The Triumph of Christianity (21 page)

The Donatist Controversy

At the beginning of his reign, Constantine assumed there “was one united body of Christians.”
²⁵
Events in North Africa soon challenged that assumption. At issue was the status of clergy, including bishops, who were
traditores
who had deserted the faith and collaborated with Roman officials during the Great Persecution—the many who had handed over their copies of scripture to be burned and some who had even betrayed other Christians to the oppressors. A major group of North African bishops held that these men were expelled from the church and that any and all sacraments performed by these clerics were therefore invalid. Of central concern here was the consecration of new bishops. The leader of this faction was Donatus (315–355), the bishop of Carthage, and hence the group became known as the Donatists. In opposition were church leaders, including
traditores,
who held that penance was available for all sins and therefore, having undergone the required acts of penance, the
traditores
were not only forgiven, but restored to full communion, and thus to office.

Seeking to settle this dispute, Constantine called a council at Arles. At this point Constantine only ruled in the West, so only Western bishops attended—including three from Britain. In addition to passing many measures, including a ban on gladiatorial matches, the bishops excommunicated Donatus. This was ignored in Africa where the Donatists continued to dominate. So, in 317 Constantine sent troops to Carthage to enforce the council’s verdict. But the Donatists stood firm and in 321 Constantine withdrew his forces. Eventually, it was left to St. Augustine, as bishop of Hippo, to propel Roman forces to crush the Donatists. Even so they continued in the more remote communities into the seventh century.

By far the most important aspect of the case of the Donatists is that it marked the first use of repressive state power on behalf of the church. Constantine’s proclamation against the persecution of Christians would now apply only to
some
Christians. The affair also acknowledged the state as a legitimate arbiter of church policies. Constantine wanted to settle disputes within the church and maintain unity. But, just as he did not tolerate disobedience to his political rule, he was quite willing to destroy those who opposed the religious positions he decided to favor. All of these negative aspects of the new relationship between church and state were greatly reinforced during the battle over Arianism.

Arianism

A theological dispute had long been brewing among church intellectuals, especially in North Africa and the East. Was Jesus equal to God, having always existed? Or was he created by God, and hence there was a time when Jesus did not exist? Tradition stood with the always existing Son. But there were a number of dissenters, many of them bishops who had studied under Lucian of Antioch (240–312), a renowned theologian who was martyred at the end of the Great Persecution. Eventually Arius (250–336), a priest in Alexandria, emerged as the intellectual leader of this group who believed in the creation of Jesus, and as the matter became a major dispute within the church, the doctrine became known as Arianism. Eventually the conflict became so intense (somewhat inflamed by antagonisms concerning priests and bishops who had collaborated during the persecution) that Constantine took the matter in hand.

In 325 the emperor assembled a council at Nicaea (near Constantinople). Having been urged to do so by Constantine, the council adopted a formal creed, or statement of orthodox belief. Known as the Nicene Creed, it is still repeated in many Christian churches, and it explicitly rejects Arianism, if in somewhat convoluted form. In addition, Arius and several of his supporters were denounced and exiled and all copies of Arius’s writings were ordered to be burned. In 336, with Constantine’s concurrence, church officials decided to readmit Arius to communion, but he died on the way to Constantinople (some believe he was poisoned).

Thus the position was adopted that there could be no dissent and only one Christianity. This was a legal, not a sociological, position—as the latter holds that there never is complete agreement on religious matters and dissent is inherent in the variation in religious tastes that exists among members of any population (see chapter 2). Hence Constantine’s interference ensured a future of nasty persecutions of dissenting Christians.

Pagan Coexistence

A
LTHOUGH CONSTANTINE PLAYED A
central role in repressing all Christian dissent, he was remarkably tolerant of paganism throughout his reign. Constantine neither outlawed paganism nor did he condone persecution of non-Christians. In fact, although Constantine subsidized and gave official standing to the Christian church, he continued some funding of pagan temples.
²⁶
As for charges that he encouraged Christian mobs to destroy pagan temples, a claim that originated with the early Christian historian Eusebius who used it to show how “the whole rotten edifice of paganism” rapidly came crashing down as part of God’s plan, “it is very likely that Eusebius report[ed] everything he knew of temple destruction,” yet he could offer only four instances
²⁷
and only one of these seems a legitimate case. The other three involved temples of Aphrodite, which featured ritual prostitution.

