The State Adopts the Church

In 303 the Roman state was confiscating Christian scripture and demolishing Christian buildings. In 380 the Roman state made one particular form of Christianity compulsory and began confiscating everyone else's buildings. Seventy-seven years (three generations) separate those two sentences, and what happened in between is the most consequential institutional event in the history of the religion.

The usual way of telling it is as a triumph: truth prevailed, the persecuted inherited the empire. This chapter tells it the other way round, because that is what the record supports. The empire did not surrender to the church. It absorbed it (the way any large organism absorbs a useful smaller one), and the church that emerged had the empire's shape, the empire's law, the empire's boundaries, and the empire's habits.

What was absorbed

Two corrections to the standard picture, both from mainstream scholarship.

Persecution was real but episodic. For most of the first three centuries Christians were an oddity of doubtful legality, occasionally lynched, occasionally prosecuted, mostly left alone. Empire-wide, systematic persecution is essentially two events: the edict of Decius in 250 requiring universal sacrifice, and the Diocletianic persecution from 303. The martyr count was later inflated enormously: the tally of the persecuted is a genre of Christian literature, not a census.¹

The final persecution is the baseline for everything else in this chapter. In February 303 Diocletian's first edict ordered churches demolished and scriptures surrendered for burning; later edicts imprisoned the clergy and required universal sacrifice. Enforcement, patchy in the West and savage in parts of the East, ran with intermissions for eight years. It ended in a failure so complete that the man most identified with it admitted as much in writing: in 311 the dying emperor Galerius issued an edict of toleration whose text survives, conceding that the policy had not brought the Christians back to the gods of their ancestors but had merely stopped them worshipping anything, and asking them to pray to their own god for the safety of the state.² Even in retreat, the empire's interest in the Christian god was its interest in every god: what can he do for the state? Constantine did not invent that question. He invented the scale of the answer.

The movement was already institutionalising. By 300 there were bishops with defined territories, a clergy distinct from laity, property held in common by congregations, a charitable apparatus, and long-distance correspondence between churches. This is important: the state did not adopt a loose spiritual movement. It adopted an organisation with a working chain of command across every province, which is precisely what made it worth adopting. The persecutors had grasped the same point from the other side: the edicts of 303 went first for the infrastructure (buildings, books, clergy) rather than for belief.

Constantine

The founding legend is a vision before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. The two contemporary accounts do not agree: Lactantius has a dream instructing him to mark his soldiers' shields, while Eusebius, writing later, has a cross of light in the sky at midday, seen by the whole army, a story that grows with the telling and which Eusebius says he had from the emperor himself.³ Lactantius wrote within a few years of the battle; Eusebius's version dates from after Constantine's death, a quarter of a century on, by which time the story had had every opportunity to improve.

What followed in 313 was not the establishment of Christianity but the toleration of it: the so-called Edict of Milan extended freedom of worship to all cults and ordered confiscated Christian property returned. What Constantine then did over the next twenty-five years is the interesting part, because it went far beyond toleration:

• Clergy were exempted from civic duties and taxation, and bishops were granted judicial powers, the episcopalis audientia, a bishop's court whose rulings the state would enforce.
• Churches received imperial money and imperial land, and were built in the form of the basilica: not a temple but the Roman civic hall, the building where a magistrate sat in judgement. The architecture of Christian worship is borrowed from the architecture of Roman administration, and it was never given back.
• Bishops were given the public post, the imperial courier system, to travel to councils at state expense.
• In 321 the first day of the week became a public day of rest, on which courts and most work ceased. The law does not call it the Lord's day. It calls it dies Solis, the venerable day of the Sun, which is why the ambiguity of Constantine's own religion still sits in the middle of the Western working week.
• The emperor convened and presided over a doctrinal council at Nicaea in 325, an assembly of bishops summoned by a man who was not baptised, to settle a question of the nature of God, with the imperial apparatus available to enforce the result.

Who invited whom matters, because the invitation ran in the direction the triumphal telling prefers to forget. Within months of the toleration edict, the church of North Africa split over whether a bishop consecrated by a traditor (one who had handed over the scriptures during the persecution) could validly hold office, and both parties appealed to Constantine to decide between them. He referred the case to a synod at Rome in 313, then to a larger council at Arles in 314, summoned by imperial letter; when the Donatists rejected both verdicts he tried confiscation and exile, and when that failed too he abandoned the attempt in disgust in 321.⁴ The precedent, however, was set, and it was set at the church's own request: bishops had asked an emperor to determine which of them were really bishops, and an emperor had answered. Every later chapter in the long history of state-managed Christianity is a footnote to that appeal.

