Volume 1, Chapter 6

THE CHURCH AND THE PAGAN ROMAN EMPIRE

Section 1: THE STATE -- HOSTILE AND TOLERANT

Section 2: THE STATE DE-PAGANISED

Note C: THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF THE PERSECUTING STATE

THE STATE -- HOSTILE AND TOLERANT

THE Roman power, at the time of Our Lord's birth, (4 B.C.), had already nearly reached to what were to be the limits of its geographical expansion. With the exception of the island of Britain, the Romans held the whole of Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube, northern Africa from the Atlantic, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and the most of Asia Minor. Claudius (41-54) was to add Britain, Trajan (98-117) Dacia and a great territory to the east of the Euphrates. But except for these later conquests, the Empire which at the beginning of the fourth century saw the conversion of Constantine, was, geographically, the same Empire in which the Apostles had preached.

The conquering power showed to the religions of the conquered peoples a politic tolerance. There was, of course, nothing in the old Roman religion to breed in its adherents anything approaching to a spirit of intolerance. That religion was essentially a private, local, personal relation between an individual, an individual family, an individual city, and its own protecting deity. From the nature of the case there was in such a religion no room for the idea of propaganda, no anxiety that others should share its benefits, no zeal to compel others to come in. The cult of Rome and the worship of the emperor which, later still, was associated with it, was, it is true, universally imposed. But to the syncretist age in which this new State cult developed, the universal insistence that all men should worship the State was no hardship. The new cult -- a mere ritual which, like all the rest, involved no new definite belief, prescribed nothing in the way of conduct -- was in no way incompatible with the devotee's loyalty to the score of cults which already claimed his attention; and if the State saw in this new cult a means to promote the unity of a world-wide Empire, the means was yet not an artificial thing specially devised by the State for this purpose, but a natural product of the religious spirit of the time.

Two exceptions there were to the Roman State's universal toleration or indifference. No cult would be authorised which was of itself hostile to the State; nor any which was itself exclusive of all others, The basis of these exceptions was, once more, political policy and not any dogmatic zeal To these exceptions there was again in turn one very striking exception. Judaism was essentially an exclusive religion. No Jew could have any share in any other religion. No Jew could take part in the official worship of the State. Yet the Jewish religion was not only not persecuted, but it was the subject of the State's special protection. The reason for this singular exception is to be found in the coincidence of the religion and the race. Judaism was the religion of a subject nation. The non-Jewish adherents of the sect were so rare as to be negligible, nor did their number really increase. The religion of the Jew was part of his nationality and, as such, the traditional Roman policy, which tolerated all differences in the one loyalty, tolerated the Jew's religion and protected it.

It was in the shadow of that protection that the religion of the Church made its first contacts with the Roman authority, for to the Romans the first Christians they knew were members of a Jewish sect. The differences between the Christians and other Jews were mere quarrels of Jewish divinity, with which the Roman law refused to occupy itself. Naturally enough it was only a matter of time before the Jews who did not see in Jesus Christ the promised Messias, and who were responsible for the expulsion of His followers from the body of Judaism, made it clear to the Roman officials that in Christianity they had to deal with a new, nonnational religion. From the moment when the distinction was clear, and the exclusiveness of the new religion recognised, it became for the Roman State an unlawful religion in the technical sense, and the atmosphere thickened with hostility. To this legal suspicion of the Church as a religious conspiracy, there was added very soon the more fruitful suspicion of its members as monsters of depravity, meeting secretly for the performance of rites bloody and unnaturally obscene. A tradition which goes back to the first century itself, credits the Jews with the authorship of these only too successful calumnies.

By the time of the Emperor Nero (54-68) the Christians were known as such in Rome, they were numerous, and they were the objects of popular suspicion and hatred. It is to Nero there falls the horrible distinction of exploiting this hatred to cover up his own misdeeds, and also of setting a precedent in the manner of dealing with the new religio illicita.

The circumstances which brought about the persecution under Nero (64-67) are obscure. The terms of the legislation are lost, though it seems agreed that it was Christianity as such that was the object of the law. Christiani non sint is its spirit. More certain than the terms of the law are the facts of the terrible scenes in the garden of Nero's palace on the Vatican, where, like so many human torches to light up a festivity, thousands of Christians, clad in garments steeped in pitch, paid with their lives for loyalty to their new faith. Equally certain appears to be the motive which turned Nero's attention to the Christians -- the chance of saddling an already suspect people with the guilt of his own recent criminal burning down of Rome. Little is known in detail of this first persecution, though from the first epistle of St. Peter (iv, 12, 15, 16) warning Christians in general to lead good lives so that if condemned for their faith it will be evident to all that their faith is their only crime, it might be argued that the persecution was not confined to Rome.

Nero's criminal insanity was already nearing its term when the Christians fell victims to it. Four years after the Vatican martyrdoms he was dead, slain by his freedman too impatient to wait for the emperor's suicide; and the State, after a century of peace, was once again in all the turmoil of civil war. To Nero, in that year, three different armies gave three successors, all three of whom died violent deaths, the swiftly passing Otho, Galba, and Vitellius. Finally the army of Vespasian triumphed and with his acknowledgment as emperor the Roman world once more had peace. Peace came to the Christians, too, for the persecution had been Nero's personal act. In the reaction which followed his death Nero's laws were annulled, except, significantly, his law against the Christians. Nero had put them outside the State's protection. There they remained, the peace they now enjoyed the accident of circumstances.

Under the Flavian emperors -- Vespasian, Titus and Domitian -- the restoration necessary after twenty years of crazy rule was systematically carried out in the spirit of the empire's best tradition. How, towards the end of his fifteen years' reign, Domitian (81-96) suddenly turned into a second Nero or Caligula is one of the commonplaces of the imperial story. From his struggle with the senatorial aristocracy a reign of terror developed which involved all the better elements of the population and the Christians with them. Details, once again, are few. There is no record of any new law, and it was, apparently, under Nero's all sufficient edict that the martyrs suffered. They included, at Rome, members of the noblest families, the emperor's own kinsfolk, Flavius Clemens, recently consul, and his wife, and Glabrio, another ex-consul. It is to this persecution, too, that tradition ascribes the martyrdom of St. Clement of Rome, and the passion of St. John the Evangelist before the Latin gate of the city.

Domitian, too, died violently, murdered by his officers before his madness had found the chance to murder them, and before the persecution had lasted long. In his place the officers of the guard installed as emperor the elderly Nerva (96-98) and with Nerva there came in a new tradition of administration and a wholly new spirit. The chronic problem of the "right to the throne" in a State where the chief magistrate was, in the last analysis, supreme because he was the commander-in-chief, where there was no such thing as a principle of legitimacy, and where the army was an army of citizens, this new tradition solved by the principle of adoption. The emperor, early in his reign, chose his successor, adopted him as his son. and secured his recognition as emperor-to- be. For the best part of a century the system worked admirably, and it gave to the empire its golden age of prosperity and peace under Trajan (98-117), Hadrian (117-138), Antoninus Pius (138-161) and Marcus Aurelius (161-180). But Marcus Aurelius chose his own son to succeed him, the worthless and incompetent Commodus (180- 192) whose murder was the prelude to a century of civil anarchy in which, more than once, the Empire seemed on the point of disappearing entirely.

With these emperors whose skill in administration, practical wisdom and concern for the welfare of their subjects have made them ever since the very type of the model ruler, Christianity had to face the worst century of all the persecutions. It was to these emperors, moderates like Trajan, cultured scholars like Hadrian, philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, that St. Justin and the rest addressed their reasoned and eloquent pleas for toleration. All in vain. Not only did the Apologists go unheard, but the emperors, by removing the process against the Christians from the unseemly irregularity of lynch-law, not only fixed the State's hostility in their regard, but indirectly provided a recommendation to the zeal of good citizens to discover the Christians and to good magistrates to persecute them: indirectly, for the motive of the first of the new imperial orders was to solve a case of conscience for an administrator anxious to administer the law faithfully and yet perplexed by the consequence that he was thereby sending to torture and death citizens of blameless life.

