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THE Roman power, at the time of Our Lord's birth, (4 B.C.), had already
nearly reached to what were to be the limits of its geographical
expansion. With the exception of the island of Britain, the Romans held
the whole of Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube, northern
Africa from the Atlantic, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and the most of Asia
Minor. Claudius (41-54) was to add Britain, Trajan (98-117) Dacia and a
great territory to the east of the Euphrates. But except for these
later conquests, the Empire which at the beginning of the fourth
century saw the conversion of Constantine, was, geographically, the
same Empire in which the Apostles had preached.
The conquering power showed to the religions of the conquered peoples a
politic tolerance. There was, of course, nothing in the old Roman
religion to breed in its adherents anything approaching to a spirit of
intolerance. That religion was essentially a private, local, personal
relation between an individual, an individual family, an individual
city, and its own protecting deity. From the nature of the case there
was in such a religion no room for the idea of propaganda, no anxiety
that others should share its benefits, no zeal to compel others to come
in. The cult of Rome and the worship of the emperor which, later still,
was associated with it, was, it is true, universally imposed. But to
the syncretist age in which this new State cult developed, the
universal insistence that all men should worship the State was no
hardship. The new cult -- a mere ritual which, like all the rest,
involved no new definite belief, prescribed nothing in the way of
conduct -- was in no way incompatible with the devotee's loyalty to the
score of cults which already claimed his attention; and if the State
saw in this new cult a means to promote the unity of a world-wide
Empire, the means was yet not an artificial thing specially devised by
the State for this purpose, but a natural product of the religious
spirit of the time.
Two exceptions there were to the Roman State's universal toleration or
indifference. No cult would be authorised which was of itself hostile
to the State; nor any which was itself exclusive of all others, The
basis of these exceptions was, once more, political policy and not any
dogmatic zeal To these exceptions there was again in turn one very
striking exception. Judaism was essentially an exclusive religion. No
Jew could have any share in any other religion. No Jew could take part
in the official worship of the State. Yet the Jewish religion was not
only not persecuted, but it was the subject of the State's special
protection. The reason for this singular exception is to be found in
the coincidence of the religion and the race. Judaism was the religion
of a subject nation. The non-Jewish adherents of the sect were so rare
as to be negligible, nor did their number really increase. The religion
of the Jew was part of his nationality and, as such, the traditional
Roman policy, which tolerated all differences in the one loyalty,
tolerated the Jew's religion and protected it.
It was in the shadow of that protection that the religion of the Church
made its first contacts with the Roman authority, for to the Romans the
first Christians they knew were members of a Jewish sect. The
differences between the Christians and other Jews were mere quarrels of
Jewish divinity, with which the Roman law refused to occupy itself.
Naturally enough it was only a matter of time before the Jews who did
not see in Jesus Christ the promised Messias, and who were responsible
for the expulsion of His followers from the body of Judaism, made it
clear to the Roman officials that in Christianity they had to deal with
a new, nonnational religion. From the moment when the distinction was
clear, and the exclusiveness of the new religion recognised, it became
for the Roman State an unlawful religion in the technical sense, and
the atmosphere thickened with hostility. To this legal suspicion of the
Church as a religious conspiracy, there was added very soon the more
fruitful suspicion of its members as monsters of depravity, meeting
secretly for the performance of rites bloody and unnaturally obscene. A
tradition which goes back to the first century itself, credits the Jews
with the authorship of these only too successful calumnies.
By the time of the Emperor Nero (54-68) the Christians were known as
such in Rome, they were numerous, and they were the objects of popular
suspicion and hatred. It is to Nero there falls the horrible
distinction of exploiting this hatred to cover up his own misdeeds, and
also of setting a precedent in the manner of dealing with the new
religio illicita.
The circumstances which brought about the persecution under Nero
(64-67) are obscure. The terms of the legislation are lost, though it
seems agreed that it was Christianity as such that was the object of
the law. Christiani non sint is its spirit. More certain than the terms
of the law are the facts of the terrible scenes in the garden of Nero's
palace on the Vatican, where, like so many human torches to light up a
festivity, thousands of Christians, clad in garments steeped in pitch,
paid with their lives for loyalty to their new faith. Equally certain
appears to be the motive which turned Nero's attention to the
Christians -- the chance of saddling an already suspect people with the
guilt of his own recent criminal burning down of Rome. Little is known
in detail of this first persecution, though from the first epistle of
St. Peter (iv, 12, 15, 16) warning Christians in general to lead good
lives so that if condemned for their faith it will be evident to all
that their faith is their only crime, it might be argued that the
persecution was not confined to Rome.
Nero's criminal insanity was already nearing its term when the
Christians fell victims to it. Four years after the Vatican martyrdoms
he was dead, slain by his freedman too impatient to wait for the
emperor's suicide; and the State, after a century of peace, was once
again in all the turmoil of civil war. To Nero, in that year, three
different armies gave three successors, all three of whom died violent
deaths, the swiftly passing Otho, Galba, and Vitellius. Finally the
army of Vespasian triumphed and with his acknowledgment as emperor the
Roman world once more had peace. Peace came to the Christians, too, for
the persecution had been Nero's personal act. In the reaction which
followed his death Nero's laws were annulled, except, significantly,
his law against the Christians. Nero had put them outside the State's
protection. There they remained, the peace they now enjoyed the
accident of circumstances.
