2. THE STATE DE-PAGANISED
The famous edict of Constantine and Licinius is by no means a charter of rights and privileges. It is a political act, and as such is conditioned by the circumstances of the moment. Both of these emperors had long been agreed that the persecution menaced the future of the State. If one of them was recently converted to a belief in Christianity -- and the belief was as yet incomplete -- his colleague, however, still remained a Pagan. Constantine himself could have no policy which went beyond the maintenance of a balance between the two religions, and the language of the edict, as far as we can tell, is not that of a Christian at all. In this respect it is very evidently the supplement to the act of 311 and the spirit it breathes is that of the " deistic " monotheism which was the reigning fashion at the court. It is an arrangement prepared by Constantine which his colleague accepts, and which is expressed in tactfully neutral language. The motive for the new policy is no longer the restoration of the old Roman ways but simply " the public good." This is unattainable if due honours are not rendered to "the divinity." That these honours may be rendered, all who honour "the divinity" have leave to do so -- Christians with the rest. Thus the edict does not by any means proclaim universal toleration. "To the Christians and to all men we decree there be given free power to follow whatever religion each man chooses, that, whatever gods there be, they may be moved mercifully in regard to ourselves and those over whom we exercise authority" -- an insurance devised possibly to comfort the devout Pagan critic against vengeance from the old gods for any apostasy implied in the act. The edict, then, grants once more what Alexander Severus had first granted, and then Gallienus thirty years later. But this time the grant is explicitly built into the law as a fundamental principle of public welfare; and the emperors from whom it emanates are no religious dilettantes, nor weaklings anxious at a crisis to rally a disunited people. They are conquerors, one of them the empire's greatest soldier for generations and a whole-hearted convert to the faith, and the edict is the sign of their conquest. But it does more than restore liberties. A further clause gives the surest of all guarantees that the toleration is no mere matter of form, no political trick of the moment. It decrees the restoration to Christians of whatever property has been confiscated "without any price asked or any transference money. . . without delay and without discussion." [1]
That Constantine's conversion to a belief that Jesus Christ is the one only God was sincere is certain, and equally certain his subsequent loyalty to what he considered to be the best interests of the Church through which the one God chose to be worshipped. But whatever the growth of his knowledge of his new faith and of his attachment to it, he remained, as emperor, faithful to the principles of the edict of 313. Even had he desired to christianise the State, the difficulties before him would have prevented it. The Christians were by no means in the majority. The West especially, his own sphere of operations, was strongly Pagan; [2] and its anti-Christian habits and traditional prejudice survived for the best part of the next hundred years. If there were Christians who, impatiently, demanded a reversal of roles and repression of the Pagans they found no welcome at the court. Whatever the emperor's personal preferences, he maintained the Pagans in the posts they occupied; and he continued to be the Pontifex Maximus of the Pagan Cults. So bound up with the old religion was the imperial office, that to have abolished the pontificate at that moment would have been to strip himself of vast prestige and authority; to have transferred the office to another would have been almost an abdication. Tertullian had plainly said that no man could become emperor and remain a Christian, and for the next sixty years the Christian Emperor proved him right to this extent, at least, that he retained and exercised the supreme headship of the Pagan Cults. Finally, for the first eleven years which followed the edict, Constantine's colleague was a Pagan, and a Pagan who gradually grew hostile to Christianity.
In 323 there was a breach between the two emperors in which religious differences played their part. Licinius abandoned the policy of 313 and, in the States of the eastern Empire, the persecution raged once more. Constantine's victory at Chrysopolis (September, 323) brought this to an end, and it ended, too, the reign of Licinius. Six months later his death -- in which not improbably Constantine had a share -- left Constantine without a rival, sole master of the whole Roman world. His new, unquestioned supremacy found expression in a notable change of the form of his language about matters religious. So far he had kept studiously to the neutrality of 313. He had, as Pontifex Maximus, carried through certain reforms -- divination in secret was henceforward forbidden, and certain abuses in magical rites. As emperor he had granted the Catholic clergy those exemptions from the burdens of citizenship which the Pagan priests had always enjoyed, he had given the churches the right to receive legacies and he had made the Sunday a legal holiday. In his language he had been as impartial as in his actions, and not a sign escaped to show publicly his increasing contempt for the stupidities of the old polytheism and for its superstitions. But now, victorious over a Paganism lately militant, and master for the first time in the more Christian part of the Empire, he was free to express his personal sentiments. In the proclamation which announced the victory to the bishops of the East, he tells the story of his conversion, describes the atrocities of Diocletian's persecution, speaks of himself as brought to the Faith by God to be the means of the Faith's triumph, and declares that he takes up the government of his new State " full of faith in the grace which has confided to me this holy duty." There is a like change in his language to his Pagan subjects. The policy of 313 is scrupulously maintained, but he does not hesitate to speak of Pagan " obstinacy," of their " misguided rites and ceremonial," of their "temples of lying" which contrast so strikingly with "the splendours of the home of truth."
