The Fall of the Roman Empire (23 page)

One danger that it had constantly in mind was apostasy from the faith, the subject of six severe enactments within fifteen years. The fiercest measures were the work of the intensely devout Theodosius i. In gratitude for his reconciliation with Ambrose, he forbade any pagan worship whatever, and in 381 even visits to temples were prohibited. Then, in the following year, on the death of Theodosius' fellow-Emperor Valentinian II, events occurred which intensified this severity. For a usurper, Eugenius, was set up in the West, and although nominally a Christian he was such a lukewarm believer that his accession put fresh heart into the pagans of Rome.

Theodosius 1 retaliated with drastic edicts. Every sort of pagan observance was even more emphatically forbidden, and judges, town councillors and chief citizens were made responsible for all evasions, under the threat of dire penalties. The Code of Theodosius 11 includes no less than twenty-five laws, drawn up by his predecessors and himself, directed against paganism in all its forms. The influence of Ambrose had indeed been effective-at least upon legislation, if not, perhaps, upon its enforcement, since even after this strongly anti-pagan law the Emperors still felt it necessary to issue thirteen more edicts to the same effect.

Theodosius 1, in a spirit of deliberate vengeance, seems to have interpreted his role as the precise counterpart and reversal of the old pagan persecutions of the Christians. The opposing view was expressed by a pagan writer, Eunapius of Sardis (Sart), who declared, with the Christians in mind, that 'our age has risked being wholly kicked about by jackasses'. Meanwhile, in 394, the upstart Eugenius was suppressed, and, owing to the discomfiture of his pagan supporters, this was the time when the Christians first achieved a decided majority in the Senate. The age of ambivalence, of possible latitude of thought, was gone from the ancient Roman world for ever.

Nevertheless, when Theodosius I died in the following year, the regents of his sons Arcadius and Honorius at first adopted a moderate policy towards the pagans, seeking to assert the state's authority against the anti-pagan excesses of the clergy. But in North Africa religious riots broke out in 399 among the pagans because their shrines had been closed, and in consequence the bishops of the region, two years later, asked the Western government for new laws to 'extirpate the last remnants of idolatry'.

Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius - now Annaba in Algeria -found himself actively caught up in this situation, and came out in favour of coercion of the pagans by the state. They must be compelled to change their ways. And apostates, too, must be forcibly returned to the fold as the Imperial edicts so rightly insisted, since Christ, like a general who brings back deserters recognized by the brand on the back of their hands, is entitled to use military methods to recall his own deserters to his army.

Augustine exulted over the destruction of pagan temples. A philosopher who belonged to the old religion, Nectarius, tried to bring home to him, in human terms, the hardships that these persecutions caused. But all such efforts to change his mind proved vain. And they became more useless still after Alaric had captured Rome. For this event frightened the Christians, since it gave paganism a new lease of life. Look, said the pagans, what has happened to Rome, now that it is Christian and has abandoned its ancestral gods! And that was the case Augustine's
City of God
sought to refute. Although this great work branched out in many directions, its immediate stimulus came from the need to stem this new pagan revival, made possible by the traumatic events of 410.

Until the death of Stilicho two years earlier, there had still been hopes of a more conciliatory official attitude towards the pagans. For he himself, during the period when he was virtually controlling the Empire, had urged a certain measure of religious toleration and balance. Nevertheless, even Stilicho had felt it necessary to burn the Sibylline books, the most sacred documents of paganism. For that, he was posthumously assailed, in 417, by the pagan poet Rutilius Namatianus, who reiterated firmly once again that it was because of the Romans' desertion of the gods that disaster had overtaken them; and he derided the Christian saints for failing to save the city.

