A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

Had the Christian cult been, like its non-Jewish contemporaries, a mere effort to “worship God according to conscience,” it need not have undergone pagan persecution any more than they, or than Judaism, save when the State imposed the duty of worshipping the emperor’s statue. A God the more was no scandal to polytheists. Christism had taken from Judaism, however, as a first principle, the detestation of “idols,” and its propaganda from the first had included a violent polemic against them. For the Christians the pagan Gods were not unrealities: they were evil dæmons, constantly active. Insofar, too, as the first Jesuists in the western part of the empire shared the Jewish hatred for Rome that is expressed in the Apocalypse, they were likely enough to provoke Roman violence. A constant prediction of the speedy passing away of all things was in itself a kind of sedition; and when joined with contumely towards all other religions it could not but rouse resentment. Thus, though the story of the great Neronian massacre is, as already noted, an apparent fiction as regards the Christians, being unnoticed in the book of Acts, Jesuists and Jews alike ran many chances of local or general hostility under the empire from the first. The express doctrines, put in the mouth of the founder, that he had come to bring not peace but a sword, and to create strife in families, were not fitted to soften the prejudices aroused by the religious claims of the new faith; and in the time of Tertullian they were defined in the west as “enemies of the Gods, of the emperors, of the laws, of morals, and of all nature.”

According to Tertullian, writing under Severus or Caracalla, only the bad emperors had persecuted the Church. But its danger had always lain less in special imperial edicts than in the ordinary bearing of the laws against secret societies and nocturnal worships, and in the ordinary tendency of ignorant and priest-led fanaticism to a panic of cruelty in times of popular distress or alarm. An earthquake or pestilence was always apt to be visited on the new “atheists” as provokers of the Gods. The mere habit of midnight worship, which is one of the proofs that early Jesuism was in some way affiliated to sun-worship, was a ground for suspicion; but as Mithraism was freely tolerated in spite of its nocturnal rites, Christism might have been, but for its other provocations. And even these were for long periods ignored by the Government. If the often-quoted letter of Pliny to Trajan (about the year 100) be genuine, it proves an official disposition to protect the Christians, when politically innocent, from fanatical attacks; and Tertullian, who speaks of such a letter, credits Marcus Aurelius with limiting the scope of the laws which tended to injure the sect, though we know from Marcus himself that Christians suffered death. By common consent, though there was certainly much random persecution in the first three centuries, the formula of “ten persecutions” is fabulous; and that ascribed to Domitian is hardly better established than that ascribed to Nero. That the Christists suffered specially as tradition asserts in the reign of Hadrian, when the Jews were specially hated because of their last desperate revolt, is probable; but Hadrian gave no general orders, and is credited like the Antonines with shielding the new sectaries. It is finally very doubtful whether any ordained and legalized persecution of Christians ever took place save (1) in Egypt under Severus, who at first and afterwards was friendly; (2) on a small scale under Maximinus; (3) in the east under Decius and (4) under Valerian; and (5) throughout the empire under Diocletian and his colleagues (from 303 to 311). These episodes occurred within a period of little over a hundred years.

In all periods alike, from the end of the first century down to Constantine, there was no doubt much chronic cruelty. The letter from the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, cited by Eusebius and assigned to the year 161, is a doubtful document; but the savageries there described were only too possible. Public cruelty seems to have worsened in the very period in which the inhabitants of cities had become most unused to war, and the finer minds had grown most humane; like the other animal instincts, it had grown neurotic in conditions of vicious idleness, and many men had become virtuosi in cruelty as in lust. The Christian gospel itself now held up “the tormentors” as typical of the processes of divine punishment; and torture was for many an age to be a part of Christian as of pagan legal procedure.

Insofar as persecution was legalized, it is to be understood not as a putting down of a new religious belief, but as an attack on its political and social side. In the case, for instance, of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, who after a flight and a banishment was put to death under Valerian and Gallienus (258), the bishop’s far-reaching activities are the presumptive reason for his fate. It is to be remembered, as Gibbon notes, that in ten years of Cyprian’s tenure of office four emperors themselves died by the sword, with their families and their adherents. At times, no doubt, the attack on Christians was unprovoked, consisting as it might in a challenge to a Christian to swear allegiance by or sacrifice to the statue of the emperor, when he was willing to swear by his own creed. The public worship of the emperor was the one semblance of a centralized religious organization which, like that of the Christian Church, existed throughout the empire. Precedented by old Egyptian and eastern usage, and by the practice of Alexander and his successors, it had first appeared in Rome in the offer of the cringing senate to deify Julius Cæsar, and in the systematic measures of Augustus to have Julius worshipped as a God (divus), an honour promptly accorded to himself in turn. The apotheosis was signalized by giving the names of Julius and Augustus to the months Quintilis and Sextilis; and only the final unpopularity of Tiberius prevented the substitution of his name in turn for that of September, an honour offered to and refused by him in his earlier life.

