God Against the Gods (20 page)

“We are persecuted,” Arius complained, summing up the arguments that his enemies made against him, “because we say, ‘The Son has a beginning but God is without beginning.’ ”
²¹

Ultimately, the theologians in each camp succeeded in boiling down the whole controversy to a choice between one of two catch-words. One faction insisted on characterizing God and Jesus as
homoousion
, a Greek word that can be translated into plain English as “made of the
same
stuff,” that is, God the Father and God the Son were actually one and the same divinity. The other faction insisted on characterizing them as
homoiousion
, that is, “made of
similar
stuff,” that is, God the Father could and should be distinguished from God the Son. The two words are spelled the same in Greek with the exception of a single tiny letter, an
iota
, which turns
homoousion
into
homoiousion
. The irony was immortalized by Edward Gibbon, who refers to the crucial Greek letter as “the important diphthong.”
²²

“[T]he profane of every age,” he writes with sly good humor, “have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians.”
²³

Remarkably, the arcane theological debate over Arianism was not confined to theologians. Rather, the struggle between the Arians and their adversaries tapped into the reservoir of fear and loathing that seems to well up whenever two human beings fix their attention on some difference between them, whether it is a matter of race or religion, class or color, age or sex. The question of whether God and Jesus were made of the same stuff or different stuff was and is ultimately unanswerable—indeed, that was what church authorities meant when they characterized the Trinity as a mystery—but that did not stop ordinary men and women throughout the Christian community from literally brawling with one another over an
iota.

“If you ask a shopkeeper for change, he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten,” wrote theologian Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394) at the hottest moment of the crisis within Christianity over Arianism. “If you inquire about the quality of bread, the baker will answer, ‘The Father is greater, the Son is less.’

And if you ask the bath attendant to draw your bath, he will tell you that the Son was created
ex nihilo
.”
²⁴

Nor was it merely a war of words. Followers of one faction or the other were willing to take to the streets with rocks and cudgels, burn down each other’s churches, lodge false charges against each other with the imperial authorities, and even drag out and string up each other’s priests and bishops. To impugn his adversaries, for example, an Arian bishop in Antioch instructed a couple of priests to recruit a prostitute from a local brothel and slip her into the bed of a visiting anti-Arian bishop from Cologne as he lay asleep at an inn—they were to break into his bedchamber at daybreak, reveal him as a whoremonger, and thus cast shame on the enemies of the Arian cause. But the harlot refused to play her role in the plot—once smuggled into the bishop’s bed, she raised an alarm and betrayed the plotters. On that day, it was the Arians whose reputation was sullied.

That Stranger God

Nothing in Constantine’s upbringing in pagan Rome would have prepared him for the theological viper’s nest into which he wandered when he put himself under the patronage of the Christian god. Polytheism, to be sure, was fully as diverse in its beliefs and practices as monotheism; if, as we have already seen, one bishop was able to count 156 heresies in Christianity, a pagan priest of the same era counted 360 gods and goddesses whom he deemed worthy of worship, one for each day of the ancient Egyptian calendar. But there was a crucial difference between the two kinds of diversity—paganism embraced
all
the rival gods and goddesses, and the very idea of “heresy” was something alien and baffling.

What’s more, Constantine was distracted by far more urgent and worldly concerns. His coemperor, Licinius, was fully as ambitious as Constantine himself, and each of them aspired to be the one and only Augustus. Licinius, for example, had tried to discourage any new challengers to the imperial status quo by murdering the surviving blood relations of all the dead emperors of the old Tetrarchy, including the wife and daughter of Diocletian, the son of Severus and the whole family of Maximian. Licinius was also implicated in an elaborate plot against Constantine himself, an incident that prompted the two emperors to send their armies into the field against each other only a year or so after the wedding of Licinius and Constantine’s half sister. After a few early and tentative skirmishes, they backed off from open civil war, and each of the willful emperors waited for the opportunity to strike a decisive blow against the other.

One sign of Licinius’s concern over the ambition of his brother emperor can be seen in his policy toward the Christian population in the half of the Roman empire over which he reigned. Although the Edict of Milan obliged him to refrain from persecution of
any
faith, Licinius suspected the Christians of sympathies toward Constantine—if the two emperors challenged each other on the battlefield again, the Christians could be expected to side with Constantine. Christians had always been regarded as subversives by the pagan emperors of Rome, of course, but the anxieties of Licinius were even more acute now that his coemperor reigned under the sign of the cross.

