One of the most cogent reasons for the Church’s success was its charitable work, which made it a strong presence in the cities. By 250, the church in Rome was feeding fifteen hundred poor people and widows every day, and during a plague or a riot, its clergy were often the only group able to organize food supplies and bury the dead. At a time when the emperors were so preoccupied with defending the frontier that they seemed to have forgotten the cities, the Church had become firmly established there.127 But in this time of social tension, its prominence could be threatening to the authorities, who now began more systematically to seek Christians out for execution.
It is important to explore the ideal of martyrdom, which has surfaced alarmingly in our own time and is now associated with violence and extremism. Christian martyrs, however, were victims of imperial persecution and did not kill anybody else. The memory of this harassment would loom large in the consciousness of the early Church and shape the Christian worldview. However, until the third-century crisis, there had been no official empire-wide persecution, only sporadic local outbreaks of hostility; even in the third century, there were only about ten years when the Roman authorities intensively pursued Christians.128 In an agrarian empire the ruling aristocracy expected its religion to be different from that of their subjects, but ever since Augustus, the worship of the gods of Rome was deemed essential to the empire’s survival. The Pax Romana was thought to rely on the Pax Deorum, the peace imposed by the gods, who in return for regular sacrifice would guarantee the empire’s security and prosperity.
So when Rome’s northern frontier was threatened by the barbarian tribes in 250, the emperor Decius ordered all his subjects to sacrifice to his genius to procure the gods’ aid on pain of death. This decree was not directed specifically against Christians; moreover, it was difficult to implement, and the authorities do not seem to have hunted down anybody who failed to turn up to the official sacrifice.129 When Decius was killed in action the following year, the edict was rescinded. In 258, however, Valerian was the first emperor to target the Church specifically, ordering that its clergy be executed and the property of high-ranking Christians confiscated. Once again, not many people seem to have been killed, and two years later Valerian was taken prisoner by the Persians and died in captivity. His successor, Galienus, revoked the legislation, and Christians enjoyed forty years of peace.
Clearly Valerian had been troubled by the Church’s organizational strength rather than by its beliefs and rituals. The Church was a new phenomenon. Christians had exploited the empire’s improved communications to create an institution with a unity of structure that none of the traditions we have discussed so far had attempted. Each local church was headed by a bishop, the “overseer” who was said to derive his authority from Jesus’s apostles, and was supported by presbyters and deacons. The network of such near-identical communities seemed almost to have become an empire within the empire. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons (c. 130–200), who was anxious to create an orthodoxy that excluded aggressive sectarians, had claimed that the Great Church had a single Rule of Faith, because the bishops had inherited their teaching directly from the apostles. This was not only a novel idea but a total fantasy. Paul’s letters show that there had been considerable tension between him and Jesus’s disciples, and his teachings bore little relation to those of Jesus. Each of the Synoptics had his own take on Jesus, and the Johannines were different again; there were also a host of other gospels in circulation. When Christians finally established a scriptural canon—between the fourth and sixth centuries—diverse visions were included side by side.
Unfortunately, however, Christianity would develop a peculiar yearning for intellectual conformity that would not only prove to be unsustainable but that set it apart from other faith traditions. The rabbis would never attempt to create a single central authority; not even God, much less another rabbi, could tell another Jew what to think.130 The Buddha had adamantly rejected the idea of religious authority; the notion of a single rule of faith and a structured hierarchy was entirely alien to the multifarious traditions of India; and the Chinese were encouraged to see merit in all the great teachers, despite their disagreements.