The convert emperor no longer hides his contempt for Paganism, but he is careful still to distribute offices to Christian and Pagan alike. All are equal, and both religions equal, before the law.
The first breach in this policy of neutrality was the work of his sons. Constantine died in 337 leaving as heirs his three sons, Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans. The eldest died three years later, and the new law bears the signature of the two younger brothers. It declares the abolition of all sacrifices and threatens dire punishment to those who contravene it (341). Among one section of the Christians its enactment was the occasion of great joy. They exhorted the emperors to go further still. Whence so great an uneasiness among the Pagans that, a year later, the emperor in the West, Constans, the vast majority of whose subjects were Pagans, published a new law to reassure them, ordering special care for the historic temples of the old capital. Ten years later Constantius II, now sole emperor, published a new edict which threatened death to those who worshipped idols. The temples were to be closed, the sacrifices to cease. No doubt where the thing was peaceably possible the law was enforced. But despite the law the facts show the old religion as still flourishing unhindered throughout the West. All the old feasts were observed at Rome, with all the accustomed sacrifices, in the year which followed this law (354), and in the very year which saw its renewal Constantius II himself, visiting Rome, confirmed the privileges of the different cults, the subsidies of public money granted to them and, acting as Pontifex Maximus, he filled the vacant priestships by nominations of different members of the Roman aristocracy. This contrast between the terrifying threats, and the impotent toleration of those who ignored the threats was characteristic of the general policy of Constantine's vacillating successors. They repudiated their father's policy, and were yet too weak to enforce the repudiation. The chief effect of their legislation was to irritate the Pagans, and to prepare the way for the anti-Christian reaction which followed under Julian.
Julian (361-363), the successor of Constantius II, has gone down to history as Julian the Apostate, but the title is hardly fair, for though Julian set himself to reverse the policy of the previous fifty years and to restore Paganism, it is hard to see that he was ever a Christian at all, and he certainly was never a Catholic. He was a nephew of Constantine and, a child of five at the emperor's death, one of the very few near relations of the new emperors who survived the general massacre designed to remove possible rivals to their succession. For these massacres, in which his father, two uncles, and a brother perished, Julian declared Constantius II responsible, and in this personal hatred of Constantius, which deepened after that emperor's execution in 354 of Julian's only surviving brother, may be found one reason for Julian's fanatical hatred of everything Christian. His earliest education he received under the care of the arch-Arians Eusebius of Nicomedia, George of Cappadocia and Aetius; and once his childhood was past he was deprived of even this pale reflection of Christian truth. In place of Arian bishops and their sterile logomachies, he now had hellenists to tutor him, and in the distant and lonely palaces to which he was exiled, the imaginative boy grew to adolescence and early manhood, dreaming of a revival of the Paganism of the poets and the philosophers. His own religion was little more than a devotion to the classic Greek Culture, a thing intellectual, literary, artistic. His philosophy was the neo-Platonism of the day, something of Plotinus and much more of superstition and magic, a melange that had in it something of the modern Theosophy cults and Spiritualism, with a veneer of elaborate ritual. The thing he planned to revive had never existed; it was the golden age of every adolescent's dreaming fancy, the past seen through the idealism of literature. But for all his bookishness the shy, reserved, and ascetic young man showed his gifts as a ruler once his cousin named him Caesar (358), and enough of political ambition once the troops hailed him Emperor (360) to take the offensive against Constantius II. But the sudden death of Constantius (Nov., 361) gave him the mastery of the world without a battle, and for twenty months he ruled supreme. It was too short a time for any permanent accomplishment, and his revival had the ultimate effect of all schemes that plan to ride the skies and fail. It left the prestige of the old religion very much lower than it had found it, left it indeed covered with ridicule.
For the greatest attempt of all was now made to organise Paganism, its cults and its priesthood; to give it a coherent body of doctrine, a fixed and regular liturgy. Its priests, on the model of the Christian clergy, were to be teachers, and schools of Pagan theology were established. The practice of good works was to be a function of the new religion; orphanages, hospitals, asylums to be founded in which the new Pagan virtue of charity would find expression. Nothing was less in keeping with the facts of the old Paganism, nothing less in accord with the Roman tradition, than the new priesthood as Julian planned it, influenced obviously by the desire to defeat Christianity by copying the Christian spirit. The Roman priest had been an important personage in the political and social life of the day. High rank in the priestly college, and high office in the State had always gone together. But Julian's priests were to live like monks, ascetics, carefully avoiding contact with the evil world, given to a life of virtue, and service, prayerful, studious, continent.