Licinius began to issue a series of decrees that were aimed at deterring the perceived threat from the Christians in his realm. Christians were once again forbidden to serve in the palace, the government and the army in his portion of the Roman empire. Christian rituals were to be conducted out-of-doors, where the worshippers could be easily watched by imperial agents. And bishops were forbidden to gather in church councils to consider matters of theological controversy like the ones provoked by the Donatists and the Arians. The pagan emperor, of course, was unconcerned whether one faction or another provided the next man to wear the bishop’s miter in Alexandria or Carthage—rather, he wondered what plots the Soldiers of Christ were preparing against
his
crown when they met behind closed doors.

The renewed persecution of Christians in the eastern empire supplied Constantine with a lofty motive for escalating his rivalry with Licinius into open warfare. “Licinius’ growing dislike for the Christians,” insists the historian John Holland Smith, “was simply one of the justifications for war found by Constantine’s propaganda machine.”
²⁵
Indeed, Licinius may have been provoked by Constantine into sending an army into Thrace, which lay on the boundary between the eastern and western portions of the empire, and thus providing Constantine with a plausible excuse for going to war. After seven years of peaceful but troubled coexistence between the coemperors, Constantine once again raised the battle standard called the
labarum
and marched out at the head of an army to do battle against a pagan enemy.

Constantine had already elevated two of his sons, Crispus and Constantine II, to the rank of Caesar, and now he placed Crispus in command of the war fleet that gathered in the Bosphorus. The armies of the rival emperors met in battle at the gates of Adrianople in the summer of 324, and Constantine’s victory sent Licinius into retreat toward Byzantium, where he was cut off by the fleet under the command of Crispus and then besieged by Constantine’s army. Licinius and a remnant of his army escaped to Chrysopolis, the site of his final and crucial defeat.

Constantine’s campaign against Licinius can be seen as a cunning and decisive blow against a rival for supreme political power. But the ancient sources, both Christian and pagan, insist on characterizing it as a holy war, the opening battle of the final struggle between God and the gods. Licinius fought under the aegis of the old pantheon of pagan Rome—his battle standards were decorated with images of the traditional gods and goddesses, and his army included a corps of
magi
who offered blood sacrifices in a desperate effort to enlist them in the battle with Constantine and pored over the entrails of the slaughtered animals to read the auguries of the battle to come. Constantine, by contrast, fought under battle standard that bore the “monogram of Christ,” his corps of priests offered prayers to the Christian god alone and he taught his troops a new war cry: “
Deus summus salvator!
” (“God the Highest, Savior!”)
²⁶

“Constantine is not fighting against us but against the gods,” Licinius announced in advance of the decisive battle, according to Constantine’s chronicler, Eusebius of Caesarea. “Now we shall see who is wrong. If the gods prove themselves in battle to be true helpers, we shall march against all the godless. But if that stranger god wins, we have sacrificed to our gods in vain. We shall know what to do, for one must follow the conquering god.”
²⁷

Of course, the final victory of Constantine can be measured in purely political terms. A pagan historian called Eutropius insists that the struggle between the emperors was a rivalry for absolute power between two ambitious men: “[O]nce he had decided to rule the whole world,” insists Eutropius, Constantine “occasioned a war with Licinius.”
²⁸
Indeed, the defeat of Licinius meant that the Roman empire was now ruled by a single all-powerful monarch; for the first time in nearly a half century, only one man held the lawful title of Augustus. A coin issued by Constantine in celebration of his new stature was inscribed with the boastful and self-revealing phrase
Rector totius orbis
—“Ruler of the Whole World”—and now, at least in terms of the vast empire that was the Roman world, the words were literally true.
²⁹

Then, too, the imperial politics of ancient Rome can be seen as an intimate family affair. The surrender of Licinius was negotiated by his wife, Constantia, the half sister of Constantine, in exchange for a promise to spare the defeated emperor’s life. It is a measure of Constantine’s ruthlessness that he ultimately repudiated the promise he made to Constantia, his favorite of among all his brothers and sisters. Just as Licinius carried out a purge of potential rivals, Constantine ordered Licinius to be put to death by strangling in 325. Apologists for Constantine insist that he was compelled to murder Licinius for reasons of state—the old intriguer was accused of engaging in a treasonous conspiracy with barbarian tribes of Gaul—but even the ancient Christian sources concede that the murder of Licinius was carried out “secretly” and “in defiance of civilised custom when oaths have been sworn.”
³⁰

God the Highest

Constantine had favored the Christians within his realm ever since the victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, of course, but even after the defeat of Licinius, the fate of Christianity in pagan Rome was not yet clear. After all, the vast majority of the Roman population, including all but a few members of the imperial household and the ruling class, were still pagans. Would Christianity merely continue to enjoy the generous gifts and personal protection of the man who happened to be the reigning emperor, or would it replace the old imperial cult as the state religion of the empire?

