The Institutionalization of Propositional Belief

Belief that certain things are true has been part of Christian thinking from as far back as we can trace. In 1 Corinthians 15: 3–11, for example, written in the early 50s, Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures … so we preach and so you believed (οὕτως κηρύσσομεν καὶ οὕτως ἐπιστεύσατε).’Footnote ⁵ For very early Christians, however, it was not believing itself that admitted one to the community or kept one there. That took a further step: putting one's trust in God and Christ.

This distinction should come as no surprise. Under the Roman empire, almost everybody believed in the existence of a vast number of gods, heroes, divine men, spirits and demons. Nobody worshipped them all, not only because there were so many, but because many were specific to a particular locality or family or had a limited sphere of action.Footnote ⁶ In Christian contexts, the distinction between belief and religious commitment is less obvious in Greek than in English, because the verb Christians most often use for committing to God and Christ, pisteuein, can mean both ‘to believe’ and ‘to trust’. In context, however, it is normally clear which meaning is in play. Paul and other early writers undoubtedly expect members of their communities to believe certain things about God, Jesus Christ and God's action in the world, but when they call them to commit to Christ, they use pistis language in its sense of ‘trust’.Footnote ⁷

Early Christian writing, in general, has limited interest in belief. Gospels, sayings collections, acts, apocalypses, letters, hymns, prayers, spells, oracles and sermons all use pistis language, but nearly always in a relational sense. From around the turn of the first century, however, some writers become increasingly interested in belief, in two contexts: internal wrangles among the faithful about what to believe and debates between Christians and outsiders.

Even in these contexts, before the fourth century Christian writers do not typically discuss what they or others believe using pisteuein or credere. They prefer the language of thinking or knowing: nomizein, dokein, doxa, gnōsis, phronēsis, putare, noscere, opinio. Footnote ⁸ It is only in the fourth century that Christians begin regularly to use pistis / fides language to refer to right belief. There are two likely reasons for the shift. The first is what we might call ‘concept creep’: Christians are so invested in pistis / fides language that, over time, they apply it to more and more aspects of the cult, and since ‘belief’ is a possible meaning of pistis and fides, it is there to be used. The second is the influence of Platonism.

Among Greek speakers, Plato and his followers use pistis atypically, to refer to beliefs which are based on the evidence of this world, which in their view are unreliable compared with knowledge of the world of ideas.Footnote ⁹ In the late Roman republic and early principate, however, we encounter a number of intellectuals (including Cicero, Plutarch and Origen's Celsus) influenced by Platonism who are also deeply and explicitly interested in the nature and validity of mainstream cult. Plato's specialized usage of pistis creates a difficulty for them, because mainstream cult involves beliefs about the gods which are based on this-worldly evidence, such as the fulfilment of prophecy and the recorded successes of the gods in healing people or ending wars. Many middle Platonists are concerned to defend this-worldly reasons for believing certain things about the gods. Probably because of their debt to Plato, they often use pistis / fides language to do so.Footnote ¹⁰ Early Christians, some of whom are also much interested in Platonism, are also keen to defend their cult against accusations that it is irrational. Some of these discuss Christian pistis in terms which are increasingly influenced by Platonism.

A few examples must suffice. Justin Martyr was born about 100 CE. In his Dialogue with Trypho he describes how, as a young man, he investigated several schools of philosophy, including Platonism, before discovering and converting to Christianity. During the 150s Justin composed an apology, addressed to the imperial household, defending Christianity against contemporary accusations that it was immoral, irrational and seditious. Most of his defence of Christianity's rationality is couched in the language of thought and knowledge, but occasionally he uses pistis language, in very much the way that religious middle Platonists use it, to suggest that there are this-worldly bases on which it is rational to believe:

The idea that we please God by deploying the reason God has given us and imitating the divine virtues, and that we can do this because of the teaching we have received, parallels contemporary middle Platonism (and, indeed, Stoicism).Footnote ¹² Justin does not define what he means by Christian pistis, but by linking it twice with persuasion he implies that it is the outcome of teaching applied to reason, and therefore that it is a cognitive function: something like belief.