Christian leaders would make the Church even more threatening to the authorities during the forty peaceful years after Valerian’s death. When Diocletian finally established his palace in Nicomedia in 287, a Christian basilica was clearly visible on the opposite hill, seeming to confront the imperial palace as an equal. He made no move against the Church for sixteen years, but as a firm believer in the Pax Deorum at a time when the fate of the empire hung in the balance, Diocletian would find the Christians’ stubborn refusal to honor the gods increasingly intolerable.131 On February 23, 303, he demanded that the presumptuous basilica be demolished; the next day he outlawed Christian meetings and ordered the destruction of churches and the confiscation of Christian scriptures. All men, women, and children were required on pain of execution to gather in the empire’s public squares to sacrifice to the gods of Rome. Yet the legislation was implemented in only a few regions and in the West, where there were few Christian communities, hardly any at all. It is difficult to know how many people died as a result. Christians were rarely pursued if they failed to show up for the sacrifice; many apostatized, and others found loopholes.132 Most of those who were put to death had defiantly presented themselves to the authorities as voluntary martyrs, a practice the bishops condemned.133 When Diocletian abdicated in 305, these edicts expired, though they were renewed for a period of two years (311–13) by Emperor Maximianus Daia.
The cult of the martyrs, however, became central to Christian piety because they proved that Jesus had not been unique: the Church had “friends of God” with divine powers in its very midst. The martyrs were “other Christs,” and their imitation of Christ even unto death had brought him into the present.134 The Acts of the Martyrs claimed that these heroic deaths were miracles that manifested God’s presence because the martyrs seemed impervious to pain. “Let not a day pass when we do not dwell on these tales,” Victricius, the fifth-century bishop of Rouen, urged his congregation. “This martyr did not blench under torturers; this martyr hurried up the slow work of the execution; this one eagerly swallowed the flames; this one was cut about but stood up still.”135 “They suffered more than is possible for human beings to bear, and did not endure this by their own strength but by the grace of God,” explained Pope Gelasius (r. 492–96).136 When the Christian slave girl Blandina was executed in Lyons in 177, her companions “looked with their eyes through their sister to the One who was crucified for them.”137
When the young wife and mother Vibia Perpetua was imprisoned in Carthage in 203, she had a series of remarkable dreams that proved even to her persecutors that she enjoyed special intimacy with the divine. The prison governor himself perceived “that there was a rare power in us,” her biographer recalled.138 Through these “friends of God,” Christians could claim respect and even superiority over pagan communities. Yet there would always be more than a hint of aggression in the martyr’s “witness” to Christ. On the night before her execution, Perpetua dreamed that she had been turned into a man and wrestled with an Egyptian in the stadium, a man huge and “foul” of aspect, but with an infusion of divine strength, she was able to throw him to the ground. When she woke, she knew that she would not be fighting wild beasts that day but “the Fiend” himself and that “the victory would be mine.”139
Martyrdom would always be the protest of a minority, yet the violent deaths of the martyrs became a graphic demonstration of the structural violence and cruelty of the state. Martyrdom was and would always be a political as well as a religious choice. Targeted as enemies of the empire and in a relationship of starkly asymmetrical power with the authorities, these Christians’ deaths were a defiant assertion of a different allegiance. They had already achieved an eminence that was intrinsically superior to Rome’s, and by laying their deaths at the door of the oppressors, the martyrs effectively dem
onized them. But these Christians were beginning to develop a history of grievance that gave their faith a newly aggressive edge. They were convinced that, like Jesus in the book of Revelation, they were engaged in an ongoing eschatological battle; when they fought, like gladiators, with wild beasts in the stadium, they were battling with demonic powers (embodied in the imperial authorities) that would expedite Jesus’s triumphant return.140 Those who voluntarily presented themselves to the authorities were committing what would later be called “revolutionary suicide.” By forcing the authorities to put them to death, they laid bare for all to see the intrinsic violence of the so-called Pax Romana, and their suffering, they firmly believed, would hasten its end.
