by Susan Jacoby
One of my favorites was Saint Vitus (for whom the neurological disease Saint Vitus’ dance is colloquially named), who supposedly died in 303. Vitus is also the patron saint of dogs, young people, actors, comedians, and mummers, and is asked to intercede in cases not only of Saint Vitus’ dance (the correct scientific name is Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological disorder) but also of epilepsy and insomnia. The details of his martyrdom, though, are obscure. Even the church classifies the Vitus stories as legend rather than fact, but of course I was not told that as a child. I was particularly enthralled by the tortures that Vitus was said to have survived through divine intervention before God finally let him be put to death. According to legend, he emerged intact from a cauldron of molten lead and then, when Vitus was thrown into a lion’s den, the fearsome animal turned tame and cuddled against the future martyr. (The Vitus legends are yet another example of the appropriation of the Hebrew Bible by early Christianity. In the book of Daniel, the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar throws Daniel into the lion’s den and his companions, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, into a fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to idols. All emerge unscathed as testimony to the power of the God of Israel.)
Stories of Diocletian’s martyrs provided perverse entertainment for Catholic schoolchildren in the twentieth century, but in the fourth century, they were the glue that helped bind together the Christians who were becoming a majority in the empire’s cities. A pagan majority, pagan worship, and the shrines for pagan rituals persisted much longer—it is generally thought, for centuries—in the countryside.
The bravery of the Christians who went willingly to their deaths, especially when the persecutions were a relatively recent memory, was a powerful tool for attracting converts, in much the same fashion as secular martyrs serve to attract new adherents to political groups seen (rightly or wrongly) as a persecuted vanguard. Vitus was not just my favorite martyr; according to contemporary chroniclers, his devotional cult flourished in Central Europe and was responsible for many conversions in that part of the empire as the political tide was turning decisively against purely secular imperial authority.
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Soon after the end of the persecutions, Constantine the Great, having succeeded his father, beheld his miraculous vision at the Milvian Bridge, and ushered in what was to be the first empowered Christian century of the decaying Roman Empire. Within the year, Constantine was sole emperor in the Western portion of the empire. The East was ruled by Licinius, who had succeeded to the throne after Galerius’s little-mourned death. Despite Constantine’s vision, after which he displayed the cross as a military standard in a manner that elevated Christianity in the imagination of his soldiers and his subjects, Constantine did not instantly impose Christianity; he began a long, slow, uneven process that would result in the victory of the faith by the end of the century. In 313, Constantine and Licinius jointly issued the Edict of Milan, a document that nullified all of the tetrarchy’s edicts against Christians and stated that “freedom of worship ought not to be denied,” and that decisions about faith, for Christians, pagans, and Jews, should be relegated to “each man’s free choice.”
It sounds good—almost like an Enlightenment document—if one ignores the fact that imperial edicts, unlike democratic constitutions, can be modified by the whim (or long-term plan) of a single ruler. Constantine soon began to renege on the promise of religious freedom as far as Jews were concerned. In 315, he issued a new edict, forbidding Jews—and only Jews—from proselytizing. Much later in the fourth century, however, Judaism demonstrated its continuing appeal for outsiders by attracting large numbers of Arabs, with whom the Jews had generally lived in amity throughout the early Diaspora, in Himyar (now Yemen). The Arab converts to Judaism proved just as intolerant of Christians as Christians were proving to be of Jews in late antiquity, and expended a fair amount of effort in the fifth century trying to wipe out the Christians among them. In the end, around 525, the Arab Jews of Himyar were vanquished when a much larger force of Ethiopian Christian troops crossed the Red Sea to attack them. (Today a tiny remnant of those Arab-descended Jews—no more than a few hundred—still live in a Yemen descending into chaos as militant Shia Houthi rebels—whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damnation to the Jews”—have seized power. The United States and Britain, which tried to get the remaining Jews out of Yemen, both closed their embassies as a result of escalating violence in 2015. Suleiman Jacob, the unofficial rabbi of a community of just fifty-five Jews in the capital of Raida, said in a poignant interview, “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave. Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah.”8)