A generation later, another apologist goes a little further. Athenagoras of Athens (born c.133) was also a philosopher, probably a Platonist, and a Christian convert. His Apology, also addressed to the reigning emperor and his son and dated to 176–7, is a plea for equal rights. Like Justin, Athenagoras claims that Christians are moral people and loyal subjects of the emperor. Like Justin's, his Apology uses mainly the language of thought and knowledge rather than that of pistis. In one passage, however, he claims that Christians share many of their views with poets and philosophers, including that, ultimately, there is only one God.Footnote ¹³ This being the case, it is outrageous that Christians, uniquely, are accused of atheism and challenged ‘to prove what we think and have rightly believed (ὅ τι καὶ νοοῦμεν καὶ ὀρθῶς πεπιστεύκαμεν), that there is one God’ (7.27).

‘What we think and rightly believe’ is a telling phrase. From the second century onwards, Christians were accused by critics of urging converts, ‘Do not think, just believe’.Footnote ¹⁴ Athenagoras insists that Christians both think and believe, echoing a phrase, pistis orthē, ‘right belief’, which goes back to Plato's Republic (10.601e). For Plato, ‘right belief’ has useful qualities but is inferior to knowledge. Later Platonists and writers who invoke Plato, however, use pistis orthē and doxa orthē approvingly, of right beliefs or opinions which are part of piety and which are appropriately held by those who are in a process of gaining knowledge of the divine.Footnote ¹⁵ Athenagoras therefore implies that Christian pistis is part of a thought process about the divine which philosophers share and which leads to knowledge. To claim this, however, he has to present Christian pistis as belief rather than (for instance) as trust.

Almost a generation later again, Clement of Alexandria takes a more sustained interest in pistis, especially in the Protrepticus, addressed to non-Christians, and the Stromateis, addressed to Christians. This article cannot do justice to the complexity of Clement's thinking, but his contribution to the evolution of Christian understanding of pistis is decisive: partly because he is a serious philosopher with a particular interest in Platonism, who is deeply interested in the relationship between pistis and knowledge, and partly because he profoundly respects the letters of Paul, and wants to do justice to Paul's conviction that pistis brings human beings into their right relationship with God and stands at the heart of that relationship.

Clement develops a multi-stage theory of pistis. Footnote ¹⁶ At its simplest, it can be the kind of pre-rational trust or belief in things we take for granted which all human beings practise every day.Footnote ¹⁷ At a more sophisticated level, it is a belief-response to things that are self-evident to reason.Footnote ¹⁸ When, for example, in the gospels, we encounter the Word of God in Jesus Christ, Clement claims that we are encountering something self-evident to reason, to which we respond with pistis. Footnote ¹⁹

For Clement, reason and pistis are both, ultimately, gifts from God, although both must be exercised by the faithful.Footnote ²⁰ The early stages of pistis make further rational thought and enquiry possible. By building on faith with investigation, we can begin to understand and to know God, and to judge the truth of claims about God.Footnote ²¹ This leads to a further level of pistis: that which we have in the truth of something which has been demonstrated by reason. This highest level of pistis is very close to, if it is not identified with, gnosis, knowledge of God and even (in Platonic fashion) assimilation to God.Footnote ²²

In this summary, two points are of particular interest. Clement makes the most sustained early attempt to syncretize Christianity and Platonic philosophy, and in the process makes belief central to pistis. And he applies his understanding of pistis to his reading of an authoritative early writer, shifting the centre of gravity of Paul's pistis, in his interpretation, from trust in God and Christ to belief. Clement's approach is summed up at the beginning of the Protrepticus, in an image of what Christ, the Word of God, does for the faithful: ‘I am the door [Christ says], which we who seek to understand (noēsai) Christ must discover so that he may throw heaven's gates wide open to us. For the gates of the Word being intellectual (logikai), are opened by pistis (logikē).’Footnote ²³

Clement marks a new high-water mark in the philosophopoiesis of Christianity. He is not the last writer, however, to push the meaning of pistis towards belief. He is followed, among others, by his fellow Alexandrian and perhaps fellow school-member Origen, in his invective Against Celsus.Footnote ²⁴ Against Celsus was written in the late 240s, in belated response to a late second-century work by Celsus, who, on the basis of internal evidence, was a Platonist and polytheist. From Origen's extensive quotations and citations of Celsus's Logos Alēthēs (True Doctrine), Celsus seems to have been extensively interested in pistis. His account is apparently that of a mainstream polytheist of his day. Pistis is both trust in the gods and belief, based on this-worldly experience, that certain things are true about the gods.Footnote ²⁵

