When Church became Empire

When Church became Empire

Christianity in the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries

INTRODUCTION

Around the year AD 485, in the great city of Antioch, a curious crowd was gathering to see an unusual spectacle: a parrot that had been taught to say the thrice holy (trisagion) hymn.¹ “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal,” it squawked, “who was crucified for us.”² It was these last words that really caught the crowd’s attention. They were an addition to the ancient prayer instituted by Antioch’s controversial bishop, Peter the woolworker.³ Already, their inclusion in the liturgy had prompted riots in which several people had been killed, and the atmosphere in the city remained tense.⁴ Coming upon the parrot, Isaac, a priest visiting from Edessa, a city on the Roman-Persian border, was so struck by the scene that he later preached a lengthy sermon about it.⁵ Writing in verse, Isaac quipped that “Even a bird has squawked that [Jesus’ crucifixion] is the crucifixion of God.”⁶

We might wonder why Antioch’s Christians should have cared so much about such a seemingly small point of liturgical tinkering? In this case, as Isaac made abundantly clear, the addition to the trisagion was intended as a defiant blow against the imperially approved decisions of the Council of Chalcedon. This council of bishops had been called in 451 to resolve the ongoing and fiery theological disputes among the churches of the eastern Mediterranean world concerning the precise relation of Christ’s nature (physis), person (hypostasis), and substance (ousia). Such terms can be baffling to most well-read Christians today. So why on earth did illiterate Christians in Antioch or Aramaic speakers in Edessa feel so strongly about a debate regarding subtle differences in Greek theological terminology?

Over a century and a half before a parrot was trained to oppose the Council of Chalcedon, the emperor Constantine (ruled 306-337) had astonished the Roman world by embracing the beliefs of the empire’s small Christian community. Only a decade earlier, the emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305) had initiated one of the most intense persecutions of Christians so far. Now they were welcome in the corridors of power, where the emperor was proclaiming his own devotion to their God. Constantine also attempted to facilitate and, when that failed, compel agreement between Christians. Now that Christianity had been officially recognised as legal, and especially now that Constantine had made his own Christian beliefs public, the involvement of the emperor in the concerns of so significant a community of imperial subjects was inevitable. For the first time the affairs of the church began to become mixed up with the affairs of the empire. Whether such a mixing could ever work was a debated question, in Constantine’s own day as much as our own. Inadvertently, in his quest for unity, he had set in motion a process that would lead to the first great divisions in the church.

But what was it like to be a Christian in this changing world and changing church? In this episode we’ll explore how ordinary Christians experienced and responded to the Christianising policies of the emperors and the theological decisions of church councils. What drew people in the fourth and fifth centuries, in greater numbers than ever before, to start going to church and identifying as Christians? How much of a role did Christian emperors’ promotion of Christianity and persecution of paganism play in this growth? Was this still in any way a grassroots movement driven by encounters with Christ, and the radically transformative Good News of a loving God? Did the emperors direct the theological debates of imperially summoned councils? Why then did so many ordinary Christians care so much about their abstract theological definitions? Enough sometimes even to riot in support of, or objection to, their imperially sanctioned decisions. And how, indeed, did Christians wrestle with their faith in a servant king becoming the religion of power emperors and violent crowds?

Emperors

The world which Constantine’s sons inherited was one in which “everything had been turned upside down.”⁷ The many ancient and ancestral gods upon whose power and favour the empire’s fortunes had for so many centuries relied on had been suddenly put aside by the emperor. Constantine instead honoured only one God, whom he associated with the God of the Christians. As unexpected as the emperor’s interest in the shockingly exclusive beliefs of this strange group might have been, the impact was not short lived. Under Constantine and his sons, who succeeded him as co-emperors,⁸ Christianity began to be widely adopted among the many new men at court. Constantine had brought unity and order back to the empire with the longest reign of any emperor since Augustus (r. 27 BC-AD 14). For many, this was proof enough of the wisdom and efficacy of his new approach to the divine. Suddenly the beliefs of the Christians had to be taken seriously.

BISHOP PEGASIUS – SEEKING STATUS

There was certainly a sense among some that associating with Christianity was a good strategy for winning imperial favour. Among these had perhaps been Pegasius, bishop of Ilium. In 362, he evidenced the shallowness of his commitment to Christianity by applying for a job as a priest of the old Roman gods under the new emperor Julian (r. 360-363).⁹ Constantine’s last surviving son died childless and was succeeded by his cousin Julian. Julian, too, had been raised a Christian, but as a young man he had become increasingly disillusioned with Christianity.¹⁰ He had begun exploring the beliefs of the Neoplatonist philosophers and embraced the old gods of the empire.¹¹ Julian only seems to have gone public about his reactionary beliefs after becoming emperor, when he immediately set about attempting to restore (and reform) the empire’s ancestral rites. One of his initiatives was to organise an institution of priests in imitation of the Christian bishops. Bishop Pegasius was one of those who applied.

Had Pegasius, then, originally become a bishop merely out of ambition for power? Julian mused.¹² Perhaps. Since Constantine’s reign, bishops had increasingly received imperial recognition and support. Gradually they were being integrated into the machinery of imperial governance, with their authority extending beyond just the Christian community. Bishops were now coming to be drawn from among the traditional local authorities. Some of these, no doubt, sought to become bishops as a way of gaining status in the local community. Under Julian, such bishops and courtiers were again changing their clothing. As Julian set about purging Christians from the court, some clearly had a flexible enough understanding of the divine powers to shed the name Christian and retain their position.¹³

Julian had actually met Pegasius a number of years before, when the bishop had served as the young prince’s guide around the remains of the ancient city of Troy. Julian had expected to find the city’s temples in ruins, having heard that the zealous Pegasius had torn them down. Instead, he found them pristine. Together they approached the altars of Hector and Achilles, the two great heroes and deadly foes of the Trojan war, both slain in the conflict between the fickle and capricious gods. To Julian’s surprise, an offering of flickering candles illuminated the feet of the heroes, while the oil which anointed their heads dripped down and glistened on their bronze forms. “Is it not natural that brave men should be worshipped just as martyrs are revered by the Christians?”¹⁴ Pegasius had explained. Had this bishop, like Julian himself, harboured old beliefs behind an imperially sanctioned role?¹⁵ Desire for imperial status might help motivate switches between Christianity and polytheism, but perhaps it was never quite so simple, or so purely mercenary. This new God was powerful, true, but that did not necessarily mean the old forces were any less so. The spiritual landscape was changing, and those caught up in it were figuring out where they fitted into it all.

