‘Give me the earth purged of heretics and I will give you heaven in return.’
Archbishop Nestorius to the emperor Theodosius II,
Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, VII.29
The violence that happened in Rome that year was so terrible that it would be remembered for centuries. It was AD 366 and the cause of the rioting was, at first sight, trivial.1 The role of Bishop of Rome had become vacant and there was a dispute over who should fill it. Two Christians, named Damasus and Ursinus, both wanted it. Or rather, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus puts it, their ‘passionate ambition to seize the episcopal throne passed all bounds’. Their efforts to seize it would result in ‘bloodshed and death’.2
Later, much later, the Bishop of Rome would start to be known as ‘the Pope’ – the ‘father’ – of the Church, and would become famous for habits that were frequently somewhat unfatherly. In the ninth century, for example, Pope Stephen VI put one of his predecessors, Formosus, on trial. If that sounds unremarkable, it is worth remembering that the papacy is held for life and so the predecessor was, by then, a corpse. Formosus’ decomposing body was exhumed; dressed in full regalia; put on trial; found guilty; then punished by having three of its fingers chopped off and being tossed into the Tiber.3
In the time of the Borgias, the apostolic palace became infamous for debauchery: Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, was said to have held a party for fifty prostitutes in his apartments. Naturally, they danced naked.4 Another pope, as he was dying, is rumoured to have taken the blood of three young boys in an attempt to prolong his life. It didn’t work for him, and wasn’t wonderful for the boys either, who died. (This particular pope had previously been so ill that his only diet had been to drink mere drops of milk from the breast of a young woman – for health reasons, naturally.)
The role of pope is now so established that it is hard to remember that its appearance in the pages of history is something of a surprise. The gospels do not demand popes or pomp or cathedrals or chasubles or golden robes or men in mitres – and they certainly don’t advocate prostitutes and papal apartments. And indeed, in the earliest years of the Church, bishops were not men of worldly influence – or even that much heavenly influence either. Their role had, initially, been little more than a tedious administrative one: it was the job of a bishop to oversee the funds that came into the Christian communities. Spiritual leadership was undertaken by other, more inspired, less bureaucratic individuals.5
But money has a habit of leaving a residue on the hands of those counting it and, by the middle of the first century of Christian rule, and certainly by its end, bishops had started to become very powerful men indeed. By the late fourth century, some of the most famous were sanctified celebrities: emperors inclined their ears to them; crowds cheered them, parted before them and rioted at their command. Bishops walked along porticoes that glittered with jewels and gleamed with gold; consecrated virgins chanted around them – and sometimes not so virginal women performed other services for them. Or so the rumours said.6
Such high living shocked some of the more modest clergy. One bishop, in distress, wrote that he did not know ‘that we ought to ride on splendid horses, and drive in magnificent carriages, and be preceded by a procession and surrounded by applause, and have everyone make way for us, as if we were wild beasts.’7 St Augustine modestly disdained such glitter: the honour of this world, he wrote humbly, is fleeting.8 Still, he acknowledged, it was nice while it lasted.
The glitter didn’t escape the notice of cynical non-Christian observers. As one pagan observer drily put it: ‘make me bishop of Rome and I will be a Christian tomorrow.’9 The non-Christian historian Ammianus similarly noted that any man who achieved the divine office of bishop was rewarded by some very earthly luxury. Such men were ‘assured of rich gifts from ladies of quality; they can ride in carriages, dress splendidly, and outdo kings in the lavishness of their table.’10 Ammianus, in his usual arch way, queried whether their desire was wise: such men, he wrote, ‘might be truly happy if they would pay no regard to the greatness of the city, which they make a cloak for their vices, and follow the example of some provincial bishops, whose extreme frugality in food and drink, simple attire, and downcast eyes demonstrate to the supreme god and his true worshippers the purity and modesty of their lives.’11
The bishops themselves, however, generally begged to differ. And so, in these first decades of Christian rule, their power continued to grow. Some bishops started to control gangs of young Christian men. The muscle of these men was, in theory, gathered to perform good deeds – the carrying of the sick, the burying of the dead – but these de facto militias became infamous for doing bad ones. Cities lived in fear of their massed presence and of their violence: at the start of the fifth century, some of these men acted so violently that the law stepped in to rule that their numbers ‘shall not be more than five hundred.’12 It was a forbidding ‘limitation’.