Celsus detests Christians, who, he thinks, are cowards and charlatans who tell the vulnerable and ignorant, ‘Do not ask questions, just believe’ (1.9). In attacking Celsus, Origen tackles Celsus's concept of pistis explicitly. Unexpectedly, he largely agrees with it. Both writers hold that pistis can mean trust in the divine (1.19–21, 2.3–4), although Origen thinks that such trust is particularly suitable for the uneducated who cannot aspire to knowledge (6.13).Footnote ²⁶ Both hold that the pious should be able to prove that what they believe is reasonable, and Origen thinks Christians can. Their scriptures (by which he means the Jewish scriptures) are very ancient, and writings that have stood the test of time always bear credence (5.3). Many Christian doctrines (such as that God is one and good) are shared by contemporary philosophers (1.4–5). And Christianity is proved right by its consequences (1.6, 1.55): we can believe in the incarnation, for example, because it has a beautiful effect on the character, implanting ‘a wonderful meekness and tranquillity, and love of humanity, and kindness and gentleness’ (1.67).

Origen, however, is also conscious of the limitations of what can be proven. If Christian preaching, he observes (1.62), had been based entirely on reason, then Christian pistis, like that of the philosophers, would have been belief in the wisdom of human beings rather than the power of God. Human reason is limited. We deal with its limitations by exercising pistis in another sense: that of rational risk. Every day – when we go to sea, get married or plant our fields – we trust that the things we do will turn out well. We do so in part on the basis of experience, but in part by taking a risk (1.11, cf. 1.31, 3.39). We trust in God in the same way, and this is acceptable (1.11), because risk-based trust is rational. There is always a gap between what we can infer from evidence and the uncertain future, and trust leaps into that gap.Footnote ²⁷ In a sense, here, Origen is talking of trust as a ‘leap of faith’, but not in the modern sense of the phrase. He advocates not deliberately non-rational trust or belief, but rational risk. By making this argument, however, Origen highlights the cognitive element even in trust, and shifts the centre of gravity of Christian pistis further towards believing.

All these writers are encouraged by interactions with non-Christians to present propositional belief as central to Christian pistis. At the same time, a different set of conflicts pushes some Christians in the same direction: disputes among the faithful about their understanding of God and Christ.

It is worth noting that, as far as we can tell, in very early Christian communities, thinking something different from what one's neighbours think (about the nature of Christ, say, or the resurrection) may provoke argument, but there is no sign that it leads to formal expulsion from the community.Footnote ²⁸ The first people who are said, in so many words, to be expelled from a church for departing from a community's teaching and believing the wrong thing, are Valentinus and Marcion of Sinope in the mid-second century, according to Tertullian.Footnote ²⁹ Tertullian normally uses fides language in the mainstream Latin sense of ‘trust’ or ‘loyalty’. Occasionally, however, usually when he is discussing Marcion, he invokes a more propositional meaning.

In Against Marcion, Tertullian introduces Marcion as ‘a monster more philosophical than Christian. Because Diogenes the Cynic used to go about, with a lantern, at midday, looking for a real man, but Marcion has lost the God whom he had found by dousing the light of his faith (extincto lumine fidei suae)’ (1.1.5). Marcion, in Tertullian's view, holds wrong views about God (he thinks that the God of Christians is not the God of the Hebrew Scriptures) and the nature of Christ (he is a Docetist). The ‘light of [Marcion's] faith’, the thing that ought to guide him to God, is therefore what he thinks is true about God and Christ.

This makes right belief foundational to fides, but not necessarily identical with it. In On the Flesh of Christ, however, Tertullian goes further. Marcion holds that it is irrational to think of God as taking on human flesh. Tertullian objects that it is only irrational in human reason. He appeals to 1 Corinthians 1: 25: ‘the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom’. He concludes: ‘You [Marcion] are not a Christian, because you do not believe what, being believed, makes people Christians (non es Christianus, non credendo quod creditum Christianos facit)’ (2.4). In this move, Tertullian identifies being a Christian with believing that certain things are true.Footnote ³⁰

These examples show something of how pressures on Christians from inside and outside the cult, together with their own interests and those of their interlocutors, edge some writers increasingly towards thinking of pistis less as a relationship of trust or faithfulness between God, Christ and humanity, and more as belief. This in itself, however, does not constitute the institutionalization of belief. That requires a separate step: the development of creeds.