Constantine had put an end to the Great Persecution and secured for Christians the same freedom of religion that the various pagan cults had always enjoyed, but he still served as the
Pontifex Maximus
of the priestly colleges that preserved and practiced the worship of the old pantheon. He had granted Christian clergy the same rights and privileges as those enjoyed by priests of the various pagan cults, but the official coinage of his realm continued to feature the images of Jupiter and Mars, Hercules and
Sol Invictus
, all of them condemned by the Christians not merely as false gods but as devils and demons. At the celebration of his
decennalia
, the tenth anniversary of his reign, he had declined to participate in the customary blood sacrifices, but he had permitted the uttering of prayers of thanksgiving to the pagan deities. Above all, while his official pronouncements had always invoked a supreme deity in words and phrases that
seemed
to refer to the Christian god—“God the Highest,” for example, or “The Supreme God”—he had not yet submitted to the fundamental Christian rite of baptism and, for that reason, was not yet a formal convert to Christianity.

With the victory over the last pagan emperor of the old Tetrarchy, however, Constantine was poised to make a decision for Christ that would have world-changing and history-making consequences. Now that he was the one and only emperor of the Roman empire, it was up to Constantine to determine exactly what measure of power and privilege would be bestowed upon the community of Christians whom the emperors who reigned before him had persecuted so cruelly. It was also within his power to decide which of the many contending factions within Christianity was entitled to hold itself out as what we are accustomed to call “
the
Church.” For exactly that reason, as we shall see, the bitter struggle within early Christianity over the name and nature of the Only True God turned out to be a battle for the heart and mind of one man—the emperor Constantine.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE RULER OF THE WHOLE WORLD

The Invention of the Totalitarian State by the First Christian Emperor of Rome

Begin now to cast aside the causes of that disunity which has existed among you, for by so doing, you will with one stroke be acting in the manner most pleasing to the Supreme God, and confer an extraordinary favor on me.

—Constantine to the bishops at the Council of Nicaea

Among the legal petitions, military dispatches and diplomatic notes from all over the ancient world that reached the palace of the Augustus were two letters that had nothing at all to do with affairs of state. Each one was signed by an ardent and eloquent Christian cleric who carefully argued the merits of his case in the arcane theological debate over Arianism that raged within Christianity, and each appealed to Constantine to act as the final arbiter and decide the case in his favor. Thus did the question of the begottenness or unbegottenness of Jesus Christ come to the attention of the man who ruled the Roman empire.

“It were better not to have asked,” replied Constantine, “nor to have answered such questions.”
¹

Constantine never fully grasped the finer points of the argument that he was called upon to decide one way or the other—but he was quick to understand the dangers of dissent against authority, and he knew well how to go about suppressing it. Indeed, his preference for monotheism over polytheism reflected his own ambition to achieve the same absolute power on earth that the Christian god was believed to exercise in heaven. “The division of the Empire into four sections by Diocletian required four divine patrons for the four rulers,” explains historian Andrew Alfoldi. “The restoration of the unity of the Empire, on the other hand, led inevitably to the belief that a single divine power must watch over the single earthly ruler.”
²

“Just as there is only one God, and not two or three or more,” affirms Eusebius, “so there is only one Emperor.”
³

Christianity also appealed to Constantine’s preference for order over chaos. Polytheism, as we have seen, empowered every person across the Roman empire to seek spiritual truth from whatever source he or she found most appealing, but the church demanded absolute and unquestioning obedience of everyone who had been admitted to communion. “How could Constantine,” asks Alfoldi, “fail to see the advantages of this unique organization?”
⁴
Constantine had been instructed in the dangers of heresy—a wholly new concept for a lifelong pagan—by the Christian priests who were now among his closest advisers, and he had taken the lessons to heart. “We have received from Divine Providence,” he said of himself, “the supreme favor of being relieved from all error.”
⁵

