All these features that made Christianity preeminently a religion of choice—a religion of Seekers—were the seeds of another uncelebrated innovation of the new religion—the creation of a Church. Ironically, the religion that had advanced as the way of faith and choice for the poor and the oppressed would become the core of a powerful new institution. The Church would become an independent corporation organized in a hierarchy with its own professional priesthood. And in turn it too would become an instrument for imposing belief and ritual on the unwilling. Other religious institutions, like Hinduism or Judaism, with an ethnic base either were diffused throughout the society or were auxiliary to the state.
In the Athens of the great age of Socrates and Plato, the citadel of the city faith, the Parthenon, was built for the cult of Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin). The city-goddess was the goddess of all Athenians. Similarly, the religion of Rome was only the religious aspect of the empire. At the height of the Roman Empire the state religion was supervised and its rites conducted by a college of pontifices (priests of the state cult), headed by the pontifex maximus. “Judge and arbiter of things divine and human,” he survived as the religious spokesman of the ancient kings of Rome. In the Republic he sat in the Regia, the royal palace of the ancient kings near the Forum. He supervised the sacrifices and named the Vestal Virgins. For many years the college of pontifices also fixed the state calendar, oversaw rituals, and kept the official records of the state cult. Emperor Augustus, following the example of Julius Caesar, declared himself pontifex maximus in 12 B.C. and the succeeding emperors did not give up the title.
The fervent Catholic emperor Gratian (367-383), under the influence of Saint Ambrose, was the first to abandon the title. The rise of Christianity in the West, then, is a saga of how an unpretentious and persecuted fellowship of the faithful followers of Jesus of Nazareth became transformed in three centuries into an autonomous institution challenging the ancient imperial power. It is not surprising that the fellowship that accomplished this feat claimed and was credited with miracles.
The Church, the fellowship of the faithful, was made theologically real by Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) as it had been made politically real by Emperor Constantine the Great (c. 285-337). Saint Augustine’s City of God (written 413-426) defended the new religion from responsibility for the fall of Rome to the barbarians. His figure of “two cities,” the “city of God” (civitas Dei) and the “earthly city” (civitas terrena), had been familiar in both Hebrew biblical and Greek philosophical wisdom. Now he brought them together in his Christian classic in the Latin language of Europe that dominated learning for the next centuries. The Psalms had spoken of a city of God and Plato’s Republic made a similar division. Saint Augustine now provided a theological base for the dogma of predestination. And his Confessions recounted the painful stages by which he personally was overcome by the revelation of a heavenly city.
The making of a Church, the transformation of Christianity from a persecuted sect into the dominant force in a Christianized empire, was to be the work of a troubled and ambivalent emperor in one of the empire’s most turbulent eras. It was an age of civil war, of endless battles between Eastern and Western emperors and among claimants for the throne. Constantine the Great was no saint, but a master of military strategy and command, unbeaten in provincial battles, conqueror of the Franks and the Goths. A vigorous and effective administrator, reforming the coinage and the tax system, he made Byzantium into a “Second Rome,” to be called Constantinople. He earned his title of Constantine the Great by his secular achievements. The Christianizing of the empire was accomplished not by crusading zeal but by gradual stages of de-paganizing. Perhaps the spectacle and frustration of the Roman emperor Diocletian’s terrible ten-year persecution of the Christians (303-313) had inoculated Constantine against draconian measures in religion.
Born into the military governing class, the son of Constantius, who was appointed Caesar, or deputy emperor, under Diocletian, Constantine served in the army against Persia. Raised in the Eastern Empire at the court of Diocletian at Nicomedia (modern Izmit in Turkey), he was a brilliant soldier in Egypt. His own military career spanned the empire—from Sarmatia near the Black Sea to the northern reaches of the British Isles. He joined his father, who had assumed the titles of Caesar and Augustus on an expedition to pacify the barbarians of Scotland. When his father died at York, Constantine succeeded to his father’s titles by the acclaim of the army. And when his rival emperor Galerius allowed him only the title of Caesar, Constantine fabricated a claim to the imperial throne, marched across Gaul in 312, won victories in northern Italy and marched on Rome. There Maxentius, son of the old Western emperor Maximian, had rebelled. At the Milvian Bridge, in 312, Constantine won his imperial power in the name of the Christian God. The Christian apologist Lactantius reports that Constantine had been instructed in a dream to paint the Christian monogram on the shields of his troops. According to Eusebius of Caesarea (260?-?340), “the father of ecclesiastical history,” Constantine had seen in the sky a cross with the words “In hoc signo vinces” (In this sign you will conquer). Constantine claimed that God had brought him from remote Britain across Gaul to overcome impiety and bring peace.
Did Constantine become a Christian only to secure the support of the Christian God in battle? If so, he was in a well-established tradition. The ancient Greeks and Romans had assumed that piety would be rewarded by success in battle. It is no wonder, then, that Constantine should have engaged the power of the new Christian God in battle, nor that he should have been grateful to the God in whose name he had won the decisive battle at the Milvian Bridge. What requires explaining is that Constantine should have become committed to the new religion and have used the imperial power to suppress the strong pagan opposition.
