Europe: A History (44 page)

The ‘Fathers of the Church’ is a collective label which was used from the fourth century onwards for the Christian leaders of the preceding period. The Apologists, from Aristides of Athens to Tertullian (155–255), clarified what ultimately became orthodox beliefs. Others, including Hippolytus (165–236), Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215), Origen (185–250), and Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), were revered for their defence of the faith against pagans and heretics. The body of Patristics or ‘writings of the Fathers’ is not judged to end before those of St John Chrysostom (347–407).

Heresy, of course, is a tendentious concept. It is an accusation levelled by one group of believers against another; and it can only exist if the accusers believe in their own dogmatic monopoly of the truth. In Christian history, it only emerges in the second and third centuries as the general consensus solidified. Most of the Church’s Fathers were heretical in varying degrees. The chief heresies, as defined by later orthodoxy, included Docetism, Montanism, Novatianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Donatism, Monophysitism, and Monothelitism. Of these, Arianism was specially important because it won the adherence of many communities both inside and outside the Empire. Founded by Arius (c.250–336), a priest of Alexandria, it held that Christ, as Son of God, could not share the full divinity of God the Father. It provoked the first ecumenical Council of the Church, where it was condemned. But it re-emerged through the support of the Emperor Constantius II, and its acceptance by several barbarian peoples, notably the Goths. It even split into three main sub-heresies: the Anomoeans, the Homoeans, and the Semi-Arians. It did not die out until the sixth century,
[
BRITO
]

Christian monasticism was entirely oriental in its beginnings. St Antony of the Desert (c.251–356), an opponent of Arius and founder of the first anchorite community, was yet another Alexandrian.

The Christian concepts and practices, therefore, which in due course were pronounced Catholic (universal) and orthodox (correct) were the fruit of many years of debate and dispute. Their final definition awaited the work of four Doctors of the Church, who were active in the late fourth century—SS Martin, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. Apart from the debate on the
Logos
, which soon gave precedence to the christological issue, they centred on the doctrines of Grace, Atonement, and the Church; on the Sacraments, Baptism and Eucharist; and above all on the Trinity. In 325, when the Emperor Constantine convened the first General Council of the Church at Nicaea in Asia Minor, the 300 delegates were asked to summarize the articles of basic Christian belief. They were dominated by the party from Alexandria, especially by the anti-Arian or Trinitarian group led
by Athanasius (c.296–373). There were only a handful of bishops from the West, including Cordoba and Lyons. The absent Bishop of Rome, Sylvester I, was represented by two legates. What they produced was a combination of a baptismal formula used in Jerusalem with the famous idea of
homoousios
or ‘consubstan-tiality’. The Nicene Creed has been binding on all Christians ever since:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of all things both visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
Begotten of the Father, Only-begotten,
That is, of one substance with the Father;
By whom all things both in heaven and earth were made;
Who for us men and our salvation
Came down and was incarnate, became man,
Suffered and rose again the third day;
Ascended into the heavens;
Cometh to judge the quick and the dead;
And in the Holy Spirit.
³⁴

It was three hundred years since Christ had walked in Galilee.

The Bosporus, 4 November 1079
AUC.
Shortly after ordering the execution of his heir apparent, the Emperor Constantine conducted a ceremony to mark the foundation of his new capital city. He laid the first stone of the western wall, at the point where it meets the sea. He was attended by the neoplatonist philosopher Sopater, who was acting as
telestes
or ‘magician’ and who cast the spells to secure the city’s good fortune. Also present was Praetestatus, a pontifex from Rome, who was said to have brought the most sacred of Roman talismans, the Palladium, to be buried at the base of the founder’s statue in the new forum. ‘The sun was in the sign of Sagittarius, but the Crab ruled the hour.’
³⁵

Four years later, on 11 May 1083
(AD
330), fresh ceremonies inaugurated the life of the new foundation. Shortly after the execution of Sopater, and of another pagan philosopher, Canonaris, who had shouted out: ‘Do not raise yourself against our ancestors’, Constantine presided at a grand inaugural festival. The city was officially named ‘Constantinopolis’ and ‘Roma Nova’. Prayers to the goddess Tyche, or ‘Fortune’, the city’s tutelary genius, mingled with the Christian chant of
kyrie eleison
. In the Circus, by the Temple of Castor and Pollux, sumptuous games were held, but no gladiatorial contests. In the Forum, the oversize statue of the Emperor was unveiled. It had been made by mounting Constantine’s head on an ancient Colossus of Apollo, and it stood on a huge porphyry column. In all probability, a smaller gilded statue of Constantine, carrying a tiny Tyche on its outstretched hand, was paraded in torchlight procession. Certainly a procession of that sort soon became an annual tradition in Constantinople on Founder’s Day. The Tyche carried a Cross welded to her forehead. All subsequent emperors were expected to rise and to prostrate themselves before it. New coins and medals were struck: they carried the bust of Constantine, and the inscription
TOTIUS ORBIS IMPERATOR.

Map 9. Constantinople

The choice of the city’s site had not been easily decided. The Emperor needed a capital that would benefit from the sea routes through the Bosporus and Hellespont. He had first looked at ancient Chalcedon on the Asian shore. Then he went for ancient Ilium (Troy), whose legendary connections with the founding of Rome offered important symbolic advantages. He visited the Trojan Fields, and marked out the outlines of a future city at a place revered as Hector’s Grave. The gates had already been erected (they can still be seen), before he changed his mind once again, crossing the water to the small town of Byzantium on the European shore, where he had recently conducted a victorious siege. At last, both the practicalities and the auguries were right. Later legend held that Constantine traced the line of the walls in person. Striding out in front of the surveyors, spear in hand, he left his companions far behind. When one of them called out, ‘How much further, Sire?’, he is said to have replied mysteriously, ‘Until He who walks before me stops walking.’