“The First Totalitarian State in History”

As a ruthless campaigner and an expert intriguer, Constantine was perfectly willing and able to search out and punish anyone who challenged his political authority. Among his innovations, for example, was the establishment of the so-called
agentes in rebus
, a corps of imperial couriers who served as fixers, enforcers and informers. These “doers of things,” as the Latin phrase is rendered in literal English, functioned as the ancient equivalent of a secret police, and they came to be feared and loathed by the men and women of all ranks and stations on whom they spied. The very existence of such apparatus of state security is what prompts biographer A. N. Wilson to characterize imperial Rome as “the first totalitarian state in history.”
⁶

The mind-twisting abstractions of theology, of course, were less threatening to Constantine than political intrigue, but he feared that one might encourage the other. Thus, for example, he banned private acts of divination out of concern that the auguries might encourage enemies of the state to conspire against his regime. If a soothsayer predicted the death of the emperor, the prediction might encourage a would-be assassin to make it happen. For the same reason, he continued the ancient practice of consulting the College of Haruspices, the imperial diviners, to interpret the meaning of a lightning strike on the palace or some other public structure. If the Haruspices detected a plot against Constantine, he wanted to know about it. The Christian clerics in his court condemned
all
pagan divination as the work of the devil, but Constantine did not care about the source of intelligence if it resulted in the arrest, torture and death of anyone who conspired against him.

Conflict and dissension within the church had long troubled Constantine, but all his earlier efforts to tame the unruly Christians had been defeated by the ardor with which the various factions battled against one another. The Donatists, for example, stubbornly clung to the Church of the Martyrs despite the escalating series of imperial measures that were designed to bring them back into the orthodox church. When arbitration and conciliation proved futile, Constantine resorted to banishment of Donatist bishops and seizure of their churches. The Donatists, however, still refused to recognize the authority of a church whose high clergy they regarded as cowardly and even traitorous.

Still, notably, Constantine did
not
resort to the threat or use of torture or capital punishment in dealing with the bitter debate over religious belief and practice—he preferred persuasion to coercion when it came to matters of faith. He may have placed himself under the protection of the Christian god, he may have bestowed his own largesse on those who worshiped the Only True God, but he still acted in the spirit of tolerance that was so deeply embedded in the pagan mind. “Let those who still delight in error be assured of the same degree of peace and tranquility as those who already believe,” he declares in one of his encyclicals. “It is one thing voluntarily to take up the fight for eternal life; it is quite another to compel others to do so from fear of punishment.”
⁷

Now that he reigned over a newly unified empire, however, Constantine resolved to use his influence and authority to unify the Christian church, too. As the one and only Augustus, he was ready to recognize the one and only god of the Christians—and he expected the Christians to submit to the sovereignty of one god, one emperor and one church. Christian theology, as we have seen, provided the rationale for absolute monarchy—a single all-powerful deity reigned in heaven, and a single all-powerful monarch reigned on earth. Thus did Constantine claim to be nothing less than “the vice-regent of God,”
⁸
and his coinage declared him to be “Ruler of the Whole World.” As such, Constantine regarded the theological civil war that the Christians were waging among themselves over the nature of the Only True God as both unseemly and unsafe.

On the occasion of his
vicennalia
, the twentieth anniversary of his accession to the throne, Constantine invited all the bishops of the Roman empire, some 300 or more, to gather at the palace at Nicaea. To speed them on their way, he granted them free passage on the imperial mail coaches that crisscrossed the network of Roman roads. As they arrived, he welcomed them with rich gifts, housed them in comfort, provided them with abundant food and drink. But he expected the quarrelsome churchmen to present him with something in return: the restoration of the “Peace of the Church.” Constantine sought to impose law and order on the church in the same way that he had successfully imposed law and order on the empire that he ruled as the sole and absolute Augustus.

Constantine and the Confessors

Among the bishops who gathered at the emperor’s charming lakeside villa at Nicaea in the spring of 325 were “confessors” who had suffered at the hands of the imperial authorities rather than surrender their Bibles or sacrifice to the pagan gods. Not so long ago, they had placed their own lives at risk by defying the harsh decrees of one Roman emperor, but now they found themselves enjoying the hospitality of another, more benevolent one. For these venerable heroes of the Great Persecution, the opening ceremonies of the so-called Council of Nicaea were tinged with deep and bitter irony.

