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There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ
Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire
By Michael Gaddis UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2005 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-93090-2
CHAPTER 1
"What Has the Emperor to Do with the Church?"
Persecution and Martyrdom from Diocletian to Constantine
"THE TRIUMPHS OF GOTHS AND SARMATIANS"
In late February of 303, the emperor Diocletian and his imperial colleagues issued an edict ordering churches to be destroyed, scriptures to be burned, and Christians to be dismissed from government service and stripped of civil rights. Diocletian, Galerius, and the rest of the imperial court in Nicomedia had lately celebrated the festival of the god Terminus—a fitting occasion, they thought, to undertake a campaign of repression that would put an end to the Christian religion once and for all. This marked the formal opening of the Great Persecution, the last and most brutal assault on Christians by the pagan Roman state.
The preceding four decades of peace, tolerance, and growth may have "softened" the church—as Eusebius charged—but some Christians were not willing to see their faith "terminated" without a fight. No sooner had the edict been posted than a prominent Christian angrily ripped it down and tore it to shreds, scornfully exclaiming, "These are the triumphs of Goths and Sarmatians!" We are told that the unnamed martyr then displayed an "admirable patience" as he was tortured and then burned alive. The opening act of the Great Persecution had already provoked defiance and brought imperial authority into contempt. This would not be the only such display. The universal sacrifice demanded by the authorities could not be reconciled with Christian faith. If God had not forbidden us to engage in idolatry, wrote Tertullian a century earlier, there would be no occasion for martyrdom! The "spiritual combat" long imagined by Christians was now a grim reality.
But the persecuting authorities were equally firm in their conviction that they, too, had no choice. Why did the odd and exclusive practices of a religious minority cause such concern to the leaders of the Roman state? Nearly a decade after the Persecution had begun, the pagan citizens of Tyre begged the emperor Maximinus Daia not to relent. Their petition did not fall on deaf ears. Maximinus' answer laid out, in stark language, exactly what was at stake:
For who can be found so ignorant or so devoid of all understanding as not to perceive that it is due to the kindly care of the gods that the earth does not refuse the seed sown in it, nor disappoint the hope of the husbandmen with vain expectation; that impious war is not inevitably fixed on earth, and wasted bodies dragged down to death under the influence of a corrupted atmosphere; that the sea is not swollen and raised on high by blasts of intemperate winds; that unexpected hurricanes do not burst forth and stir up the destructive tempest; moreover, that the earth, the nourisher and mother of all, is not shaken from its lowest depths with a terrible tremor, and that the mountains upon it do not sink into the opening chasms?
No one is ignorant that all these, and evils still worse than these, have oftentimes happened hitherto. And all these misfortunes have taken place on account of the destructive error of the empty vanity of these impious men.
The Christians' refusal to worship the gods—"atheism," to right-thinking pagans—threatened the hard-earned peace bestowed by those gods. Emperors as far back as Octavian Augustus had held that their primary duty was to safeguard thepax deorum, the ancient arrangement by which the gods provided peace, security, and prosperity to the human race in return for proper worship and sacrifices. If those gods did not receive what was due to them, disaster might result. It is intriguing to note the conflation of natural and man-made catastrophes in the imagination of Maximinus Daia and his contemporaries: flood, earthquake, famine, and plague loomed alongside barbarian invasion and civil war, all part of the same moral universe. The gods worked their will through agents both natural and human. Above all the emperors feared internal division, and the political violence that might erupt therefrom. The decade-long Great Persecution coincided with the gradual and bloody unravelling of the precarious Tetrarchic peace. In an irony that would be characteristic of both pagan authorities and also their later Christian counterparts, official attempts to impose unity often unleashed the very violence they sought to avoid.