Under the Flavian emperors -- Vespasian, Titus and Domitian -- the
restoration necessary after twenty years of crazy rule was
systematically carried out in the spirit of the empire's best
tradition. How, towards the end of his fifteen years' reign, Domitian
(81-96) suddenly turned into a second Nero or Caligula is one of the
commonplaces of the imperial story. From his struggle with the
senatorial aristocracy a reign of terror developed which involved all
the better elements of the population and the Christians with them.
Details, once again, are few. There is no record of any new law, and it
was, apparently, under Nero's all sufficient edict that the martyrs
suffered. They included, at Rome, members of the noblest families, the
emperor's own kinsfolk, Flavius Clemens, recently consul, and his wife,
and Glabrio, another ex-consul. It is to this persecution, too, that
tradition ascribes the martyrdom of St. Clement of Rome, and the
passion of St. John the Evangelist before the Latin gate of the city.
Domitian, too, died violently, murdered by his officers before his
madness had found the chance to murder them, and before the persecution
had lasted long. In his place the officers of the guard installed as
emperor the elderly Nerva (96-98) and with Nerva there came in a new
tradition of administration and a wholly new spirit. The chronic
problem of the "right to the throne" in a State where the chief
magistrate was, in the last analysis, supreme because he was the
commander-in-chief, where there was no such thing as a principle of
legitimacy, and where the army was an army of citizens, this new
tradition solved by the principle of adoption. The emperor, early in
his reign, chose his successor, adopted him as his son. and secured his
recognition as emperor-to-be. For the best part of a century the system
worked admirably, and it gave to the empire its golden age of
prosperity and peace under Trajan (98-117), Hadrian (117-138),
Antoninus Pius (138-161) and Marcus Aurelius (161-180). But Marcus
Aurelius chose his own son to succeed him, the worthless and
incompetent Commodus (180-192) whose murder was the prelude to a
century of civil anarchy in which, more than once, the Empire seemed on
the point of disappearing entirely.
With these emperors whose skill in administration, practical wisdom and
concern for the welfare of their subjects have made them ever since the
very type of the model ruler, Christianity had to face the worst
century of all the persecutions. It was to these emperors, moderates
like Trajan, cultured scholars like Hadrian, philosophers like Marcus
Aurelius, that St. Justin and the rest addressed their reasoned and
eloquent pleas for toleration. All in vain. Not only did the Apologists
go unheard, but the emperors, by removing the process against the
Christians from the unseemly irregularity of lynch-law, not only fixed
the State's hostility in their regard, but indirectly provided a
recommendation to the zeal of good citizens to discover the Christians
and to good magistrates to persecute them: indirectly, for the motive
of the first of the new imperial orders was to solve a case of
conscience for an administrator anxious to administer the law
faithfully and yet perplexed by the consequence that he was thereby
sending to torture and death citizens of blameless life.
This administrator was none other than Pliny the Younger and the
episode of his correspondence with Trajan throws a great deal of light
on the spirit of the persecution under these truly Roman princes,
aristocrats, conservatives, inflexible men of law. The administration
of the province of Bithynia had lately passed into the emperor's
personal charge, and Pliny, his friend and confidant, had been
despatched to carry through the necessary re-organisation.
He found a province in which Christians were so numerous, in the
countryside as well as in the towns, that the temples were deserted,
the public ritual in places abandoned and the traders for whom the
sacrifices were a means of livelihood generally impoverished.
Denunciations from such interested parties poured in to the new
governor, and persons accused of being Christians were hauled before
him for judgment. The business was new to him, and in a letter to
Trajan he set forth his hesitations, described the course he had taken,
and asked for directions. Should he make any distinction on account of
the age of the accused? Should he grant a pardon to those who repented
their Christianity? And in the case of those who refused to abandon it,
was it the bare fact of being Christians that should be punished or
should they be punished for the crimes which went with membership of
the sect? So far he had questioned the accused, and threatened them
with punishment should they admit they were Christians. Those who
obstinately refused to deny it he had punished, for, whatever the
nature of what they confessed, such obstinacy he thought deserving of
chastisement. A vast number had been denounced in an anonymous letter.
Those who denied they were, or ever had been Christians, and at Pliny's
demand proved it by offering wine and incense before the emperor's
statue and by cursing Christ, he had released. Others there were who,
once Christians, had now for some years ceased to be. These, too,
proved their Paganism in the same way. From this last class he had
obtained strong denials that Christians were bound by oath to a life of
crime. Their mutual agreement was rather to avoid theft and robbery,
adultery, frauds. Apart from the folly that, on a fixed day, the
Christians met before dawn to sing a hymn to Christ as God, he found
nothing against them.
Trajan's reply furnished the principle which for the next hundred years
determined the procedure. Pliny's action is approved. Christians are
not to be hunted out by the magistrates. Those denounced and brought
before the tribunals are, however, to be tried. If the accused denies
the accusation and supports the denial by taking part in the
sacrifices, even though the suspicion was justified, he is to go free.
Anonymous denunciations are to be ignored. Nam et pessimi exempli, nec
nostri saeculi est.
Christianity, then, is very definitely a crime, " an abstract crime,"
itself punishable. Yet for all its gravity -- death is the punishment
-- it is not the dangerous thing that, say, brigandage is. It is no
part of the State's duty to search out these criminals. The situation
is an illogical one, as the Apologists were not slow to point out. To
punish so savagely, for a "crime" such that it was not worth while
tracking down the criminals ! And to free from the penalty his past
crime deserves the criminal who will declare that he has lately ceased
to commit it ! The procedure before the tribunals was something new. It
was not by the testimony of witnesses that the crime was proved, but by
the criminal’s own refusal to deny it. None sought to convict him,
often indeed the magistrate by promises, by threats, by violence sought
to prevent his conviction. The law strained every nerve that the
criminal might escape the awful penalty which the same law declared to
be his just desert. The whole machinery of justice was employed to
force, not an admission of guilt, but a denial. In the acta of the
trials of St. Polycarp (155), of St. Justin (165), of the martyrs of
Lyons (177), of Scillium (180), and of others of this century, the
whole process can be read in detail.
