‘I am a Christian.’25 So a prisoner from Vienne arrested in 177 had replied to every question put to him by his interrogators. Rather than tell them his name, or where he had been born, or whether he were slave or free, he had instead repeatedly insisted that he had no status save that of a follower of Christ. Such obduracy, to his judges, was baffling as well as infuriating. The refusal of Christians to identify themselves as belonging to one of the familiar peoples of the earth – the Romans, or the Greeks, or the Jews – branded them as rootless, just as bandits and runaways were. Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. ‘To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland.’26 And yet, for all that, Christians did believe they belonged to a common ethnos: a people. The bonds of their shared identity spanned the world, and reached back across the generations. When the martyrs of Lyon and Vienne embraced death for the sake of their Lord, they knew themselves bound in fellowship with others who had suffered a similar fate: in Jerusalem, in Asia Minor, in Rome. They knew themselves as well to stand in a line of descent from those martyrs who had gone before them: Polycarp, and Ignatius, and Paul. They knew their citizenship to be that of heaven.
The feat of Irenaeus, labouring in the wake of their deaths, was to give substance and solidity to these convictions. Already, within his own lifetime, his achievements and those of Christians who thought like him were becoming apparent even to hostile observers. They led an organisation that, in its scale and scope, was not merely one among a crowd of churches, but something altogether more imposing: the ‘Great Church’.27 Never before had there been anything quite like it: a citizenship that was owed not to birth, nor to descent, nor to legal prescriptions, but to belief alone.
Living Stones
The Roman elite, of course, had their own views on how a universal order should properly be constituted. The surest way to shape one out of all the manifold peoples of the world – as Posidonius had long before pointed out to Pompey – was for Rome to rule the lot. In 212, an edict was issued that would have warmed the old Stoic’s heart. By its terms, all free men across the vast expanse of the empire were granted Roman citizenship. Its author, a thuggish Caesar by the name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, was a living embodiment of the increasingly cosmopolitan character of the Roman world. The son of an African nobleman, he had been proclaimed emperor in Britain, and was nicknamed Caracalla – ‘Hoodie’ – after his fondness for Gallic fashions. He understood, as only a man who had toured the world could, how various were the customs of humanity – and it perturbed him. Caracalla, who had seized power over the corpse of his murdered brother, knew what he owed the gods for their backing, and did not care to think that sacrifices made on his behalf might be failing to please them. This was why, despite the sneers of his critics that he was only interested in broadening the tax-base, he had granted a common citizenship to all the peoples of the empire. The more Roman they became the more pleasing to the heavens their cults were bound to be. ‘So it is that I think my act worthy of the majesty of the gods.’28 Caracalla’s divine patrons, who had bestowed on him and on Rome the rule of the world, were at last to receive their proper due: their religio.
The word came incense-trailed in the imaginings of pious Romans by a sense of deep antiquity. It conjured up for them visions of primordial rites: of the honours paid to the gods back in the very earliest days of their city, and which had first served to win divine favour for Rome. As in Greek cities, the abiding dread was of what might happen should rituals be neglected. Any obligation owed the gods in exchange for their protection, any tradition or custom, constituted a religio. ‘Sacrificial offerings, the chastity of virgins, the whole range of priesthoods garlanded with dignity and titles’:29 all were religiones. But even Rome was merely one among a vast number of cities. Caracalla knew that as well as anyone. Hence the need for religiones that could join all the peoples of the world. The emperor, in his decree, boasted that he would lead them in a single procession ‘to the sanctuaries of the gods’. That he had one sanctuary particularly in mind was made clear when, in the autumn of 215, he arrived in Egypt. His night-time entry into Alexandria, complete with ‘torch-lit processions and garlands’,30 shared in the splendour of the city’s most celebrated festival, when the dark streets would be lit up in honour of Serapis. The god held a particular place in Caracalla’s affections. Even before travelling to Egypt, he had commissioned a Serapeum in Rome. Inscriptions in Alexandria proclaimed him Philoserapis: ‘Devoted to Serapis.’ The appeal of the city’s most multi-cultural god was evident. Nevertheless, the cult the emperor wished to promote was not primarily that of Serapis. On coins, the god was shown passing the sceptre of the cosmos to another figure: the emperor himself. Just as Serapis, the divine father, ruled in the heavens, so did Caracalla, haloed and radiant, exercise a rule no less universal on earth. In the wake of his grant of citizenship to all the peoples of the empire, it was Caesar alone who could worthily mediate between them and their various gods. The great web of dues and obligations that had always bound the Roman people to the dimension of the supernatural now spanned the world. To poke a hole in it was not merely sacrilege but treason.
The full implications of this were soon to drench the streets of Alexandria in blood. Caracalla, who was rumoured to put to death anyone who so much as urinated in the presence of his portrait busts, was not a man to disrespect. The Alexandrians, who found his affectations risible, and made sure to let him know it, discovered this too late. Caracalla, summoning them to a public meeting, had the crowd surrounded by his troops and cut to pieces. The lesson could not have been more brutally rubbed home. Sacrilege was intolerable. To be a Roman citizen brought responsibility as well as honour. Any insult to Caesar was an insult to the gods. All that winter, Caracalla’s indignation continued to smoulder. His soldiers, roaming the streets, killed and plundered at will. Most Alexandrians had no option save to cower, and wait for the emperor’s departure. Not all, though. Some – those able to find refuge abroad – opted to slip away. Among them was a man particularly renowned for his meditations on the nature of the divine, and on the proper relationship of mortals to the heavens: the most brilliant scholar in a city renowned for its scholarship.
Yet Origen enjoyed no cushy billet, as intellectuals in Alexandria had traditionally done. Well before the arrival of Caracalla, he had learned to dread the Roman state’s capacity for violence. In 202, when he was only seventeen, his father had been arrested and beheaded; Origen himself, in the years that followed, frequently had to evade angry mobs, ‘moving from house to house, driven from pillar to post’.31 The son of Christian parents, his precocious commitment to the defence of his faith was steeled by adversity. Like Irenaeus – whose writings had reached Alexandria within only a few years of their composition – he dreaded that the Great Church was under constant siege. Only by delineating its frontiers so that none could ever mistake them, and lining them with fortifications, could it hope to be defended. The need was as pressing in Alexandria as anywhere in the Christian world. The city teemed with adversaries. It was where Basilides had founded his school. It was where, for many centuries, Jewish society had shown its most cosmopolitan face. Above all, it was where the great conqueror who had founded the city boasted his ultimate monument, a vision of Greece stamped on Egyptian soil, so that there was nowhere, not in Athens, not in Rome, where the study of Homer and Aristotle was more fruitfully nourished. To live in Alexandria – even for the most devout follower of Christ – was to experience the full dazzling potency of Greek culture.