This administrator was none other than Pliny the Younger and the episode of his correspondence with Trajan throws a great deal of light on the spirit of the persecution under these truly Roman princes, aristocrats, conservatives, inflexible men of law. The administration of the province of Bithynia had lately passed into the emperor's personal charge, and Pliny, his friend and confidant, had been despatched to carry through the necessary re- organisation.

He found a province in which Christians were so numerous, in the countryside as well as in the towns, that the temples were deserted, the public ritual in places abandoned and the traders for whom the sacrifices were a means of livelihood generally impoverished. Denunciations from such interested parties poured in to the new governor, and persons accused of being Christians were hauled before him for judgment. The business was new to him, and in a letter to Trajan he set forth his hesitations, described the course he had taken, and asked for directions. Should he make any distinction on account of the age of the accused? Should he grant a pardon to those who repented their Christianity? And in the case of those who refused to abandon it, was it the bare fact of being Christians that should be punished or should they be punished for the crimes which went with membership of the sect? So far he had questioned the accused, and threatened them with punishment should they admit they were Christians. Those who obstinately refused to deny it he had punished, for, whatever the nature of what they confessed, such obstinacy he thought deserving of chastisement. A vast number had been denounced in an anonymous letter. Those who denied they were, or ever had been Christians, and at Pliny's demand proved it by offering wine and incense before the emperor's statue and by cursing Christ, he had released. Others there were who, once Christians, had now for some years ceased to be. These, too, proved their Paganism in the same way. From this last class he had obtained strong denials that Christians were bound by oath to a life of crime. Their mutual agreement was rather to avoid theft and robbery, adultery, frauds. Apart from the folly that, on a fixed day, the Christians met before dawn to sing a hymn to Christ as God, he found nothing against them.

Trajan's reply furnished the principle which for the next hundred years determined the procedure. Pliny's action is approved. Christians are not to be hunted out by the magistrates. Those denounced and brought before the tribunals are, however, to be tried. If the accused denies the accusation and supports the denial by taking part in the sacrifices, even though the suspicion was justified, he is to go free. Anonymous denunciations are to be ignored. Nam et pessimi exempli, nec nostri saeculi est.

Christianity, then, is very definitely a crime, " an abstract crime," itself punishable. Yet for all its gravity -- death is the punishment -- it is not the dangerous thing that, say, brigandage is. It is no part of the State's duty to search out these criminals. The situation is an illogical one, as the Apologists were not slow to point out. To punish so savagely, for a "crime" such that it was not worth while tracking down the criminals ! And to free from the penalty his past crime deserves the criminal who will declare that he has lately ceased to commit it ! The procedure before the tribunals was something new. It was not by the testimony of witnesses that the crime was proved, but by the criminal's own refusal to deny it. None sought to convict him, often indeed the magistrate by promises, by threats, by violence sought to prevent his conviction. The law strained every nerve that the criminal might escape the awful penalty which the same law declared to be his just desert. The whole machinery of justice was employed to force, not an admission of guilt, but a denial. In the acta of the trials of St. Polycarp (155), of St. Justin (165), of the martyrs of Lyons (177), of Scillium (180), and of others of this century, the whole process can be read in detail.

To this legislation of Trajan the next hundred years add little if anything. And there is to be noted, as the century goes by, a tendency to disregard the prohibition to hunt out the Christians, thanks to the increasing popular hatred of their religion which calumnies inflame, and which the learned apologetic never reaches, and thanks also to the indifference of the officials. During this century, then, the Christian is at the mercy of his Pagan neighbours and acquaintances. Until they move, the law ignores his existence. Once they act, the law must act too. The magistrate is here the servant of any chance spite or hatred. The emperor's sole care is to see that, in the administration of Justice, due order is observed.

With the last of the Antonines, the " roman-ness " of the empire disappeared for ever. Commodus was murdered in 192 and his successor Pertinax, emperor by grace of the imperial bodyguard, a few months later. Didymus Julianus followed Pertinax and, as in 68, the Empire seemed doomed to a long civil war. It was rescued from this by the success of the African soldier who established himself in 193, Lucius Septimius Severus. With Severus there entered into the high places of the State a type hitherto unknown there -- the provincial for whom the provinces were more important than the capital, and who had for Rome and Roman ways a simple vigorous contempt. Nor was this all. The wife of Severus, Julia Domna, came of a Syrian priestly family. A woman of talent and highly cultured, the court under her influence became an academy. Galen, Diogenes Laertius and the great jurists Papinian and Ulpian found in her a patron. Thanks to her influence the religion fashionable in the imperial circle, for the next half century, was that philosophical morality which has been described. It was one of this circle of Julia Domna's proteges, Philostorgius, who, at the request of the empress, now wrote the famous life of the chief of the "saints" of the new moral philosophy, Apollonius of Tyana, with its classic pleas for toleration in matters of religion. The old, hard, legalist spirit of the Antonines had indeed disappeared. In its place is this fever of syncretism which finds the old classical polytheism an obstacle to the new aim of a universal, all-embracing, moral religion. Eastern cults, with their ideas of moral purification, expiation for past misdeeds, belief in a future life which is conditioned by present conduct, are a help. One Eastern cult, especially, is patronised -- that of the Sun, in which these imperial syncretists see an impersonal symbol for the Monotheism to which they tend. Into this system Christianity could not enter, but thanks to the spirit which inspired it, Christianity was now, for the first time, to experience a certain understanding and even an admiration of its ideals, and to be conceded a legal existence.

Septimius Severus was not himself personally hostile to the religion of the Church, and a Christian was foster-mother to his son and heir, Caracalla. Heliogabalus (217-222) was actually the chief priest of one of the principal Sun-cults at the time of his elevation, and he not only retained the dignity but, to the disgust of his Roman subjects, made no secret that he considered it of more account than his imperial rank. But the emperor who, more than all the rest, sums up this un-Roman succession of emperors is Julia Domna's great-nephew Alexander Severus. It was to his mother, the Empress Julia Mammaea, that St. Hippolytus dedicated his treatise On the Resurrection, and she is remembered, too, as the empress who at Antioch summoned Origen to speak before her on the Christian mysteries. Alexander Severus did not belie his parentage. In him Syncretism is indeed enthroned, more even than was Philosophy in Marcus Aurelius. In his own "oratory," side by side with statues of Orpheus and the more noble of his imperial predecessors, he placed those of Abraham and of Our Lord Himself, and in Our Lord's honour he even planned to build a temple.

Under such princes, and with such a spirit informing the court, some modification of the persecution was inevitable. To that modification the first of the line contributed not at all. Tertullian indeed speaks of his benevolence, but Christians certainly suffered during his reign, notably the famous women SS. Felicitas and Perpetua. There exists, too, the record of an edict which most scholars take as a prohibition against conversions, conversions primarily to Judaism, but also to Christianity -- "Under severe penalties it was forbidden to become a Jew (Iudaeos fieri), the thing was also enacted regarding Christians." There seems room, however, for the interpretation that the edict of Severus merely forbids circumcision whether practised by Jews or, as was still the case in parts of Palestine, by Christians.

Whatever be the share of Septimius Severus in the new policy of benevolence, that of Alexander Severus (222-235) is beyond all doubt, and this emperor is, in this respect, a more important personage than has been generally recognised. With his reverence for Christian ideals there went some knowledge that their religion was an association ruled by an elected hierarchy, for in his scheme of reforms he holds up the system as an example in reference to the nomination of governors and other high officials. The changes which Alexander Severus introduced into the anti- Christian code were fundamental, for he abrogated the law of Nero which was its basis, granting Christians the right to exist, allowing them corporately to own property, and the right to assemble for worship. Christianity then ceased to be religio illicita. The date of this legislation we do not know.

Alexander Severus was but a boy of thirteen when he succeeded his cousin, the fantastic Heliogabalus, and he was still four years short of thirty when Maximin the Thracian murdered him and took his place. With Maximin yet another type of emperor appears -- the soldier, born on the frontier, and bred in an army that is less and less a Roman thing, rough and illiterate, the successful recruit who has risen from the ranks, the ex-sergeant-major never at his ease outside the camp. From this class are to come most of the emperors of the next hundred years.