The sacrifices were restored and carried out on an enormous scale, Julian himself as Pontifex -- against all tradition -- actually immolating the victims. The Christian magistrates and officers were replaced. The Christian clergy lost all their privileges. They lost, too, what pensions the State had begun to pay them, and were obliged to restore what they had already received. Even the Christian poor were made to give back the alms which the imperial charity had assigned them. The temples, too, where these had fallen into decay, were to be restored at the expense of the Christians. But the edict most complained of was that which expelled the Christians from the schools. No Christian was henceforth to be allowed to teach or to study the ancient classical authors. "Let them keep to Matthew and Luke," said Julian. Rhetoric, Philosophy, Political Science -- to the Christian henceforward these were banned, and with them all hope of a professional career.
All this was but the preparation for a revival of the older persecution of blood -- none too easy a matter in 361 with Christianity strong through fifty years of State favour, and entrenched in all the high places of the State. Julian did not live long enough to launch another frontal attack. Death claimed him before he had the chance to show his quality as a philosophical Decius or Diocletian. But every encouragement was given to the Pagans to attack the Christians. Anti-Christian riots went unchecked, excesses, massacres even, went unpunished. To the Christians who appealed against the indifference of the officials, who stood by while property was destroyed and lives were lost, the emperor mockingly recalled that it was part of their faith to suffer wrong patiently. Martyrs there were as fifty years before, but condemned and put to death now, ostensibly, for rebellion or treason -- a new legal trickery intended to rob their deaths of any religious significance.
The persecution ended very suddenly. On June 26, 363, Julian was slain, fighting the perpetual enemy of the East, Persia, testifying with his last breath, according to Theodoret's account, Whom he had fought, and by Whom he was conquered " Galilean, Thou hast triumphed." The army gave him Jovian for a successor and Jovian was a Catholic. Without any elaborate measure of repression, the whole edifice of Julian's "Church" crumbled and fell. The new edict restoring religious toleration, and the statutes of Constantine's regime, was enough. The dead thing lately galvanised into a semblance of life ceased to move, the apostates who had served it returned to Christianity more easily than they had left it. The path to the inevitable Christianising of the State was once more open.
But despite the opportunity a reaction always presents to the victorious reactionaries, the movement to de-Paganise the State halted for another ten years and more. Jovian reigned only nine months and his successor, Valentinian I (364-75), though a Catholic, was as emperor more neutral than Constantine himself. The temples remained open, the oracles were consulted as of old; and if he took from the temples the properties which Constantius II had confiscated to the benefit of the Church, and which Julian had recently restored to the temples, Valentinian did not make them over to the Church once again, but ordered that they should revert to the imperial treasury. As he held himself aloof from the controversy between Catholics and Arians, declaring " I am a layman. It is no business of mine to scrutinise Christian dogma. That is the bishop's affair," so he showed a like indifferent neutrality in the edict which reversed Julian's educational policy; " Whoever is worthy by character and by talent to educate youth shall have the right to open a school or to gather together once more his dispersed scholars." Later in his reign (371) he is even more explicitly averse from any anti-Pagan legislation. "I do not consider this art to be criminal," he declared to the Pagan augurs, "nor indeed any of the religious observances established by our ancestors. The laws enacted at the beginning of my reign are proof of this. They grant to every man the right to follow whatever religion he prefers. I do not, therefore, condemn the auspices. I simply forbid them to be used for criminal purposes."
In the Eastern Empire, where Valentinian's brother Valens ruled (364-378), there was during these years an actual patronage of Paganism. Valens was determined that his Christian subjects should all be Arians. The thirteen years of his rule were for the Catholics of the East a long reign of terror, and in his measures of repression the emperor gladly made use of the Pagans.
Valentinian I died in 375 and with the accession of his son the youthful Gratian (375-383) the religious situation changed immediately, for the new emperor refused to be Pontifex Maximus with the words " A robe such as this does not become a Christian," and abolished the office. The anomaly of the Catholic functioning as the chief priest of Paganism was at an end; and Paganism, the head of the State declining to be its chief priest, may be considered henceforth as "disestablished." It remained to disendow the institution, and this Gratian did seven years later. By an act of the year 382 the privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the Pagan priesthood were abolished, the property of the temples confiscated and henceforward all legacies to temples were null and void.
