The New Penguin History of the World (55 page)

Persecution had shown, nevertheless, that it would require great efforts and prolonged determination to eradicate the new sect; it may even have been already beyond the capacities of Roman government to carry out such an eradication. The exclusiveness and isolation of early Christianity had waned. Christians were increasingly prominent in local affairs in the Asian and African provinces. Bishops were often public figures with whom officials expected to do business; the development of distinct traditions within the faith (those of the churches of Rome, Alexandria and Carthage being the most important) spoke for the degree to which it was rooted in local society and could express local needs.

Outside the empire, too, there had been signs that better times might lie ahead for Christianity. The local rulers of the client states under the shadow of Persia could not afford to neglect any source of local support. Respect for widely held religious views was at least prudent. In Syria, Cilicia and Cappadocia, Christians had been very successful in their missionary work and in some towns they formed a social élite. Simple superstition, too, helped to convince kings; the Christian god might prove powerful and it could hardly be damaging to insure against his ill-will. Thus Christianity’s political and civic prospects improved.

Christians noted with some satisfaction that their persecutors did not prosper; the Goths slew Decius, and Valerian was said to have been skinned alive by the Persians (and stuffed). But Diocletian did not appear to draw any conclusions from this and in 303 launched the last great Roman persecution. It was not at first harsh. The main targets were Christian officials, clergy and the books and buildings of the Church. The books were to be handed over for burning, but for some time there was no death penalty
for failing to sacrifice. (Many Christians none the less did sacrifice, the bishop at Rome among them.) Constantius, the Caesar of the West, did not enforce the persecution after 305, when Diocletian abdicated, though his eastern colleague (Diocletian’s successor, Galerius) felt strongly about it, ordering a general sacrifice on pain of death. This meant that persecution was worst in Egypt and Asia where it was kept up a few years longer. But before this it had been cut across by the complicated politics which led to the emergence of the emperor Constantine the Great.

This was the son of Constantius, who died in Britain in 306, a year after his accession as Augustus. Constantine was there at the time and although he had not been his father’s Caesar he was hailed as emperor by the army at York. A troubled period of nearly two decades followed. Its intricate struggles demonstrated the failure of Diocletian’s arrangements for the peaceful transmission of the empire and only ended in 324, when Constantine reunited the empire under one ruler.

By this time he had already addressed himself vigorously and effectively to its problems, though with more success as a soldier than as an administrator. Often with barbarian recruits, he built up a powerful field army distinct from the frontier guards; it was stationed in cities within the empire. This was a strategically sound decision which proved itself in the fighting power the empire showed in the East for the next two centuries. Constantine also disbanded the Praetorian Guard and created a new, German, bodyguard. He restored a stable gold currency and paved the way to the abolition of payments of taxes in kind and the restoration of a money economy. His fiscal reforms had more mixed results but attempted some readjustment of the weight of taxation so that more should be borne by the rich. None of these things, though, struck contemporaries as much as his attitude to Christianity.

Constantine gave the Church official houseroom. He thus played a more important part in shaping its future than any other Christian layman, and was to be called the ‘thirteenth Apostle’. Yet his personal relationship to Christianity was complicated. He grew up intellectually with the monotheistic predisposition of many late classical men and was in the end undoubtedly a convinced believer (it was not then unusual for Christians to do as he did and postpone baptism until their deathbed). But he believed out of fear and hope, for the god he worshipped was a god of power. His first adherence was to the sun-god whose sign he bore and whose cult was already officially associated with that of the emperor. Then, in 312, on the eve of battle, and as a result of what he believed to be a vision, he ordered his soldiers to put on their shields a Christian monogram. This showed a willingness to show suitable respect to whatever gods there might
be. He won the battle and thenceforth, though continuing publicly to acknowledge the cult of the sun, he began to show important favours to the Christians and their god.

