt fraud because it was just Rome repackaging some of their corrupt habits in the form of Christianity”, but the truth is much more nuanced.
Of course, compromises with the ruling system in Rome had occurred and infusions of rites popularized by the Roman pantheon occurred through many battles before, during and after the Edict of Thessalonica, but as LaRouche emphatically made clear in the quote above, something more important was in play.
In Nicene Christianity, the core universal principles and lessons embedded in the Bible were maintained. With an agreed-upon canonized list of writings that would be permitted into the official holy book, fragmentation and division was kept at bay, and most importantly, teachings of universal wisdom were made available to all. All of the key universal lessons were kept intact.
Obviously, many of the writings of the Bible are allegorical and open to a wide array of interpretation, but at the same time, you don’t want to make it so liberal that it loses its essence and potency becoming an infinitely malleable relativistic body of teachings.
As already mentioned, the ‘Nicene Creed’ served as an important non-negotiable set of ideas which made it much more difficult for Christianity’s enemies to infiltrate and divide the movement from within. Among the most important of the concepts within Nicene Christianity is the concept of the Filioque.
This concept of the Trinity asserted that God has three aspects: 1) The Father/Creator, 2) The Sun/Created and 3) The Spirit which flows through connecting each Christian to God in both infinite and finite manifestations.
The Importance of the Trinity
The idea of mankind being “made in the living image of God” was vitally important to Christianity, but so was the notion that the spirit of God emanated through both the concept of the Father and the Son. We can think of the concept of the “Holy Spirit” not as a spooky ghost, or spirit being as some superstitious fools do. But it is best thought of as that motive power which causes yearning for perfectibility, motion, transformation, improvement, discernment, love for the transcendent beyond the concerns of ego and inspiration.
It is here extremely important to hold in mind that many of the arguments of early Church fathers- especially Origen of Alexandria (185-253 AD) which argued for the Trinitarian quality of God, came from deep studies of Plato’s Timaeus published in 360 BC.
This incredible Pythagorean cosmology outlined by Plato in that incredible dialogue established a framework to explore 1) the universe, 2) the nature of the Creator of our universe, and 3) humankind. Timaeus provided the most rigorous treatment of the trifold nature of existence ever seen until that time, emphasizing that all unity is not just simply one, but three.
That is to say, as soon as ANYTHING is created, or ANYTHING is changed in position or form, we have established three simultaneous things: 1) The created/changed thing as an effect, 2) the creator of that thing (i.e.: the cause of the effect), and 3) the process of creation/change itself.
The creator, the created, and creation. That which causes the change (noun), that which is changed (noun) and the process of change as a transformative verb.
We find this trifold quality also in music. If you take a singular string that has one frequency based upon the length and tightness of the string, and if you divide the string at any location, you don’t get two new lengths with two new frequencies, but rather three identities. Three sounds. Three relationships.
You see this displayed in geometry. Simply create a circle using a compass. When a circle is created through rotational motion, we don’t simply have “a circle” but rather three things: 1) we have the center of the circle (i.e.: the axis of rotation), 2) we have the circumference of the circle made possible by that axis of rotation, and then you have 3) the radius, which connects that finite center point with that infinitely divisible circumference.
This Platonic-Pythagorean concept may sound simple, but it is an extremely rich and more elegant concept than most people realize, and it became a foundation stone to Nicene Christianity which Augustine defended.
Put it this way: How can mortal finite humans possibly relate to an idea so infinite, divine and transcendent as the Creator of All?
This is the essence of the issue of the Filioque and Trinity. And it is the standard which literally provided the principal weapon against the counterfeit gnostic groups seeking to destroy Christianity from within.
One notable example of this type of counterfeit Christian was named Simon the Sorcerer who was introduced in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament.
In the next installment, you will be introduced to the perverse version of “Christianity” by Simon the Sorcerer- the godfather of Gnosticism and the infiltration of Christianity by the mystery cults.
Footnotes
[5] For an invaluable lesson into the principled battles shaping the early church and the countless mystery cults infiltrating Christianity, see: St Irenaeus of Lyon’s Against Heresies
[6] See Appendix 1 for the full Nicene Creed
[7] Originally published in Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 8, No. 29, July 28, 1981, pp. 20-29.
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Bio: I am the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. I’ve written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. I am also host of the weekly Breaking Free of Psyops on Badlands Media and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).
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