Julian’s counter-revolution, however, proved to be short lived. In 363 he was killed while campaigning against the Persians. Constantine’s dynasty died with him, but Christianity was here to stay. After a dizzying succession of joint emperors, Theodosius I (r. 379-392) emerged as one of the last great rulers of a united empire. Under his reign, the balance between polytheists and Christians, which had been maintained since Constantine, was abandoned and Christianity was declared unambiguously the official faith of the empire.

LIBANIUS THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE END OF THE TEMPLES

Libanius could remember his childhood growing up in Antioch before the reign of Constantine, and the visits he had frequently paid to the city’s bustling temples. The shrines of the gods had in those days still been choked by fumes tinged with the rich smells of incense and charred fat. The altar stones and steps, too, had shone with the blood of a procession of animal sacrifices, poured out to placate and persuade the spirits who haunted the world and directed its terrible rhythms. As the blood flowed, so too did the rivers and rain, making the crops flourish.¹⁶ By the favour of the gods, the empire was sustained. Here among the altars were spots where the divine powers hung close, and men and women could come near with all their pleading petitions. Already though, these institutions were less glorious than they had been in the days of Libanius’ grandfathers. Imperial subsidies had slowly dried up as successive emperors had withdrawn funds to instead pay for the defence of the empire. With the coming of Constantine this trickle of support had ended completely.¹⁷ Under Constantine’s sons, the blood, too, began to stop flowing. To the newly Christian emperors, the sacrificial shedding of animal blood appeared as a particularly revolting aspect of the old worship. Constantine made limited attempts to ban blood sacrifice, implemented more forcefully under his sons and reiterated under successive emperors.¹⁸ Yet, at the many remaining altars, Libanius and others continued to burn offerings of incense as a reminder to the gods that there still remained many who honoured and remembered them.¹⁹ With the reign of Theodosius I, however, things were changing fast. In the countryside around Antioch, the temples had begun to burn.

Around 386, Libanius, now an eminent philosopher and teacher of Greek rhetoric, penned an appeal to the emperor. Bands of wild monks, he reported, roved the Syrian countryside, tearing down the roofs and walls of the temples and shrines, and smashing their altars and statues.²⁰ Meanwhile, the bishop of Antioch refused to condemn them, and even defended their actions, arguing that illicit blood sacrifices had been continuing at these country shrines.²¹ But, with their temples gone, what hope did the country folk have for the success of their harvests?²²

Libanius had every hope that the Christian emperor might intervene on behalf of the ancient and beautiful temples, which were legally protected so long as they didn’t engage in blood sacrifice.²³ Much, however, remained at the discretion of local imperial authorities, to whom the emperor increasingly gave sanction to destroy and repurpose temples. At around the same time as Libanius was writing to the emperor Theodosius, imperial officials arrived with soldiers in the nearby city of Apamea, also in Syria, intent on the destruction of its grand temple. There they enlisted the help of the city’s bishop, Marcellus, in the demolition of the great temple of Jupiter.²⁴ This is one of the first recorded incidents of a bishop taking a direct role in the destruction of a temple. Such authority was usually reserved for imperial officials, and this is revealing of the degree to which bishops were increasingly taking on the roles of civil authorities. With imperial sanction (and a band of soldiers and gladiators), Marcellus subsequently carried out a campaign of temple destruction, until he was finally lynched by an enraged mob of polytheists.²⁵

For Christians like bishop Marcellus, the gods whom their ancestors had feared, placated, and revered, appeared to them to be in reality demons.²⁶ By destroying the altars at which they, their parents, and their grandparents had once offered sacrifices, they were breaking free from their own pasts. By driving out the demons who still held their neighbours in slavery, they were continuing the work of Christ, who had broken the power of the evil spirits. Monks were frequently to be found in the vanguard of temple demolition, because it appeared to them as an extension of their own visceral fight with the demons. In the country around Antioch, the monks were proclaiming Christ’s victory over the powers of evil and death, clearing the demons out of every corner of the countryside.

VIOLENCE IN ALEXANDRIA – THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SERAPEUM

The most notorious act of destruction occurred in 391 in Alexandria. Permission had recently been given by imperial authorities to the city’s bishop, Theophilus (d. 412), to turn a neglected temple into a church.²⁷ Clearing out the temple’s statues, he had collected an array of phallic objects sacred to the god Dionysus and paraded them triumphantly through the streets to be publicly ridiculed.²⁸ Alexandria’s polytheists were scandalised. Soon rioting broke out. Mobs of polytheists attacked and lynched any Christians they could find, while Christians gathered to fight back.²⁹ Finally falling back, the furious mob, led by a local philosopher, barricaded themselves within the great Serapeum.