About the same time the statue of the goddess Victory that stood in the senate chamber at Rome was removed. This statue, to which the senators offered incense as they entered, and through whose presence the goddess herself in some sense presided over the debates of the empire's most venerable institution, had come to be the very symbol of Paganism's official primacy. It had already been removed in the time of Constantius II (357) but, to appease the storm of angry protests, it was speedily replaced. The aristocratic families of the old capital were, in fact -- along with the intelligentsia and the half-educated everywhere -- the last champions of the cults. Among the first there had developed a new, obstinate ardour about the rites and liturgies; with the men of letters it was an attachment to professional ideals, a dislike for Christianity as the feared foe of beauty and culture, whose triumph would be the triumph of barbarism. What a reality these last oppositions were, and how powerful was their main weapon -- scorn -- the elaborate constructive apologetic of St. Augustine remains to show, the De Civitate Dei. The protestations of the senatorial aristocracy were now renewed and, Gratian being murdered the following year, and the regent for his child-successor -- Valentinian II -- being an Arian, the Pagans might easily have secured the replacement of the statue once more. That they did not do so was due to the vigorous opposition of the Bishop of Milan, at this time the imperial capital. This was the great man who, until lately, had been governor of the province, one of the last of the Romans, St. Ambrose. He had been Gratian's tutor, as he was now the tutor and protector of the child-emperor. He had been the emperor's adviser in matters temporal no less than spiritual, an ambassador, more than once, where a delicate situation called for the experienced wisdom of the man in whom the Roman administrator and the Catholic bishop were so well combined. St. Ambrose is an augury of what the Middle Ages, at their best, are to be, and in nothing is he more so than in his bold defiance of the Empress Justina in this matter of the statue of Victory. Thanks to his vigour and prudence the policy of Gratian suffered no setback. Upon Paganism it produced the expected result. There was not enough faith in the cults to keep them alive once the revenues went, and with the disappearance of the priestly aristocracy whom those revenues nourished there disappeared, too, the social prestige which was the old religion's chief asset. There was no attempt to punish Pagans for belief or for practice. There was no Christian revenge, and no attempt, as yet, to substitute Christianity for Paganism as the official religion of the State. The Roman Empire was, for the moment, a State in which religion and the republic were things entirely separate. Under Gratian's successor the policy was to reach its logical conclusion. It was Theodosius who first made the State a Catholic thing.
Theodosius (379-395); the one great man the Empire produced in the two centuries which separate Constantine and Justinian, was that phenomenon hitherto rare, an emperor baptised from the beginning of his reign and a convinced practising Catholic. The Catholicism of his regular private life was the mainspring of his public action as the Catholic Emperor. He was not only Latin -- almost the first emperor for a hundred and fifty years not born East of the Adriatic -- but he came from the most Latin province of all the West, Spain. He had pre-eminently all the Latin virtues; he had a logical mind, an inexhaustible fund of personal energy, a temperament made for prompt solutions, and impatient of half measures. When Valens died, in 378, Gratian had associated Theodosius as his partner and assigned to him the difficult task of restoring the East to something like peace and contentment after half a century of religious disunion that bordered on civil war.
From the beginning Theodosius was definite. The long domination of the little clique of Arian bishops, in whose influence at court lay the real cause of the troubles, came to an end. Catholicism was freed; and security for its future provided in the first code for the repression of heresy. Orthodox Christianity received its first description in civil law as "the faith which the Roman Church has received from the Apostle Peter," it is the faith "professed by the pontiff Damasus and Peter Bishop of Alexandria." The churches of heretics of every sort, Anomeans, Arians, Apollinarians, Macedonians, are to be confiscated and handed over to the Catholics. Heretical assemblies are forbidden and heretics lose all power of making wills or of inheriting. Six times in the next fifteen years these laws are renewed.
Towards the Pagans, on the other hand, Theodosius is much less rigorous. There is a law against apostates from Christianity to Paganism, and all sacrifices to divine the future are now strictly forbidden. Divination of all kinds is abolished. On the eve of his succession to the Western Empire (391) upon the death of Valentinian II, an edict closes all the temples once and for all. Gradually they are given over to other uses. Finally, in the year in which Theodosius becomes master of the whole Roman world (392), the law occupies itself with the domestic religion which was the last refuge of Paganism, as, in Rome at least, it had been the place whence it sprang. All household rites are forbidden, all the domestic shrines are to be destroyed. But with all this anti-Pagan legislation it is to be noted that there is no attempt to compel the Pagan to become a Christian. Christian and Pagan are equal before the law. Honours and office continue to go impartially to the one as to the other. There is no violence offered to persons. The supports of the old religion have been ruthlessly struck away. The structure will soon fall of itself. Pagans remain, and will remain, here and there for a century yet, especially in the country districts. The old cults will, finally, come to be so associated with rusticity that the Roman's very name for a countryman (paganus) will for ever describe, and describe primarily, one who worships the old gods. Pagans, countryfolk, living remotely and divorced from the day's life and culture, ignorantly clinging to ancient superstitions and rites, backwoodsmen, there still will be in plenty; and for three centuries after Theodosius the business of their conversion will occupy the Church; but Paganism, with Theodosius, dies never to rise again.
1J. R. Palanque notes, as an important change, that now, for the first time, each Christian community, each church, is given legal recognition: previously it had been the Christian religion as such; F. & M. III, 22.
2One tenth only of the population Christian: so J. R. Palanque in F. & M. III 27 note 6.
