5 CHRIST AND EMPIRE

To the Emperor Caesar, God, Son of God, Augustus.

ROMAN IMPERIAL INSCRIPTION

Lord Jesus Christ … Son of God … begotten, not made.

NICENE CREED

Give me, emperor, the earth cleansed of heretics, and I will give you Heaven in return. Help me eliminate the heretics, and I will help you eliminate the Persians!

BISHOP NESTORIUS TO EMPEROR THEODOSIUS II

Ideas about God were embedded in biblical narrative, but theologians parsed them by the criteria of philosophy. Ideas about Jesus as Christ were embedded in New Testament writings but also parsed by the criteria of philosophy. What was the status of Christ, as God’s son, relative to God himself? How divine could Christ be before monotheism—belief in one single, supreme god—was compromised? How human could Christ be, without compromising his divinity? With Constantine’s conversion in 312, all these questions were amplified, the stakes raised. Imperial politics would have a determinative effect on the creeds and councils of the imperial church.

Theology

What is a god?

In Roman antiquity, different literatures provided different answers. Myths, stories about the gods, presented superhumans whose emotional lives were all too human. Gods contested with each other, married and mated with each other, and favored particular locales and peoples. They consorted variously with humans, by whom they might have offspring. They were beautiful, powerful, and immortal. They could at any time manifest in dreams, in visions, through sacred statuary, or by immediate epiphany. They could direct events on earth and were susceptible to persuasion. And they were generally invested in how they were treated. Cult thus formed the glue of divine/human relationship. Showing piety toward the god could elicit divine benefaction: long life, children, well-being, wisdom. Failure to do so could elicit divine anger.

The Jewish god was also a narrative character, mediated through scriptural story. He too had personality and emotions. He loved; he hated; he battled other, lesser gods. He forgot and remembered, made choices, grew angry, punished and forgave. He gave laws. He guided history. Occasionally biblical texts suggest that God had a body: he formed humans in his image; his footfall warned Adam of his coming; he shielded Moses with his hand, revealing only his back; he dined with Abraham. Without sexual partners, he had sons, who were also superhuman (so Genesis 6.2). He stood in a paternal relationship with Israel, his “first born son,” and especially with the kings of David’s line. He conversed with other divine beings and with humans. Like most ancient gods, he was particularly present at his altar and, once it was built, in his temple. Being faithful to his ordinances resulted in benefaction: long life, children, well-being, wisdom. Failure to do so could elicit divine anger.

Philosophy offered a very different discourse about “god.” Its categories were generated not from ancient narratives but from intellectual propositions. In its Platonic forms, theology—philosophy specifically about divinity—held that the highest god was all good, radically transcendent, immaterial, unchanging, perfect. In its Stoic forms, theology held that god was the immanent, rational, organizing power of the universe. For both schools of thought, the mind was the highest, most divine part of human being. As an intellectual discipline, theology coordinated these definitions of divinity and of humanity with other key elements of philosophy: matter, cosmos, time, soul, ethics. The way to apprehend god, for the philosopher, was through the mind.

Allegory could retrieve the ancient narratives, enabling them to speak philosophical truths. Through allegory—allos (other) agorein (to speak): “other-speak”—the enlightened reader could see through the surface meaning of the text to the intellectual depths that the narrative level concealed. Odysseus sleeping in the cave of the nymphs might seem a tale of a homesick hero. Understood allegorically, the scene depicted the way that the soul yearns to leave the physical body and return to its true home in the upper cosmos. The serpent deceiving the first woman who then gets her husband to eat the forbidden fruit might seem like the story of a primal fall. Understood allegorically, the story relates how the senses (“Eve”), if turned toward lower things (“the serpent”), can distract even the mind (“Adam”) from its pursuit of divine truth.

Theology as a form of discourse was intrinsically the preserve of a tiny intellectual elite. Only they had the education and the ability to think in this way. Most of the issues, the concerns, and even the vocabulary used for expressing philosophical ideas lay well beyond the grasp of the vast majority of ancient people. Yet theology came to assume an outsized role in Christian culture, hotly contested. Its talking points were distilled in sermons, in song, in prayers, and eventually in summary statements, “creeds.” By the fourth century, these creeds, framed by bishops, were promulgated by state-supported councils. Creeds functioned as statements of political allegiance as well as distillations of theology.

Christianity inherited all the complications of Hellenistic Jewish theology, which had blazed the trail for reading biblical narrative in Greek through a philosophical lens. Divine attributes, like God’s word or reason (Logos) or wisdom (Sophia) or power (dynamis) could be personified, adding another dimension to interpreting scriptural texts, easing them toward philosophical interpretation. In the first century, Philo had deployed God’s Word in this way, as the agent in creation. God’s Logos, he said, was a “second god” and God’s “Image,” through whom sonship could be conferred to virtuous humans. “For if we have not yet become sons of God,” he says in one treatise, “yet we may be sons of his invisible image, the most holy Logos” (On the Confusion of Languages 147). Elsewhere he refers to God’s Logos as his “first-born son.”

Philo’s Logos thus functioned as a mediator not only between God and cosmos/creation, but also and specifically between God and humanity. Though he too was divine, he was also clearly subordinate. Mediation assumes three parties: first, God; second, the mediating figure; third, the object of mediation, be it creation writ large or humanity in particular. The mediating figure may be divine, may indeed be designated [a] “god”; but for mediation, logically, to work, the mediating figure cannot be the same as either pole of what he mediates. He is a go-between.

Paul, much less systematically than Philo, expresses this same pattern of subordinate mediation. God’s messiah is other than God himself: he is that god’s “son.” Sons are subordinate to fathers (especially in Mediterranean antiquity). Paul can refer to both God and Christ as “Lord,” but that word, kyrios, while used of various divine entities, was also a mode of address to any superior: calling both God and Christ “lord” implies no confusion. (Paul calls pagan deities “lords” as well, 1 Corinthians 8.5.) Christ, says Paul, is his father’s “image” (2 Corinthians 4.4): an image is derivative of or contingent on an original. Christ, God’s preexistent agent in creation (as was Philo’s Logos), was “in the form of god”—“god-form,” meaning with a body made of pneuma (material “spirit”)—until his descent into “slave-form,” that is, human likeness (Philippians 2.6–8). Christ’s flesh enabled him to die. Death preceded the glorious resurrection, which in turn presaged Christ’s triumphant return.

One place where Paul might seem to tip over from being a late Second Temple Jew to being a fourth-century Christian comes in his letter to the Romans 9.5. In English, this passage could read: “of their people [meaning Paul’s fellow Jews] according to the flesh is the Christ. God, who is over all, be blessed forever!” Or it could read: “of their people according to the flesh is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever!” The English translation depends on how the sentence is punctuated, with or without a full stop after “Christ.”

On this issue, there are several things to bear in mind. The first is that Paul’s original letter had neither punctuation nor even space between the letters. Modern readers are the ones whose punctuation shapes Paul’s sentences. Second, given that Christ has a plenipotentiary role in Paul’s story of redemption, he could be the “god over all who is blessed forever,” without confusing him or identifying him with God the Father. “God” in antiquity was a very elastic term. Third, the identification of Christ with God the Father, the claim that he was equally as divine as the Father, took until the imperially sponsored councils of the fourth and fifth centuries to formulate. Were Paul identifying Christ with God in the mid-first century, it was a point that eluded theologians for the next three hundred years.