Nor did Constantine ever stop being what Roman emperors were. He kept the office of pontifex maximus, chief priest of the state cult, as did his Christian successors for two more generations. His coinage carried Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, well into the 320s, a decade after the vision. And when he founded his new capital on the Bosporus he adorned and partly financed it through a systematic confiscation of temple treasure across the East, stripping sanctuaries of their gold, their bronze doors and their statues; Eusebius records the operation with approval.⁵ Constantinople, the first Christian capital, was gilded with the assets of the religion it superseded, a pattern of transfer this chronicle will meet again.

And Constantine himself? He had his eldest son Crispus killed in 326, and his wife Fausta died the same year in circumstances his own panegyrists preferred not to discuss. He was baptised on his deathbed in 337, by Eusebius of Nicomedia, an Arian bishop, on the side the council he had convened had condemned; he had deferred the sacrament, as many then did, so that one washing could cover a whole reign. The first Christian emperor was, in the sober phrase of the historian who has written most about him, a Roman emperor who found Christianity useful and made it work.⁶

Nicaea: the state acquires a creed

The dispute at Nicaea was about whether the Son was of the same substance as the Father or a created being, however exalted: Alexander and Athanasius against Arius. The theology is genuinely difficult. The politics are not.

What matters here is not who was right but how it was settled. An emperor summoned the bishops. An emperor paid for their travel and housed them. An emperor is reported to have personally proposed the decisive word, homoousios, a term from Greek philosophy, not from scripture. And when the council concluded, dissenting bishops were exiled by imperial order. Doctrine had acquired a police force.⁷

Eusebius, who was in the room, describes the opening session: the assembly rising as the emperor entered in purple and gold, an entrance the bishop compares to that of a heavenly messenger of God. Some of the men who stood for him carried on their bodies the scars of the persecution his predecessors had run. They stood anyway. Twelve years earlier the state had been burning their books; now it was chairing their theology.

The subsequent decades demonstrate what that meant in practice: the imperial line swung back and forth, Athanasius was exiled five separate times as the wind changed, Constantine's own son Constantius II backed the Arian side, and for a period most of the empire's bishops held the position Nicaea had condemned. Orthodoxy in the fourth century is not a stable truth being defended. It is a contest whose referee is the palace.

The arithmetic of establishment

Something else follows from patronage, and it is measurable in outline. Christians in 300 were a minority of the empire, perhaps a tenth on the common estimates. By 400 the empire was publicly and officially Christian. No plausible history of persuasion covers that curve. What covers it is incentive: after Constantine, the palace was Christian, careers ran through the palace, the exemptions and the building funds and the bishops' courts ran through the church, and adherence followed the flow. Ramsay MacMullen concludes that the mass Christianisation after Constantine owed more to advantage, conformity and, in time, compulsion than to argument; conversions of conviction certainly happened, and are statistically indistinguishable from conversions of convenience, which is precisely the problem.⁸

The direction of the incentive is the point, not the cynicism of any individual. Under Diocletian it had cost something to be a Christian. Within two generations it began to cost something not to be. An establishment does not need to coerce most people; it needs only to make one affiliation the path of least resistance and wait. That mechanism (belief tracking benefit, at population scale, without anyone needing to lie to themselves) will do a great deal of work later in this chronicle: in the Caribbean of chapter 9, in the mission fields of chapter 10, and in the hills of chapters 23 and 24, where a colonial church that controlled the schools, and through the schools all advancement, converted a country in forty years and called the result faith.

380: the machinery is reversed

The decisive legal moment is not 313 but 380, when Theodosius I issued the edict Cunctos populos from Thessalonica. It commanded all peoples of the empire to hold the faith of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria, named that faith Catholic Christianity, and declared everyone else haeretici (heretics) who should expect divine punishment and, the text adds, whatever the emperor decides to do to them as well.⁹ A council at Constantinople the next year fixed the creed in substantially the form still recited in churches, and the state then enforced the settlement, with laws multiplying against heretics by name: Eunomians, Photinians, Manichaeans, the careful taxonomy of error that fills the sixteenth book of the Theodosian Code. Naming is an administrative act; the book reads as what it is, a filing system for belief with penalties attached.

