Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (30 page)

Mani combined all the religions which he respected with his own experience of revelation into a new 'Manichaean' cult. Like gnostic dualism before it, this provided a convincingly stark account of the world's suffering, portraying it as the symptom of an unending struggle between matched forces of good and evil. Jesus occupied a very important place in Mani's scheme of divinity: indeed, he habitually referred to himself as the 'Apostle of Jesus Christ', as Paul of Tarsus had done before him. For him Jesus was judge at the last, and a divine healer and teacher, who, as in so many gnostic cosmic constructions of his role in salvation, had no real human body: physical matter was a prison for individual spirits which sought their home in Heaven. So Mani's Jesus spoke in strong paradoxes: 'Amen, I was seized; Amen again, I was not seized . . . Amen, I suffered; Amen again, I did not suffer.'
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Mani's teachings equalled the spread of Eastern Christianity in time and geography, taking Manichaean faith as far as the shores of China as well as into the Roman Empire.
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Christians in the eastern Mediterranean in particular found his teachings as fascinating as previously they had the ideas of gnostic teachers, while the traditionalist Emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305) loathed Manichees as much as he did the Christians, initiating a policy of burning them alive, even before he and his colleagues had yielded to the impulse to begin brutal persecution of Christianity.
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Discoveries of Greek, Syriac and Coptic papyri from the 1990s onwards at an Egyptian oasis, now called Ismant el-Kharab but anciently containing the small town of Kellis, have suddenly revealed fourth-century Manichees in a new light. There they had the appearance of a variant on Christianity, regarding themselves as a Church within the town, with a community life, officers and almost certainly a monastery around which their religious life probably revolved. Among the documents are two boards bearing word lists of key Manichaean phrases in Syriac with Coptic translations, revealing the sense of a commonality in this Coptic- and Greek-speaking community with Manichees a thousand miles away in Syria, rather reminiscent of Catholic Christianity's own worldwide vision.
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No wonder the episcopal Christian Church loathed the Manichees so much and sought to eliminate them as competitors once it got the chance. It never challenged Diocletian's provision for burning Manichees alive; indeed, centuries later the Western Latin Church imitated and extended Diocletian's policy to apply it to other Christian 'heretics'.

FROM PERSECUTION TO PERSECUTION (250-300)

Celsus had made it clear that it was now impossible for the Roman authorities to ignore Christianity. By the end of the second century, this religion from an obscure eastern province was beginning to find a presence even in the imperial palace. Marcia, the Emperor Commodus's mistress and instigator of his murder, might seem a rather disconcerting pioneer patroness of Christians at Court, but it is noticeable that the first identifiably Christian gravestones for members of the imperial household date from only just after Commodus's death.
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In their wake come rather less lurid connections to the imperial family: Julia Mamaea, mother to the Emperor Severus Alexander (great-nephew of Septimius Severus), was clearly interested in Christianity, inviting Origen to talk with her about the faith, and the aggressive Roman priest Hippolytus was courtly enough to dedicate a treatise on the Resurrection (now mostly lost) either to her or to another prominent imperial lady.
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The young Severus Alexander is said, admittedly by a patchily reliable source, to have commissioned statues of Christ and Abraham for his private place of prayer alongside statues of Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander and deceased and deified imperial ancestors. This is the first recorded figure-sculpture of the Saviour in Christian history, although given its eclectic setting, with Christ reduced to a semi-divine celebrity, it forms a rather dubious precedent for the later flowering of Christian sculptural art.
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On both sides there is a sense of ambiguity. Christians were torn between their traditional exclusivity and a strong desire to please the powerful (even when the powerful offended Christian prejudices against graven images by sculpting Christ), while prominent Romans were caught between interest in and suspicion of Christian intentions.

The situation was bound to produce extremes of fortune. An edict of Septimius Severus in 202 had forbidden conversions to either Christianity or Judaism, and that had been significant in promoting persecution during his reign and those of his sons. When the usurper Maximinus Thrax murdered Severus Alexander and seized his throne in 235, the brief interval of favour for Christians came to a sudden end.
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Then, in the mid-third century, Christian subjects of the Roman emperor found themselves persecuted for the first time on an empire-wide scale on imperial initiative. The new earnestness and personal commitment to religion among non-Christian elites spelled trouble in any case for Christians, but the situation came to a head in the 240s, which historically aware Romans would realize marked a thousand years from the foundation of the city of Rome. It was a time for citizens to contemplate the history of their beloved empire, a depressing prospect for the conservative-minded succession of army officers who fought their way to the imperial throne.

