A.D. 381 Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State
Charles Freeman
Number of quotes: 43
Book ID: 11 Page: 1
Section: 3D
In January 381, the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius issued an epistula, a formal letter, to his prefect in the Danube provinces of Illyricum announcing that the only acceptable form of Christianity centred on a Trinity in which God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit were seen as of equal majesty. Theodosius went on to condemn all other Christian beliefs as heresies that would be punished by both the state and the divine judgement of God.
Quote ID: 171
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 2
Section: 3A2
The Roman legal system was adapted so as to be able to target and remove dissidents, whether pagan or Christian. With the collapse of the empire in the west, the Church took over the powers of the state in which it had acquiesced under Theodosius, and by the twelfth century, Church and state were again united in suppressing freedom of religious thought. One has to wait until the seventeenth century before the principle of religious toleration, so deep-rooted a part of ancient society, was reasserted in Europe.
Quote ID: 172
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 11 Page: 12
Section: 4B
In 363, the court orator, Themistius, had delivered a panegyric, or hymn of praise, in honour of Jovian, the emperor whose campaign against the Persians was to end in such humiliation. Despite the disastrous reality of Jovian’s reign, the traditions of the panegyric required the adulation of the emperor as if he was divine.….
Themistius proved to be a remarkable survivor, especially as he was a pagan in an increasingly Christianised empire. Eighteen years later he was still on hand in Theodosius’ court to offer a new panegyric, which again stressed the divine imagery that surrounded the emperor.
Quote ID: 173
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 19
Section: 1A
One of the great strengths of the Roman empire was its ability to reinvent itself to meet the new demands.
Quote ID: 174
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 11 Page: 25
Section: 3C1,3D1
When Theodosius cleverly equated his Nicene beliefs with the promise of divine approval, he was not alone. At very much the same time, in the western empire, the Bishop of Milan, the formidable Ambrose, claimed that those areas of the empire where the Nicene faith was strong were stable while those where Arianism prevailed, notably along the Danube, were the most unsettled.
Quote ID: 175
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 25
Section: 3D
So the next edict, issued from Thessalonika in January 380 by Theodosius to the people of Constantinople, was rather startling:It is Our will that all peoples ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practise that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans . . . this is the religion followed by bishop Damasus of Rome and by Peter, bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic sanctity: that is, according to the apostolic discipline of the evangelical doctrine, we shall believe in the single deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity.
We command that persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We judge demented and insane, shall carry the infamy of heretical dogmas. Their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by Divine Vengeance, and secondly by the retribution of hostility which We shall assume in accordance with the Divine Judgement.’ (I5)
Quote ID: 176
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 40
Section: 4B
Until the Edict of Toleration, the early Christian communities had been isolated and largely confined to the Greek-speaking cities of the empire. Evan as late as AD 300, Christians made up only a tiny minority, 2 per cent at best, of the Latin-speaking west.
Quote ID: 177
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 11 Page: 40
Section: 2A1,2D3B
Most Christian communities had an initiation ceremony, baptism, which was referred to as ‘putting on Christ’, ‘an enlightenment’ or ‘a rebirth’. This gave access to the Eucharist, a shared meal in memory of Christ.
Quote ID: 178
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 11 Page: 46/47
Section: 2B2,3C
The support of the gods was always essential, and Constantine himself told of a vision of Apollo who, accompanied by the goddess Victoria, promised him a reign of thirty years. Apollo was represented by images of the sun, and this underpinned Constantine’s association with the cult of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. On a coin minted in 313, Constantine is shown alongside Apollo with the latter wearing a solar wreath.
Quote ID: 179
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 47
Section: 3C
Later Constantine told of the cross he had seen in the sky and claimed the support of the Christian God for his success. A separate account told how he had had a dream in which he was commanded to put a sign of Christ on his soldier’s shields.
Quote ID: 180
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 47
Section: 3C
Few moments in history have been more endlessly discussed. There is no evidence that Constantine became any more pious or less brutal in either his public or private life after his victory, so was this a genuine conversion, and if so what did Constantine mean by it? How did his adoption of Christianity affect his relationship with the other gods he had shown allegiance to? The ambiquity became clear when a new triumphal arch decreed by the Roman Senate in Constantine’s honour was unveiled in 315; in its surmounting inscription, it attributed the victory of the Milvian Bridge to ‘divine inspiration’ and to Constantine’s ‘own great spirit’.