By the late second century, proto-orthodox Christian theologians also had the four (not-yet-canonical) gospel narratives to consider, which further complicated theological reflection. The three seen-together or “synoptic” Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, relate the public actions of Jesus of Nazareth: there is no cosmic back story. In Mark, Jesus simply appears as an adult, declared by God as his son at baptism, and again, later, at his transfiguration. The original ending of Mark has no resurrection scene, just an empty tomb. This gospel, in comparison with the others, is theologically spare.

John, by contrast, prefaces his account with an elaborate theological prologue: Christ is the Logos of God. He takes on flesh. (John does not say how: he has no birth narrative.) He comes down to the lower realm and then goes back up, above, to the Father. In English, the prologue reads, “And the Logos was God.” Again, punctuation and capitalization, both modern conventions, can distort the Greek. Translated clunkily but literally, John’s text reads: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with the God, and the Logos was god.” For the claim—incoherent by the canons of ancient thought—that the Logos was the same entity as the high god, the article should be repeated before the second theos, “god.” Thus, “the God was the Logos.” The prologue claims high divinity for the Logos, God’s Son, Jesus Christ, the only one who has seen the Father. (How anyone sees the invisible God is another question that will preoccupy theologians.) The Johannine Logos preexists his becoming flesh. Still subordinate, then, though highly divine—indeed, as with Philo, John’s Logos is the next most divine being to God himself.

Matthew and Luke each have birth narratives, though these differ between them. In both, Jesus is born in the messianically correct town, Bethlehem, David’s natal city. In both, Jesus is conceived of a virgin by means of holy spirit. Virgin mothers are a trope for the birth of heroes in Greek mythology, but the evangelists are thinking with the Greek of Isaiah 7.14: “A virgin will conceive and bear a son, and he will be called Immanuel,” Hebrew for “God-with-us.” Through story-telling, these evangelists teach that Jesus is both the son of God—literally—and the messiah. If John’s, like Paul’s, is a “high” Christology, and Mark’s by comparison a “low” one, the Christology of the later two synoptics seems “medium.”

Divine Sonship

Later Christian theologians, reflecting back on Paul’s letters and the gospel stories as well as on the vast bulk of the Septuagint, sought to explain with precision both Christ’s divinity (how he related to God the Father) and Christ’s humanity (how a divine figure was also human). Those who focused on Mark’s gospel favored an idea labeled “adoptionism”: Jesus began life as a mortal, and was “adopted” son of God at his baptism. Adoption still conferred divinity.

This idea was abroad in majority culture. The son of god in the Roman world was no less a figure than the emperor. Augustus stands as the font of this imperial ideology. His adoptive father, Julius Caesar, had claimed divine descent from Venus. Deified after his own death, Julius conferred his divinity on his adopted son Augustus: “god from god,” as one papyrus proclaimed. Each succeeding emperor—Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero—was adopted as his predecessor’s son. Each was divine.

Augustus was not genealogically the divine Julius’s son. That is, he was not a begotten son, but rather a man “made” divine son through the mechanism of adoption. In statuary, on coins, in inscriptions, and on monuments, through cult, Augustus’s divinity was everywhere proclaimed. Though unquestionably human, Augustus, in a world where divinity traveled along a cosmic gradient from greater to lesser, was unquestionably divine as well. In a culture that teemed with gods, Rome ultimately would proclaim only two universal deities: the emperor, and Jesus.

Adoptionism, however, in the view of some, did not speak adequately to claims for Jesus’s preexistence. John had identified Jesus as God’s Logos. Paul had imputed both a historical and a heavenly preexistence to Christ. Christ, said Paul, was the rock from whom the children of Israel had drunk in the desert; Christ was the “man from Heaven” who had had a god form before assuming human likeness. These claims still subordinated Christ to God, as indeed did all the Christological titles: Word, Son, Messiah, Image. Divine subordination still protected ancient “monotheism,” since one sole divinity, God the Father, stood at power’s pinnacle. “Logos Christology,” as seen in the work of Justin Martyr, conforms to this idea. The Logos may be “another god,” a heteros theos, as Justin says; but he is still a lower god.

Still, some later theologians, uncomfortable with this divine superfluity, sought to bolster monotheism by speaking of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as different modalities of the same divinity, with function conferring identity. God as Father was one mode; God as Son—suffering, dying, rising—was another; God as Holy Spirit—inspiring, sanctifying—a third: but all were the same, single god, a “monarch.” Called “Sabellianism” in the East and “Patripassianism” (Father-suffering) in the West, Monarchianism was condemned by other theologians as heretical. It came too close to claiming that God the Father had suffered on the cross.

How, then, to articulate the distinctions between these two entities (or three, including Spirit)? Combatting Monarchian theology, Tertullian proposed that God be envisaged as “one substantia in three personae.” This formula would come into Greek as one ousia (which means “being” or “essence”) in three hypostases (individuated entities or prosōpa, “persons”). The insistence on one ousia protected the singleness and simplicity of the ultimate God against any charge of tritheism; the invocation of three separate prosōpa protected against modalist Sabellianism. Christology, indeed, theology, had clearly entered into a reactive phase: ideas were formulated against others, which then came to be considered, for various reasons, inadequate or offensive.

Middle Platonic cosmology further complicated Christian theology. Earlier formulations, whether pagan or Christian (as we see with Justin) had held that hylē, unformed matter, had preexisted along with theos, the high god. Cosmos, the ordered material universe, was in turn eternally generated through the mediation of the demiurge, a lower divine power. The coeternity of all these dimensions of reality insulated God from any imputation of change: changelessness was an essential aspect of his perfection.

As the metaphysical opposite of theos, hylē represented imperfection and change. Despite the impress of divine forms, primal matter could communicate its intrinsic deficiencies to cosmos, especially in the sublunar realm. Hylē thus provided this system with a ready explanation for the problem of evil: unformed matter, not the perfect god, was the ultimate source of the world’s imperfections. In the crucible of developing second-century Christianities, however, various theologians fretted over this idea. Did preexistent matter imply some kind of limit on God? Why would the good God pronounce creation “good” if it were based in and on deficient matter? And to what degree would matter imply or enact a cosmic realm independent of God? It was in these circumstances, as a battle between Christian intellectuals over the moral status of matter, that the (counterintuitive) idea of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, eventually took hold.

Creation ex nihilo drove the arguments fueling later Christologies. If only God was God, and if he “created” out of nothing, then was anything not-God by definition part of his creation? To which pole of this binary should Christ be assigned? Theologically (thus, philosophically) the issue was contingency. Was the Son independently God? If so, was that not ditheism? If not, was that then Sabellianism, a too-close identification of Father and Son? Was Christ, as Son, not contingent on the Father? Simple vocabulary pulled in one direction: contingency. But concerns about the goodness of creation, the mechanisms of salvation, and the oneness of God pulled in another direction: equality. The Son, some theologians began to insist, was “begotten” of the Father, not—as by adoption or by creation—“made.” By being divinely “begotten,” the Son shared in the Father’s ousia.