This was the temple of the venerable Egyptian god Serapis. It was by far the most magnificent of all Alexandria’s temples, a sprawling complex of colonnades and halls filled with exquisite statuary and ornamentation.³⁰ It was through the rites performed here year in and year out that the Nile was persuaded to rise, sustaining all of Egypt’s fragile abundance.³¹ With the armed rioters occupying the Serapeum, the emperor now intervened. The rioters were persuaded to disperse in exchange for an imperial pardon. But Theodosius also issued orders for imperial troops to demolish the Serapeum, the heart of polytheist worship in the city.³² Alexandria’s Christians were to be permitted to build a church on its site, while the remaining temples in the city were indefinitely closed to the public.³³ Christians might benefit from such decisions, but it was the emperor and his senior officials who carried them out. Under Theodosius’ successors even incense offerings were condemned, and more and more temples were closed, turned over to use as public spaces or converted into churches.³⁴

Bishop Theophilus standing on top of the Serapeum.³⁵

CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA

In AD 412, Theophilus was succeeded as bishop of Alexandria by his nephew Cyril. As bishop, Cyril increasingly came to exercise control over the administration of the city.³⁶ Elsewhere in the fifth century, bishops were gradually stepping up to take responsibility for various aspects of civic organisation. Beyond leading the Christian community, now they might also be called on to organise the repairs of aqueducts and public baths or even the defence of the city walls.³⁷ As long-serving community leaders they were often more trusted and embedded in local society than the rotation of imperial officials dispatched from the capital. Yet, Cyril’s authority in Alexandria was greater than this. Under Cyril the church came to take control of civic affairs to an extent never before seen.³⁸ In consequence there was constant tension between the bishop and the imperial authorities.³⁹

The violence that had ensued around the actions of Cyril’s predecessors was not unusual.⁴⁰ Alexandria had a uniquely notorious reputation in the Roman world for its frequent bloody riots. Public tensions regularly led violent crowds to take to the streets and engage in fighting and looting. In previous centuries Christians and Jews had often been targets of mob violence. Yet, as Christian numbers increased, they became as susceptible as anyone else to taking out their frustrations in the streets.⁴¹ Polytheists and Christians attacked one another, as did Jews and Christians, while Christians perhaps fought each other even more frequently. In a society with little popular representation, particularly a large city like Alexandria, home to over a hundred thousand people, it was through the actions of crowds, and particularly through violence, that ordinary people made their voices heard. As the empire grew more Christian, rioting was one way Christians might also challenge imperial control. The responsibility of diffusing such tensions had been a chief concern of Roman governors since the days of Pontius Pilate. Now it increasingly fell to the local bishops.⁴² Cyril, on the other hand, was frequently accused of inflaming the crowds.⁴³ Not for the first time fighting broke out between Jews and Christians in Alexandria. In response, Cyril, taking the role of civil authority, ordered that the Jews should be expelled from the city and he had their synagogue plundered.⁴⁴ The imperial governor was outraged at the bishop’s unilateral behaviour. But when he challenged Cyril, bands of monks descended on the city to attack him, and fighting again spilled into the streets.⁴⁵ Worse was still to come.

THE MURDER OF HYPATIA

Living in Alexandria at this time was a woman named Hypatia, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest minds of her age.⁴⁶ She was a philosopher, a follower of the thought of Plato and Plotinus, and a revered teacher, particularly of mathematics and astronomy. She saw the world moving through the will of the divinity, and time progressing through the constant motion of the wandering stars. Her vision of the world had little room for a God small enough to become a man. Philosophers were above believing tales of petulant gods or of dying gods. Although, like Libanius, they could be wise enough to recognise that there might be wisdom and safety in the ancestral customs. Nevertheless, the imperial governor of Alexandria, himself a Christian, still readily turned to Hypatia for wisdom and advice. Among some Christians in the city, it was rumoured that it was her influence that had poisoned the governor’s mind against Cyril.⁴⁷ A plot was hatched. While travelling in her carriage one day, she was ambushed by a frenzied mob of Christians. They dragged her into a nearby church and there stoned her to death with roof tiles and dismembered her body.⁴⁸

Hypatia’s murder was a particularly shocking incident, not least to the Christians of her own day. Socrates, a contemporary Christian historian, deplored that her killers had brought shame on Cyril and the whole city. “To those who believe in Christ, murders, fighting, and such behaviour should be completely unthinkable!”⁴⁹ Incidents of horrendous violence stand out in the historical sources precisely because they were unusual and therefore notable. Indeed, we know of Christian violence primarily because Christian authors denounced it as unchristian. In the fourth and fifth centuries no one was persecuted for not being a Christian. Generally imperial officials seem to have only been interested in legislating against sacrifices and offerings to the gods, not against belief in them. So long as polytheists were not endangering society by making offerings to demons, no one needed to fear. Imperial involvement in church life, promotion of Christianity and destruction of temples were all in continuity with the logic of Roman religious policy prior to Constantine. It had been Christians’ refusal to participate in public worship and sacrifices which had once been thought worthy of punishment. While worship of the old gods was now forbidden, there was no comparative compulsion to participate in Christian worship. Indeed, polytheists and Jews were guaranteed complete legal protection from violence.⁵⁰ Throughout the fourth century there remained prominent polytheists at court and in the administration.⁵¹ And while non-Christians began to be excluded from imperial offices in the early fifth century,⁵² even by the end of that century there still remained many polytheists across the empire. The empire of the fourth and fifth centuries remained a world in which Christians and polytheists lived and worked alongside one another. Christian and polytheist thinkers taught and learned from one another, exchanged letters, and appealed on each other’s behalf. Hypatia had kept up a correspondence with her former student Synesius, bishop of Cyrene.⁵³ Among Libanius’ students had likewise been John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople (d. 407), and Theodore, the bishop of Mopsuestia (d. 428), while two of Socrates Scholasticus’ teachers had been polytheist priests in Alexandria during the Serapeum riots.⁵⁴ It was a world equally mixed and messy.