Other bishops were even blunter in their use of authority. Eschewing de facto armies, they instead simply opted – or so their critics said – for the real kind. The Christian writer John Chrysostom recorded, in disgust, that some of his followers had been bloodily attacked in church by just such soldiers. Bishops, he wrote in anger, were now ‘not ashamed to have officers marching ahead of them in place of deacons.’13
And now, in Rome, in AD 366, men were massing once again as two men vied for the most desirable bishopric of all. To know precisely what happened in that infamous election in Rome is difficult: the sources are scant, inadequate, and the whiff of bias is often detectable. Accusations of heresy swirled. What is known is that whatever happened was very bloody indeed. First one contender, and then the next, had themselves ordained as bishop. Then the men’s supporters started to mass. Then violence broke out. What followed was, more or less, chaos. The episode concluded with some Christians barricading themselves in one basilica, while Damasus set to work outside it. First, he summoned his muscle: gladiators, charioteers, gravediggers, as well as members of the clergy. Then, armed with hatchets, swords and clubs, they besieged the basilica.14 A papal contest had turned into a battle.
The doors of the basilica were broken down, a fire was set underneath, and then, as some of Damasus’ men attacked at ground level, others started tearing tiles off the roof of the building and hurling them onto the Christians huddling below. Eventually, Damasus and his men, ‘rushing in, slaughtered 160 people, women and men alike; they wounded even more, many of whom later died.’15 That chronicle is a little breathless – but even Ammianus puts the figure of the dead only a little lower: it is, he wrote, ‘certain that in the basilica . . . 137 corpses were found on a single day.’16 Whichever it was it was a bloody start to the episcopate of Pope Damasus – or, as he would later be called, St Damasus.
The ‘peace of the Church’ is the name given to the period following Constantine’s conversion. But as academics have observed, the name was a misnomer.17 When one ancient historian wrote an account of one small part of the violence that started to unfurl between Christians in this era, he called his work ‘The Civil War’ and given the bitterness and, in places, the violence that followed, it has been pointed out that that title feels apt.
The irony of what happened when Christianity gained control of the Roman Empire was not lost on its classical critics. Within half a century of Christian rule, as the Emperor Julian wrote, in disgust, large numbers of so-called ‘heretics’ were ‘sent into exile, prosecuted, and cast into prison.’ That was the least of it. As Julian continues, ‘many whole communities of those who are called “heretics” were actually butchered, as at Samosata and Cyzicus, in Paphlagonia, Bithynia, and Galatia, and among many other tribes also villages were sacked and completely devastated’; so-called ‘heretics’ were ‘slaughtered’.18 Such people claimed to be doing the work of God, but, as Julian acerbically observed, these massacres had nothing to do with their religion. They were, he wrote, ‘your own doings; for nowhere did either Jesus or Paul hand down to you such commands.’19
It is possible that Julian is exaggerating: the state generally preferred to exile rather than execute to avoid creating martyrs. But without doubt there was violence between various Christian groups in this period – and North Africa was the scene of some of the worst (or, at any rate, it was best recorded there). At the turn of the fourth century, one dissident bishop in North Africa complained that other Christians in that region had ‘tortured us and our fathers without ever stopping through a hundred years and more.’ He listed the horrors that had been inflicted by other Christians: the ‘great number of venerable bishops killed and others thrown into exile, Christians tortured far and wide, sacred virgins raped, wealthy men proscribed, the poor pillaged, basilicas seized.’ These Christian persecutors, he wrote, ‘threw off great heights Christians who were trying to escape their grasp . . . and rained blows on those who tried to resist them.’ In one village, he went on, they had committed mass slaughter of their fellow Christians.20
As always, trying to understand precisely what happened is hard: Christians did not hurry to preserve the accounts of the violence they had inflicted on their brethren. Yet, as the historian Peter Brown has also observed, ‘Religious coercion on a large scale was mainly practised by Christians on other Christians.’21 Nonetheless, when trying to understand what happened in these years, the historian must rely on snippets – a mention in a letter here, a sideswipe in a sermon there. However, for all that the historical record starts to become thin, vivid moments are preserved.