To this legislation of Trajan the next hundred years add little if
anything. And there is to be noted, as the century goes by, a tendency
to disregard the prohibition to hunt out the Christians, thanks to the
increasing popular hatred of their religion which calumnies inflame,
and which the learned apologetic never reaches, and thanks also to the
indifference of the officials. During this century, then, the Christian
is at the mercy of his Pagan neighbours and acquaintances. Until they
move, the law ignores his existence. Once they act, the law must act
too. The magistrate is here the servant of any chance spite or hatred.
The emperor's sole care is to see that, in the administration of
Justice, due order is observed.
With the last of the Antonines, the " roman-ness " of the empire
disappeared for ever. Commodus was murdered in 192 and his successor
Pertinax, emperor by grace of the imperial bodyguard, a few months
later. Didymus Julianus followed Pertinax and, as in 68, the Empire
seemed doomed to a long civil war. It was rescued from this by the
success of the African soldier who established himself in 193, Lucius
Septimius Severus. With Severus there entered into the high places of
the State a type hitherto unknown there -- the provincial for whom the
provinces were more important than the capital, and who had for Rome
and Roman ways a simple vigorous contempt. Nor was this all. The wife
of Severus, Julia Domna, came of a Syrian priestly family. A woman of
talent and highly cultured, the court under her influence became an
academy. Galen, Diogenes Laertius and the great jurists Papinian and
Ulpian found in her a patron. Thanks to her influence the religion
fashionable in the imperial circle, for the next half century, was that
philosophical morality which has been described. It was one of this
circle of Julia Domna's proteges, Philostorgius, who, at the request of
the empress, now wrote the famous life of the chief of the "saints" of
the new moral philosophy, Apollonius of Tyana, with its classic pleas
for toleration in matters of religion. The old, hard, legalist spirit
of the Antonines had indeed disappeared. In its place is this fever of
syncretism which finds the old classical polytheism an obstacle to the
new aim of a universal, all-embracing, moral religion. Eastern cults,
with their ideas of moral purification, expiation for past misdeeds,
belief in a future life which is conditioned by present conduct, are a
help. One Eastern cult, especially, is patronised -- that of the Sun,
in which these imperial syncretists see an impersonal symbol for the
Monotheism to which they tend. Into this system Christianity could not
enter, but thanks to the spirit which inspired it, Christianity was
now, for the first time, to experience a certain understanding and even
an admiration of its ideals, and to be conceded a legal existence.
Septimius Severus was not himself personally hostile to the religion of
the Church, and a Christian was foster-mother to his son and heir,
Caracalla. Heliogabalus (217-222) was actually the chief priest of one
of the principal Sun-cults at the time of his elevation, and he not
only retained the dignity but, to the disgust of his Roman subjects,
made no secret that he considered it of more account than his imperial
rank. But the emperor who, more than all the rest, sums up this
un-Roman succession of emperors is Julia Domna's great-nephew Alexander
Severus. It was to his mother, the Empress Julia Mammaea, that St.
Hippolytus dedicated his treatise On the Resurrection, and she is
remembered, too, as the empress who at Antioch summoned Origen to speak
before her on the Christian mysteries. Alexander Severus did not belie
his parentage. In him Syncretism is indeed enthroned, more even than
was Philosophy in Marcus Aurelius. In his own "oratory," side by side
with statues of Orpheus and the more noble of his imperial
predecessors, he placed those of Abraham and of Our Lord Himself, and
in Our Lord's honour he even planned to build a temple.
Under such princes, and with such a spirit informing the court, some
modification of the persecution was inevitable. To that modification
the first of the line contributed not at all. Tertullian indeed speaks
of his benevolence, but Christians certainly suffered during his reign,
notably the famous women SS. Felicitas and Perpetua. There exists, too,
the record of an edict which most scholars take as a prohibition
against conversions, conversions primarily to Judaism, but also to
Christianity -- "Under severe penalties it was forbidden to become a
Jew (Iudaeos fieri), the thing was also enacted regarding Christians."
There seems room, however, for the interpretation that the edict of
Severus merely forbids circumcision whether practised by Jews or, as
was still the case in parts of Palestine, by Christians.
Whatever be the share of Septimius Severus in the new policy of
benevolence, that of Alexander Severus (222-235) is beyond all doubt,
and this emperor is, in this respect, a more important personage than
has been generally recognised. With his reverence for Christian ideals
there went some knowledge that their religion was an association ruled
by an elected hierarchy, for in his scheme of reforms he holds up the
system as an example in reference to the nomination of governors and
other high officials. The changes which Alexander Severus introduced
into the anti-Christian code were fundamental, for he abrogated the law
of Nero which was its basis, granting Christians the right to exist,
allowing them corporately to own property, and the right to assemble
for worship. Christianity then ceased to be religio illicita. The date
of this legislation we do not know.
Alexander Severus was but a boy of thirteen when he succeeded his
cousin, the fantastic Heliogabalus, and he was still four years short
of thirty when Maximin the Thracian murdered him and took his place.
