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The famous edict of Constantine and Licinius is by no means a charter
of rights and privileges. It is a political act, and as such is
conditioned by the circumstances of the moment. Both of these emperors
had long been agreed that the persecution menaced the future of the
State. If one of them was recently converted to a belief in
Christianity -- and the belief was as yet incomplete -- his colleague,
however, still remained a Pagan. Constantine himself could have no
policy which went beyond the maintenance of a balance between the two
religions, and the language of the edict, as far as we can tell, is not
that of a Christian at all. In this respect it is very evidently the
supplement to the act of 311 and the spirit it breathes is that of the
" deistic " monotheism which was the reigning fashion at the court. It
is an arrangement prepared by Constantine which his colleague accepts,
and which is expressed in tactfully neutral language. The motive for
the new policy is no longer the restoration of the old Roman ways but
simply " the public good." This is unattainable if due honours are not
rendered to "the divinity." That these honours may be rendered, all who
honour "the divinity" have leave to do so -- Christians with the rest.
Thus the edict does not by any means proclaim universal toleration. "To
the Christians and to all men we decree there be given free power to
follow whatever religion each man chooses, that, whatever gods there
be, they may be moved mercifully in regard to ourselves and those over
whom we exercise authority" -- an insurance devised possibly to comfort
the devout Pagan critic against vengeance from the old gods for any
apostasy implied in the act. The edict, then, grants once more what
Alexander Severus had first granted, and then Gallienus thirty years
later. But this time the grant is explicitly built into the law as a
fundamental principle of public welfare; and the emperors from whom it
emanates are no religious dilettantes, nor weaklings anxious at a
crisis to rally a disunited people. They are conquerors, one of them
the empire's greatest soldier for generations and a whole-hearted
convert to the faith, and the edict is the sign of their conquest. But
it does more than restore liberties. A further clause gives the surest
of all guarantees that the toleration is no mere matter of form, no
political trick of the moment. It decrees the restoration to Christians
of whatever property has been confiscated "without any price asked or
any transference money. . . without delay and without discussion." [ ]
That Constantine's conversion to a belief that Jesus Christ is the one
only God was sincere is certain, and equally certain his subsequent
loyalty to what he considered to be the best interests of the Church
through which the one God chose to be worshipped. But whatever the
growth of his knowledge of his new faith and of his attachment to it,
he remained, as emperor, faithful to the principles of the edict of
313. Even had he desired to christianise the State, the difficulties
before him would have prevented it. The Christians were by no means in
the majority. The West especially, his own sphere of operations, was
strongly Pagan; [ ] and its anti-Christian habits and traditional
prejudice survived for the best part of the next hundred years. If
there were Christians who, impatiently, demanded a reversal of roles
and repression of the Pagans they found no welcome at the court.
Whatever the emperor's personal preferences, he maintained the Pagans
in the posts they occupied; and he continued to be the Pontifex Maximus
of the Pagan Cults. So bound up with the old religion was the imperial
office, that to have abolished the pontificate at that moment would
have been to strip himself of vast prestige and authority; to have
transferred the office to another would have been almost an abdication.
Tertullian had plainly said that no man could become emperor and remain
a Christian, and for the next sixty years the Christian Emperor proved
him right to this extent, at least, that he retained and exercised the
supreme headship of the Pagan Cults. Finally, for the first eleven
years which followed the edict, Constantine's colleague was a Pagan,
and a Pagan who gradually grew hostile to Christianity.
In 323 there was a breach between the two emperors in which religious
differences played their part. Licinius abandoned the policy of 313
and, in the States of the eastern Empire, the persecution raged once
more. Constantine's victory at Chrysopolis (September, 323) brought
this to an end, and it ended, too, the reign of Licinius. Six months
later his death -- in which not improbably Constantine had a share --
left Constantine without a rival, sole master of the whole Roman world.
