In 313 the co-emperors Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Toleration, legalizing Christianity throughout the Empire. Ultimately, Constantine wrested control from his co-rulers to achieve sole rule of the empire in 324 and become the first Christian emperor. Although he was not baptized until shortly before his death in 337, his extraordinary support for the Church was instrumental in bringing
Christianity into the public sphere. Whereas most Christian meetings had been held in fairly small, private settings, like that exemplified in the house church preserved at Dura Europos in Syria (Krautheimer 1986: 27, fig.1), Constantine helped establish a public Christianity, in part by building churches and shrines on a monumental scale and adapting a type of imperial public architecture known as the basilica (a large, rectangular building, frequently apsed, in which legal, administrative, and commercial business was conducted). Constantine was not the originator of this trend in church building, but his use of the form lent an imperial association and de facto sanction to early basilica churches, which housed the burgeoning Christian population and provided an appropriate setting for the evolving performance of the liturgy (prescribed ceremonies); they also came to occupy significant positions within Roman cityscapes. In Rome, for example, Constantine built the new cathedral (the church of the highest-ranking ecclesiastical position of a city), St. John the Lateran, on imperial property. In the capital city Constantine founded on the site of ancient Byzantium, his New Rome, he set aside space for the new cathedral dedicated to Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, in the very heart of the city among the grandest public buildings and right next to the old acropolis. New Rome, called Constantinople or Constantine’s city, vied for prominence with old Rome and Alexandria in part by the construction of grand public spaces and architecture, and in part by the increasing enlargement of the role of the city within the emerging Church.
Constantine’s support of the Church advanced the development of a hierarchical administration based on the territorial and civic governance of the Empire, but this organization of the early Church did not prevent the emergence of sectarian divisions, which were rooted both in local cultures and in doctrinal issues. Especially divisive were debates concerning the nature (in Greek, physis) of Christ. In 451, over five hundred bishops attended the Council of Chalcedon (a city just across the Bosphoros from Constantinople) convoked by the emperor Marcian (450-457), which decreed a Dyophysite statement of Christ’s two (dyo) natures. Thirteen Egyptian bishops refused to stray from the Monophysite doctrine (Christ has one nature: Man-God) decreed by the Council of Nicaia in 431. From this turning point the Monophysite Egyptian Coptic Church developed within interconnected strands of religious beliefs and politics, but, despite the schismatic position of the native Egyptian church, Alexandria, an Apostolic See founded by Saint Mark, remained a key participant in the development of the early Christian doctrine.
World History