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Most conversions to Judaism in the late imperial period were undoubtedly the result of ordinary mixed marriages, demonstrating Jewish receptivity to outsiders rather than proselytizing in the active sense. Though not always an absolute requirement for a rabbi’s approval of a mixed marriage, conversion was certainly a good idea for any pagan who wanted to get along with his or her (usually her) Jewish in-laws and the Jewish community. Mixed marriages, as demonstrated in the lives of both Constantine and Augustine, were also a factor in many conversions to Christianity. Unlike Jews, Christians were free to proselytize in any way they chose—in public and private, in churches as well as homes. During this period, there were also a good many conversions to paganism, especially Eastern cults, and Constantine made no move to prohibit pagan proselytizing. The most important reason for Constantine’s hands-off policy regarding pagans was undoubtedly his awareness that most of his troops were pagan. They prayed to “God, the giver of victory and all good things,” with no religious definition of the deity.9
Constantine’s singular move against Jews was dictated by his understanding that the continuing existence of Judaism posed a unique challenge to Christianity’s truth claim and was therefore of much greater concern than paganism to the church leaders whose loyalty the emperor wished to ensure. Although Constantine had not been baptized after his revelation at the Milvian Bridge—his formal christening would wait until he was much closer to death—the emperor soon began to give official preference to Christians, by filling the civil service from the ranks of the church. Delaying formal conversion until late in life, or even until death was imminent, was a common practice among Christian believers for the very reason Monica failed to baptize Augustine when he was sick as a child: the baptized Christian might go on to earn himself hell instead of being absolved at the last minute of sins committed before his formal admission to the church. The sacrament of Penance, also called the sacrament of Reconciliation, was not an individual confession to a priest in Augustine’s time but a communal admission of wrong. The most serious sins—say, worshipping an idol or embracing a heresy—might eventually be wiped out after doing serious penances imposed by the bishop. The sacrament of Penance for healthy adults, by contrast, was more of a refillable get-out-of-jail-free card, in which the priest could absolve a penitent of the same repeated sin if he believed the sinner had sought forgiveness with a “firm purpose of amendment.” This absolution had to be repeated if the sinner lapsed and repeated the same offense. Baptism, by contrast, wiped out all previous sins, so it made a certain amount of sense to delay being christened, as Constantine and Augustine’s father, Patricius, did, until death seemed to be approaching and there was little time left to commit additional grave sins requiring penitential absolution. Of course, waiting too long, if the soul departed from the body before baptism, precluded the possibility of salvation. Timing was everything.
The delay in his baptism, however, did not prevent Constantine from becoming involved with church business in an unprecedented fashion. His real break with imperial tradition was not his favoritism toward Christians in office (what ruler does not make use of patronage to promote loyalty?) but his increasing tendency to involve himself, as ruler of Rome, in internal church quarrels. On theological matters, Constantine always sided with the Church of Rome. In 325, he did somet
hing no emperor had ever done before—or would even have thought of doing—by summoning all of the bishops of the church to a meeting in Nicaea, where the council gave birth to the Nicene Creed. The creed, which declared God the Father and God the Son to be one in substance, has probably been the cause of more controversy and bloodshed than any other doctrine in Christian history. It was as if the emperor had weighed in on the side of one rabbi over another in the interpretation of a crucial Jewish law, or chosen to displace Jupiter from pagan temples. The idea of the Trinity now had the imprimatur of not only the bishops but the head of state. Meanwhile, Constantine’s mother, Helena, was traveling in Judaea in pursuit of the True Cross—a journey that, like the story of Vitus, is chronicled in unverifiable legend. What is verifiable is Constantine’s aggressive program of using state money to build Christian churches. In 335, just two years before his death, Constantine presided over the dedication of the elaborate Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. After Constantine’s death in 337, the status of both pagans and Christians fluctuated for the next half-century, depending on the religious convictions of the emperor. Christians continued to be subject to sporadic persecutions, but they never lost the economic and political foothold that Constantine had given them. Only Jews were on a clear, continuous downward track within the empire.