Quote ID: 181
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 48
Section: 2E3,3C
The one consistent theme in Constantine’s policy towards Christians is that he, rather than the Church, defined the relationship. He was, after all, offering a persecuted minority full membership of Roman society and he knew it would be dependent on him. More than this, he proclaimed that the clergy would now be exempt from taxation and civic duties so that ‘they shall not be drawn away by any deviation and sacrifice from worship due to the divinity …for it seems that, rendering the greatest possible service to the deity, they most benefit the state’. This is Constantine not so much humbling himself before God, as using the power of the Church to sustain his own rule.….
Constantine fostered the process by granting immense patronage to the Church in the shape of buildings,
….
In this way a pagan custom, the worship of gods through impressive buildings, was transferred successfully into Christianity.
Quote ID: 182
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 49
Section: 3A4C,3C
When Christianity became Constantine’s religion as the result of the apparent support shown for him by the Christian God at the Milvian Bridge, it meant accepting that God willed the rise to power of the emperor by means of bloody warfare.
Quote ID: 183
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 49
Section: 3A4C
On the other hand, as we will see, bishops such as the formidable Ambrose of Milan followed Constantine’s precedent by equating God’s support with the coming of imperial victory. The consequences of this relationship between Christianity, war and imperial conquest still resonate today.
Quote ID: 184
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 11 Page: 49
Section: 3A4,3C
Bishops had not supplanted the secular authorities, the local governors and prefects, in the cities, but they had often built up impressive networks through their congregations. While a provincial governor might stay in post for three or four years, bishops would be in office for twenty, even thirty, years.… .
A bishop with popular support could be a formidable figure, even able to challenge the will of an emperor.
Quote ID: 185
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 11 Page: 50
Section: 3A3B,3A4,3C
We know of Constantine channelling corn and oil to the poor of Alexandria through the city’s bishop, and so, effectively merging the Christian duty to help the poor with the political need to prevent unrest by feeding the volatile population. In Constantinople, the Church was ordered to organize free funerals for the poor. Bishops were given the same rights as secular magistrates to free slaves. So the status of the bishop rose steadily.Within this framework, however, tensions between and within local Christian communities suddenly became important in a different way.
….
But now there might be two or more rival Christian communities in a city, each claiming the tax exemption and patronage of the emperor. Who were the ‘real’ Christians, and who decided this in any case?
Quote ID: 186
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 53
Section: 3C1
Arius found further support from another Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, the future biographer of Constantine.
Quote ID: 187
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 55
Section: 3C1
Homoousios was a term taken from Greek philosophy, not from scripture. It had been used by pagan writers such as Plotinus to describe the relationship between the soul and the divine. Even the most ingenious biblical scholars combing their way through the Old and New Testaments could find no Christian equivalent. Quite apart from this the word had actually been condemned by a council of bishops meeting in Antioch in 268 on the grounds that it failed to provide sufficient distinction between Father and Son,
Quote ID: 188
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 11 Page: 56
Section: 3C1
The Nicene statement was to form the core of the Nicene Creed, which forms the basis of faith in the Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant Churches today.….
it said nothing about the Trinity, for instance – the only reference to the Holy Spirit was ‘And I believe in the Holy Spirit’.
Quote ID: 189
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 57
Section: 3C1
When he was eventually baptized, in the closing months of his life in 337, the emperor called on Arius’ old supporter, the ‘blasphemous’ Eusebius of Nicomedia, whom he had reinstated in his bishopric in 327, to administer the sacrament.
Quote ID: 190
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 57
Section: 3C,4B
Constantine was trying to mould a Church of his own making and in doing so he had broken with much of Christian tradition. He bequeathed lasting tensions to the Church in the form of debates over the correct use of wealth (how much, for instance, should be diverted into showcase buildings), the relationship of Christians to war and imperial authority, and the nature of the Godhead itself.
Quote ID: 191
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 57
Section: 3A4,3C
The context within which the Church operated had been changed for ever. ‘The master narrative of Christianity would become so deeply implicated in the narrative of imperial power that Christianity and government would become inextricably linked.’20
Quote ID: 192
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 58
Section: 3C1
The evidence seems to suggest that after Nicaea, Constantine was shrewd enough to accept that the debate was impossible to resolve. His policy was to be tolerant of differing beliefs while remaining intolerant of any bishops, such as Athanasius of Alexandria, who caused or intensified unrest in their communities. For Constantine, as with most emperors, good order was more important than correct doctrine.
Quote ID: 193
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 63
Section: 3C1,3D
But there had been no mention of the Trinity in the Nicene Creed. The assertion ‘And I believe in the Holy Spirit’ had been included, but nothing was said of the Spirit having any divine status or being related to Father and Son in any way.
