The Triumph of Christianity, 330—400 ce
The century and a quarter that separate the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon (October-November 451) is the classic Age of the Fathers. It is the period that saw the definition of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine in the form that has survived to our own time.
In the West, the Papacy emerged as the authoritative centre for ecclesiastical discipline and order, and relations with the Empire were delimited through the statecraft of Ambrose of Milan. Western theology found its great exponent in Augustine of Hippo whose ideas concerning the nature of the Church, of Grace and Free Will were to influence European theology across the divides of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In the East, on the other hand, the conversion of Constantine led to the opposite process of integration of Church and State and the distinctive Byzantine polity that lasted until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and, through the Tsars, in Russia until the revolution of 1917. These movements of thought produced leaders of equal calibre, in the East, the Cappadocian Fathers, Cyril of Alexandria and John Chrysostom, in the West, Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and Pope Leo. The fourth century was an age of great changes in the intellectual and economic life of the Mediterranean and the Western European peoples. It was not a period of decline and decay.Under Constantine’s three sons (Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans) who succeeded him, much of this was already taking place. The advance of Christianity in the period down to the death of Constantius II in 361 demonstrated that the faith was not to be merely a state religion. The numbers of bishoprics multiplied; extensive Christian quarters, such as at Salona on the Dalmatian coast, and Hippo and Djemila (Cuicul) in North Africa, grew up either outside or within the boundaries of the cities; bishops became advisers to the emperor and prominent at all levels of civic and political life.
The names of no less than 1,100 clergy, from pope to humble presbyters and deacons, have survived in contemporary records of the age.In much of the Empire, some of the earlier Christian militancy had modified. North Africa was indeed torn by the Donatist schism, and the Donatists reflected the intransigencies of an earlier age. Elsewhere, however, Christianity was tending to absorb and convert traditional pagan values, and provide a climate in which a Christianised, but still recognisably Classical education flourished, extending, it is to be noted, to women. For the first and last time until the Renaissance and Reformation, laymen and women contributed significantly to the formation of Christian doctrine.
In its triumph, however, the Church was not to be united. Apart from fundamental differences of outlook between East and West, in the East itself the Creed of Nicea had opened up serious rifts. To the misgivings of a majority of Eastern bishops over the formula ‘of one substance with the Father’ as applied to Christ, was added the personality of Athanasius who had succeeded Alexander as Bishop of Alexandria in June 328. His long episcopate of forty-five years in all (328-73) was punctuated by five periods of exile which testified to his turbulent spirit as well as his uncompromising defence of the Creed of Nicea. Though Arius was not restored as a presbyter of Alexandria, Athanasius was condemned for unruly behaviour by a council held at Tyre in 335 and exiled to Trier by Constantine himself (November 335). While the Eastern bishops considered that the Creed of Nicea failed to distinguish adequately between Father and Son, the West accepted the Creed. In 340 Pope Julius (337-52) wrote to the Eastern bishops requiring them to justify their sentence against Athanasius or restore him forthwith. Not surprisingly the Easterners refused, and at a council held at Serdica (Sofia) in 342/3 bishops from the two halves of the Empire failed to agree, parting not even on speaking terms.
The seeds of permanent schism between East and West had been sown.Athanasius returned in triumph to Alexandria in October 346, but another thirty-five years were to elapse before the Second Ecumenical Council held at Constantinople in 381 finally accepted the Nicene formula with changes acceptable to the Eastern episcopate, thus formally ending the Arian controversy.
In the 350s East and West clashed again, this time over the emperor’s authority in the Church. The Emperor Constantius had tried to impose on the Western bishops a formula of belief regarding the Son that replaced ‘of the same substance’ (homoousios) as the Father, by ‘of like substance’ (homoiousios). The aged Hosius, Bishop of Cordoba, who had accompanied Constantine to his victory over Maxentius in 312, spoke for the Western bishops, drawing on the analogy of the two swords (taken from Luke 22:38) to point to the distinction between imperial and ecclesiastical rule, with the implication that the latter was more authoritative. The emperor had no right to impose changes on beliefs affirmed by bishops in council. He must desist from harassing Athanasius. Constantius failed to get his way. In the West, an important precedent against imperial control of the Church had been established.
