It was to be almost 200 years before there were systematic persecutions of Christians by the Roman emperor in his role as Pontifex Maximus. Decius was the first of these when he punished Christians who failed to offer animal sacrifices to the pagan gods in AD 250. There were further martyrdoms under Valerian in AD 257 – 9,44 and in AD 303 – 5 Diocletian launched separate pogroms against Christians and Manicheans.45 Diocletian's Rescript on the Manichees ordered the leaders of that sect burnt at the stake together with their most persistent followers. He accused them of committing many crimes, disturbing quiet populations and even working ‘the greatest harm to whole cities.’ Making clear why to be a Manichean was to be a heretic, he wrote: It is indeed highly criminal to discuss doctrines once and for all settled and defined by our forefathers, and which have their recognised place and course in our system. Wherefore we are resolutely determined to punish the stubborn depravity of these worthless people.46
In other words Dicoletian was burning those poor Manichean elect because they disagreed with established religious doctrines and dogmas. The tone of his Rescript is eerily similar to papal pronouncements of the 13th century calling down the Albigensian Crusades upon the Cathars of the Languedoc.
As to the Roman persecution of the Christians, authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have made the valid point that ‘in its whole history … Christianity was officially persecuted for a total of five years .’47 This is not the impression given to children brought up in the Western Christian tradition who are led to imagine centuries of sustained persecution. The truth is that there were a few isolated incidents between AD 50 and 250 followed by a few years of – admittedly – awful tortures, again frequently involving burning at the stake, but also scorching in red-hot iron chairs, scourging, ‘the frying pan’(! ), and consumption by wild beasts.48
Such torments ended for the Christians when their champion Constantine the Great defeated his rivals at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in AD 312 and became the senior ruler of Rome's cruel and violent empire.49 He immediately extended state tolerance to Christianity. This, however, did not mean that the powers of the Pontifex Maximus, which he continued to hold in his hands as emperor, were done away with. It simply meant that in future – with the notable exception of the reign of Emperor Julian the Apostate (AD 332 – 63 ) – these powers would no longer be used against Christians. It was not until AD 380 under Emperor Theodosius50 that Roman Catholic Christianity was adopted as the state religion (while other forms of Christianity were denounced as ‘demented and insane’).51 So this technically was the moment when Catholicism formally acquired the right to be protected by the emperor in his capacity as Pontifex Maximus. But it had long previously been given carte blanche by Constantine himself to persecute its internal enemies – the heretics.
The first step on the road to the stake
Even by Roman standards Constantine the Great was not a nice man. He had his eldest son Crispus executed (while the latter was en route to attend celebrations with him) and his wife Fausta locked in an overheated steam room and poached to death!52 He did not in fact become a baptised Christian until hours before his death, thus allowing himself considerable latitude for cruelty, excess and wickedness along the way. Indeed it is reported that one of the principal reasons for his adoption of Christianity (other than his ‘miraculous’ success at Milvian Bridge, which is another story) had been that it alone amongst the religions of Rome had promised him expiation of his many sins. Apparently the priests of the pagan temples, horrified even to be asked for expiation by such a brute, had refused him.53
So it seems that Constantine, who had good reason to worry about the afterlife destiny of his soul, owed a very large debt to the Christian bishops. By granting them state tolerance in 312 – 313 he repaid part of it. But he was a politician with an eye to his constituencies. Despite much urging he therefore refused to abolish or interfere in any way with the freedom of religion of the many other popular and powerfully-supported faiths in the empire. Defending the very same policy of tolerance from which Christianity had just benefited, he reminded the bishops: It is one thing to undertake the contest for immortality voluntarily, another to compel it with punishment.54
This was a matter on which Constantine remained consistent throughout his life – with one exception. That exception was announced in an edict (circa 324 – 326). In it he attacked the ‘venomous errors’ of Christian heretics, confiscated their properties and initiated other persecutions. The wording of the edict has been preserved for us by Constantine's fawning biographer, the eminent church father Eusebius. It is worth quoting it at some length: Be it known to you by this present decree, you Novatians,55 Valentinians, Marcionites [the latter, two well-known Gnostic sects], Paulians and those called Cataphrygians, all in short who constitute the heresies by your private assemblies, how many are the falsehoods in which your idle folly is entangled, and how venomous the poisons with which your teaching is involved, so that the healthy are brought to sickness and the living to everlasting death through you. You opponents of truth, enemies of life and counsellors of ruin! Everything about you is contrary to truth, in harmony with ugly deeds of evil; it serves grotesque charades in which you argue falsehoods, distress the unoffending, deny light to believers …
The crimes done by you are so great and immense, so hateful and full of harshness, that not even a whole day would suffice to put them into words; and in any case it is proper to shut the ears and avert the eyes, so as not to impair the pure and untarnished commitment of our own faith by recounting the details. Why then should we endure such evils any longer? Protracted neglect allows healthy people to be infected as with an epidemic disease. Why do we not immediately use severe public measures to dig up such a great evil, as you might say, by the roots?
