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

by J. M. Robertson

Thus in the thirty years from the death of Constantine to the accession of Theodosius the Great, while the Church continued to grow in wealth, it can have made little progress politically, and it certainly made none morally. The law of Valentinian against the gain-seeking monks and priests of Rome is the testimony of a Christian emperor to the new demoralization set up by his Church. Perhaps on pagan pressure, but apparently with emphasis, he forbade ecclesiastics to receive personal gifts or legacies from the women of property to whom they acted as spiritual advisers. Such a law was of course evaded by such expedients as trusteeships: greed was not to be baulked by legal vetoes. The higher clergy showed the same instincts; and in the final struggle of Damasus and Ursinus to secure by physical force the episcopal chair of Rome (366), one hundred and thirty-seven dead bodies were counted in the basilica, Damasus having hired gladiators to carry his point. In the provinces, doubtless, the church was often better represented; and the new species of chorepiscopi or rural bishops must have included some estimable men; but at all the great Christian centres reigned violence, greed, and hate. In North Africa the feud between the Donatists and the rest of the Church had reached the form of a chronic civil war, in which Donatist peasant fanatics, called Circumcelliones, met the official persecution by guerilla warfare of the savagest sort. In the East, the furious strifes between Arians and Athanasians were sufficient to discredit the entire Church as a political factor; and the better pagans saw in it a much worse ethical failure than could be charged on their own philosophies. “Make me bishop of Rome,” said the pagan prefect Praetextatus jestingly to Damasus, “and I will be a Christian.” What rational element lay in Arianism was countervailed by the corruption set up by court favour; and orthodoxy found its account in popular ignorance. One of the last notably philosophic heretics was Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, who in 343 revived the doctrine of a “modal” Trinity. Anathematized and ostracized by Athanasians and Arians alike, he died in exile.

The accession (379) of Theodosius, made co-emperor by Gratian, son of Valentinian, on the fall of Valens, marks the final establishment of Trinitarian Christianity, with the official suppression of Arianism and paganism. The young Gratian had been partly educated under Bishop Ambrose of Milan, one of the first notable types of masterful ecclesiastic; and under that influence he confiscated the lands of the pagan temples in the West, withdrew the privileges of the priests, and caused to be removed from the Senate at Rome the ancient and sacred statue of the Goddess Victory, formerly removed by Constantius and restored by Julian. Fiscal needs seem to have had much to do with the confiscations, for the economic life of the western empire was steadily sinking. The young emperor did not attempt to prohibit pagan worship or abolish the right of the temples to receive legacies; and though he is said to have refused the title of Pontifex Maximus it seems to have been officially given to him. His anti-pagan policy, however, seems to have counted for something in his unpopularity, which became so great that when Maximus revolted in Britain and invaded Gaul, Gratian was abandoned on all hands.

Maximus too was a Christian—another proof that since Constantine many military men had come to think “the luck was changed”—and though he conciliated the pagans he did not re-endow their cults. It was under his auspices, too, that Priscillian, bishop of Avila, in Spain, who had adopted Gnostic views closely resembling those of the Manichæans, and had been banished under Gratian, was tried in Gaul for his heresy, put to the torture, and executed at Treves with several of his followers. A new step had thus been taken in the process of establishment, so that when Theodosius overthrew Maximus and left the empire of the West to the young Valentinian, the cause of official paganism was much weakened. And when Valentinian in turn was deposed and slain by the pagan party, though Ambrose confessedly thought the Christian cause in the West was lost, Eugenius did not venture to restore to the priesthoods the possessions and revenues which had been turned to the support of the decaying State, menaced all along the north by a hungry barbarism that grew ever more conscious of its power, and of the impotence of the imperial colossus.