AUGUSTINE’S CONVERSION

Imperial toleration and support meant that Christians now became a more visible presence to people across the empire. In 384, a scholar named Augustine (354-430) had recently arrived in Milan to take up the role of professor of rhetoric at the imperial court. He had been brought up by a Christian mother in North Africa but had long ceased to call himself a believer. Moving in imperial court circles in Milan, however, Augustine now came into contact with the city’s bishop, Ambrose (d. 397). Ambrose had originally been a local imperial official, rising to become the city’s governor before being appointed bishop. He soon became famous for his eloquence as a scholar and preacher.⁵⁵ But to Augustine he appeared first “simply as a man who showed me kindness.”⁵⁶ Still, as a master of rhetoric himself, Augustine was intrigued by Ambrose’s reputation and began attending his sermons to see for himself whether the bishop was everything he had heard.⁵⁷

There was no immediate transformation in his life. He remained in thrall to his own desires and doubts. He sent away his concubine, the mother of his son, in order to contract a more profitable marriage, but was so overcome by heartbreak and lust that he immediately found himself another concubine.⁵⁸ Like Hypatia and the emperor Julian, he was a keen student of the Neoplatonist philosophers and similarly believed in one mighty creator God. He was, however, sceptical about Christ. What did Christians mean that He was both human and divine, and the saviour? There must have been many others like Augustine in the swelling congregations of the newly Christianising empire; living worldly lives, unbaptised, uncommitted, and uncertain. And yet, despite all the success of his career, in his heart Augustine remained restless. He was tormented by intellectual and spiritual dissatisfaction and uncertainty, which had only grown since meeting Ambrose.⁵⁹

Augustine was by no means the first great scholar to wrestle with Christianity. Only a few decades earlier a philosopher named Marius Victorinus had begun to read the gospels. Victorinus was a man very much after Augustine’s own heart. He was an intellectual giant who had risen to become imperial professor of rhetoric in the city of Rome. He served as tutor to many senators and had translated the works of the Neoplatonists into Latin from Greek.⁶⁰ Like most of Rome’s citizens and senators Victorinus was also a publicly active polytheist. And yet, in private, the elderly but still curious philosopher had been studying the bible and reading any Christian writings he could find. After many months of study, he concluded that he was convinced. He was a Christian. However, he didn’t see any reason why he should offend his polytheist friends by being too public about it. It didn’t seem particularly necessary for him to go to church, let alone be baptised. “Is it the walls of the church that make a Christian?” he had retorted to his Christian friend. How many others must there have been like Victorinus, whose worldviews were now shaped by Christianity, but who saw little need to commit further? And yet, something did eventually change. One day Victorinus headed to church for the first time, and a little later he was baptised in public, refusing offers of a discreet private baptism.⁶¹

At the same time as Augustine heard the story of Victorinus’ conversion, he was in the midst of his own intellectual struggle. Delving into the very works of the Neoplatonists which Victorinus had translated, Augustine had at last begun to find something intellectually satisfying. In them he “attained sight of the God who IS.”⁶² But when he opened the letters of the Apostle Paul, it seemed that whatever truth he had found in the philosophers, he now found here too, and more besides.⁶³ Like Victorinus, he was now convinced.

The earliest known portrait of Augustine, from the sixth century. Lateran Palace, Rome.

And yet, Augustine was still reluctant to commit. The changes to his life which Christ demanded appeared to him too weighty. For many, however, it was precisely Christianity’s uncompromising vision of virtue and counter-cultural living which proved so attractive. The emperors might now profess Christ, but this was still a world of stark inequality and everyday cruelty. Millions remained enslaved, gladiators still fought to the death for the bloodlust of crowds,⁶⁴ and infants were still regularly abandoned to die.⁶⁵ And yet, Christianity continued to confront Roman society’s assumptions with its radical vision of human value and equality. In Rome, a Christian hermit was stoned to death by an angry crowd while he attempted to disrupt the gladiator fights. The incident encouraged the emperor to finally put a stop to the games.⁶⁶ Christian consecrated virgins similarly rescued and raised babies which had been abandoned to die.⁶⁷ Exposure and killing of infants was outlawed by the emperors, and unwanted children were increasingly instead left outside churches.⁶⁸ Some Christians even began to challenge the ancient and universal institution of slavery.⁶⁹ If God had bought humans’ freedom, who were we to continue calling them slaves? While the emperor Julian had rejected Christianity, disdaining imperial hypocrites, he continued to envy the charity of Christian communities. He chastised the men of Antioch for having neglected to offer sacrifices while allowing their wives to donate their money to the Christians. When Christians fed the poor, they gained wider admiration and led people away from the worship of the gods.⁷⁰ “It is disgraceful,” Julian bemoaned, “that, when the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”⁷¹

In the summer of 386, while Augustine was staying with his friends in a country villa outside Milan, a friend visiting from the imperial court introduced him to the story of Antony the Great (d. 356).⁷² This Antony had given up a life of wealth and ease for one of self-denial and prayer in the Egyptian desert. Wonders and miracles had accompanied his change in lifestyle, and many people who were still alive in Augustine’s day had witnessed them. Augustine was amazed to hear that God continued to act in the ways he read about in scripture. This was the story of a new kind of hero. Once the heroes who the gods favoured and men admired had been mighty warriors and glorious rulers, but now it was the humble and lowly in whom God delighted. The lives of otherwise ordinary men and women witnessed to how powerfully present God could be in a life fully surrendered to Him. Antony seemed to have discovered a whole new way of living the good life. Already Antony’s story had inspired many other Christians to pursue similarly committed lives. Augustine’s friend told him about two other young men at the imperial court who, after reading, had been inspired to leave their promising careers and become monks.⁷³ “Why should we strive so hard to be the emperor’s friends,” they had reasoned, “when we could be God’s friends right here and now?”⁷⁴

Hearing these stories left Augustine devastated. He “shook with turmoil at the inescapability of the decision” and took himself off into a private corner of the garden, where he burst into tears.⁷⁵ “I felt captive to my sins and wanted to make an end of them.”⁷⁶ He thought of Antony and the hermits who had “exchanged their load for wings.”⁷⁷ At last, throwing open the bible to a random page, it seemed that the passages were speaking right to him.⁷⁸ “In an instant… the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”⁷⁹ Unbeknown to Augustine, one of his friends was at the same time undergoing a similar transformation on the other side of the garden. Augustine shortly afterwards resigned from imperial service and was baptised together with his friend and his son. Hearing the hymns which filled the church, tears of gladness flowed.⁸⁰ The restless Augustine had finally found rest.