Maximin's policy, in many matters, was the simple one of reversing the policies of his predecessor. His short reign (235-238) saw then a renewal of the persecution, a renewal in which the State set the new precedent of itself taking action against the Christians. The conquirendi non sunt of Trajan had fallen along with the institutum Neronianum which it had organised. The new fury derived from an edict intended for the whole Empire, and aimed specifically at the Church's rulers. The persecution -- in which, among others, both the pope, Pontian, and the anti-pope Hippolytus were deported to the mines in Sardinia -- was of short duration, for Maximin's successor Gordian III (238-244) returned to the regime of Alexander Severus, and the next emperor, Philip (244-249) was himself a Christian.

But this short persecution of Maximin had far-reaching results. It set the precedent of State initiative, and the equally menacing precedent of general edicts. No longer was the Christian safe so long as his Pagan neighbours were friendly, or he could find means to hide the fact of his faith. The State was no longer indifferent until provoked to action by private zeal. Maximin had been inspired by hatred of his predecessor, in whose entourage many Christians were to be found, rather than by any interest in Christianity itself. But fifteen years later there came an emperor whom enthusiasm for the old national religions inspired. He copied Maximin's methods and extended them into a plan of simple extermination. This was Decius (249-251).

In Decius it was the spirit of the ancient republic that returned for a few years to the Empire. With Severus, fifty years earlier, a culture hostile to the Roman genius had come to rule the Roman world; with Maximin, Barbarism undisguised; and with these changes, a new and terrifying insecurity for whoever held the throne. Between Marcus Aurelius and Decius (180-250) history counts the names of sixteen emperors, and of them all, one only escaped a violent death. In the thirty years between Decius and Diocletian (251-284) there are eleven emperors more, and of these not one died in his bed. The battlefield claimed of the whole perhaps half a dozen. The rest were murdered, either by the troops who had elected them or by the troops of their rivals; and if Gallienus continued to rule for eight whole years, there is record during that time, in one province or another, of nineteen rival emperors set up by the different armies.

Decius interrupted this tradition of barrack-square emperors. He came of a Roman family, and he inherited all the cold conservatism and austere reverence for tradition proverbially associated with the Roman. He was a member of the Senate when his predecessor, Philip the Arab, named him as his commissioner to suppress a mutiny of the army. Decius was too successful for his own peace. The troops insisted that he should be emperor. Yet another short sharp civil war, and either the field of battle or the daggers of Decius' supporters removed Philip. The new emperor set himself to undo all the work of the past seventy years. The discontent of the Roman with the domination of the provinces, of the East, of the Barbarian, found in him a leader. The State was to be re- Romanised. Amongst other things the old religion, overshadowed for half a century by the imperial patronage of oriental cults, was to be restored. Christianity was to disappear. A day was appointed by the imperial edict upon which all those whose religious allegiance was doubtful were to appear before a local commission. Each of the suspects was in turn to be bidden to offer sacrifice, to make a declaration denying his faith and insulting its Founder, and finally all were to share in a formal banquet where the wines and food used in the sacrifices were to be consumed. Certificates were then to be issued testifying that the accused had proved himself a good Pagan. Not a town, not a village of the Empire escaped the trial. For those who refused to sacrifice, the penalty was, ultimately, death. But the emperor's intention was not so much the massacre of Christians as their conversion to the old religion. Whence, in the case of the loyal Christians, long drawn out trials which lasted for months and filled the prisons with confessors, repeated interrogations and the extensive use of torture in the hope of gradually breaking down the resistance.

Among the better known victims of this persecution was the Bishop of Jerusalem, Alexander, who had been the fellow-pupil of Origen at the School of Alexandria and was later his protector. Origen himself was imprisoned and subjected to continual tortures. At Rome the pope St. Fabian was executed out of hand, an exception to the general procedure, to be explained perhaps by Decius' own statement after the event that he would rather hear of a rival to his throne than of the election of a new bishop in Rome. The terror inspired by the government was sufficient to keep the see vacant for more than a year.

If martyrs were by comparison few, the number of confessors was huge; and, by the testimony of contemporaries (for example St. Denis of Alexandria), the number of apostates greater still. The penalty of confiscation of all property appears to have influenced many of the better class of Christians, and the connivance of the magistrates countless others. Not so much that there were magistrates who could be bribed, but that very many of them were willing to issue certificates of sacrifice to any Christian who would accept one, whether he had in fact sacrificed or not. Such nominal apostasy often enough satisfied the officials and saved the Christian's property and life. It was one of the chief causes of that crisis which, on the morrow of the persecution, was to occupy the bishops in every province of the Empire. In more than one place the majority of the faithful had, technically at least, renounced their faith.

Decius was slain, bravely fighting the barbarians on the Danube, in 251. He had reigned less than two years. But the persecution had ended even before his death. The emperor apparently realised that he had gained for the State religion merely the feeblest and most worthless of the Christians. He had failed utterly to rally that better element whose falling away from the old ideals he so deplored. For the Church itself the emperor's policy was a rude shock, revealing, as it did beyond all doubt, proof upon proof of the disastrous effects of the long peace upon the quality of its members' spirituality. Origen's general strictures were given an unpleasant particularity.

To Decius succeeded Gallus (251-253) and to Gallus, Valerian, in whom all the best ideals of Decius might seem assured of success, for it was Valerian whom Decius had named as a kind of general superintendent of morality when he appointed him to the restored office of Censor. To the Christians, however, Valerian was at first well disposed, and there were so many of them in his service that St. Denis of Alexandria could say that his palace was almost a church. "He was kind and well-disposed to the people of God, and none of his predecessors, not even the emperors who were openly known to be Christians, showed them more sympathy and made them more welcome than did Valerian at the beginning of his reign." [33] For four years all went well until the influence of his chief adviser, Macrinus, brought the emperor to a renewal of the methods of Decius. The cause of the change, apparently, was the increasingly desperate situation of the Empire, attacked now on all its frontiers at once, the Rhine, the Danube, the Sahara, Mesopotamia and Armenia, while pirates ravaged the coasts of Britain and of Asia Minor. Macrinus, a devotee of the old cults, superstitious, and a responsible official, is thought to have interpreted the disasters as the signs of the wrath of the gods provoked by the toleration of the arch-enemy, the religion of Christ.

There are two phases of the persecution. The first edict -- August, 257 -- was directed against the persons of the clergy and against the reunions of the faithful. The bishop in each town, and his priests, were to be summoned to sacrifice to the gods of the State. Those who refused were to be exiled, and the cemeteries and other places of worship were seized by the State. Christians who persisted in meeting for religious purposes were to be punished with death. A year later, by a second edict, the penalties were increased and the proscription was given a wider field. Not exile, now, but death is the penalty for the clergy who refuse to sacrifice; and it is to be carried out immediately on their refusal. The laity also are brought within the terror. Nobles who admit they are Christians are to lose their rank, their properties and their lives, while those specially attached to the Emperor's personal service -- the Caesariani -- are to suffer confiscation of goods and to be reduced to serfdom. The new legislation was rigorously applied. At Rome the newly-elected pope, Sixtus II, was arrested, tried and beheaded within a few days, and his more famous deacon Laurence. At Carthage St. Cyprian, exiled under the first edict, was now recalled and put to death under the second. But, as in 251, a political catastrophe brought the new reign of terror to an unexpected end. An invasion from Persia summoned Valerian to the distant eastern frontier. His armies were overwhelmed and he himself fell into the hands of the enemy, to end his life in chains, to be a public show in every town through which his conqueror passed, and this even after death, for his skin was stuffed and preserved to be an everlasting memorial of the greatest disgrace that ever befell a Roman Emperor.

The new emperor was Valerian's son, Gallienus, associated with him in the Empire since 253. One of his first acts was to end the persecution, and the act by which he did so is extremely important. It was no mere cessation of hostilities but the definite restoration of a status once held and recently lost, a recognition once more of the Church's legal right to exist. The "Peace of Gallienus" is a re-affirmation of the policy of Alexander Severus, with the new precedent that the emperor now treats directly with the bishops and restores to them the Church property under sequestration since three years before. Once more the Christian is to be unmolested in the practice of his religion, is to enjoy all his rights as a citizen. It was indeed peace and it endured for forty years.

