MEANWHILE IN EUROPE 205ology, philosophy, medicine, or law. Today, of course, the baccalaureate is
the degree one gets for graduating from a four-year liberal arts college.
As wealth accumulated in Europe, a few people were able to spend all
their time studying, reading, writing, and making art. With Greek thought
back in the mix, a set of new ideas filtered into the imagination of learned
Europeans. The Greeks had said, "Man is the measure of all things," and
their pagan pantheon had represented "God" as a collection of deities with
human personalities who interacted with one another and with humanity
in dramatic ways. The Greeks had taken a penetrating interest in the nat-
ural world and the human here-and-now. They had made great strides in
discerning patterns among natural events as a first step toward explaining
them. People who read and discussed the ancient Greek texts got inter-
ested, therefore, in unraveling the mysteries of life on earth, an orientation
quite at odds with the attitudes fostered by the church since the fall of
Rome, for in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, the prevailing doctrine
declared the material world to be evil. The only point of being here was to
get out of here, and so the only subject worth studying was the hereafter
and the only texts worth consulting were the scriptures and scriptural
commentaries. The new humanists did not think of themselves as com-
peting with Christianity; they were hardly godless atheists; but Church of-
ficials saw a threat in the new forms of thought. They could feel where all
this was going.
Christianity grew within the framework of a dying Rome. It developed
a hierarchy that resembled and shadowed the administrative hierarchy of
Rome. As the imperial structure crumbled, the Christian structure took its
place by default, becoming the framework that continued to support civi-
lized life. The Byzantine emperor, always the head of the imperial hierar-
chy, automatically evolved into the head of this Christian hierarchy. The
various bishops were subservient to him as the head of the Church, just as
the governors had been (and were still) subservient to him as the head of
the empire. The doctrines of the Christian religion were formulated by
bishops at councils convened by the emperor and updated periodically at
similar councils, with the emperor always having the final say.
So closely did Christianity intertwine with Rome that when the empire
split in two, the church divided too. In the east, the emperor remained the
head of the church. In the west, the very title of "emperor" dropped out of