As unusually intimate and dramatic as Augustine’s account of his Christianisation might appear, many of the other new Christians across the empire must have had similar experiences. With the conversion of the emperors, Christianity had become both legal and respectable, and Christians themselves were more frequently seen and encountered. At court in particular, their presence was inescapable. Emperors surrounded themselves with Christians, and bishops like Ambrose increasingly came to play an important civic role. Some, like Pegasius, certainly identified as Christians in order to gain the emperors’ favour or preserve their local civic prominence. Yet, many ordinary people throughout the empire must have increasingly counted Christians among their friends and family, as Augustine did. Like Augustine, too, many people must have been attending the newly prominent churches out of curiosity. Many of those who now filled congregations must have been unbaptised, holding a variety of beliefs. But Christian ideas and beliefs were also increasingly entertained and adopted, even by those who didn’t attend church, as had been the case for Victorinus. The conversion of the emperors had made Christianity thinkable and at times even fashionable. Yet, in spite of this, Christianity was attractive to many for the same reasons it always had been. Christians continued to proclaim a radical and challenging message, both attractive and transformative, socially and personally, a vision of a loving God who was close to human frailty.

Jesus healing. Mural from the catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, and a sarcophagus from the catacombs now in the Vatican Museum.

THE CHALLENGE OF EMPIRE

While the imperial embrace of Christianity created new possibilities, it also carried inherent tensions. Christians wrestled with their church becoming imperial, wealthy, and conventional. How could the pride and glory of emperors, the power struggles of bishops, and the violence of mobs ever sit comfortably with the example of Christ? As the empire Christianised so also was the church imperialised. Writing around the time of the demolition of the Serapeum, the Christian scholar Jerome lamented that: “the church first grew by being persecuted and crowned with martyrdom; but now, after reaching the Christian Emperors, it has increased in influence and in wealth but has decreased in Christian virtues.”⁸¹ As emperors sought to establish more control over church affairs, and increasingly to transform the church into an arm of the imperial state, they found themselves often in conflict with bishops.⁸² Ambrose, after leaving imperial service to become bishop, had prominently confronted several emperors. “The emperor is within the church, not above it,”⁸³ he had publicly preached, for “emperors are laymen and in matters of faith bishops judge emperors not emperors bishops!”⁸⁴

At the same time other Christians, like the layman Socrates, did not hold back from criticising the violent actions of Christian mobs or the imperious aspirations of bishops like Cyril. Augustine, in his book The City of God, attempted to make sense of these tensions. The real church, he demonstrated, existed apart from the temporary Roman Empire, as well as beyond its borders. This was the heavenly city, the city of God.⁸⁵ In their departure from ordinary life, ascetics and hermits like Antony challenged the increased worldliness of the church, seeking instead to find the city of God in the wilderness. And when emperors attempted to intervene in and direct church affairs, they often met fierce popular opposition from Christians at large. Across this period, growing numbers of ordinary Christians were willing to defy the emperor and the decisions of his imperially sanctioned councils when their rulings clashed with the believers’ own vision of Christ. But why did so many people care so much about the incredibly complex points of theology being debated at the councils? Enough indeed to take to the streets in opposition or at times indeed in support of their subtle definitions. Council debates did not merely stem from the desire of emperors for control, nor from bishops’ struggles for influence. But rather they were rooted in the intense concerns of ordinary Christians about their own relation to God.

Councils

NICAEA – BEGOTTEN NOT CREATED?

Long before a parrot was taught to sing the Trisagion, theological disagreements were already spawning songs. During the reign of Constantine, one could have heard ordinary men and women, “sailors, millers, and travellers on the high road,” singing ditties about the relation of God the father to Christ the son. These songs had been written by the controversial preacher Arius, who set them to popular tunes in order to disseminate his ideas more widely.⁸⁶ Arius had first been propelled to notoriety by an argument with the bishop of Alexandria over what it meant for Christ to have been begotten of the father. In Arius’ view, as he quipped, “there was a time when the Son was not.”⁸⁷ The clash between bishop and presbyter sent shock waves throughout the church in the eastern empire. Constantine was determined to heal this growing rift. In a letter to Arius and the bishop, the emperor commanded them to reconcile and stop discussing such abstract theology. By arguing about things they couldn’t possibly know or understand, so Constantine contended, they were causing confusion and division in the flock they should have been shepherding.⁸⁸ Yet, the emperor’s demands went unheeded. Determined, Constantine set about summoning a church council to resolve the issue.

Small councils, local and regional assemblies of bishops, had already become a common way for Christian communities to resolve disputes long before the emperor had become involved. These councils allowed Christians to perceive where the consensus naturally lay, and to come to resolutions which embraced as wide a consensus as possible. The council which Constantine now summoned at Nicaea was the first time so many bishops had ever assembled. Over two hundred came, along with thousands of priests and interested laity. Crucially, it was the first time bishops had been assembled at imperial command. Still, the outcome was neither predetermined nor influenced by the emperor. Constantine was simply determined that the dispute should be resolved. Whatever decision they arrived at, imperial force would confirm.⁸⁹

The result was the Nicene Creed, a formulation of belief which nearly all the bishops agreed to sign. Much of what the creed outlined was uncontroversial. Christians across the empire and beyond all already agreed on most of the books of the bible, and there were no rulings about its contents at the council. They also all agreed that Christ was divine. Rather, debate, based on shared scripture, was restricted to discussing precisely how the relation of Christ’s divinity to God the father should be described and understood. The great theological innovation of the creed was the term homoousios, which described Christ as being “of the same essence” as the father. To this, all subscribed except Arius and two bishops who were exiled from their churches. Peace, Constantine thought, had at last come. But his hopes were premature.