More significant even than his toleration of pagan temples, Constantine continued to appoint pagans to the very highest positions, including those of consul and prefect (see chapter 11). In addition, pagan philosophers played a prominent role in his court,
²⁸
and depictions of the sun god appeared on his coins. Indeed, “Constantine directed his most ferocious rhetoric” not against pagans, but against Christian dissidents: Donatists, Arianists, Valentinians, Marcionites, and the “Gnostic” schools.
²⁹
Partly for these reasons, ever since Gibbon’s time, leading historians have dismissed Constantine’s conversion as an insincere political gambit. But, the most recent historians
³⁰
now regard Constantine’s conversion as genuine and cite the persistence of pagan elements in his reign as examples of his commitment to religious harmony. Of critical importance are two edicts issued by Constantine soon after he defeated Licinius to reunite the empire. Both stressed peaceful pluralism.

The
Edict to the Palestinians
is notable for the pluralism of its language. In it, Constantine repeatedly referred to God, but never mentioned Christ, using “phrases common to Christians and pagans alike [which] is consistent with the search for a common denominator that was the hallmark of his religious policy.”
³¹
But, it is the
Edict to the Eastern Provincials
that fully expresses Constantine’s commitment to accommodation and his rejection of coercive forms of conversion. He began with a prayer, invoking “the most mighty God” on behalf of “the common benefit of the world and all mankind, I long for your people to be at peace and to remain free from strife.” He went on: “Let those who delight in error alike with those who believe partake of the advantages of peace and quiet.... Let no one disturb another, let each man hold fast to that which his soul wishes, let him make full use of this.” He continued, “What each man has adopted as his persuasion, let him do no harm with this to another.... For it is one thing to undertake the contest for immortality voluntarily, another to compel it with punishment.” Finally, Constantine condemned “the violent opposition to wicked error... immoderately embedded in some souls, to the detriment to our common salvation.”
³²

Thus, in both word and deed Constantine supported religious pluralism, even while making his own commitment to Christianity explicit. In fact, during Constantine’s reign, “friendships between Christian bishops and pagan grandees” were well known, and the many examples of the “peaceful intermingling of pagan and Christian thought may... be thought of as proof of the success of [Constantine’s]... policy” of consensus and pluralism.
³³

The Persian Massacres

T
HUS FAR THE FOCUS
has been on the role of Constantine vis-à-vis Christianity and paganism within the empire—a subject that has received lavish scholarly coverage. But hardly any attention has been paid to his role in provoking an extraordinary slaughter of the Christians in Persia. Oddly, although the number who died in these massacres probably greatly exceeded the number who died in all the persecutions by the Romans put together, this aspect of Christian history has been almost totally ignored.
Encyclopedia Britannica
covers the Persian massacres in one sentence in its biography of the Persian ruler Shāpūr II and in two sentences in its history of Iran. In his magisterial
Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church,
W. H. C. Frend gave the Persian martyrs no mention at all. John Fox (1517–1587) devoted half a page of his
Book of Martyrs
to “Persecutions of the Christians in Persia,” but told nothing of the events involved and is content to fill most of his space with a letter supposedly sent to the King of Persia by Constantine, urging him to embrace his local Christians. If the letter is authentic, it was odd of Constantine to have written it since Rome and Persia had been bitter enemies for centuries. In any event, Constantine’s embrace of Christianity was the primary factor prompting the Persians to massacre Christians. It happened like this.

Shāpūr II was proclaimed as King of Persia at his birth in 309, and after a period of regency, he took command and ruled until his death in 379. In 337, the year that Constantine died, Shāpūr sent his forces across the Tigris River to attempt to reconquer Armenia and Mesopotamia from the Romans. Shāpūr was fully aware of the special status Constantine had conferred upon Christianity, and consequently he feared that the Persian Christians were potential traitors in conflicts with Rome. These fears were exploited by Zoroastrian priests who whispered to Shāpūr “that there is no secret” that the Christian bishops do not reveal to the Romans.
³⁴

As a response, the king imposed a double tax on Christians, but it did not cause the flood of defections he had anticipated. So, on Good Friday 344, Shāpūr had five bishops and one hundred Christian priests beheaded outside the walls of the city of Susa, and the massacres began.
³⁵
For the next several decades “Christians were tracked down and hunted from one end of the empire to the other.”
³⁶
Before it ended, soon after Shāpūr died, tens of thousands had been killed—one source estimated that thirty-five thousand were martyred,
³⁷
and another that “as many as 190,000 Persian Christians died.”
³⁸
Nevertheless, substantial numbers of Persian Christians survived and the faith soon reestablished itself as a major presence.