Other Christians, however, did not regard the empire as satanic; rather, they experienced a remarkable conversion to Rome.141 Again, this shows that it is impossible to point to an “essential” Christianity that promoted identical courses of action. Origen, for instance, believed that Christianity was the culmination of the classical culture of antiquity; like the Hebrew Scriptures, Greek philosophy had also been an expression of the Logos, the Word of God. The Pax Romana had been providentially ordained. “It would have hindered Jesus’ teaching from being spread through the whole world,” Origen believed, “if there had been many kingdoms.”142 The statesmanship and wise decision making of the bishops of the Mediterranean cities gained them a reputation for being the “friends of God.”143 Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (200–258), claimed that he presided over a privileged society that was invested with a majesty every bit as powerful as Rome.144
In 306 Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, who had distinguished himself as a soldier under Diocletian, succeeded his father Constantius Chlorus as one of the two rulers of the empire’s western provinces. Determined to achieve sole supremacy, he campaigned against his coemperor Maxentius. On the night before their final battle at the Milvian Bridge near Rome in 312, Constantine had a vision of a flaming cross in the sky embellished with the motto: “In this conquer!” A dreamer and visionary, Constantine also saw himself as a “friend of God” and would always attribute his subsequent victory to this miraculous omen. That year he declared Christianity to be religio licita.
Constantine employed the philosopher Lucius Caecilius Lactantius (c. 260–325) as a tutor for his son Crispus. Lactantius had been converted to Christianity by the courage of the martyrs who had suffered under Maximianus Daia. The state was, he believed, inherently aggressive and predatory. Romans might talk loftily about virtue and respect for humanity but did not practice what they preached. The goals of any political power, Rome included, were always “to extend the boundaries which are violently taken from others, to increase the power of the state, to improve the revenues,” and this could only be achieved by latrocinium, “violence and robbery.”145 There was no such thing as a “just” war, because it was never permissible to take human life.146 If Romans really wanted to be virtuous, Lactantius concluded, they should “restore the possessions of others” and abandon their wealth and power.147 That might have been what Jesus would have done, but it was not likely to happen in Christian Rome.
6
Byzantium: The Tragedy of Empire
In 323 Constantine defeated Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire. His ultimate ambition, however, was to command the civilized world from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Iranian Plateau, as Cyrus had done.1 As a first step, he moved his capital from Rome to the city of Byzantium at the Bosporus, the juncture of Europe and Asia, which he renamed Constantinople. Here he was greeted by Eusebius (c. 264–340), the bishop of Caesarea: “Let the friend of the All-Ruling God be proclaimed our sole sovereign … who has modeled himself after the archetypal form of the Supreme Sovereign, whose thoughts mirror the virtuous rays by which he has been made perfectly wise, good, just, pious, courageous and God-loving.”2 This was a far cry from Jesus’s criticism of such worldly authority, but in antiquity, the rhetoric of kingship had always been virtually interchangeable with the language of divinity.3 Eusebius regarded monarchy, the rule of “one” (monos), as a natural consequence of monotheism.4 There was now one God, one empire, and one emperor.5 By his military victories, Constantine had finally established Jesus’s kingdom, which would soon spread to the entire world. Eusebius understood Constantine’s Iranian ambitions perfectly and argued that the emperor was not only the Caesar of Roman Christians but also the rightful sovereign of the Christians of Persia.6 By crafting and articulating an imperial Christianity and baptizing the latrocinium of Rome, Eusebius entirely subverted the original message of Jesus.
Constantine’s conversion was clearly a coup. Christianity was not yet the official religion of the Roman Empire, but it had at last been recognized in Roman law. The Church could now own property, build basilicas and churches, and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Yet those Christians who had accepted imperial patronage so joyfully failed to notice some glaring incongruities. Jesus had told his followers to give all they had to the poor, but the Christian emperor enjoyed immense wealth. In the Kingdom of God, rich and poor were supposed to sit at the same table, but Constantine lived in an exalted state of exception, and Christianity would inevitably be tainted by its connection with the oppressive agrarian state. Eusebius believed that Constantine’s conquests were the culmination of sacred history:7 Jesus had given his disciples all power in heaven and earth, and the Christian emperor had made this a political reality.8 Eusebius chose to ignore that he had achieved this with the Roman legions that Jesus had condemned as demonic. The close union of church and empire that began in 312 meant that warfare inevitably acquired a sacral character—though Byzantines would always be reluctant to call war “holy.”9 Neither Jesus nor the first Christians could have imagined so great an oxymoron as the notion of a Christian emperor.
