CHAPTER 5

Church and Empire: Diocletian,
Constantine and the
Controversy over Arius

(THIRD TO FOURTH CENTURIES)

Tertullian died around 225CE. The next 100 years were crucial for the Church and they saw dramatic and wide-reaching changes in the way that Christians lived and worshipped as communities. When the emperors were minded to persecute Christians, their efforts became more systematic: this came to a head in the so-called ‘Great Persecution’ at the beginning of the fourth century, when Diocletian attempted an empire-wide policy. But at the same time, Christianity grew markedly in influence even among the ruling classes. Some pagan emperors pursued policies of religious toleration (albeit limited and often temporary) which gave Christians some liberties. One of Diocletian’s co-rulers, Constantius, was sympathetic to Christianity and had a Christian wife. The child of this marriage was Constantine, who came to be not only the first Christian emperor but the first man who wanted to Christianize the Empire. In 325CE he summoned a council of bishops which adjudicated on controversial matters of Christian doctrine and practice – an event which Tertullian would have found hard to comprehend.

In order to appreciate these dramatic changes, it is necessary to understand a little about their political context – although attempting to summarize these years is a bit like trying to knit with spaghetti, so complex is the tangle of events and so slippery is our grasp of them. Any generalization is bound to distort but the unstable history of imperial rule in the third century can often be made to look like the inevitable decline of a weak pagan system, before the foundation of a stable Christian empire. This warps the account of the pagan empire as much as it warps the account of what came after, which was certainly not an era of total stability either for the Empire or for the Church – as the next chapter will show. Whilst acknowledging the huge difference made by Constantine, this account will try not to obscure some of the continuities between his rule and what went before and after.¹

The century after Tertullian’s death saw great instability on the Empire’s borders. The Empire was vulnerable to attack from the Sassanid rulers of Persia in the east and from tribes attacking the Romans in the regions of the Rhine and Danube in the north.² Changes of rule in the east were particularly bewildering: in about 213 the Romans captured King Abgar IX of Osrhoene (the eastern area of Syria around Edessa) and sent him in chains to Rome; by the mid-third century Osrhoene had been captured by the Sassanids; by 256 the Sassanids had advanced into the Roman province of Syria and even attacked Antioch. The emperor Valerian retrieved the Roman province, but when he advanced further to Edessa in 260 he was captured and the Sassanids attacked Antioch again, taking away many captives. Earlier the Sassanids had captured Armenia, but they were far from invulnerable themselves: Queen Zenobia resisted them and gained territory in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor and Lebanon for a short-lived empire based in Palmyra (267–72). In the third century, every emperor from Caracalla (212-17) onwards died a violent death; this instability of the Empire’s governance was intimately connected with the instability of the Empire’s borders, for while emperors were expected to be military men leading expeditions to guard the frontiers they were especially vulnerable not only to enemy attack but also to the treachery of their own generals.³ Between 235 and 284 there were over 50 men to whom one can refer as ‘Emperor’. It was partly because of this political instability that those men who were emperors for a reasonable length of time were particularly concerned to put forward policies to promote the unity of the Empire. Inevitably, such policies had an adverse effect on those who were perceived not to fit in.

Not only did Christian communities not fit in, but during this period of instability they continued to grow and become more publicly visible. It is in this period – in other words before the accession of Constantine – that there is the first secure evidence of dwellings being adapted for use specifically for Christian worship. Most famously, a house which was converted to include a baptistry has been discovered at Dura Europos; it must predate 256 when the Sassanids attacked the town and it was abandoned.⁴ By this date, Christians already owned substantial catacombs in Rome and it was probably in the second half of the third century that Christians began to construct buildings specifically for their own liturgies.⁵ The first examples of securely identifiable Christian art date from this period: paintings in the catacombs (c.200CE) and Christian sarcophagi (c.270CE). Both use a combination of classical images (no doubt given a Christian interpretation) like the shepherd, or the philosopher and pupil(s) with biblical scenes, such as Noah’s ark, Daniel in the lion’s den and the three young men in the fiery furnace.⁶ Christianity already had a well-organized network of paid clergy⁷ and in some areas Christianity had become a major provider of poor relief, especially in times of famine or plague.⁸ In this period, Christianity also seems to have spread into the countryside, whilst previously it had been mainly an urban phenomenon.⁹ Expansion was sometimes due to the actions of a charismatic individual and companions – for example, Antony of Egypt who encouraged individuals to take up a celibate ascetic life in the desert regions of Egypt, or Gregory the Wonderworker who, according to his biographer Gregory of Nyssa, converted large numbers of people in the towns and villages of Pontus and Cappadocia in Asia Minor.¹⁰

In late 249 or very early 250 the emperor Decius ordered that everyone in the Empire should sacrifice to its gods. It seems to have been a measure designed with a combined religious and political purpose: to gain the gods’ favour towards the Empire and its new ruler and to bind the Empire together in this act of propitiation.¹¹ The policy in itself was probably not aimed directly at Christians (although it has often been presented like that). Nevertheless, the way in which the policy was enacted inevitably affected Christians more than most others. Although it did not ban Christian worship, it did rule out the worship of the Christian God alone, and thus the policy collided with the religious exclusivism for which Christians were well known. The process was invigilated carefully and everyone who agreed was given a libellus, or a certificate, to prove that ‘in accordance with the edict’s decree I have made sacrifice and poured a libation, and partaken of the sacred victims’.¹²

The policy appears to have had a dramatic initial success: there were reports from both Alexandria and Carthage, for example, that many Christians gave in.¹³ It is unclear what the sanction for refusal was: it may have been up to the discretion of local governors. Certainly they seemed to focus on punishing Church leaders – presumably because the priests and bishops refused to encourage their congregations to comply with the imperial edict. Consequently, the Church was in effect decapitated: in 250 the bishops of all the major cities in the Empire either died (Fabian of Rome, Alexander of Jerusalem, Babylas of Antioch) or were forced to flee (Dionysius of Alex-andria, Cyprian of Carthage).¹⁴ Many other Christians were imprisoned and were given the honorific title confessor for their willingness to declare their Christian faith and their readiness to become martyrs, even if death did not in fact become their final fate. As we shall see, their high status in the Church caused considerable problems for the ordained clergy. On the other hand, many Christians agreed to sacrifice, or gained libelli fraudulently. Furthermore, the administrative difficulty of rigorous enforcement may have meant that many of the less prominent members of the churches simply avoided confrontation. In any case the energetic pursuit of the policy did not last long: it was decreasing even by the time Decius died in 251.¹⁵ Under his successor Gallus, and initially under the next emperor Valerian, Christianity seems to have recovered rapidly and large numbers of those who had lapsed sought readmission to the Church.

