Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (6 page)

It was Diocletian, tough Dalmatian career-soldier and great reforming emperor, who launched the last great Roman persecution of the Church. Diocletian had been content to tolerate Christianity for twenty years (his wife and daughter were probably Christians) but his Caesar (military second-in command), Galerius, was a fanatical pagan, and Christianity was clearly an obstacle to Diocletian’s vision of a reformed empire based on a return to traditional (that is pagan) values. In 298, pagan priests conducting the auguries at Antioch complained that the presence of Christian officials was sabotaging the ceremonies (the Christians had defended themselves from demons during the ceremony by making the sign of the cross). This was enough to trigger a confrontation which had been long brewing, and the persecution commenced. The aim at first was to oust Christians from the civil service and army, to close down and destroy churches, and to compromise the clergy. Under Galerius’ influence, the persecution escalated and became a bloodbath. The toll was worst in the East and in North Africa, with most of the West relatively unscathed, but Rome was scandalised by the cowardly surrender of Pope Marcellinus, and the legacy of the persecution was to be a permanent schism in the African church over the question of communion with the lapsed. Christianity, however, was now too entrenched in the empire to be stamped out in this way. Galerius,
who had succeeded Diocletian on the latter’s retirement in 305, died in 311. He detested Christianity, but he was forced to issue an edict of toleration for Christians on his deathbed. And in the following year the fortunes of the Church changed irrevocably with the accession of Constantine as emperor.

Constantine had been declared emperor by the troops at York in 306 on the death of his father, Constantius, commander-in-chief of the imperial armies in the West. Like his father, he had originally worshipped Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, but his mother Helena was a Christian, and his sister Anastasia’s name means ‘Resurrection’. Constantine himself now moved towards Christianity. He achieved mastery of Rome in October 312, defeating the rival Emperor Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome. Constantine attributed this improbable victory to divine intervention, but just which divinity he credited is a matter of debate. Years later he told the historian Eusebius that while still in Gaul he had prayed before battle to Sol Invictus for help. Next day he had seen in the sky a cross of light, and the words ‘In this [sign] conquer.’ For his struggle with Maxentius Constantine had banners made bearing this ‘labarum’, the cross being formed by the Greek monogram for Christ, the Chi Ro: the emblem was painted on the shields of his soldiers.

Constantine was not a sophisticated man, and this identification of the Unconquered Sun with Christ seems to have presented him with no problems. By 312, however, Constantine was certainly widely believed to be a Christian. When the Arch of Constantine was erected to commemorate his victory over Maxentius the inscription prudently omitted any mention of the ‘Immortal Gods’, vaguely attributing his triumph to the ‘prompting of the Divinity’. His conversion to Christianity was probably gradual. The Chi Ro symbol would not appear on his coins until 315, and for five years after his accession Constantine continued to issue coins depicting himself as a devotee of the Unconquered Sun, or carrying images of the pagan gods.

From the moment of his accession, however, the fortunes of Christianity throughout the empire changed for ever. Whatever the state of his private conscience, Constantine had identified the Church not as the principle obstacle to unity and reform, but as its best hope. Christianity would provide imperial Rome with the common set of values and the single cult which it so badly lacked. From a persecuted sect, Christianity became the most favoured religion. A stream of edicts
granted religious freedom ‘to Christians and all others’ (the order of the words here was crucial). Confiscated Church property was returned (without compensation to the purchasers), Christian clergy were exempted from the responsibilities of public office, and public funds were allocated for the work of the Church.