Gallienus died in 268. Claudius II, Aurelian, Tacitus, Probus, Carus and Diocletian (284-305) succeeded him one after another, and under Diocletian, in 302, the persecution was renewed. About these thirty-four years that lie between the death of Gallienus and the first edicts of Diocletian we have almost no knowledge at all. There is the appeal to Aurelian in 272 on the part of the church of Antioch, embarrassed by the presence of the deposed Paul of Samosata in the episcopal palace. There are allusions to other episcopal dissensions, and that is almost all we know. Aurelian meditated a renewal of the war against Christianity -- he even issued the edicts -- as a part of his campaign to establish, as the new State religion, the solar monotheism which was his own especial cult. But he was killed before his ordinance could be put into execution and no martyrdom is recorded in his reign. The period is one of unhindered propaganda and of uninterrupted unconcealed activity on the part of the Church. Churches are built everywhere -- in Rome alone, by the end of the century, there were more than forty -- and to be a bishop is to occupy an envied position, so great is the deference shown by the imperial government, so high and so secure is the bishop's social standing. Christians rise to the chief posts in the administration, even to be governors of provinces, and, in the words of Eusebius of Caesarea, who grew up to manhood under this happy regime, " The emperors allowed the Christians in their service to make the freedom of the faith almost a matter of glory," even dispensing them from the sacrifices which were part of the routine of official life.

Nevertheless, below the surface, the old Pagan animosity survived. The old calumnies, so scornfully retorted on those who spread them by, say, Tertullian, had perhaps disappeared. Origen and St. Cyprian had found friends and admirers in circles where, fifty years earlier, their very existence would have been ignored. But fifty years later than Origen and St. Cyprian the educated Pagan world is still materialist at heart, sceptical about the life after death, and unhesitating when it feels the attraction of vice. The crowd, despite the philosophers and the centuries of progress in the reformation of religion, is still, in its measureless ignorance, where its ancestors were three, four, and ten centuries earlier -- materialist, sensual, superstitious, its present tolerance easily stirred to cruelty against the demonstrated enemies of the human race. The philosophers have on their side the prestige of the traditional culture. Christianity is still on the defensive, still easily derided as fit only for old women and the abnormally stupid, a butt for wits who continue to make mock of a sect that worships a shamefully executed criminal. In all these manifestations, and they are the ever- recurring theme of the theatre's topical skits, there lurks an active disgusted hostility towards such fools. But most dangerous of all was the reasoned hatred that found its armoury in Porphyry's great work Against the Christians. Porphyry himself was, it is true, no advocate of persecution; but his learning, his extensive knowledge of Christianity and of Christians, his specious and effective criticism, were at the service of philosophers less indifferent than himself to the fate of what they attacked. Such a philosopher was the one whom Lactantius describes as a really influential personage of the imperial court, at the moment when the persecution was renewed. This was, apparently, Hierocles. He, too, wrote his book, an address To the Christians. It is a reasoned criticism of the Gospels and the Life of Our Lord. The miracles are not denied, but they are set beside the alleged miracles of Apollonius of Tyana to destroy whatever force Christians give to them as proofs of Our Lord's divinity. The book was written in a popular style. Bitter and mordant in its language, it attacks the religion of the Christians as an insult to reason.

As the third century drew to its close the old State religion and the new philosophical deism drew together, in opposition to the object of their common hatred. Popular feeling there was in plenty to exploit against the Christians, a tradition made up of a variety of elements appealing to every rank and class. It needed but the opportunity and the vast coalition would move. That opportunity none could create but the emperor. The moment came when he was won over, and the long peace ended, suddenly, in the greatest of all the persecutions. The emperor was Diocletian.

Diocletian has deservedly a very great name in history. He succeeded in halting the general dissolution of the Empire which had gone on now for half a century, and faulty as many of his measures were, they made possible another century and a half of greater peace and prosperity than the West was to know again until the later Middle Ages. He restored the Roman power by remodelling it: the central administration, the provinces, taxation, the army, the imperial court. The last vestiges of the old republican State disappeared, the de facto absolutism that had grown with every generation since Augustus received explicit recognition, and the emperor, even to the trappings and ceremonial, was henceforward that semi-divine autocrat the East had always known, and against which the West had always fought. The truth that the most important region of the Empire was the frontier was emphasised in the most striking way possible. From now on Rome ceased to be the Capital. In all his twenty years of reign Diocletian visited it but twice, and Constantine, the greatest of his successors, hardly more often in a still longer reign. The capital follows the emperors, and the emperors live on the frontiers defending what is now perpetually in danger. The emperors -- for, another revolutionary change due to Diocletian, there is no longer but one emperor. The task is beyond any one man's energies, and as well to provide for the State as to lessen the danger from the inevitably powerful subordinate, the imperial task is shared by equals. Diocletian was acclaimed emperor in November 284. On April 1, 285, he made over the administration of the Western half of the Empire to his comrade-at-arms of half a lifetime, Maximian. Eight years later he carried the principle a step further. To each emperor was adjoined a lieutenant, who would ultimately succeed his chief and to whom, meanwhile, there was entrusted with the title of Caesar the administration of a group of provinces. Thus when the persecution broke out, in 303, four princes ruled the one Empire, Diocletian and Galerius in the East, Maximian and Constantius Chlorus in the West. [34]

Diocletian was as little a lover of Roman ways as Severus had been a hundred years before. He was a provincial, and a none too cultured provincial, with a certain cold surliness of manner that repelled. In religion he had no personal preferences. He was not, for example, like Aurelian, concerned to depress one religion in order to exalt another. But he was notably superstitious. Towards Christianity he continued, and apparently as the obvious policy, the policy official since the Peace of Gallienus. His household was filled with Christians and his wife and daughter were converts to the faith. The persecution when it came was not so much the fruit of long deliberation on his part, as an enormous blunder into which he was tricked to consenting. The real author of the persecution was Diocletian's lieutenant, the Caesar Galerius, and this time it was undisguisedly the war of one religion on another, a persecution which had for its complement the most elaborate attempt to revive Paganism yet undertaken by the Roman State.

The history of the series of persecutions which began with Diocletian's edict of February 24, 303, and which did not end until the so-called Edict of Milan, ten years later, is far too complicated to be set forth adequately in any chronological summary. It was a persecution differing as widely in its methods as the four princes who ruled the Empire differed one from another, and its history is complicated by the rapid changes in the government which mark these ten years. The Empire is divided, united, divided anew; Diocletian and Maximian resign; Galerius and Constantius Chlorus succeed them, with Maximin Daia and the son of Constantius -- Constantine -- as their respective Caesars; Constantius dies in 306 and, although Constantine maintains his hold on the provinces he has ruled as Caesar, there is a new Western Emperor, Severus. The son of Diocletian's old colleague, Maximian, next makes himself master of Italy and Africa. This is Maxentius. A few years later, and Maximian himself returns claiming the honour he had resigned. Six emperors are simultaneously in the field, and civil war again claims the Empire for its own.

Galerius was, once more, the barbarian soldier in the purple, the typical sergeant-major emperor, a good soldier but by Roman standards hardly civilised, violent, crafty, and greatly influenced by his mother, a superstitious peasant from the Carpathians with whom hatred of Christianity was a passion. The first step was to remove the Christian officers from the army. On the plea that the military discipline was suffering from the neglect of the old religious ritual, orders were issued that the routine sacrifices were to be resumed. Those who refused to take part must abandon their careers. The Christians thereupon resigned by hundreds from the army commanded by Galerius. A little later it was represented to Diocletian, more and more superstitious as he aged, that the presence of unbelievers interfered with the auspices. The augurs were unable to divine the will of the gods while unbelievers were present. The emperor thereupon ordered that all his household, on pain of being scourged, should show their faith by offering sacrifice, and that the soldiers should do the same or leave the army. By the end of 302 the regime of tolerance had so far changed that the army and the imperial service were closed to professing Christians.

