When Theodosius moved to the west in 388 to confront Maximus, he encountered Ambrose in Milan. Ambrose was soon on the offensive. Theodosius had condemned a Christian community at Callinicum on the Euphrates who had sacked a Jewish synagogue. He had ordered restitution. Ambrose insisted that he should not restore a building where Christ was denied and Theodosius retracted his order. When the emperor appeared to have initiated or condoned a massacre of some rioters in Thessalonica in 390, Ambrose threatened to excommunicate him and took the credit for forcing him to repent. (Although Theodosius’ acquiescence may well have been a calculated public relations exercise, the incident was later exploited by popes as a precedent for the primacy of the church over the state.)
So Theodosius became a Christian emperor of the type desired by Ambrose. It was in his reign that a wide variety of further heresies were defined and, probably at the instigation of his fanatical magister officiorum, Flavius Rufinus, a vigorous onslaught launched against pagan cults in a series of laws from the early 390s. It was now that the games at Olympia ceased after nearly 1,200 years. In Egypt bands of fanatical monks wrecked the ancient temples. The Serapeum, near Alexandria, one of the great temple complexes of the ancient world, was torn apart in 391. In north Africa Christian vigilantes raided pagan centres and ridiculed traditional beliefs. Intolerance towards Jews was given some official backing by the Callinicum episode and further inflamed by Christian preachers such as John Chrysostom. By the beginning of the fifth century Jews were banned from the civil service. In a masterly funeral oration for Theodosius in Milan in 395 Ambrose told his listeners that there was no doubt that such a committed Christian emperor ‘enjoys everlasting light and eternal tranquillity’ with God.
So new relationships between the churches and the imperial state were being forged. When Hilary, bishop of Poitiers and one of the more formidable supporters of the Nicene cause, was asked his views on the emperors, he replied that ‘he [the emperor] does not bring you [the Christian bishops] liberty by casting you in prison, but [now] treats you with respect within his palace and makes you his slave’ Despite Ambrose’s apparent triumph over Theodosius, the church had now become the servant of the state in a way that many Christians, such as Hilary, deplored. Bishops were increasingly used by the state to keep order and the benefits offered for acquiescence in this role were many. It was Ammianus Marcellinus who talked of the bishops of Rome as ‘enriched by the gifts of matrons, they ride in carriages, dress splendidly and outdo kings in the lavishness of their table, even though it was precisely this opulence that drove many bishops to reassert their moral authority through charitable building programmes (as with the complex of leper colonies built by Basil of Caesarea) or personal austerity. In his Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH, 2002), Peter Brown sets out the way in which the bishops recognized the needs of ‘the poor’ (a theme Brown develops in much greater detail in his Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550, ad, Princeton and London, 2012).
However, what resources were offered the poor were minuscule compared to those lavished on the gold and mosaic within the churches. The aristocratic Melania the Younger may have renounced her wealth but she gave so many ‘offerings of both gold and silver treasure and valuable silk veils’ to adorn a church in impoverished Thagaste in north Africa that churches in neighbouring cities were impelled to compete (as they had down with their civic buildings in the more prosperous years of the second century). Meanwhile in Rome, pope Sixtus II (432-40), with support from the emperor, built the imposing basilica of Santa Mary Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill, so extending papal influence into one of the residential enclaves of the aristocracy. One of its superb original mosaics celebrates the triumph of the papacy while Sixtus lavished the basilica with gold plate including a wine jug weighing twelve pounds. (The link between Santa Maria Maggiore and gold persisted— its ceiling was coated in the sixteenth century with the earliest gold to come in from South America.) With time a more formal system of distribution of a church’s income was standardized. The bishop could take a quarter of all income for himself, another quarter was allocated to his clergy, another quarter to the upkeep of church buildings, and the remaining quarter was distributed among ‘the poor’, although who exactly qualified as ‘the poor’ was not easy to resolve. (See again the exhaustive study by Peter Brown, Through the Eye of the Needle, cited above.)
In many ways the church adopted attitudes that were supportive of traditional values and customs. Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge had raised the possibility that the Christian God sanctioned success in war. By the late 370s, Ambrose was able to declare that ‘the army is led not by military eagles or the flight of birds but by your name, Lord Jesus, and Your Worship’ Remarkably, Jesus who, of course, had in reality been crucified by Roman soldiers, is portrayed as one in the Archi-episcopal chapel in Ravenna (c.500). Depictions of Christ in Majesty—the earliest is in the late fourth-century church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome—show him displayed as an emperor or even the God Jupiter might be. The result was a tension in the Christian tradition, between those who saw Christianity essentially as part of the natural conservative order of things and those who were inspired by the Gospels to reject worldly status and power. (A study which concentrates primarily on the way that Christians formulated new approaches to society is Averil Cameron’s Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Berkeley and London, 1991.)
World History