It took the genius of Origen, in the early third century, to frame a Christology that was both radically egalitarian and subordinationist at the same time. Origen distinguished between God and everything else in terms of “body” and in terms of contingency. Only the triune God, he taught, was completely self-generated, and only God was absolutely without body of any sort. The inner dynamics of the triune God, however, accommodated distinction, the scope for God the Father being unrestricted; for the Son, involved with secondary, temporal, material creation; for the Holy Spirit, restricted to the (true) church.

A century later, Alexandria would be convulsed over these questions, the battle lines drawn between the bishop, Alexander, and a priest, Arius. According to one version of the story, Alexander preached on the unity of the Trinity. His presbyter, Arius, hearing Alexander’s speech as an endorsement of Sabellianism, took Origen’s ideas in another direction: the only-begotten Son was contingent on the father, he taught, though timelessly generated by him. In the sense of contingency, not of time, Christ had a “beginning.” Christ was still divine, just not as divine as the Father. But contingency, to Arius’s enemies, implied creation, “creatureliness.” The claim seemed to diminish Christ’s godhead.

Alexander and Arius communicated their disagreement to other bishops in the East, who promptly got swept up in the argument. Arius amassed considerable support with two bishops in other important cities—Eusebius of Nicomedia (an eastern capital), and the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (an administrative node of the empire). Antioch’s bishop sided with Alexander. Then suddenly, in 324, the dynamics of the controversy altered dramatically. The emperor, Constantine, weighed in.

Constantine, Nicaea, and After

To the reigning imperial powers, Constantine seemed an imperial interloper. But he was also an effective general. Once his troops, in 306, declared him Augustus, he made a sweep of the West, conquering territories and amassing power. The last western city to fall to him, in 312, was Rome. As was usual in antiquity, he felt that his victory had been aided by a god. But the god in question was a relative newcomer: Christ.

Controversy continues to swirl around the issue of Constantine’s conversion. The definitive point of dramatic reversal narrated by Lactantius and by Eusebius does not correspond to Constantine’s actions. Even after the formation of his new allegiance in 312, he continued as pontifex maximus, the imperial overseer of traditional Roman cults. His coins bore images of the sun god, Sol Invictus. The Chi-Rho symbol of Christianity appears on them only belatedly. Pagans continued to dominate his court, his civil apparatus, and his army. He closed only a limited number of pagan sites, while countenancing the building of new ones. He was not baptized until on his deathbed. The idea of a single, dramatic moment of conversion, which both Lactantius and Eusebius claim he narrated to them, could well be a creation of his own retrospect. His active involvement with Christians, when he suspended the imperial directives of Diocletian’s persecution in 306, had begun six years prior to his victory at the Milvian bridge.

In the event, after his 312 triumph at Rome, Constantine handsomely repaid Christ’s favor, becoming an enthusiastic patron of Christian assemblies. He involved himself deeply in complex theological disputes. He worked hard to bring some sort of concord and unity to his chosen community. His commitment to Christianity seems unambiguous. His problem initially may have been identifying which Christian church to support.

There were many different Christian communities, of widely variant theologies, when Constantine experienced the power of the Christian god. Valentinians and Marcionites still assembled. The Montanists of the “New Prophecy” prevailed in Phrygia in Asia Minor. Manichaeism, Diocletian’s suppression notwithstanding, spread from one end of the empire to the other, and beyond. In the wake of the imperial persecutions, more new communions, like that of the rigorist Novatianists, the Melitians, and the Donatists had formed. So why did Constantine sponsor the particular group that he did? Perhaps he had been influenced through his prior contact with Lactantius, whom he had chosen to be a tutor for one of his sons. Perhaps he was influenced by his mother Helena, who may (or may not) have been Christian herself at this point. Perhaps he was already in sympathy with Ossius, the western bishop who would later serve as his episcopal emissary. The simplest explanation is that he chose the church that he happened to be already familiar with, perhaps through an earlier, covert affiliation.

Constantine’s personal religious motives to one side, his new choice of sponsorship had practical benefits as well. Christians of all sorts concentrated in cities. (The term for non-Christian gentiles, pagani or “country dwellers,” was coined later in this period.) And cities were themselves nodal points within the power network constructed by empire, centers through which emperors could exercise local control through provincial governors and collect the all-important taxes that supported the army.

The Christian communities that Constantine chose to sponsor were especially characterized by strong institutional organization, which mimicked the Roman provincial one. They were headed by a monarchical bishop, an “overseer” with a lifetime appointment. The origins and evolution of this ecclesiastical position, the ways that it developed into a signature church office, are obscure: in the late first and early second centuries, prophets, wandering teachers, charismatic intellectuals (like Origen in the third century), and wonder-workers all wielded authority together with local “presidents” or bishops and presbyters. But by the mid-third century, (male) bishops emerge at the apex of stable (and salaried) hierarchies of presbyters, deacons, readers, and exorcists. Sometimes, elevation to the office depended on family connections: sons of bishops became bishops themselves. Sometimes the bishop was chosen by acclamation: the congregation would shout out their choice, which could lead to congregations split between favored candidates. Sometimes the presbyters chose a bishop from among themselves, though the candidate was ordained—infused with holy spirit—by other bishops.

Their duties were both pastoral and administrative. Bishops interpreted scriptures, expounded doctrine, and presided over liturgies, especially for initiation (baptism) and for the celebration of the community ritual of the eucharist. Importantly, they were invested with the authority to forgive sins. Locally, and no less importantly, bishops mediated charity, controlling welfare distributions to church dependents and to the urban poor.

Assertions of episcopal authority began to grow in the second century. First Clement held that the apostles themselves had established the rules for the orderly appointment of church leaders. According to Ignatius of Antioch, the bishop “presides in the place of God” (Letter to the Magnesians 6.1), a view repeated in the later Didascalia Apostolorum (“Teaching of the Apostles,” preserving early third-century traditions). The Didachē, a manual of Christian discipline (early second century?), while acknowledging the authority of wandering apostles and prophets, also upheld that of the stationary “overseers” and deacons. Irenaeus, late in the second century, presented bishops and “true presbyters” as the sole guardians of apostolic teaching (Against Heresies 4.26, 2). Tertullian, in the early third century, argued that the original bishops of the empire’s major cities had all been appointed by the apostles (Prescription against Heretics 32). By the mid-third century, the apostles had become bishops themselves.

As a loose federation of scattered communities, these monarchical churches sought to align on issues of doctrine and discipline across vast distances. Bishops attempted, through regional councils and through correspondence, to stay coordinated with each other—another testament to their administrative organization. Letters threaded independent churches together. A papyrus fragment reveals that Irenaeus’s work against heresies, written in Lyon in the 180s, had already made its way to Egypt by the turn of the century. Regional synods convened to coordinate responses to various challenges. In 250, some sixty bishops gathered in Rome against the rigorist Novatian, divided over policy for reintegrating the lapsed back into community; in the 260s, three large synods repudiated the teachings of the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata. Prestige, and property bequeathed by the faithful, accrued to bishops, especially in the wealthy major cities. As dispensers of charity, bishops functioned as local patrons with considerable clout, commanding the loyalty of their urban base. Besides setting calendars, serving as conduits of Spirit through sacraments, forgiving sins, ordaining priests, and consecrating other bishops, they exercised juridical roles within their own churches, settling internal disputes.