In 257–58, however, Valerian issued an edict against all Christians that they should recognize pagan ceremonies; they were also banned from public Christian worship (as opposed to worship in private houses) and from entering Christian burial places. There is little evidence for the overall implementation of the decree.¹⁶ However, perhaps in the face of defiance from Christians, imperial policy seems to have hardened towards those with the most influence in the Church: bishops, priests and deacons from various regions of the Empire were executed.¹⁷ Furthermore, those Christians with the highest standing in Roman society had their property confiscated and were threatened with execution or slavery.¹⁸ In this period the bishops of Rome and Carthage (Sixtus and Cyprian) were killed, and Bishop Dionysius was deported again from Alexandria, having in vain argued that he did not need to recognize pagan ceremonies in order to pray for the Empire and its ruler:

Not all men worship all gods; each worships some – those he believes in. We believe in the one God and creator of all things, who entrusted the throne to his most beloved emperors, Valerian and Gallienus; him we both worship and adore, and to him we continually pray that their throne may remain unshaken.¹⁹

When Gallienus succeeded his father Valerian, he reversed his father’s policy against the Christians, allowing a certain amount of religious tolerance and the recovery of Church property. He perhaps recognized the difficulty of pursuing a policy of persecution when it lacked general popular support²⁰ in a period when the Empire faced more urgent, external threats. For 40 years Christians enjoyed peace from imperial persecution.

In 284 Diocletian came to power and ruled for 21 years, first on his own, then with a co-emperor, then finally in a rule of four – the ‘tetrarchy’. Within the tetrarchy there were two senior emperors (the Augusti) and two junior emperors (the Caesars). The east was ruled by one Augustus and his Caesar and the west likewise; each half of the Empire was further divided into two regions so that each of the imperial tetrarchs had responsibility for a particular area. Roughly speaking, the Empire was thus divided into the north-west (Gaul, Britain), the south-west (Italy, Africa, Spain), the north-east (the Balkans, Greece, Asia Minor) and the south-east (Syria, Palestine, Egypt).²¹ Although complex, the way the Empire was divided became crucial for differing Christian experiences of persecution and for the eventual spread of official toleration of Christianity from the northwest to the south and east.

Diocletian’s longevity as an emperor had a stabilizing influence in itself and he was determined to set the administration of the Empire on a more effective footing, reorganizing, for example, the currency, the tax system, the army and the provinces’ boundaries. His aim for the unity and stability of the Empire was also expressed religiously through his re-emphasis on the gods of Rome.²² Like Decius, he was clearly appealing to the traditional ground of imperial stability; in particular Diocletian also expressed a strong distaste for religious novelty, whether Christian or Manichaean.²³ Yet there was also a certain amount of reinvention taking place: Diocletian identified his rule particularly with Jupiter (himself) and Hercules (his co-Augustus), and encouraged the explicit attribution of divine qualities to the emperors, without going so far as actually claiming to be a god.

For a long time Christians remained undisturbed, and it is unclear why Diocletian finally turned his attention to the Christians – his co-Augustus Galerius has been blamed both by Christian writers from the era and by some later historians. In February 303, Diocletian issued an edict throughout the Empire which ordered that Christian churches should be destroyed, that the churches’ Scriptures and valuables should be handed over to imperial authorities, and that Christians should cease meeting to worship. The church building in the eastern imperial capital Nicomedia was the first symbolic victim of the decree. In Nicomedia there were violent reprisals against Christians who objected to the decree (and who were also suspected of being responsible for two fires in the imperial palace).²⁴ Possibly because of this local reaction, Diocletian declared shortly afterwards that Christians would lose any civic honours and judicial privileges they previously held (for example, all Christians could now be tortured, and none could bring civil court actions without swearing a pagan oath). In the summer of 303, a further edict ordered the arrest of bishops, priests and deacons. As the prisons rapidly filled up, this was followed in the autumn with the order that these clergy should be forced to sacrifice (if necessary, compelled by physical violence) and then set free.²⁵ These further edicts seem only to have applied to the eastern Empire, however.

The penalties for disobedience against the first edict were left unspecified and to a certain extent depended on the judgement of individual governors, who in turn may have been influenced by the mood of local populations. In the east, Diocletian’s two further decrees suggest that his aim was not the extermination of individual Christians but rather forced compliance to his religious programme: sacrifice became the major test of loyalty. In the west, Christians focused on the issue of handing over the Scriptures. Many did so – and still others handed over books which they passed off as Scripture.²⁶ Certainly some were executed for their failure to comply, but it is very difficult to judge how many. In particular, although both rulers of the west seem to have destroyed Christian churches, Constantius in the north-west appears not to have enforced the other aspects of Diocletian’s first edict in the vigorous way that Maximian did in the south-west.

In early 304, Diocletian ordered all inhabitants of the Empire to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death. While Decius provided certificates for those who sacrificed but had no sure means of checking whether everyone had presented themselves, Diocletian’s new census lists (initially prepared for efficient tax collection) must have encouraged a belief that a more rigorous enactment was possible. Nevertheless, even this edict was not uniformly enforced: either it was only intended for the east, or the western emperors did not carry it out effectively. Indeed, when Diocletian and Maximian retired in 305, and Constantius replaced Maximian as the senior emperor in the west, the persecution of Christians in the west ceased. There was, however, still some unevenness of policy. When Constantius died in 306, Constantine claimed his father’s emperorship and allowed Christians not only to worship but also to claim their property back. Meanwhile Maxentius, Constantine’s co-emperor – and increasingly his rival – in the west, did not take this step until 311.

