30. If the old rites pleased, why did Rome also take up foreign ones? I pass over the ground hidden with costly [pg 346] buildings, and shepherds' cottages glittering with degenerate gold. Why, that I may reply to the very matter which they complain of, have they eagerly received the images of captured cities, and conquered gods, and the foreign rites of alien superstition? Whence, then, is the pattern of Cybele washing her chariots in a stream counterfeiting the Almo? Whence were the Phrygian prophets and the deities of unjust Carthage, always hateful to the Romans? And he whom the Africans worship as Celestis, the Persians as Mithra, and the greater number as Venus, according to a difference of name, not a variety of deities?
31. They ask to have her altar erected in the Senate House of the city of Rome, that is where the majority who meet together are Christians! There are altars in all the temples, and an altar also in the Temple of Victory. Since they delight in numbers, they celebrate their sacrifices everywhere. To claim a sacrifice on this one altar, what is it but to insult the faith? Is it to be borne that a heathen should sacrifice and a Christian be present?… Shall there not be a common lot in that common assembly? The faithful portion of the Senate will be bound by the voices of those who call upon the gods, by the oaths of those who swear by them. If they oppose they will seem to exhibit their falsehood, if they acquiesce, to acknowledge what is a sacrilege.
(f) Codex Theodosianus, XVI, 10, 12; A. D. 392.
Decree of Theodosius prohibiting heathen worship as a crime of the same character as treason.
The following decree may be said to have permanently forbidden heathenism, at least in the East, though as a matter of fact many heathen not only continued to practise their rites in defiance of the law or with the connivance of the authorities, but also received appointments at the court and elsewhere. The law was never repealed. In course of time heathenism disappeared as a religious system.
XVI, 10, 12. Hereafter no one of whatever race or dignity, whether placed in office or discharged therefrom with honor, powerful by birth or humble in condition and fortune, [pg 347] shall in any place or in any city sacrifice an innocent victim to a senseless image, venerate with fire the household deity by a more private offering, as it were the genius of the house, or the Penates, and burn lights, place incense, or hang up garlands. If any one undertakes by way of sacrifice to slay a victim or to consult the smoking entrails, let him, as guilty of lese-majesty, receive the appropriate sentence, having been accused by a lawful indictment, even though he shall not have sought anything against the safety of the princes or concerning their welfare. It constitutes a crime of this nature to wish to repeal the laws, to spy into unlawful things, to reveal secrets, or to attempt things forbidden, to seek the end of another's welfare, or to promise the hope of another's ruin. If any one by placing incense venerates either images made by mortal labor, or those which are enduring, or if any one in ridiculous fashion forthwith venerates what he has represented, either by a tree encircled with garlands or an altar of cut turfs, though the advantage of such service is small, the injury to religion is complete, let him as guilty of sacrilege be punished by the loss of that house or possession in which he worshipped according to the heathen superstition. For all places which shall smoke with incense, if they shall be proved to belong to those who burn the incense, shall be confiscated. But if in temples or public sanctuaries or buildings and fields belonging to another, any one should venture this sort of sacrifice, if it shall appear that the acts were performed without the knowledge of the owner, let him be compelled to pay a fine of twenty-five pounds of gold, and let the same penalty apply to those who connive at this crime as well as those who sacrifice. We will, also, that this command be observed by judges, defensors, and curials of each and every city, to the effect that those things noted by them be reported to the court, and by them the acts charged may be punished. But if they believe anything is to be overlooked by favor or allowed to pass through negligence, they will lie under a judicial warning. And when they have been warned, if by any negligence [pg 348] they fail to punish they will be fined thirty pounds of gold, and the members of their court are to be subjected to a like punishment.
§ 70. The Dogmatic Parties and Their Mutual Relations
The parties in the Arian controversy became greatly divided in the course of the conflict. Speaking broadly, there were still two groups, of which one was composed of all those who regarded the Son as a creature and so not eternal and not truly God; and the other, of those who regarded Him as uncreated and in some real sense eternal and truly God, yet without denying the unity of God. The former were the various Arian parties tending to constant division. The latter can hardly yet be comprised under one common name, and might be called the anti-Arian parties, were it not that there was a positive content to their faith which was in far better harmony with the prevailing religious sentiment of the East and was constantly receiving accessions. In the second generation after Nicæa, a new group of theologians came to the front, of whom the most important were Eustathius of Sebaste, Cyril of Jerusalem, and the three Cappadocians, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, most of whom had at least sympathized with the Homoiousian party. Already at the synod of Ancyra, in 358, an approach was made toward a reconciliation of the anti-Arian factions, in that, by a more careful definition, homoousios was rejected only in the sense of identity of being, and homoiousios was asserted only in the sense of equality of attributes in the not identical subjects which, however, shared in the same essence. Homoiousios did not mean mere similarity of being. (Anathemas in Hahn, § 162; Hefele, § 80.) The line of development ultimately taken was by a precise distinction between hypostasis and ousia, whereby hypostasis, which never meant person in the modern sense, which later is represented by the [pg 349] Greek prosopon, was that which subsists and shares with other hypostases in a common essence or ousia.
Additional source material: Athanasius, De Synodis (PNF); Basil, Epp. 38, 52, 69, 125 (PNF, ser. II, vol. VIII); Hilary of Poitiers, De Synodis, cc. 87-91 (PNF, ser. II, vol. IX); Socrates, Hist. Ec., III, 25.