Institutionalization and the Creeds

The history of the creeds is a topic of much current debate to which this essay does not seek to contribute. It assumes only what is least controversial: that creeds develop out of baptismal interrogations, and that there are credible indications of their existence from at least the second century, though direct evidence comes, at the earliest, from the third.Footnote ³¹ If creeds begin life as baptismal interrogations, then they are always institutional: they define community membership. It does not follow, however, that they are always understood as propositional. The terms used of them suggest that, before the fourth century, they are not.

Early creeds are called ektheseis (expositions), mathemata (lessons) or, most often, symbola. A symbolon is a token, a guarantee, or any kind of official document, such as the token carried by imperial messengers.Footnote ³² These terms suggest that early creeds are thought of as summaries of teaching which act as an identity marker. This is far from a new observation, but it has not been connected with the question about what kind of faith is at stake when Christians use or invoke a creed. If creeds are identity markers, however, there are many aspects of Christian identity to be marked other than propositional beliefs, including trust in God, worship of Christ, obedience to teaching, acknowledgement of episcopal authority and presence at communal rituals. If creeds are summaries of teaching, that teaching may include much beside propositions, such as the narratives of the Scriptures and authoritative early Christian writings, stories about the saints or the history of the church. We cannot assume that early Christians understood the identity they assumed and affirmed by saying early creeds as based on propositional beliefs, much less as defined by them.

Evidence of how creeds are put together and used, and the way their formally closest relations are used, also suggest that encoding propositional beliefs is not their earliest function. Liuwe Westra has argued that the hypothetical proto-Roman creed is constructed in part out of Christological acclamations, which at some point after about 150 CE were fused with a trinitarian baptismal formula.Footnote ³³ Comparative evidence suggests that this is a plausible picture. Acclamations are ubiquitous in classical antiquity, and many of them sound very like Christological formulae, and some not unlike Christian creeds:

Throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, acclamations act as identity markers and forms of worship. They imply beliefs, but their purpose is less to define or police beliefs than to affirm worshippers’ commitment to a divinity.Footnote ³⁸

Acclamations also have a close relationship with the affirmations which are made when one person or group pledges allegiance to another. The baptismal question-and-answer in the Apostolic Tradition begins: ‘Do you pisteueis [believe in, trust in, make your commitment to] one God, the Father Almighty, and his only-begotten son Jesus Christ, our Lord and our Saviour, and his Holy Spirit, Giver of life to all creatures’. The candidate responds: ‘Pisteuo.’ This formula is strikingly similar to the tripartite affirmation which new subjects make when they become part of the Roman empire:

This is the Roman formula for deditio in fidem, the ritual by which new allies give themselves into a relationship of trust and loyalty with Rome. If Christians did not derive their idea of pledging pistis / fides to God, through a set of questions and answers, from the Roman empire, they surely accomplish something very similar by it, and it makes good sense that the resulting formula becomes known as a symbolon.

Creeds operate as identity markers, acclamations and affirmations or pledges of faith. Acclamations are also closely related to, and often embedded in, prayers and hymns, from the Homeric hymns through the Hebrew psalms to the offering prayer: ‘My father was a wandering Aramean’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hymns and prayers commonly include, or allude to, stories about the god who is being worshipped or the past relationship between the god and his or her worshippers. It has occasionally been noted, though it has not been much explored, that creeds also make good sense as summaries of stories. Frances Young observes:

Cyril is one of many sources attesting that much of the content of pre-baptismal instruction consisted of the contents of the Scriptures, full as they are of stories, acclamations, prayers and hymns, and that creeds were taught shortly before baptism as a summary of that teaching.Footnote ⁴²