In the east the situation was rather different. In the same year that Constantine freed Christians in the north-west, the Caesar Maximinus launched an enthusiastic pursuit of the final edict in his region of Palestine and Syria and Egypt, using the new census data.²⁷ The senior tetrarch in the east was the Augustus Galerius. It is unclear what his policy was until 311 when, close to death, he issued an edict of toleration of Christians. In this he claimed superiority for himself as the senior emperor of all the Empire and issued the edict in the name of all his imperial colleagues; but Maximinus held to the terms for only half a year before he restarted his persecution, targeting Church leaders and encouraging cities to petition him for permission to expel Christians.²⁸

Meanwhile, Constantine had defeated his western rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312CE), fighting, he claimed, under the banner of Christ. For years there had been three claimants to imperial power in the west: Constantine, Maxentius and Licinius. For a while Constantine and Licinius united and Constantine claimed for himself the role as senior Augustus of the Empire, requesting that Maximinus stop persecuting Christians in the east. Maximinus merely pretended to comply, only truly capitulating shortly before he was defeated by Licinius in 313. That year, Constantine and Licinius issued the edict of Milan, proclaiming tolerance for all religious worship and the restitution of Christian property. Licinius gained responsibility for the east and although persecution never returned, his harassment of Christians (for example, refusing them jobs in his palaces or civil service) allowed Constantine to paint his eventual defeat of Licinius as the final liberation of Christians in the Empire.²⁹

What can we learn from this narrative about the nature of the final phase of Christian persecution, from Decius to Maximinus? Firstly, in contrast with the earlier persecutions, these actions against Christians constituted an imperial policy imposed from the top rather than a response to popular sentiment rising from below. Secondly, although the various edicts testify that imperial policies were conceived, it is also evident that they were not necessarily carried out in a systematic or effective way. The division of the Empire into different regions had a lot to do with this; imperial reliance on individual governors in far-away cities was another factor. Thirdly, it was not a period of continuous persecution. Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea both wrote impassioned works against the persecuting emperors which have indelibly influenced later perspectives on the period, yet they spent most of their lives in peace.³⁰ It is also notoriously difficult to estimate the number of Christian deaths in this period. The persecutions made their impact as much through fear as through actual violence – a fear that was intensified by the inconsistency of policy across the Empire and by the clear shock when persecution was renewed in 304 after over 40 years. Finally, when seeking a cause for the policy of persecution it is simplistic to force a choice between a motive of political contingency (seeing Christians as a destabilizing force) or of religious conviction. All the emperors in this period seem to have believed that the destiny of the Empire was vitally connected with the correct veneration of the divine – Constantine is no different from Diocletian in this respect. Where they differed was on the question of which god(s) should be venerated and how important it was that all took part in broadly the same kinds of acts of veneration.

Throughout this period Christianity struggled with the effects of persecution. For many, the threat of martyrdom defined their sense of Christian identity much more clearly; for others, the shifting imperial policy created ambiguity and complexity. In particular, many Christians became absorbed with arguments about how to deal with those who had lapsed – that is, those who had sacrificed or obtained their certificates (libelli) by deception – but who wanted to return to the Church. Our best evidence for these conflicts comes from the writings of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage. He came from a wealthy family, was well educated and probably destined for a prominent public career. In 248, only a few years after conversion to Christianity, he was elected bishop. During the Decian persecutions he (and other presbyters) fled Carthage in order, he wrote, ‘to ensure that everyone is left undisturbed’, lest ‘my presence may provoke an outburst of violence and resentment among the pagans’.³¹ Clearly, however, this action caused resentment among his fellow Christians, and in a document written on his return he somewhat defensively emphasized that ‘the Lord commanded us in the persecution to depart and to flee’. While his example might not have been as brilliant as that of the confessors (on whom he lavished praise), at least – he claimed – he outshone those who stayed, held on to their wealth and denied their faith.³²

Although this work On the Lapsed celebrates the ‘peace’ brought about by the end of the Decian persecutions, the Christian community was clearly dangerously divided. Many were begging to be allowed to rejoin the Church and some priests were apparently readmitting them without the imposition of the kind of penance which would usually be required by the Church for post-baptismal sin. Other priests were reluctant to readmit them at all, on account of the seriousness of their sin of denying Christ.³³ Readmission seems to have been encouraged by the actions of confessors in prison who – anticipating that they would soon be martyrs – issued documents promising to intercede for the lapsed when the martyrs reached heaven. These ‘letters of peace’ (libelli pacis) were thus perceived by many to outweigh or counteract the libelli which they had fraudulently gained in order to avoid capture. There a suggestion in Cyprian’s letters that they were being traded (as no doubt the original libelli had been).³⁴

In On the Lapsed Cyprian was careful not to criticize the confessors directly, but was scathing about those who were trying to avoid the discipline of penance. Persecution arose, he argued, as a result of a failure of discipline in the Church: congregations had become obsessed with wealth and its ostentatious and fashionable display; priests lacked faith, piety and mercy.³⁵ When persecution began, most Christians gave in immediately: they ‘ran to the market-place of their own accord’; they risked spiritual death in order to save their property, and, not content with endangering their own lives, they involved their own children in their pagan sacrifices.³⁶ Cyprian asserted that there were two possible remedies for such actions:

He is an unskilful physician who handles the swelling edges of wounds with a tender hand, and, by retaining the poison shut up in the deep recesses of the body, increases it. The wound must be opened, and cut, and healed by the stronger remedy of cutting out the corrupting parts.³⁷

For Cyprian the remedy did not mean ‘cutting out’ the lapsed for ever, as some like the Roman presbyter Novatian argued. Rather, it meant giving them the right treatment. Foolishly ‘tender’ priests were allowing people back ‘before their sin [was] expiated, before confession [had] been made of their crime, before their conscience [had] been purged by sacrifice and by the hand of the priest’.³⁸ But, Cyprian asserted, God alone has the authority to forgive sin. This precipitate action did the believers more harm than good: it brought an apparent ‘peace’, which was in fact ‘another persecution’; it seemed to cure, but in reality attacked them with ‘a secret corruption’.³⁹ In order to press his point home, Cyprian gave some lurid examples of those who were punished by sudden fatal illnesses when they tried to take communion without being truly penitent.⁴⁰ These gruesome passages reveal that both Cyprian and the lapsed believed that they were physically as well as spiritually polluted by their consumption of pagan sacrifices and that the Eucharist was in some sense an antidote.⁴¹ Cyprian warned that believers needed to be suitably prepared for its consumption or it would have only dangerous consequences. Instead of hasty reception back into communion, then, Cyprian recommended full confession of sins to a priest and the performance of appropriate acts of penance, such as prayer vigils, weeping, prostration on the ground, fasting and the wearing of the most simple of clothes, almsgiving and good works.⁴² Only then could the priest offer absolution on God’s behalf and the lapsed could be received back into communion.⁴³

