Despite the support of Constantine the church was still relatively weak. Constantine’s sons, though Christian, had continued to tolerate paganism. (Historians still use the word ‘paganism’ as a general term for non-Christian beliefs but they do so with marked unease. The connotations attached to the word unfairly degrade a broad range of beliefs, many of which were highly sophisticated.) They still held the traditional title ofpontifex maximus and subsidized pagan temples. A law of 342 prohibited the destruction of temples so as to protect the traditional entertainments and ‘the celebration of ancient pleasures’ associated with them. Constantius had as many pagans in his administration as the pagan Julian did some twenty years later.
It was only in the 350s that Constantius launched a determined attack on those who ‘offered sacrifice or cultivated the images of the [pagan] gods’. An edict against the practice of divination followed—emperors were always wary of those prepared to predict their successors. However, even this campaign had its limits. When Constantius visited Rome in 357 (in one of his most famous passages Ammianus describes how the emperor struggled to maintain his self-control when faced for the first time with the magnificence of the city), he realized the persistent strength of paganism there and refrained from upsetting the privileges of the senators and the revenues of their temples. Although paganism in late fourth-century Rome was not as vibrant as used to be believed, archaeological evidence shows that temples in Rome were being restored as late as the 380s.
The church was also in some confusion. After the stage-managed outcome of the Nicene Council, there was increasing recognition that the formula of consubstanti-ality (expressed by the Greek word homoousios) had no backing from the scriptures and went against earlier teaching. Like his father, Constantius was determined to achieve an agreed creed around which he could group the Christian communities, and he called together bishops from east and west in two separate councils in 359. Participants from each of these eventually met together in one assembly in Constantinople the following year, 360. The debates of 359 and 360 were muddled and bitter but the emperor himself did nothing to achieve a settlement. Ammianus Marcellinus puts it well when he opined that Constantius ‘confounded the plain and simple doctrine of the Christians with absurd superstition, in which, by involved discussions rather than efforts at agreement, he aroused more controversies’.
Eventually Constantius secured a somewhat unstable consensus for a compromise creed in which Jesus was declared to be homoios, ‘like’ the Father, with the Nicene term homoousios specifically condemned on the grounds that ‘it was not familiar to the masses, caused disturbance and because the Scriptures do not contain it’. This certainly reflected the artificial nature of the Nicene creed imposed by Constantine in 325 but it was hardly a more sustainable alternative, especially as Constantius never gained the immense prestige among Christians that his father had enjoyed. (The best account of the theological debates of these years is to be found in R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381 AD, Edinburgh, 1988.)
The settlement of 360 was also threatened by Constantius’ successor Julian. Julian had been brought up a Christian but the elimination of most of his immediate relations by Christian emperors had shaken him. He was further disillusioned by the Christian infighting over doctrine. ‘Experience’, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, ‘had taught him that no wild beasts are so dangerous to man as Christians are to one another.’ So he ‘converted’ back to paganism. As the orator Libanius put it in a panegyric to the emperor: ‘You quickly threw aside your error [Christianity], released yourself from darkness and grasped truth instead of ignorance, reality in place of falsehood, our old gods in place of that wicked one and his rites.’ From now on, Julian proclaimed, Christians were to confine their teachings to their churches.
Julian was an intellectual, a philosopher emperor whose opposition to Christianity rested as much on a rejection of its teachings as on his personal experience of it as a faith torn by dissension. He mounted a powerful critique of Christian belief in his Contra Galilaeos (362-3), where he analysed the scriptures for contradictions. He argued instead that a diverse empire needed a diverse set of gods to represent its many different cultures and traditions. (He followed this through by encouraging the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem although, to the joy of the Christians, this support for Judaism was halted by a major fire.) However, it was one thing for Julian to dissect the scriptures, it was another to find a stable alternative around which to rally the empire. His own presence lacked the dignity expected of an emperor—he often seemed distant and self-absorbed when in public—while his religious ideas appeared complex and incoherent, a mixture of sophisticated philosophy with a personal enthusiasm for pagan sacrifices, at a time when many pagans had rejected them. Fascinating though he remains, Julian was not able to reverse the growth of Christianity.
With Jovian came a restoration of Christian privilege and there were to be no more pagan emperors. The church was able to resume its progress. Increasingly its influence was based on the emergence of strong bishoprics headed by men of character and power. The church had acquired great wealth, mostly in land donated by the faithful, while the bishops had been given rights of jurisdiction (they could order the release of slaves, for instance) and often had an important role in the distribution of alms. Administrative expertise was essential. For this reason bishops were normally chosen from the traditional ruling classes and in some cases were appointed even before they were baptized. (For the emergence of the bishops in this period see Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition, Berkeley and London, 2005, and Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire, Madison, 1992.)
One such was Ambrose, bishop of Milan from 374 to 397 and perhaps the most influential bishop and preacher of his age. Ambrose had been an effective governor of north Italy and, when there was some dispute over the succession to the bishopric of Milan, he was asked to be bishop. Once baptized, he quickly mastered his new role, adopted the Nicene creed, despite the homoios settlement of 360, and showed he was much more than an administrator. In the twenty-four tempestuous years of his rule he waged an outspoken campaign against moral laxity, heresy (especially Arianism), and paganism. The council he held in the basilica at Aquileia in 381 was a superbly stage-managed condemnation of the Arian bishops summoned to attend apparently as equals but then browbeaten into submission. (The debates of these decades are normally assumed to be about ‘Arianism’. That convention is followed here but many of the anti-Nicene ideas had nothing specific to do with Arius, who was, in any case, essentially a spokesman for ‘subordinationist’ ideas that were widespread in his day.)