Stilicho's death was immediately followed by a law excluding pagans from the army - since their loyalty was no longer regarded as secure. Thereafter, acts of repression against the pagans continued well on into the 430s. Then the beginning of the next decade witnessed the accession of Pope Leo 1, who declared that 'Truth, which is simple and one, does not admit of variety'. In the same spirit, in 448, Theodosius 11 started to burn pagan books: 'all the volumes that move God to wrath and that harm the soul we do not want to come to men's hearing'. The pagan cult was evidently still active enough, even at that late date, to prompt such stringent precautions.

After that, it did little more than linger on. One of the last eminent pagans was the Greek historian Zosimus, who wrote his
New History
at about the turn of the sixth century. Like Rutilius Namatianus, he looked back upon Theodosius I'S forced Christianization of the Empire as the direct cause of Rome's downfall - because it had obviously provoked divine retribution. Ironically enough, the results of that forcible official policy had been the disastrous reverse of what Constantine intended, when he saw Christianity as the potential unifying element of his Empire.

The men who originated and developed this idea, of which the Greco-Roman world had hitherto been free, that people should be coerced because of their opinions, bear a heavy load of responsibility for the persecutions that followed throughout medieval times, and subsequently. And meanwhile, these coercions had helped to destroy the Roman Empire, by intensifying the very disunities they were designed to eliminate.

Equally divisive and equally destructive were the conflicts within Christianity itself. When Constantine had made the Christian faith his state religion, he was no doubt prepared for objections from the pagan majority. But the savage enmities which rapidly developed among the Christians themselves took him by surprise. 'The very persons', he wrote to Bishop Chrestus of Syracuse in Sicily, 'who ought to display brotherly harmony and concord are estranged from one another in a way that is disgraceful if not positively sickening'.

Constantine's surprise did not, perhaps, sufficiently take into consideration the historical background. Greco-Roman paganism had never been monolithic; it consisted of a variety of different and separate cults, only loosely associated. So to most people it was not particularly surprising that, among the Christians too, there was a wide variety of different 'heresies' (from the Greek word
hairesis,
choice or sect). Yet the later Empire witnessed the growing official conviction that there ought to be a single orthodoxy - and the existence of numerous heresies became a source of ferocious dissatisfaction, not only to the established church but to the Emperors. It was their persistent ambition that the brand of Christianity favoured by themselves should become
Catholic,
in other words universal and unifying.

That was why Constantine, in 314, wrote to a functionary in North Africa that divine favour could only be secured by
united worship,
which must rise above disputes and quarrels, since these were distasteful to the Highest God. For nothing, declared his ecclesiastical supporter Eusebius, so greatly infuriates God as the division of the church: it is like cutting the body of Christ into pieces.

Yet all Constantine's hopes were doomed to frustration. He spent the greater part of his reign striving to establish cooperation among the Christians he had elevated so abruptly - and he strove in vain. It was not very long before his patience was exhausted; whereupon the adherents to heresies found their churches confiscated and their bishops sent into exile. Five years afterwards, Constantine declared it better, after all, to leave their punishment to God. But it was too late: the damage had already been done, and the hateful precedent set. Christians, almost as soon as they became a power in the land, had begun to persecute other Christians.

From this time onwards, in less than a century and a quarter, successive Emperors passed no less than sixty-six decrees against heretics. In his
Panarion
or Medicine Chest, written in 378, Bishop Epiphanius of Constantia (Salamis) in Cyprus, listing as many as eighty heresies, prescribed remedies for their adherents just as if they had been bitten by poisonous snakes; and a characteristic coin design shows Emperors stamping upon human-headed snakes representing these dissidents.

When Julian came to the throne in 361, his reaction against the Christian faith was largely prompted by these violent quarrels within its ranks, 'since he knew from experience', as Ammianus puts it, 'that no wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another'. However, Valentinian 1, although official Christianity had been restored, remained as tolerant to 'heretics' as to pagans. But Gratian and Theodosius I, under the influence of Ambrose, reversed both policies alike.