With Maximin yet another type of emperor appears -- the soldier, born
on the frontier, and bred in an army that is less and less a Roman
thing, rough and illiterate, the successful recruit who has risen from
the ranks, the ex-sergeant-major never at his ease outside the camp.
From this class are to come most of the emperors of the next hundred
years.
Maximin's policy, in many matters, was the simple one of reversing the
policies of his predecessor. His short reign (235- 238) saw then a
renewal of the persecution, a renewal in which the State set the new
precedent of itself taking action against the Christians. The
conquirendi non sunt of Trajan had fallen along with the institutum
Neronianum which it had organised. The new fury derived from an edict
intended for the whole Empire, and aimed specifically at the Church's
rulers. The persecution -- in which, among others, both the pope,
Pontian, and the anti-pope Hippolytus were deported to the mines in
Sardinia -- was of short duration, for Maximin's successor Gordian III
(238-244) returned to the regime of Alexander Severus, and the next
emperor, Philip (244-249) was himself a Christian.
But this short persecution of Maximin had far-reaching results. It set
the precedent of State initiative, and the equally menacing precedent
of general edicts. No longer was the Christian safe so long as his
Pagan neighbours were friendly, or he could find means to hide the fact
of his faith. The State was no longer indifferent until provoked to
action by private zeal. Maximin had been inspired by hatred of his
predecessor, in whose entourage many Christians were to be found,
rather than by any interest in Christianity itself. But fifteen years
later there came an emperor whom enthusiasm for the old national
religions inspired. He copied Maximin's methods and extended them into
a plan of simple extermination. This was Decius (249-251).
In Decius it was the spirit of the ancient republic that returned for a
few years to the Empire. With Severus, fifty years earlier, a culture
hostile to the Roman genius had come to rule the Roman world; with
Maximin, Barbarism undisguised; and with these changes, a new and
terrifying insecurity for whoever held the throne. Between Marcus
Aurelius and Decius (180- 250) history counts the names of sixteen
emperors, and of them all, one only escaped a violent death. In the
thirty years between Decius and Diocletian (251-284) there are eleven
emperors more, and of these not one died in his bed. The battlefield
claimed of the whole perhaps half a dozen. The rest were murdered,
either by the troops who had elected them or by the troops of their
rivals; and if Gallienus continued to rule for eight whole years, there
is record during that time, in one province or another, of nineteen
rival emperors set up by the different armies.
Decius interrupted this tradition of barrack-square emperors. He came
of a Roman family, and he inherited all the cold conservatism and
austere reverence for tradition proverbially associated with the Roman.
He was a member of the Senate when his predecessor, Philip the Arab,
named him as his commissioner to suppress a mutiny of the army. Decius
was too successful for his own peace. The troops insisted that he
should be emperor. Yet another short sharp civil war, and either the
field of battle or the daggers of Decius' supporters removed Philip.
The new emperor set himself to undo all the work of the past seventy
years. The discontent of the Roman with the domination of the
provinces, of the East, of the Barbarian, found in him a leader. The
State was to be re-Romanised. Amongst other things the old religion,
overshadowed for half a century by the imperial patronage of oriental
cults, was to be restored. Christianity was to disappear. A day was
appointed by the imperial edict upon which all those whose religious
allegiance was doubtful were to appear before a local commission. Each
of the suspects was in turn to be bidden to offer sacrifice, to make a
declaration denying his faith and insulting its Founder, and finally
all were to share in a formal banquet where the wines and food used in
the sacrifices were to be consumed. Certificates were then to be issued
testifying that the accused had proved himself a good Pagan. Not a
town, not a village of the Empire escaped the trial. For those who
refused to sacrifice, the penalty was, ultimately, death. But the
emperor's intention was not so much the massacre of Christians as their
conversion to the old religion. Whence, in the case of the loyal
Christians, long drawn out trials which lasted for months and filled
the prisons with confessors, repeated interrogations and the extensive
use of torture in the hope of gradually breaking down the resistance.
Among the better known victims of this persecution was the Bishop of
Jerusalem, Alexander, who had been the fellow-pupil of Origen at the
School of Alexandria and was later his protector. Origen himself was
imprisoned and subjected to continual tortures. At Rome the pope St.
Fabian was executed out of hand, an exception to the general procedure,
to be explained perhaps by Decius' own statement after the event that
he would rather hear of a rival to his throne than of the election of a
new bishop in Rome. The terror inspired by the government was
sufficient to keep the see vacant for more than a year.
If martyrs were by comparison few, the number of confessors was huge;
and, by the testimony of contemporaries (for example St. Denis of
Alexandria), the number of apostates greater still. The penalty of
confiscation of all property appears to have influenced many of the
better class of Christians, and the connivance of the magistrates
countless others. Not so much that there were magistrates who could be
bribed, but that very many of them were willing to issue certificates
of sacrifice to any Christian who would accept one, whether he had in
fact sacrificed or not. Such nominal apostasy often enough satisfied
the officials and saved the Christian's property and life. It was one
of the chief causes of that crisis which, on the morrow of the
persecution, was to occupy the bishops in every province of the Empire.
In more than one place the majority of the faithful had, technically at
least, renounced their faith.
Decius was slain, bravely fighting the barbarians on the Danube, in
251. He had reigned less than two years. But the persecution had ended
even before his death. The emperor apparently realised that he had
gained for the State religion merely the feeblest and most worthless of
the Christians. He had failed utterly to rally that better element
whose falling away from the old ideals he so deplored. For the Church
itself the emperor's policy was a rude shock, revealing, as it did
beyond all doubt, proof upon proof of the disastrous effects of the
long peace upon the quality of its members' spirituality. Origen's
general strictures were given an unpleasant particularity.