The public stages are clear in Constantine’s movement from pious follower of the old Roman gods to a pious Christian banning paganism. The personal stages in his movement of conscience are not so clear. And the mystery of Constantine’s motives has made him a favorite figure for either the admiration or the malice of historians. After the Christian God had helped him to victory in 312, he ceased to take part in pagan ceremonies, but retained the title of pontifex maximus. The triumphal arch erected in his honor after his defeat of Maxentius, which we can still see in Rome, shows Constantine holding a cross with the legend “By this saving sign I have delivered your city from the tyrant and restored liberty to the Senate and people of Rome.” He had the name of Jupiter erased from the arch—a hodgepodge of earlier Roman sculpture and (in Gibbon’s words) “a melancholy proof of the decline of the arts and of the meanest vanity.” Still Constantine kept the old gods on his new gold coin, the solidus, which would survive for centuries as the unit of Byzantine currency. And he continued to associate himself with the Roman sun-god. His political adeptness was proved by his ability for many years to give guarantees to both of the conflicting religions.
After the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine still tolerated paganism. But he restored the confiscated property of Christian communities, Christians were favored for public positions and their proselytizing was supported. By 320 Constantine was openly attacking polytheism. Perhaps, as Jacob Burckhardt suggests, Constantine himself was simply a deist hoping to enlist the common devotion of all religions, including even the ancient sun-god and Mithras. So he proposed rituals that both pagans and Christians could conscientiously observe. One was his prayer for the armies “to honor the Lord’s Day, which is also called the day of light and of the sun.”
Constantine brought an epochal change in the relation of religion to the state. A new institution—the Church—was conjured up by his acts of toleration, the Edicts of Milan (313). The first edict recognized the Christian clergy as a class or corporation (clerici). He granted equal rights to all religions at the same time that he restored the confiscated property of the Christians. What was implied was even more significant than what was declared. For the very idea of a state rel
igion, which had dominated ancient Greece and Rome, was abolished, “until Christianity clothed itself with the shell that paganism had discarded,” as Jacob Burckhardt elegantly observes.
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As Constantine’s support of Christianity solidified, and his opposition to paganism grew, he was increasingly concerned by divisions within the Church and took measures to heal them. He tried to suppress the “Donatist” schism in North Africa over whether priests and bishops who had lapsed from the Church could be readmitted.
Then he intervened to settle the division over the two natures of Jesus, which would long trouble the fellowship of the faithful. The Christian Gospel in the West had responded both to the need for a superhuman authority, in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, and to the need of each believer to reach within himself, in the tradition of the Greek philosophers. This dual appeal was expressed in the two titles of Jesus—Son of God, Son of Man. And the Gospels tell how the Son of God brought salvation to the world by the sacrifice of the Son of Man. But what was the relation between these two natures of Jesus? Disciples of Jesus, from the earliest time, were troubled and divided by efforts to define this duality. If Jesus had been created by God, then he was not of the same substance as God, but if he was begotten by God, then he must be of God’s same substance. Constantine saw Christian unity threatened by bitter exchanges on this theological issue. The followers of Arius (born c. 250) believed that Christ, being the most perfect creature in the material world, had been “adopted” by God as a son. And the view had been spread by Arius’ popular poetic work, Thalia (“Banquet”), which led to Arius’ condemnation by the bishops as a heretic, and his exile from his post as priest in Alexandria. Constantine betrayed his own theological innocence when he called this dispute “a fight over trifling and foolish verbal differences.”
Without calculating the consequences of this act of theological goodwill, Constantine unwittingly gave a new independent reality to the Church—and a new institutional reality to the fellowship of the faithful that would enable it to challenge the age-old imperial authority. Before this time there had been synod meetings of representatives of local churches. But the Council of Nicaea that Constantine convened would be something new, and newly menacing to the secular power. For the first time this council would be ecumenical (from the Greek oikoumene, the inhabited world)—and hence speak for a universal church. Such a community of all believers could hardly have seemed feasible before there was a Christian empire of the Roman world. The Church would speak for a new power in the world—a fellowship of the faithful, which before long would consider itself the equal or superior of the imperial power that convened it.
Constantine himself opened this first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in Asia Minor in May 325, with an address. He had already written to Arius observing that the dispute Arius had fostered was a product of too much leisure and worried a trivial issue that could easily be settled. For this council, Constantine had brought together some 318 bishops, including delegates even from Armenia and Scythia outside the empire. But he did not sense the theological hatred (odium theologicum) he had roiled, nor did he imagine the Frankenstein he had created.
After three months’ discussion, the assembled bishops agreed upon a creed—the Nicene Creed—which would become the dogma of Christian orthodoxy for succeeding centuries. Was Jesus the Son of God identical in substance with God or merely a demigod? The Council declared that Jesus was “begotten not created, one in being (homoousios) with the Father.” Eusebius of Caesarea was there and reported the decisive intervention by Emperor Constantine himself. “Our emperor, most beloved by God, began to reason [in Latin, with a Greek translation supplied by an interpreter] concerning [Christ’s] divine origin, and His existence before all ages: He was virtually in the Father without generation, even before he was actually begotten, the Father having always been the Father, just as [the Son] has always been a King and a Savior.” To enforce this dogma, all books by Arius or his followers were to be burned “that not a single record of it should be left to posterity,” and anyone who possessed such a work and refused to burn it should be put to death.
