How different it would have been, of course, had the empire itself been Christian! A remote, a fantastical possibility – and yet, just a couple of years before his arrest, Origen himself had thought to float it. ‘Should the Romans embrace the Christian faith,’ he had declared, ‘then their prayers would see them overcome their enemies; or rather, having come under the protection of God, they would have no enemies at all.’50
But to believe that a Caesar might be won for Christ was indeed to believe in miracles.
Keeping the Faith
In the summer of 313, Carthage was a city on edge. An ancient rival of Rome for the rule of the western Mediterranean, destroyed by the legions and then – just as Corinth had been – refounded as a Roman colony, its commanding position on the coastline across from Sicily had won for it an undisputed status as the capital of Africa. Like Rome and Alexandria, it had grown to become one of the great centres of Christianity: a status much seeded, in the words of one Carthaginian Christian, by ‘the blood of the martyrs’.51 In Africa, the Church had long treasured the scars of persecution. The judicial execution in 258 of Carthage’s most celebrated bishop, a noted scholar by the name of Cyprian, had confirmed them in a peculiarly militant understanding of their faith. Purity was all. There could be no compromising with the evils of the world. Belief was nothing if it was not worth dying for. This was why, in 303, when an imperial edict was issued commanding Christians to hand over their books of scripture or face death, Africa had been at the forefront of resistance to the decree. The provincial authorities, determined to break the Church, had expanded on the edict by commanding that everyone make sacrifice to the gods. Recalcitrant Christians were rounded up and brought in chains to Carthage. Batches of them had been executed. By the time, two years later, that the persecution finally petered out, the conviction of Christians across Africa that God demanded a purity of belief, absolute and untainted, had been fertilised with yet more martyrs’ blood. Ten years on from the most savage persecution endured by the church of Carthage, the mood in the city was anxious, fractious, fraught. The death of its bishop, Majorinus, served as a lightning rod for various tensions. One question predominated. How, in the wake of a concentrated effort to wipe the Church from the face of Africa, were Christians best to defend the sanctity of their faith?
Three centuries on from the birth of Christ, this was an issue with ramifications far beyond the Church itself. Bishops in the great cities were well on their way to becoming public figures. If the state was prone to targeting them with persecution, then so also, on occasion, might an emperor opt to grant them favours. Back in 260, only a decade after the arrest and torture of Origen, a change of regime had seen churches granted a particularly significant privilege: the right to own property. Bishops, already armed with considerable powers of patronage, had thereby accrued an even greater heft. That they were elected only served to enhance the potency and scope of their leadership. Authority such as theirs, exercised over growing flocks, was something that any Roman official might grudgingly respect. The devastating persecution launched in 303 had done nothing to diminish this. Indeed, if anything, the failure of the provincial authorities to uproot the Church served only to enhance the prestige of those leaders who had defied it. When, in the summer of 313, a new bishop was elected in succession to Majorinus, he might not have seemed, by the traditional standards of the Roman ruling classes, an impressive figure. Donatus came from Casae Nigrae, an obscure town far to the south of Carthage, perched on the fringes of the desert, ‘where the burnt land bears nothing but venomous snakes’.52 Yet this stern and rugged provincial – precisely because he rejected all markers of status – could lay claim to an influence in Carthage that owed nothing to either wealth or breeding. Power rendered him dangerous – and being dangerous made him feared.