Quote ID: 194
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 69
Section: 3C1
Athanasius had emerged from the shadow of Alexander, the champion of anti-Arianism, and he clung resolutely to the formula at Nicaea, including homoousios. However, his life at Alexandria was continually troubled by the tensions of the city and his readiness to exert his authority with violence.
Quote ID: 195
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 76/77
Section: 2E3,3C
The founding of Constantinople illustrates how Constantine, whatever his personal commitment to Christianity, distanced himself from the Church. The emperor himself inaugurated the building programme by marking the new limits of the city with a spear as in traditional Greek ritual.
Quote ID: 196
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 77
Section: 2B2,3C
Among the ceremonies of the official foundation on II May 330, a chariot bearing a statue of Constantine, which itself carried a statue of Tyche, ‘good fortune’ personified as a goddess, was paraded in the hippodrome, watched by the bejeweled emperor himself from the imperial box he had installed at the edge of the palace.
Quote ID: 197
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 77
Section: 2B2,3C
Constantine appears to have left Severus’ foundation intact and constructed, just outside its walls, an oval forum with a statue of himself in the guise of the sun god, Helios, placed on a column in the centre.
Quote ID: 198
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 77
Section: 2B2,3C
Churches were also built, but their dedications to Wisdom (Sophia), Peace (Eirene) and the ‘the Sacred Power’ suggest that Constantine was working with an imagery that was as much pagan as Christian.
Quote ID: 199
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 77
Section: 3C,2D2
Constantine was stressing the ancient tradition of the supreme deity supporting the emperor – even if his own behaviour left it unclear whether this was Jupiter (or Apollo), an abstract Platonic principle, Helios (or Sol Invictus) or the Christian God. It was only after Constantine’s death that Constantinople became an unambiguously Christian city. The city’s cult of the ancient virgin goddess Rhea, left untouched by Constantine, gradually became transformed into that of the Virgin Mary. I
Quote ID: 200
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 91/92
Section: 3D
He immediately summoned Bishop Demophilus to his palace and requested that he support the doctrine that God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit were of equal majesty, a formula that equated with Nicene beliefs. Theodosius must have hoped he would capitulate, but Demophilus stuck to his principles and refused. As a result, he and many of his clergy were banned from the city. For years to come they are recorded as worshipping in the open air outside the walls. Theodosius was now forced to turn to Gregory, whom he asked to become the new bishop of the city. Gregory was delighted with the favour of the emperor but he knew only too well how unpopular with imposition was, and he was full of apprehension when Theodosius told him he would be formally installed in the Church of the Holy Apostles almost immediately, on Friday 27 November.It proved to be a tense day. Soldiers lined the route from the hippodrome to the church and crowds massed behind them. No one would dare shout abuse directly at the emperor, but here were certainly calls for Theodosius to respect their faith. It was as if, Gregory later recounted, the city had been taken by conquest and this was a parade of the victors.
….
On 10 January 381, the emperor issued a letter (epistula) to Eutropius, the praetorian prefect of Illyricum, the most unsettled area of his half of the empire, asking him to impose the Nicene faith across his provinces.
….
If there was any dispute, between rival Christian factions in the diocese, for instance, the prefect would have to restore order. The prefects also monitored the appointment of bishops and ensured that tax exemptions were correctly applied. The law of January 381 was, in effect, asking Eutropius to recognize only those of the Nicene faith as bishops.
Quote ID: 201
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 93
Section: 3D
There had to be a definition of the Nicene faith that the prefect could follow.
Quote ID: 202
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 93/94
Section: 3D
Eutropius was instructed to deal harshly with the ‘insane and demented heretics’. Not only did they have to surrender their present churches to the Nicenes, but they were not allowed even to build their own places of worship within a city, let alone claim any tax exemptions. Any disturbance or display of sedition was to be treated by expelling them beyond the walls of the city. A few months later, a further law forbade ‘heretics’ even to build churches outside a city wall. The law closed with its declared aim: that ‘catholic churches in the whole world might be restored to all orthodox bishops who hold the Nicene faith’.
Quote ID: 203
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: xv
Section: 3A4A
the Greek tradition of free-ranging intellectual thought was challenged by the specific ways in which Christianity manifested itself in the fourth and fifth centuries as the servant of an authoritarian state.
Quote ID: 169
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 11 Page: 102
Section: 3D1
The initiatives taken by Theodosius in 381, even if uneven in their immediate application, irrevocably changed the spiritual lives of its Christian population. Richard Hanson, author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the Nicene debate, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, notes that the result of the Council of Constantinople was ‘to reduce the meanings of the word “God” from a very large selection of alternatives to one only’ with the result that ‘when Western man today says “God” he means the one, sole exclusive Trinitarian God and nothing else’. I4 If Hanson is right, then there can have been few more important moments in the history of European thought.