To Decius succeeded Gallus (251-253) and to Gallus, Valerian, in whom
all the best ideals of Decius might seem assured of success, for it was
Valerian whom Decius had named as a kind of general superintendent of
morality when he appointed him to the restored office of Censor. To the
Christians, however, Valerian was at first well disposed, and there
were so many of them in his service that St. Denis of Alexandria could
say that his palace was almost a church. "He was kind and well-disposed
to the people of God, and none of his predecessors, not even the
emperors who were openly known to be Christians, showed them more
sympathy and made them more welcome than did Valerian at the beginning
of his reign." [ ] For four years all went well until the influence of
his chief adviser, Macrinus, brought the emperor to a renewal of the
methods of Decius. The cause of the change, apparently, was the
increasingly desperate situation of the Empire, attacked now on all its
frontiers at once, the Rhine, the Danube, the Sahara, Mesopotamia and
Armenia, while pirates ravaged the coasts of Britain and of Asia Minor.
Macrinus, a devotee of the old cults, superstitious, and a responsible
official, is thought to have interpreted the disasters as the signs of
the wrath of the gods provoked by the toleration of the arch-enemy, the
religion of Christ.
There are two phases of the persecution. The first edict -- August, 257
-- was directed against the persons of the clergy and against the
reunions of the faithful. The bishop in each town, and his priests,
were to be summoned to sacrifice to the gods of the State. Those who
refused were to be exiled, and the cemeteries and other places of
worship were seized by the State. Christians who persisted in meeting
for religious purposes were to be punished with death. A year later, by
a second edict, the penalties were increased and the proscription was
given a wider field. Not exile, now, but death is the penalty for the
clergy who refuse to sacrifice; and it is to be carried out immediately
on their refusal. The laity also are brought within the terror. Nobles
who admit they are Christians are to lose their rank, their properties
and their lives, while those specially attached to the Emperor's
personal service -- the Caesariani -- are to suffer confiscation of
goods and to be reduced to serfdom. The new legislation was rigorously
applied. At Rome the newly-elected pope, Sixtus II, was arrested, tried
and beheaded within a few days, and his more famous deacon Laurence. At
Carthage St. Cyprian, exiled under the first edict, was now recalled
and put to death under the second. But, as in 251, a political
catastrophe brought the new reign of terror to an unexpected end. An
invasion from Persia summoned Valerian to the distant eastern frontier.
His armies were overwhelmed and he himself fell into the hands of the
enemy, to end his life in chains, to be a public show in every town
through which his conqueror passed, and this even after death, for his
skin was stuffed and preserved to be an everlasting memorial of the
greatest disgrace that ever befell a Roman Emperor.
The new emperor was Valerian's son, Gallienus, associated with him in
the Empire since 253. One of his first acts was to end the persecution,
and the act by which he did so is extremely important. It was no mere
cessation of hostilities but the definite restoration of a status once
held and recently lost, a recognition once more of the Church's legal
right to exist. The "Peace of Gallienus" is a re-affirmation of the
policy of Alexander Severus, with the new precedent that the emperor
now treats directly with the bishops and restores to them the Church
property under sequestration since three years before. Once more the
Christian is to be unmolested in the practice of his religion, is to
enjoy all his rights as a citizen. It was indeed peace and it endured
for forty years.
Gallienus died in 268. Claudius II, Aurelian, Tacitus, Probus, Carus
and Diocletian (284-305) succeeded him one after another, and under
Diocletian, in 302, the persecution was renewed. About these
thirty-four years that lie between the death of Gallienus and the first
edicts of Diocletian we have almost no knowledge at all. There is the
appeal to Aurelian in 272 on the part of the church of Antioch,
embarrassed by the presence of the deposed Paul of Samosata in the
episcopal palace. There are allusions to other episcopal dissensions,
and that is almost all we know. Aurelian meditated a renewal of the war
against Christianity -- he even issued the edicts -- as a part of his
campaign to establish, as the new State religion, the solar monotheism
which was his own especial cult. But he was killed before his ordinance
could be put into execution and no martyrdom is recorded in his reign.
The period is one of unhindered propaganda and of uninterrupted
unconcealed activity on the part of the Church. Churches are built
everywhere -- in Rome alone, by the end of the century, there were more
than forty -- and to be a bishop is to occupy an envied position, so
great is the deference shown by the imperial government, so high and so
secure is the bishop's social standing. Christians rise to the chief
posts in the administration, even to be governors of provinces, and, in
the words of Eusebius of Caesarea, who grew up to manhood under this
happy regime, " The emperors allowed the Christians in their service to
make the freedom of the faith almost a matter of glory," even
dispensing them from the sacrifices which were part of the routine of
official life.