In 380 Theodosius I suddenly published a very strong regulation denouncing heresies. A year later he ordained that all the church buildings of such sects were to be surrendered to Catholic bishops as defined by himself. Then, during the remaining fourteen years of his life, he issued as many as seventeen other laws against all such dissidents. From now on, laws against heresy outnumbered laws against paganism by five to one. Most remarkable of all, because of the feelings of insecurity to which it bore witness, was an edict which actually forbade the discussion of any religious question whatever - thus attempting, with complete futility, to deprive contemporaries of one of their favourite occupations.

In 407-8, heresy was once again declared a public crime, 'because offences against the divine religion are injuries to the whole of the community'. At the same time, all non-Catholics were excluded from court: though in the following year Honorius was compelled to relax these regulations, because it proved impossible to exclude or coerce every Arian German. But then in 410 and 415 came further edicts, denouncing the heretics all over again. For bishops who could boast co-religionists of the calibre of Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine were in no mood to allow the government to tolerate deviators, and all three of these outstandingly influential thinkers continued to thunder vigorously against such criminals.

We have seen how Augustine, after long and careful deliberation, came to the conclusion that it was right to request the secular authorities to suppress the pagans by force. But he spent an even greater part of his life urging similar action against heresies. For their adherents, in his belief, would be tormented for ever in hell-fire. For him, as for the Emperors, there could only be one single church. And those who stayed outside it, however eloquently they might call themselves Christians, were outside the Body of Christ.

Initially, Augustine had rejected the use of force against heretics, as he rejected it in the first place against pagans as well. But later, after prolonged thought, he changed his mind, because 'he had learnt their potential wickedness, and how they could benefit from discipline'. So he came round to a belief in coercion, convincing himself, as he had convinced himself about the pagans, that the state must be called in to compel them to conform. For this forcible method, he now explained, was really just like giving medicine to an unwilling patient - and could therefore even be described as a true work of love: 'loving with severity' was better than 'deceiving with indulgence', and Emperors, with all their array of repressive resources, could serve God in a way which private citizens could not emulate. In a letter to Vincentius, bishop of Cartennae (Tenes) in Mauretania Caesariensis (Algeria), he enlarged on the reasons for this altered attitude.

. . . For originally my opinion was that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ, that we must act only by words, fight only by arguments, and prevail by force of reason, lest we should have those whom we knew to be avowed heretics feigning themselves to be Catholics. . . .But this opinion of mine was overcome not by the words of those who controverted it, but by the conclusive instance to which they could point. For in the first place, there was set over against my opinion my own town which, although it was once wholly on the side of Donatism, was brought over to Catholic unity by the fear of the imperial edicts. I was made to own that to this matter the word of Scripture might be understood as applying: 'Give opportunity to a wise man and he will become wiser.'

But 'opportunity' was nothing better than a euphemism for violent suppression (Appendix 1).

Later, in the
City of God,
Augustine added the paradoxical justification that those who could
really
claim to be victimized were not the heretics at all but the faithful who were their persecutors - because the very existence of such evil-doers caused loyal Christians to 'suffer persecution, not in their bodies but in their hearts'. Hence the psalmist says, 'According to the multitude of sorrows in my heart' - not 'in my body'. But that did not help the heretics, whom the government, agreeing on political grounds with Augustine's theological arguments for compulsion, was now using force to bring into line.

This systematic, active intolerance was something hitherto unknown in the Mediterranean world. It reflected the growth of dogma, which in turn reflected a decline of rational intellectual activity. And now Augustine had placed himself in the forefront of this intolerant movement. Because of his eloquence and influence, he has been declared the Prince and Patriarch of Persecutors. He has also been denounced as the forerunner and first theorist of the Spanish Inquisition. It is only fortunate that, since he lived across the sea in North Africa, he was not in a central enough position to make himself the Grand Inquisitor of the whole Roman world. But even so, the damage done by the coercion he favoured and encouraged was great. Voltaire and Gibbon were right to blame the hostility between Christian and Christian, as well as between Christian and pagan, for helping to bring down the Empire.