The famous edict of Constantine and Licinius is by no means a charter of rights and privileges. It is a political act, and as such is conditioned by the circumstances of the moment. Both of these emperors had long been agreed that the persecution menaced the future of the State. If one of them was recently converted to a belief in Christianity -- and the belief was as yet incomplete -- his colleague, however, still remained a Pagan. Constantine himself could have no policy which went beyond the maintenance of a balance between the two religions, and the language of the edict, as far as we can tell, is not that of a Christian at all. In this respect it is very evidently the supplement to the act of 311 and the spirit it breathes is that of the " deistic " monotheism which was the reigning fashion at the court. It is an arrangement prepared by Constantine which his colleague accepts, and which is expressed in tactfully neutral language. The motive for the new policy is no longer the restoration of the old Roman ways but simply " the public good." This is unattainable if due honours are not rendered to "the divinity." That these honours may be rendered, all who honour "the divinity" have leave to do so -- Christians with the rest. Thus the edict does not by any means proclaim universal toleration. "To the Christians and to all men we decree there be given free power to follow whatever religion each man chooses, that, whatever gods there be, they may be moved mercifully in regard to ourselves and those over whom we exercise authority" -- an insurance devised possibly to comfort the devout Pagan critic against vengeance from the old gods for any apostasy implied in the act. The edict, then, grants once more what Alexander Severus had first granted, and then Gallienus thirty years later. But this time the grant is explicitly built into the law as a fundamental principle of public welfare; and the emperors from whom it emanates are no religious dilettantes, nor weaklings anxious at a crisis to rally a disunited people. They are conquerors, one of them the empire's greatest soldier for generations and a whole-hearted convert to the faith, and the edict is the sign of their conquest. But it does more than restore liberties. A further clause gives the surest of all guarantees that the toleration is no mere matter of form, no political trick of the moment. It decrees the restoration to Christians of whatever property has been confiscated "without any price asked or any transference money. . . without delay and without discussion." [1]
That Constantine's conversion to a belief that Jesus Christ is the one only God was sincere is certain, and equally certain his subsequent loyalty to what he considered to be the best interests of the Church through which the one God chose to be worshipped. But whatever the growth of his knowledge of his new faith and of his attachment to it, he remained, as emperor, faithful to the principles of the edict of 313. Even had he desired to christianise the State, the difficulties before him would have prevented it. The Christians were by no means in the majority. The West especially, his own sphere of operations, was strongly Pagan; [2] and its anti-Christian habits and traditional prejudice survived for the best part of the next hundred years. If there were Christians who, impatiently, demanded a reversal of roles and repression of the Pagans they found no welcome at the court. Whatever the emperor's personal preferences, he maintained the Pagans in the posts they occupied; and he continued to be the Pontifex Maximus of the Pagan Cults. So bound up with the old religion was the imperial office, that to have abolished the pontificate at that moment would have been to strip himself of vast prestige and authority; to have transferred the office to another would have been almost an abdication. Tertullian had plainly said that no man could become emperor and remain a Christian, and for the next sixty years the Christian Emperor proved him right to this extent, at least, that he retained and exercised the supreme headship of the Pagan Cults. Finally, for the first eleven years which followed the edict, Constantine's colleague was a Pagan, and a Pagan who gradually grew hostile to Christianity.
In 323 there was a breach between the two emperors in which religious differences played their part. Licinius abandoned the policy of 313 and, in the States of the eastern Empire, the persecution raged once more. Constantine's victory at Chrysopolis (September, 323) brought this to an end, and it ended, too, the reign of Licinius. Six months later his death -- in which not improbably Constantine had a share -- left Constantine without a rival, sole master of the whole Roman world. His new, unquestioned supremacy found expression in a notable change of the form of his language about matters religious. So far he had kept studiously to the neutrality of 313. He had, as Pontifex Maximus, carried through certain reforms -- divination in secret was henceforward forbidden, and certain abuses in magical rites. As emperor he had granted the Catholic clergy those exemptions from the burdens of citizenship which the Pagan priests had always enjoyed, he had given the churches the right to receive legacies and he had made the Sunday a legal holiday. In his language he had been as impartial as in his actions, and not a sign escaped to show publicly his increasing contempt for the stupidities of the old polytheism and for its superstitions. But now, victorious over a Paganism lately militant, and master for the first time in the more Christian part of the Empire, he was free to express his personal sentiments. In the proclamation which announced the victory to the bishops of the East, he tells the story of his conversion, describes the atrocities of Diocletian's persecution, speaks of himself as brought to the Faith by God to be the means of the Faith's triumph, and declares that he takes up the government of his new State " full of faith in the grace which has confided to me this holy duty." There is a like change in his language to his Pagan subjects. The policy of 313 is scrupulously maintained, but he does not hesitate to speak of Pagan " obstinacy," of their " misguided rites and ceremonial," of their "temples of lying" which contrast so strikingly with "the splendours of the home of truth."