While Cyprian’s emphasis on a rigorous regime of penitence echoed some of Tertullian’s concerns, his was a much more church-focused and priest-focused notion of penance. Tertullian’s concept seemed to rely on the righting of the direct relationship between the believer and his God; priests possessed an authority not because of their ecclesiastical position but because of their possession of certain spiritual gifts (charismata). But precisely because Cyprian felt that the confessors and their priest-supporters had abused that charismatic notion of authority in the Church, in letting the lapsed back too easily, he insisted that the process of penance had to be properly regulated by the Church – specifically by councils of bishops as indicators of the unified will of the Church. So besides the theological response offered in On the Lapsed, Cyprian’s practical response to the crisis was to call a council in Carthage, which in 251CE decided on the appropriate treatment of the lapsed: those who had falsely obtained certificates could be readmitted to the Church, but those who had sacrificed would only be readmitted on their death-beds. In each case, readmission was dependent on doing appropriate penance.⁴⁴

Around this time, Cyprian also wrote his treatise On the Unity of the Church. Like Irenaeus, he claimed that bishops were successors to Christ’s Apostles, but went beyond this, however, in stressing the unified foundation of the Church on one Apostle: Peter.⁴⁵ He asserted that this unity was also foretold in the Song of Songs’ depiction of the Church as the one bride of Christ.⁴⁶ Expanding on this image, Cyprian commended the Church as the one mother of all believers: ‘from her womb we are born, by her milk we are nourished, by her spirit we are animated’.⁴⁷ Conversely, he pictured those who leave the Church either as miscarried foetuses who cannot live without their mother or as men who faithlessly consort with an adulteress.⁴⁸ The language of disease and contagion which he once applied to the lapsed was now directed to those who break the unity of the Church, who assume priestly or episcopal office with no authority and who thus deceive their congregations, ‘vomiting forth deadly poisons from pestilential tongues’.⁴⁹ He is forthright even about the confessors: ‘confession is the beginning of glory, not the full desert of the crown’; ‘even if such men were slain in confession of the Name [of Christ] … the inexplicable and grave fault of discord is not even purged by suffering’.⁵⁰ One might find his rhetoric tasteless – Cyprian undoubtedly wielded his metaphors with a great deal less precision and grace than his predecessor Tertullian – but Cyprian’s anxieties were not at all unfounded: his policy had failed to convince the most dedicated forgivers of the lapsed, who elected a rival bishop to Cyprian. Their party was probably an alliance of lapsed clergy and laity, perhaps with the support of some confessors released from captivity.

Other Christian communities were also split by the question of the lapsed. Around the time of Cyprian’s council in 251, there was a contested election to the bishopric of Rome, in which Cornelius and Novatian were elected as rivals. Cornelius took a line broadly similar to that of Cyprian, but Novatian took an even more rigorous approach: none of the lapsed should be readmitted to the Church. After some delay Cyprian chose to recognize Cornelius, but Novatian and his followers proved to be a thorn in his side, provoking rigorists in Africa to hostility and recognizing the second rival bishop to Cyprian in Carthage.⁵¹ Thus these events in Rome further destabilized the Carthaginian situation.

The rival groupings in Carthage arose partly because Cyprian’s policy of 251CE failed to deal with a pressing question: what about clergy who had lapsed? More specifically, did those who had been baptized by a lapsed priest need to be rebaptized? Cyprian’s own answer provocatively equated lapsed clergy with heretics: whatever their doctrinal beliefs were, by taking a lax line on the question of penance and subsequently setting up their own rival bishops and priests they were guilty of splitting themselves off from the one Church.⁵² He clashed in particular with Stephen, one of Cornelius’ successors as Bishop of Rome.⁵³ Stephen was inclined to be tolerant, apparently arguing that if there was ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ (Ephesians 4.5) then it was unnecessary to rebaptize those baptized by heretics or schismatics. In response, Cyprian presented the issue to him as a neat dilemma: if you say that the Church is one and has one baptism, either you must recognize the Church of the schismatics along with their baptism or you must reject their Church and their baptism together. It is self-contradictory to accept their baptism and reject their Church. In fact, Cyprian argued, one should say that those from heretical or schismatic sects were simply baptized in the true Church not rebaptized.⁵⁴

The argument between Stephen and Cyprian quickly accelerated, not least because problems surrounding the issue of rebaptism were not confined to Rome and Africa. Cyprian had been right to think that, for the most part, order within a region could be maintained by councils of its bishops.⁵⁵ Although consensus among them was important, ultimately order was often dependent on a tacit understanding that one bishop had particular authority over other bishops in the same region – the bishop of Carthage in North Africa, the bishop of Rome in Italy, the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, and so on. But there were no established methods for adjudging disagreements between regions – between Rome and Carthage, or Carthage and Alexandria. Congregations or individual bishops tended to appeal to men they thought had special moral, intellectual or spiritual authority, or those they thought would support their case. Thus, when Stephen allowed some Spanish lapsed bishops to retain their sees, their congregations appealed in protest to Cyprian. Novatian (still in place as rival bishop in Rome until 258) garnered support for his rigorist line from bishops in Gaul and Antioch.⁵⁶ Cyprian successfully appealed for support to bishops as far afield as Cappadocia. Meanwhile, Dionysius of Alexandria tried to intervene with an ameliorating line: although he personally agreed with Stephen he urged him and his successor not to interfere in other regions if they had come to a peaceable agreement. Writing to a Roman presbyter he recognized that both parties claimed long-established tradition for their different practices and he advised: ‘I would not think of upsetting their arrangements and involving them in strife and contention. “You shall not move your neighbour’s boundaries, which were fixed by your ancestors” [Deuteronomy 19.14].’ ⁵⁷ In fact, Valerian’s persecutions began before the churches had time to resolve their differences, but the episode illustrates how churches were uncertain as to how to resolve disputes between each other – an issue which was only to grow in importance. What also emerges from these debates is the huge importance attributed to baptism – particularly in the African Church where it was seen as a watershed moment, utterly dividing the believer’s previous life from his or her new life of absolute loyalty to God, creator of the world and father of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is also clear that denying one was a Christian was widely regarded not just as hypocrisy, treachery or a weakness of faith, but as causing pollution – both of individuals and those with whom they associated and worshipped. Again, this view was particularly strong in North Africa, where it resurfaced after the persecutions of 303–5.