Conclusion

T
HE CREATION OF A
rich, powerful, and intolerant Christian church was the primary legacy of the conversion of Constantine. Far better that he had remained a pagan who opposed religious persecution, while allowing Christian diversity to flourish.

Chapter Eleven
The Demise of Paganism

R
ECENTLY, IT HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE
to admire the old pagans and to wish they had managed to withstand the rise of Christianity. Jonathan Kirsch began his recent book,
God Against the Gods,
with a brief catalogue of lurid episodes of religious intolerance, and then proceeded to regret that the emperor Julian failed to undo Constantine’s boost of Christianity and restore the empire to paganism: “it is tantalizing to consider how close he [ Julian] came to bringing the spirit of respect and tolerance back into Roman government and thus back into the roots of Western civilization, and even more tantalizing to consider how different our benighted world might have been if he had succeeded.”
¹
Similarly, in his prizewinning study of Hellenism, Glen Bowersock wrote that “polytheism is by definition tolerant and accommodating.”
²
And Ramsay MacMullen claimed that paganism was “no more than a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition.”
³

This view of religious history was initiated during the so-called Enlightenment by Edward Gibbon (1737–1784), who claimed that the triumph of Christianity was produced by “intolerant zeal.”
⁴
Pagans were unable to survive this militant Christian onslaught because they were, in Gibbon’s oft-quoted phrase, imbued with “the mild spirit of antiquity.”
⁵
Should anyone object to this claim by citing pagan persecutions of Christians, Voltaire (1684–1778) confided that the persecution of Christians had never amounted to much
⁶
and Gibbon agreed, charging that Christian “writers of the fourth and fifth centuries” exaggerated the extent of the persecutions because they “ascribed to the magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts against heretics.” In truth, Gibbon continued, the Roman magistrates “behaved like men of polished manners... [and] respected the rules of justice.”
⁷
There is not a hint here about Christians being burned on poles to light up Nero’s garden.

Even many generations of Christian writers, going as far back as Eusebius (275–339), proudly claimed that once armed with the authority of the state the church had quickly smashed all the pagan temples and crushed all opposition. Until recently, not even major Christian historians have objected to Gibbon’s conclusion that the Christianization of Rome was due to “the irresistible power of the Roman emperors”
⁸
in concert with the repressive nature of the Roman Catholic Church. As the distinguished historian Peter Brown summed up: “From Gibbon and Burckhardt to the present day, it has been assumed that the end of paganism was inevitable, once confronted by the resolute intolerance of Christianity; that the interventions of the Christian emperors in its suppression were decisive.”
⁹

But it isn’t true!

As Peter Brown continued: large, active pagan communities “continued to enjoy, for many generations, [a] relatively peaceable... existence.” All that really happened is that they slowly “slipped out of history.”
¹⁰

During the past generation many distinguished historians
¹¹
not only have reaffirmed the reality of the pagan persecutions of Christians; they also have greatly qualified and minimized claims concerning the Christian coercion of pagans. To this has been added renewed interest in the political aspects of Constantine’s rule (especially through the remarkable studies by H. A. Drake). Consequently, we now know that a period of relative tolerance and tranquility prevailed between Christians and pagans during Constantine’s reign. The Christians were, of course, growing rapidly in this era, but without substantial recourse to coercive methods. Enter Julian the Apostate. An examination of Emperor Julian’s anti-Christian efforts reveals how it fully rekindled Christian fears of renewed persecutions and thereby empowered the most militant elements in the early church. Even so, post-Julian efforts by this Christian faction to settle “old scores” with pagans resulted in only sporadic and scattered efforts at coercion and reprisal—far less extensive, much less severe, and not nearly as effective as had been thought. Nor was coercion of pagans backed by the state. Consider this clause from the Code of Justinian (529–534): “We especially command those persons who are truly Christians, or who are said to be so, that they should not abuse the authority of religion and dare to lay violent hands on Jews and pagans, who are living quietly and attempting nothing disorderly or contrary to law.”
¹²
As this suggests, there had been some attacks by Christians on pagans, but the overall record shows that in this same era pagan mobs also had attacked Christians from time to time. Far more surprising is how few attacks of either kind seem to have occurred.
¹³

