During the 4th century, some important developments had changed the character of Christianity. An ascetic movement originating in the east in the previous century now exercised a wide appeal. For a long time Christianity had known an ascetic undercurrent preaching celibacy, but since the later 3rd century hermits (literally, “people in the wilderness”) had made their appearance in Egypt, who saw in voluntary solitude and selfmortification an imitation of Christ and a way to salvation. When persecution had stopped after 260 and finally after 313, martyrdom as a direct way to salvation (and sainthood) was no longer feasible, and this may have given an extra impulse to the movement into the
Desert, where the recluses strove to overcome the demons of their desires, freeing themselves from all but the barest needs and thus attaining a near-saintly status. In around 320 in Egypt, the first communities of monks appeared, men who at the edge of the desert lived their ascetic lives collectively under severe rules prescribing from hour to hour what they had to do and how they had to concentrate their minds on the divine. Such monasteries were led by an abbot, who in Egypt and soon elsewhere in the east was supervised by the local bishop. The monasteries attracted thousands of men (others, fewer in number, were for nuns) and grew into a very important social phenomenon. In the second half of the 4th century, the movement reached Rome and soon Gaul. There, in the 4th and 5th centuries, the foundations were laid for the monasticism of the European Middle Ages. This monasticism was part of a broader ascetic movement, already referred to, within Christianity in praise of celibacy, forbidding widows to remarry, propagating an unmarried status for some girls, and trying to allow sex only for the purpose of procreation within a lawful marriage. The unmarried women were usually supposed to assist the church in her caring for the very poor or the sick.
Christian learning and theology flourished in the same period as the ascetic movement spread. Eusebios, the bishop of Caesarea in Palestina, was the writer of the first history of the church, a world chronicle, and various treatises in which the whole of history, from the Creation to the time of Constantine was presented as a meaningful process, led by God, with the Christian empire as its glorious outcome. Other theologians devoted much ingenuity to dogmatic questions. Because of the intertwining of church and state since Constantine, dogmatic questions leading to ecclesiastical conflicts and schisms were always also of political importance. In the 4th century, the main question concerned the relationship between God the Father and Christ the Son who was also God. The followers of the Egyptian priest Arius (Areios) were of the opinion that the Son could not be co-eternal with God the Father; as soon as He, Christ, was there He was also God, but there logically must have been a “time” (if one could speak of “time” before the creation of the world) in which He was not, hence He was “lesser” than the Father. This view caused great consternation among all those who saw Christ as equally, not “lesser” divine. Arius was excommunicated by the bishop of Alexandria but received much support elsewhere in the east. When Constantine had conquered the eastern half of the empire in 324, he was immediately confronted by this dispute that had grown very bitter. He convened a council of bishops in 325 in Nicaea, near the Bosporus, where more than 200 bishops should decide the matter. Constantine himself often attended the sessions, eager for a formal unity of the church, for which he as emperor felt responsible. The bishops decreed that the Father and the Son were “of the same essence,” a verdict that nearly all bishops could subscribe to and that became orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the dispute went on for years, for the formula of Nicaea was rather vague. In the end, though, the emperor Theodosius convened a council in Constantinople in 381, where the dogma of Nicaea was reaffirmed and extended with the Holy Spirit: these three “persons” of the one God were deemed to be of the same “essence.” That was the dogma of the Holy Trinity. Those who thought otherwise were now heretics, as were various other Christian subgroups, all of which were outside the “Catholic” church and faced increasing discrimination, and even persecution. This dispute, which after 381 died out in the empire, was historically important because it forced the emperors to intervene in the church, it
Exacerbated a growing rift between the Greek-speaking east (where the question of the trinity was fervently debated) and the Latin-speaking west (where many were hardly aware of the problem and hence a bit suspicious of the Greeks), and because it widened the gulf between the inhabitants of the Roman Empire and the Germanic invaders settling there in the 5th century, who had in the meantime been converted to the Arian form of Christianity.