The convert emperor no longer hides his contempt for Paganism, but he is careful still to distribute offices to Christian and Pagan alike. All are equal, and both religions equal, before the law.
The first breach in this policy of neutrality was the work of his sons. Constantine died in 337 leaving as heirs his three sons, Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans. The eldest died three years later, and the new law bears the signature of the two younger brothers. It declares the abolition of all sacrifices and threatens dire punishment to those who contravene it (341). Among one section of the Christians its enactment was the occasion of great joy. They exhorted the emperors to go further still. Whence so great an uneasiness among the Pagans that, a year later, the emperor in the West, Constans, the vast majority of whose subjects were Pagans, published a new law to reassure them, ordering special care for the historic temples of the old capital. Ten years later Constantius II, now sole emperor, published a new edict which threatened death to those who worshipped idols. The temples were to be closed, the sacrifices to cease. No doubt where the thing was peaceably possible the law was enforced. But despite the law the facts show the old religion as still flourishing unhindered throughout the West. All the old feasts were observed at Rome, with all the accustomed sacrifices, in the year which followed this law (354), and in the very year which saw its renewal Constantius II himself, visiting Rome, confirmed the privileges of the different cults, the subsidies of public money granted to them and, acting as Pontifex Maximus, he filled the vacant priestships by nominations of different members of the Roman aristocracy. This contrast between the terrifying threats, and the impotent toleration of those who ignored the threats was characteristic of the general policy of Constantine's vacillating successors. They repudiated their father's policy, and were yet too weak to enforce the repudiation. The chief effect of their legislation was to irritate the Pagans, and to prepare the way for the anti-Christian reaction which followed under Julian.
Julian (361-363), the successor of Constantius II, has gone down to history as Julian the Apostate, but the title is hardly fair, for though Julian set himself to reverse the policy of the previous fifty years and to restore Paganism, it is hard to see that he was ever a Christian at all, and he certainly was never a Catholic. He was a nephew of Constantine and, a child of five at the emperor's death, one of the very few near relations of the new emperors who survived the general massacre designed to remove possible rivals to their succession. For these massacres, in which his father, two uncles, and a brother perished, Julian declared Constantius II responsible, and in this personal hatred of Constantius, which deepened after that emperor's execution in 354 of Julian's only surviving brother, may be found one reason for Julian's fanatical hatred of everything Christian. His earliest education he received under the care of the arch-Arians Eusebius of Nicomedia, George of Cappadocia and Aetius; and once his childhood was past he was deprived of even this pale reflection of Christian truth. In place of Arian bishops and their sterile logomachies, he now had hellenists to tutor him, and in the distant and lonely palaces to which he was exiled, the imaginative boy grew to adolescence and early manhood, dreaming of a revival of the Paganism of the poets and the philosophers. His own religion was little more than a devotion to the classic Greek Culture, a thing intellectual, literary, artistic. His philosophy was the neo-Platonism of the day, something of Plotinus and much more of superstition and magic, a melange that had in it something of the modern Theosophy cults and Spiritualism, with a veneer of elaborate ritual. The thing he planned to revive had never existed; it was the golden age of every adolescent's dreaming fancy, the past seen through the idealism of literature. But for all his bookishness the shy, reserved, and ascetic young man showed his gifts as a ruler once his cousin named him Caesar (358), and enough of political ambition once the troops hailed him Emperor (360) to take the offensive against Constantius II. But the sudden death of Constantius (Nov., 361) gave him the mastery of the world without a battle, and for twenty months he ruled supreme. It was too short a time for any permanent accomplishment, and his revival had the ultimate effect of all schemes that plan to ride the skies and fail. It left the prestige of the old religion very much lower than it had found it, left it indeed covered with ridicule.
For the greatest attempt of all was now made to organise Paganism, its cults and its priesthood; to give it a coherent body of doctrine, a fixed and regular liturgy. Its priests, on the model of the Christian clergy, were to be teachers, and schools of Pagan theology were established. The practice of good works was to be a function of the new religion; orphanages, hospitals, asylums to be founded in which the new Pagan virtue of charity would find expression. Nothing was less in keeping with the facts of the old Paganism, nothing less in accord with the Roman tradition, than the new priesthood as Julian planned it, influenced obviously by the desire to defeat Christianity by copying the Christian spirit. The Roman priest had been an important personage in the political and social life of the day. High rank in the priestly college, and high office in the State had always gone together. But Julian's priests were to live like monks, ascetics, carefully avoiding contact with the evil world, given to a life of virtue, and service, prayerful, studious, continent.