These bishops, in short, represented—and offered—an empire-wide network of influence and support. Constantine’s patronage would amplify what these bishops were already doing in their communities. The bishops, in turn, offered him a talent pool for a new kind of magistrate.

Already in 260, the emperor Gallienus issued edicts ending his father Valerian’s persecution of Christians. And in 311, the Christian god had been eased into Rome’s pantheon by the eastern emperor, Galerius, when he ended Diocletian’s persecution and exhorted Christians to pray to their god for the safety of the res publica and of the emperor (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 34.5). But Constantine, in 312, made a singular commitment. The Christian god had aided his ascendancy. He would repay. While maintaining the imperial role of pontifex maximus over traditional cults, Constantine also assumed personal responsibility for the proper worship of the Christian deity as well.

For this reason, the discord of the North African church, which embroiled him almost immediately, commandeered Constantine’s attention. Inheriting from the Second Sophistic an emphasis on homodoxia and homonoia, unanimity of thought, prelates urged that proper religio should be unanimous, the identity and unity of the true church unambiguous. Constantine agreed, for reasons that were doubly practical. First, only right religio could guarantee the security of the empire. And, second, the emperor had to know which bishops to sponsor. It was in the course of his attempts to resolve North Africa’s Donatist conflict that Constantine set an important precedent. With the failure of a commissioned episcopal council to produce a satisfactory result, he had gone on to convene, in Arles in 314, an episcopal synod overseen by himself.

In 313, together with the eastern emperor Licinius, Constantine issued a declaration formally establishing freedom of practice for all inhabitants of the empire, specifically mentioning Christians, the so-called Edict of Milan. Once he consolidated power over the East in 324, however, Constantine positioned himself specifically as Christianity’s champion. He then met with another unhappy surprise: his newly unified empire was once again riven by disunity within his favored church. He tasked his episcopal adviser, Ossius of Cordova, with quieting the discord. Arriving in Alexandria, Ossius sided with his fellow bishop Alexander against the presbyter Arius. The council that he subsequently called in Antioch ended with provisional excommunications, including that of Eusebius of Caesarea—another unhappy result. Constantine then took matters into his own hands once again. He called for an “ecumenical”—that is, an empire-wide—episcopal council, to be held under imperial sponsorship at Nicaea in 325. And he himself would be present, to ensure the result he sought: concord.

More than two hundred bishops—the number is uncertain—assembled at Nicaea. The vast majority were from the East, only a handful from the West. (The Roman bishop, Silvester, did not attend but sent two presbyters to represent him.) A clogged agenda confronted them: not only deciding on the nature of Christ, thus of God, but also fixing the date of Easter, which wandered between lunar (thus, Jewish) and solar dates in different communities. They had to sort out a policy for episcopal jurisdictions, which imitated imperial provincial organization. Over what extraprovincial territories would each metropolitan bishop exercise authority? What was to be done about the disciplinary schisms over how to reintegrate those who had lapsed, which followed in the wake of the first imperial persecution (the Novatianists, in Rome) and the last (the Melitians, in Egypt)? What was the status of clerical marriage?

The decisions of the council, ultimately, could not be enforced. Positions identified with Arius long prevailed; Easter calendars continued to differ; episcopal jurisdictions were continuously contested; the Melitians and Novatianists perdured; the issue of clerical marriages was left unsettled. But the rewards of imperial support encouraged cooperation. Only those who obliged the emperor could expect his benefactions.

One lasting result of the Nicene council was its movement toward a creed that, by the end of the century—and only by the end of the century—would serve as the touchstone for imperially recognized orthodoxy. Despite his own shaky grasp of the finer points of theological dispute—a quarrel “over small and quite minute points,” as he complained to Alexander and Arius (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 2.68.2; 71.1)—Constantine had insisted on the use of homoousios, “of one substance.” This term would define imperial orthodox theology about Christ. It was interpretable enough to wrest the consent of those, like Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, who inclined toward Arius. Eventually, by 328, Arius himself would be reconciled, too, to the imperial church. Christ was now, by decision of the council, fully God. A corollary question—if so, then how fully human?—remained contested for another century and never met with unanimity.

Constantine effected a phase change in Christianity. For the first time, the idea of “orthodoxy” had serious social purchase. Only the churches that he recognized would receive the benefits that obliging him and his quest for concord could bestow. And those benefits were considerable. Constantine transferred huge amounts of wealth to the “universal and orthodox” church via its bishops. He did so by confiscating the holdings of some temples, stripping them of their gold and silver ornamentation and melting down cultic statuary. In some instances, he redistributed funds by transferring the revenue-producing estates supporting the temple cults to his own purse (the res privata) or to that of the local bishop. He sometimes did the same with the revenues of civic estates. By despoiling the temples he accomplished two goals: building up the churches (and tying its bishops to himself in effect as his clients) and compromising public pagan cult.

Constantine also ordered provincial governors to provide annual grain distributions for church personnel and dependents (virgins, widows, orphans, the poor). These grain rations were channeled through the bishops. He sponsored the development of monumental Christian architecture, erecting huge basilicas and encouraging bishops, enriched from the res privata, to do the same. The upkeep of these buildings and provision of their sumptuous furnishings were likewise underwritten by the government.

And Constantine transferred more than wealth. He thereby also transferred power. Grain distributions enhanced the status of bishops as important local patroni in their own cities. Further, bishops could now adjudicate civil cases and call on imperial authorities to enforce their decisions. Their authority to oversee the manumission of slaves was affirmed. Bishops could legally receive bequests. They could travel at public expense, by the imperial posting system. And they were excused from the onerous and expensive service to city councils (curiae). Episcopal office, with its tax exemptions, local power, and juridical authority, became an attractive career choice for men with talent and ambition.

But Constantine’s largesse came at a cost. Failure to cooperate had more than financial consequences, considerable though those were. Only clergy who obliged him would keep their sees: exile, with Constantine, became a tool for enforcing party discipline. It was one that he did not hesitate to use. The prelate who exemplifies the application, and the failure, of this means of control was Athanasius of Alexandria, who succeeded Bishop Alexander in 328.

Constantine sought concord. Athanasius had his own ideas. Implacably opposed to Arius, he refused to receive the latter back into communion, even though Arius had himself reconciled with the emperor. Worse: Athanasius also had little truck with receiving rigorist Melitian prelates back into the fold. Constantine summoned him to yet another council in Tyre in 335, where the powerful Eusebius of Nicomedia arranged for his excommunication and deposition. Not only were Athanasius’s means of policing orthodoxy in Alexandria violent, Eusebius charged; he had also threatened to inhibit the transfer of Egyptian grain from the port city to the new eastern capital, Constantinople. Off went Athanasius to Gaul. The contacts that he made in the West would serve him well in this protracted battle of wills.