Pagans' fear of their gods' anger expressed itself in ways surprisingly similar to Christian discussions of God's wrath. Lactantius' treatise On the Anger of God, penned in the aftermath of the Persecution, offered a powerful argument for the place of anger in divine justice. Without divine anger, Lactantius argued, there would be no fear among mortals. Without fear of God, there could be no religion and no morality. Just as God himself is angry at those who transgress his laws, so does he command us to imitate that anger, and act upon it, in opposing and punishing evil. When the divine law was transgressed by a few, risking a wrath that might fall upon everyone, then leniency toward the guilty equalled cruelty to the innocent. Even while rejecting their authority in religious matters, the Christians had always conceded to the pagan emperors a special role in enforcing God's justice. Most pagans, meanwhile, saw the righteous anger of their own gods as providing moral force to worldly law for the punishment of evildoers. Despite their sharp disagreements over religion, the underlying conceptions of justice and of a ruler's responsibilities did not differ greatly between pagans and Christians. Both sides projected onto their respective divinities their own anger at the other's behavior. In ordering the punishment of Christians, the pagan authorities would have understood themselves to be undertaking an unpleasant but necessary duty.
Christians had long been scapegoats for popular fears of divine anger, as Tertullian had famously complained: "If the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightaway the cry is, 'Christians to the lion!'" In the first two centuries after Christ, persecution of Christians had been mainly local and sporadic. In the absence of any coherent imperial policy or sense of urgency from the center, magistrates typically acted in response to popular prejudice. A significant shift took place in the late third century, as first Decius and Valerian and then (after a forty-year hiatus) the Tetrarchs launched coordinated, empire-wide attempts to enforce religious unity and stamp out Christian "atheism." A number of factors had combined to drive this shift in imperial religious policy. Earlier emperors' concern for the pax deorum had led them to legislate on the practices and morals of Rome's senatorial and equestrian elites. By the third century, grants of universal citizenship and the long process of Romanization had expanded the definition of "Roman" to encompass more or less everyone in the empire. Now the gods of Rome were, at least in theory, everyone's gods. The military and political turmoil of the mid-third century created a new sense of urgency in which traditionalists such as Decius became convinced that only collective expressions of devotion by all Romans could assuage the gods' anger and restore Rome's fortunes. The universal sacrifice first demanded by the emperor Decius in 250 was intended as a gesture as much patriotic as pious. Christians were not initially its targets, but their refusal to take the emperor's "Pledge of Allegiance" rendered them suspect on grounds both religious and political. Subsequent persecutions took aim more directly at the Christians and their church.
Diocletian and his colleagues envisioned a Roman people united in common loyalty to the traditional gods as a necessary concomitant to their hard-won restoration of security and political order. "Unity" as an ideological program was more critical than ever to a precarious imperial college system that depended on maintaining consensus and harmony among military strongmen whose ambitions and rivalries could easily unleash yet another catastrophic round of civil war. The "problem" of Christians first came to imperial attention in the military, when some soldiers earned martyrdom through their refusal to sacrifice. Diocletian was subsequently shocked to discover Christians in the imperial household itself, and began to listen to pagan intellectuals who advocated a hard line against the Christians. Even the oracles, apparently, endorsed persecution. Each attempt to force these Christians into "loyalty" or purge them provoked unexpected resistance, and revealed to the authorities that Christian intransigence was a larger problem than they had thought, which in turn led them to broader repressive measures, until finally imperial policy—at least in some parts of the empire—aimed at the elimination of the Christian religion.
The pagan belief in the pax deorum, like the conviction of later Christian emperors that God's favor depended on proper worship by a unified church, created the preconditions for official intolerance. The greater the emphasis on unity, the more severe the threat posed by the arrogant nonconformity of a small minority. If divine anger was taken seriously, this meant that dangerous and destructive power rested in the hands of marginalized sects. In theory, the late Roman government could no more tolerate their religious dissent than a modern government could tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists.
But a high-minded concern for the general welfare did not by itself exhaust the complicated motives that drove the persecutors. Pious fear of the gods and sense of public duty blended with anger, frustration, and sometimes outright prejudice against the obstinate disobedience of the Christians. Magistrates took offense not so much at the content of Christian belief and practice as at the attitude displayed in their courtrooms by its adherents—an arrogant and reckless refusal to yield to higher authority. Where Christian martyrs were in fact driven to disobedience by sincere religious objections to the actions demanded of them, pagan authorities could see only contumacia, a stubborn and treasonous contempt for the emperor's lawful command.