Nevertheless, below the surface, the old Pagan animosity survived. The
old calumnies, so scornfully retorted on those who spread them by, say,
Tertullian, had perhaps disappeared. Origen and St. Cyprian had found
friends and admirers in circles where, fifty years earlier, their very
existence would have been ignored. But fifty years later than Origen
and St. Cyprian the educated Pagan world is still materialist at heart,
sceptical about the life after death, and unhesitating when it feels
the attraction of vice. The crowd, despite the philosophers and the
centuries of progress in the reformation of religion, is still, in its
measureless ignorance, where its ancestors were three, four, and ten
centuries earlier -- materialist, sensual, superstitious, its present
tolerance easily stirred to cruelty against the demonstrated enemies of
the human race. The philosophers have on their side the prestige of the
traditional culture. Christianity is still on the defensive, still
easily derided as fit only for old women and the abnormally stupid, a
butt for wits who continue to make mock of a sect that worships a
shamefully executed criminal. In all these manifestations, and they are
the ever-recurring theme of the theatre's topical skits, there lurks an
active disgusted hostility towards such fools. But most dangerous of
all was the reasoned hatred that found its armoury in Porphyry's great
work Against the Christians. Porphyry himself was, it is true, no
advocate of persecution; but his learning, his extensive knowledge of
Christianity and of Christians, his specious and effective criticism,
were at the service of philosophers less indifferent than himself to
the fate of what they attacked. Such a philosopher was the one whom
Lactantius describes as a really influential personage of the imperial
court, at the moment when the persecution was renewed. This was,
apparently, Hierocles. He, too, wrote his book, an address To the
Christians. It is a reasoned criticism of the Gospels and the Life of
Our Lord. The miracles are not denied, but they are set beside the
alleged miracles of Apollonius of Tyana to destroy whatever force
Christians give to them as proofs of Our Lord's divinity. The book was
written in a popular style. Bitter and mordant in its language, it
attacks the religion of the Christians as an insult to reason.
As the third century drew to its close the old State religion and the
new philosophical deism drew together, in opposition to the object of
their common hatred. Popular feeling there was in plenty to exploit
against the Christians, a tradition made up of a variety of elements
appealing to every rank and class. It needed but the opportunity and
the vast coalition would move. That opportunity none could create but
the emperor. The moment came when he was won over, and the long peace
ended, suddenly, in the greatest of all the persecutions. The emperor
was Diocletian.
Diocletian has deservedly a very great name in history. He succeeded in
halting the general dissolution of the Empire which had gone on now for
half a century, and faulty as many of his measures were, they made
possible another century and a half of greater peace and prosperity
than the West was to know again until the later Middle Ages. He
restored the Roman power by remodelling it: the central administration,
the provinces, taxation, the army, the imperial court. The last
vestiges of the old republican State disappeared, the de facto
absolutism that had grown with every generation since Augustus received
explicit recognition, and the emperor, even to the trappings and
ceremonial, was henceforward that semi-divine autocrat the East had
always known, and against which the West had always fought. The truth
that the most important region of the Empire was the frontier was
emphasised in the most striking way possible. From now on Rome ceased
to be the Capital. In all his twenty years of reign Diocletian visited
it but twice, and Constantine, the greatest of his successors, hardly
more often in a still longer reign. The capital follows the emperors,
and the emperors live on the frontiers defending what is now
perpetually in danger. The emperors -- for, another revolutionary
change due to Diocletian, there is no longer but one emperor. The task
is beyond any one man's energies, and as well to provide for the State
as to lessen the danger from the inevitably powerful subordinate, the
imperial task is shared by equals. Diocletian was acclaimed emperor in
November 284. On April 1, 285, he made over the administration of the
Western half of the Empire to his comrade-at-arms of half a lifetime,
Maximian. Eight years later he carried the principle a step further. To
each emperor was adjoined a lieutenant, who would ultimately succeed
his chief and to whom, meanwhile, there was entrusted with the title of
Caesar the administration of a group of provinces. Thus when the
persecution broke out, in 303, four princes ruled the one Empire,
Diocletian and Galerius in the East, Maximian and Constantius Chlorus
in the West. [ ]
Diocletian was as little a lover of Roman ways as Severus had been a
hundred years before. He was a provincial, and a none too cultured
provincial, with a certain cold surliness of manner that repelled. In
religion he had no personal preferences. He was not, for example, like
Aurelian, concerned to depress one religion in order to exalt another.
But he was notably superstitious. Towards Christianity he continued,
and apparently as the obvious policy, the policy official since the
Peace of Gallienus. His household was filled with Christians and his
wife and daughter were converts to the faith. The persecution when it
came was not so much the fruit of long deliberation on his part, as an
enormous blunder into which he was tricked to consenting. The real
author of the persecution was Diocletian's lieutenant, the Caesar
Galerius, and this time it was undisguisedly the war of one religion on
another, a persecution which had for its complement the most elaborate
attempt to revive Paganism yet undertaken by the Roman State.
The history of the series of persecutions which began with Diocletian's
edict of February 24, 303, and which did not end until the so-called
Edict of Milan, ten years later, is far too complicated to be set forth
adequately in any chronological summary. It was a persecution differing
as widely in its methods as the four princes who ruled the Empire
differed one from another, and its history is complicated by the rapid
changes in the government which mark these ten years. The Empire is
divided, united, divided anew; Diocletian and Maximian resign; Galerius
and Constantius Chlorus succeed them, with Maximin Daia and the son of
Constantius -- Constantine -- as their respective Caesars; Constantius
dies in 306 and, although Constantine maintains his hold on the
provinces he has ruled as Caesar, there is a new Western Emperor,
Severus. The son of Diocletian's old colleague, Maximian, next makes
himself master of Italy and Africa. This is Maxentius. A few years
later, and Maximian himself returns claiming the honour he had
resigned. Six emperors are simultaneously in the field, and civil war
again claims the Empire for its own.
Galerius was, once more, the barbarian soldier in the purple, the
typical sergeant-major emperor, a good soldier but by Roman standards
hardly civilised, violent, crafty, and greatly influenced by his
mother, a superstitious peasant from the Carpathians with whom hatred
of Christianity was a passion. The first step was to remove the
Christian officers from the army. On the plea that the military
discipline was suffering from the neglect of the old religious ritual,
orders were issued that the routine sacrifices were to be resumed.