Trajan Decius, an energetic senator and provincial governor who seized power as emperor in 249, felt this keenly. He attributed the empire's troubles on the morrow of its thousandth year squarely to the anger of the old gods that their sacrifices were being neglected - as we have seen (see pp. 167-8), he was right. For Decius the solution was simple: enforce sacrifices on every citizen, man, woman and child, or at least the head of a household in the name of all its members - a radical intensification of a traditional practice whereby emperors ordered every community to offer sacrifices on their accession. It was obvious that the group which had most systematically avoided sacrifices in the empire was the Christians, and the confrontation which now took place turned a pitiless spotlight on an intransigence which had often previously been unobtrusive. In 250 the new imperial policy was implemented with bureaucratic efficiency. Those who sacrificed were issued with certificates of proof, some of which have been preserved for us in the rubbish pits and desert sands of Egypt.
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The order was coupled with punishment, usually imprisonment but in some cases death, for those who refused. Two later emperors, Trebonianus Gallus and Valerian, revived the policy in 252 and 257 between their many other preoccupations, and persecution was only abandoned in 260 by Gallienus, son and successor of the hapless Persian prisoner Valerian, because the empire faced so many other pressing dangers. But in the previous decade, the Christian Church had been severely damaged, not so much in terms of death and suffering, because few died outside a small group of leaders, but in terms of morale.

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians gave way. This might have been predicted, because the same thing had happened when, for instance, Pliny the Younger had arrested Bithynian Christians back in 112. It was only natural to wish to obey the emperor: that most Christians felt a deep reverence for the empire is obvious from their leading writers' confused and contradictory statements about the limits on obedience to it.
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Moreover, the Church as a whole was not used to persecution, or certainly not a systematic campaign directed from the centre. Trouble did not end when persecution ended and the leadership began picking up the pieces. The bishops' authority was at stake. Some bishops had followed the Lord's command recorded in John's Gospel to suffer martyrdom bravely and had been killed (including the Bishops of Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome). Others had followed the Lord's precisely contradictory advice to be found in Matthew's Gospel to flee from city to city; they included such important figures as the Bishops of Carthage and Alexandria.
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Those who had fled were likely to come in for criticism from those who had stayed and suffered for their faith; from the Roman technical legal term for someone who pleads guilty as accused in court, these steadfast Christians were termed 'confessors'. Confessors provided the troubled Church with an alternative sort of authority based on their sufferings, particularly when arguments began about how and how much to forgive those Christians who had given way to imperial orders - the so-called 'lapsed'. Many of the lapsed flocked to the confessors to gain pardon and re-entry to the Church, and the bishops did not like this at all. Especially important disputes broke out in Rome and Carthage over the issue of forgiveness. Faced with both defiance from some confessors and the election of a rival bishop, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage engaged in pamphlet warfare, producing statements about the role of a bishop in the Church which were long to outlive this particular dispute. He came to see authority for forgiveness of sins as vested in the bishop and he stressed that the bishop was the focus for unity in the whole Catholic Church, a successor of the Apostles in every diocese. It was another stage in the discussion which Ignatius, Clement and Irenaeus had begun. In Rome the argument was mainly over whether there could be any forgiveness at all for those who had lapsed. The priest Novatian, a hardliner on this issue, opposed the election of his colleague Cornelius as bishop, since Cornelius held that forgiveness was possible at the hands of a bishop. The Church in Rome was bitterly divided as to whom to support. Cyprian and Cornelius, who had arrived at similar conclusions about the powers of a bishop, allied with each other and the supporters of Novatian found themselves an isolated minority.

