“Wherefore, it is expedient for your Excellency to know that we have resolved to abolish every one of the stipulations contained in all previous edicts sent to you with respect to the Christians, on the ground that they now seem to us to be unjust and alien from the spirit of our clemency.
“Henceforth, in perfect and absolute freedom, each and every person who chooses to belong to and practise the Christian religion shall be at liberty to do so without let or hindrance in any shape or form.
“We have thought it best to explain this to your Excellency in the fullest possible manner that you may know that we have accorded to these same Christians a free and absolutely unrestricted right to practise their own religion.
“And inasmuch as you see that we have granted this indulgence to the Christians, your Excellency will understand that a similarly free and unrestricted right, conformable to the peace of our times, is granted to all others equally to practise the religion of their choice. We have resolved upon this course that no one and no religion may seem to be robbed of the honour that is their due.”
Then follow the most explicit instructions for the restoration to the Christians of the properties of which they had been robbed during the persecutions, though the robbery had been committed in accordance with imperial command. Whether a property had been simply confiscated, or sold, or given away, it was to be handed back without the slightest cost and without any delays or ambiguities (Postposita omni frustratione atque ambiguitate). Purchasers who had bought such properties in good faith were to be indemnified from the public treasury by grace of the Emperor.
But the abiding interest of this celebrated edict lies in the general principles there clearly enunciated. Every man, without distinction of rank or nationality, is to have absolute freedom to choose and practise the religion which he deems most suited to his needs (Libera atque absoluta colendæ religionis suæ facultas). The phrase is repeated with almost wearisome iteration, but the principle was novel and strange, and one can see the anxiety of the framers of this edict that there shall be no possible loophole for misunderstanding. Everybody is to have free choice; all previous anti-Christian enactments are annulled; not only is no compulsion to be employed against the Christian, he is not even to be troubled or annoyed (Citra ullam inquietudinem ac molestiam). The novelty lay not so much in the toleration of the existence of Christianity,—both Constantine and Licinius had two years before signed the edict whereby Galerius put an end to the persecution,—but in its formal official recognition by the State.
What motives, then, are assigned by the Emperors for this notable change of policy? Certainly not humanity. Nothing is said of the terrors of the late persecutions and the horrible sufferings of the Christians—there is merely a bald reference to previous edicts which the Emperors consider “unjust and alien from the spirit of our clemency” (Sinistra et a nostra clementia aliena esse). There is no appeal to political necessity, such as the exhaustion of the world and its palpable need of rest. The motives assigned are purely religious. The Emperors proclaim religious toleration in order that they and their subjects may continue to receive the blessings of Heaven. One of them at least had just emerged victoriously from the manifold hazards of an invasion of Italy. Surely we can trace a reference to the battle of the Milvian Bridge and the overthrow of Maxentius in the mention of “the Divine favour towards us, which we have experienced in affairs of the highest moment” (Divinus juxta nos favor quem in tantis sumus rebus experti). What Constantine and Licinius hope to secure is a continuance of the favour and benevolence of the Supreme Divinity, the patronage of the ruling powers of the sky. The phraseology is important. The name of God is not mentioned—only the vague “Summa Divinitas,“ ”Divinus favor,” and the still more curious and non-committal phrase, “Quicquid est Divinitatis in sede cœlesti.” In Eusebius the same phrase appears in a form still more nebulous (ὅτι ποτέ ἐστι θειότης καὶ[καὶ] οὐρανίου πράγματος). A pagan philosopher, more than half sceptical as to the existence of a personal God, might well employ such language, but it reads strangely in an official edict.
But then this edict was to bear the joint names of Constantine and Licinius. Constantine might be a Christian, but Licinius was still a pagan, and Licinius was not his vassal, but his equal. He would certainly not have been prepared to set his name to an edict which pledged him to personal adherence to the Christian faith. Constantine, in the flush of triumph, would insist that the persecution of the Christians should cease, and that the Christian religion should be officially recognised. Licinius would raise no objection. But they would speedily find, when it came to drafting a joint edict, that the only religious ground common to them both was very limited in extent, and that the only way to preserve a semblance of unity was to employ the vaguest phraseology which each might interpret in his own fashion. If we can imagine the Pope and the Caliph drafting a joint appeal to mankind which necessitated the mention of the Higher Power, they would find themselves driven to use words as cloudy and indistinct as the “Whatever Divinity there is and heavenly substance” of Eusebius. No, it was not that Constantine’s mind was in the transitional stage; it was rather that he had to find a common platform for himself and Licinius.
But to have converted Licinius at all to an official recognition of the Christians and complete toleration was a great achievement, for the principle, as we have said, was entirely new. M. Gaston Boissier, in discussing this point, recalls how even the broad-minded Plato had found no place in his ideal republic for those who disbelieved in the gods of their fatherland and of the city of their birth. Even if they kept their opinions to themselves and did not seek to disturb the faith of others, Plato insisted upon their being placed in a House of Correction—it is true he calls it a Sophronisterion, or House of Wisdom—for five years, where they were to listen to a sermon every day; while, if they were zealous propagandists of their pernicious doctrines, he proposed to keep them all their lives in horrible dungeons and deny their bodies after death the right of sepulture. How, one wonders, would Socrates have fared in such a state? No better, we fancy, than he fared in his own city of Athens. But, throughout antiquity, every lawgiver took the same view, that a good citizen must accept without question the gods of his native place who had been the gods of his fathers; and it was a simple step from that position to the stern refusal to allow a man, in the vigorous words of the Old Testament, to go a-whoring after other gods. “For I, thy God, am a jealous God.” The God of the Jews was not more jealous than the gods of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the Romans would like to have been, had they had the same power of concise expression.
What was the theory of the State religion in Rome? Cicero tells us in a well-known passage in his treatise On the Laws, where he quotes the ancient formula, “Let no man have separate gods of his own: nor let people privately worship new gods or alien gods, unless they have been publicly admitted.”[[55]] Nothing could be more explicit. But theory and practice in Rome had a habit of becoming divorced from one another. It is a notorious fact that, as Rome’s conquering eagles flew farther afield, the legions and the merchants who followed in their track brought all manner of strange gods back to the city, where every wandering Chaldæan thaumaturgist, magician, or soothsayer found welcome and profit, and every stray goddess—especially if her rites had mysteries attached to them—received a comfortable home. In a word, Rome found new religions just as fascinating—for a season or two—as do the capitals of the modern world, and these new religions were certainly not “publicly admitted” by the Pontifex Maximus and the representatives of the State religion. Occasionally, usually after some outbreak of pestilence or because an Emperor was nervous at the presence of so many swarthy charlatans devoting themselves to the Black Arts, an order of expulsion would be issued and there would be a fluttering of the dove-cotes. But they came creeping back one by one, as the storm blew over. While, therefore, in theory the gods of Rome were jealous, in practice they were not so. The easy scepticism or eclecticism of the cultured Roman was conducive to tolerance. Cicero’s famous sentence in the Pro Flacco, “Each state has its own religion, Lælius: we have ours,” shews how little of the religious fanatic there was in the average Roman, who stole the gods of the people he conquered and made them his own, so that they might acquiesce in the Roman domination. The Roman was tolerant enough in private life towards other people’s religious convictions: all he asked was reciprocity, and that was precisely what the Christian would not and could not give him. If the Christian would have sacrificed at the altars of the State gods, the Roman would never have objected to his worship of Christ for his own private satisfaction. There lies the secret of the persecutions, and of the fierce anti-Christian hatreds.