This search for agreement on the two natures of Jesus the Christ did not succeed in enforcing orthodoxy. For forty years after Constantine, Arianism remained the doctrine of the Eastern Empire. But it had drawn Christians together and brought an ominous new institution into being. The Church would be governed by the bishops of the whole Christian world. By 324 Constantine had seen himself, he explained to the bishops, as “a bishop established by God of those outside [the Church],” even as a “thirteenth apostle.” The seeking would unite, while the finding and defining would divide. Succeeding Church councils would elaborate the dogma as they continued to redefine the nature, or two natures, of the Christ. Each new definition provided new targets for objection, more ammunition for dissent.
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Battles between Church and state would punctuate all Western history and leave fertile ambiguities even in the New World. But Constantine had created a new relation between the state and religion. The religion of the state would no longer be a state religion. Yet Constantine’s name would be given to the policy of establishing a Christian Church as the religion of the state, signaling a special close alliance between the state and a particular Christian Church. “Constantinism” troubled Europe for centuries.
Ironically, too, this close association of the state with the independent Christian forces of virtue provided a classic example of the historic powers of forgery. The so-called Donation of Constantine was a supposed grant by Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester I (314-335) in Rome of spiritual sovereignty over all the other great patriarchs and over all matters of faith and worship, as well as temporal sovereignty over Rome and the entire Western Empire. This was said to have been Constantine’s thank-you gift to Sylvester for miraculously healing his leprosy and converting him to Christianity. A brilliant example of the independent Renaissance spirit was the demonstration in 1440 by the vigorous Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) that the “donation” was only a forgery designed to empower the papacy. This was a foretaste too of the spirit of the Protestant Reformation. For centuries Constantine’s supposed Donation remained the basis for the expansive powers of medieval popes over kings, princes, bishops, and patriarchs.
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Christianity, we must not forget, did not come into a religious vacuum. It came on a Roman scene adorned by a vivid and sumptuous state religion, headed, as we have seen, by the college of pontiffs and a pontifex maximus, now the emperor himself. Even when Gratian became emperor in 375, six decades after Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, most senators were pagans—still being sworn into office on the altar of the ancient Roman goddess of Victory in the Senate Hall, with libations of wine and incense. This was only one sign of a still-powerful pagan religion that commanded the loyalty of most of the ruling nobles of Rome. Edward Gibbon’s famous “Five Causes of the Growth of Christianity,” which aroused the ire of faithful and credulous Christians, is not often enough seen as a catalog also of the powers of the dying but still-prevalent and revered pagan religion. “While that great body [of the Roman Empire] was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol.”
The affair of the Altar of Victory in 382 dramatized the power of the ancient Roman religion. Fortunately, the words of the heroes on both sides have been preserved. This affair actually offers us one of the most vivid and eloquent dramas of appeal to the spirit of tolerance and the force of tradition. The fortunes of the Altar of the ancient goddess of Victory in the Senate Hall had varied with the tastes of the emperors. Constantius had removed it, Julian the Apostate had restored it, but the Christian zealot Gratian removed it again in 382. In Rome at the time there were some 42
4 pagan temples, so that, as Gibbon observes, “in every quarter of Rome the delicacy of the Christians was offended by the fumes of idolatrous sacrifice.”
Four respectable pagan deputations begged Gratian’s successor, Emperor Valentinian II, to restore the Altar of Victory, symbol of the gods under whom Rome had flourished. They set the stage for a classic confrontation between the old religion of the greatness of Rome and the new religion of Christ and Constantine. Spokesman for restoring the pagan altar was the eloquent Symmachus, a wealthy and noble senator, prefect of the city, a pontiff and augur, and proconsul of Africa, who reported on the affair to Emperor Valentinian II. His moving plea for tradition was also a surprisingly liberal diatribe against ideology. “Grant, I implore you,” urged Symmachus, “that we who are old men may leave to posterity that which we received as boys.” The ancestral Roman polytheism had kept people honest, and would continue to do so. “All things,” he declared, “are full of God, and no place is safe for perjurers, but the fear of transgression is greatly spurred by the consciousness of the very presence of deity.” Then Symmachus quoted the Eternal City herself (aeterna Roma) begging the emperors:
Let me use my ancestral ceremonies, she says, for I do not repent me of them. Let me live after my own way; for I am free. This was the cult that drove Hannibal from the walls of Rome and the Gauls from the Capitolium. Am I kept for this, to be chastised in my old age? . . . I do but ask peace for the gods of our fathers, the native gods of Rome. It is right that what all adore should be deemed one. We all look up at the same stars. We have a common sky. A common firmament encompasses us. What matters it by what kind of learned theory each man looketh for the truth? There is no one way that will take us to so mighty a secret. All this is matter of discussion for men of leisure. We offer your majesties not a debate but a plea.
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