The debate in Cyprian’s day had been over the libellatici – those who had either sacrificed or obtained certificates (libelli) saying they had. In the early fourth century arguments centred on the treatment of the traditors – those who had handed over Scriptures to the imperial authorities, as bidden by Diocletian’s first decree. An increasing atmosphere of suspicion against them became evident. It was most strong in the congregations in Numidia, who suspected the Bishop of Carthage and his staff of not being sufficiently supportive of Christian martyrs and imprisoned confessors during the persecutions. The suspicion erupted into open dissent over an election of a successor to the Bishop of Carthage, who died in 311. The Bishop’s archdeacon, Caelician, was chosen, but the Numidian rigorists objected, alleging, amongst other things, that one of Caecilian’s consecrations was invalid because it involved a bishop who was a traditor (following a similar line of argument to Cyprian’s claim that baptism by a lapsed priest had no efficacy). The rigorists elected their own rival bishop, who was supported then succeeded by the most powerful champion of the movement – a priest called Donatus from Casae Nigrae in Numidia.

The following years saw increasing tension between the two factions and a series of appeals for imperial support. Constantine backed Caelician from the start, probably because he suspected the Donatists of disrupting the unity of the Church with schism. Yet he gave a hearing to both parties and called councils at Rome (313), then Arles (314) for that reason. In 317 he attempted a stricter line and ordered the confiscation of Donatist church property; but this policy proved ineffective at curbing Donatist popularity and was abandoned in 321. In all likelihood, both Donatist and Catholic churches possessed bishops who were traditors; but rapidly questions about the status of lapsed individuals and the election of individual bishops were subsumed by rival visions of the Church as a whole. The followers of Donatus denied they were schismatics and saw themselves as the true inheritors of the one Catholic, i.e. whole, Church.⁵⁸ Known as Donatists by their opponents, they have a good claim to be known as ‘African Christians’, so dominant were they in that region for so many years.⁵⁹ According to them, the Church had to be kept pure from all taint of pagan idolatry; for the Catholics, the important thing was to keep the Church united. Both appealed to Cyprian to support their visions of the Church, the Catholics appealing to his notion of unity in On the Unity of the Church, and the Donatists using such images as his notion of the Church as a pure mother, or a saving Ark.

Constantine did not resolve the Donatist controversy: the Donatists’ influence in North Africa was still extremely vigorous when Augustine was writing two centuries later. Yet the fact that he was appealed to and agreed to intervene on a question of Church unity is very significant. It was not the first time that a Roman emperor had become involved in a Christian dispute – in 270 the church of Antioch had appealed to Emperor Aurelian – but Constantine took a more active role than his predecessor. No doubt both his personal faith in the Christian God as God of the Empire and the destabilizing effect of large-scale schism in the Christian Church impelled Constantine to make these moves. In his letter calling the council at Rome, he wrote: ‘I feel it to be a very serious matter that in those provinces which divine providence has freely entrusted to [me], and where the population is very large, the general public should be found persisting in the wrong course as if it were splitting in two.’ ⁶⁰ Nevertheless it is interesting that both emperors, the pagan and the Christian, acted with respect for Church councils as an already established method of Church order. Aurelian was only appealed to when Paul of Samosata refused to give up church buildings in Antioch, despite having been deposed by three councils which had the support of influential bishops such as Dionysius of Alexandria. The charges were heresy and immoral conduct. Aurelian’s judgement against Paul rested on the idea that a bishop must be recognized as such by the wider Church, particularly in its councils.⁶¹ Constantine went one step further: he summoned and attended councils and tried to use his authority to ensure that the Church came to a consensus on an issue, rather than leaving it hanging. Although opinions differ as to his influence on the outcome of the councils, he does not appear to have imposed his will on them in a direct and autocratic manner. Ultimately, unity was his concern and this required achieving a genuine consensus rather than telling bishops what he thought they should think. This policy seems to have united his behaviour at both Arles and Nicaea, despite the fact that they dealt with very different theological questions.

Inevitably such actions raise the question of Constantine’s personal faith. Three issues need to be dealt with: first, Constantine’s conversion; secondly, the material effects of his imperial policies on Christians, and finally his dealings with disputes among Christians.

The most famous account of what has often been called ‘Constantine’s conversion’ was given by Eusebius in his Life of Constantine:

About the time of the midday sun when the day was just turning, he said he saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and rising over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, ‘By this conquer.’ … He was, he said, wondering to himself what the manifestation might mean; then, while he meditated, and thought long and hard, night overtook him. Thereupon, as he slept, the Christ of God appeared to him with the sign which had appeared in the sky, and urged him to make a copy of the sign which had appeared in the sky, and to use this as a protection against the attacks of the enemy.⁶²

Unfortunately there are divergent interpretations of the event. Eusebius set it some time before Constantine’s crucial battle against Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge across the Tiber near Rome; Lactantius placed it more dramatically on the eve of the battle. An earlier account suggested that Constantine interpreted the vision as being from Apollo/the Sun, not from the Christian God.⁶³ Some modern scholars have suggested that what Constantine saw was not a vision but a solar halo.⁶⁴

