tations of doctrine. Whereas the Gnostics and their pagan equivalents were ad
hoc networks of part-time participants, the church had a material foundation
which enabled it to support full-time priests, to send out missionaries, to
publicize martyrs and support widows and orphans of those fallen in the
faith.^31 It was this organization that eventually proved attractive to the Roman
state administrators as an adjunct to their own organization; and it was an
organization whose material basis was to prove more enduring than the state
itself at the fall of the empire.
It took numerous struggles to consolidate such an organization, espe-
cially welding the sphere of control by bishops and metropolitans. The heresy
disputes which wracked the church were a sign of emerging organizational
strength, for only a centralized organization can enforce doctrinal orthodoxy.
The most serious external rival were the Manichaeans, not because they based
their doctrine on Gnostic themes, but because they formed a mass-recruitment
church competing in the bastions of Christian strength—Carthage and Rome.
All of the church’s moves in the heresy disputes can be seen as a defense of its
distinctive organizational structure. Any doctrine was opposed as heresy which
destroyed the chain of command of the central church hierarchy, which dis-
puted the right to appoint priests or to retain control over ascetic monks. It
would be even more accurate to say that the faction within church politics
which made these organizational choices emerged as the orthodoxy; whichever
faction favored the most permanence-enhancing organizational structure was
in fact the one to win out. Meditative monks living in the desert gave a great
deal of trouble, and mysticism and occultism were rejected if they broke from
the community of lay worshippers under the ritual leadership of centrally
appointed priests. The Gnostics, as movements of part-time amateurs meeting
around favorite personalities, were an organizational enemy. So was any great
emphasis on magic, since it is decentralizing, with little call for a formal
hierarchy. Also ruled out were purely intellectual modes of salvation, since
these would exclude the mass of the population, especially the popular base
which, among monotheistic religions, Christianity had made almost uniquely
its own.
The result was that Christianity could not go to extremes of idealism,
rejecting the value or the reality of the material world. Idealist intellectual
doctrines could be admitted, but only as an activity of specialized theologians
within the organizational hierarchy of the church. Such doctrines could not be
allowed to have an effect on practice to the extent of devaluing ordinary work,
money making, or politics, which were activities on which the church depended
for its strength. For this reason, Christianity came to incorporate more and
more of the surviving elements of materialist philosophy in late antiquity,
especially as the pagan united front centered on mysticism and idealism.122 •^ The Skeleton of Theory