His new, unquestioned supremacy found expression in a notable change of
the form of his language about matters religious. So far he had kept
studiously to the neutrality of 313. He had, as Pontifex Maximus,
carried through certain reforms -- divination in secret was
henceforward forbidden, and certain abuses in magical rites. As emperor
he had granted the Catholic clergy those exemptions from the burdens of
citizenship which the Pagan priests had always enjoyed, he had given
the churches the right to receive legacies and he had made the Sunday a
legal holiday. In his language he had been as impartial as in his
actions, and not a sign escaped to show publicly his increasing
contempt for the stupidities of the old polytheism and for its
superstitions. But now, victorious over a Paganism lately militant, and
master for the first time in the more Christian part of the Empire, he
was free to express his personal sentiments. In the proclamation which
announced the victory to the bishops of the East, he tells the story of
his conversion, describes the atrocities of Diocletian's persecution,
speaks of himself as brought to the Faith by God to be the means of the
Faith's triumph, and declares that he takes up the government of his
new State " full of faith in the grace which has confided to me this
holy duty." There is a like change in his language to his Pagan
subjects. The policy of 313 is scrupulously maintained, but he does not
hesitate to speak of Pagan " obstinacy," of their " misguided rites and
ceremonial," of their "temples of lying" which contrast so strikingly
with "the splendours of the home of truth."
The convert emperor no longer hides his contempt for Paganism, but he
is careful still to distribute offices to Christian and Pagan alike.
All are equal, and both religions equal, before the law.
The first breach in this policy of neutrality was the work of his sons.
Constantine died in 337 leaving as heirs his three sons, Constantine
II, Constantius II, and Constans. The eldest died three years later,
and the new law bears the signature of the two younger brothers. It
declares the abolition of all sacrifices and threatens dire punishment
to those who contravene it (341). Among one section of the Christians
its enactment was the occasion of great joy. They exhorted the emperors
to go further still. Whence so great an uneasiness among the Pagans
that, a year later, the emperor in the West, Constans, the vast
majority of whose subjects were Pagans, published a new law to reassure
them, ordering special care for the historic temples of the old
capital. Ten years later Constantius II, now sole emperor, published a
new edict which threatened death to those who worshipped idols. The
temples were to be closed, the sacrifices to cease. No doubt where the
thing was peaceably possible the law was enforced. But despite the law
the facts show the old religion as still flourishing unhindered
throughout the West. All the old feasts were observed at Rome, with all
the accustomed sacrifices, in the year which followed this law (354),
and in the very year which saw its renewal Constantius II himself,
visiting Rome, confirmed the privileges of the different cults, the
subsidies of public money granted to them and, acting as Pontifex
Maximus, he filled the vacant priestships by nominations of different
members of the Roman aristocracy. This contrast between the terrifying
threats, and the impotent toleration of those who ignored the threats
was characteristic of the general policy of Constantine's vacillating
successors. They repudiated their father's policy, and were yet too
weak to enforce the repudiation. The chief effect of their legislation
was to irritate the Pagans, and to prepare the way for the
anti-Christian reaction which followed under Julian.
Julian (361-363), the successor of Constantius II, has gone down to
history as Julian the Apostate, but the title is hardly fair, for
though Julian set himself to reverse the policy of the previous fifty
years and to restore Paganism, it is hard to see that he was ever a
Christian at all, and he certainly was never a Catholic. He was a
nephew of Constantine and, a child of five at the emperor's death, one
of the very few near relations of the new emperors who survived the
general massacre designed to remove possible rivals to their
succession. For these massacres, in which his father, two uncles, and a
brother perished, Julian declared Constantius II responsible, and in
this personal hatred of Constantius, which deepened after that
emperor's execution in 354 of Julian's only surviving brother, may be
found one reason for Julian's fanatical hatred of everything Christian.