The truth about when and where Constantine was ‘converted’ will probably never be known. What is reasonably certain is that by 310 he was a committed monotheist and by the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 he was interested enough in Christianity to have a retinue of Christian advisors. Like most conversions, Constantine’s conversion to Christianity was most likely a journey rather than a life-changing event. He may have first interpreted a vision as being from Apollo/Sol, then reinterpreted it in Christian terms at or after his defeat of Maxentius.⁶⁵

What was crucial for the history of Christianity was that something caused Constantine to connect his victory over Maxentius with the God of Jesus Christ and to express his faith with a specific symbol, the labarum. This sign Eusebius explains as the ‘monogram of Christ’: the artful combination of the first two letters of the word Christos in Greek, χ (chi) and ρ (rho). Already in Christian art, the iconography of Apollo or Sol Invictus had been applied to Christ: a third-century mosaic in a Roman necropolis depicted Christ with sun-like rays radiating from his head. The labarum appears to further stylize these rays into a chi-rho monogram. A particularly beautiful application of the symbol, in which the monogram still appears behind Christ’s head, can be seen in a mid-fourth-century mosaic from Hinton St Mary in Britain.⁶⁶ From 312 onwards the chi-rho symbol was used in a variety of ways, both by the imperial authorities and by individuals: it was incorporated into military armour (appearing on the emperor’s own helmet from 315); it was used on coins (from at least 327, if not earlier); it was carved on monuments, both public and personal; it was used as a seal on signet rings; it appeared on domestic cutlery.⁶⁷ Archaeological evidence from the fourth century attests to the use of the symbol in a wide variety of locations throughout the Empire.

Other tangible evidence of the effect of Constantine’s support for Christianity was his programme of rebuilding churches – many of which, of course, had been destroyed in the years after 303. In the eastern imperial capital, Nicomedia, he rebuilt the church which had been destroyed immediately after Diocletian’s edict in 304. Constantine provided money for the first church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, the new eastern capital which Constantine dedicated in 330. In Rome he provided for a basilica, St John Lateran, and for the construction of shrines to the Roman martyrs, including a church dedicated to Peter on the Vatican hill.⁶⁸ Eusebius describes in detail Constantine’s desire that a ‘house of prayer worthy of the worship of God should be erected near the Saviour’s tomb on a scale of rich and royal greatness’, in order that the place of Jesus’ resurrection should be ‘an object of attraction and veneration to all’.⁶⁹ The original plan appears to have been to build a church on the presumed site. When, however, a pagan temple was removed, Eusebius reports that ‘immediately and contrary to all expectation’ the cave in which Jesus was buried was discovered.⁷⁰ The tradition that Helena, mother of Constantine, found relics of the true Cross there goes back only to Bishop Ambrose in the 390s; however, she clearly played an important role in Constantine’s building programme in the Holy Land, as Eusebius attributes both to her and to her son the founding of churches at Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives.⁷¹

Besides granting Christians their property back and actively funding the rebuilding of their churches, Constantine seems to have made some changes in law which benefited them. For example, he exempted clergy certainly from paying the civic dues expected from rich citizens and possibly from all forms of taxation and he recognized the use of the bishop as a judge in civil cases between Christians. His social legislation was later interpreted as encouraging Christian values (although whether it was drawn up with that direct purpose is unclear): he removed the tax penalties for celibate citizens or couples without children and made divorce harder, especially for women. He declared Sunday a holy day on which no business could be conducted except the release (manumission) of slaves – this exception is explained by the fact that manumissions by Christians seemed to have taken place in church before the congregation in the presence of bishops, that is, presumably at the Sunday services.⁷² Constantine abolished crucifixion as a form of execution, and forbade criminals to be branded or tattooed on their forehead (as had previously been the practice).⁷³ He banned gladiatorial combat, but only in 325 (and in fact it outlived the official ban for years). Some pagan temples were destroyed to make way for Christian churches (particularly at Christian holy sites, such as Jerusalem, or the oak at Mamre where Abraham was said to have been visited by three angels, Genesis 18), but there was no systematic policy of destruction. In Rome in particular the ancient temples were left standing, and public divination was tolerated ‘as a relic of the past’, even though private use of the practice was forbidden.⁷⁴

There is no reason to doubt Constantine’s sincerity as a Christian. At some point in or before 312 his pagan monotheism was replaced by Chris-tianity. Even if he did sometimes deliberately blend the symbolism of the two, this was in order to avoid imposing an exclusively Christian piety on every citizen: he had seen enough of persecution to know that it did not promote the unity of the Empire. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to separate personal and political aspects of Constantine’s support for Chris-tianity. His personal conviction in the truth of Christianity was combined with his belief that he required not only the goodwill of Christian citizens but the goodwill of the Christian God for the Empire to flourish. When he presented himself as liberator of Christians within the Empire and a protector of those outside it, this was both an expression of his belief that Christians deserved to practise their religion in peace and a demonstration of his power and influence. Again, his building programme demonstrated not only his personal devotion but also his patronage of the decorative arts. It advertised imperial favour towards certain cities of the Empire as pagan emperors had done before in building temples. For this reason, it is not wise to attempt to ask whether it was personal piety or political expediency that led him to intervene in the Christian controversy which led up to the first ecumenical council of Nicaea.

Whereas the issues which divided Cyprian, Novatian and Stephen, or Donatus and his opponents, were the nature of the Church and its sacraments, the main question under discussion at Nicaea was a more fundamental one about the nature of God as Trinity. The debate highlighted a difficulty underlying even the most sophisticated Christian theology up to this time: how is it possible to say that God is one and that the Father and the Son are both God?⁷⁵ Although the writings of such theologians as Justin, Irenaeus and Tertullian had affirmed both these propositions, none had attempted to explain their coherence except in rather basic terms, often using analogies such as Justin’s mind and word and Tertullian’s roots-tree-fruit or fountain-river-stream. A further problem – which was to have very serious implications – was that Origen’s theology of the Trinity could be developed in two different directions: one which stressed the co-equality of the three persons and another which stressed the apparently subordinate roles of the three persons.⁷⁶

This underlying tension between two possible readings of Origen came out into the open in Alexandria in the early years of the fourth century with an argument between Arius, a presbyter, and his bishop, Alexander. It is uncertain why the controversy began or who provoked it.⁷⁷ One of the first documents we have is a declaration of Arius’ faith, which he addressed to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria probably around 321. It is a highly self-conscious piece of writing: Arius stresses the points on which he and Alexander agree, staking his claim to the orthodox tradition of the Church while at the same time claiming that any other position but his should be classified as one of the various heresies which he outlines. It is, in other words, precisely the kind of text one would expect from someone who has just been – or who anticipates being – accused of heterodox and untraditional views. (The precise theological issues at stake will be discussed below.)