The sacrifices were restored and carried out on an enormous scale, Julian himself as Pontifex -- against all tradition -- actually immolating the victims. The Christian magistrates and officers were replaced. The Christian clergy lost all their privileges. They lost, too, what pensions the State had begun to pay them, and were obliged to restore what they had already received. Even the Christian poor were made to give back the alms which the imperial charity had assigned them. The temples, too, where these had fallen into decay, were to be restored at the expense of the Christians. But the edict most complained of was that which expelled the Christians from the schools. No Christian was henceforth to be allowed to teach or to study the ancient classical authors. "Let them keep to Matthew and Luke," said Julian. Rhetoric, Philosophy, Political Science -- to the Christian henceforward these were banned, and with them all hope of a professional career.
All this was but the preparation for a revival of the older persecution of blood -- none too easy a matter in 361 with Christianity strong through fifty years of State favour, and entrenched in all the high places of the State. Julian did not live long enough to launch another frontal attack. Death claimed him before he had the chance to show his quality as a philosophical Decius or Diocletian. But every encouragement was given to the Pagans to attack the Christians. Anti-Christian riots went unchecked, excesses, massacres even, went unpunished. To the Christians who appealed against the indifference of the officials, who stood by while property was destroyed and lives were lost, the emperor mockingly recalled that it was part of their faith to suffer wrong patiently. Martyrs there were as fifty years before, but condemned and put to death now, ostensibly, for rebellion or treason -- a new legal trickery intended to rob their deaths of any religious significance.
The persecution ended very suddenly. On June 26, 363, Julian was slain, fighting the perpetual enemy of the East, Persia, testifying with his last breath, according to Theodoret's account, Whom he had fought, and by Whom he was conquered " Galilean, Thou hast triumphed." The army gave him Jovian for a successor and Jovian was a Catholic. Without any elaborate measure of repression, the whole edifice of Julian's "Church" crumbled and fell. The new edict restoring religious toleration, and the statutes of Constantine's regime, was enough. The dead thing lately galvanised into a semblance of life ceased to move, the apostates who had served it returned to Christianity more easily than they had left it. The path to the inevitable Christianising of the State was once more open.
But despite the opportunity a reaction always presents to the victorious reactionaries, the movement to de-Paganise the State halted for another ten years and more. Jovian reigned only nine months and his successor, Valentinian I (364-75), though a Catholic, was as emperor more neutral than Constantine himself. The temples remained open, the oracles were consulted as of old; and if he took from the temples the properties which Constantius II had confiscated to the benefit of the Church, and which Julian had recently restored to the temples, Valentinian did not make them over to the Church once again, but ordered that they should revert to the imperial treasury. As he held himself aloof from the controversy between Catholics and Arians, declaring " I am a layman. It is no business of mine to scrutinise Christian dogma. That is the bishop's affair," so he showed a like indifferent neutrality in the edict which reversed Julian's educational policy; " Whoever is worthy by character and by talent to educate youth shall have the right to open a school or to gather together once more his dispersed scholars." Later in his reign (371) he is even more explicitly averse from any anti-Pagan legislation. "I do not consider this art to be criminal," he declared to the Pagan augurs, "nor indeed any of the religious observances established by our ancestors. The laws enacted at the beginning of my reign are proof of this. They grant to every man the right to follow whatever religion he prefers. I do not, therefore, condemn the auspices. I simply forbid them to be used for criminal purposes."
In the Eastern Empire, where Valentinian's brother Valens ruled (364-378), there was during these years an actual patronage of Paganism. Valens was determined that his Christian subjects should all be Arians. The thirteen years of his rule were for the Catholics of the East a long reign of terror, and in his measures of repression the emperor gladly made use of the Pagans.
Valentinian I died in 375 and with the accession of his son the youthful Gratian (375-383) the religious situation changed immediately, for the new emperor refused to be Pontifex Maximus with the words " A robe such as this does not become a Christian," and abolished the office. The anomaly of the Catholic functioning as the chief priest of Paganism was at an end; and Paganism, the head of the State declining to be its chief priest, may be considered henceforth as "disestablished." It remained to disendow the institution, and this Gratian did seven years later. By an act of the year 382 the privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the Pagan priesthood were abolished, the property of the temples confiscated and henceforward all legacies to temples were null and void.