Some of the madder emperors later tried to carry on the process of putting themselves in the calendar, but were duly disobeyed after death. Detested emperors, such as Tiberius and Nero and Domitian, were even refused the apotheosis; but in general the title of divus was freely accorded, so abject had the general mind grown under autocracy; and it was usual in the provinces to worship the living emperor in a special temple in association with the Genius of Rome; while the cults of some emperors lasted long after their death. The common sense as well as the sense of humour of some rulers led them to make light of the institution; and the jest of the dying Vespasian, “I fancy I am turning God,” is one of several imperial witticisms on the subject; but it lay in the nature of autocracy, in Rome as in Egypt or in Incarian Peru, to employ sagaciously all methods of abasing the human spirit, so as to secure the safety of the throne. One of the most obvious means was to deify the emperor—a procedure as “natural” in that age as the deification of Jesus, and depending on the same psychological conditions. And though the person of the emperor was seldom quite safe from assassination by his soldiery, the imperial cult played its part from the first in establishing the fatal ideal of empire. No sequence of vileness or incompetence in the emperors, no impatience of the insecurity set up by the power of the army to make and unmake the autocrat, no experience of the danger of a war of claimants, ever seems to have made Romans dream of a saner and nobler system. Manhood had been brought too low.

Imperialism being thus an official religion in itself, the cult of the emperor lay to the hands of any magistrate who should be disposed to put a test to a member of the sect which decried all established customs and blasphemed all established Gods. It was the recognized way of imposing the oath of allegiance apart from any specific law. Where such a procedure was possible, any malicious pagan might bring about a stedfast Christian’s death. There is Christian testimony, however, that many frenzied believers brought martyrdom wilfully on themselves by outrages on pagan temples and sacred statues; and it is Tertullian who tells how Arrius Antoninus, pro-consul in Asia, drove from him a multitude of frantic fanatics seeking death, with the amazed demand to know whether they had not ropes and precipices. The official temper evidently varied, as did that of the Christians. In the period before Diocletian, save for the intrigues of pagan priests and provincial demagogues, and the normal suspicions of autocratic power, there was nothing in the nature of a general and official animosity, though the Christian attitude was always unconciliatory enough. But by the beginning of the fourth century the developments on both sides had created a situation of strain and danger. The great effort of Diocletian to give new life to the vast organism of the empire, first by minute supervision, and then by sub-division under two emperors, called Augusti, and two Cæsars, wrought a certain seriousness of political interest throughout the bureaucracy; and the Christian body, long regarded with alternate contempt and dislike, had become so far organized and so considerable a force that none who broadly considered the prospects of the State could avoid reckoning with it.

At the same time paganism had taken on new guises: the Neo-Platonists, so-called, restated the ancient mythology and theology in forms which compared very well with the abstract teaching of the Church; and among the educated class there was some measure of religious zeal against Christians as blasphemers of other men’s Gods. It may or may not have needed the persuasion of his anti-Christian colleague, the Cæsar Galerius, to convince such a ruler as Diocletian that the Christian Church, a growing State within the State, still standing by an official doctrine of a speedy world’s-end, and rejecting the cult of the emperor, was an incongruous and dangerous element in the imperial scheme. It was in fact a clear source of political weakness, though not so deadly a one as the autocracy itself. To seek to suppress it, accordingly, was almost a natural outcome of Diocletian’s ideal of government. He had sought to give a new air of sanctity to the worship of the emperor by calling himself Jovius and his colleague Maximian Herculius; and to make the effort succeed it might well seem necessary to crush the one cult that directly stood in the way, alike as a creed and as an organization. The refusal of some Christian soldiers, too, to submit to certain commands which they considered unlawful gave Galerius a special pretext for strong measures.