Ambrose insisted that it was the church that should define orthodoxy and set the standards of morality and that it was the duty of the state to act in support. He first worked on the young Gratian, inducing him to surrender the post ofpontifex maximus. His cause celebre was his battle with the Roman senate over the statue of Victory that adorned the senate house in Rome. Gratian was persuaded to order its removal despite opposition from the pagan senators. Ambrose was also important in encouraging the cult of relics. Having found the supposed bodies of two martyrs, Protasius and Gervasius, in 386, he exposed the remains in his own cathedral but also distributed parts of them to others he wished to impress. ‘Blood and earth’ from the two were sent as a gift to his fellow bishop, Victricius, at Rouen while ‘dust’ soaked in the martyrs’ blood was dispatched to bishop Gaudentius of nearby Brescia. This was the old practice of gift relationships extended to the Christian world. It helped that the spiritual power of a fragment of a martyr’s bone was assumed to have the power of the whole. Soon churches were building up their own impressive collections of dust and bone fragments. (Ambrose’s initiatives are covered in Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital, Berkeley and London, 1994.)
After Julian’s death the arguments over the relationship between Jesus the Son and God the Father that Constantius had failed to settle had revived. The continuing debates were embittered by the lack of any secure foundation on which they could rest. Scripture, tradition, the teachings of rival schools of theology, and Greek philosophy could never be brought into consensus. In the western empire there was general sympathy for a united Godhead of Father and Son on the Nicene model. In the east debate was more vigorous and varied so that, in an age when theological debate was still free to flourish, there was a spectrum of ‘Arian’ views from those, followers of the radical Eunomius, who stressed that Father and Son were ‘unlike’ each other, to those who believed that they were ‘like in substance, ‘of similar substance’, to (at the other extreme from Eunomius) the Nicene formula that Father and Son were ‘of the same substance. Valens (emperor of the east, 364-78) had tolerated this debate so long as good order was maintained but enthusiasts for Nicaea branded him ‘an Arian’ and they explained his defeat and death at Adrianople as punishment from God for this tolerance of heresy.
The most impassioned champion of the Nicene cause in the east (cf. Ambrose in the west) was Athanasius (c.298-373), the intransigent and tempestuous bishop of Alexandria. However, Athanasius’ attacks on the Arians depended more on invective than on reasoned thought. More impressive intellectual backing for Nicaea came from the works of the three theologians from Cappadocia, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, the so-called Nicene Fathers. All three were steeped in traditional philosophy—Basil of Caesarea argued that one had to absorb it before progressing to the study of the scriptures—and they were masters of argument. While Nicaea had only provided a formula for the consubstantiality of Father and Son (with only a reference to the Holy Spirit), the Nicene Fathers integrated the Holy Spirit in a Trinity in which three persons, God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, shared a common substance without losing their distinct personalities.
If there was to be any resolution of the varying approaches to the relationship between Father and Son it could not be made without the support of the emperor. It was Theodosius I who decided to back a revised Nicene creed. He had absorbed the Nicene tradition from his Spanish background and had been baptized when seriously ill by a Nicene-supporting bishop. In January 380, just after his elevation as emperor of the east, Theodosius issued an edict ordering all to believe ‘in the single deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity. Those who did not accede to this formula were judged to be ‘demented and insane’ and would ‘carry the infamy of heretical dogmas’. They would be subject to the vengeance of God and the hostility of the state. Like the Nicene Fathers Theodosius had gone further than Nicaea by integrating the Holy Ghost into a Trinity but he had also, for the first time in the history of the empire, highlighted specific beliefs that were to be outlawed.
Having made a grand entrance into Constantinople in November 380, Theodosius set about summoning bishops whom he knew were sympathetic to his formula to a council which would meet the next year, 381. Some 150, all from the east (as Theodosius had no jurisdiction in the west), assembled. The proceedings were once again tempestuous (and the presiding bishop, Gregory of Nazianzus, now bishop of Constantinople, forced to resign) but the formula was accepted and all alternatives banned. The ‘demented and insane’ ‘Arians’ were ordered out of their churches. Among the losers were the ‘barbarian’ peoples who had been converted to Christianity at a time when Arianism was dominant and who now found themselves classed as heretics. The proclamation of the Council that Constantinople, an upstart in the hierarchy of Christian cities, was now second only to Rome underlined the essentially political nature of Theodosius’ settlement. The ancient Christian cities of Antioch and Alexandria were profoundly hurt.
It is possible that Theodosius’ support for the creed was part of a deliberate policy of consolidating an ‘orthodox’ empire against ‘heretical’ ‘barbarians’ but emperors were also uneasy about emphasizing the humanity of Jesus as one who had been executed by a Roman governor as a ‘King of the Jews’ and thus a rival to the emperor. (Witness the shouting of the crowds in Thessalonika: ‘These men all act against the edicts of Caesar saying there is another king, Jesus’ (Acts of the Apostles 17: 7).) An elevation of Jesus into the Godhead helped avoid the issue. More importantly the definition of ‘heresies’ in the 380s was a turning point in the history of Christian theology. Never before had a division between orthodox and non-orthodox been so rigidly defined and, what is more, enforced through Roman law. The Council of Constantinople was later proclaimed an ecumenical council despite being a stage-managed assembly of eastern bishops already committed to Nicaea. Theodosius’ pivotal role in initiating the process was airbrushed from the Christian record. (See Charles Freeman, ad 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, London, 2008.)
World History