In the next few months Diocletian was won round to a plan of general extermination. Again it was with Galerius that the scheme originated. A council of State was summoned to discuss the matter, and the last hesitations of Diocletian were overcome when the oracle of Apollo at Miletus spoke in favour of Galerius. But, still reluctant, Diocletian would allow no death penalties.

The signal was given when on the day the edict was published, February 24, 303, the cathedral of the capital city, Nicomedia, was, by the emperor's order, burned down. The edict forbade the Christians to assemble for worship, the churches were to be destroyed, the sacred books handed over to the police, and all Christians were to renounce their faith. Those who refused were, if nobles, to lose their rank; if citizens to become slaves; and, if slaves already, to remain slaves forever. When, soon afterwards, the imperial palace took fire Diocletian's last hesitations vanished and at Nicomedia blood began to flow in abundance.

New edicts followed. First the clergy throughout the Empire were to be arrested, and be summoned, under pain of death, to abjure. Then (304) the same was decreed for the general body of the Christians. There was now no choice but apostasy or death for millions. The legislation was the most severe so far and the most systematic. A host of new and horrible punishments were devised to terrify the weak into submission. Christians were rounded up by the hundred, summoned to sacrifice, and massacred. In one case at least, in Phrygia, where the whole population was Christian, a whole town was wiped out. A phrase in the authentic acts of one of the victims of this time -- St. Philip, Bishop of Heraclea -- summarises the spirit of the new savagery. " You have heard the law of the emperor," says the judge, speaking to the accused. "It commands that throughout the world members of your society must either sacrifice or perish." With the resignation of Diocletian and Maximian (305), Galerius and his new Caesar, his nephew Maximin Daia, developed the inquisition yet further. By the edict of 306 all citizens -- not merely suspected Christians -- were to be summoned to sacrifice. Heralds in the streets were to call out the heads of families, the army to be paraded for the purpose. It is now, too, that the first evidences show of a decline in the character of the judges who carry out the edicts. A new type of magistrate appears, men as gross as the new emperors themselves, to whom the persecution was an opportunity for loot and for lust, and whose malignity devised new horrors and provoked a new danger for the accused, some of whom -- a thing hitherto unknown -- threw themselves to death to escape inevitable shame. The persecution went its way unhindered in the East for the best part of eight years. In the West it had never been so violent. Where Constantius Chlorus ruled as Caesar, in Gaul and in Britain, there had been practically no persecution at all: where the Emperor Maximian ruled, in Italy, Spain and Africa, the Christians had suffered as in the countries directly subject to Diocletian. But in 305 Constantius became emperor; Spain passed under his rule and there the persecution ceased. Africa and Italy passed, first to Severus and then (autumn of 306) to Maxentius; under neither of these princes were the persecuting edicts enforced. When Constantius Chlorus died (July 306) his son Constantine succeeded him and maintained his policy of toleration.

For the policy of Galerius, the successful coup d'etat by which Constantine came to the purple was a defeat. The dispossession of Severus, whom he had named to succeed Constantius in the West, was a second; for here again the victor, Maxentius, abandoned the policy of persecution. Far different was the fate of the Christians in the East where the advent of Maximin Daia balanced the gain through Constantine and Maxentius. The new eastern Caesar was, like his uncle, Galerius, the simple product of the wilds beyond the frontier, tamed a little by the army, but hardly improved from his crude native barbarism. Yet, curiously enough, it was he who planned, and to some extent carried through, a great scheme of reformation by which Paganism should itself at last become a "Church." Temples were restored, new ones built, the priests for the first time organised in a hierarchy with a presiding high priest for each province. The ritual was standardised, and the " magicians," the clergy of Maximin Daia's predilection, promoted to the highest offices of the State. It was in the interest of this new State religion that Maximin Daia continued the persecution, henceforward admittedly the war of one religion on another and not a simple measure of precaution in the interest of the State's security.

This new phase, however, was not of long duration. On April 30, 311, an imperial edict brought the whole persecution to an end, restoring the status of 303. It bears the names of Galerius, of Constantine and of Licinius. Galerius, after eighteen years of Empire, was dying in the horrible agony Lactantius has described. Fifteen days after the publication of the edict he was no more. His share in that edict can have been no more than nominal. It was really the act of Constantine and Licinius, the first stage of the new policy of which the Edict of Milan, two years later, was to be the consummation. The edict of 311 is by no means a pro-Christian manifesto. The emperors are at no pains to hide their scorn for the religion they are reprieving. They refer approvingly to the edicts which inaugurated the persecution, and to the end in view, the restoration of the old Roman life. Those edicts are now annulled because it has been proved that what Christians had returned to the ways of their ancestors had done so simply through fear. The chief result of the persecution had been the creation of a large class who worshipped neither the Roman gods nor the God of the Christians. Before the menace such a feature in the national life presents, the emperors prefer to grant once more a licence to Christianity to exist. Denuo sint christiani. They may reorganise their Churches; the prisoners are to be freed. Let them for the future avoid anything which is contrary to the established order, and let them not forget the duty laid upon them to pray to their God for the safety of the State and its princes.

From the new policy Maximin Daia, now in the East the supreme ruler, held himself coldly aloof. As Constantius had never given an effective assent to the edict of 303, so Maximin ignored that of 311. Nevertheless even Maximin yielded somewhat to the new forces, and in a letter to the provincial governors of his Empire halted the persecution. For a moment the Christians breathed easily through all the Roman world.

Licinius was an old friend of Galerius, for years one of his most confidential advisers. Had Galerius been wholly free in the matter, Licinius would have succeeded Constantius in 306, and again Severus in 307. It was not until 308 that he was in fact associated with Galerius in the Empire, and Galerius proclaimed his confidence by naming him Emperor and not Caesar. He was then heir to the provinces Galerius had ruled, with Nicodemia as their capital, and to whatever he could hold of Galerius' position as the senior emperor. Maximin Daia was overshadowed by a newer power. He did not intend to remain so and with his invasion of the states of Licinius the duel between Paganism and Christianity reopened. It was marked on the part of Paganism by a last supreme revival.

From all over the East petitions from the municipal and provincial councils came in -- organised to some extent by the imperial officials -- calling for the suppression of Christianity. The petitions and Maximin Daia's replies, into which there has crept a tone of piety that makes them nothing less than Pagan sermons, were inscribed on tablets of bronze and set up in the chief places of the cities -- a new and subtle means of anti-Christian propaganda. The calamities which of late years have afflicted the State, war, famine, plague, tempest, all these are the natural effects of the wrath of the gods provoked by the practices of Christian folly. In the loyalty of all good citizens to the ancient religion lies the Empire's one hope. Let the temples once more take up their place in the people's life, the sacrificial fires be renewed. The emperor will himself lead in the pious work, the head and centre of every religious inspiration. For the encouragement of the Pagan, the State organised a campaign of education in the wickedness of Christianity. Placards, pamphlets, lectures subsidised by the State, set before the Pagan the vile thing his Christian neighbours were. Elaborate forgeries alleged to be the sacred books of the Christians appeared, and these blasphemous parodies and caricatures were used as lesson books in the schools. The latest Pagan offensive was at its height and beginning to show results in a revival of Pagan practice when, as Maximin Daia planned to ally himself with Maxentius in Italy -- hitherto a usurper in the eyes of the three " legitimate " emperors -- against the combination of Licinius and Constantine, the news of news came to him that Constantine had declared himself a Christian.

It was unexpected news, and the occasion of the declaration fitted it -- the eve of a battle against Maxentius upon which, following a first reverse, Constantine staked his whole fate.