With a ruler who openly favored Christianity, the church began to attract more wealthy Romans. However, the interaction of wealth, Christianity, and the state was in its infancy during Constantine’s reign. The process did not really accelerate and become a significant political force until mid-century, with the rise of a new middle and upper-middle class. The expansion in the number of newly prosperous and Roman citizens after 350 coincided with poverty and economic chaos for many in the lower classes, providing opportunities for religious appeals of every kind. In this competition, Christianity was better situated than any other faith, because it offered spiritual credit for charity in this life (a lure for the wealthy) and the promise of rewards in heaven for those who were poor enough to need charity. Paganism, by contrast, offered no coherent vision of an afterlife in which all of the sorrows of mortal existence would be wiped away.
The growing wealth of the Christian churches created a serious internal conflict within the Christian community, because there was an obvious contradiction between many of the anti-acquisitive themes of the scriptural Jesus and the church’s approval and pursuit of riches and rich members. As Peter Brown notes, this dilemma was not easily solved, if it was solved at all, at either the communal or the individual level.
The New Testament had passed on to the Christian communities of the later empire the challenge of Jesus to the Rich Young Man, along with his equally disturbing comment on the young man’s failure to meet this challenge: that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:24). Once the truly rich had entered the churches, at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, these words took on a new immediacy. I am tempted to call this period the Age of the Camel. Christians of ascetic temperament watched expectantly to see which—if any—of the very large camels of their age were prepared to pass through the eye of the needle through renouncing their wealth. Those who did so received instant acclaim and have been studied with alacrity ever since. Compared with the heroes and heroines of renunciation, the silent majority of Christians who retained their wealth have been allowed to sink back into obscurity.10
The new wealth in the second half of the fourth century was not exclusively Christian, but neither Jewish wealth nor pagan wealth was under the control of a disciplined, centralized institution seeking converts in an organized way. The church was able to put its financial resources to use, in ways that less centralized faiths could not, in its effort to exercise more influence on the state. (One of the most unexpected developments in scholarship during the past two decades is the proliferation of new studies of the late Roman Empire emphasizing the role that economic factors played in the spread of Christianity. The indefatigable Brown—now professor emeritus of history at Princeton University—has examined the relationship in lively and illuminating detail. He observes that the new scholarship has opened “a vista of late Roman society from which many of the accustomed landmarks have vanished.”11 No one can read Brown’s magisterial 2012 work, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, without understanding that Christian money was essential to the proselytizing force of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. Brown does not treat the subject as a heretofore unexplored scandal or as an argument against Christianity but as a complex historical association that has never received its due.)
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Throughout the forty years after Constantine’s death, most of the emperors, in both East and West, had Christian sympathies—though there were important exceptions. Licinius, who signed the Edict of Milan with Constantine, turned against Christians and purged them from the civil service even as Constantine was packing government offices with Christians in his portion of the empire. On the whole, though, Christianity made steady progress until Julian, a committed pagan who had been raised as a Christian, became emperor in 361. Known to Christian history as Julian the Apostate, he died in battle after a reign of just two years, in 363. Julian had attempted to undo Constantine’s preferential treatment of Christianity and restore paganism as the state religion. He was brought up and educated as a Christian and only “came out” as a pagan after becoming emperor. It is probably inaccurate to describe Julian as a convert to paganism, since it seems likely that he had never accepted the Christian teachings of his childhood and waited prudently, until he gained imperial power, to declare his true religious allegiance.
A man with a clever and subtle mind, Julian took on the church at its two most vulnerable points. These were the proliferation of “heresies” within Christianity, and the continuing, maddening persistence of Jews, who rejected Jesus as the fulfillment of the Judaeo-Christian story. Like Constantine, Julian injected himself into the internal business of the church. Unlike Constantine, the last pagan emperor interfered to promote Christian diversity rather than uniformity—or, as the church fathers viewed it, to encourage heresies within their faith. Many bishops and priests of dissident Christian sects, like the Donatists, had been exiled by imperial officials who favored Catholicism. Julian ordered that all of the clergymen be allowed to return home and decreed that all forms of Christianity be tolerated within the empire. Nothing could have infuriated the church leaders more, since they considered freedom of religion a form of persecution, and freedom of conscience (if it conflicted with church doctrine) a sin against God.