His earliest education he received under the care of the arch-Arians
Eusebius of Nicomedia, George of Cappadocia and Aetius; and once his
childhood was past he was deprived of even this pale reflection of
Christian truth. In place of Arian bishops and their sterile
logomachies, he now had hellenists to tutor him, and in the distant and
lonely palaces to which he was exiled, the imaginative boy grew to
adolescence and early manhood, dreaming of a revival of the Paganism of
the poets and the philosophers. His own religion was little more than a
devotion to the classic Greek Culture, a thing intellectual, literary,
artistic. His philosophy was the neo-Platonism of the day, something of
Plotinus and much more of superstition and magic, a melange that had in
it something of the modern Theosophy cults and Spiritualism, with a
veneer of elaborate ritual. The thing he planned to revive had never
existed; it was the golden age of every adolescent's dreaming fancy,
the past seen through the idealism of literature. But for all his
bookishness the shy, reserved, and ascetic young man showed his gifts
as a ruler once his cousin named him Caesar (358), and enough of
political ambition once the troops hailed him Emperor (360) to take the
offensive against Constantius II. But the sudden death of Constantius
(Nov., 361) gave him the mastery of the world without a battle, and for
twenty months he ruled supreme. It was too short a time for any
permanent accomplishment, and his revival had the ultimate effect of
all schemes that plan to ride the skies and fail. It left the prestige
of the old religion very much lower than it had found it, left it
indeed covered with ridicule.
For the greatest attempt of all was now made to organise Paganism, its
cults and its priesthood; to give it a coherent body of doctrine, a
fixed and regular liturgy. Its priests, on the model of the Christian
clergy, were to be teachers, and schools of Pagan theology were
established. The practice of good works was to be a function of the new
religion; orphanages, hospitals, asylums to be founded in which the new
Pagan virtue of charity would find expression. Nothing was less in
keeping with the facts of the old Paganism, nothing less in accord with
the Roman tradition, than the new priesthood as Julian planned it,
influenced obviously by the desire to defeat Christianity by copying
the Christian spirit. The Roman priest had been an important personage
in the political and social life of the day. High rank in the priestly
college, and high office in the State had always gone together. But
Julian's priests were to live like monks, ascetics, carefully avoiding
contact with the evil world, given to a life of virtue, and service,
prayerful, studious, continent.
The sacrifices were restored and carried out on an enormous scale,
Julian himself as Pontifex -- against all tradition -- actually
immolating the victims. The Christian magistrates and officers were
replaced. The Christian clergy lost all their privileges. They lost,
too, what pensions the State had begun to pay them, and were obliged to
restore what they had already received. Even the Christian poor were
made to give back the alms which the imperial charity had assigned
them. The temples, too, where these had fallen into decay, were to be
restored at the expense of the Christians. But the edict most
complained of was that which expelled the Christians from the schools.
No Christian was henceforth to be allowed to teach or to study the
ancient classical authors. "Let them keep to Matthew and Luke," said
Julian. Rhetoric, Philosophy, Political Science -- to the Christian
henceforward these were banned, and with them all hope of a
professional career.
All this was but the preparation for a revival of the older persecution
of blood -- none too easy a matter in 361 with Christianity strong
through fifty years of State favour, and entrenched in all the high
places of the State. Julian did not live long enough to launch another
frontal attack. Death claimed him before he had the chance to show his
quality as a philosophical Decius or Diocletian. But every
encouragement was given to the Pagans to attack the Christians. Anti-
Christian riots went unchecked, excesses, massacres even, went
unpunished. To the Christians who appealed against the indifference of
the officials, who stood by while property was destroyed and lives were
lost, the emperor mockingly recalled that it was part of their faith to
suffer wrong patiently. Martyrs there were as fifty years before, but
condemned and put to death now, ostensibly, for rebellion or treason --
a new legal trickery intended to rob their deaths of any religious
significance.
The persecution ended very suddenly. On June 26, 363, Julian was slain,
fighting the perpetual enemy of the East, Persia, testifying with his
last breath, according to Theodoret's account, Whom he had fought, and
by Whom he was conquered " Galilean, Thou hast triumphed." The army
gave him Jovian for a successor and Jovian was a Catholic. Without any
elaborate measure of repression, the whole edifice of Julian's "Church"
crumbled and fell. The new edict restoring religious toleration, and
the statutes of Constantine's regime, was enough. The dead thing lately
galvanised into a semblance of life ceased to move, the apostates who
had served it returned to Christianity more easily than they had left
it. The path to the inevitable Christianising of the State was once
more open.