THE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES

Two great fleets of warships raced towards one another, oars and rams slicing through the waves. Their captains were thirsting for battle and seething from long-held grudges. Yet, as the ships clashed in combat, great dark storm clouds descended and enveloped them so that they could no longer distinguish who was friend or foe. The sea, too, swelled, and rising waves and plunging rain blurred and combined. The swirling winds filled the air with water and threw ships together in showers of splintering wood. If this was not enough, now some of the captains and crews began to turn on each other. Crews rushed to murder their captains, and bands of crewmen fought one another. The sounds of smashing waves, roaring winds, cracking timber, and the raging and screaming of men made any attempt at commands unintelligible. Even, finally, as the fatally breached ships sank slowly below the waves, still men continued to stab and strangle each other. This, indeed, was the metaphorical image that Basil (d. 379), a bishop in Cappadocia in northeast Anatolia, conjured up to describe the conflict which raged through the church in the decades following Nicaea.⁹⁰

In these years, Constantine and his sons and successors, faced with continued division, sought to enforce peace and compromise instead of creedal unity. Constantine permitted Arius to return and instead exiled several pro-Nicene partisans. Athanasius, bishop of Alexander, and the foremost defender of the Nicene definition, for instance, was exiled for his intolerance towards non-Nicenes, even being accused of encouraging the assault of another priest.⁹¹ Constantine’s sons likewise saw many pro-Nicenes as troublemakers and were willing to use even greater force to achieve unity and peace in the church. Yet, they still struggled to control the bishops. Athanasius proved a particular thorn, repeatedly defying the emperor and returning from exile to Alexandria.⁹² The emperors arranged various councils to try and restore unity, but with very limited success. Significant councils were called at Antioch in 342,⁹³ Serdica in 343,⁹⁴ Seleucia in Anatolia and Arminium in Italy in 359,⁹⁵ and Constantinople in 360.⁹⁶ The emperors and many of the assembled bishops promoted broad definitions in place of the Nicene creed, but these were unacceptable to the remaining stalwart proponents of Nicaea. Consensus proved impossible to create. None of these councils was as well attended as Nicaea had been, and Serdica in particular collapsed after the eastern bishops refused to meet with the western bishops, because they had brought Athanasius with them. Meanwhile, some bishops, including Athanasius, assembled their own smaller councils against imperial wishes, to try and promote the Nicene definition.⁹⁷ Try as the emperors might, the issue simply would not go away. The bishops were a constant uncontrollable annoyance, and even when the emperor could bully and threaten them into compromise, many in the wider church remained defiant. An emperor could summon the bishops and depose those who opposed him, but here his powers to control and direct the church ceased.

In the markets and the forums, it seemed at times that people could talk of nothing else except theological definitions and disputes. Whether you were at a party or walking down the street, you might be accosted by someone wanting to discuss the nature of the Trinity. When the moneychanger was giving you your coins, he might start asking you your opinion on whether the son was begotten or not, and when you asked the baker how much his loaves cost today, he might reply that, indeed, the Father was greater than the Son. Even once you had stripped off and were relaxing at the public baths, the attendant might, unprompted, propose to you that, in his opinion, the Son simply came from nothing. Neither was it just a matter of interest to working men, but women, too, might be heard debating with one another about whether Christ was co-eternal with the Father.⁹⁸ Bishops might decry the confusion which the endless public bickering of theologians was creating among ordinary believers, and advise their congregants not to go about idly spouting their opinions on things beyond human understanding – but it is evident that even the most ordinary people continued to care deeply.

They cared in some cases to the point of violence. In Constantinople, a confrontation between two rival claimants to be bishop led to rioting in the streets, which only ended with the death of an imperial general sent to quell the unrest. The pro-Nicene claimant was exiled, but returning, in defiance of the emperor, he was arrested and died in prison.⁹⁹ His rival was reported to have been granted imperial troops to persecute pro-Nicene believers, confiscating their churches and exiling them from their cities.¹⁰⁰ There was armed resistance to imperial soldiers in the country, while in Constantinople deadly clashes occurred between crowds.¹⁰¹ It was even claimed that some who refused to accept clergy who opposed Nicaea were arrested by the bishop and forced to swallow communion bread consecrated by these priests.¹⁰² Such was the stubborn defiance of some against the attempts of emperors and bishops to force theological definitions.

In 381, the new emperor, Theodosius I, decided to summon a council in Constantinople made up primarily of those with known pro-Nicene sympathies.¹⁰³ Theodosius now threw his imperial support unambiguously behind the council’s predetermined decision. Those who continued to resist the council were ordered to have their church buildings seized and to be sent into exile.¹⁰⁴ Yet, even in the early years of the fifth century, one could still hear those who opposed Nicaea assembling in the streets and public squares of Constantinople at night to chant their hymns. “Where are they that say three things are but one power?” they sang. In response, John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople, organised nightly counter marches, for which he wrote his own theological hymns. But as the processions ran into one another, fighting broke out, and several people were killed, leading the emperor to ban these gatherings.¹⁰⁵

EPHESUS AND CHALCEDON

While the dispute over Nicaea might have been resolved by Theodosius’ council at Constantinople, it wasn’t long before tensions again flared up. At the centre of the fray was Cyril of Alexandria. The theological disputes over the nature of the person of Christ seem this time even more rarefied, yet they led to the most serious and long-lasting divisions between Christians so far. The debate had begun when Constantinople’s new bishop, Nestorius, had voiced his support of the title christotokos (Christ-bearer) for Mary, instead of theotokos (God-bearer).¹⁰⁶ Soon his statements were being talked about and debated all over Constantinople. Was he right? Could a Christian say such a thing? Bishops from across the empire began condemning him, with Cyril the most vocal among them, and the debate was threatening once again to spiral. So, in 431, the emperor summoned a council of bishops to convene in Ephesus.¹⁰⁷