Arius and his followers were probably deposed by a synod in Alexandria in around 321. They appear to have left for Palestine, where they were permitted to practise as presbyters, and gained a considerable amount of support from, amongst others, the influential Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine.⁷⁸ During this period Arius wrote to a supporter, Eusebius, bishop of the imperial capital Nicomedia, ‘the bishop [Alexander] greatly injures and persecutes us and does all he can against us, trying to drive us out of the city as godless men, since we do not agree with him when he says publicly, “Always Father, always Son” ’.⁷⁹ A further synod in Alexandria (but with signatories from beyond Egypt) condemned Arius, but his views were still attracting a great deal of support both in the eastern provinces and in Egypt where there seem to have been rival congregations sympathetic to Arius. The controversy came to the attention of Constantine in 324CE. Newly victorious over Licinius and now sole emperor, the unity of the Empire and the unity of the Church within the Empire was very much on his mind. He sent his bishop-advisor Ossius to Alexandria with a letter begging both sides to cease from their quarrel. Recalling his efforts to heal the Donatist schism in North Africa, he expressed distress that another church was divided into rival parties:

The impulse of your quarrel did not arise over the chief point of the precepts of the Law, nor are you faced with the intrusion of a new doctrine concerning the worship of God, but you have one and the same mind, so that you should be able to come together in a compact of fellowship. That so many of God’s people, who ought to be subject to the direction of your minds, are at variance because you are quarrelling with each other about small and quite minute points is deemed neither to be fitting not in any way legitimate.⁸⁰

‘These small and very insignificant questions’ seriously divided Christianity for the next half-century. Even after this, ‘Arianism’ was still an issue until at least the seventh century and some would argue Arianism in some shape or form never totally left the Church.

Even by 325 Constantine had clearly become convinced of the necessity of a different kind of response: he summoned bishops from all over Europe to meet at Nicaea, near the eastern imperial capital of Nicomedia.⁸¹ Although it is impossible to know who had the original idea for such a council, it is clear that Constantine sponsored it (both morally and financially), attended it and that his advisor Ossius chaired it.

What caused Constantine’s change of mind? Some have suggested that Alexander, on receipt of Constantine’s letter, persuaded Ossius that the issues were far more serious than the emperor thought. Another factor may have been a large council at Antioch in 325 which produced a very clear-cut condemnation of Arianism and excommunicated three bishops, including the very influential Eusebius of Caesarea.⁸² Constantine must have realized the destabilizing force of such a move – despite the fact that the Antioch excommunications were provisional on further debate at a council planned for Ancyra later that year. Constantine may also have been aware that the bishop of his eastern capital Nicomedia was a prominent supporter of Arius. It is likely that it was Constantine who proposed that the council of Ancyra be moved to Nicaea and opened the invitation to all bishops.

In the end, although the council was attended by around 250–300 bishops, they were overwhelmingly from the east. As one might expect, there were many representatives from Asia Minor (around 100 bishops), the region of Oriens (Arabia, Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine: about 50) and Egypt (22 bishops). Bishops came from Greece and its islands and the rest of the Balkan region (including the remote area near the Black Sea). There were bishops from Edessa in the Roman province of Mesopotamia and from two Roman cities on the Persian frontier (Rhesina and Nisibis). Two came from the kingdom of Armenia, which had become the first Christian kingdom in 314. On the other hand, there was only one from Gaul and none from Germany and Britain (all of which had sent delegates to the Council of Arles in 314); more surprisingly, there were no delegates from Italy or Africa. The only representative from Spain seems to have been Ossius himself. Seemingly, then, the westerners ‘did not know what all the fuss … was about’ – an interesting indication that it was perhaps not Constantine’s theological naivety that led to his initial reaction to Alexander and Arius but rather a more widespread western lack of comprehension.⁸³ Arius’ prominent episcopal supporters were present, but it was not a trial and it is unclear whether he himself attended.

What was at issue between Arius and Alexander and what did the council resolve? Amid all the rhetoric of the ‘Arian controversies’ it is easy to forget that both sides were united on some key issues. (Just as with earlier debates with the Gnostics, it was the similarity of the deviant views that made the deviation so threatening.) Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and his presbyter apparently agreed that there was ‘one God, alone unbegotten, alone everlasting, alone unbegun, alone true … alone wise, alone good … judge, governor … God of Law and Prophets and New Testament; who begat an only-begotten Son before eternal times, through whom he made both the ages and the universe’.⁸⁴ Arius was concerned that Christian theology might fall into three different kinds of error. First, he was worried about any suggestion that there might be two or more ‘unbegottens’ (agenneta) – that is, two independent but absolutely divine principles.⁸⁵ Consequently he stressed that God the Father was the only unbegotten one and emphasized the status of the Son as begotten from the Father (‘one God, alone unbegotten, who begat an only-begotten Son’). Secondly, he wanted to avoid any suggestion that the begetting of the Son from the Father was like the division of one material substance into two: the Son was not ‘as Valentinus pronounced … an issue, nor, as Mani innovated, a consubstan-tial part (homoousios meros) of the Father’. Finally, he did not want the Son to appear an automatic or random offspring of the Father; rather he stressed that the Son was begotten ‘by [the Father’s] own will’.