Those who refused to take part must abandon their careers. The
Christians thereupon resigned by hundreds from the army commanded by
Galerius. A little later it was represented to Diocletian, more and
more superstitious as he aged, that the presence of unbelievers
interfered with the auspices. The augurs were unable to divine the will
of the gods while unbelievers were present. The emperor thereupon
ordered that all his household, on pain of being scourged, should show
their faith by offering sacrifice, and that the soldiers should do the
same or leave the army. By the end of 302 the regime of tolerance had
so far changed that the army and the imperial service were closed to
professing Christians.
In the next few months Diocletian was won round to a plan of general
extermination. Again it was with Galerius that the scheme originated. A
council of State was summoned to discuss the matter, and the last
hesitations of Diocletian were overcome when the oracle of Apollo at
Miletus spoke in favour of Galerius. But, still reluctant, Diocletian
would allow no death penalties.
The signal was given when on the day the edict was published, February
24, 303, the cathedral of the capital city, Nicomedia, was, by the
emperor's order, burned down. The edict forbade the Christians to
assemble for worship, the churches were to be destroyed, the sacred
books handed over to the police, and all Christians were to renounce
their faith. Those who refused were, if nobles, to lose their rank; if
citizens to become slaves; and, if slaves already, to remain slaves
forever. When, soon afterwards, the imperial palace took fire
Diocletian's last hesitations vanished and at Nicomedia blood began to
flow in abundance.
New edicts followed. First the clergy throughout the Empire were to be
arrested, and be summoned, under pain of death, to abjure. Then (304)
the same was decreed for the general body of the Christians. There was
now no choice but apostasy or death for millions. The legislation was
the most severe so far and the most systematic. A host of new and
horrible punishments were devised to terrify the weak into submission.
Christians were rounded up by the hundred, summoned to sacrifice, and
massacred. In one case at least, in Phrygia, where the whole population
was Christian, a whole town was wiped out. A phrase in the authentic
acts of one of the victims of this time -- St. Philip, Bishop of
Heraclea -- summarises the spirit of the new savagery. " You have heard
the law of the emperor," says the judge, speaking to the accused. "It
commands that throughout the world members of your society must either
sacrifice or perish." With the resignation of Diocletian and Maximian
(305), Galerius and his new Caesar, his nephew Maximin Daia, developed
the inquisition yet further. By the edict of 306 all citizens -- not
merely suspected Christians -- were to be summoned to sacrifice.
Heralds in the streets were to call out the heads of families, the army
to be paraded for the purpose. It is now, too, that the first evidences
show of a decline in the character of the judges who carry out the
edicts. A new type of magistrate appears, men as gross as the new
emperors themselves, to whom the persecution was an opportunity for
loot and for lust, and whose malignity devised new horrors and provoked
a new danger for the accused, some of whom -- a thing hitherto unknown
-- threw themselves to death to escape inevitable shame. The
persecution went its way unhindered in the East for the best part of
eight years. In the West it had never been so violent. Where
Constantius Chlorus ruled as Caesar, in Gaul and in Britain, there had
been practically no persecution at all: where the Emperor Maximian
ruled, in Italy, Spain and Africa, the Christians had suffered as in
the countries directly subject to Diocletian. But in 305 Constantius
became emperor; Spain passed under his rule and there the persecution
ceased. Africa and Italy passed, first to Severus and then (autumn of
306) to Maxentius; under neither of these princes were the persecuting
edicts enforced. When Constantius Chlorus died (July 306) his son
Constantine succeeded him and maintained his policy of toleration.
For the policy of Galerius, the successful coup d’etat by which
Constantine came to the purple was a defeat. The dispossession of
Severus, whom he had named to succeed Constantius in the West, was a
second; for here again the victor, Maxentius, abandoned the policy of
persecution. Far different was the fate of the Christians in the East
where the advent of Maximin Daia balanced the gain through Constantine
and Maxentius. The new eastern Caesar was, like his uncle, Galerius,
the simple product of the wilds beyond the frontier, tamed a little by
the army, but hardly improved from his crude native barbarism. Yet,
curiously enough, it was he who planned, and to some extent carried
through, a great scheme of reformation by which Paganism should itself
at last become a "Church." Temples were restored, new ones built, the
priests for the first time organised in a hierarchy with a presiding
high priest for each province. The ritual was standardised, and the "
magicians," the clergy of Maximin Daia's predilection, promoted to the
highest offices of the State. It was in the interest of this new State
religion that Maximin Daia continued the persecution, henceforward
admittedly the war of one religion on another and not a simple measure
of precaution in the interest of the State's security.
This new phase, however, was not of long duration. On April 30, 311, an
imperial edict brought the whole persecution to an end, restoring the
status of 303. It bears the names of Galerius, of Constantine and of
Licinius. Galerius, after eighteen years of Empire, was dying in the
horrible agony Lactantius has described. Fifteen days after the
publication of the edict he was no more. His share in that edict can
have been no more than nominal. It was really the act of Constantine
and Licinius, the first stage of the new policy of which the Edict of
Milan, two years later, was to be the consummation. The edict of 311 is
by no means a pro-Christian manifesto. The emperors are at no pains to
hide their scorn for the religion they are reprieving. They refer
approvingly to the edicts which inaugurated the persecution, and to the
end in view, the restoration of the old Roman life. Those edicts are
now annulled because it has been proved that what Christians had
returned to the ways of their ancestors had done so simply through
fear. The chief result of the persecution had been the creation of a
large class who worshipped neither the Roman gods nor the God of the
Christians. Before the menace such a feature in the national life
presents, the emperors prefer to grant once more a licence to
Christianity to exist. Denuo sint christiani. They may reorganise their
Churches; the prisoners are to be freed. Let them for the future avoid
anything which is contrary to the established order, and let them not
forget the duty laid upon them to pray to their God for the safety of
the State and its princes.
