The Triumph of Christianity (18 page)

But for all of the ferocity of both officials and pagan onlookers, the persecution was a very hit or miss affair, probably in part because Decius soon had to lead his army out to head off another serious invasion by Goths. In the subsequent battle, Decius was killed and his army was annihilated. His successor Valerian continued the persecution, again concentrating on the Christian elite. Some members of the imperial household were exposed as Christians and were sent in chains to do forced labor. Pope Sixtus was discovered in the catacombs beneath Rome and put to death. More bishops were executed—Cyprian of Carthage was found and martyred.
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But no Christian victim came to a worse end than did Valerian himself, who led forces east to Edessa, lost a battle, and was taken prisoner by Persians who humiliated him, tortured him at great length, and after he died stuffed his skin with straw and kept it in a temple as a trophy.

With the death of Valerian, his son Gallienus, who had been serving with his father as co-emperor, took over. Historians disagree as to whether Gallienus was an effective emperor (like so many emperors, he was murdered by the army), but he earned a significant place in history by repealing all of the anti-Christian policies. Amazingly, dozens of accounts of this action written by modern historians of the early church offer no explanation of why he did it. Apparently few are aware that his wife, the empress Salonia, was a Christian!
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In any event, Gallienus inaugurated a long period of toleration during which the church expanded rapidly and many Christians rose to positions of power. Of this era, Eusebius wrote: “It is beyond our powers to describe in a worthy manner the measure and nature of that honor as well as freedom which was accorded [the church] by all men.”
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Then, in “about
AD
296 a purge of Christians from army and Civil Service began—an ominous sign for the future; in 303 the Great Persecution broke out.”
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The “Great Persecution”

H
ISTORIANS (MYSELF INCLUDED) HAVE
long blamed the emperor Diocletian for initiating the “Great Persecution.” That may be somewhat unwarranted. Both Diocletian’s wife and daughter were Christians.
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In addition, Diocletian had allowed Christians to build a large new church directly facing his palace (Diocletian resided in Nicomedia). Finally, he did nothing to upset the “peace of Gallienus” during his first twenty years on the throne.

The evidence would seem conclusive that this last bloody persecution mainly originated with Galerius as he rose to power; he succeeded Diocletian in 305. Galerius was “a fanatical pagan” and Diocletian “feared him.”
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In any event, Diocletian did give in to demands that Christians pay for the ills that had befallen the empire. Indeed, it was an era of more rapid imperial decline and even greater peril than had been faced by Decius. Large areas had been lost to barbarian invaders. As for internal affairs, Michael Rostovtzeff (1870–1952) offered this pithy summary:

Hatred and envy reigned everywhere: the peasants hated the landowners and the officials, the city proletariat hated the city
bourgeoisie,
the army was hated by everybody.... Work was disorganized and productivity was declining; commerce was ruined by the insecurity of the sea and the roads; industry could not prosper, since the market for industrial products was steadily contracting and the purchasing power of the population was diminishing; agriculture passed through a terrible crisis.... Prices constantly rose, and the value of the currency depreciated at an unprecedented rate.... The relations between the state and the taxpayer were based on more or less organized robbery: forced work, forced deliveries, forced loans and gifts were the order of the day. The administration was corrupt and demoralized.... The most terrible chaos thus reigned throughout the ruined Empire.
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What could be done? Like Decius, Diocletian decided that the salvation of Rome lay in the hands of the gods. And, guided by Decius’s prescription for revival, he too issued an edict requiring a general sacrifice. Of course, the Christians refused. So it was that on February 23, 303, imperial soldiers marched into the church across from the palace, looted the altar plates and chalices, burned all sacred scriptures, and then demolished the building.
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Then an edict was issued, perhaps by Galerius in Diocletian’s name since it is thought that at this moment Diocletian was incapacitated “by a severe nervous breakdown, no doubt brought on by the strain of action that struck so many near to him.”
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This edict banned all Christian gatherings, ordered the seizure or destruction of all churches, required that all Christian scriptures be burned, barred Christians from public office or from appearing in court, and prohibited anyone from freeing a Christian slave. However, even if Diocletian did not originate this edict, eventually he did “preside over many trials and tortures in person.”
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In the case of a member of the imperial household named Peter, who was discovered to be a Christian, Diocletian had him “stripped, raised high, and scourged all over.” Then salt and vinegar were poured on his wounds and he was “slowly roasted” alive.
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All told, approximately three thousand leaders and prominent members were executed, and thousands of others were sentenced to slavery and sent to the mines.
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Even so, the edicts against Christians were ignored in some cities and, even more remarkably, rapid Christian growth continued! In fact, the large size of the Christian population by this time probably accounts for the fact that there was very little popular support for the persecutions. No mobs took part; no flood of informants came forth. Christianity had become “respectable.”
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On his deathbed in 311, Galerius revoked all the decrees he had caused to have been issued against the Christians. He grumbled that the persecutions had been ineffective anyway, but he also ordered the Christians to pray for his recovery. The persecutions were over.

The total number of Christian fatalities resulting from the Roman persecutions is unknown. Frend’s claim that the
total
killed in
all
anti-Christian persecutions amounted only to “hundreds, not thousands”
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is surely wrong. Eusebius’s
Martyrs of Palestine
is not a sound basis for estimating deaths even in that area, because it is primarily a memorial Eusebius wrote about his friends who had died. Local tradition has it that the number of Christians martyred in the city of Alexandria between 303 and 311 came to 660.
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Whatever the grand total, clearly the number who died was not sufficient to make any dent in the rapid growth of the Christian population. In 250 at the onset of Decius’s persecution, Christians probably already made up nearly 20 percent of the populations of the major cities and in 303 when the “Great Persecution” began, at least 10 percent of the whole empire had become Christian, and Christians probably were a majority in the major cities. It would have required a gigantic bloodbath to destroy the church.

