Baptism and Cosmic Allegiance: A Brief Observation

David Bentley Hart

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 20, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 457-465 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/earl.2012.0023

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Baptism and Cosmic Allegiance: A Brief Observation

DAVID BENTLEY HART
For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, as Fergusons book exhaustively illustrates, baptism was understood as nothing less than a personal rebellion against the cosmic, political, and spiritual order of ancient paganism. As pagan culture slowly disappeared and was replaced by a Christian culture, the baptismal rites explicit transfer of a new Christians allegiance from the old gods to the risen Lord became less necessary and, ultimately, largely unintelligible. The gradual introduction of infant baptism reected the transformation of the ancient religious milieu, as the understanding of baptism as renunciation of evil gods and demons gave way to a concern to nurture souls from birth until death within the Christian community. Changes in baptismal meaning and practice in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages suggest that further developments lie ahead, as late modern Christianity confronts a postChristian future in the developed world.

One of the recurrent themes of Everett Fergusons immense, magisterial study, as well as one of the principal conclusions he takes pains to reiterate in its closing pages, is that the widespread practice of infant baptism developed only very slowly, over the better part of two centuries. This seems to me to be an altogether incontestable claim, and it is one upon which I want to reect in what follows, if only very briey. My interest in the matter, however, is not theological, at least not in the fullest sense. Infant baptism no doubt raises a number of genuinely theological questions, and it has certainly had some fairly conspicuous ramications in theological history, encouraging Augustine, for instance, to adhere yet more rmly to his disastrous misreading of Paul on the nature of sin and the workings of grace, or encouraging later generations of Christians to view baptism as a purely extrinsic transaction, meant merely to secure the minimal conditions for salvation. But I do not think that the fact of the practices gradual evolution has any great bearing on how Christians
Journal of Early Christian Studies 20:3, 457465 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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ought to view baptism, or on which form of baptismal practice they should view as most correct. Even if we were able to determine with absolute certainty what the baptismal practices of the apostolic era werewhich we are notthere would be no reason to regard them as more authoritative than the practices that succeeded them in later generations. The church of the apostles is, of course, the golden ideal to which Christian memory (or Christian fantasy) most instinctively reverts in moments of uncertainty. Some Christian communities, in fact, subsist almost entirely upon the myth of a return to the faiths unadulterated origins, imagining that they have recreated the Christianity of the New Testament in clapboard chapels, storefront meetinghouses, or converted garages. But that is all illusion. Moreover, in truth, either one believes in the workings of the Holy Spirit in Christian history or one has no reason to trust in any aspect of the tradition. And, unless one thinks of baptism as some form of sympathetic magic, whose efcacy is bound to the precise repetition of immemorial formulae, one should scarcely be surprised or scandalized by the discovery that the rite should take various forms at different times and places, according to the churchs changing cultural situation and the spiritual needs of its members. Incorporation into the body of Christ is a work of grace, which is innitely capable. I approach the primacy of adult baptism in the early centuries, therefore, principally as a matter of historical concern. I am interested in what it tells us about the special spiritual signicance of the rite in the context of a pre-Christian world, and so what it might suggest to us about its signicance in the post-Christian world of late modern western culture. There was a time long ago, after all, when ones baptism was not only one of the most momentous events of ones lifeand even perhaps among the most dramatic, terrifying, and joyousbut also a genuine transformation of everything one was. Today, at least in the lands where Christianity has been long established, most Christians are baptized in infancy. Even those who come from traditions that delay the rite until adulthood have either been raised as Christians or, at the very least, grown up in a culture formed by Christian convictions and narratives: having been reared in the faith, or at least in its atmosphere, their baptisms afrm the lives they have always led or beliefs they have always held, explicitly or tacitly. For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, by contrast, baptism was of an altogether more radical nature. It was not merely a symbolic drama marking a casual shift in religious association, like moving from the Methodists to the Episcopalians; it was a change in ones social and spiritual identity, and alsofor want of a better phrasein ones cosmic station. The act of becoming a Christian was not only an avowal of faith,

