SPEAKING FREELY How Christians lost their anarchist spirit
By Dallas Darling
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
Nero never fiddled while Rome burned, especially since the violin was not invented until the 16th century. However, another rumor might have been accurate, in that perhaps Christians did start the fire. There was evidence, after all, that in some of the poorer districts of the city they had been circulating texts prophesying that Rome would be burned to ashes and the Roman Empire would be destroyed by their own Son of God. It is also of interest that the Great Fire of Rome started in and around the Circus Maximus. [1]
This was where thousands of Romans were entertained by cruel
and deadly blood-sport spectacles, where they regularly reveled in the slaughter of tens of thousands of exotic animals, where they worshipped and placated Roman and Greek gods, and where they were regularly reminded of their own Son of God, or Caesar, and the Imperial Cult of Rome.
The Gospels are filled with Jesus and his disciples committing acts of civil disobedience, of revolutionary non-violent action campaigns, of disobeying certain laws and customs, and of directly, or at least imagining, the destruction of exploitive properties.
For example, they healed and fed people on the Sabbath. They challenged gender, ethnic and religious codes. They overturned and smashed the money changers' tables in the Temple, condemning a religious institution that was charging exorbitant prices for offerings and thereby alienating the poor and marginalized.
After prophesying of the destruction of oppressive institutions and their structures, Jesus even accepted the title Lord and King, a clear threat to the Roman emperor. Later, followers of Jesus would proclaim that he was greater than Caesar and Jesus' kingdom had brought an end to Rome's. Some even staged daring and miraculous jail breaks.
Initially, the Jesus Movement, or Christianity, mirrored the philosophy that governments, like Rome, were responsible for most of society's ills. Early Christian communal living, where members freely agreed to live together and share their property, reflected a belief that people were inherently rational and could rule themselves in an equitable manner.
Perhaps like the French anarchist PJ Proudhon, who lived during a time of great economic disparity and coined the phrase "property is theft", Christians living in Rome were deeply moved to act against Rome's nobility and their sinister and imposed institutions of slave labor, military conscription, recurring indebtedness, violent entertainment spectacles, and their oppression of the poor and marginalized.
By attempting to burn down the Maximus Circus, Christians were overturning and smashing one of Rome's propertied classes' tools that served as the enemy of a just social order.
Like other popular revolutionary movements, early Christians struggled with faith-based non-violence versus faith-based violence. In utterly rejecting violence against individuals, did some Christians in Rome decide on a more radical manifestation of anarchy by pursuing anarcho-syndicalism, or the direct action of strikes, sabotage, and in some cases destroying properties that symbolize oppression? (Recall that the concept of "salvation" also means "liberation".)
In the Apocalypse of John, Rome and its imperial ambitions are referred to as the "mother of prostitutes ... abominations of the earth''. Rome is "Fallen! Fallen!" and has "become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil sprit ... For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries, and the kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries." Still yet, "no one can buy her cargoes of bodies and souls of men."
John had been exiled to an island and imprisoned after emperor Nero's reign. His crime was refusing to recant "Jesus is Lord". (This ideal was a particular problem in the Roman Empire, since it disregarded Roman imperial laws and festivals, and since the affirmation of the sovereignty of Jesus was a direct challenge to the absolute rule of the Roman Emperor.)
When he wrote that divine intervention would undo Rome and its empire, that it would be thrown down and burned, because "in her was found the blood of prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth'', [2] was he recalling the Great Fire of Rome? Was he thinking about how large numbers of Christians were arrested and killed for their anarcho-syndicalism? For dressing Christians in animal skins and having them torn apart by dogs, was he imagining prophetic-based and divine violence against the Roman Empire? [3]
There is, of course, always a thin line between prophetic imaginations and prophetic realities.
Notes:
1. Withington, John. A Disastrous History Of The World, Chronicles Of War, Earthquake, Plague and Flood, London, Piatkus Books, 2008. Pg 277.
2. See the Apocalypse of John Chapter 17.
3. Tacitus, (Annals, 15.44).
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say.Please click hereif you are interested in contributing. Articles submitted for this section allow our readers to express their opinions and do not necessarily meet the same editorial standards of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
Dallas Darling is the author of
Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John's Apocalyptic Vision,
and
The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace.
He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Dallas' writings at www.beverlydarling.com and wn.com//dallasdarling.
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