In 394 the emperor Theodosius had been challenged by Eugenius, a usurper from Gaul. Eugenius was a pagan and attracted the support of many leading Roman senators. Theodosius met their forces at the river Frigidus in the Alps and crushed them. The battle was seen by contemporary Christians as the confirmation of the triumph of their faith. The arrival of the bora, a cutting wind from the Alps, which scattered Eugenius’ forces, was interpreted as a miraculous intervention.
Despite the dramatic presentation of the battle between two opposing forces, the church, in fact, was by now largely integrated into Roman society. Christianity had been associated by Constantine and his successors with success in war. Its Nicene bishops were powerful figures and expected to uphold the authority of the state. A vast building programme of churches contrasted with the decay of other public buildings.
Yet this was a changed world. The pleas that the pagan senator Symmachus made to Gratian over the statue of Victory in the senate house survive: ‘What does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret,’ he protested. Now it did matter. For the first time, in Theodosius’ edict of 380, the state had taken responsibility for defining what ‘truth’, in the sense of correct belief, consisted of. This marks a turning point in the history of western thought. While Greeks and Romans had punished blasphemy and wild expressions of religious ecstasy, this had been done on an ad hoc basis. It was never believed that there was a deliberate campaign to undermine the traditional gods—there were simply specific disruptions or blasphemous individuals who needed to be dealt with as need arose. Although this is not often appreciated, from now on theological orthodoxy had become part of the wider history of western thought.
In this new world, heretics were considered to be an army of enemies of God, always in battle formation and ready to seek out the weaknesses of the orthodox (who in Augustine’s formulation were orientated towards wickedness in any case). A common symbol for heresy was the many-headed Hydra, the mythical creature who grew two new heads for every one that was cut off. So the fight against heresy was perceived as never-ending. Those who succumbed to the blandishments of the heretics would be condemned to everlasting hellfire, a tortuous fate unknown in the pagan world. (See John Casey’s excellent After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, Oxford and New York, 2009, whose opening chapters range across the pagan and Christian world of antiquity.)
A growing preoccupation with the elimination of paganism and heresy meant, inevitably, that the rich diversity of Graeco-Roman spiritual experience was stifled, with the result that, eventually, spiritual aspirations could no longer be expressed outside a Christian context. Christianity had become as much an expression of an ideology as of practice. Jews were increasingly isolated, and the fourth century marks for them, in the words of Nicholas de Lange, ‘the beginning of a long period of desolation’.
In his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon blamed this narrowing of perspective on Christianity but, however seductive the power of his prose, this is too simplistic. The Christianity of the fourth century may have been far removed from the Christianity of the Gospels and have been transformed into something that could never have been imagined from their teachings, an authoritarian institution with a rigid interpretation of ‘truth’ that now collaborated closely with the imperial government. However, without such a structure, the church could never have provided the cohesion and order the communities of the west needed as the Roman empire collapsed around them. The tensions resulting from the conflict between these different forms of authority have shaped the later history of Christianity.
World History