Constantine had marched from his own States -- as yet overwhelmingly Pagan -- through Italy, still Pagan too, and was preparing to attack the single army which lay between him and Rome, of all the empire's great cities perhaps the most Pagan. The expedition he had undertaken had no religious significance -- its purpose was simply the destruction of the power of a usurper. Constantine himself was not merely a Pagan but, from all his associations and upbringing he belonged to that new school of Paganism from whose scorn Christianity had naturally least hope of recruits. His parents were Pagans, and his father's religion a form of that new moral monotheism, popular with the army, whose symbol was the Sun -- Sol Invictus. One form of that cult had seemed destined to high fortunes under Aurelian (269-75). After Aurelian's death Constantius Chlorus was its most eminent supporter. The cult then probably came to Constantine as part of his paternal inheritance, and as he shook himself free of the influence of Diocletian and Maximian (whose son-in-law he was) the young emperor showed himself openly the protector of his father's cult. By the time of his expedition against Maxentius his evolution in religion had gone beyond this. He had abandoned the last traces of a cult of the Sun, and reached the point of a simple belief that there is but one God. The final, decisive step was not the fruit of any further meditation but was due to something which happened to Constantine the very night before the battle at the Milvian Bridge, a mile or two outside the Flaminian Gate of Rome. In a dream the emperor was bidden to mark his soldiers' shields with the sign of God, coeleste signum Dei, and go into battle with this as his badge. He did so. In the fight which followed he was victorious, and Maxentius was drowned in the Tiber as he fled from the field. Constantine entered Rome convinced now that the one, supreme God was the God whom the Christians worshipped -- Jesus Christ.

From Rome, after receiving the congratulations of the Senate, he proceeded to Milan for the solemnities of the marriage arranged between his sister and his colleague Licinius. At their meeting the two emperors, advancing the policy of the act of two years before, published what has come to be called the Edict of Milan (313, probably February), the final and definitive admission of the State that the new religion of the Church must survive. Maximin Daia -- to anticipate the story by a few months -- took advantage of the absence of Licinius in the West and, despite the difficulties of the winter, invaded his States, crossed into Europe, and with his powerful army laid waste the rich provinces which are now the Balkans. There, at Nicopolis, he met, and was defeated by Licinius, returned from Milan in haste; and with the defeat and death of Maximin Daia the authors of the Edict of Milan were masters of the Roman world (May 1, 313).

THE STATE DE-PAGANISED

The famous edict of Constantine and Licinius is by no means a charter of rights and privileges. It is a political act, and as such is conditioned by the circumstances of the moment. Both of these emperors had long been agreed that the persecution menaced the future of the State. If one of them was recently converted to a belief in Christianity -- and the belief was as yet incomplete - - his colleague, however, still remained a Pagan. Constantine himself could have no policy which went beyond the maintenance of a balance between the two religions, and the language of the edict, as far as we can tell, is not that of a Christian at all. In this respect it is very evidently the supplement to the act of 311 and the spirit it breathes is that of the " deistic " monotheism which was the reigning fashion at the court. It is an arrangement prepared by Constantine which his colleague accepts, and which is expressed in tactfully neutral language. The motive for the new policy is no longer the restoration of the old Roman ways but simply " the public good." This is unattainable if due honours are not rendered to "the divinity." That these honours may be rendered, all who honour "the divinity" have leave to do so -- Christians with the rest. Thus the edict does not by any means proclaim universal toleration. "To the Christians and to all men we decree there be given free power to follow whatever religion each man chooses, that, whatever gods there be, they may be moved mercifully in regard to ourselves and those over whom we exercise authority" -- an insurance devised possibly to comfort the devout Pagan critic against vengeance from the old gods for any apostasy implied in the act. The edict, then, grants once more what Alexander Severus had first granted, and then Gallienus thirty years later. But this time the grant is explicitly built into the law as a fundamental principle of public welfare; and the emperors from whom it emanates are no religious dilettantes, nor weaklings anxious at a crisis to rally a disunited people. They are conquerors, one of them the empire's greatest soldier for generations and a whole-hearted convert to the faith, and the edict is the sign of their conquest. But it does more than restore liberties. A further clause gives the surest of all guarantees that the toleration is no mere matter of form, no political trick of the moment. It decrees the restoration to Christians of whatever property has been confiscated "without any price asked or any transference money. . . without delay and without discussion." [35]

That Constantine's conversion to a belief that Jesus Christ is the one only God was sincere is certain, and equally certain his subsequent loyalty to what he considered to be the best interests of the Church through which the one God chose to be worshipped. But whatever the growth of his knowledge of his new faith and of his attachment to it, he remained, as emperor, faithful to the principles of the edict of 313. Even had he desired to christianise the State, the difficulties before him would have prevented it. The Christians were by no means in the majority. The West especially, his own sphere of operations, was strongly Pagan; [36] and its anti-Christian habits and traditional prejudice survived for the best part of the next hundred years. If there were Christians who, impatiently, demanded a reversal of roles and repression of the Pagans they found no welcome at the court. Whatever the emperor's personal preferences, he maintained the Pagans in the posts they occupied; and he continued to be the Pontifex Maximus of the Pagan Cults. So bound up with the old religion was the imperial office, that to have abolished the pontificate at that moment would have been to strip himself of vast prestige and authority; to have transferred the office to another would have been almost an abdication. Tertullian had plainly said that no man could become emperor and remain a Christian, and for the next sixty years the Christian Emperor proved him right to this extent, at least, that he retained and exercised the supreme headship of the Pagan Cults. Finally, for the first eleven years which followed the edict, Constantine's colleague was a Pagan, and a Pagan who gradually grew hostile to Christianity.

In 323 there was a breach between the two emperors in which religious differences played their part. Licinius abandoned the policy of 313 and, in the States of the eastern Empire, the persecution raged once more. Constantine's victory at Chrysopolis (September, 323) brought this to an end, and it ended, too, the reign of Licinius. Six months later his death -- in which not improbably Constantine had a share -- left Constantine without a rival, sole master of the whole Roman world. His new, unquestioned supremacy found expression in a notable change of the form of his language about matters religious. So far he had kept studiously to the neutrality of 313. He had, as Pontifex Maximus, carried through certain reforms -- divination in secret was henceforward forbidden, and certain abuses in magical rites. As emperor he had granted the Catholic clergy those exemptions from the burdens of citizenship which the Pagan priests had always enjoyed, he had given the churches the right to receive legacies and he had made the Sunday a legal holiday. In his language he had been as impartial as in his actions, and not a sign escaped to show publicly his increasing contempt for the stupidities of the old polytheism and for its superstitions. But now, victorious over a Paganism lately militant, and master for the first time in the more Christian part of the Empire, he was free to express his personal sentiments. In the proclamation which announced the victory to the bishops of the East, he tells the story of his conversion, describes the atrocities of Diocletian's persecution, speaks of himself as brought to the Faith by God to be the means of the Faith's triumph, and declares that he takes up the government of his new State " full of faith in the grace which has confided to me this holy duty." There is a like change in his language to his Pagan subjects. The policy of 313 is scrupulously maintained, but he does not hesitate to speak of Pagan " obstinacy," of their " misguided rites and ceremonial," of their "temples of lying" which contrast so strikingly with "the splendours of the home of truth."

The convert emperor no longer hides his contempt for Paganism, but he is careful still to distribute offices to Christian and Pagan alike. All are equal, and both religions equal, before the law.

The first breach in this policy of neutrality was the work of his sons. Constantine died in 337 leaving as heirs his three sons, Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans. The eldest died three years later, and the new law bears the signature of the two younger brothers. It declares the abolition of all sacrifices and threatens dire punishment to those who contravene it (341). Among one section of the Christians its enactment was the occasion of great joy. They exhorted the emperors to go further still. Whence so great an uneasiness among the Pagans that, a year later, the emperor in the West, Constans, the vast majority of whose subjects were Pagans, published a new law to reassure them, ordering special care for the historic temples of the old capital. Ten years later Constantius II, now sole emperor, published a new edict which threatened death to those who worshipped idols. The temples were to be closed, the sacrifices to cease. No doubt where the thing was peaceably possible the law was enforced. But despite the law the facts show the old religion as still flourishing unhindered throughout the West. All the old feasts were observed at Rome, with all the accustomed sacrifices, in the year which followed this law (354), and in the very year which saw its renewal Constantius II himself, visiting Rome, confirmed the privileges of the different cults, the subsidies of public money granted to them and, acting as Pontifex Maximus, he filled the vacant priestships by nominations of different members of the Roman aristocracy. This contrast between the terrifying threats, and the impotent toleration of those who ignored the threats was characteristic of the general policy of Constantine's vacillating successors. They repudiated their father's policy, and were yet too weak to enforce the repudiation. The chief effect of their legislation was to irritate the Pagans, and to prepare the way for the anti-Christian reaction which followed under Julian.