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but also a profound act of renunciation, a taking leave of much of what one had previously known and been, in order to be joined to a new reality whose demands upon one were absolute. In entering the body of Christ, one also consciously and irrevocably departed from the world one had inhabited all ones life, and from the allegiances that had bound one to that world. It was, in a very real sense, an act of rebellion. Now, of course, one has to avoid exaggerations. As a nascent Christendom took root and began to spread out through the empire, inexorably displacing the older order of spiritual and cultural afliations, the choice to enter the church slowly became a less drastic decision than it had been in the rst three centuries and more of the gospel. As association with the church increasingly became socially advantageous (which for many persons, in every age, is the matter of chief concern), the rite inevitably began to acquire the character of a social formality. Nevertheless, one still should not underestimate the gravity of baptism for those who genuinely lived between two worlds: that of the slowly withdrawing pagan past and that of the gradually approaching Christian future. Even in the rst several decades after the Edict of Milan, a sincere convert to Christianity from paganism was doing something that today perhaps only a new convert in certain mission elds of the global South or East can quite understand. There was great wisdom in the insistence of the Christian communities of late antiquity that a convert be required to endure a long period of instruction and preparation before baptism. Obviously, catechetical and liturgical customs varied greatly from place to place, but this aspect of Christian initiation was very nearly universal. It had to be. The interval of a new converts catechumenate, during which he or she enjoyed only an imperfect participation in the life of the community, and remained separated from the Eucharist, was often far more than merely an instruction in the grammar of Christian beliefs. It was also a spiritual probation of sorts, a time of scrutiny, a liminal state of suspense, lasting quite often for a period that we today might regard as terrically excessive. It involved tutelage in the faith, moral examination, discipline of the will, and a general formation in the habitus of Christian life, but it also involved, for former pagans, a profound inversion of vision, a total reversal of how they understood the cosmos and the powers that presided over it. The story of redemption that they would learn in their catechesis, after all, was not one merely of private reformation of character or intention, but of rescue from slavery to evil and falsehood: all persons, it said, had labored in bondage in the household of death, prisoners of death and the devil, languishing in ignorance of their true home. Then Christ had come to set the prisoners free and, by his death and resurrection, invaded the kingdom of our captor and

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overthrew it, vanquishing the power of sin and death in us, shattering the gates of hell, and plundering Hades of its captives. It was into this story that ones own life was to be entirely merged, without reserve or remainder, when one at last passed through the life-giving waters of baptism. In the risen Christ, a new humanity had been created, free from the rule of death, and one became part of this new creation by dying and rising again with Christ in baptism and by feeding upon him in the Eucharist. The culmination of this process, moreover, could scarcely have spoken more eloquently of the converts passage from one encompassing frame of reality to another. One sees this in, for instance, the fully developed rites of the early Byzantine world. Ideallymaking allowance, of course, for variations in local customs and the unpredictability of particular circumstancesthe converts baptism would come on Easter eve, during the midnight vigil. At the appointed hour, the baptizand would depart the church for the baptistery and its baptismal pool or (if possible) owing stream. Everything that then followed gave dramatic expression to the magnitude of the transformation that was taking place: the blessings, exhortations, unctions, and prayers; the naked descent into the waters, triple immersion, and chrismation; the new garment of white, the rst full attendance at the eucharistic celebration, andat lastthe rst taste of the consecrated bread and wine. On that night, the new Christian would have died to his or her old life and received a new and better life in Christ.1 Perhaps the most crucial features of the rite, howeverat least, for understanding what baptism meant for the convert from paganismwere the ritual acts of renunciation, exorcism, and submission, during which the convert turned his or her face to the west (the land of evening, and so symbolically the realm of all darkness, cosmic and spiritual), underwent a rather forcibly phrased exorcism, and rejectedeven reviled and, quite literally, spat atthe devil and his ministers, and then turned to face the east (the land of morning and light) to confess his or her faith in and submission to Christ. The traces of these ancient practices, which linger on in the baptismal liturgies of East and West (especially the former), but which are now usually the province of vaguely embarrassed or bemused godparents, often seem at best rather quaint. No one involved, at any rate, tends to feel any great transition is taking place, or that any perilous venture has been undertaken, or that something of cosmic import is taking place. In
1. For a rich and detailed treatment of the Byzantine rite, see Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1974).