Constantine, after all, wore the imperial diadem that had once crowned the heads of the emperors who had been their tormentors. The Roman legionnaires who lined the approach to the palace wore the same uniforms as the soldiers who had dragged them into dungeons where they were put to torture. As they walked past the guard of honor and entered the vast hall where Constantine waited to receive them, more than a few of the bishops hobbled on legs that had been sliced or shattered beyond healing. At the most sublime moment, according to one eyewitness account, Constantine himself bent down to kiss the empty eye sockets of a blind old man whose eyes had been gouged out by the imperial torturers during the Great Persecution.

“One might have thought it a foreshadowing of Christ’s kingdom,” enthuses Eusebius of Caesarea, “and a dream rather than a reality.”
⁹

Constantine, in fact, pointedly showed his deference to the convocation of bishops. His entourage consisted only of his family and a few of the Christians who served in his court—the bodyguard that always accompanied the emperor had been left outside the hall. He remained standing until one of the bishops granted him permission to be seated on his gilded throne, a reversal of the protocol that usually governed an audience with the Roman emperor. When the bishops celebrated the Christian rite of the Eucharist, he dutifully rose and left the hall—since he had not been baptized, he was not permitted to participate in the Holy Communion.

Yet Constantine was not wholly self-abasing in the presence of the bishops who had answered his call and were now dutifully gathered before him. He was arrayed in a gold and purple mantle, which symbolized his imperial authority, and he was perfectly willing to lecture the churchmen on their duties. When he rose to address the Council of Nicaea, Constantine did not bother to comment on any of the bitter disputes that had prompted him to summon the bishops in the first place. Significantly, he spoke in Latin, the official language of government, rather than Greek, the language of theology and the Christian Bible. And he made it clear that unity within the church was as crucial as unity within the empire.

“I will and wish for all of you peace and unanimity,” declared the old warrior whose sword had been washed in the blood of his vanquished enemies, foreign and domestic.
¹⁰
“Internal strife within the Church of God is far more evil and dangerous than any kind of war.”
¹¹

The Government of All Earthly Things

The Council of Nicaea was charged by the emperor with the task of curing all of the afflictions that disturbed the Peace of the Church. One of the most vexing problems was the date of Easter, a question that generated much bitterness because one faction relied on the Jewish calendar to determine the date and thus suffered the indignity of consulting the Jewish clergy to find out when to observe the holiest day in the Christian calendar. Another was the making of peace within the Christian community in Egypt; a breakaway faction in Alexandria, the Meletians, just like the Donatists in Carthage, refused to recognize the authority of the orthodox bishops, whom they accused of having been
traditores
during the Great Persecution, and declared their allegiance to the Church of the Martyrs. As for the subtle and corrosive debate between Arius and his adversaries over the proper distinction to be made between God the Father and God the Son—the debate over “the important diphthong”—all that mattered to Constantine was that the question be decided one way or the other and the whole noisy argument be silenced once and for all.

Constantine always claimed to be acting out of lofty Christian motives in addressing churchly matters, but even his most pious utterances betray a certain pragmatic concern that is more characteristic of polytheism than of monotheism. The traditional pagan idea of the “peace of the gods” was based on the sure conviction that a deity must be cosseted in order to win and keep its divine favor. Any offensive words or deeds by the worshiper posed the danger of alienating the god to whom worship was offered. Constantine took the same stance in his dealings with the new deity who had granted him victory over his enemies. The clamor in the church must be quieted so that the Christian god would not be disquieted. What was at stake, as far as Constantine was concerned, was the very survival of his imperial regime.

“I consider it utterly contrary to divine law that we should neglect such quarrels and disputes, by which the Highest Divinity may perhaps be roused to anger not only against the human race but also against me myself, to whose care He has entrusted, by His celestial will, the government of all earthly things,” Constantine declared when he first attempted to repair the breach between the orthodox church and the Church of the Martyrs. “For I shall not be able to feel truly and fully secure . . . until I see everyone venerating the Most Holy God in the proper cult of the catholic religion with harmonious brotherhood of worship.”
¹²

The fact that Constantine mentions himself as often as God or the church reveals the real and urgent concern that prompted him to convene the Council of Nicaea. Indeed, if the Arian controversy interested the emperor at all, it was only out of the anxiety that the god of the Christians, who had entrusted Constantine with “the government of all earthly things,” might grow so displeased with Constantine’s apparent inability to silence the debate that he would change his mind and choose someone else to govern over the Roman empire.