The bishop’s bitterest enemies, however, were not the provincial authorities. They were his fellow Christians. Donatus was not the only man to have claimed the leadership of the Carthaginian church. He had a rival. Caecilian had won the bishopric two years previously – but his election had been furiously contested. Able though he was, a forceful and experienced administrator, he was notorious for scorning the pre-eminence of martyrs as God’s favourites. This reputation, even at the best of times, would have rendered him unacceptable to many Christians in Carthage; but the times were not the best. The church in Africa was riven from top to bottom. While many of its leaders had upheld the conviction of one bishop that it was better for him ‘to be burned in the fire than the holy scriptures’, others had not. There were Christians who, in the heat of persecution, had handed them over. This, to Donatus and his followers, was a betrayal that could not be forgiven. Those who had surrendered the scriptures in their keep – the traditores, as they were contemptuously termed – were no longer seen as Christian. They had saved their skins at the cost of their souls. Their very voices were cancerous with infection. Only re-immersion in the waters of baptism could hope to cleanse them of their sin. Yet the traditores, far from acknowledging their fault, had installed as their bishop Caecilian, a man darkly rumoured not merely to have been a traditor himself, but to have colluded in the persecution of those who had refused to hand over the scriptures. Between two such opposed points of view, between those who insisted on defiance of the world and those who preferred to compromise with it, between Donatists and Caecilianists, what reconciliation could there possibly be? A grim and unsettling truth stood revealed: that shared beliefs might serve to divide as well as bring together the Christian people.
Donatus, in his ambition to heal the schism, naturally turned to the heavens. His followers believed with a devout literalism the claim of their bishop to have a direct line of communication with God. Nevertheless, in the absence of a divine response sufficient to persuade the Caecilianists, Donatus found himself with a pressing need for an alternative source of authority. Fortunately, only a year before his election as bishop, a miracle had occurred. Or so, at any rate, the events of 312 appeared to startled Christians. In that year, a renewed bout of civil war had shaken Italy. A claimant to the rule of Rome named Constantine had marched on the city. There, on the banks of the river Tiber, beside the Milvian Bridge, he had won a decisive victory. His rival had drowned in the river. Constantine, entering the ancient capital, had done so with the head of his defeated enemy held aloft on a spear. Provincial officials from Africa, summoned to meet their new master, had dutifully admired the trophy. Shortly afterwards, as a token of Constantine’s greatness, it had been dispatched to Carthage. But so too had something much more unexpected. A package of letters arrived in the city, which betrayed clear Christian sympathies. The governor was instructed to restore to the church any possessions confiscated from it; Caecilian – who, shrewd operator that he was, had already made sure to write to Constantine, offering his most profuse congratulations – was personally assured of the emperor’s sympathies for ‘the most holy Catholic Church’.53 Shortly afterwards, another letter from the emperor arrived in Carthage. In it, the governor was instructed to spare Caecilian and his fellow priests the burden of civic dues. Donatus, scandalised by the favouritism shown his rival, was nevertheless alert to its broader implications. Constantine was not merely gracing the Church with toleration: it was almost as though he had written as a Christian.
And so it proved. Over time, remarkable stories would be told of how Constantine had been won for Christ: of how, on the eve of his great victory at the Milvian Bridge, he had seen a cross in the sky, and then, in his dreams, been visited by the Saviour himself. For the rest of his life, the emperor would never doubt to whom he owed the rule of the world. Nevertheless, devoutly grateful though he was, it would take him time properly to fathom the full radical and disorienting character of his new patron. Initially, he viewed the Christian god as merely a variant upon a theme. The claim that there existed a single, all-powerful deity was hardly original to Jews or Christians, after all. Philosophers had been teaching it since at least the time of Xenophanes. That the Supreme Being ruled the universe much as an emperor ruled the world, delegating authority to functionaries, was an assumption that many in the Roman world had come to take for granted. Caracalla, arriving in Alexandria, had essentially been auditioning Serapis for the role. Others had awarded it to Jupiter or to Apollo. The ambition, as it had been for a century, was to define for all Roman citizens a single, universally accepted due of religiones – and thereby to provide for the empire, amid all the many crises racking it, the favour of the heavens. Constantine, by acknowledging the primacy of Christ, aspired to see Christians join with their fellow citizens in the pursuit of this urgent goal. In 313, issuing a proclamation that for the first time gave a legal standing to Christianity, he coyly refused to name ‘the divinity who sits in heaven’.54 The vagueness was deliberate. Christ or Apollo, Constantine wished to leave the choice of whom his subjects identified as ‘the supreme divinity’55 to them. Where there were divisions, he aimed to blur.