The population of Ephesus was in an uproar. All day crowds gathered in the streets chanting the name of the theotokos, and all night their torchlit processions continued. It was reputedly Cyril who had whipped them up to intimidate his opponents.¹⁰⁸ Certainly he revelled in the popular clamour.¹⁰⁹ The situation continued to deteriorate. Cyril unilaterally opened the council before the delegation from Antioch had arrived and he rushed through a vote to condemn Nestorius in his absence. When he finally arrived, the bishop of Antioch was furious and opened his own counter-council, censuring Cyril. Cyril in response voted for him to be deposed. The emperor looked on in dismay. There seemed little he could do to keep the church together. Nestorius hurriedly renounced his controversial beliefs for the sake of church unity, and the emperor had him exiled down the Nile. But this did nothing to reconcile the Alexandrians and Antiochians. In the streets and households of Constantinople, too, Nestorius’ ideas, while they might have been abandoned by their originator, continued to spawn arguments and divisions among ordinary believers.¹¹⁰

The controversy rumbled on. In 451 another council was called in the city of Chalcedon. It was the largest gathering of bishops so far, although they nearly all came from the eastern end of the empire. They were summoned to address the increasingly bitter fallout from the debate around Nestorius by ruling on the precise relationship of Christ’s human and divine natures (physeis). The majority of the assembled bishops agreed to confirm the definition laid out by Leo, the bishop of Rome, in his short letter to the council, known as Leo’s Tome. Many of the Egyptian bishops, however, remained unconvinced. While the rest of the bishops voted on the new definition, they walked out. However united the majority of the bishops now felt, the Council of Chalcedon had in reality set the seal on the most serious and lasting division so far.¹¹¹

In towns across the eastern Mediterranean, those who had once been fellow brothers and sisters in Christ now coldly declined to greet each other in the street. Some even refused to take communion from bishops who had signed the council’s definition. In Pamphylia, one ordinary layman stood up during the sermon, shouting out that the bishop was preaching the heresy of Chalcedon.¹¹² In Alexandria, the new bishop appointed by the council was attacked by a mob and lynched.¹¹³ In Antioch, too, debates about Chalcedon, for which the innovation of the anti-Chalcedonian addition to the trisagion served as a proxy, had led to rioting. When the trisagion addition was briefly introduced in Constantinople by the emperor, there was again rioting, with Syrians particularly being targeted. The house of the previous governor, a Syrian, was burned down as the people blamed him for having introduced this innovation from Antioch. A Syrian monk, who they found in his house, was lynched and his head was paraded through the streets, the crowd all the while chanting, “here is the enemy of the trinity!”¹¹⁴ The lines of division ran through almost every community in the east. In subsequent centuries, resistance to Chalcedon would become particularly pronounced among non-Greek speaking communities. The Coptic Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Armenian churches, as well as many Syriac and Arabic speaking churches, consolidated around opposition to the Chalcedonian definition.¹¹⁵

WHY DID THEY CARE?

These intricate theological debates can appear completely baffling. How many natures (physeis) and persons (hypostases) did Christ have? Was He of the same essence (ousia) as the Father or only of a similar essence? Monophysis or dyophysis, or, indeed, miaphysis?¹¹⁶ Between homoousia or homoiousia there was the difference of only an iota. It seems difficult enough to understand the meanings and distinctions between these different Greek terms, let alone understand why they mattered.¹¹⁷ And yet to very many ordinary and even illiterate Christians they clearly mattered a great deal. But why?

It was in church, through hearing and participating in the liturgy, that Christians primarily learned about their faith. It was here that they heard the scriptures and sang hymns commemorating the great events of salvation history. It was here, at each celebration of communion, that they joined in the story of Christ’s death and resurrection. It was here, too, that they learned to understand Christ as God incarnate and God as Trinity.¹¹⁸ Intellectual theologians and bishops, like Augustine and John Chrysostom, fully appreciated the importance of the liturgy for helping people understand who God is. While they might debate in rarified language with one another, they worked hard to make their sermons understandable to the broadest of congregations.¹¹⁹ Nor were they afraid to discuss the current debates about Christ, but they argued for particular understandings and warned against others.¹²⁰ Gregory of Nazianzus, another bishop from Cappadocia, even wrote plays about the life of Christ in the style of classical Greek dramas, to be performed in church, weaving into them clear statements about the nature of Christ’s incarnation.¹²¹ The majority of early Christians might not have been able to read very well, but they certainly weren’t theologically illiterate. In the recitation of prayers and the singing of hymns they learned all the complexities of theology necessary to become invested in doctrinal debates. Indeed, it was not in the councils that theological disagreements formed but in the daily life of the church. The same bishops who assembled to debate fine and seemingly abstract points of theological terminology in the council chambers, spent the rest of their time knee-deep in pastoral work. It was in this shared world, amidst practical concerns about suffering and salvation, that complex theological questions emerged. Council debates, indeed, often revolved around the precise wording of the liturgy rather than merely abstract doctrine.

The decisions made at the councils were not intended to comprehensively define God. Rather, their theological definitions were intended to serve as guardrails against particular misunderstandings. It was the terrifying possibilities that these definitions either safeguarded against or opened the door to that most concerned the majority of Christians. At the heart of this concern, on all sides, was an anxiety that heaven and earth might drift apart, and that God might not be as near as they needed Him to be. God had to have come close to man in Christ. Christ had to be God with us.