It is not to be forgotten that the emperors and the bureaucracy had some excuse for a policy of suppression in the bitter strifes of the Christian sects and sections. Eusebius confesses that these were on the verge of actual warfare, bishop against bishop and party against party, each seeking for power; and for all it was a matter of course to accuse opponents of the worst malpractices. Some of the darkest charges brought by the pagans against Christians in general were but distributions of those brought by the orthodox against heretics, and by Montanists and others against the orthodox. A credulous pagan might well believe that all alike carried on vile midnight orgies, and deserved to be refused the right of meeting. It is not probable, however, that the two emperors and the persecuting Cæsar proceeded on any concern for private morals; and though Galerius was a zealous pagan with a fanatical mother, the motive of the persecution was essentially political. What happened was that the passions of the zealots among the pagans had now something like free scope; and, unless the record in Eusebius is sheer fable, the work was often done with horrible cruelty. On the other hand, there is Christian testimony to the humanity of many of the better pagans, who sheltered their Christian friends and relatives; and the Cæsar Constantius Chlorus, a tolerant pagan, who ruled in Gaul and Britain and Spain, gave only a formal effect to the edict of the emperors, destroying churches and sacred books, but sparing their owners. The fact, finally, that in ten years of persecution the number of victims throughout the eastern and central empire appears to have been within two thousand, goes to suggest that the mass of the Christians either bowed to the storm or eluded it. Bitter discussions, reviving some of the previous century, rose afterwards as to the proper treatment of the traditores, those who surrendered and forswore themselves; and the more zealous sects and churches either imposed long penances or refused to receive back the lapsed. As the latter course would only weaken themselves, the majority of the churches combined policy with penalty.

The time was now at hand when the Church, from being an object of aversion to the autocracy, was to become its instrument. Just before his death in 311, Galerius, who was little of a statesman, began to see what Diocletian would doubtless have admitted had he lived much longer, and what Constantius Chlorus had probably suggested to his colleagues, that the true policy for the government was to adopt instead of crushing the Christian organization. Only the original anticivism of the cult, probably, had prevented a much earlier adoption of this view by the more politic emperors. It was the insistence on the imminent end of the world, the preaching of celibacy, the disparagement of earthly dignitaries, the vehement assault on the standing cults of the State, no less than the refusal to sacrifice to the emperor’s statue, that had so long made Christism seem the natural enemy of all civil government. The more the Church grew in numbers and wealth, however, the more its bishops and priests tended to conform to the ordinary theory of public life; and as theirs was now the only organization of any kind that reached far throughout the State, save the State itself and the cult of the emperors, the latter must evidently either destroy it or adopt it. The great persecution, aiming at the former end, served only to show the futility of official persecution for such a purpose, since pagans themselves helped to screen staunch Christians, and the weaker had but to bow before the storm. Already Constantine, acting with a free hand on his father’s principles, had given complete tolerance to the Christians under his sway; and Maxentius, struggling with him for the mastery of the West, had done as much. Even in the East, Maximin had alternately persecuted and tolerated the Christians as he had need to press or pacify Galerius. The language used by Galerius, finally, in withdrawing the edict of persecution, suggests that besides recognizing its failure he had learned from his opponents to conceive the possibility of attaching to the autocracy a sect so much more widely organized and so much more zealous than any of the other subsisting popular religions, albeit still numbering only a fraction of the whole population.

To many of the Christians, on the other hand, long persecution had doubtless taught the wisdom of recanting the extremes of doctrine which had made even sceptical statesmen regard them as a danger to any State. It is clear that bishops like Eusebius of Cæsarea would readily promise to the government a loyal attention to its interests in the event of its tolerating and befriending the Church; and the sacred books offered texts for any line of public action. The empire, always menaced by barbarism on its frontiers, needed every force of union that could be used within; and here, finally adaptable to such use, was the one organization that acted or was fitted to act throughout the whole. To the leading churchmen, finally, association with the State was the more welcome because on the one hand general persecution would cease, and on the other all the party leaders could hope to be able by the State’s means to put down their opponents. A generation before, in the year 272, the Emperor Aurelian, on the express appeal of the party of bishops who had deposed Paul of Samosata, had intervened in that quarrel to give effect to the will of the majority, which otherwise could not have been put in force; and such occasions were sure to arise frequently. It needed only another innovating emperor to bring about the coalition thus prepared.