Julian (361-363), the successor of Constantius II, has gone down to history as Julian the Apostate, but the title is hardly fair, for though Julian set himself to reverse the policy of the previous fifty years and to restore Paganism, it is hard to see that he was ever a Christian at all, and he certainly was never a Catholic. He was a nephew of Constantine and, a child of five at the emperor's death, one of the very few near relations of the new emperors who survived the general massacre designed to remove possible rivals to their succession. For these massacres, in which his father, two uncles, and a brother perished, Julian declared Constantius II responsible, and in this personal hatred of Constantius, which deepened after that emperor's execution in 354 of Julian's only surviving brother, may be found one reason for Julian's fanatical hatred of everything Christian. His earliest education he received under the care of the arch-Arians Eusebius of Nicomedia, George of Cappadocia and Aetius; and once his childhood was past he was deprived of even this pale reflection of Christian truth. In place of Arian bishops and their sterile logomachies, he now had hellenists to tutor him, and in the distant and lonely palaces to which he was exiled, the imaginative boy grew to adolescence and early manhood, dreaming of a revival of the Paganism of the poets and the philosophers. His own religion was little more than a devotion to the classic Greek Culture, a thing intellectual, literary, artistic. His philosophy was the neo-Platonism of the day, something of Plotinus and much more of superstition and magic, a melange that had in it something of the modern Theosophy cults and Spiritualism, with a veneer of elaborate ritual. The thing he planned to revive had never existed; it was the golden age of every adolescent's dreaming fancy, the past seen through the idealism of literature. But for all his bookishness the shy, reserved, and ascetic young man showed his gifts as a ruler once his cousin named him Caesar (358), and enough of political ambition once the troops hailed him Emperor (360) to take the offensive against Constantius II. But the sudden death of Constantius (Nov., 361) gave him the mastery of the world without a battle, and for twenty months he ruled supreme. It was too short a time for any permanent accomplishment, and his revival had the ultimate effect of all schemes that plan to ride the skies and fail. It left the prestige of the old religion very much lower than it had found it, left it indeed covered with ridicule.

For the greatest attempt of all was now made to organise Paganism, its cults and its priesthood; to give it a coherent body of doctrine, a fixed and regular liturgy. Its priests, on the model of the Christian clergy, were to be teachers, and schools of Pagan theology were established. The practice of good works was to be a function of the new religion; orphanages, hospitals, asylums to be founded in which the new Pagan virtue of charity would find expression. Nothing was less in keeping with the facts of the old Paganism, nothing less in accord with the Roman tradition, than the new priesthood as Julian planned it, influenced obviously by the desire to defeat Christianity by copying the Christian spirit. The Roman priest had been an important personage in the political and social life of the day. High rank in the priestly college, and high office in the State had always gone together. But Julian's priests were to live like monks, ascetics, carefully avoiding contact with the evil world, given to a life of virtue, and service, prayerful, studious, continent.

The sacrifices were restored and carried out on an enormous scale, Julian himself as Pontifex -- against all tradition -- actually immolating the victims. The Christian magistrates and officers were replaced. The Christian clergy lost all their privileges. They lost, too, what pensions the State had begun to pay them, and were obliged to restore what they had already received. Even the Christian poor were made to give back the alms which the imperial charity had assigned them. The temples, too, where these had fallen into decay, were to be restored at the expense of the Christians. But the edict most complained of was that which expelled the Christians from the schools. No Christian was henceforth to be allowed to teach or to study the ancient classical authors. "Let them keep to Matthew and Luke," said Julian. Rhetoric, Philosophy, Political Science -- to the Christian henceforward these were banned, and with them all hope of a professional career.

All this was but the preparation for a revival of the older persecution of blood -- none too easy a matter in 361 with Christianity strong through fifty years of State favour, and entrenched in all the high places of the State. Julian did not live long enough to launch another frontal attack. Death claimed him before he had the chance to show his quality as a philosophical Decius or Diocletian. But every encouragement was given to the Pagans to attack the Christians. Anti-Christian riots went unchecked, excesses, massacres even, went unpunished. To the Christians who appealed against the indifference of the officials, who stood by while property was destroyed and lives were lost, the emperor mockingly recalled that it was part of their faith to suffer wrong patiently. Martyrs there were as fifty years before, but condemned and put to death now, ostensibly, for rebellion or treason -- a new legal trickery intended to rob their deaths of any religious significance.

The persecution ended very suddenly. On June 26, 363, Julian was slain, fighting the perpetual enemy of the East, Persia, testifying with his last breath, according to Theodoret's account, Whom he had fought, and by Whom he was conquered " Galilean, Thou hast triumphed." The army gave him Jovian for a successor and Jovian was a Catholic. Without any elaborate measure of repression, the whole edifice of Julian's "Church" crumbled and fell. The new edict restoring religious toleration, and the statutes of Constantine's regime, was enough. The dead thing lately galvanised into a semblance of life ceased to move, the apostates who had served it returned to Christianity more easily than they had left it. The path to the inevitable Christianising of the State was once more open.

But despite the opportunity a reaction always presents to the victorious reactionaries, the movement to de-Paganise the State halted for another ten years and more. Jovian reigned only nine months and his successor, Valentinian I (364-75), though a Catholic, was as emperor more neutral than Constantine himself. The temples remained open, the oracles were consulted as of old; and if he took from the temples the properties which Constantius II had confiscated to the benefit of the Church, and which Julian had recently restored to the temples, Valentinian did not make them over to the Church once again, but ordered that they should revert to the imperial treasury. As he held himself aloof from the controversy between Catholics and Arians, declaring " I am a layman. It is no business of mine to scrutinise Christian dogma. That is the bishop's affair," so he showed a like indifferent neutrality in the edict which reversed Julian's educational policy; " Whoever is worthy by character and by talent to educate youth shall have the right to open a school or to gather together once more his dispersed scholars." Later in his reign (371) he is even more explicitly averse from any anti-Pagan legislation. "I do not consider this art to be criminal," he declared to the Pagan augurs, "nor indeed any of the religious observances established by our ancestors. The laws enacted at the beginning of my reign are proof of this. They grant to every man the right to follow whatever religion he prefers. I do not, therefore, condemn the auspices. I simply forbid them to be used for criminal purposes."

In the Eastern Empire, where Valentinian's brother Valens ruled (364-378), there was during these years an actual patronage of Paganism. Valens was determined that his Christian subjects should all be Arians. The thirteen years of his rule were for the Catholics of the East a long reign of terror, and in his measures of repression the emperor gladly made use of the Pagans.

Valentinian I died in 375 and with the accession of his son the youthful Gratian (375-383) the religious situation changed immediately, for the new emperor refused to be Pontifex Maximus with the words " A robe such as this does not become a Christian," and abolished the office. The anomaly of the Catholic functioning as the chief priest of Paganism was at an end; and Paganism, the head of the State declining to be its chief priest, may be considered henceforth as "disestablished." It remained to disendow the institution, and this Gratian did seven years later. By an act of the year 382 the privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the Pagan priesthood were abolished, the property of the temples confiscated and henceforward all legacies to temples were null and void.