About the same time the statue of the goddess Victory that stood in the senate chamber at Rome was removed. This statue, to which the senators offered incense as they entered, and through whose presence the goddess herself in some sense presided over the debates of the empire's most venerable institution, had come to be the very symbol of Paganism's official primacy. It had already been removed in the time of Constantius II (357) but, to appease the storm of angry protests, it was speedily replaced. The aristocratic families of the old capital were, in fact -- along with the intelligentsia and the half-educated everywhere -- the last champions of the cults. Among the first there had developed a new, obstinate ardour about the rites and liturgies; with the men of letters it was an attachment to professional ideals, a dislike for Christianity as the feared foe of beauty and culture, whose triumph would be the triumph of barbarism. What a reality these last oppositions were, and how powerful was their main weapon -- scorn -- the elaborate constructive apologetic of St. Augustine remains to show, the De Civitate Dei. The protestations of the senatorial aristocracy were now renewed and, Gratian being murdered the following year, and the regent for his child-successor -- Valentinian II -- being an Arian, the Pagans might easily have secured the replacement of the statue once more. That they did not do so was due to the vigorous opposition of the Bishop of Milan, at this time the imperial capital. This was the great man who, until lately, had been governor of the province, one of the last of the Romans, St. Ambrose. He had been Gratian's tutor, as he was now the tutor and protector of the child-emperor. He had been the emperor's adviser in matters temporal no less than spiritual, an ambassador, more than once, where a delicate situation called for the experienced wisdom of the man in whom the Roman administrator and the Catholic bishop were so well combined. St. Ambrose is an augury of what the Middle Ages, at their best, are to be, and in nothing is he more so than in his bold defiance of the Empress Justina in this matter of the statue of Victory. Thanks to his vigour and prudence the policy of Gratian suffered no setback. Upon Paganism it produced the expected result. There was not enough faith in the cults to keep them alive once the revenues went, and with the disappearance of the priestly aristocracy whom those revenues nourished there disappeared, too, the social prestige which was the old religion's chief asset. There was no attempt to punish Pagans for belief or for practice. There was no Christian revenge, and no attempt, as yet, to substitute Christianity for Paganism as the official religion of the State. The Roman Empire was, for the moment, a State in which religion and the republic were things entirely separate. Under Gratian's successor the policy was to reach its logical conclusion. It was Theodosius who first made the State a Catholic thing.
Theodosius (379-395); the one great man the Empire produced in the two centuries which separate Constantine and Justinian, was that phenomenon hitherto rare, an emperor baptised from the beginning of his reign and a convinced practising Catholic. The Catholicism of his regular private life was the mainspring of his public action as the Catholic Emperor. He was not only Latin -- almost the first emperor for a hundred and fifty years not born East of the Adriatic -- but he came from the most Latin province of all the West, Spain. He had pre-eminently all the Latin virtues; he had a logical mind, an inexhaustible fund of personal energy, a temperament made for prompt solutions, and impatient of half measures. When Valens died, in 378, Gratian had associated Theodosius as his partner and assigned to him the difficult task of restoring the East to something like peace and contentment after half a century of religious disunion that bordered on civil war.
From the beginning Theodosius was definite. The long domination of the little clique of Arian bishops, in whose influence at court lay the real cause of the troubles, came to an end. Catholicism was freed; and security for its future provided in the first code for the repression of heresy. Orthodox Christianity received its first description in civil law as "the faith which the Roman Church has received from the Apostle Peter," it is the faith "professed by the pontiff Damasus and Peter Bishop of Alexandria." The churches of heretics of every sort, Anomeans, Arians, Apollinarians, Macedonians, are to be confiscated and handed over to the Catholics. Heretical assemblies are forbidden and heretics lose all power of making wills or of inheriting. Six times in the next fifteen years these laws are renewed.
Towards the Pagans, on the other hand, Theodosius is much less rigorous. There is a law against apostates from Christianity to Paganism, and all sacrifices to divine the future are now strictly forbidden. Divination of all kinds is abolished. On the eve of his succession to the Western Empire (391) upon the death of Valentinian II, an edict closes all the temples once and for all. Gradually they are given over to other uses. Finally, in the year in which Theodosius becomes master of the whole Roman world (392), the law occupies itself with the domestic religion which was the last refuge of Paganism, as, in Rome at least, it had been the place whence it sprang. All household rites are forbidden, all the domestic shrines are to be destroyed. But with all this anti-Pagan legislation it is to be noted that there is no attempt to compel the Pagan to become a Christian. Christian and Pagan are equal before the law. Honours and office continue to go impartially to the one as to the other. There is no violence offered to persons. The supports of the old religion have been ruthlessly struck away. The structure will soon fall of itself. Pagans remain, and will remain, here and there for a century yet, especially in the country districts. The old cults will, finally, come to be so associated with rusticity that the Roman's very name for a countryman (paganus) will for ever describe, and describe primarily, one who worships the old gods. Pagans, countryfolk, living remotely and divorced from the day's life and culture, ignorantly clinging to ancient superstitions and rites, backwoodsmen, there still will be in plenty; and for three centuries after Theodosius the business of their conversion will occupy the Church; but Paganism, with Theodosius, dies never to rise again.
1J. R. Palanque notes, as an important change, that now, for the first time, each Christian community, each church, is given legal recognition: previously it had been the Christian religion as such; F. & M. III, 22.
2One tenth only of the population Christian: so J. R. Palanque in F. & M. III 27 note 6.