For its proponents, the Nicene definition served as an essential safeguard for understanding Christ as fully God. And yet, Nicaea was rejected and resisted for most of the fourth century, particularly in the eastern empire. Its opponents were described as ‘Arians’ by later chroniclers (and as ‘Ariomaniacs’ by Athanasius), but, for the most part, this seems a little unfair. Rather, they were a very mixed bag with a range of views and concerns. Most were scared of over-definition, and especially the use of words not found in scripture, such as homoousios. Nicaea seemed to them to have introduced an unnecessary and potentially misleading definition that might erase the distinction between Father and Son, leading Christ’s humanity to be seen as either illusory or separate from His divinity.

At Ephesus, Cyril and his allies had again become concerned that Nestorius’ teaching was separating Christ’s divinity and humanity, opening the door to Him being less fully God. Nestorius was called the divider of Christ. For Cyril and his supporters, it was simple. If Mary isn’t the mother of God (theotokos), then Christ isn’t God! On the other hand, their opponents were concerned that an overemphasis of Jesus’ divinity would erase His equal humanity, concerns that were subsequently taken up by the supporters of Chalcedon. Likewise, Cyril’s successors feared that Chalcedon was simply a return to Nestorianism, and the diminishing of Christ’s full divinity. Decades later, these fears hadn’t abated. In his sermon on the parrot, Isaac wrote that the bird was refuting those who denied the crucifixion and split Christ in two – by which he meant the supporters of Chalcedon. They were deceived by the devil! For, in his view, they were denying God’s grace and salvation, His humility by which He became great, and His victory over death.¹²²

To the men and women passionately debating the relation of father and son and crowding together to drown out defiant bishops with chanted slogans, it mattered that God had come down to them. That they could be confident He had shared in their sufferings and achieved their salvation. The controversies focused obsessively on the awesome condescension of God, that He remained mighty yet had freely embraced humanity, known in Greek as synkatabasis. That God had shared human flesh and that Christ crucified was God was essential for salvation. If God had not entered humanity, how could humans be assured of salvation? “Suffering and death could only be defeated, and His victory and salvation achieved, if God suffered in His nature.”¹²³ It is perhaps no coincidence that it is in the midst of these debates that we see the first Christian depictions of Christ on the cross. Before this the crucifixion had only been depicted through symbols and allusions. The earliest surviving examples of the full scene come from Rome, dating to around the time of the Council of Ephesus.

The crucifixion depicted ca. 430s on an ivory box from Rome, featuring scenes from the life of Christ. British Museum. (Author’s Photo).

More intimately, it mattered that God knew human suffering. That, when people suffered, they knew God was still with them, had, indeed, associated Himself with their suffering. He had “shared in the poverty of our flesh,” and “His hunger and thirst had been like our own.”¹²⁴ As Shenoute (d. 456), the abbot of the white monastery in Egypt, reread the gospel account of Christ’s crucifixion, tears streamed down his face. Christ’s suffering was a rebuke to the powerful, he wrote, that they too should bend as Christ had bent in mercy.¹²⁵ If God had really condescended to share in frail humanity, then so too should the emperor show mercy to his subjects and the rich show mercy to the poor.¹²⁶ By humbling Himself, God had humbled the proud.¹²⁷ Ordinary Christians cared about these disputes quite simply because they cared about God with us.

Imperial support might have helped Christianity become dominant in the Roman Empire. But there were still a great many believers throughout the empire willing to become aliens to the emperor in order to be near to God. Beyond the Roman world, too, particularly in the Persian Empire, Christianity had also continued to grow rapidly under quite different circumstances.

STILL, IT GREW…

In the Roman Empire, there can be little question that the Christianisation of the emperor helped Christianity to become dominant. But this does not account entirely for its success. This is, indeed, only half of the Christian story. In the Sasanian Persian Empire, Christianity had continued to grow steadily without imperial support, even while facing increased persecution.¹²⁸ By the sixth century, Christians were probably already a majority in Persian Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). Christianity had also continued to spread rapidly further east. At a council of the Persian church in 424, one could have encountered bishops who had travelled all the way from the vast cities of Merv, in today’s Turkmenistan, and Herat in Afghanistan.¹²⁹ There were soon Christian communities throughout Central Asia and across the Indian Ocean. By the sixth century there were even Christians in China. Around the same time as bishop Augustine of Canterbury was arriving in southern England, a Central Asian bishop named Alopen was arriving in the Imperial capital of Tang China.¹³⁰ But this is a story for another series! The reasons for Christianity’s growth outside the Roman Empire continued to play a part in its spread within the empire, too. Even after the imperialization of the Roman church, the gospel remained revolutionary and attractive.

Yet, at the same time as Christianity was growing within and without the Roman Empire, serious cracks were beginning to arise in the unity of the church. Tensions continued over what it meant for the Roman church to become imperial. Each new council, called to resolve emerging institutional and theological divisions, seemed only to leave more people outside. Chalcedon in particular, left a huge swathe of believers irreconcilably opposed to the imperial church. The Persian church, too, was growing apart from their brothers and sisters in the Roman world, as their experiences increasingly diverged.¹³¹ And yet, right across these divisions, in spite of infighting, violence, and imperialization, people remained captivated by the image of God made man. Five hundred years on from when Jesus had walked the shores of Galilee, Christianity, though fractured, had lost none of its momentum, and there was no sign of its growth slowing.

Recommended reading

PRIMARY TEXTS

Isaac of Antioch, Memra On the bird who sang the Trisagion (translated by R.A. Kitchen).

Socrates Scholasticus, History of the Church.

Augustine, Confessions.

The Martyrdom and the History of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabba'e (translated by K. Smith).

The Canons of the Synod of Mar Ishaq (410 AD) (translated by M.J. Birnie).

SECONDARY LITERATURE

Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), Chapter 4.

Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), Chapters 1 & 2.

Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003), Chapter 1.

Simcha Gross, “Being Roman in the Sasanian Empire: Revisiting the Great Persecution of Christians under Shapur II,” Studies in Late Antiquity 5.3 (2021): 361-402.

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