Ironically, as we shall see, the same disconnect would prevail under the Christian empire when secular authorities and establishment bishops looked at those they called "heretics" or "schismatics." They, likewise, preferred to characterize religious dissidence as a result of pride, obstinacy, or philoneikia ("quarrelsomeness" or "love of controversy") rather than sincere belief, emphasizing the personal vendettas or character flaws of its proponents. Where martyrs had seen the devil driving their persecutors, establishment Christians would see Satan inspiring the very disobedience they sought to suppress. For both pagans and Christians, attribution of the worst possible motives to one's opponents helped to justify violence against them.
In practice, the violence of the Persecution varied dramatically from one region to the next, depending—as did the effectiveness of any government policy—upon the willingness of the local officials directed to carry it out. Large parts of the empire escaped persecution altogether, as did the far west under Constantius Chlorus. At the other extreme, some magistrates went beyond the letter of the edicts in prosecuting their hatred of Christians. Christian sources complain of sadistic officials and savage torments; these accounts, while probably exaggerated, are not inherently implausible given the Roman system's normal reliance on judicial torture. The persecution of Christians simply involved the regular workings of the Roman state's machinery of coercion, aimed at a new target. Judicial torture and spectacular public executions were the normal violence one would expect to be directed against those perceived as disobedient or dangerous. Because religious dissent—unlike more conventional crimes such as murder or assault—could be undone by a simple change of mind, the persecutors' aim was fundamentally coercive rather than punitive. Arrested Christians typically received numerous invitations to sacrifice and opportunities to reconsider—and their refusal to take advantage of this leniency made them all the more infuriating in the eyes of the authorities.
What impact did these spectacular displays of official persecution and Christian martyrdom have on their intended audience? Traditional Roman criminal justice assumed that gruesome public punishment of wrongdoers would impress onlookers with the power of the state and deter future transgressions. Roman authorities clearly believed persecution would work the same way: the execution of a few Christians would emphasize society's unanimous condemnation of their behavior, and frighten the rest into compliance. But this strategy assumed that authorities, potential wrongdoers, and the general public shared the same basic assumptions about what constituted criminal behavior. Common murderers and thieves usually did not have a community of supporters who regarded their executions as unjust and would venerate their memory and hold them up as role models.
Contemporary Christian apologists, as well as later Christian tradition, believed in contrast that persecution only made the church stronger: the blood of the martyrs, they argued, was the seed of the church. Not only did the example of the martyrs strengthen the faith of fellow believers, but the spectacle of brave Christians going willingly to death also inspired pagan onlookers and brought new converts. Our evidence for the latter effect comes exclusively from Christian sources with an apologetic or hagiographic agenda, of course, but it is not entirely implausible when one considers Roman culture's traditional fascination with dramatic stories of self-sacrifice, both in exemplary history and also in the gladiatorial arena.
In contrast to the triumphalist narrative of Christian tradition, skeptical modern historians have pointed out the small number of martyrs (probably a few thousand, in contrast to the far greater toll of early modern Europe's wars of religion, for example) and have drawn attention to the widespread apostasy, lapsing, or simple evasion with which the vast majority of Christians met the demands of persecution.
The truth must lie somewhere in between. Christian numbers seem to have enjoyed dramatic growth during the four decades of peace between Valerian and Diocletian, and of course again under Christian emperors in the fourth century, rather than during actual episodes of persecution. Certainly only a very small proportion of Christians were actually martyred: for every one who defied the authorities and suffered punishment, surely many others sacrificed or feigned to do so, and even more simply left town or found some other means of evading the edicts. Some more enthusiastic Christians not only admitted this fact but regarded it as a good thing, a "winnowing" process that would distinguish the strong from the weak: those who lapsed, they argued, had never been true Christians to begin with. Most agreed that God allowed them to suffer persecution in order to punish them for their sins and test their faith. Even if it would be an exaggeration to say that more than a very few zealots actually looked forward to persecution, certainly Christians in later and more comfortable times looked back with some nostalgia on the days of Diocletian as they listened to heroic and exemplary tales of martyrdom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ by Michael Gaddis. Copyright © 2005 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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