Accordingly, since it is no longer possible to tolerate the pernicious effect of your destructiveness, by this decree we publicly command that none of you henceforward shall dare to assemble. Therefore we have also given order that all your buildings in which you conduct these meetings … not only in public but also in houses of individuals or any private places … are to be confiscated … and handed over incontestably and without delay to the Catholic Church … and thereafter no opportunity be left for you to meet so that from this day forward your unlawful groups may not dare to assemble in any place either public or private.56
It was the first step on the slippery slope of persecution. Within less than a century, in league with emperors like Theodosius, the Catholic Church had begun to burn heretics at the stake …
When coercion was learnt
H. A. Drake, professor of history at the University of California, thinks that Constantine's out-of-character initiative against the heretics in AD 324 – 6 was almost certainly the result of pressure from the bishops57 – i.e. that the emperor was paying off another instalment of his spiritual debt to them. Besides, looking at his options at the time, it would have seemed like the obvious move to make: With heresy, both imperial and episcopal agendas came together. Punishment of improper worship was the one action that Constantine would have been prepared by centuries of imperial procedure to take, and the one that, in his eyes, a new and important constituency had the most right to demand. It had the additional advantage of demonstrating his toughness to militant Christians at very little cost.58
Drake has investigated Christianity's rise to power in Rome and its changing relationships with the state between Constantine's initial acceptance of the faith in AD 312, its elevation as the official religion of the empire in AD 380, and the banning of all other faiths in AD 392.59 This was a period of immense importance for the future of Christianity in which – for good or ill – it set the course that it has followed ever since. It was also the period, as Drake observes, in which ‘militant Christians first came to dominate and then to define the Christian movement.’60 Noting that in the decades after Constantine the Church ‘became more militant and more coercive as it became more powerful’ he asks:
‘What happened to the Christian movement, why was it that the militant wing prevailed?’61
During the first three centuries AD we know already that the ‘Christian movement’ consisted of a diverse mass of sects, all of which defined themselves as followers of Christ despite their wildly varying doctrines and contradictory beliefs.
At one end of the scale there were those like the Gnostics who rejected the Old Testament, interpreted the New Testament allegorically within a dualist framework, did not believe that Christ had been born in the flesh (or crucified), allowed the greatest possible latitude for individual revelation and inspiration, and had no wish to impose dogma on others. Although they claimed to be the original Christians, guarding the true apostolic succession, they were interested not in coercion but in a process of personal enquiry and experience that would lead their initiates to a saving knowledge of the truth. They did not believe that there was just one exclusive path to this gnosis. As such, blind obedience to any form of dogma, together with intolerance for the beliefs of others, were rejected by all the Gnostic systems.
At the other end of the scale were Drake's ‘militant Christians’, the Catholics and their bishops who established their primary power centre in Rome in the early fourth century AD after they had won Constantine's favour. They too claimed to be the original Christians, guarding the true apostolic succession, and it was on the exclusive basis of their doctrines and beliefs that what we now think of as the ‘Christian Church’ took shape during the decades that followed. They accepted the Old Testament, interpreted the New Testament with adamant literalism, believed in Christ's incarnation, crucifixion and bodily resurrection (and that all humans would experience bodily resurrection too), rejected dualism, allowed no latitude whatsoever for individual revelation and inspiration, and felt it was their duty to impose their beliefs on others. Their interest was in obtaining the complete and unquestioning faith of their congregations in the infallibility of the doctrines that they taught. As such, dogma, the enforcement of blind obedience, and violent intolerance for the beliefs of others, were, from the beginning, their stock in trade.