If creeds emerge as summaries of teaching, summaries of stories, pledges, tokens of allegiance and acclamations, while Christian ‘faith’ language begins life focused primarily on trust and faithfulness rather than on belief as defining the divine-human relationship, gradually, Christians’ disputes with each other and with non-Christians encourage them to make more and harder claims to knowledge and truth, and increasingly to use pistis / fides language of those claims.Footnote ⁴³ This process reaches a crux in 325, at the Council of Nicaea, where the creed negotiated in response to Arianism includes, for the first time, material explicitly formulated to express what are claimed to be doctrinal truths. This creed is validated by the institutional authorities of the emperor and assembled bishops; it is used to baptize, and to assess the orthodoxy of existing community members. This is the moment when (at least in that form of Christianity endorsed by the emperor) Christians achieve ‘orthopisty’: propositional belief becomes institutionalized as definitive of being Christian. Significantly, it is after Nicaea that the phrase ‘the true faith’ (pistis alēthēs, vera fides) becomes widespread in our sources.

An Explosion of Inspiration: Images of fides qua

From the development of orthopisty, we turn to a very different aspect of early Christian faith. From the beginnings of Christian tradition, pistis had been imagined as active and dynamic. For Paul, it enables people to be forgiven and made right with God.Footnote ⁴⁴ In a saying of Jesus, it has the power to move mountains.Footnote ⁴⁵ With that exception, the early language of faith is not strongly imagistic, nor do early writings explore explicitly what faith is.Footnote ⁴⁶ From the second century, however, especially in pastoral and devotional writing, we find a steady increase in imagery which explores what faith is and does.Footnote ⁴⁷

Given that faith has always been understood as leading to healing or release from sin, it is not surprising that some images are of healing or purification.Footnote ⁴⁸ John Chrysostom and Augustine, for example, both make much use of the idea of faith as medicine: ‘the medicine of all the wounds of the soul’, as Augustine calls it.Footnote ⁴⁹

One might think that the faith which is medicinal would be the content of doctrine. Occasionally it is, but more often it is the faith by which the faithful believe. Almost all images of faith are used to describe both how and what Christians believe. This convergence may seem surprising and potentially confusing, but there are good reasons for it. Images draw heavily on a relatively small group of authoritative early texts, especially the emerging canonical gospels. Christians are also keen to hold the different meanings of their faith language together. They imply that it is no accident that the act of trusting or believing in God and Christ, the new covenant and the content of doctrine are all called pistis / fides, and using the same imagery of them all is one way to express – if hardly to explain – their integrity.

The fact that faith can act as medicine for the soul does not necessarily imply that it is wholly under the believer's control. Between the second and fourth centuries, it becomes increasingly common to affirm that faith is a gift from God. This idea has roots in 1 Corinthians 12: 9, where pistis is a gift of the Spirit, and Galatians 5: 22, where it is a fruit of the Spirit, and it becomes a significant theme, not least in fourth-century debates about grace and free will. The imagery of faith, however, does not polarize grace and free will as some argumentative writing does. More often, it seems to reflect a sense that faith is complex. It is given to Christians, but they have to accept it; it does something they cannot do for themselves, but they also have to exercise it. For John Chrysostom, for instance, faith is an oak tree planted in the soul which the faithful person must tend.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Ambrose, it is the drachma which the woman who has acquired it loses, and has to find again in order to save her soul.Footnote ⁵¹

Another cluster of images focuses on the salvific function of faith, specifically its ability to elevate the soul from earth to God or heaven. ‘Faith lifts the soul up from earth to God’, says a second-century collection of gnomic sayings, The Sentences of Sextus (402). For Clement, in the Paidagogos (1.4.1), faith is a ship's rope by which we haul ourselves up to God, while for Ephrem the Syrian in one of his hymns on faith (84.1), the faith of the thief on the cross possesses him and raises him to paradise.

Most images of faith, however, focus less on heaven or the afterlife, and more on the role of faith in this life. This is a striking development. The earliest Christian writings say very little about what faith does, or what the faithful do with it, after their conversion, except that one must continue to be faithful.Footnote ⁵² From the second century, however, Christians become increasingly interested in the role of faith after conversion: no doubt, at least in part, because they expect to have more life after conversion. As one late antique dice oracle says, ‘Do not abandon the faith that is in your heart: it is helpful to you.’Footnote ⁵³