Consequently, and despite the prevailing historical view, paganism wasn’t quickly obliterated. Instead, it seeped away very slowly. The Academy at Athens did not close until 529, and “even in most Christian Eddessa... organized communities of pagans were still sacrificing to Zeus-Hadad in the last quarter of the sixth century.”
¹⁴
When early Muslim forces threatened Carrhae (Harran) in 639, pagans still so outnumbered Christians in the city that all members of the delegation sent to negotiate with the Arabs were pagans.
¹⁵
In fact, there were still many active pagans and functioning temples to the gods in Greece and further east as late as the tenth century.
¹⁶
Moreover, for a considerable time in many parts of the empire, including some major cities, the prevailing religious perspectives and practices consisted of a remarkable amalgam of paganism and Christianity. Finally, paganism never fully died out in Europe; it was assimilated by Christianity. For example, many pagan festivals continued to be celebrated and many of the gods lingered under very thin Christian overlays. Although the medieval church went to extreme lengths to stamp out various Christian heresies such as the Cathars, it essentially ignored the persistence of paganism.

Now for the details.

Coexistence

C
ONSTANTINE WAS NOT RESPONSIBLE
for the triumph of Christianity. By the time he gained the throne, Christian growth already had become a tidal wave of exponential increase.
¹⁷
If anything, Christianity played a leading role in the triumph of Constantine, providing him with substantial and well-organized urban support. And although historians long reported bitter outcries by pagans against Constantine’s support of Christianity, the best recent scholars now agree that there is no evidence of such protests
¹⁸
and propose that even those pagans most directly involved regarded the emperor’s favors to the church as a “bearable evil.”
¹⁹

Well they might have, for as was recounted in the previous chapter, Constantine was very tolerant of paganism. Not only did he fail to suppress the temples, he continued to appoint some pagans to high office (see table 11.1, p. 193) while repeatedly advocating religious tolerance. This policy was continued by “the refusal of his successors for almost fifty years to take any but token steps against pagan practices.”
²⁰
And a public culture emerged that mixed Christian and pagan elements in ways that seem remarkable, given the traditional accounts of unrelenting repression. A newly famous example is a calendar prepared in 354 for an upper-class Roman.
²¹

The calendar was created by a prominent artist who later fulfilled commissions for Pope Damasus, and it is likely that many such calendars were circulated. As with Catholic calendars ever after, this one noted all of the festivals of the church and commemorated the burial dates of important popes. But it also included illustrated sections consisting of “representations of those rites of the Roman public cult associated with each month.” Careful examination of the calendar confirms that the Christian and pagan elements are not discordant elements, but, as Peter Brown put it, “form a coherent whole; they sidle up to each other.”
²²

Indeed, a sort of Christo-paganism was prevalent well into the fifth century, and probably later. In Ravenna during the 440s, the bishop expressed his dismay that “the new birth of the year is blessed by outworn sacrilege” in reaction to the participation of “the most Catholic princes” of the city in pagan rites involving their dressing as “the gods of Rome” and comporting themselves before a huge audience in the Hippodrome.
²³
In similar fashion, not even St. Augustine could convince his flock in Hippo that such matters as bountiful crops and good health were not, in effect, subcontracted to pagan gods by the One True God,
²⁴
as Christians in Hippo continued to regard it as both legitimate and valuable to perform pagan rites. In many parts of Europe, the use of paganism as magic has continued into the modern era.
²⁵

Unfortunately, the era of toleration that existed under Constantine was misrepresented by early Christian writers, particularly Eusebius, who wanted to show that the emperor was the chosen instrument to achieve God’s will that all traces of paganism be quickly stamped out and the One True Faith established as the Church Triumphant. It may have been an effective polemic, but it was spurious history and, worst of all, as we have seen, it has been avidly seized upon by those eager to place the church in the worst possible light. In truth it was not Constantine or his immediate successors who reinstituted religious persecution, but the last pagan emperor—the one whom Jonathan Kirsch wishes had won out.

