Diocletian and Constantine

The final test of strength came in 303 when Diocletian (284-305) had been emperor for nineteen years. Why this otherwise dour, canny ruler sought con­clusions with the Christians is obscure, but the most likely reason is that he came to see the Christian Church as the single great independent organisation in an Empire which he and his colleagues were administering increasingly on unitary lines.

The persecution that began on 23 February 303 lasted for nine years. It started with administrative measures aimed at destroying the Church’s organisation and literature. Churches were destroyed, Scrip­tures had to be handed over to be burnt, and clergy were forced to sacrifice to the gods. In addition, the lives of ordinary Christians were made burdensome by withdrawing any privileged status from upper-class (honorati) Christians and denying them the right to plead at law. There was, however, to be no bloodshed, and this in general was observed. After Diocletian’s incapacity through illness (early 304) and abdication (1 May 305), however, power fell to his more anti-Christian successors, in particular Galerius (Caesar 292, Augustus 305-11) and his deputy (Caesar) Maximin (d. 313). A series of edicts extended the persecution to the laity and made death the penalty for refusal to sacrifice. Repression was especially severe in North Africa during 304 and in Egypt from 308 to 311. There, hundreds died in savage acts by the authorities. To this day the Coptic era counts from the accession of Diocle­tian. In retrospect, his reign marked the Church’s baptism of blood.

In the spring of 311, however, Galerius fell ill. In desperation he sought the help of the Christian God. On 30 April 311, six days before he died, he signed an edict that effectively ended the persecution. In this edict he accepted that the displeasure of the Christian God could not be provoked without danger, but the immortal gods of Rome were still the guardians of the state.

In the West, however, the persecution had ended in 305. Galerius’ colleague, Constantius, had not reopened it. When he died at York on 25 July 306, his son Constantine was immediately proclaimed emperor by his father’s troops. A period of confusion ensued, but by the spring of 312 Constantine was effectively Emperor of the western Roman provinces and only Maxentius, son of Diocletian’s western colleague, Max­imian, stood in his way to Rome and sole power. The decisive battle at the Milvian Bridge some five miles north of Rome on 28 October 312 was won by Constantine and he entered the city in triumph.

In 310 Constantine had had a vision of Apollo, prom­ising him a victorious reign of thirty years, and so far that promise had been kept. On the eve ofthe decisive battle with Maxentius, however, hehadhada second vision, this time susceptible of a Christian interpretation. ‘Constan­tine’, says a contemporary Christian author, Lactantius, ‘was directed in a dream to mark the heavenly sign of God on the shields of his soldiers and thus join battle. He did as he was ordered and with a cross-shaped letter X with the top bent over, he marked Christ on the shields’ (On the deaths ofthe Persecutors, Ch. 44).

Contemporaries believed that Constantine had bene­fited by some form of divine aid, and there can be little doubt that from that moment on he moved towards acceptance of the Christian faith. For some years however, his personal inclination towards Christianity was balanced by his regard for the Sun God whose companionship he continued to claim on his bronze coinage (i.e. that with Empire-wide use by ordinary people) until c. 325. His actions, however, foreshadowed future developments; from the moment of his victory over Maxentius he was determined that the last embers of the persecution against the Christians should be extinguished. In February 313 he met his colleague Licinius, who was emperor in the Balkan provinces of the Empire, and there at Milan drew up the famous Edict which marked the official end of the Great Persecution.