But despite the opportunity a reaction always presents to the
victorious reactionaries, the movement to de-Paganise the State halted
for another ten years and more. Jovian reigned only nine months and his
successor, Valentinian I (364-75), though a Catholic, was as emperor
more neutral than Constantine himself. The temples remained open, the
oracles were consulted as of old; and if he took from the temples the
properties which Constantius II had confiscated to the benefit of the
Church, and which Julian had recently restored to the temples,
Valentinian did not make them over to the Church once again, but
ordered that they should revert to the imperial treasury. As he held
himself aloof from the controversy between Catholics and Arians,
declaring " I am a layman. It is no business of mine to scrutinise
Christian dogma. That is the bishop's affair," so he showed a like
indifferent neutrality in the edict which reversed Julian's educational
policy; " Whoever is worthy by character and by talent to educate youth
shall have the right to open a school or to gather together once more
his dispersed scholars." Later in his reign (371) he is even more
explicitly averse from any anti-Pagan legislation. "I do not consider
this art to be criminal," he declared to the Pagan augurs, "nor indeed
any of the religious observances established by our ancestors. The laws
enacted at the beginning of my reign are proof of this. They grant to
every man the right to follow whatever religion he prefers. I do not,
therefore, condemn the auspices. I simply forbid them to be used for
criminal purposes."
In the Eastern Empire, where Valentinian's brother Valens ruled
(364-378), there was during these years an actual patronage of
Paganism. Valens was determined that his Christian subjects should all
be Arians. The thirteen years of his rule were for the Catholics of the
East a long reign of terror, and in his measures of repression the
emperor gladly made use of the Pagans.
Valentinian I died in 375 and with the accession of his son the
youthful Gratian (375-383) the religious situation changed immediately,
for the new emperor refused to be Pontifex Maximus with the words " A
robe such as this does not become a Christian," and abolished the
office. The anomaly of the Catholic functioning as the chief priest of
Paganism was at an end; and Paganism, the head of the State declining
to be its chief priest, may be considered henceforth as
"disestablished." It remained to disendow the institution, and this
Gratian did seven years later. By an act of the year 382 the privileges
and exemptions enjoyed by the Pagan priesthood were abolished, the
property of the temples confiscated and henceforward all legacies to
temples were null and void.
About the same time the statue of the goddess Victory that stood in the
senate chamber at Rome was removed. This statue, to which the senators
offered incense as they entered, and through whose presence the goddess
herself in some sense presided over the debates of the empire's most
venerable institution, had come to be the very symbol of Paganism's
official primacy. It had already been removed in the time of
Constantius II (357) but, to appease the storm of angry protests, it
was speedily replaced. The aristocratic families of the old capital
were, in fact -- along with the intelligentsia and the half- educated
everywhere -- the last champions of the cults. Among the first there
had developed a new, obstinate ardour about the rites and liturgies;
with the men of letters it was an attachment to professional ideals, a
dislike for Christianity as the feared foe of beauty and culture, whose
triumph would be the triumph of barbarism. What a reality these last
oppositions were, and how powerful was their main weapon -- scorn --
the elaborate constructive apologetic of St. Augustine remains to show,
the De Civitate Dei. The protestations of the senatorial aristocracy
were now renewed and, Gratian being murdered the following year, and
the regent for his child-successor -- Valentinian II -- being an Arian,
the Pagans might easily have secured the replacement of the statue once
more. That they did not do so was due to the vigorous opposition of the
Bishop of Milan, at this time the imperial capital. This was the great
man who, until lately, had been governor of the province, one of the
last of the Romans, St. Ambrose. He had been Gratian's tutor, as he was
now the tutor and protector of the child- emperor. He had been the
emperor's adviser in matters temporal no less than spiritual, an
ambassador, more than once, where a delicate situation called for the
experienced wisdom of the man in whom the Roman administrator and the
Catholic bishop were so well combined. St. Ambrose is an augury of what
the Middle Ages, at their best, are to be, and in nothing is he more so
than in his bold defiance of the Empress Justina in this matter of the
statue of Victory. Thanks to his vigour and prudence the policy of
Gratian suffered no setback. Upon Paganism it produced the expected
result. There was not enough faith in the cults to keep them alive once
the revenues went, and with the disappearance of the priestly
aristocracy whom those revenues nourished there disappeared, too, the
social prestige which was the old religion's chief asset. There was no
attempt to punish Pagans for belief or for practice. There was no
Christian revenge, and no attempt, as yet, to substitute Christianity
for Paganism as the official religion of the State. The Roman Empire
was, for the moment, a State in which religion and the republic were
things entirely separate. Under Gratian's successor the policy was to
reach its logical conclusion. It was Theodosius who first made the
State a Catholic thing.