One manifestation of this was an edict the following year, which was issued by another of the contenders for the empire, after agreement with Constantine at Milan. It restored to Christians their property, and granted them the toleration that other religions enjoyed. The justification may reveal Constantine’s own thinking as well as his wish to arrive at a satisfactory compromise formula with his colleague, for it explained its provisions by the hope ‘that whatever divinity dwells in the heavenly seat may be appeased and be propitious towards us and to all who are placed under our authority’. Constantine went on to make considerable gifts of property to the churches, favouring, in particular, that of Rome. Besides providing important tax concessions to the clergy, he conferred an unlimited right to receive bequests on the Church. Yet for years his coins continued to honour pagan gods, notably the ‘Unconquered Sun’.

Constantine gradually came to see himself as having a quasi-sacerdotal role, and this was of the first importance in the further evolution of the imperial office. He saw himself as responsible to God for the well-being of the Church, to which he more and more publicly and unequivocally adhered. After 320 the sun no longer appeared on his coins and soldiers had to attend church parades. But he was always cautious of the susceptibilities of his pagan subjects. Though he later despoiled temples of their gold while building splendid Christian churches and encouraging converts by preferment, he did not cease to tolerate the old cults.

In some of Constantine’s work (like that of Diocletian) there was the development of things latent and implicit in the past, an extension of earlier precedents. This was true of his interventions in the internal affairs of the Church. As early as 272, the Christians of Antioch had appealed to the emperor to remove a bishop and in 316 Constantine himself tried to settle a controversy in North Africa by installing a bishop of Carthage against the will of a local sectarian group known as Donatists. Constantine came to believe that the emperor owed to God more than a grant of freedom to the Church or even an endowment. His conception of his role evolved towards that of the guarantor and, if need be, the imposer of the unity which God required as the price of His continuing favour. When he turned on the Donatists it was this view of his duty which gave them the unhappy distinction of being the first schismatics to be persecuted by a Christian government. Constantine was the creator of Caesaropapism, the belief that the secular ruler has divine authority to settle religious belief, and of the notion of established religion in Europe for the next thousand years.
Constantine’s greatest act in the ordering of religion came just after he had formally declared himself a Christian in 324 (a declaration preceded by another victory over an imperial rival who had, interestingly, been persecuting Christians). This was the calling of the first ecumenical council, the Council of Nicaea. It met for the first time in 325, nearly 300 bishops being present, and Constantine presided over it. Its task was to settle the response of the Church to a new heresy, Arianism, whose founder, Arius, taught that the Son did not share the divinity of the Father. Though technical and theological, the nice issues to which this gave rise prompted enormous controversy. Grave scandal was alleged by Arius’s opponents. Constantine sought to heal the division and the Council laid down a Creed which decided against the Arians, but went on in a second reunion to readmit Arius to communion after suitable declarations. That this did not satisfy all the bishops (and that there were few from the West at Nicaea) was less important than that Constantine had presided at this crucial juncture, proclaiming the emperor’s enjoyment of special authority and responsibility. The Church was clothed in the imperial purple.

There were other great implications, too. Behind the hair-splitting of the theologians lay a great question both of practice and principle: in the new ideological unity given to the empire by the official establishment of Christianity, what was to be the place of diverging Christian traditions, which were social and political, as well as liturgical and theological, realities? The churches of Syria and Egypt, for example, were strongly tinctured by their inheritance of thought and custom both from the Hellenistic culture and the popular religion of those regions. The importance of such considerations helps to explain why the practical outcome of Constantine’s ecclesiastical policy was less than he had hoped. The Council did not produce an emollient formula to make easier a general reconciliation in a spirit of compromise. Constantine’s own attitude to the Arians soon relaxed (in the end, it was to be an Arian bishop who baptized him as he lay dying), but the opponents of Arius, led by the formidable Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, were relentless. The quarrel remained unsettled when Arius died, and Constantine’s own death followed not long after. Yet Arianism was not to prosper in the East. Its last successes, instead, were won by Arian missionaries to the Germanic tribes of south-east Russia; borne by these barbarian nations, Arianism was to survive until the seventh century in the West.