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late antiquity, however, for the true convert from the old faiths, this was by no means mere ritual spectacle; it was an actual and, so to speak, legally binding transference of fealty from one master to another. Even the physical posture and attitude of the baptizand was charged with a certain bold irreverence: pagan temples were as a rule designed with their entrances to the east and their divine images at their western ends, facing out towards the forecourt altar. One looked to the west when one looked to see the god within his house. In thus turning his or her back upon, repudiating, and abusing the devil, then, the convert was also explicitly breaking all ties to the gods to whom he or she had formerly been indentured, and doing so with a kind of triumphant contempt; and, in confessing Christ, he or she was entering the service of the invincible conqueror who had defeated death, despoiled hell of its hostages, subdued the wicked powers in high places, and been raised up the Lord of history. We today are probably somewhat prone to forget that, though the early Christians did indeed regard the gods of the pagan order as false gods, they did not necessarily understand this to mean that these gods did not exist; they understood it principally to mean that the gods were deceivers. But they were still quite real and quite formidable within their own spheres: demons, malignant elemental spirits, aerial principalities, occult agencies masquerading as divinities, exploiting the human yearning for the divine, and working to thwart the designs of God, in order to enslave humanity to darkness, ignorance, and death. To renounce ones loyalties to these beings was not merely to turn from fantasy to truth, but also to enlist oneself in the forces of a cosmic rebellion. One was issuing a declaration that one had been emancipated from the prince of this world or god of this world. In this sense, the pagan convert was really living out, at a perfectly personal level, the great spiritual and cosmic drama described by the writers of the New Testament: in its fallen state, the cosmos lies under the reign of evil (1 John 5.19), but Christ came to save the world, to lead captivity captive (Eph 4.8), and to overthrow the empire of those thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers (Col 1.16, etc.) that have imprisoned creation in corruption and evil. Again, given the perspectives of our age, even most Christians can scarcely avoid reading such language as chiey mythological, or avoid simply missing the cosmic and supernatural allusions altogether and reading them instead in a psychological or political way. This is a pity, because it makes it almost impossible to grasp the scandal and the exhilaration of early Christianity. These thrones, powers, principalities, and so forth were not, of course, earthly princes or empires (though princes and empires served

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their ends). Much less were they vague abstractions. Rather, they were the angelic cosmocrators of apocalyptic tradition, the celestial governors of the nations, the archons, the often-mutinous legions of the air, who, though they had been overthrown by Christ, were still mighty and dreadful in their ruin. It was from the tyranny of these powers of wickedness in high places that Christ had come to set creation free. And so the life of faith was, for the early church, before all else, spiritual warfare, waged between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of this fallen world, and every Christian on the day of his or her baptism had been conscripted into that struggle, on the side of Christ. From that point on, he or she was both a subject of and a co-heir to a kingdom not of this world, and henceforth no more than a resident alien in the earthly city. The modern tendency, of course, is to view such beliefs as superstitious, and most modern Christians would regard them as more or less accidental to the rite of baptism. In late antiquity, however, practically no one doubted that there was a sacral order to the world, or that the social, political, cosmic, and religious realms of human existence were always and inextricably intertwined in one another. Every state was also a cult, or a plurality of cults, and society was a religious dispensation: the celestial and political orders belonged to a single continuum, and ones allegiance to ones gods was also ones loyalty to ones nation, people, masters, and monarchs. One could even say (to risk a very large generalization) that the sacred premise of the whole of Indo-European paganism was this: the universe is an elaborate and complex regime, a hierarchy of power and eminence, atop which stood the great god, and below whom, in a descending scale, stood a variety of subordinate orders, each holding a place dictated by divine necessity and fullling a cosmic functiongreater and lesser gods and daemons, kings and nobles, priests and prophets, and so on, all the way down to slaves. This order, moreover, though it was at once both divine and natural, was also in some ultimate sense precariously poised and strangely fragile, and had to be sustained by prayers, sacrices, laws, pieties, and coercions, and had to be defended at all times against the forces of chaos that threatened it from every side, whether spiritual, social, political, erotic, or philosophical. For cosmic, political, and spiritual order was all one thing, continuous and organic, and its authority was absolute. In such a world, the gospel as it was rst preached was an outrageous thing indeed, and it was perfectly reasonable for its cultured despisers of the rst few centuries to describe its promulgators as atheists. Christians werewhat could be more obvious?enemies of society, impious, subversive, and irrational; it was no more than civic prudence to detest them for refusing to honor the gods of their ancestors, for scorning the

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common good, and for advancing the grotesque and shameful claim that all gods and spirits had been made subject to a crucied criminal from Galilee who, during his life, had consorted with peasants and harlots, lepers and lunatics.2 This was far worse than mere irreverence: it was pure and misanthropic perversity, and it was anarchy. One can see something of this alarm in the fragments we still possess of Celsuss On True Doctrine. It is unlikely, really, that Celsus would have thought the Christians worth his notice had he not recognized something uniquely dangerous lurking in their teachings. He would have naturally viewed the new religion with a certain patrician disdain, undoubtedly, and his treatise contains a considerable quantity of contempt for the pliant rabble that Christianity attracted into its fold: slaves and men of lowly birth, the uneducated and uneducable, women and children, cobblers, laundresses, weavers of wool, and other common tradespersons. That aspect of Christianity, however, would have made the faith no more distasteful to him than any of those other Asiatic superstitions that occasionally coursed through the empire, working mischief in every social class, and provoking a largely impotent consternation from the educated and well bred. It would hardly have merited the energetic attack he actually wrote. What clearly and genuinely horried Celsus about this particular superstition was not its predictable vulgarity, but the novel spirit of rebellion that permeated its teachings. He continually speaks of Christianity as a form of sedition or rebellion, and what he principally condemns is its deance of the immemorial religious customs of the worlds tribes, cities, and nations. To him it was obvious that the several peoples of the earth were governed by various gods who served as lieutenants of the highest god, and the laws and customs they had established in every place were part of the divine constitution of the universe, which no one, highborn or lowborn, should presume to disregard or abandon. It was appalling to him that Christians, feeling no decent reverence for ancient ordinances and institutions and wisdoms, should refrain from worship of the gods, or decline to venerate the good daemons who served as intermediaries between the human and divine worlds, or refuse to pray to these ancient powers for the emperor. These Christians were so depraved as to think they had actually been elevated above the temples and traditions and cults of their ancestors; they even ludicrously imagined themselves somehow to have been raised above the immortal servants of God, the divine stars and other celestial intelligences, and to have been granted a kind of immediate intimacy with God himself.
2. See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 118.