When Eugenius and his party in turn fell before Theodosius, the cause of State-paganism was visibly lost; and though Theodosius died in the following year (395) he left the old cults finally disestablished in Italy as well as in the East. In his reign of sixteen years in the East he had as far as possible suppressed Arianism, depriving the Arians of their churches; had caused or permitted many of the already disendowed pagan temples to be robbed and dismantled; and had prohibited all pagan worships, besides continuing the crusade against divination. Under the shelter of such persecuting edicts, monks and other enterprising Christians, calling themselves “reformers,” were at liberty everywhere to plunder or destroy the shrines, and even to secure the lands of pagans on the pretence that they had defied the law and offered sacrifices. So gross became the demoralization that Theodosius, more scrupulous than the clergy, at length passed a law to punish the Christian spoilers; but this could not save the pagans. Many of them, to save themselves, affected conversion, and went to Christian altars to do inward reverence to their old Gods. There can have been no worthy process of moral suasion in such circumstances. Coercion, applauded by Augustine and personally practised by such Christian leaders as St. Martin of Tours, became the normal procedure; and naturally the constrained converts brought with them into the Church all the credences of their previous life. For the Church, such a triumph was glory enough, especially when there was added to it a law by which all Christian offenders, clerical or lay, were amenable to trial and punishable before ecclesiastical tribunals only.

It does not appear that the many cruel laws of Theodosius against heretics and pagans were carried out to the letter: it had sufficed for the overthrow of official paganism that it should be cut off from its financial basis; and the emperor not only tolerated but employed professed pagans, being even willing to grant to those of Rome concessions which Ambrose could not endure. On their part the pagans, though still very numerous, were non-resistant. Broadly speaking, they consisted of two sorts—the more or less philosophic few, who were for the most part monotheists, inclined to see in all Gods mere symbols of the central power of the universe; and the unphilosophic multitude, high and low, who believed by habit, and whose spiritual needs were on the ordinary Christian plane. The former sort were not likely to battle for the old machinery of sacrifice and invocation; and the latter, with none to lead them, were not hard to turn, when once new habits had time to grow. Whoever gave them a liturgy and rites and sacraments, with shrines and places of adoration, might count on satisfying their religious yearnings; and this the Christian organization was zealously bent on doing. Their festivals were preserved and adapted; their local “heroes” had become Christian martyrs and patron saints; their mysteries were duplicated; their holy places were but new-named; their cruder ideals were embraced. In the way of ceremonial, as Mosheim avows, there was “little difference in those times between the public worship of the Christians and that of the Greeks and Romans.” The lituus of the augur had become the crozier of the bishop; the mitres and tiaras of the heathen priests were duly transferred to the new hierarchy; and their processions were as nearly as possible copies of those of the great ceremonial cults of Egypt and the East.

A sample of the process of adaptation lies in the ecclesiastical calendar, where in the month of October are (or were) commemorated on three successive days Saint Bacchus, Saint Demetrius, and Saints Dionysius, Rusticus, and Eleutherius, all described as martyrs. The five names are simply those of the God Dionysos, whose rustic festival was held at that season. In the same way, Osiris becomes St. Onuphrius, from his Coptic name, Onufri. It is probable, again, that from the year 376, when the shrine of Mithra at Rome was destroyed by Christian violence, the Roman Pope, who succeeded the high priest of Mithra at the Vatican mount, sat in the Mithraic sacred chair, preserved in St. Peter’s to this day. As representing Peter, he bore Mithra’s special symbols. And where the higher paganism had come to repudiate the popular religion of trappings and ceremonial no less than that of sacrifice and that of mere self-mortification, established Christianity placed the essence of religion anew in external usages on the one hand and asceticism on the other; cherishing the while every “superstition” of the past, and beginning a species of image-worship that the past had hardly known. What was overthrown was merely public or official worship: the religious essentials of paganism—to wit, polytheism; the belief in the intercession of subordinate spiritual powers; the principles of sacrifice and propitiation, penance, and atonement; the special adoration of local shrines and images; the practice of ritual mysteries and imposing ceremonies; the public association of a worship with the fortunes of the State—all these were preserved in the Catholic Church, with only the names changed. There was no “destruction of paganism,” there was merely transformation. And so immeasurably slow are the transformations of national habit that for many generations even the terminology and the specific usages of paganism survived in every aspect save that of open worship; so that Theodosius and his sons were fain to pass law after law penalizing those who ventured to revert from Christianity to paganism. Such reversions were the measure of the moral as compared with the official success of Christianity.