From the new policy Maximin Daia, now in the East the supreme ruler,
held himself coldly aloof. As Constantius had never given an effective
assent to the edict of 303, so Maximin ignored that of 311.
Nevertheless even Maximin yielded somewhat to the new forces, and in a
letter to the provincial governors of his Empire halted the
persecution. For a moment the Christians breathed easily through all
the Roman world.
Licinius was an old friend of Galerius, for years one of his most
confidential advisers. Had Galerius been wholly free in the matter,
Licinius would have succeeded Constantius in 306, and again Severus in
307. It was not until 308 that he was in fact associated with Galerius
in the Empire, and Galerius proclaimed his confidence by naming him
Emperor and not Caesar. He was then heir to the provinces Galerius had
ruled, with Nicodemia as their capital, and to whatever he could hold
of Galerius' position as the senior emperor. Maximin Daia was
overshadowed by a newer power. He did not intend to remain so and with
his invasion of the states of Licinius the duel between Paganism and
Christianity reopened. It was marked on the part of Paganism by a last
supreme revival.
From all over the East petitions from the municipal and provincial
councils came in -- organised to some extent by the imperial officials
-- calling for the suppression of Christianity. The petitions and
Maximin Daia's replies, into which there has crept a tone of piety that
makes them nothing less than Pagan sermons, were inscribed on tablets
of bronze and set up in the chief places of the cities -- a new and
subtle means of anti-Christian propaganda. The calamities which of late
years have afflicted the State, war, famine, plague, tempest, all these
are the natural effects of the wrath of the gods provoked by the
practices of Christian folly. In the loyalty of all good citizens to
the ancient religion lies the Empire's one hope. Let the temples once
more take up their place in the people's life, the sacrificial fires be
renewed. The emperor will himself lead in the pious work, the head and
centre of every religious inspiration. For the encouragement of the
Pagan, the State organised a campaign of education in the wickedness of
Christianity. Placards, pamphlets, lectures subsidised by the State,
set before the Pagan the vile thing his Christian neighbours were.
Elaborate forgeries alleged to be the sacred books of the Christians
appeared, and these blasphemous parodies and caricatures were used as
lesson books in the schools. The latest Pagan offensive was at its
height and beginning to show results in a revival of Pagan practice
when, as Maximin Daia planned to ally himself with Maxentius in Italy
-- hitherto a usurper in the eyes of the three " legitimate " emperors
-- against the combination of Licinius and Constantine, the news of
news came to him that Constantine had declared himself a Christian.
It was unexpected news, and the occasion of the declaration fitted it
-- the eve of a battle against Maxentius upon which, following a first
reverse, Constantine staked his whole fate.
Constantine had marched from his own States -- as yet overwhelmingly
Pagan -- through Italy, still Pagan too, and was preparing to attack
the single army which lay between him and Rome, of all the empire's
great cities perhaps the most Pagan. The expedition he had undertaken
had no religious significance -- its purpose was simply the destruction
of the power of a usurper. Constantine himself was not merely a Pagan
but, from all his associations and upbringing he belonged to that new
school of Paganism from whose scorn Christianity had naturally least
hope of recruits. His parents were Pagans, and his father's religion a
form of that new moral monotheism, popular with the army, whose symbol
was the Sun -- Sol Invictus. One form of that cult had seemed destined
to high fortunes under Aurelian (269-75). After Aurelian's death
Constantius Chlorus was its most eminent supporter. The cult then
probably came to Constantine as part of his paternal inheritance, and
as he shook himself free of the influence of Diocletian and Maximian
(whose son-in-law he was) the young emperor showed himself openly the
protector of his father's cult. By the time of his expedition against
Maxentius his evolution in religion had gone beyond this. He had
abandoned the last traces of a cult of the Sun, and reached the point
of a simple belief that there is but one God. The final, decisive step
was not the fruit of any further meditation but was due to something
which happened to Constantine the very night before the battle at the
Milvian Bridge, a mile or two outside the Flaminian Gate of Rome. In a
dream the emperor was bidden to mark his soldiers' shields with the
sign of God, coeleste signum Dei, and go into battle with this as his
badge. He did so. In the fight which followed he was victorious, and
Maxentius was drowned in the Tiber as he fled from the field.
Constantine entered Rome convinced now that the one, supreme God was
the God whom the Christians worshipped -- Jesus Christ.
From Rome, after receiving the congratulations of the Senate, he
proceeded to Milan for the solemnities of the marriage arranged between
his sister and his colleague Licinius. At their meeting the two
emperors, advancing the policy of the act of two years before,
published what has come to be called the Edict of Milan (313, probably
February), the final and definitive admission of the State that the new
religion of the Church must survive. Maximin Daia -- to anticipate the
story by a few months -- took advantage of the absence of Licinius in
the West and, despite the difficulties of the winter, invaded his
States, crossed into Europe, and with his powerful army laid waste the
rich provinces which are now the Balkans. There, at Nicopolis, he met,
and was defeated by Licinius, returned from Milan in haste; and with
the defeat and death of Maximin Daia the authors of the Edict of Milan
were masters of the Roman world (May 1, 313).
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