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And in thus claiming emancipation from the principalities and powers, the thrones and dominions, they had also renounced their spiritual and moral ties to their peoples and to the greater cosmic order. To Celsus, this was all too clearly an unnatural and deracinated piety, something unprecedented and even somewhat monstrous, a religion like no other, which sought to transcend nations altogether rather than provide a sacred bond between the believer and his nation. And, of course, he was entirely correct. Christians were indeed a separate people, or at least aspired to be, another nation within each nation, as Origen liked to say. The church, governed by its own laws and acknowledging no rival allegiances, truly did aim at becoming a universal people, a universal race, more universal than any empire of gods or men, and subject only to Christ. No creed could have been more subversive of the ancient wisdom of the world, and no movement more worthy of the hatred of those for whom that wisdom was the truth of the ages.3 All of which brings me back to the issue of the relatively late and gradual adoption of infant baptism by the church. As I have said, I do not regard this as an issue with particularly profound theological implications. Needless to say, as pagan culture slowly disappeared and was replaced by a Christian culture, the baptismal rites explicit transfer of a new Christians allegiance from the old gods to the risen Lord became less necessary and, in the end, largely unintelligible. Thereafter, it was only natural that the practice of baptism should accommodate itself to a radically new social and cultural situation, one in which the principal concern of the church was the care of Christian souls from the cradle to the grave, and the formation of Christian minds within the context of a baptized civil society that was supposedly identical with the sacramental body of Christ. Those who today insist on making a theological issue out of adult baptism generally do so on the grounds that the rite, in their view, ought somehow to give visible expression to a fully formed adult consciousness freely submitting itself to Gods grace. However, there is no such thing as a fully formed adult consciousness, grace does not require our consent to operate upon us, and our free decision to submit or not to submit to God is something undertaken daily. None of that seems worth fretting aboutunless, as I have said, one thinks of baptism as a kind of magic spell. Nonetheless, again, as an historical observation, the practice of adult baptism in late antiquity is strangely illuminative of certain realities of the culture of late

3. See Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 94125.

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modernity. In the context of a Christian civilization, baptism simply could not retain quite the signicance it had possessed in a pre-Christian setting. It simply no longer involved any shift in loyalties, any act of resolute deance of familiar powers, or any actual conversion of thought or will. Today, however, it seems quite clear that the whole developed world is moving rapidly towards and into its post-Christian future, with America bringing up the rear. It is worth wondering, perhaps, whether the transformation of our cultural situation will lead once again to a new set of emphases in baptismal practices and sacramental theology. The church will increasingly nd itself more or less isolated from the center of civic life, and will increasingly nd the circumambient world to be again under the sway of alien powersnot the gods of old, perhaps, but elemental spirits of another, somewhat drearier kind. In those circumstances, baptism will inevitably once again become more and more an elective rite, a choice made by adults disenchanted with the world around them, and a break with an unbaptized upbringing. Almost certainly, baptism will once again come to be understood as a real and momentous change in ones personal allegiances. It will again acquire a somewhat subversive character, and again be seen as an act not only of afrmation, but also of principled repudiationof, in fact, rebellion. For the ardent proponent of adult baptism, it will perhaps be something of a bitter victory if this should come to pass. It will mean that, culturally speaking, Christianity will have become so marginal and moribund that most people will have ceased bringing their children to the baptismal font even out of nostalgia, or (so to speak) just to be on the safe side. On the other hand, however, it might also mean that, spiritually speaking, a new epoch of Christianity has begun, one that requires a particularly chastened and reective sort of faith from believers. Whatever the case, though, however the Christian understanding or practice of baptism may be altered by the new cultural reality, the result will certainly provide further proof of the innite versatility of grace. David Bentley Hart is the author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies and several other works in Christian history and thought