The transformation of little Byzantium into Constantinople the Great required works of immense size and speed. Constantine’s Wall ran across the peninsula from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmora, some two miles to the west of the ancient acropolis. Constantine’s Forum was built immediately outside Byzantium’s older wall. The separate suburbs of Sycae (Galata) and of Blachernae, on opposing sides of the Golden Horn, received separate fortifications; whilst much of the old city was stripped or demolished. The graceful granite column of Claudius Gothicus, erected in
AD
269 after a famous victory, was left on the point of the promontory, looking out over the sea to Asia. Constantinople, like Rome, contained seven hills, which were soon to be covered with public and private buildings. Eighty years later, a description mentions a Capitol or school of learning, a Circus, two theatres, eight public and 153 private baths, 52 porticoes, five granaries, eight aqueducts, four meeting-halls, fourteen churches, fourteen palaces, and 4,388 listed residences of outstanding architectural merit. To adorn this megalopolis, vast numbers of art treasures were brought from Greece—the Pythian Apollo, the Samian Hera, the Olympian
[
ZEUS
],
the Pallas of Rhodian Lindos. Four hundred and twenty-seven statues were assembled to stand in front of Saint Sophia alone. Colonists were forcibly imported from all the neighbouring settlements. In order to feed them, and to supply the annual dole, the grain fleets of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor were redirected. Constantinople had to be launched in record time; its neighbours were vandalized, emptied, and starved.

The character of Constantine has attracted much speculation. As the first Christian emperor, he became the subject of shameless hagiography. ‘Speech and reason stand mute’, wrote Eusebius of Caesarea, the first biographer, ‘when I gaze in spirit upon this thrice-blessed soul, united with God, free of all mortal dross, in robes gleaming like lightning, and in ever radiant diadem.’
³⁶
Yet to his detractors he was an odious hypocrite, a tyrant and murderer, whose reputation was only burnished by a deathbed conversion and by the forgeries of the subsequent
era. Gibbon, who was allergic to Christian legends, none the less preferred a generous interpretation, stressing talents marred only by the extravagances of his old age. Constantine was ‘tall and majestic, dexterous … intrepid in war, affable in peace … and tempered by habitual prudence … He
deserved
the appellation of the first Emperor who publicly professed the Christian religion.’
³⁷

Despite his mother’s example, it is a moot point how far Constantine was a practising Christian. He publicly confessed his debt to the One God; but most of his actions, including the Edict of Toleration, could equally be explained by the policy of a tolerant pagan. During the festivities at Constantinople, he was most interested in promoting the worship of himself. At the same time, he was a devoted patron of church-building, not least in Rome, where both St Peter’s and the Basilica Constantiniana (St John Lateran) were his foundations. In 321 he enforced the general observance of Sunday as a day of rest. As was common, he long deferred his formal baptism, being christened by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, an Arian, on his deathbed. He gave no special favours to the Bishop of Rome. Constantine basked in the deepening theatricality of the late imperial cult. As the
Sol Invictus
(the Unconquered Sun), he inherited Diocletian’s practice of the
adoratio purpurae
, the adoration of the purple, and he surrounded himself with the obsequious language of oriental despotism. Public art, as illustrated on the friezes of the Arch of Constantine in Rome, was growing more stiff and formal. Intellectual life at Constantine’s court was dominated by the drive to reconcile the rising tide of Christianity with traditional culture. Constantine relied on the convert rhetorician Lactantius, whom he had known at Trier, both to teach his son Crispus and, in the
Divinae Institutiones
, to set out a systematic account of the Christian world view.

The state of the Christian religion in Constantine’s reign must be nicely gauged. After the Edict of Milan (313) the Church benefited from official toleration and a stable revenue and, with the Nicene Creed, from a coherent doctrine. Yet it was still little more than a minority sect in the early stages of institutional growth. There was no supreme ecclesiastical authority. The scriptural canon was not fully agreed. None of the greatest of the Church Fathers, from John Chrysostom to Augustine, had yet been born. The greatest of the heresiarchs, Arius, enjoyed considerable influence at the imperial court, being recalled from exile in 334. Indeed, Arianism was destined to become dominant in the succeeding reign. The Donatists in Africa had recently been suppressed. The only countries where Christianity was growing beyond the Empire were Armenia and Abyssinia. The age of sporadic persecutions was past; but ‘the divisions of Christendom suspended the ruin of Paganism’.

In 330 the Empire was in healthier shape than for many decades. East and West had been reunited. The general peace held. Constantine’s reforms have been dismissed as ‘a timid policy, of dividing whatever is united, of reducing whatever is eminent, of dreading every active power, of expecting that the most feeble will prove the most obedient’. At least they gave the Empire a breathing space. The army was brought under control by dividing the jurisdiction of the praetorian
prefects into rival masterships of cavalry and infantry; by distinguishing the élite palatine troops from the second-rate forces on the frontier; and by the widespread introduction of barbarian officers and auxiliaries. The Emperor’s lavish building projects, and his repair of the road and postal system, was paid for by an oppressive land tax. A far-flung network of imperial messengers, who acted as official spies, kept potential opponents in fear.

Constantine had no plan for avoiding the perennial problems of succession. He had killed his eldest son, Crispus, on rumours of a Roman plot. But this still left him with three more sons—Constantine, Constantius, and Constans—a favoured nephew, and three brothers. Two years before his death he divided the Empire between them, raising his sons to the rank of Caesar. They ill repaid his generosity. Constantine II was killed whilst invading the territory of Constans. Constans was killed by the usurper, Maxentius. Constantius II, having initiated a massacre of his remaining relatives, was left to win the Empire from Maxentius.