The old religion made one articulate stand, and its vocabulary deserves notice. In 384 Symmachus, prefect of Rome and spokesman for the pagan senatorial aristocracy, petitioned for the return of the Altar of Victory to the Senate house, where it had stood for four centuries. His petition survives, and it is a plea for pluralism: all rites, he argued, look toward the same mystery, and so great a secret cannot be reached by one road alone. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, answered on behalf of the young emperor Valentinian II, and won; the altar stayed out.¹⁰ The case for tolerance is now being made by the pagan, in nearly the terms Christians had used when they were weak; the case against it is being made by the church, in the terms the empire had used when it was persecuting. Neither party had changed its mind. They had changed places.

What followed within a generation:

• Sacrifice prohibited and the temples closed by a sequence of laws culminating in 391 and 392; then the demolitions. The Serapeum of Alexandria, one of the great sanctuaries and libraries of the ancient world, was destroyed by a Christian mob under the patriarch Theophilus in 391.
• The Olympic games ended; the Vestal Virgins were disbanded after seven centuries of continuous service.
• In 385, Priscillian of Ávila was executed at Trier on the emperor's authority, the first Christian put to death by Christians for heresy. Martin of Tours and Ambrose both objected to the precedent. The precedent stood.
• In 415 the mathematician and philosopher Hypatia was murdered in Alexandria by a Christian mob during a factional conflict involving the same patriarchate.

Within a hundred years the persecuted had inherited not merely the empire but the persecuting apparatus, and had begun using it: first on non-Christians, then, with more energy, on the wrong sort of Christians.

Augustine supplies the doctrine of force

The intellectual step that makes coercion respectable was taken in North Africa. Augustine of Hippo spent decades against the Donatists, a rigorist African church that had broken away over whether clergy who had handed over scripture during the persecution could still administer valid sacraments. Augustine began as an opponent of compulsion and changed his mind, arguing that state coercion of schismatics worked, and reading the parable line compelle intrare (compel them to come in) as authority for it.¹¹

That argument, from the most influential theologian in Western Christianity, is the seed of a very long harvest: the medieval inquisitions, the forced conversions of the Reconquista, the Requerimiento read aloud to uncomprehending people in the Caribbean in chapter 9, and the mission schools of chapter 10 that punished children for speaking their own languages. The claim that souls may be saved by force was not improvised by conquistadors. It was in the library.

What the transaction changed

The organisation took the empire's shape. Dioceses were Roman administrative units and kept the name. Church law borrowed Roman legal procedure. The bishop of Rome inherited the prestige of the capital and, in time, the title pontifex maximus, which had belonged to the pagan state cult. When Rome's western administration collapsed, the church was the only institution still standing with a continent-wide chain of command, which is why the papacy became a political power, and why kings for the next thousand years needed its blessing.

The theology took the empire's shape too. Eusebius's court theology mapped the heavenly monarchy directly onto the earthly one: one God, one emperor. Christ ceased to be depicted as a young shepherd and became Pantokrator, ruler of all, enthroned and robed like the emperor. A religion founded by a man executed for claiming a kingdom that was not Caesar's had made Caesar's throne the model of God's.

And dissent became a crime. This is the durable inheritance. Once truth is enforced by the state, the categories "heretic", "infidel" and "savage" are all doing the same work: marking people outside the moral community, against whom force is legitimate. That is chapter 1's boundary, now backed by an army, a legal code and an eschatology.

The next chapter goes back a step to ask a related question: given that there were many Christianities in the second and third centuries, who decided which books were scripture, and what happened to the ones that lost?

Footnotes

1. Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution (New York: HarperOne, 2013), makes the strong version of the case; for a more measured treatment, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, "Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?", Past & Present 26 (1963), pp. 6–38. ↩
2. The edict is preserved in Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 34, and in Greek translation in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VIII.17. ↩
3. Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 44; Eusebius, Life of Constantine I.28–31. ↩
4. H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952). ↩
5. Eusebius, Life of Constantine III.54, on the stripping of the temples. ↩
6. Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), and Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). ↩
7. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); on the council itself, Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The entrance scene is Eusebius, Life of Constantine III.10. ↩
8. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). ↩
9. Codex Theodosianus XVI.1.2. ↩
10. Symmachus, Relatio 3; Ambrose, Letters 17 and 18. ↩
11. Augustine, Letter 93 and Letter 185; Luke 14:23. On the Donatist conflict, Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ↩