Recalled to Alexandria in 337 with Constantine’s death, Athanasius was soon pushed into exile again by Constantine’s son and eastern successor, Constantius II. The bishop refused to ratify a compromise creed favored by the new emperor. (A creed, however much it represented a credo, functioned as well and not least as a public declaration of political fealty.) In 339, consequentially, Athanasius found refuge in Rome, within the independent territories of Constantius’s brother. The bishop of Rome received Athanasius in defiance of his excommunication in the East—an assertion of authority that only deepened the ecclesiastical split growing along the political fault line between Constantine’s heirs.

Compounding these troubles was a power vacuum that developed suddenly within the church at Constantinople. Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius’s old ally and Athanasius’s nemesis, had assumed the see of Constantine’s new city; but late in 341, Eusebius died. Contested between two prelates, the position’s power was compromised, hampering the eastern bishops’ political effectiveness. Empire-wide schism loomed. The attempt to head it off, at a council in Serdica (342–43), only made matters worse: eastern and western bishops split into two separate conclaves. Finally, Constantius blinked and allowed Athanasius to return to Alexandria in 345.

Power politics in their imperial inflection were no less troubled. In the West, Constantius’s brothers, Constantine II and Constans, fought with each other, with Constans emerging victorious. Then Constans fell to a usurper, whom Constantius overcame in turn. The empire was now reunited under a single monarch, diminishing the scope for ecclesiastical maneuverings. Constantius exploited his opportunity, arranging for Athanasius’s condemnation by two councils in Arles and in Milan. Noncompliant western bishops, including the bishop of Rome, were duly exiled, as was Athanasius once more, ousted by military force in 356. This time the recalcitrant bishop stayed closer to home, fleeing to hide with monks in the nearby desert and maintaining communication with his base back in the city. His replacement was an Arian sympathizer, George.

Christology churned these waters even more. If homoousia, “of the same essence” or “being” as the Father, staked too much on divine identity, could one say that Christ expressed homoiousia, “similarity of essence” with the Father, as some Homoian prelates ventured to pose? Or—so George of Alexandria—was Christ’s essence utterly unlike that of the absolutely unique Father, a position labeled “Anomian,” “dissimilar”? The homousian theologians, with the fierce Athanasius as their champion, brooked no compromise. One of Athanasius’s exiled western defenders, Hilary of Poitiers, appropriating the discourse of martyrdom, roundly reviled the Christian Constantius as Nero, Decius, and Antichrist, persecutors all of the true church. In Hilary’s view, Constantius was on the wrong side of the Christological debate.

Christological controversy generated more heat than light. It articulated battle lines drawn over the issue of authority. Who was in charge, the emperor or the bishops? The bishop of Rome or, independently, the metropolitan bishops? The individual bishop in his own district, or the majority of a translocal synod? As for Christology itself, earlier doctrine provided little guidance. The rhetoric of apostolic tradition notwithstanding, definitions of orthodoxy had long outgrown their New Testament sources: none of those authors had been thinking, or teaching, in terms of ousia. The content of orthodoxy in this period was itself under construction. The prerogative to decide which definition of “orthodoxy” would prevail was no less contested. The question had practical consequences: decisions determined who received imperial sanction, who support.

Suddenly, in 361, everything changed again. Constantius died. Athanasius returned to Alexandria in 362, local mobs having murdered George in an ugly urban riot. Athanasius would continue in his seat of power, interrupted by two more brief exiles, until his own death in 373. By then, he and all his episcopal colleagues, of whatever Christological persuasion, had lived through a shocking reversal of fortune. Constantius had been succeeded by his younger cousin, Julian, who in turn became sole emperor. With his rise to power, the new Roman ruler openly declared his own religious allegiance. Julian worshiped the old gods.

Julian

A cradle Christian, baptized in his youth, Julian was also a survivor. In 337 his Christian cousins, Constantine’s sons and heirs, had slaughtered all the ancillary males of the family, including Julian’s father. Too many family members, they felt, might muddy the waters of dynastic inheritance. The young Julian and his half brother, Gallus, were allowed to survive (though Constantius executed the unhappy Gallus in 354). Julian was even permitted to go to Athens to pursue his studies in philosophy. Making contact with pagan Neoplatonists, Julian covertly redirected his religious allegiances.

Julian was called from his studies suddenly in 355, when Constantius appointed him Caesar and tasked him with shoring up the Rhine border. Surprisingly, Julian demonstrated so much military talent that, in early 360, his enthused troops—resisting Constantius’s order to relocate further east—acclaimed him Augustus. Only Constantius’s death in 361 averted a brewing civil war. Julian was free to worship the gods.

How daring was his decision? Even after Constantine’s conversion, and his championing of his favored church, the vast majority of the army had remained pagan, with little effort on the part of Christian emperors to affect a religious reorientation. The Roman senate had also remained overwhelmingly pagan, despite some Christian inroads under the Constantinian regimes. Pagans had served in prominent positions in the courts of Constantine and his sons. Civic celebrations and spectacles had all continued, though in principle decoupled from the animal offerings that the emperor had found so distasteful. And Constantine himself, his personal enthusiasms notwithstanding, had continued as pontifex maximus to oversee traditional cults. In the 330s, he even approved the establishment of cults to his own family, the gens Flavia, complete with priesthoods, theatrical performances, and gladiatorial combats (but no blood sacrifices), for a town in Italy (Hispellum) and a province of Africa. Imperial cult had remained a coin of privilege, and a means to garner imperial patronage and, thus, benefactions (such as immunity from curial service for imperial priests). Notwithstanding the triumphalist rhetoric of his two publicists, Lactantius and Eusebius, Constantine’s kingdom had retained a pagan majority.

Julian’s regime immediately affected the churches: he shut off the financial spigot and ended clerical privileges. Knowing well the Christian ideology of martyrdom, he also avoided any use of coercive force. His means of undermining the churches was more subtle: he would use tolerance. “I had imagined that the prelates of the Galileans were under greater obligations to me than to my predecessor,” he wrote in a published letter, “for in his reign many of them were banished, persecuted and imprisoned, and many of the so-called heretics were executed.” Julian would have none of it. “All this has been reversed in my reign. The banished are allowed to return, and confiscated goods have all been restored to their owners” (Letter 52). Back came the heretical leaders and exiled bishops, back came the Christological contestants. Left to their own devices, Julian was sure, and now completely free to be out in the open, Christians would claw each other to pieces.

Cannily, too, Julian determined to rebuild the temple of the Jewish god in Jerusalem. In Constantine’s newly Christian city, the church of the Holy Sepulcher, lauded by Eusebius as a new temple on the order of Solomon’s, loomed over the wasted mesa of the old temple site. Julian knew his New Testament, and the adversus Iudaeos traditions, which had made so much of the temple’s destruction in 70 as a permanent sign of God’s repudiation of the Jews and, specifically, of blood sacrifices. But Julian vigorously championed blood sacrifices for traditional cult (to an excessive degree, some pagan courtiers felt). Jews sacrificed to the highest god, he stated—though he also noted that, oddly, they sacrificed to none others. No matter. He would restore this sacred site to Jewish worshipers, to perform rites that Julian felt to be honorable, ancient, and correct.