Alexander no doubt shared such concerns. His disagreement centred on the way in which Arius conceived of the begetting of the Son from the Father: to Alexander it suggested that Arius and his followers ‘deny [Christ’s] divinity, and proclaim him equal to all mankind’.⁸⁶ In fact, Arius’ language for the generation of the Son was often paradoxical: the Son was ‘a perfect creature of God, but not as one of the creatures – an offspring, but not as one of things begotten’. He was ‘begotten timelessly before all things’, but he ‘was not, before he was begotten’.⁸⁷ It seems that Arius felt that the Son’s begetting was an absolutely unique event, equivalent neither to the splitting of the divine substance into two parts nor with the creation of the universe. Again, this belief itself was not contentious; the problem was the conclusion Arius drew from it: that therefore the Son’s status was absolutely unique, being the equal neither of God nor the rest of creation. In order to explain the Son’s divine attributes, Arius seems to have claimed that God ‘promoted him as his Son by adoption’,⁸⁸ and that the Son did not possess divine qualities by nature, but as a gift by the Father’s will: ‘by [God’s] own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before age as God, only-begotten and unchangeable’.⁸⁹

Alexander’s objections thus centred on two interrelated issues. He was impatient with Arius’ denial that the Father and Son were co-eternal (‘the bishop makes great havoc of us and persecutes us severely … he has driven us out of the city as atheists because we do not concur in what he publicly preaches, namely that “God has always been, and the Son has always been: Father and Son exist together” ’ ⁹⁰). Thus Arius’ heresy was often encapsulated by his enemies as the claim that ‘there was, when he was not’ (that is, ‘there was a time when there was God the Father, but not God the Son’). But the denial that the Son had always existed was only a symptom of the fundamental issue: Arius denied that the Son was God in the same way that the Father was God. Indeed, to stress this point Arius was not afraid to use the language of ‘created’ for the Son, even to the extent of arguing that the Son was created ‘from nothing’.⁹¹

In recent years, scholars have debated whether Arius was motivated primarily by logic or by more theological, even spiritual, motives. One view is that Arius’ excessive reliance on logic forced him to erroneous conclusions. Arius accepted the premises that (i) to be God is to be unbegotten (i.e. uncaused, ontologically independent); (ii) there cannot be two unbegottens and (iii) that the Son was ‘the only-begotten one of the Father’ (John 1.14).⁹² From these Arius concluded that the Father alone was unbegotten, and that therefore the Father alone was God. The other view is that Arius was motivated by a concern to explain the workings of salvation: according to this interpretation Arius thought Jesus Christ was in many ways a human like other humans, but as ‘he rose in stature’ he was taken up by God into a relationship of Sonship. All humans now can imitate the love and obedience of Christ and, like him, although to a lesser degree, share in divine qualities as the adopted sons of God.⁹³

The problem with the first view is that it does not explain the popularity of Arius’ views. It has also tended to be accompanied by a very simplistic and negative view of the use of philosophy in Christian theology – as if ‘Greek philosophy’ in itself were the cause of heresy. The problem with the second is that it exaggerates some features of Arius’ theology and does not give enough weight to others (it emphasizes the role of the Son incarnate and downplays his cosmic role, e.g. the idea that all things were created through him). The current consensus rests on two important understandings. First, philosophy and theology, ontology and salvation are interconnected. Arius seems to have thought that the Son’s role as saviour and mediator depended on his ontological position half-way between God and creation. The Son could, as nothing else could, bridge the gap between God and humanity. It was this position that Athanasius most forcefully denied in his writings against the Arians, insisting that the ‘mediatorship’ expressed in the New Testament was based on the Son’s incarnate life, being both fully divine (so that he could save) and fully human (so that he could save humanity). Secondly, all scholars are in agreement that the interpretation of Scripture was a hugely important element of the controversy: he felt compelled to explain biblical verses such as ‘the Father is greater than I’ (John 14.28). He seized on other verses which suggested Jesus’ growth or improvement (e.g. Luke 2.52) and the ‘emptying’ (Philippians 2.5–11). Particularly popular among Arius’ followers was Proverbs 8.22: ‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work’, which to them suggested the Son’s beginning in time. Arius’ popularity can at least partly be explained by the fact that he endeavoured to explain the profoundly ambiguous (if not contradictory) nature of the New Testament’s pronouncements about Jesus’ relationship to the Father and the various ways in which the Hebrew Bible could be read as referring to the Son.

The creed which emerged from Nicaea seems above all to have had the aim of ruling Arius’ views out. Whether it did anything more positive in the way of defining the precise nature of the Son is more difficult to determine. The creed itself, together with its condemnations, ran:

We believe in one God, Father all-sovereign,
maker of all things, seen and unseen;

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,

begotten from the Father as only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the
Father,

God from God, light from light, true God from true God,

begotten not made,

homoousios with the Father,

through whom all things came into existence, the things in heaven and the things on earth,

who because of us and because of our salvation came down and was incarnated, made human, suffered, and arose on the third day, ascended into heaven,
comes to judge the living and the dead;

And in one Holy Spirit.

And those who say ‘there was once when he was not’ or ‘he was not before he was begotten’ or ‘he came into existence from nothing’ or who affirm that the Son of God is of another hypostasis or substance, or a creature, or mutable or subject to change, such ones the catholic and apostolic church pronounces accursed and separated from the church.

The phrases ‘from the being of the Father’ and ‘not made’ seem expressly to contradict Arius’ claim that the Son was ‘out of things which were not’. ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’ reiterates this point.⁹⁴ Similarly, the anathemas (condemnations) at the end are deliberately aimed at Arius’ view.

The most famous word in the creed, homoousios, was probably chosen precisely because Arius had criticized its use. Presumably the council did not mean that the Father and Son were composed of the same physical or corporeal stuff, but beyond that it is not at all clear what they did think it meant. It is even possible that this uncertainty was precisely what the word’s proponents desired: it allowed the council to rule out a negative (that the Son was not homoousios with the Father), without needing to explain what the positive statement meant. Certainly it allowed even an Arian supporter like Eusebius of Caesarea to agree to the Creed, although he did feel the need to explain to his congregation how he understood the word: it did not imply that the Godhead was corporeal, nor that the Son existed through the division of or subtraction of something from the Father. He carefully avoided the conclusion that homoousios established the equality of the Son and the Father. It is unknown who proposed the word (suggestions have included Ossius, or Constantine himself). Whoever it was may well have been aware of the advantages of a term which had a range of broadly acceptable meanings but which clearly ruled Arius’ views out. The disadvantage of the word’s flexibility only became apparent in later years when the fundamental questions of the controversy resurfaced.