Quote ID: 204
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 103/104
Section: 3C1,3D,3D1
By creating a religious barrier between Homoian Goth and Nicene Roman, Theodosius could define a fault line along which he could rally his own troops against ‘the barbarians’. In the west, in these same years, Ambrose of Milan was stressing the relationship between support for the Nicene faith and the success of the empire in war.….
In effect, the emperor’s laws had silenced the debate when it was still unresolved.
….
It is likely that he was simply frustrated by the pressures he found himself under and genuinely believed that an authoritarian solution would bring unity to the embattled empire. At the same time control of dogma went hand in hand with greater control of the administrative structure of the Church.
….
by defining and outlawing specific heresies, he had crossed a watershed. It soon became clear that once the principle of toleration was successfully challenged, as it had been by his new laws, the temptation to extend the campaign against dissidents would be irresistible.
The first non-Christian sect to be attached was the Manicheans,
….
Theodosius ordered that no Manichean of either sex should be able to bequeath or inherit any property. This excluded Manicheans passing on family wealth from generation to generation, a basic right for Roman citizens. Then in 382, the emperor decreed the death penalty for membership of certain Manichean sects and put in place an informer system. It was to be the first step to the sect’s elimination and to a wider campaign against non-Christian beliefs.
Quote ID: 205
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 11 Page: 107
Section: 3A2A,3D
In Rome in 366, over a hundred were killed in the street fighting that broke out on the death of Bishop Liberius before his successor, Damasus, was elected. Damasus’ use of thugs to secure his victory was repugnant to most of his fellow bishops, and his moral authority was weakened for the rest of his reign. In 374, similar tensions between Homoians and Nicenes gripped the city of Milan after the death of the Homoian bishop Auxentius. This time the state intervened in the person of the praetorian prefect, Petronius Probus, who appears to have engineered the appointment of one of his protégés, the provincial governor Ambrose.….
He had then been acclaimed by the people as the new bishop even though he was not yet a baptized Christian, Valentinian accepted this version of events and Ambrose was duly baptized and enthroned within a week.
Quote ID: 206
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 114
Section: 3A1B
When Valentinian acquiesced in his bishop’s demand, the underlying issue of religious toleration, clearly presented by Symmachus, was firmly rejected. The debate – and Ambrose’s victory – marked another turning point.
Quote ID: 207
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 118
Section: 3A2B
In 388 Theodosius had been irritated by a request for advice from a local governor concerning the sacking of a Jewish synagogue at Callinicum on the Euphrates by a Christian mob led by their bishop. The emperor simply suggested that the bishop should be ordered to bear the cost of restoring the building. When Ambrose heard of the matter, he tried to present the emperor with a very different response to the incident.….
Ambrose further dramatized the affair by claiming that he would be happy to take responsibility for giving ‘the orders that there would be no building in which Christ was denied’. [I] Theodosius quietly sent a command to the local governor cancelling his original instructions.
….
-now an emperor was condoning a Christian attack on a Jewish place of worship.
Quote ID: 208
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 119
Section: 3A2B
In 386 the orator Libanius bravely warned Theodosius of the devastating effect that tearing down ancient temples in the countryside would have on peasant life. He detailed how ‘the black-robed tribe the monks . . . hasten to attach the temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron . . . utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues and the overthrow of altars. . . the priest i.e. of the sanctuary concerned must either keep quiet or die’. This is one of the last pleas for religious toleration to be recorded in the ancient world. The archaeological evidence for this destruction, in both the eastern and western empire, is pervasive.4
Quote ID: 209
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: 120
Section: 3D
Theodosius was welcomed to the Senate with a panegyric from a Gallic orator, Pacatus, which was so rooted in traditional formulas as to give no hint that the emperor was a Christian.
Quote ID: 8159
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: xii
Section: 4B
I began realizing the extent to which the Church had benefited from but had also been shaped by the patronage of the state.
Quote ID: 168
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 11 Page: xvi
Section: 3D
I stress the central role of the emperors, especially Theodosius I, AD 379-395, in defining Christian doctrine.….
It is not until the seventeenth century that the concept of religious toleration is restated, and that was only after decades of debilitating religious wars showed, in the specific context of post-Reformation Europe, the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of institutional religion.
Quote ID: 170
Time Periods: 47
End of quotes