Before that moment was reached, Constantine found himself obliged to deal with two serious disputes in the West and East respectively, which in their turn foreshadowed the future development of Western and Eastern Christendom. The Donatist movement arose from the situation in North Africa after the Great Persecution. The Church there was rent between those who were prepared to accept back Christians, including clergy, who had lapsed, on relatively easy terms, and those who regarded anyone who had sacrificed or handed over the Scriptures to the authorities as ‘Betrayers’ (Traditores). Following the decisions of Cyprian’s councils, they regarded sacraments dispensed by these clergy as invalid and separation from them by their congregations as justified. In 311, however, an election to the vacant see of Carthage saw the consecration of a moderate, the archdeacon Caecilian, to this position of authority. He was challenged immediately by a coalition of interests, the most powerful of which was the Numidian Church. Constantine, however, angry that there could be divisions among the Chris­tian ministry, backed Caecilian from the start, ordering his officials in North Africa to provide him with a considerable sum of money (winter312/13). The opposition appealed to the emperor with a request for impartial episcopal judges (from Gaul) to adjudicate between them and Caecilian. For three years there was incessant legal activity between the opposing factions.

In the East also, dispute arose out of events in the Great Persecution; but whereas in North Africa the issue was ecclesiastical and disciplinary, in the East it affected fundamentals of doctrine and belief. If the origins of the Donatist controversy extended back to Cyprian and the puritanical tradition represented by Tertullian and the martyrs, the Arian controversy had its roots in the tensions within Alexandrian theology represented by Origen and his opponents.

The issue appeared to come into the open suddenly, in c. 318, with a theological disagreement between Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and Arius, one of his senior presbyters. To quote the words of a fifth-century historian, ‘Alexander attempted one day, in the presence of presbyters and the rest of his clergy, too ambitious a discourse about the Holy Trinity, the subject being “Unity in Trinity”.’ Arius, one of the presbyters under his jurisdiction, a man possessed of no little logical acumen, thinking that the bishop was introducing the doctrine of Sabellius the Libyan (i.e. the Modalist concept of the relationship between God and Christ), from love of controversy advanced another view diametrically opposed to the opinion of the Libyan, ‘and agreed that if God begat the Son, there must have been when he was not, and in addition, as part of the order created by God, he must have possessed free will and was capable of vice as well as virtue’ (Socrates, Eccl.

These ideas were repudiated by Alexander and his colleagues, but however absurdly Arius may have pressed them, they were a corollary of Origen’s teaching seventy years before on the relations of God, Jesus and creation. Moreover, Arius had offended a powerful group of puritan-minded clergy (the Meletians) who had wanted sterner treatment of those who had lapsed in the Great Persecution than adjudged by Alexander. Arius had once agreed with them, but had changed sides. The Meletians were glad of the chance of embroiling him in a charge of heresy. Egypt and soon the whole of Eastern Christendom were split by the controversy, when in 321 Licinius, now emperor in the whole of the East, revived measures of harassment against the Christians. For him the ‘Supreme God’ was always Jupiter, while for Constantine he had become identified with the Christian God. The issue could not be avoided. Constantine attacked Licinius and defeated him at Chrysopolis on the Bosphorus on 18 September 324. Shortly afterwards, in a manifesto addressed to his newly acquired provinces, he proclaimed his faith in Christianity, offering only a scornful toleration to his pagan subjects. He now turned to the division within Eastern Christianity itself.

Constantine first tried to shame Arius and his oppo­nents into agreement. This failed, and in the spring of325 he ordered bishops from all over the Empire to meet at Nicea in western Asia Minor. The dispute raised by Arius and a variety of other controversies, such as the continuing problem of the date of Easter, were to be solved, and peace was to be established throughout the Church.

While this aim was not achieved, the Council of Nicea (20 May-July 325) was extraordinarily important. The summons by the emperor (as well as his active participation in its proceedings) showed the way to lay participation, if not control, in the affairs of the Church from that time onwards. Arianism was condemned, and the Creed of Nicea recognised Christ as active in the process of creating, and not as belonging to the created universe.

The seal was set on this process by Constantine’s dedication, on 11 May 330, of Constantinople as a Christian city that was to be his capital henceforth. His baptism at Easter 337, five weeks before his death, completed a religious progress that began with distaste for Diocle­tian’s religious policy and some admiration for the Christians, and led to his being the architect of a religious revolution that was to change the course of the history of a large portion of mankind.