The depth of Julian’s Christian formation was evident in another regard: the ways in which he determined to revivify and restore traditional cults. These really amounted to a reform built on an ecclesiastical template. Traditional cults had formed no “ism”: they had always been multivocal, locally specific, independent, uncoordinated, and energetically various. Julian now envisaged a sort of central administration, an organized pagan “church.” High priests would exercise jurisdiction on the model of metropolitan bishops. The imperial treasury would support standing priesthoods and pagan charities for the poor, this last self-consciously modeled on Jewish and Christian philanthropy.

Finally, and most controversially, Julian ruled that Christians could no longer serve as teachers. The curriculum of the schools—for grammar, for rhetoric, for philosophy—had always been crammed with gods, and so it had remained, since the days when Alexander the Great had widely exported it. For this reason, the ideologically fastidious Tertullian had urged Christian teachers, a century and a half before Julian, to quit their posts (On Idolatry 10). What did a Christian have to do with pagan gods? Julian asked the same question and came to the same answer. Hellenistic Jews and, later, educated Christians had driven a wedge between pagan religiousness and pagan learned culture, appropriating the latter for their own ends. Julian insisted on closing that gap. His edict effectively cut the ground out from under Christian learning, infuriating classically trained Christian intellectuals, who claimed paideia for themselves.

All these projects came to naught with Julian’s early death in 363, on campaign against Persia. With Julian, the Constantinian dynasty came to its close. A Christian successor, Jovian, was declared in the field. He ended Julian’s initiatives. Church benefactions, however, would be restored to only a fraction of their previous levels: Constantine’s generosity had proved unsustainable. But both in practice and in principle, the questions thrown into sharp relief with Constantine’s sponsorship remained. Who was in charge? Who was in, and who was out? Which was the orthodox and universal church? And what was orthodoxy?

Continuing Controversies

Jovian died in less than a year. His successor, a military officer, Valentinian I, again split the empire East and West, handing the East to his brother, Valens. Neither brother, like Jovian before them, concerned himself with Christological niceties, perhaps as a matter of political pragmatism: the ongoing theological controversies, seeping downward to urban populations through sermons, song, and sloganeering, destabilized public peace. Taking a stand would compromise the imperial newcomers’ neutrality and potentially alienate different contestants and their urban bases. In the view of the Homousians, however, this neutrality made Valens into an “Arian.”

Both brothers died in office, Valentinian in 375, Valens, in a harrowing military encounter with Goths, in 378. Gratian, Valentinian’s young son, briefly succeeded him in the West: it was Gratian who disavowed the old imperial title of pontifex. In the East, a nondynastic choice fell on another military man, Theodosius I (379–95). A fervent adherent of the Nicene position, Theodosius together with Gratian issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, establishing Nicaea as the empire-wide standard of orthodoxy:

We desire that all the peoples who are ruled by the guidance of our clemency should be versed in that religion which it is evident that the divine apostle Peter handed down to the Romans, and which the pope Damasus and Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic sanctity, adhere to.… We command that those persons who follow this rule shall have the name of catholic [“universal”] Christians. The rest, however, whom we judge to be demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten, first, by divine vengeance and, secondly, by the retribution of our own initiative, which we shall assume in accordance with divine judgement. (Theodosian Code 16.1.2)

Perhaps Theodosius thought that broadcasting his preference would bully the various outliers into compliance. No less important, perhaps he thought that it would quiet the raging factionalism of the eastern bishops. The stratagem might have worked, had it not been for a subsequent canon promulgated at a council that he convened in Constantinople in 381. Under his supervision, the council championed Constantinople’s authority as second only to Rome’s. Theodosius thereby alienated Alexandria, which had long regarded itself as the eastern empire’s preeminent see. Intercity and intracity contests over authority and prestige would continue to be expressed in a theological key well into the fifth century, as Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople faced off over teachings about the nature of the Trinity and about the person of Christ.

The seesaw of imperial power and episcopal authority is nowhere better expressed than in the relationship between imperial figures and the bishop of Milan, the imperious Ambrose. The latter, an aristocrat of senatorial rank, was serving as regional governor when he was called by lay acclamation to serve as the city’s bishop. Ambrose was first baptized, then eight days later ordained. The exercise of authority, with its implications of power, came easily to him. An implacable foe of Arianism and of traditional Roman religions, as well as an adamant supersessionist as regards Judaism, Ambrose had no trouble facing down imperial power. He may well have relished it.

One test came in 386, when the widow of Valentinian I and regent of the adolescent Valentinian II, the empress Justina, required one of Milan’s cathedrals to be made available for the army’s Gothic troops, who were (or were labeled as) “Arian.” Justina’s and Valentinian’s own sympathies lay in that direction. Ambrose resolutely refused, mobilizing popular sentiment against Justina and invoking the language of martyrdom: he would give up his life before a Nicene building would be ceded. He and his people staged a sit-down strike within the contested basilica, refusing to yield to imperial troops. In the end, Justina backed down.

A second incident involved the emperor Theodosius. It concerned a synagogue in Callinicum, on the eastern edge of the empire. In 388, the bishop there had incited a Christian mob to burn down the building, an act that was both patently illegal and plainly disruptive. (A local Valentinian chapel met with a similar fate.) Theodosius ordered the perpetrators punished and directed the bishop to restore the structure out of his own funds. Learning of this, Ambrose refused to continue with a eucharistic service when Theodosius was present until and unless Theodosius rescinded his directive. Resistant, the importuned Theodosius finally acquiesced.

A third incident, two years later, occurred when Ambrose threatened the emperor with excommunication. The sources for this are late and conflicting, but at issue seems to have been Theodosius’s handling of an urban rebellion in Thessalonica. Residents had murdered the presiding Roman military official, evidently for ordering the arrest of a popular charioteer. In response, the army was said to have massacred thousands. Ambrose demanded that Theodosius do public penance for his role, whether in ordering or in countenancing the slaughter. According to these later sources, Theodosius complied. His status as a baptized layman complicated his relation to episcopal authority. The emperor was still unquestionably supreme: he controlled the army and had a monopoly on coercive force. Equally unquestionably, however, the bishops as urban powerbrokers with their bases of popular support exercised local clout.

Theological contestations, meanwhile, continued apace. At issue now was the Holy Spirit’s relation to God the Father and the Son. Were they all of the same ousia (essence)? If so, how were they to be distinguished? Were they all one hypostasis (an independently existent entity) or three hypostases in one ousia? Communities split over the argument: at one point, Antioch had three different claimants to the episcopal see, the contestants ranging across the interpretive options, each with the popular backing of his own violent urban faction. Again, the fight was parsed in terms of “Arianism,” by this point more a slogan than a description. Politicking between Alexandria and Rome over Antioch finally led to a resolution, and two of Antioch’s contestants were sent packing.