Why did the militant wing prevail? The answer that Drake gives to his own question is in a sense a tautology. The militant wing of the once broad church of Christianity prevailed because it was militant and because it was the first to acquire access to the coercive apparatus of the state. As a simple and universal function of human organisation, Drake suggests: … there are persons in every mass movement who are willing to coexist with variant beliefs and others who see such non-believers as outsiders and as a threat that must be neutralised.62
If coercive powers are made available to people who cannot tolerate variant beliefs, as they were in Rome in the fourth century, then it is inevitable that they will soon be used to enforce uniformity by destroying or marginalising other religions. But because of Constantine's calculated squeamishness about persecuting pagans, the dogmatic tendencies of the Catholic bishops during their first few decades in imperial favour were channelled exclusively into the fight against heresy. This was a fight that the Church was subsequently to pursue with single-minded ferocity during the 13th and 14th centuries when it destroyed the Cathars and until as late as the 17th century when heretics throughout Europe were still routinely burnt at the stake. Indeed it may well be that it was only through this early process of discriminating against, stigmatising, punishing, terrorising, and physically eliminating internal rivals that the members of the militant faction of Christianity were able to elucidate their own beliefs fully in the first place. ‘The existence of heresy cannot be considered apart from the existence of the Church itself,’ argues Zoé Oldenbourg: The two run pari passu. Dogma is always accompanied by heresy; from the very first, the history of the Christian Church was a long catalogue of battles against various heresies.63
Thus what had started out as Constantine's ‘low-cost’ strategy to appease militant Christians, to whom he felt indebted, and to impose uniformity on the more heterodox Christian sects (something that would have appealed to the dictatorial instincts of any red-blooded Roman emperor) was to have unforeseen consequences that rebounded down the ages. Before Constantine there had been an eclectic field of Christians in which no sect held power over any other – because all were persecuted. After Constantine the field was rapidly transformed and polarised. On one side, clustered around a literal interpretation of the scriptures, were the bishops of the Catholic Church – the militants whom the emperor wanted to appease. On the other side was everyone else and every other shade of opinion. The net effect, after AD 324 – 6, was that all anyone needed to do to become a ‘heretic’, and to risk losing freedom of assembly, home, property and life, was to disagree publicly with the infallible pronouncements of the bishops – most particularly the supreme bishop of the Church of Rome. It is not an accident that by the 380s the emperors had renounced their age-old responsibility of Pontifex Maximus – high-priest of the Roman state religion – leaving it for the popes to pick up.64
To this day it remains their official title.65
Longing for power long before Constantine
We are not suggesting that militant literalism within the Christian Church was created by Constantine's willingness to punish heretics. On the contrary a strong literalist tendency had been present in Christianity long before the fourth century – perhaps as long as any of the Gnostic sects – and simply took advantage of this willingness. The really radical transformation of Constantine's reign was that for the first time it gave literalists the power to impose their views on others.
It's obvious with hindsight that they'd been longing for this for centuries. It's obvious, too, how they consistently made use of rabble-rousing emotional arguments and hateful accusations during their years in waiting simply to stir up trouble for their opponents – sophisticated techniques that modern disinformation specialists would call black propaganda. Everything about their demeanour and rhetoric indicates that these people believed they would one day gain the power of enforcement over others – as they eventually did under Constantine – and that once they had it they would not hesitate to use it.
Consider, for example, the words of Irenaeus, one of the Catholic Church's great scourges of Christian Gnostics during the second century: Let those who blaspheme the Creator … as [do] the Valentinians and all the falsely so-called Gnostics, be recognised as agents of Satan by all who worship God. Through their agency Satan even now … has been seen to speak against God, that God who has prepared eternal fire for every kind of apostacy.66
From the first to the fourth centuries there are repeated examples of this sort of rhetoric, often wound up to an even higher pitch and including accusations of cannibalism, sexual promiscuity, infant sacrifice and so on. Another telling detail is that even before Gnosticism was banned, techniques were in use to ‘flush out’ and identify its initiates for possible future persecution. Because the Gnostic perfecti were generally vegetarian, one well-tried method of identifying their presence amongst the orthodox clergy and monks of Egypt was to make meat-eating compulsory for all once a week.67
It is the victors who write history, not the losers; so we don't know whether such witch-hunts and hate campaigns had begun to spark off physical violence against the Gnostics as early as the second century. But the Gnostics’ side of the story may have survived in one of the Nag Hammadi texts, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, which says in part: After we went forth from our home, and came down to this world, and came into being in the world in bodies, we were hated and persecuted, not only by those who are ignorant [pagans], but also by those who think they are advancing the name of Christ, since they were unknowingly empty, not knowing who they are, like dumb animals.68
Massacre of the Innocents
Constantine's edict of AD 324 – 6, cited at length earlier, handed the militant Christians the one thing they'd obviously wanted all along – the power of the state to persecute their old opponents, the Gnostics. It is notable
that the edict is expressed in the peculiarly violent rhetoric favoured by the militants. As Drake points out it was a very deliberate choice of words when the emperor characterised the beliefs of Gnostics as ‘venomous’ – a term comparing those who held them to snakes. Similarly: … he likens heresy to a disease, something capable of infecting healthy souls. Such images are important as labels that serve both to identify and stigmatise a group, making it easier to single out its members and deny them humane treatment … This step, however limited in scope and duration, opened the door for the more massive coercion campaigns that would occur at the end of the century. 69
During the last decade of Constantine's rule the evidence shows, as expected, that militants began to use the new powers he had given them;70 but they did so quite tentatively at first – as though feeling out the opposition. Under the reigns of his sons they became significantly more persecuting.71 During the 15 years that Emperor Theodosius was on the throne (AD 379 – 395) he outdid all his predecessors by passing more than 100 new laws aimed at the Gnostics – laws that deprived them of their property, their liberty and frequently their lives, confiscated their places of assembly and commanded the destruction of their books .72 It is unlikely to be a coincidence that this was the precise period in which the codices of the Nag Hammadi library were hidden away in Upper Egypt to escape detection and destruction. And though records are incomplete, we know that there was also state sponsorship of anti-heretical terrorism during the same period in Lower Egypt.