The pagan reaction under the Emperor Julian (the Apostate, 361-3) did not halt the progress of the Church, except perhaps in Britain. It did, however, destroy some of its self-confidence, and in North Africa, the restoration of the Donatist bishops who had been exiled by the Emperor Constans gave their church another thirty years of superiority over their Catholic rivals. In the East, however, Julian’s reign incidentally contributed towards driving the factions within the Church to accept a uniform statement of belief based on the Creed of Nicea. It was the Cappadocian Fathers’ (Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his friend Gregory Nazianzen) lasting claim to renown that the stark wording of that Creed was modified to include a definition of the work of the Spirit and interpreted to accord with the Platonic insights shared by most of the Eastern episcopate.
When in 380 the Emperor Theodosius I (379-95) decreed that Catholic Christianity should be the sole religion of the Empire, East and West would agree on the definitions of the relations of the Persons of the Trinity as expressed at the Council of Constantinople in 381.One further movement accompanied the triumph of Christianity, namely asceticism. What Antony had started in Upper Egypt in the reign of Diocletian took on. Alongside the individual call to the desert, there was growing up the view that ascetics could fulfd their vocation even better by living in communities. In Egypt, Pachomius, an ex-soldier (c. 290-346), decided to establish monasteries on communal lines, organised as self-sufficient villages. The idea became popular. At the end of the century, Jerome described how ‘brethren of the same trades were lodged together in one house under its own superior. Manual work was encouraged. Excesses were discouraged.’ Yet excesses, competitions even in fasting and abstinence, did take place, and in Syria, where monasticism seems to have developed independently, extreme rigours of individual ascetic achievement were the rule. In the next century, the pillar saints, such as Simeon (d. 459) or Daniel Stylites (d. c. 480) combined ascetic life on the lofty eminence of the capital of a column with a social purpose. They became tribunes of the people, settling disputes, forwarding petitions to the authorities, even the emperor, and denouncing evil-doers, as well as converting crowds of heathens who came to listen to their preaching. In Asia Minor, however, another aspect of the work of the Cappadocian Fathers was to bring monasticism there under the control of the episcopate and direct its energies towards social welfare in town and countryside alike. Hospitals, orphanages and schools began to flourish under their guidance. The monastic Rules drawn up by Basil of Caesarea have remained valid in Orthodox Christianity to our day.
In the West, on the other hand, asceticism evolved in contrary directions.
In North Africa, the Donatist rejection of the idea of a Christian Empire and insistence on the irreconcilable distinction between Church and Empire produced a strange popular movement among the peasants on the High Plains of Numidia, part religious and part socialrevolutionary, which drew its teaching from a literal understanding of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. These Circumcellions, as they were known, saw the Devil at work in inequalities of wealth and in the existence of slavery. They ambushed wealthy landowners and forced them to change places with their slaves, running behind their own carriages. They prevented creditors from collecting debts and they freed slaves. The intensity and violence of their convictions was demonstrated by their ultimate aim of gaining the martyr’s crown, even by leaping over precipices.At the other end of the social scale, Christians including some of great wealth were interpreting a life dedicated to Christ as one requiring complete renunciation and estrangement from the world (alienatio). Men and women such as Martin of Tours, Jerome, Paulinus of Nola, Honoratus of Lerins and Melania the Elder and Younger, set examples of self-abnegation, and founded the first religious communities in the West. At the same time, their refusal to undertake public office and wholesale unloading of vast properties on to the market contributed to the weakness of the Empire when confronted by massive barbarian inroads in the first decade of the fifth century.
By this time, the Greco-Roman world was overwhelmingly Christian. One of the last bastions of the old religion was the senatorial aristocracy of Rome, but even this had succumbed by the end of the century. With a sure sense of self-preservation, its members became within a generation or so the most ardent supporters of the Papacy. All over the Mediterranean world, the period 380-410 witnessed the final phase of religious transformation, shown by the building of churches, the creation of parishes and the establishment of a religious life that had a considerable place for relics, martyrs’ shrines and pilgrimages. Medieval Christianity had come into being.