The idea that the state would tolerate dissenting forms of Christianity—and call them Christian—was especially odious. Throughout most of Christian history, Roman Catholic and conservative Protestant leaders would take the same line. William Warburton, an eighteenth-century Anglican bishop and historian (who was as interested as Gibbon, from quite a different perspective, in the last pagan emperor and the role of Christianity in the decline of Rome as a secular power), described Julian’s granting of full religious liberty not only to pagans but to all Christians as “this mask of moderation and equity for no other purpose than to inflame the dissensions of the Church.”12 (Warburton’s analysis was untroubled by the fact that his own faith was, and had been since its inception under Henry VIII, deemed heretical by Rome.)
Aggravated as the Catholic hierarchy was by the emperor’s extension of religious liberty to dissident Christians viewed as rebels and heretics, the church rulers were even more outraged by Julian’s attempt to relegitimize Judaism as one of many religions sanctioned by imperial authority. One of the most provocative actions taken by Julian during his reign was his unsuccessful attempt to rebuild the temple that had been destroyed by the Romans. Julian saw Christians, not Jews, as a threat to imperial authority—and especially to the paganism he wished to rest
ore as the empire’s favored, albeit not exclusive, religion. He understood fully that the reason for the Catholic Church’s Adversus Judaeos position was Catholicism’s claim to have fulfilled and therefore superseded the predictions of the ancient Hebrew prophets. The destruction of the temple by the Romans, therefore, was seen as definitive proof of Jewry’s defeat and of Christianity’s claim to be the fulfillment of Jewish law and prophecy. What could deal the Christians a more decisive blow than the renascence of the site most sacred to Jews throughout the known world?
In 363, Julian issued an edict of toleration that allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem and provided for the rebuilding of the temple. He also wrote an extraordinary public letter, addressed to the Jewish community throughout the empire, in which he noted that the only difference (a rather big difference) between Jews and pagans was that Jews offered sacrifice to one god and pagans to many. Then Julian designated money from the imperial treasury for the specific purpose of rebuilding and restoring the temple to its former glory. After the edict was circulated, Jews converged on Jerusalem from distant corners of the empire to participate in the project so integral to their religion. Julian, with his Christian education, would have been familiar with passages in Matthew and Luke in which Jesus supposedly predicted the destruction of the temple. He understood that Christians would understand the literal rising of a new temple from the ashes and stones of the old site as a direct challenge to the words spoken by their god and savior.
Of course, the Third Temple was not to be. The Jews who had begun to gather stones were working on a site rich in natural gas deposits, and continual explosions gave Christians cause to rejoice. The explosions, probably caused by earthquakes, were naturally seen as the hand of God striking down Jewish efforts to rebuild their most sacred site. Still, this quixotic endeavor might conceivably have come to fruition had Julian lived and been able to pour the treasure of Rome into righting whatever went wrong with the project from geological causes or faulty engineering. But he was killed in battle in the same year that he had issued the orders to rebuild the temple. Christians naturally regarded his death as a miracle and as a demonstration of the victory of Christ. Legend has it that, at the moment of his death, Julian uttered the words “Thou has conquered, Galilean.” Stories of deathbed recantations by “apostates” would surface repeatedly throughout Christian history, but they were of utmost importance when Christianity had not yet succeeded in conquering the Western world. Twenty-five years after Julian’s death, as Jews were being systematically persecuted under the Christian emperor Theodosius I, John Chrysostom repeatedly referred to the debacle of Julian’s attempt to rebuild the temple as an example of the divine wrath that had already been visited upon Jews for denying Jesus and that would be visited on anyone else who refused to accept the triune God.