Theodosius (379-395); the one great man the Empire produced in the two
centuries which separate Constantine and Justinian, was that phenomenon
hitherto rare, an emperor baptised from the beginning of his reign and
a convinced practising Catholic. The Catholicism of his regular private
life was the mainspring of his public action as the Catholic Emperor.
He was not only Latin -- almost the first emperor for a hundred and
fifty years not born East of the Adriatic -- but he came from the most
Latin province of all the West, Spain. He had pre-eminently all the
Latin virtues; he had a logical mind, an inexhaustible fund of personal
energy, a temperament made for prompt solutions, and impatient of half
measures. When Valens died, in 378, Gratian had associated Theodosius
as his partner and assigned to him the difficult task of restoring the
East to something like peace and contentment after half a century of
religious disunion that bordered on civil war.
From the beginning Theodosius was definite. The long domination of the
little clique of Arian bishops, in whose influence at court lay the
real cause of the troubles, came to an end. Catholicism was freed; and
security for its future provided in the first code for the repression
of heresy. Orthodox Christianity received its first description in
civil law as "the faith which the Roman Church has received from the
Apostle Peter," it is the faith "professed by the pontiff Damasus and
Peter Bishop of Alexandria." The churches of heretics of every sort,
Anomeans, Arians, Apollinarians, Macedonians, are to be confiscated and
handed over to the Catholics. Heretical assemblies are forbidden and
heretics lose all power of making wills or of inheriting. Six times in
the next fifteen years these laws are renewed.
Towards the Pagans, on the other hand, Theodosius is much less
rigorous. There is a law against apostates from Christianity to
Paganism, and all sacrifices to divine the future are now strictly
forbidden. Divination of all kinds is abolished. On the eve of his
succession to the Western Empire (391) upon the death of Valentinian
II, an edict closes all the temples once and for all. Gradually they
are given over to other uses. Finally, in the year in which Theodosius
becomes master of the whole Roman world (392), the law occupies itself
with the domestic religion which was the last refuge of Paganism, as,
in Rome at least, it had been the place whence it sprang. All household
rites are forbidden, all the domestic shrines are to be destroyed. But
with all this anti-Pagan legislation it is to be noted that there is no
attempt to compel the Pagan to become a Christian. Christian and Pagan
are equal before the law. Honours and office continue to go impartially
to the one as to the other. There is no violence offered to persons.
The supports of the old religion have been ruthlessly struck away. The
structure will soon fall of itself. Pagans remain, and will remain,
here and there for a century yet, especially in the country districts.
The old cults will, finally, come to be so associated with rusticity
that the Roman's very name for a countryman (paganus) will for ever
describe, and describe primarily, one who worships the old gods.
Pagans, countryfolk, living remotely and divorced from the day's life
and culture, ignorantly clinging to ancient superstitions and rites,
backwoodsmen, there still will be in plenty; and for three centuries
after Theodosius the business of their conversion will occupy the
Church; but Paganism, with Theodosius, dies never to rise again.
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