Sometimes faith is described as foundational for the church or for Christian life. In the second-century apocalypse The Shepherd of Hermas, Hermas is given a vision of the church as a tower which is in the process of being built.Footnote ⁵⁴ All the parts of the tower stand for God, virtues or various groups of Christians, and the whole structure is supported by seven women (3.8.2) who form an eclectic group of virtues. The first and most foundational of these virtues is Pistis, because, as the church herself says, ‘through pistis the chosen of God are saved.’Footnote ⁵⁵

The most widely used image of faith in this life, however, is that of a ship, which carries the faithful across the turbulent seas of life, bearing them up, weathering storms and bringing them safely into the harbour of heaven.Footnote ⁵⁶ One might think that the faith we sail in would be ‘the faith’: the cult or the church. Sometimes it is, but more often it is the faith of the faithful. Tertullian describes its action in On Idolatry 24:

Without faith, says John Chrysostom, we are like people trying to cross the sea without a ship. They can swim for a while with their hands and feet but, as they get further out, they are swamped by the waves.Footnote ⁵⁸ For those who think of their spiritual journey as terrestrial rather than maritime, faith, according to Prudentius's Psychomachia (362–6), weaves new clothes for those setting out on their journey; it shines a light on the way;Footnote ⁵⁹ and, according to Paulinus of Nola, it strengthens the hearts of the faithful when they are afraid.Footnote ⁶⁰

As the faithful travel, faith plays several further roles in their lives. In two popular images, faith is guide and teacher. ‘May pistis guide you in all good actions’, say the Sentences of Sextus (166).Footnote ⁶¹ A famous early example of pistis as both leader and teacher appears on the late second-century tombstone of Abercius of Hierapolis, in Asia Minor:

The queen with golden robes is probably the Roman church, while the fish which Pistis feeds to Abercius may well be fides quae, the content of doctrine. Pistis's feeding of Abercius with fish may also echo the feeding of the five thousand; if so, then Pistis here acts like Christ, a theme to which we will return.

On Christians’ journeys, whether literal or metaphorical, faith is often a nurturing or a comforting presence. Two tombstones from late antique Gaul refer to her (in a very Roman expression) as alma fides: ‘Alma Fides procured (conferre) for [someone whose name is lost] the height [or ‘support’] of apostolicity, and when he died he went up to heaven.’Footnote ⁶³ For Ambrose, in an evening hymn, ‘watchful faith with cooling care’ soothes the fevered brows of the faithful as they fall asleep.Footnote ⁶⁴

In more extreme situations, faith does more. Peter Chrysologus, in a sermon, describes the martyrdom of St Laurence on the gridiron. This horrible death, as Peter describes it, is made bearable with the help of faith:

The divine gift of faith seems to take Laurence's pain away.

For Prudentius, in the Harmatogenia, when the soul of the faithful person finally reaches heaven, Faith is there, like Abraham or Godself, to clasp it to her bosom and let it unload all its troubles: ‘Then, as the exiled soul returns to be reinstated in her heavenly country, white-haired Fides receives her to her bosom and comforts her nursling with tender affection, while [the soul] plaintively describes the many toils she has endured since she took up lodging in the flesh.’Footnote ⁶⁶

In several of these passages, faith is more or less strongly personified. Before exploring personification a little further, however, it is worth summarizing the cumulative shape and effect of these images so far. Images of faith, among many authors and across many genres, describe faith as saving and changing the faithful. It acts as the foundation of their lives and carries them through life to a safe harbour. On the way, it supports them, comforts them and relieves their suffering. It teaches them and guides them, and, one way or another, ensures that eventually they reach heaven. These images convey vividly not only how important faith is, but how people imagine it as a dynamic force at the centre of their lives, and life itself as a project to which faith is essential. This makes faith extraordinarily precious, a theme which no-one captures better than Ephrem. In his hymns on faith, faith is a priceless pearl (16.6) which a merchant offers to his king as the most valuable thing he owns. It is a peeled grape (16.8), the most luxurious thing a vinedresser can offer his master. It is a beautiful bride (20.7), who should be carried in triumph through the marketplace.

The drama of these images should not mask the fact that for most Christians, most of the time, especially by the fourth century, life was probably not especially dramatic or dangerous. This, in itself, may be one reason why faith imagery develops as it does. It is often observed that by the fourth century Christians no longer expect the final cosmic battle or the return of Christ imminently, and persecution and martyrdom are no longer a regular risk. It is sometimes suggested that monasticism and asceticism develop in part as a response to this lessening of risk: as an alternative framework of life in which those with a particularly dramatic and dynamic sense of their life of faith can live it out. The imagery of faith, I suggest, does something similar for all the faithful. It creates a ‘mental set’, in which everyday life is a cosmic drama in which all the faithful can take part.