In Carthage, in the middle of the AD 340s, some Christians had been pursued by the local governor. One of them, Maximian, was arrested and tortured, beaten with lead-tipped scourges until his limbs dislocated, and ‘this mangling of the limbs created one big wound.’22 Other Christians were executed en masse, in a manner that was, even in a vicious period, notably cruel. They were put in boats, rowed out ‘into the billows of the sea’, then two casks of sand were tied around each person – one around the neck, one around the feet – and they were dumped into the water: a brutal method of execution, but one that would, as their executioners knew, prevent other Christians finding their bodies then reverencing them as martyrs.23 Non-Christians looked on in disgust at what they saw as barbaric violence – as did many Christians. It is likely that the vast majority of Christians of all kinds were far less interested in religious difference than the rhetoric or the violence of their rulers might make them seem.
Even Constantine himself seems to have been taken aback by Christianity’s bitter sectarianism. He had embraced one form of this religion imagining that, in doing so, he embraced unity: one God, one emperor. Instead, in Christianity he found himself with a fissile, feuding mass, and the more he exerted pressure on it, the more it seemed to fracture – much to his irritation. Like a father forced to referee between warring children, Constantine shows every sign of being less interested in these squabbles than deeply irritated by them, later raging against the ‘malignant perversity and disloyalty’ of the Christians who were fighting with each other in North Africa.24 He was often conspicuously uninterested in the theological nitty-gritty of their debates and even counselled people against harming their heretical neighbours, for ‘it is one thing to take on willingly the contest for immortality, quite another to enforce it with sanctions.’25
Although, rarely did those perpetrating such violence call it violence. Instead, both heretics and the Church wrapped a comforting cloak of metaphor around such acts, arguing that they were not cruel at all, but necessary, even loving. Medical metaphors bloomed as the Church Fathers explained why to be cruel was to be kind; why to harm someone was in fact to heal them. Epiphanius’ virulent treatise against heretics is called ‘the medicine chest’ (the Panarion) because it provided ‘antidotes’ to the heretics ‘to counteract their poison.’26 In simile after simile, a web of words was woven ever tighter around the heretics.
Hagiographies recorded with enthusiasm how holy men ‘cured’ the misbeliefs of the erring, liberating them from their sins (and frequently also ‘liberating’ them of their churches and their possessions too). Such works celebrated these ‘healers’ in passionate prose. The account of a late-fourth-century bishop of Edessa called Rabbula records with enthusiasm how Rabbula (‘this great and most glorious doctor’) had, during his time, ‘forced’ many ‘false religions’ to the truth. When Rabbula took office, the whole land was ‘entirely overgrown in the thickets of sin.’27 The energetic Rabbula was undeterred by such a challenge. Instead, ‘anxious in every way to wrest people from sin and to make them partakers in righteousness’, he set to work, to ‘pull up entangling weeds.’28
As his hagiography records with satisfaction, he was ‘at all times like an experienced doctor’, diagnosing what remedy was necessary against ‘diseases of the soul’ and lancing ‘with a sharp blade the putrefaction of an abscess, to cause suffering and to restore to life.’29 What the feeling of his flock was when they saw Rabbula approaching with his ‘sharp blade’ is not recorded. Doubtless some must have been terrified, for some heretics he ‘hurled . . . with great compassion into monasteries for the rest of their lives’, while others he ‘forbade . . . to be found ever again in his province.’ This was perhaps ‘healing’; it was also exile and life imprisonment without trial.30 But it worked. As the Life of Rabbula joyfully records, the ‘evil doctrine’ of heresy was ‘conquered’ and ‘thousands of Jews and myriads of heretics he converted to the Messiah during all of the years of his priesthood.’31
The great German theologian Walter Bauer was sceptical of this account. There might, he wrote, have been tens of thousands of heretics ‘pressing for baptism at the hands of Rabbula’.32 But, he adds, one might also want to read such a life with caution, warning that ‘we find ourselves in a period in which the power of the state also was already deliberately cooperating in the suppression of outspoken heresy’.33 Rabbula’s methods were, Bauer observes, ‘rather coarse’, and he is scornful of what ‘the tyrant of Edessa’ – as one Christian called him – really achieved. The thousands of conversions were, Bauer wrote, ‘at best only the outward submission of people whose buildings had been torn down, whose scriptures had been burned, whose community goods had been confiscated, and who found themselves subjected to the worst kind of harassment, including danger to life and limb.’34