Julian’s Folly

F
LAVIUS
C
LAUDIUS
J
ULIANUS, NOW
known as Julian the Apostate, had only a brief (361–363) and quite disastrous rule as emperor. Despite that, he has become a virtual saint among antireligious intellectuals. Edward Gibbon complained
²⁶
that Julian’s many virtues have been “clouded” by the “irreconcilable hostility” of his Christian enemies who despised him for his “devout and sincere attachments to the gods of Athens and Rome.”
²⁷
Two centuries later, Gore Vidal turned Julian’s life into an heroic novel. Throughout, the central theme has been that while Julian did seek to revive the vigor of paganism, he did so in a tolerant spirit. The truth is quite different.

Julian was ostensibly raised as a Christian, but some of his prominent tutors were pagans and they steeped him in the Greek classics.
²⁸
Under their tutelage, Julian became a puritanical,
²⁹
ascetic, and fanatical
³⁰
pagan, who had been initiated into several of the mystery cults, including the Eleusinian mysteries
³¹
and probably Mithraism
³²
as well. Julian was careful to comport “himself publicly as a Christian while worshipping the pagan gods,”
³³
until he took the throne. Once installed as emperor, Julian loudly revealed his contempt for those he reviled as “Galileans” whose “haughty ministers,” according to Gibbon, “neither understood nor believed their religion”
³⁴
and at once set about trying to restore paganism as the state-supported, dominant faith.

Not wanting to create new martyrs, Julian did not initiate the bloody persecution of Christians à la Nero or Diocletian, but he did condone the torture of several bishops, exiled others, and ignored the “summary executions that seem to have taken place in large numbers in central and southern Syria during [his] reign.”
³⁵
Thus there was no imperial response when the “holy virgins [in Heliopolis] were rent limb from limb and their remains thrown to the pigs.”
³⁶
When knowledge that a pagan emperor now ruled prompted pagans in Alexandria to torture the city’s Christian bishop, to tear him limb from limb, and to then crucify “many Christians,” Julian’s main concern was to obtain the dead bishop’s library for himself.
³⁷

In a gesture that H. A. Drake compared to “a schoolboy thumbing his nose at his teachers,”
³⁸
Julian revived the widespread celebration of blood sacrifices, sometimes involving a hundred cattle at a time, a practice that had long been outlawed in response to Christian influence. In addition, Julian cut off state funding of the churches and subsidized the temples. He replaced Christians with pagans in high imperial offices (see table 11.1). In an action that was far more significant than it might appear to modern readers, Julian made it illegal for Christians to teach the classics. This meant that upper-class parents had to choose between sending their offspring to be instructed by pagans or deny them the opportunity to acquire “the language, the looks, the innumerable coded signals that were absorbed unconsciously with classical
paideia
[or education, without which] Christian children would not have been able to compete in the elite culture of classical antiquity, as Julian knew full well.”
³⁹

But, as Drake noted, the deepest of all the “wounds [Julian] was able to inflict, despite a relatively short tenure,” was to revive Christian anxieties that another era of vicious persecution lay ahead. “Christians at the time... had no assurance that another Julian was not in the offing, and they could plausibly fear that worse was yet to come.”
⁴⁰
Consequently, “Julian was a blessing” for those Christians who opposed pluralism. As Drake summed up: “The effect of Julian’s efforts was to polarize Christians and pagans, to remove the middle ground that traditional culture had previously provided, while at the same time lending credence to militant fears of a revival of persecution.”
⁴¹
Julian’s friend and admirer Liabius agreed that Julian “refused the use of force, but still the threat of fear hung over [the Christians], for they expected to be blinded or beheaded: rivers of blood would flow in massacres, they thought, and the new master would devise new-fangled tortures, the fire, sword, drowning, burial alive, hacking and mutilation seemed child’s play. Such had been the behaviour of his predecessors and they expected his measures to be more severe still.”
⁴²