Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

by T. W. Allies

Melito, Bishop of Sardis, addressing an apology for the Christian faith to Marcus Aurelius, besought him to “protect a philosophy which was nurtured together and began together with Augustus;”[185] and, in fact, it was at the moment when Augustus closed the temple of Janus, and proclaimed that there was peace in the Roman world, that our Lord was born at Bethlehem. Thirty-three years after, He was crucified by the governor of a province who represented the person of the Emperor Tiberius, and on the ground that he had infringed the rights of that emperor by calling Himself King of the Jews. Forthwith, when “Peter rose up in the midst of the brethren” to propose the appointment of a twelfth apostle, that he might take the place of the traitor who had betrayed his Master to death, we are told the number of the persons together was about a hundred and twenty. This number, then, indicated those disciples of our Lord who had been gained during His ministry, and were then at Jerusalem. We have another indication of numbers, where it is said that our Lord, before His ascension, was seen by “more than five hundred brethren at once,”[186] which would indicate the larger number of His adherents in Galilee.

These two statements give a notion as to the extent to which the teaching of our Lord had been accepted when the event of His public execution took place, which was intended by those who brought it about to effect the destruction of His claim to teach the world, and which was calculated, according to all human judgment, to produce the effect intended.

The empire of Augustus, and “the philosophy nurtured and begun together with it,” took their several courses, and at the end of three hundred years the greatest man who had sat upon the throne of Augustus in all that interval came to the conclusion that the Christian Church was become the power of the time. What makes the greatness of Constantine, we have been told, makes him one of those characters in the world’s history who are the individual expression of the spirit of their time, is, that he understood his time, that he perceived the weakness and powerlessness of the heathen world, the inward dissolution of the old beliefs; that the Christian faith was alone the substantial power of the time, the Christian faith, as the Corpus Christianorum, in the strong, flexible, and yet compact organisation of the Catholic Church, as seen in its one episcopate. Constantine knew Christianity only in this form; and the majestic unity into which the episcopate of the Church had already grown was for him so imposing that he saw in the Christian Church[187] the power through which the Roman empire, greatly needing a regeneration, could alone be made capable of it. That was the real power which could give a new basis to the State when it was falling into self-dissolution.

To indicate the greatness of the change involved in the action of the Roman emperor, we may here use the words of St. Gregory the Great to the Anglo-Saxon King Ethelbert, when he wrote to him at the end of the sixth century: “Illustrious Son, guard carefully the grace which thou hast received by a divine gift; hasten to extend the Christian faith among the peoples subject to thee, for He will render the name of your glory yet more glorious to your posterity, whose honour you seek and preserve in the world. For so Constantine, most pious emperor of old, calling back the Roman commonwealth from the perverted worship of idols, subjected it with himself to Jesus Christ, our omnipotent Lord God.”[188]

But what had passed in the interval, since the officer of Tiberius crucified the Head, that the successor of Tiberius, Constantine, should recognise the Body as the only power which could hold together his tottering State?

What had happened was such facts as these.

After the Jews had spent their utmost malice in persecuting the Christian messengers, first at Jerusalem, upon St. Stephen’s death, and then throughout the empire, wherever the authority of the Sanhedrim could reach them, Nero, the last emperor of the family of Augustus, moved by Jewish instigation, turned upon Christians the accusation of burning Rome, and slew what the Roman historian calls a “huge multitude” of them, with torments so atrocious that pity for them began to arise even among those who hated them.

Secondly, at the distance of another generation, Domitian slew his cousin, even while he held the consulate, and an unknown number of other Christians, on the imputed charge of impiety, that is, of deserting the heathen gods.

Thirdly, twenty years later, in the time of Trajan, we learn, by his correspondence with Pliny, that the mere profession of the Christian faith was a capital crime; and the punishment of Ignatius, in the Roman amphitheatre, made his name famous to all future generations. We know not to how many in the reign of Trajan the profession of the Christian faith was the sacrifice of life. But the Bishop of Antioch, if the most illustrious, was far from the only victim.

Fourthly, an abundance of martyrs in the reign of his successor, Hadrian, testifies the continuance and the exercise of this law proscribing the Christian profession. The noble Roman matron who witnessed the execution of her seven children is an instance how savage a man of letters and curious taste could be, when there was a question of Christian realities crossing his feelings as a heathen.