In the Latin-speaking west, a Christian literature flourished in the 4th and 5th centuries. It reached its height in the works of Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa (modern Algeria). In a sense, Augustine closed the period of Christian antiquity and opened that of the Christian Middle Ages. His main work, apart from numerous treatises on various theological subjects, was the City of God (de Civitate Dei), written under the impact of the decline of the empire in the west, especially after the plundering of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Augustine’s message was that this event had been less catastrophic than many other calamities that had struck Rome in the past, but that, eventually, it was not important in the greater scheme of things. For the empire was, after all, of no significance in the light of eternity. In opposition to the earthly “city” of the empire and to everything made by men, he placed the “City of God,” peopled by all the faithful and existing for all eternity, the world of heaven and the spirit against the imperfect material world.
The ecclesiastical conflicts had another political dimension in that the positions of the great bishoprics came into play here. In the 4th century, the bishops of the provincial capitals had as metropolitan bishops acquired a certain authority and supervision over the other bishops of their province; likewise, the bishops of some important supra-provincial centers such as Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and others claimed an even higher authority over the bishops in regions such as Egypt, Syria, etc. At Nicaea in 325, the bishop of Rome was recognized as the highest ranked of all the bishops, but in the Greek east the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople vied for the second place. The council of 381 formally assigned that second place in the church to the bishop of Constantinople, which inspired the patriarchs of Alexandria to make some attempts at securing their own independence from the new imperial city. This was part of the background to a new dogmatic conflict that divided the church in the 5th and 6th centuries. This time it was about the nature of Jesus Christ and the question of the relationship between the human and the divine in his person. Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, stressed the human character of Jesus, who had in his view only become divine by his resurrection and ascent to heaven; the patriarch of Alexandria defended the fully divine character of Jesus, starting from his miraculous conception and birth. In a first round in 428, Nestorius was condemned by most of his fellow bishops, deposed, and sent into exile to Egypt by the emperor (since Constantine, the emperors automatically supported the decisions of a council and banished bishops who had been deposed). Nestorius’ followers, however, spread his interpretation among the by then already numerous Christians in the Sassanid Empire. Next, the patriarch of Egypt overplayed his hand by trying to force through an extreme view of the nature of Jesus, the doctrine of Monophysitism (stating that in Jesus there actually was only one physis or “nature,” that is, his divine nature), which aroused much opposition. In 451, at the council of Chalcedon (on the Bosporus opposite Constantinople) it was decided, following a written statement of the bishop of Rome to that effect, that in the one person of Jesus there were two natures mysteriously combined,
A human and a divine nature. This time the patriarch of Alexandria had to go into exile, while the pope, as we may now call the bishop of Rome, had established his authority in the wider church.
When Eusebius of Caesarea wrote his history of the church, the church for him was practically confined to the Greco-Roman world. Christianity outside the Roman Empire, as in Asia, gets only minimal attention in his work. In Sassanid Persia, Christianity was reinforced by war prisoners taken in Syria and Asia Minor by the Persian kings during their incursions into the Roman Empire in the 3rd century and settled in Mesopotamia. Until the 4th century, the Christians here were more or less left undisturbed, but in the 4th and 5th centuries they were sporadically persecuted. The influence of Christianity and Gnosticism on the religion of Mani is obvious. Not long after 300, probably between 310 and 320, the king of Armenia became a Christian and ordered his people to convert likewise. After 428, as mentioned above, the adherents of Nestorius made their appearance among the Christians in the Persian Empire and won most of the communities there over to their doctrine. The Nestorians then organized themselves as a separate church under their own bishops and patriarch, independent of Constantinople or Rome. This church exhibited a strong missionary zeal: the Nestorians became enthusiastic promoters of their religion, which made it the third missionary religion after Buddhism and the Manichaenism, and Nestorianism spread along the Silk Road as far as China.
World History