For the church in Rome, it was a bonanza beyond their wildest imaginings. The meagre early entries of the official papal chronicle, the
Liber Pontificalis
, based on scraps of half-remembered information or simply invented, suddenly explode into lavish detail in the entry for Pope Sylvester (314–35). Page after page lovingly enumerates Constantine’s benefactions, above all, the great basilican churches he would build in and around the city: a cathedral, baptistry and residence for the Pope at the Lateran, raised partly in the palace of his wife Fausta and partly on the ruins of the barracks of the imperial horseguards, who, unluckily for them, had fought for Maxentius; the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in the old Sessorian Palace; the great cemetery churches on the Vatican over the shrine of Peter, and at the third-century site of the joint cult of Peter and Paul, San Sebastiano. But the buildings were only the tip of the iceberg. To maintain them, massive grants of land and property were made – estates in Numidia, Egypt, in the Adriatic islands, on Gozo, farms in Tyre, Tarsus, Antioch, gardens, houses, bakeries, and baths in Rome itself. And then there was the avalanche of precious metals: for the Lateran, seven silver altars, weighing 200 pounds apiece, over a hundred silver chalices, a life-sized silver statue of Christ enthroned, surrounded by the twelve Apostles and four angels with spears and jewelled eyes, a chandelier of gold hung with fifty dolphins; in the baptistry, a golden lamb and seven silver stags from which water poured into a porphyry font.
¹³

These benefactions were intended to establish the worship of Christ on a properly imperial footing. The Lateran basilica was immense, bigger than any of the secular basilicas in the Forum, capable of accommodating crowds of up to 10,000. But Constantine drew back from the symbolic imposition of Christianity in the historic heart of Rome. His two main city churches, at the Lateran and at Santa Croce, were on the fringes, near the walls, not at the centre, and, like St Peter’s, they were built on imperial private property, not on public land. Rome remained pagan still, and Constantine’s departure in 324 for his new capital, Constantinople, at Byzantium on the
Bosphorous and closer to the heartlands of empire in the Eastern and Danube provinces, left the city to the domination of conservative senatorial families. Their hereditary paganism was as precious to them as Protestantism would be to the Cabots and Lowells in nineteenth-century Boston, a mark of true
Romanitas
and of old money, and a witness against the vulgarity and populism of the Emperor’s unpleasant new religion.

For Constantine, Christianity meant concord, unity in the truth. God had raised him up, he believed, to give peace to the whole civilised world, the
oecumene
, by the triumph of the Church. As he rapidly discovered, however, the Church itself was profoundly divided. The providential instrument of human harmony which God had placed in his hand turned out to be itself out of tune. Undaunted, he set himself to restore the unity of Christians, confident that for this, too, God had given him the empire. It was an aim and a confidence which his successors would share, and the imposition of unity on the churches at all costs became an imperial priority: ironically, it was a priority which set them on a collision course with the popes.

Constantine’s first encounter with Christian division was not long in coming. In North Africa a new bishop of Carthage, Caecilian, had been consecrated in
AD
311, and one of the officiating bishops was suspected of having handed over copies of the Scriptures during the great persecution. In a now familiar move, hard-line Christians announced that Caecilian’s ordination was invalid because of the involvement of this
traditor
, and they set up their own bishop. Neighbouring bishops and congregations took sides, the hard-liners soon earning the name Donatists from their leading bishop, and once again the church in North Africa found itself deeply divided. Within six months of his seizure of power, Constantine had been approached by the Donatists, asking him to appoint bishops from Gaul (where there had been no
traditores)
to decide who was the true Bishop of Carthage.

This extraordinary appeal to an unbaptised emperor, whose conversion to Christianity may well not yet have been known in Africa, was highly significant. It had long been the custom for disputes in the African church to be referred to the bishops of Rome for arbitration or judgement, but this was an unattractive option for the Donatists, since Roman theology denied that the involvement of a ‘traitor’ bishop could invalidate a sacrament. Whether Constantine
appreciated the politics of the appeal to himself, rather than to Pope Miltiades (311–14), is doubtful, but he wrote to the Pope, commanding him to establish an inquiry in collaboration with three bishops from Gaul, and to report back to him. It was the first direct intervention by an emperor in the affairs of the Church.

Caecilian and Donatus both came to Rome for the hearing, but in the meantime Miltiades had taken steps to transform the commission of inquiry into a more conventional synod, by summoning fifteen Italian bishops to sit with him and the Gallic bishops. Predictably, the synod excommunicated Donatus and declared Caecilian the true Bishop of Carthage in October 313. Miltiades set about coaxing Donatist bishops back into mainstream or ‘Catholic’ communion by promising that they would be allowed to retain episcopal status. Doggedly, the Donatists appealed once more to Constantine, and once more he responded with scant respect for papal sensibilities. He summoned a council of many bishops to Aries, appointing the bishops of Syracuse and Aries to oversee its proceedings. Miltiades had by now died and the new Pope, Sylvester I (314–35), did not travel to Aries. Nevertheless, with a better sense of the Pope’s prerogative than the Emperor, the synod duly reported their proceedings in a deferential letter to Sylvester, lamenting that he had been unable to leave the city ‘where the Apostles to this day have their seats and where their blood without ceasing witnesses to the glory of God’. They asked the Pope to circulate their decisions to other bishops, a clear recognition of his seniority.