Most dramatically of all, faith helps the faithful to fight for their faith, and even fights for them: defending them against attack, bearing the brunt of their suffering in martyrdom, and seeing off the devil. It is in these roles that faith is most strongly personified. The idea that faith fights for the faithful has Christian roots in Ephesians 6.16, where pistis is a shield.Footnote ⁶⁷ In later writers, the shield often becomes a weapon. Armed with the word of faith, says Cyril of Alexandria in his Commentary on John, we destroy arguments and every obstacle to the knowledge of God, while Ambrose tells us that every martyr's faith is his sword.Footnote ⁶⁸ By the fourth century, Faith is sometimes the one wielding the weapon: Paulinus of Nola, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine are among the writers of this period who talk about Faith going into battle on behalf of the faithful. No description of faith as a warrior, however, is more famous or influential than that of Prudentius in his poem, the Psychomachia.

The Psychomachia is an epic account of the war for the Christian soul between the virtues, led by Fides under the generalship of Christ, and a host of vices:

Prudentius's personifications have received abundant attention from both literary critics and theologians.Footnote ⁷⁰ The poem can be seen as the culmination of the classical theme of the gods at war which goes back to Homer, and the beginning of a long medieval tradition of large-scale allegory. Personification also offers a powerful mechanism for capturing all the meanings of faith (or hope, love or other key Christian qualities) under one helmet: Fides, for example, at different points in the poem, is a gift from God, the trust of the faithful, ‘the faith’ in the sense of the cult, and true doctrine.Footnote ⁷¹ The personification of faith heightens that sense which has just been discussed, of faith as a force at the centre of Christian life, and life as a drama to which faith is crucial.Footnote ⁷² Few life experiences can be more dramatic than hosting a bare-armed heroine inside you while she battles for your soul.

This article cannot do justice to Prudentius's personification of faith, much less to his practice of personification as a whole. It is, though, worth mentioning briefly two aspects of the former which add something to our understanding of the role of imagery in general to early Christian understandings of faith.

The Psychomachia begins with a prologue which traces God's command to the faithful to make war on the vices back to Abraham. Most of the poem consists of a series of duels between Fides, Pudicitia, Patientia, Mens Humilis and others, and their opposites, interspersed with lengthy speeches urging the reader to repentance and Christian life. Prudentius presents the battle as taking place within a human soul, and most commentators assume that the soul is doing battle with itself. A few have argued that the virtues and vices represent opposing forces in the battle between God and the powers of the world, or even that they are echoes of the deified abstractions of Greek and Roman cult.Footnote ⁷³ All these theories have something to commend them, but all leave questions unanswered.

The idea that there is tension between virtues and vices within the soul goes back to Plato, although philosophers do not normally talk about progress in virtue as a war. Prudentius's terminology of virtue and vice is undoubtedly philosophical, but his picture of what is happening in the soul owes more to the Pauline epistles, in particular the idea that the faithful are given various qualities as gifts by the Holy Spirit, and the idea that the faithful are fighting a war in themselves against the devil.

In the prologue (13–14), Prudentius says that the example of Abraham reveals that a bellicosus spiritus must do battle and overcome the monsters in our enslaved heart (cor).Footnote ⁷⁴ When all the vices have been expelled, Christ himself ‘will enter the humble abode of the pure heart and give it the privilege of entertaining the Trinity’ (prologue 59–63). Prudentius appeals to Christ to tell him ‘with what fighting force the mind (mens) is armed’ (5–6). He already knows the answer: the troops are the virtues, under Christ's leadership (11–20).

