Yet faith, as he had already discovered, could divide as well as unify. His triumph at Nicaea was only a partial one. Bishops and theologians continued to quarrel. Even Constantine himself, in the final years of his life, found his loyalty to the provisions of the Nicaean Creed starting to fray. On his death in 337, he was succeeded to the rule of the eastern half of the empire by a son, Constantius, who actively rejected them, and promoted instead an understanding of Christ as subordinate to God the Father. Disputes that previously had been of concern only to obscure sectarians were now the very stuff of imperial politics. Approval or repudiation of the Nicaean Creed added to the endless swirl of dynastic ambitions an entirely new dimension of rivalry. At issue, though, was not merely personal ambition. The entire future of humanity, so Constantine and his heirs believed, was at stake. The duty of an emperor to secure the stability of the world by practising the correct religio meant, increasingly, that theologians were as likely to feature in his concerns as generals or bureaucrats. Unless the favour of God could be secured, what value armies or taxes? Christianity was ‘the true worship of the true god’,61 or it was nothing.
In Carthage, of course, they had long known that. In 325, when Caecilian returned from Nicaea, his part in the great council held there did nothing to temper the loathing felt for him by the followers of Donatus. Even when Donatus died in exile some three decades later, the schism refused to be healed. This was hardly surprising. It was not the personal ambitions of the rival bishops that had stoked the mutual hatreds of their followers – nor anything else that provincial officials, desperate to keep order in Africa, could readily understand. When Donatists stripped a Catholic bishop naked, hauled him to the top of a tower and flung him into a pile of excrement, or tied a necklace of dead dogs around the neck of another, or pulled out the tongue of a third, and cut off his right hand, they were behaving in a manner that might have appeared calculated to baffle the average Roman bureaucrat. That differences of doctrine might divide the Christian people was a realisation that Constantine had fast had to come to terms with; but it was not doctrine that divided them in Africa. The hatred ran much deeper than that. Donatists who seized a church from Catholics would make sure to paint its walls white, scrub its floors with salt and wash its furnishings. Only in this manner, they believed, could the building be cleansed of contamination: the contamination of opponents who had compromised with the world.
What was the surest way to plant anew the Garden of Eden on earth? Was it, as the Donatists argued, to raise a wall against the clutching of briars and nettles, and to tend only those narrow flower beds that were manifestly clear of weeds? Or was it, as their opponents insisted, to attempt the planting of the whole world with seeds? ‘Grant to God that His garden be spread far and wide.’ So one Catholic bishop, responding to the Donatist charge that he had made common cause with the world as it was, rather than as it should be, urged his opponents. ‘Why do you deny to God the Christian peoples of East and North, let alone those of the provinces of the West, and of all the innumerable islands with whom you share no fellowship of communion, and against whom you – rebels that you are, and few in number – range yourselves?’62 The hatreds roused by this bitter disagreement – perplexing though they might seem to anyone not raised in the traditions of the African church – proved impossible to resolve. Constantine himself, after his brief foray into the Donatist controversy, had ended up distracted by more pressing issues. The terrorism practised by Catholics and Donatists, endemic though it fast became, was not of an order to disturb the transport of grain from the province to Rome – and so, by and large, they were left alone. Decades on from the deaths of both Caecilian and Donatus, the killings continued, the divisions widened, and the sense of moral certitude on both sides grew ever more entrenched.
For the first time, two fundamental dimensions of Christian behaviour had been brought into direct conflict on the public stage of an imperial province. Whether God’s people were best understood as an elect of the godly or as a flock of sinners was a question without a conclusive answer. For all the ultimate success of the Catholic leadership in isolating their rivals from the mainstream of the Church, the appeal of the cause represented by the Donatists could not entirely be suppressed. A signpost was pointing to a new and radical future. Throughout Christian history, the yearning to reject a corrupt and contaminated world, to refuse any compromise with it, to aspire to a condition of untainted purity, would repeatedly manifest itself. The implications of this tendency would, in time, be felt far beyond the Church itself. A pattern had been set that, over the course of millennia, would come to shape the very contours of politics. Constantine, by accepting Christ as his Lord, had imported directly into the heart of his empire a new, unpredictable and fissile source of power.
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* The letter is quoted by Eusebius, a historian of the church writing a century and a half after the events it describes. It is perfectly possible – indeed likely – that he added his own touches to it; and yet, for all that, allusions in the narrative to doctrinal controversies contemporaneous with Irenaeus make it clear that the bulk of the letter must be authentic. It may even be by Irenaeus himself.
V
CHARITY
AD
362: P
ESSINUS
The new emperor, heading across Galatia, found signs of decay in every temple he visited. Paint flaked from statues, and altars stood unsplashed by blood. The strut of the ancient gods had, in recent decades, become a cringe. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more evident than in Pessinus. Here, since primordial times, Cybele had her seat. Once her castrated priests had ruled the entire city. It was from Pessinus, in 204 BC, that the first statue of the goddess to arrive in Rome had been sent. Half a millennium on, pilgrims still took the road there to pay honour to the Divine Mother. Fewer and fewer, though. Even in Pessinus itself, Cybele’s hold was slipping. The great bulk of her temple, which for centuries had dominated the city, increasingly stood as a monument not to her potency, but to her fading.
The shock of this cut Flavius Claudius Julianus to the quick. The nephew of Constantine, he had been raised a Christian, with eunuchs set over him to keep him constant in his faith. As a young man, though, he had repudiated Christianity – and then, after becoming emperor in 361, had committed himself to claiming back from it those who had ‘abandoned the ever-living gods for the corpse of the Jew’.1 A brilliant scholar, a dashing general, Julian was also a man as devout in his beliefs as any of those he dismissively termed ‘Galileans’. Cybele was a particular object of his devotions. It was she, he believed, who had rescued him from the darkness of his childhood beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, heading eastwards to prepare for war with Persia, he had paused in his journey to make a diversion to Pessinus. What he found there appalled him. Even after he had made sacrifice, and honoured those who had stayed constant in their worship of the city’s gods, he could not help but dwell in mingled anger and despondency on the neglect shown Cybele. Clearly, the people of Pessinus were unworthy of her patronage. Leaving the Galatians behind, he did as Paul had done three centuries before: he wrote them a letter.