How much of the Church’s rise was in the end inevitable it is hardly profitable to consider. Certainly – in spite of a North African Christian tradition which saw the state as an irrelevance – something so positively important as Christianity could hardly have remained for ever unrecognized
by the civil power. Yet someone had to begin. Constantine was the man who took the crucial steps which linked Church and empire for so long as the empire should last. His choices were historically decisive. The Church gained most, for it acquired the charisma of Rome. The empire seemed less changed. Yet Constantine’s sons were brought up as Christians and even if the fragility of much in the new establishment was to appear soon after his death in 337, he had registered a decisive break with the tradition of classical Rome. Ultimately, unwittingly, he founded Christian Europe and, therefore, the modern world.

One of his decisions only slightly less enduring in its effects was his foundation, ‘on the command of God’, he said, of a city to rival Rome on the site of the old Greek colony of Byzantium at the entrance to the Black Sea. It was dedicated in 330 as Constantinople. Though his own court remained at Nicomedia and no emperor was to reside there permanently for another fifty years, Constantine was again shaping the future. For a thousand years Constantinople would be a Christian capital, unsullied by pagan rites. After that, for 500 years more, it would be a pagan capital and the constant ambition of would-be successors to its traditions.

Once again, though, this is anticipating too much. We must return to the empire as Constantine left it, in Roman eyes still coterminous with civilization. Its frontiers ran for the most part along natural features which recognized, more or less, the demarcations of distinct geographical or historical regions. Hadrian’s wall in Britannia was their northern limit; in continental Europe they followed the Rhine and Danube. The Black Sea coasts north of the mouths of the Danube had been lost to barbarians by 305
BC
, but Asia Minor remained in the empire; it stretched as far east as the shifting boundary with Persia. Further south, the Levant coast and Palestine lay within a frontier which ran to the Red Sea. The lower Nile valley was still held by the empire and so was the North African coast; the African frontiers were the Atlas and the desert.

This unity was, for all Constantine’s great work, in large measure an illusion. As the first experiments with co-emperors had shown, the world of Roman civilization had grown too big for a unified political structure, however desirable the preservation of the myth of unity might be. Growing cultural differentiation between a Greek-speaking East and a Latin-speaking West, the new importance of Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt (in all of which there were large Christian communities) after the establishment of Christianity, and the continuing stimulus of direct contact with Asia in the East, all drove the point home. After 364 the two parts of the old empire were only once more and then only briefly ruled by the same man. Their institutions diverged further and further. In the East the emperor
was a theological as well as a juridical figure; the identity of Empire and Christendom and the emperor’s standing as the expression of divine intention were unambiguous. The West, on the other hand, had by 400 already seen adumbrated the distinction of the roles of Church and State which was to father one of the most creative arguments of European politics. There was an economic contrast, too: the East was populous and could still raise great revenues, while the West was by 300 unable to feed itself without Africa and the Mediterranean islands. It now seems obvious that two distinct civilizations were to emerge, but it was a long time before any of the participants could see that.

Instead, they saw something much more appalling: the western empire simply disappeared. By 500, when the boundaries of the eastern empire were still much what they had been under Constantine, and his successors were still holding their own against the Persians, the last western emperor had been deposed and his insignia sent to Constantinople by a barbarian king who claimed to rule as the eastern emperor’s representative in the West.

This is striking: what, actually, had collapsed? What had declined or fallen? Fifth-century writers bewailed it so much that it is easy to have the impression, heightened by such dramatic episodes as sackings of Rome itself, that the whole of society fell apart. This was not so. It was the state apparatus which collapsed, some of its functions ceasing to be carried out, and some passing into other hands. This was quite enough to explain the alarm. Institutions with a thousand years of history behind them gave way within a half-century. It is hardly surprising that people have asked why ever since.