Prudentius's list of virtues does not exactly match any other such list (of which there are many in Greek philosophy, Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity), but nearly all of them are qualities familiar to Christians as either gifts or fruits of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12: 4–11 or Galatians 5: 22. Pistis, as has already been noted, appears in both lists. As has also been noted, the idea that qualities, which have been given to us, help us to fight the devil, appears several times in early epistles, most famously in Ephesians 6: 10–17. In those passages, the qualities the faithful put on are not their own virtues, but gifts from God which enable them to defend themselves in the cosmic war with the devil. The psychology of this poem therefore owes something to philosophy but rather more to the Pauline epistles. It is never fully articulated, no doubt because developing a theory of the soul was not Prudentius's prime concern, but the poem conveys a strong sense that the most important thing a Christian soul can do is to be receptive to Christ: to let Christ and his troops into itself to do their work.Footnote ⁷⁵ This implies a rather different psychology from the philosophically informed theories which patrologists attribute (often rightly) to other writers.Footnote ⁷⁶ Prudentius has little or no sense that what matters in faith is knowledge, reason or the control of the best part of the soul over the rest of the soul or the rest of the self. He focuses on openness, receptivity and acquiescence to Christ.

As we have seen, Prudentius is by no means the only writer who personifies faith, especially when the life of faith is being imagined as a battle. In scenes of combat, the imagery of faith reveals not only something of these writers’ psychology, but also some notable theology.

Poem 15 is one of several in which Paulinus celebrates the birthday of St Felix of Nola, who was believed to have been martyred during the Decian persecution or soon after. Here, he is describing how a martyr's faith holds out under persecution: ‘Faith defeats [men armed with steel] through [its] awareness of heavenly truth; it measures the future life against immediate death, and it joyfully restores to God the mind which is victorious over the conquered body, and transports it to the delighted stars’ (15.147–52). This is figurative but not perhaps a very developed personification; but Paulinus continues:

It is a recurring theme in martyrologies that the martyr either puts on, or feels, the presence of God or Christ, and that the presence of God with a human being causes shining.Footnote ⁷⁷ Here, however, we find Fides supporting Felix, alongside God and Christ.Footnote ⁷⁸

This is not an isolated passage. We have already encountered Faith behaving very like Christ on Abercius's tombstone and in a sermon of Peter Chrysologus, where she consoles St Laurence on the gridiron and takes away his pain. In his Hymn in Honour of St Laurence, Prudentius goes even further. He describes how, in Christianity's battle with mainstream cult, ‘Fides fought in arms, not sparing her own blood, for by death she destroyed death and spent herself to save herself’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This is a remarkable image. The language of salvation and the destruction of death unmistakably references the saving death of Christ. The phrase ‘by death she destroyed death’ virtually quotes 2 Timothy 1: 10. Here, therefore, Fides – Laurence's faith or perhaps ‘the faith’ – acts like Christ himself. She re-enacts Christ's saving death, and is imagined as continuing Christ's saving work on earth in the ongoing battle with idolatry.

In these passages, Faith constitutes a form of God's ongoing presence with the faithful, very much as do the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit. Either she enters people and inhabits them, like Christ or the Spirit, or she is with them, supporting them, as the risen Christ can be described as with the faithful and supporting them.Footnote ⁸⁰ Theologically, this idea may come as a surprise to modern readers. We may wonder why Christians, who in this period already sometimes find themselves obliged to explain to outsiders in what sense they have only one god, not three, feel it appropriate to cast faith as yet another form of God's presence with the faithful. Remarkably, writers of this period do not seem to regard this as a problem. One reason may be that the fourth century is an era in which intermediaries of various kinds proliferate between the divine and human spheres, notably in the cults of Mary the Bearer of God and the saints. Another reason may be that Faith never becomes a fully-fledged hypostasis of God, as Roman Fides is of Jupiter. I have yet to discover a Christian praying to her.Footnote ⁸¹ She acts like Christ or the Spirit ad occasionem, to suit a writer's immediate needs, and then reverts to her usual status as an attitude, a relationship, a virtue, the body of doctrine or ‘the faith’. This, indeed, is surely one of the attractions of imagery. It is highly flexible: it can help writers and their audiences think about the role of a quality like faith in their relationship with God, without involving them in complex and controversial questions of essence or personhood.

All these images and personifications testify to the central and honoured place of Christian faith in the divine-human relationship. It can be the sign and (in a non-technical sense) the substance of God's presence with the faithful. By having faith, the faithful have God, and God has them. In contrast with Christian thinking about belief, however, the imagery of faith, fluid and adaptable as it is, never becomes a focus of controversy in antiquity.