Matters became worse when, in their initial enthusiasm, the Novatianists started making new Christian converts in North Africa as well as in Rome. When many of their sympathizers decided that the division had gone too far, and the newly baptized applied to rejoin the Catholic Church in communion with Cyprian and Cornelius, Carthage and Rome were faced with the problem of deciding the terms. Was Novatianist baptism valid? Cyprian thought not, but a new Bishop of Rome, Stephen, wishing to be conciliatory to those who were coming in, disagreed with him. Now a furious argument broke out between them, partly an expression of Rome's growing feeling that the North African bishops were inclined to think too well of their own position in the Western Church. Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ's punning proclamation in Matthew's Gospel 'Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church' (Matthew 16.18).
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It is the first time known to us that the text had been thus used by a Bishop of Rome; this row in 256 represents another significant step in Rome's gradual rise to prominence. In the end, North Africa and Rome agreed to differ on the issue of baptism, the North Africans saying that valid baptism could take place only within the Christian community which is the Church, the Romans saying that the sacrament belonged to Christ, not to the Church, and that therefore it was valid whoever performed it if it was done in the right form and with the right intentions.

Comparative peace then descended on the Church for several decades, and it is likely that the steady expansion of Christian numbers was one significant factor in the decline of traditional religious institutions during that period (see p. 168). In 272 the Church even called in the Emperor Aurelian for legal support in a long-running effort to evict the obstinate deposed Bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who had refused to end his occupation of the cathedral church complex in Antioch: the first recorded imperial intervention in Christian affairs. Nevertheless there followed the most serious bout of persecution yet, designed to wipe out Christianity in the empire, led by the reforming Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian made it his life's work to restore the glory of the old Rome, and although the oppressive bureaucracy and relentless quest for uniformity which emerged from his efforts were very different from the early empire, he was determined to honour the old gods: he distrusted all religious novelty, not just Christianity. Only gradually did his undemonstrative religious conservatism turn into active persecution of Christians.

In the last decade of the third century Diocletian became increasingly influenced by a clique of army officers from Rome's Adriatic provinces in the Balkans, headed by Galerius, one of the colleagues whom Diocletian had chosen to help him govern the empire. Gradually this rabidly anti-Christian group, some of them enthusiasts for Neoplatonism, persuaded Diocletian to follow his inclinations and from 303 a full-scale attack was launched on the Christians, beginning with clergy. Churches were torn down, sacrifices ordered and Christian sacred texts confiscated. Persecution was not so intense in the West, where Diocletian's colleague Constantius had some sympathy with Christianity, but elsewhere pressure intensified after Diocletian retired from public life in 305. Although this 'Great Persecution' proved to be the last in the history of the Roman Empire and ended two decades later with an extraordinary turnaround in the Church's fortunes, it was far more savage than most previous assaults on Christianity; nearly half all recorded martyrdoms in the early Church period are datable to this period.
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Moreover, as we will see in Chapter 6, the eventual end of persecution left in its wake the same welter of internal quarrels as the mid-century persecutions by Decius and his successors.

KINGS AND CHRISTIANS: SYRIA, ARMENIA

This was a moment of dire danger for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Anyone capable of taking a wide view over the Mediterranean world in 303 would have been justified in concluding that it represented a final set-piece conflict between the traditional alliance of Graeco-Roman religion and politics and an organization which had made an unsuccessful bid to transform the empire and was now suffering the consequences. But Christianity was not merely a prisoner of the Roman world. Eastwards of Rome's Mediterranean provinces, something remarkable had happened a century before: the religion of the carpenter's son and the tent-maker Roman citizen had entered an alliance with a monarch. So, for the first time, it experienced what it was like to be established and promoted by the powerful. In cultures beyond the empire, Christianity expressed itself in other languages than Greek or Latin. These Christians might have very different priorities and perspectives from those within the Roman imperial frontiers and they went on to produce Christian traditions very different in character. They survive today, reminding the heirs of Greece and Rome that Christianity began as a religion of the Middle East and was as likely to move east as west. In Chapters 7 and 8 we will trace their stories into the fifteenth century, before taking up the stories of the Latin, Greek and Slavic Churches. To do this is a necessary reminder of the sheer variety of Christianity from its earliest days: a vital lesson to learn for modern Christians who wish to impose a uniformity on Christian belief and practice which has never in fact existed.