Ultimately, the work of the Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus—quieted some of the turmoil by arguing that the Trinity represented three hypostases in one ousia. The Son was “begotten” of the Father; the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father. Liturgical tradition—baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit—unobtrusively supported their formulation. This satisfied some and not others. High theology continued to steer between the Scylla of Sabellianism and the Charybdis of tritheism. Biblical language could not oblige the ambitions of late Roman theology: theologians were stuck with terms set by philosophy.

Fissures also appeared in theological constructions of Christ. The question of his divinity, for the Nicenes, being settled at Nicaea, another remained: how human was he? And in what way? Apollonaris of Laodicea urged that divine Logos had replaced human mind: as a unified person, Christ had to have had but a single nature, which clearly had to be his divine one. And since Christ was truly God, his mother, Mary, could be rightly acclaimed Theotokos, “God-bearer.” Against this position, Theodore of Mopsuestia urged that the union of Jesus and God was one of will. Christ, he insisted, had two natures, one fully divine, the other fully human. Only a full assumption of human nature, argued Theodore, could effect salvation.

The contest dragged on, reaching a continuous boil from the 420s through the 450s, during the reign of Theodosius II. The two primary contestants were Nestorius of Constantinople, a student of Theodore’s, and Cyril of Alexandria. Alexandria, proud heir to Athanasian Christology, emphasized Christ’s divinity. (The standing competition for prestige and authority between the two cities did not calm the conflict.) High divinity, Cyril insisted, made Mary—the cult of whom was energetically developing in this period—the “God-bearer,” Theotokos, a word long sanctioned by liturgical use. Christ’s two aspects, divine and human, were merged into one hypostasis: Christ had a single, divine nature (physis, thus a “miaphysist” position). Nestorius, shoring up the idea of Christ’s humanity and deploring the earlier formulations of Apollonaris, rejected the term in favor of Christotokos, “Christ-bearer.” This seemed to the Alexandrians to diminish Christ’s divinity. Argument continued unabated.

Finally, through a series of slick political maneuverings and outright bribes, Cyril prevailed: Nestorius was deposed and exiled. A pro-Nestorian council of bishops in turn pronounced Cyril deposed. Theodosius, hesitating, eventually acquiesced to Nestorius’s fate while withdrawing his confirmation of Cyril’s deposition. But the emperor could not indefinitely tolerate a standing schism: that might alienate heaven, and thereby threaten the security of the empire. It also confused imperial administration. And it unsettled public peace, since cities split between contesting bishops were wracked by urban violence. A compromise was patched together, affirming Cyril’s position but repeating many of the phrases amenable to the Nestorian-leaning sympathies of Antioch.

The compromise was unstable. Conflict again broke out shortly after Cyril’s death in 444, when Antiochene loyalists attacked the Alexandrian formulations as denying the true humanity of Christ. Everyone jumped into the ensuing fray: the emperor’s powerful sister, Pulcheria; the western emperor’s regent, Galla Placidia; the bishops of Alexandria, of Constantinople, and of Rome. The Second Council of Ephesus, convened by the emperor (449), satisfied nobody. And then, compounding the controversies and confusions, in 450 Theodosius II suddenly died. A new emperor, Marcian, reinforced the legitimacy of his appointment by marrying Pulcheria. They insisted on convening yet another council at Chalcedon (451).

Some five hundred and twenty bishops, mostly from the East, now met at Chalcedon. Marcian and Pulcheria, hailed respectively as a “new Constantine” and a “new Helena,” attended only one of the meetings, but their agents ensured that the program remained on track toward some sort of stable compromise. The bishop of Alexandria was condemned and deposed, the Antiochene position of “two natures”—amenable to Pope Leo of Rome—affirmed. Christ was proclaimed “truly God and truly man,” two natures “without confusion, change, division or separation,” coming together in one hypostasis. Paradox was as much clarity as the Christological conundrum could achieve.

Marcian declared contention at an end. It was not. Christological controversies divided even this one notionally unified community: Christians in Egypt, in Syria, and in Palestine immediately rejected Chalcedon. Their separate communions persist to this day.

The Imperial Church

How did Christianity affect empire? And how did empire affect Christianity?

In terms of the personal behaviors of the chief secular power players, Christianity seems to have had small effect. Constantine eliminated Licinius and his nine-year-old son as soon as he took over the eastern half of the empire in 324. The deaths of his own son Crispus and wife, Faustina, were laid at his door. Rule was bloody business: Constantine’s decision to be baptized only when near death showed practical prudence. His surviving sons murdered nine of their other close male relatives as they, in turn, consolidated their imperial inheritance. No late Roman ruler hesitated to use coercive force, including murder, whether to police cooperation with imperial policy (seen as the enforcement of “orthodoxy”) or to clarify any ambiguities around power.

What of orthodoxy’s outliers? How did Christian imperial power affect them? Constantine’s patronage had its first and harshest effects on other Christians, now officially branded as “heretics.” Their persecution continued, if anything more pointedly since they could be targeted by their local competitors, those bishops now empowered by the state. Christian diversity was in effect criminalized, though as with the earlier anti-Christian persecutions, so now: enactment according to the wish of the bishops depended on the sporadic cooperation of governors and local elites.

Pagans fared better. Some practices were abridged, though the army remained overwhelmingly pagan, as did the empire’s total population, most of which (perhaps 80 percent?) lived in the countryside. Pagan cults would not be proactively legislated against until the reigns of Gratian and of Theodosius I in the 380s. Their efforts, too, met with uneven results. But empowered bishops and emboldened monks could initiate local exercises of coercive force. In 391, the bishop Theophilus oversaw the destruction of Alexandria’s famous Serapeum; in 415, when the city was convulsed in an urban riot orchestrated by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, the pagan philosopher Hypatia was torn limb from limb.

Jews, finally, the perennial outliers, were reviled at the Council of Nicaea, but this was because some churches—against Constantine’s wishes—continued to observe Easter according to the Jewish calendar’s designation of Passover. Imperial law in fact affirmed Jewish freedom of practice for Jews; and the Jewish patriarch in Tiberias retained his own prestige, another power player of the late empire. But again, belligerent initiatives could disrupt social peace. In 388, Callinicum’s bishop spurred a Christian mob’s destruction of a synagogue; on Minorca in 418, another bishop spurred the destruction of the synagogue and forced conversion of the island’s Jews; in the mid-fifth century, the infamous Barsauma and his monks ravaged Jewish sites in Roman Palestine.

Constantine’s personal enthusiasm for and vigorous favoritism toward one Christian denomination flooded the designated churches with economic benefits, greatly enhancing the bishops’ position where it mattered most, at the local level. Exempt from taxation and curial duties, bishops—distributing grain, supporting church dependents, adjudicating civil cases—became major urban powerbrokers, relentless ecclesiastical politicians, and indefatigable combat theologians. But what they gained in power, they lost in doctrinal independence: theology, at least in principle, had to coordinate both with episcopal consensus and with imperial policy. Creeds—simplified statements of complex theological positions—became a mechanism of this coordination.

Yet bishops could also push back, especially by using their local base, becoming masters at orchestrating urban riots and imposing their views against rivals by force. City populations were radicalized, often to the point of violence. In the East, militant monks became part of the mix, a potent force readily mobilized by belligerent bishops resisting imperial replacements. By exercising coercive force, monks legitimized it.