Through his weeding of the ungodly, the holy Rabbula gained not merely souls, but also a great deal of property and wealth. The Life of Rabbula records how some Arian ‘heretics’ were cured by Rabbula when he ‘broke down their house of prayer and brought them to his own’.35 It then goes on to explain how, after he had ‘quietly’ destroyed the heretical meeting places, he then went on ‘to carry and bring all of its treasure[s] into his church until he had even taken all its stones for [his] use.’36 Another group of heretics, the ‘perfidious’ Audians (who considered that, as God had made man in his own image, God must have a human form), found that they too lost not only their dignity but also their property when Rabbula ‘disbanded their congregation, exiled them from their temple and expelled them from it. He settled in their place [our] brothers.’37
The appropriation of the buildings is worth noting, for another recurring theme that can be glimpsed in the texts of this period is that of money and property. Across the empire, long-running disputes between ‘heretics’ and the ‘true Church’ often ignited around church buildings, which, in those days of rapidly increasing numbers of Christians, were much in demand. It was a common complaint that the Church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.38
In these years, the magnificent religious variety that had once flourished within the Roman Empire starts to decline. The vast and striking profusion of those early Christianities – sects that worshipped one divine being, or two, or a male–female deity, or a Jesus who had laughed during the crucifixion – starts to fade away. Not always due to hostile forces: some of these sects would have needed no suppression and would have died anyway. Some were already moribund; simply because a religion is born does not mean that it will survive.
Indeed, some sects seemed almost designed for extinction. Augustine himself recorded that, in the countryside near him, in Hippo, ‘there is also one rural heresy’ – and then he corrects himself ‘– or rather, there was one. For growing smaller little by little it only survived in one small hamlet, in which there were a very small number of such persons, even if they were the sum total.’39 As Augustine explains what the sect’s beliefs were, it becomes clear why they might not have flourished. ‘These men did not have sex with their wives,’ he writes, ‘although it was not permitted for them to live without wives from the same sect in their belief.’ Instead of bringing up their own children, the celibate couple then adopted a son and a daughter, ‘and by this sort of agreement they furnished their future descendants.’40
Though clearly, given their diminishing numbers, it didn’t furnish them that well. However, as Augustine makes clear, it was not merely their odd habits that were causing these ‘heretics’ of North Africa to die out. They had been shrinking because of these habits, certainly – but it was something else that finished them off, and it is this that Augustine hints at in a sentence that is more ominous because it is so calmly noted. ‘By now,’ Augustine writes, ‘all of them have been corrected and have been made Catholics, so that nothing of that former error now remains.’41
We will never know what these long-forgotten Christians thought of their ‘correction’ at the hands of the Church; we will never know what form their correction took, nor how their ‘error’ was quashed. Were they preached to? Fined? Flogged? Merely persuaded by the kindly words of Augustine or some other preacher? We have no idea. We will never know how these men and women – who had given their life to celibacy in tandem, and to the raising of other people’s children – felt about the fact that they had ‘all’ now been ‘corrected’ and ‘made Catholics’. Because they have gone.
So much has been lost. Almost all the information we have on the Christian sects that once existed comes only from the form of Christianity that suppressed them. Take the long legal lists in the Theodosian Code which name, one after another, all the heresies that were now forbidden. They were included in the code because their ideas were to be wiped out.
But, ironically, the Code now acts as their epitaph, too. To read the Code now is to read a catalogue of the dead, as the law lists those sects whom it will eventually destroy: the Novatians and the Sabbatians, the Eunomians and the Valentinians, the Priscillianists and the Phrygians, the Borborites and the Messalians and the Enthusiasts and the Donatists and the Audians and the Hydroparastatae and the Tascodrogitae and the Photinians and the Paulians and the Marcellians . . . On and on and on, naming and preserving, destroying and erasing, all in one.