Constantine’s dismay at the divisions of Christian North Africa was to be redoubled when, having overthrown the pagan rival Emperor in the East, Licinius, he moved to his new Christian capital, ‘New Rome’, Constantinople. For the divisions of Africa were as nothing compared to the deep rift in the Christian imagination which had opened in the East. It was begun in Egypt, by a presbyter of Alexandria, Arius, famed for his personal austerities and his following among the nuns of the city. Arius had been deposed by his Bishop for teaching that the Logos, the Word of God which had been made flesh in Jesus, was not God himself, but a creature, infinitely higher than the angels, though like them created out of nothing before the world began. Arius saw his teaching as a means of reconciling the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation with the equally fundamental belief in the unity of God. In fact, it emptied
Christianity of its central affirmation, that the life and death of Jesus had power to redeem because they were God’s very own actions. But the full implications of Arianism were not at first grasped, and Arius attracted widespread support. A master-publicist, Arius rallied grassroots support by composing theological sea-shanties to be sung by the sailors and stevedores on the docks of Alexandria. Theological debate erupted out of the lecture-halls and into the taverns and bars of the eastern Mediterranean.

The theological issues were mostly lost on Constantine, though many of the clergy he surrounded himself with were supporters of Arius, including the fluffy-minded Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, historian of the Church and Constantine’s chosen official biographer. It was obvious, nonetheless, that something had to be done to settle a dispute that threatened to wreck Constantine’s vision of Christianity as the cement of empire. In 325 he summoned a council of bishops to meet at Nicaea to resolve the issue. Only a handful of Westerners attended, including the bishops of Carthage and Milan. Pope Sylvester sent two priests to represent him.

The Council of Nicaea, summoned by the Emperor, who presided over some of the sessions, was an event of enormous significance for the Christian Church. In due course, ‘ecumenical’ or general councils, of which this was the first, would come to be recognised as having binding authority in matters of faith. The Council was an unqualified disaster for the Arian party. Arius and his followers were condemned, and the Council issued a Creed containing the statement that Christ was ‘of the same essence’ (
homoousios
) with the Father, a resounding affirmation of his true divinity.

Nicaea was the beginning, not the end, of the Arian controversy. The defeated Arians had been frogmarched into agreement by an emperor determined to sew things up quickly. They were silenced, not persuaded, and after the Council was over, they regrouped and returned to the attack. Modified forms of Arius’ teaching would win support throughout the Eastern empire for the next three generations, and Constantine’s son and successor in the East, Constantius, himself adopted Arian beliefs. Constantine remained firmly committed to the Nicene faith – it was, after all,
his
Council. But he longed for a settlement of the disputes, and never abandoned hope that some form of words could be found which would paper over the differences between the two sides. Constantine himself was finally
baptised on his deathbed in 337 by his Arian chaplain, Eusebius of Nicomedia. His body lay in state in the white robe of the newly baptised, and all around him his Empire began to fall to pieces.

The chief defender of the orthodox faith at Nicaea had been the deacon, Athanasius, from 328 Bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius was the greatest theologian of his age and a man of epic stamina and courage, but he was undiplomatic to the point of truculence, and as bishop he was not above strong-arm methods of enforcing discipline. In 335 his enemies, who were many, took the opportunity of the forthcoming anniversary celebrations of Constantine’s thirty years as emperor to call for the renewed pacification of the Church. They persuaded Constantine that Athanasius had threatened to cut off Egyptian corn supplies to Constantinople if the Emperor interfered with him, and they succeeded in having Athanasius deposed, excommunicated and exiled to Gaul. One by one, his supporters were then picked off.