The last act in the official crusade against paganism, open spoliation, had become possible at length through the sheer decadence of character in the empire. In the west, so-called Romans had lived on a tradition of ancient rule till they were become as masquerading apes in the light of the retrospect: all that was left of patrician semblance was a faculty for declamation, pedantry, and pomp. The repeated discussions over the removal of the statue of Victory were on the senatorial side a tissue of artificial rhetoric, on the Christian a mixture of frank bigotry and bad sophistry. Religious fanaticism, the last and lowest form of moral energy, abounded only with the mob; and the formless pagan crowd, never in touch with priests or senators, and never conscious of a common centre, was useless for political purposes when at length the upper class had need of it; while the much smaller Christian mob, drilled and incited to a common fervour, was a force formidable even to the autocrat. Patricians whose line had for centuries cringed in all things political were not the men to lose their lives for a ceremonial; and those of them who as priests had been plundered by Gratian and Theodosius were on this side also devoid of organization, and incapable of joint action. The rule of Valentinian had forced the Christian Church to remain in touch with its original and popular sources of revenue; whereas the pagan priesthoods, once deprived of stipends and domains, had nowhere to turn to, and may be said to have fallen without a blow, unless the deposition of Valentinian II by Arbogastes, and the short usurpation of Eugenius, be regarded as their last official effort to survive.

But the cause of empire in the West was no less moribund than that of the ancient Gods. Italy was reaching the last stage of economic and military depletion. The richest revenue-yielding provinces of the empire lay in Africa and the East; and when there came the fatal struggle with barbarism, the eastern and richer part of the empire, so long wont to act independently of the western, let that succumb. It was at least dramatically fit that the multiform and fortuitous contexture of Roman paganism, evolved like the empire itself by a long series of instinctive acts and adaptations, unruled by any higher wisdom, should yield up its official form and sustenance to feed the dying body politic, and should be expunged from the face of the State before that was overthrown. Augustine might say what he would to the reproachful pagans, but the last humiliation came under Christian auspices; and the fanatical Jerome, type of the transformation of Roman energy from action to private pietism, had to weep in his old age that his cult could not save the immemorial city whose very name had so long ruled the world, and was almost the last semblance of a great thing left in it.

It consisted with the universal intellectual decadence that neither the pagans nor the Christians realized the nature of either the religious or the political evolution. The former regarded the new faith as a blasphemy which had brought on the empire the ruinous wrath of the Gods; the latter called the barbaric invasion a divine punishment both of pagan and Christian wickedness, and saw in the decline of all pagan worship the defeat of a false faith by a true. Neither had the slightest perception of the real and human causation; the degradation of the peoples by the yoke of Rome; the economic ruin and moral paralysis of Rome by sheer empire: and as little could they realize that the fortunes of the creeds were natural socio-political sequences. What had ecclesiastically happened was essentially an economic process, albeit one set up by a religious credence. Paganism as a public system disappeared because it was deprived of all its revenues; Christianity as a system finally flourished because the church was legally empowered to receive donations and legacies without limit, and debarred from parting with any of its property. Any corporation whatever, any creed whatever, would have flourished on such a basis; while only a priesthood capable of building up a voluntary revenue as the Christian church had originally done could survive on pagan lines after the Christian creed had been established. The pagan priesthoods, originally generated on a totally different footing, could not learn the economic lesson, could not readjust themselves to a process which, as we have seen, originated in conditions of fanatical nonconformity, which latter-day paganism could not reproduce. But so far were the mental habitudes and the specific beliefs of paganism from disappearing that Christian historians in our own day bitterly denounce it for “infecting” their “revealed” creed, which in the terms of their claim was divinely designed to overthrow paganism, and which would assuredly have rent itself into a medley of reciprocally anathematizing sects but for the unifying coercion of the State. What had really died out on the “spiritual” side was the primitive ideal of the Christian Church. What survived as Christianity was really an idolatrous polytheism.