Yet again, we see that a tradition that had once challenged state aggression was unable to sustain this ethical stance when it became identified with aristocratic rule. The Christian Empire would inevitably be tainted by the “robbery and violence” (latrocinium) that, Lactantius believed, characterized all imperialism. As in Darius’s imperial Zoroastrianism, eschatological fulfillment had been projected onto a political system that was inevitably flawed. Eusebius maintained that Constantine had established the kingdom that Christ was supposed to inaugurate at his Second Coming. He taught the Christians of Byzantium to believe that the ruthless militarism and systemic injustice of the Roman Empire would be transformed by the Christian ideal. But Constantine was a soldier, with very little knowledge of his new faith. It was more likely that Christianity would be converted to imperial violence.
Constantine may have felt the ambiguity of his position, because he delayed his baptism until he was on his deathbed.10 In the very last year of his life, he was planning an expedition against Persia, but when he fell sick, Eusebius reported, “he perceived that this was the time to purify himself from the offences which he had at any time committed, trusting that whatever sins it had been his lot as a mortal to commit, he could wash them from his soul.”11 He told the bishops: “I shall now set for myself rules of life which befit God,” tacitly admitting, perhaps, that for the last twenty-five years he had been unable to do so.12
The emperor had experienced these contradictions before he arrived in the East when he had to deal with a case of Christian heresy in North Africa.13 Constantine felt quite entitled to intervene in such matters because, as he famously said: “I have been established by God as the supervisor of the external affairs of the church.”14 Heresy (airesis) was not simply a dogmatic issue but also a political one: the word meant “to choose another path.” Because religion and politics were inseparable in Rome, lack of consensus in the Church threatened the Pax Romana. In matters of state, no Roman emperor could permit his subjects to “go their own way.” Once he had become sole emperor of the western provinces, Constantine had been bombarded with appeals from the Donatist separatists and was co
ncerned that “such disputes and altercations … might perhaps arouse the highest deity not only against the human race, but also against myself, to whose care he has … committed the regulation of all things earthly.”15 A significant number of North African Christians had refused to accept the episcopal consecration of Caecilian, the new bishop of Carthage, and had set up their own church with Donatus as their bishop.16 Because Caecilian’s orders were accepted as valid by all the other African churches, the Donatists were destroying the consensus of the Church. Constantine decided that he had to act.
Like any Roman emperor, his first instinct was to crush dissent militarily, but he settled instead for the confiscation of Donatist property. Tragically, however, when the imperial troops marched into a Donatist basilica to carry out the edict, the unarmed congregation resisted, and a massacre followed. At once the Donatists loudly complained that the Christian emperor was persecuting his fellow Christians and that despite Constantine’s conversion, nothing had changed since the days of Diocletian.17 Constantine was forced to revoke the edict, left the Donatists in peace, and instructed orthodox bishops to turn the other cheek.18 He would have been uneasily aware that the Donatists had gotten away with it. Henceforth he and his successors would be wary of any theological or ecclesiastical discourse that threatened the Pax Christiana on which the security of the empire, they believed, now depended.19
Constantine was reluctant to promote his Christianity in the sparsely Christianized West, but his arrival in the East marked his political conversion to the faith. There could as yet be no question of making Christianity the official religion of the empire, and pagans still held public office, but Constantine closed down some pagan temples and expressed his disapproval of sacrificial worship.20 Christianity’s universal claims seemed ideally suited to Constantine’s ambition to achieve world rule, and he believed that its ethos of peace and reconciliation were in perfect alignment with the Pax Romana. But to Constantine’s horror, the eastern churches, far from being united in brotherly love, were bitterly divided by an obscure—and to Constantine, incomprehensible—theological dispute.
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