This phase in the development of imperial orthodoxy is largely a tale of bishops, emperors, and theologians struggling to assert authority, often through muscular means. And the intellectual wrangling over issues Trinitarian and Christological can seem like the theological equivalent of particle physics. Ousia, prosopon, hypostasis, physis: how was the vast majority of the faithful ever and even involved?

Gregory of Nyssa, commenting on the atmosphere in Antioch, observed, “If you ask for your change, someone philosophizes to you on the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you ask the price of bread, you are told, ‘The Father is greater and the Son inferior.’ If you ask, ‘Is the bath ready?’ someone answers, ‘The Son was created from nothing’ ” (On the Deity of the Son). As much as he exaggerates for comic effect, Gregory also reveals an intriguing level of downward penetration of these lofty concepts. Through sloganeering, song, sermons, and liturgy—as well as through civic patriotism and loyalty to their local patronus, the bishop—masses who had no means of grasping the fine points of theological dispute were socialized into having a place in the fight. The emperor had his army, but the bishop, through the lumpen laity and local monks, in effect had his own militia.

“Arianism” was originally only a schismatic position: in terms of sacred texts, liturgical calendar, and sacraments, Arius and Alexander stood in communion. Arius’s position became an “ism” and subsequentially a “heresy” because of the imperialization of the church. Other eastern bishops had so energetically waded into the controversy that Constantine, walking in a few years later, had to oblige: concord between bishops mattered for concord between heaven and earth.

This moment in the history of Christianity is invariably analyzed in terms of politics and—or versus—theology. These are the terms we think with. But the two were never distinct and separate realms in Roman antiquity: what we think of as “politics” and what we think of as “religion” were eternally wed. We draw a distinction that would not have been all that evident to contemporaries.

The intimate linkage, or synonymity, of religion and politics is best illustrated by the fate of Rome, both the city and the empire, in the West. Under Constantius II, a bishop Ufilas had missionized tribes of Goths at the edges of empire. Ufilas had espoused a gospel-based message against the philosophizing homoousian Christology of the Nicenes. The Goths probably thought that they were affiliating with Roman religion. Once inside of Rome’s borders, they discovered that they were “heretics.” Rome looked down on Goths as “barbarians.” Doctrinal difference underscored ethnic difference. If to be Roman was to be “Nicene,” then clearly these tribes were “Arian.” It is doubtful that resistance to homoousia as anything other than a slogan fed mainstream Gothic identity.

In an odd way, the “Arianizing” of these tribes, the Goths and ultimately the Vandals, worked to strengthen the claims to hegemony of the bishop of Rome. The central government of the western empire crumbled in the mid-fifth century as these tribes, originally mobilized as troops for various Roman strongmen, settled permanently within the empire: in Italy, in Provence, in Spain, and ultimately—shockingly—by conquest, in North Africa as well. Romans expressed resentment by doubly repudiating the newcomers as “barbarians” and as “heretics.” Once again, the rhetoric of martyrdom sounded. When Christian Vandals disenfranchised catholic prelates in North Africa, to be replaced by their own clergy—ironically, by appeal to laws that the catholics themselves had framed against Donatists—catholics hailed their actions as “persecution.” “I am a Christian! I am a Christian! By Saint Stephen [the protomartyr], I am a Christian!” a catholic child asserts in a tale of Vandal aggressions, sounding the rhetoric of martyrdom, casting Christian Vandals as pagan persecutors. To be catholic was to be (“really”) Roman; to be Roman was to be catholic; and to be catholic and Roman, insisted Rome’s bishop, was to be loyal to the directives and decisions of Rome. Out of loyalty perhaps not unmixed with nostalgia, western Christians would look to Rome, the see of the apostle Peter, its first bishop.

But what the papacy gained in the West it lost in the East. Rome pressed for recognition of primacy vis-à-vis Constantinople. At the Council of Chalcedon (451), this was and was not affirmed. Canon 28 read, “Primacy and exceptional honor shall be preserved for the most God-beloved archbishop of Senior Rome according to the canons.” And then the shoe dropped. “But the most sacred archbishop of imperial Constantinople, New Rome, is to enjoy the same privileges and honor.” Given that no effective emperor ruled in the splintering West, Constantinople could well afford to be both gracious and independent: there was little chance of repeating the charged situation that had threatened to break into doctrinally augmented civil war between Constans and Constantius II back in 345.

The emperor Zeno’s best efforts to achieve doctrinal concord, in 482, only led to further fracturing. Zeno had tried to find a way to knit together the pro- and anti-Chalcedonians by issuing, on his own authority, a unifying doctrinal teaching called the Henotikon. It both condemned Nestorians and endorsed Cyril, made no reference to two natures, and deliberately avoided all mention of Chalcedon. It thereby inflamed urban violence in Jerusalem and Ashkelon (where pro-Miaphysite crowds drove court-appointed Chalcedonian bishops from their sees), and in Scythopolis, Alexandria, and Antioch (where Chalcedonian bishops were lynched). Rome, staunchly Chalcedonian, broke with the eastern church. Schism perdured for more than thirty years.

“Christianization” and “Romanization” were never discrete processes: what became the imperial church had formed within the matrix of Roman culture and power politics. Well before Constantine, both Melito of Sardis and, later, Origen had argued that the empire, under Augustus, and Christianity, with Christ’s incarnation, had been coordinated by divine providence: the pax Romana had facilitated the spread of the gospel (Eusebius, Church History 4.26.7–8; Against Celsus 2.30). Eusebius repeated the lesson. Constantine, in reuniting the empire, he proclaimed, had overseen the triumph of the church. Monarchy recapitulated monotheism: as one god ruled in heaven, so too his viceroy, the emperor, ruled on earth.

In its institutional structures, in its province-wide organization, in its concentration of authority in its bishops (especially in metropolitan sees), the church endorsed by Constantine was already “Romanized.” Constantine’s lavish patronage and the bishops’ subsequent and unhesitating embrace of coercive force only made it more so. And in his politics if not in his personal conduct, the emperor became “Christianized,” assuming a role within the church functionally analogous to that of pontifex maximus. Imperial concern for doctrinal concord was genuinely motivated, indeed galvanized, by concern for the well-being of the state. Bishops reinforced that mentality. “The fides of the emperor,” intoned Ambrose, “produces strength in his soldiers” (On the Death of Theodosius 6).

A sixth-century baptistry in Ravenna displays a mosaic image of a beautiful young man. He is dressed as a Roman army officer, perhaps as an emperor. The open codex that he holds proclaims “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” This is a portrait of Christ, drawing on the Gospel of John. The death of Jesus of Nazareth in this mosaic is referenced only gently by a small cross-bar on the staff borne over the figure’s armored shoulder. Dressing a god in Roman military garb was a traditional means of naturalizing foreign deities: the Egyptian gods Apis, Horus, and Anubis had been presented in this way. We see another naturalization here. In this figure of the Roman Christ, his two natures, that of church and of empire, truly do come together as one.