Christian Intransigence

F
ROM EARLIEST DAYS THROUGH
the present, accounts of the persecutions focus on the martyrs, on those who displayed extraordinary courage to stand firmly in their Christian commitment through the most abominable tortures. These martyrs will take center stage here as well. But first it seems appropriate to acknowledge that very substantial numbers of Christians denied or renounced their faith when faced with such ordeals.
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As Eusebius noted, “some indeed, from excessive dread, broken down and overpowered by their terrors, sunk and gave way.”
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It could hardly have been otherwise. Thus, during the persecution by Decius, many Christians performed the required sacrifice, and many others paid bribes to obtain certificates that they had sacrificed. Many more did these same things during the Great Persecution.

In the eyes of the church leaders the two acts were equivalent and both of them placed the individual outside the Christian community. But even if they had lacked the courage needed to stand firm, the overwhelming majority wanted to regain the kingdom and asked to be readmitted. This was achieved by a “judicious blend of severity and mercy.... Forgiveness, after repentance attested by heavy penance, was the rule.”
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In any event, primary attention must be paid to those many Christians whose incredible intransigence has stood as a beacon of inspiration to Christians ever since. However, given the snippets of brutality included thus far, there is little point in offering more examples of martyrdom. It seems sufficient to point out that a few were beheaded, that being regarded as the humane sentence, but the rest were put through such an amazing array of tortures that it seems beyond credibility that
anyone
persisted—especially since most could have escaped at any point along the way simply by defecting. But again and again they bore it all. In fact, the church fathers were forced to frequently forbid voluntary martyrdom in an effort to prevent zealous members from presenting themselves to the authorities. Even so, surviving documents reveal “an astonishingly large number of volunteers.”
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The Basis of Martyrdom

F
OR CENTURIES
C
HRISTIAN MARTYRS
were revered for their faith and courage. Then along came social scientists to reassure us that normal people never would have done such things, that the martyrs were mentally ill and their apparent feats of courage were rooted in
masochism
—the love of pain. Hence, their capacity to endure “the most excruciating torments... can only be explained as the result of the building up of a pathologically intense, ecstatic mental state.... The masochistic phenomena are the most remarkable characteristic of the early martyrdoms.”
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Subsequently, a study produced at the prestigious University of Chicago Divinity School drew very favorable reviews by claiming: “One of the elements of the morbid desire for martyrdom was the abnormal enjoyment of the pain which it involved. This phenomenon is known as ‘masochism.’... Clearly, the voluntary surrender of one’s self to the experience of martyrdom, when it is known that the most exquisite tortures were involved, is
prima facie
evidence of the presence of the tendency towards masochism.”
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Other psychologists and psychiatrists have offered different explanations of martyrdom, including self-hypnosis and sensory overload,
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but all of them persist in seeing voluntary martyrdom as proof of irrationality if not outright psychosis. In doing so, they fail to recognize that there were substantial rewards attached to martyrdom. While these were not sufficient to motivate most Christians to endure torture, they seem to have been the primary motivation of those Christians who did.

Early in the rise of Christianity there developed a “cult of saints” that offered amazing rewards for martyrdom—not all of them postponed until the life after death. Extraordinary fame and honor were achieved by the martyrs. They often were lionized before they even were sentenced, let alone put to the test. Consider Bishop Ignatius of Antioch. In about 110
CE
, he was arrested and sentenced to die in the arena at Rome. Then began his long, leisurely journey to Rome, accompanied by ten Roman soldiers. All along the way, local Christians came out to meet and greet him as a “conquering hero,”
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to shower him with food and gifts, and to display their admiration for his steadfast refusal to compromise. Hence, as noted in chapter 6, his only real fear was that influential Christians in Rome would arrange to have him pardoned. For, as he wrote in his letter asking them not to interfere: “Suffer me to be the food of wild beasts, which are the means of making my way to God.”
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But for all his eagerness to make his way to God, Ignatius anticipated glory in this life as well because martyrs were carefully remembered and their feats of endurance were constantly retold and celebrated by the living. Consider the example of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who was burned alive in about 156. Afterward his charred bones were retrieved by local Christians and each year thereafter they gathered where his bones were buried “to celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of his martyrdom.”
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Indeed, we know the names of so many of the early Christian martyrs precisely because their stories were carefully recorded for posterity.

Finally, of course, the martyrs usually suffered their agonies in public settings and that too helped to fulfill their hopes of making a lasting contribution to their faith. Eugene and Anita Weiner have presented this compelling portrait of the “rewards” of martyrdom:

Every effort was made to ensure that the group would witness the events leading up to the martyrdom. It was not uncommon for fellow Christians to visit the accused in their cells and to bring food and clothing to make the imprisonment more bearable. There even were celebrations to dramatize the forthcoming test of faith. These supportive efforts brought comfort and help in a most trying situation, and had a latent message for the martyr-designate, “what you do and say will be observed and recorded.” In a word, it will be significant and passed down in ritual form and celebration.

All martyrs were on stage. Some suffered remorse and recanted but those who could take the pressure were assured of eternity, at least in the memories of the survivors. What was distinctive about martyrdom was not only the promise of reward in the hereafter, but the certainty of being memorialized in this world. The martyr saw before dying that he or she had earned a place in the memories of the survivors and the liturgy of the church.
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