About the same time the statue of the goddess Victory that stood in the senate chamber at Rome was removed. This statue, to which the senators offered incense as they entered, and through whose presence the goddess herself in some sense presided over the debates of the empire's most venerable institution, had come to be the very symbol of Paganism's official primacy. It had already been removed in the time of Constantius II (357) but, to appease the storm of angry protests, it was speedily replaced. The aristocratic families of the old capital were, in fact -- along with the intelligentsia and the half-educated everywhere -- the last champions of the cults. Among the first there had developed a new, obstinate ardour about the rites and liturgies; with the men of letters it was an attachment to professional ideals, a dislike for Christianity as the feared foe of beauty and culture, whose triumph would be the triumph of barbarism. What a reality these last oppositions were, and how powerful was their main weapon -- scorn -- the elaborate constructive apologetic of St. Augustine remains to show, the De Civitate Dei. The protestations of the senatorial aristocracy were now renewed and, Gratian being murdered the following year, and the regent for his child- successor -- Valentinian II -- being an Arian, the Pagans might easily have secured the replacement of the statue once more. That they did not do so was due to the vigorous opposition of the Bishop of Milan, at this time the imperial capital. This was the great man who, until lately, had been governor of the province, one of the last of the Romans, St. Ambrose. He had been Gratian's tutor, as he was now the tutor and protector of the child-emperor. He had been the emperor's adviser in matters temporal no less than spiritual, an ambassador, more than once, where a delicate situation called for the experienced wisdom of the man in whom the Roman administrator and the Catholic bishop were so well combined. St. Ambrose is an augury of what the Middle Ages, at their best, are to be, and in nothing is he more so than in his bold defiance of the Empress Justina in this matter of the statue of Victory. Thanks to his vigour and prudence the policy of Gratian suffered no setback. Upon Paganism it produced the expected result. There was not enough faith in the cults to keep them alive once the revenues went, and with the disappearance of the priestly aristocracy whom those revenues nourished there disappeared, too, the social prestige which was the old religion's chief asset. There was no attempt to punish Pagans for belief or for practice. There was no Christian revenge, and no attempt, as yet, to substitute Christianity for Paganism as the official religion of the State. The Roman Empire was, for the moment, a State in which religion and the republic were things entirely separate. Under Gratian's successor the policy was to reach its logical conclusion. It was Theodosius who first made the State a Catholic thing.

Theodosius (379-395); the one great man the Empire produced in the two centuries which separate Constantine and Justinian, was that phenomenon hitherto rare, an emperor baptised from the beginning of his reign and a convinced practising Catholic. The Catholicism of his regular private life was the mainspring of his public action as the Catholic Emperor. He was not only Latin -- almost the first emperor for a hundred and fifty years not born East of the Adriatic -- but he came from the most Latin province of all the West, Spain. He had pre-eminently all the Latin virtues; he had a logical mind, an inexhaustible fund of personal energy, a temperament made for prompt solutions, and impatient of half measures. When Valens died, in 378, Gratian had associated Theodosius as his partner and assigned to him the difficult task of restoring the East to something like peace and contentment after half a century of religious disunion that bordered on civil war.

From the beginning Theodosius was definite. The long domination of the little clique of Arian bishops, in whose influence at court lay the real cause of the troubles, came to an end. Catholicism was freed; and security for its future provided in the first code for the repression of heresy. Orthodox Christianity received its first description in civil law as "the faith which the Roman Church has received from the Apostle Peter," it is the faith "professed by the pontiff Damasus and Peter Bishop of Alexandria." The churches of heretics of every sort, Anomeans, Arians, Apollinarians, Macedonians, are to be confiscated and handed over to the Catholics. Heretical assemblies are forbidden and heretics lose all power of making wills or of inheriting. Six times in the next fifteen years these laws are renewed.

Towards the Pagans, on the other hand, Theodosius is much less rigorous. There is a law against apostates from Christianity to Paganism, and all sacrifices to divine the future are now strictly forbidden. Divination of all kinds is abolished. On the eve of his succession to the Western Empire (391) upon the death of Valentinian II, an edict closes all the temples once and for all. Gradually they are given over to other uses. Finally, in the year in which Theodosius becomes master of the whole Roman world (392), the law occupies itself with the domestic religion which was the last refuge of Paganism, as, in Rome at least, it had been the place whence it sprang. All household rites are forbidden, all the domestic shrines are to be destroyed. But with all this anti-Pagan legislation it is to be noted that there is no attempt to compel the Pagan to become a Christian. Christian and Pagan are equal before the law. Honours and office continue to go impartially to the one as to the other. There is no violence offered to persons. The supports of the old religion have been ruthlessly struck away. The structure will soon fall of itself. Pagans remain, and will remain, here and there for a century yet, especially in the country districts. The old cults will, finally, come to be so associated with rusticity that the Roman's very name for a countryman (paganus) will for ever describe, and describe primarily, one who worships the old gods. Pagans, countryfolk, living remotely and divorced from the day's life and culture, ignorantly clinging to ancient superstitions and rites, backwoodsmen, there still will be in plenty; and for three centuries after Theodosius the business of their conversion will occupy the Church; but Paganism, with Theodosius, dies never to rise again.

NOTE C: THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF THE PERSECUTING STATE

How did the disciples of the Church regard the Roman State which was their persecutor? From the very beginning there were two schools of thought. The Apocalypse speaks of the Roman power in language of unmeasured abhorrence. It is the beast, the great harlot, drunk with the blood of the saints, destined for its crimes to a fearful chastisement.

But in St. Paul there is discoverable a certain pride in the Empire of which he is a citizen, and a faith that its stability and the order it secures are to be, under God, a powerful means of Christian propaganda. The authority which, in some instances, it misuses, is none the less divine in its origin; and whoever resists it resists thereby God Who is its author. To the Christian the prince " is God's minister. . . for good. . . an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil." Obedience, loyalty, the payment of tribute are then obligations in conscience (Rom. xiii, 1-7). Nor does the teaching change when, a few years later, Nero's edicts have destroyed the Christian's legal security. It is still his duty to pray "for Kings and for all that are in high station " (I Tim. ii, 2), "to be subject to princes and powers, to obey at a word, to be ready to every good work" (Titus iii, 1-2). The contemporary writings of St. Peter (I Peter ii, 13-15) are inspired by the same ideals, "Be ye subject to every human creature for God's sake: whether it be the king as excelling, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of the good. . . . Fear God. Honour the King." Such, in the first generation of Christianity, was the Church's general commentary on Our Lord's own direction to "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

This theory of the lawfulness of authority, of the State's right to loyal obedience, and of the Christian's political duties as obliging him in conscience, the persecutions by no means destroyed. It is repeated faithfully in the writers of every generation from Nero to Constantine, and, a rooted tradition by the time of that emperor's conversion, it supplied one of the foundations upon which he and his successors were able to build their untraditional novelty of a State-directed Christianity. The epistle of St. Clement of Rome gives a noteworthy testimony to the theory, in the prayer it contains for "our masters and those who govern us on earth " since " Thou, O Lord, has given them sovereign power" and " knowing the glory and honour with which Thou has endowed them, grant us to be submissive and never to rebel against Thy will. . . . Give to them O Lord health, peace, harmony and security, that they may exercise without harm the authority Thou has confided to them."

The martyrs, too -- St. Polycarp for example -- pray for the emperors in whose name they suffer and for those who are the agents of the imperial power in their death. This religious concern for the welfare of the State is so known an element of the Christian mind that the Apologists can point to it in disproof of the charge that Christianity is a danger to the State; and Tertullian lightly invites the magistrates, "Come good governors, put this soul to the torture while it prays to God for the emperor." Christians, the same bitter spirit insists, have a greater interest than Pagans in the Empire's welfare for it is, in God's providence, the one barrier against all-destroying anarchy and chaos. Nor, he notes, has a Christian ever been found among all the hundred leaders of sedition and revolt.

The Church, then, by no means saw in the Empire a thing evil in its nature, a thing therefore to be destroyed. Nor was there ever any Christian policy in the matter of the persecutions except the heroic policy of patient Endurance and prayer for the persecutor until the providence of God should send quieter times.

Endnotes

33: St. Denis of Alexandria. [back]

34: One feature of Diocletian's reforms should be noted for it had its effect in the history of the Church. This was his subdivision of the existing provinces, and the grouping of the new provinces into dioceses. The dioceses again were grouped into praetorian prefectures. See map. [back]

35: J. R. Palanque notes, as an important change, that now, for the first time, each Christian community, each church, is given legal recognition: previously it had been the Christian religion as such; F. & M. III, 22. [back]

36: One tenth only of the population Christian: so J. R. Palanque in F. & M. III 27 note 6. [back]