Whatever the answer, it seems unlikely that Christianity finally conquered because Constantine became convinced of its truth. The historian Eusebius was being either naive or dishonest when he wrote: ‘When I gaze in spirit upon this thrice-blessed soul, united with God, free of all mortal dross, in robes gleaming like lightning and in ever-radiant diadem, speech and reason stand mute.’ For it seems likely that the empress Helena made her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in an attempt to atone for the crimes committed by her son, while Constantine himself felt no such misgivings.
When, in 326 A.D., Constantine decided to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium, on the Hellespont, he was, in effect, handing over Rome to the Christians. The city whose name had become identified with materialism and violence became the city of love and salvation; Caesar surrendered his crown to the pope. Subsequent history, as we shall see, raised the intriguing question of which actually conquered the other.
THE END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Within a year of achieving respectability, in 313 A.D., the Christians were squabbling like children. The cause of the quarrel was that one party found it impossible to forgive the other for compromising with the Roman authorities during Diocletian’s persecutions. The Christians had been ordered to hand over their sacred books. Some had refused and been martyred. Some had handed over books that they claimed to be scriptures, secure in the knowledge that the police were illiterate – one bishop handed over medical textbooks. A few had actually handed over their sacred books for the duration of the persecution. Now these compromises became the object of rage and contempt, and the non-compromisers wanted to see them punished and ejected from the church. The non-compromisers called themselves Donatists (after a Bishop Donatus who held their views). To Constantine’s mild astonishment, these advocates of love and forgiveness began to assail one another in public. He was dragged into the quarrel himself when he ordered that confiscated church buildings should be handed back to the Christians; now he had two lots of Christians each claiming they were the rightful owners. The Bishop of Rome sided against the non-compromisers; so did a council of bishops who met in Aries in 314 A.D. The indignant Donatists rejected their decision and proceeded to kill their opponents. Belatedly, it must have dawned on Constantine that these Christians were just as quarrelsome and difficult as the Jews, and that he had made a grave mistake in substituting their religion for the easygoing paganism of the Romans. It may well have been the sight of his Christian subjects snarling at one another that decided him to flee to Byzantium. But his hope of peace was again disappointed. The Greek Church was just as bitterly divided. And the cause, it seemed, was that a priest named Arius was unable to swallow the notion that Jesus was actually the God who had created the universe, and that this commonsense notion scandalised the Bishop of Alexandria. Arius appealed to the historian Eusebius – the one who thought Constantine was free of all mortal dross – and Eusebius agreed with him. The struggle soon became so fierce that Constantine was forced to call a special council of bishops at Nicaea, near Nicomedia (just across the Hellespont from Byzantium). This council came down against Arius and in favour of the proposition that Jesus was God the Father – a notion that would have shocked the founder of Christianity, or possibly, since he seems to have had a sense of humour, made him smile. The decision made, of course, no difference whatever to Arius and his supporters, who remained convinced – rightly – that commonsense was on their side, whatever the Nicene Creed said to the contrary. Arius’s opponents declared him a heretic – taken from a Greek word meaning to think for oneself (which Christians found increasingly reprehensible), and he was refused communion. When Arius died, his chief opponent, Athanasius, circulated a story that he had been struck down by direct heavenly intervention, presumably by a thunderbolt.
And while the Christians squabbled and killed one another, the Roman emperors continued to do the same. Constantine died in 337 A.D., just after being baptised. The fact that his heirs were Christians did not prevent them from adopting traditional Roman methods of settling the succession; two nephews whom Constantine had included among his heirs were executed, and his three sons then ruled the empire jointly, the one called Constantius taking over the throne in Byzantium (now called Constantinople). His first act was to allay the fears of various uncles and aunts by personally guaranteeing their safety. His next was to plot against them. The bishop of Nicomedia entered into the plot and provided a forged document, supposed to be written by the emperor Constantine, declaring that he had been poisoned by his brothers. The soldiers were shown this document, and they went off and massacred two uncles, seven cousins and numerous other kinsmen. The only members of the family who were spared were two children named Gallus and Julian. Meanwhile, the other two brothers of Constantius quarrelled and went to war; one killed the other; then the killer was in turn killed by a rebel officer who wanted to seize the throne. Constantius killed the rebel and so became sole emperor. In due course, perhaps out of guilt, he appointed Gallus as joint Caesar, but soon regretted the decision and had him arrested and beheaded like a criminal.
Meanwhile, Constantius’s cousin Julian showed no desire to become emperor. He was a bookworm by temperament. This did not save him from being arrested and kept at the court of Milan for seven months, where his life was in continual danger. But he was so obviously harmless that Constantius finally allowed him to go to Athens to study. There he became absorbed in philosophy and lived as an ordinary student. And eventually Constantius appointed Julian to be Caesar of Gaul and the northern countries. There Julian showed himself to be a natural soldier and won some important victories over French and German tribes. But when he began to suspect that Constantius was changing his mind, and that he would be next on the list for assassinations, he decided to put up a fight and marched south with his army. The fight proved to be unnecessary; Constantius died before they clashed, and the bookworm Julian – like Claudius before him – became emperor of Rome.
Understandably, Julian did not feel particularly friendly towards the Christians, recalling the role of the Bishop of Nicomedia in the murder of his family. Being a philosopher rather than a statesman, he saw that Constantine had made a mistake in raising Christianity to the position of official religion of the empire. The proof was that the Christians were still denouncing one another as heretics and assassinating one another when the opportunity arose. Power had proved as dangerous to the Christians as it had to the Caesars. The gentle, neighbour-loving apostles of the man-god were becoming rather worse than the Jewish zealots who had caused so much trouble to the Caesars. During one squabble about rival popes in 366 A.D., their supporters fought in church and left behind a hundred and thirty-seven corpses. The historian Ammianus remarks mildly that ‘wild beasts are not such enemies to mankind as are most Christians in their deadly hatred to one another’. So Julian decided to do what he could to restore the balance. It was not his intention to persecute, or even suppress, the Christians. He only wanted to make them stop squabbling and behave like Christians. So he summoned the various bishops who were denouncing one another and asked them to desist. He restored the rights of ‘heretics’ who had been banished and allowed them to return. He withdrew the special privileges enjoyed by Christians – such as tax concessions. He opened pagan temples and tried to bolster the morale of pagan priests, who were in a state resembling shellshock after half a century of Christian persecution. Julian was attempting to restore some of the old religious tolerance that had existed before Constantine had given the Christians the whip hand.
There was a yell of outraged indignation from the Christians, who immediately labelled him Julian the Apostate. Christian writers poured out blistering denunciations. One of these was the emperor’s old schoolfriend Gregory of Nazianz, to whom Julian had been helpful; in his epistles against Julian, Gregory had to find discreditable reasons for Julian’s kindness; he even accuses him of failing to persecute the Christians in order to deny them the glory of martyrdom.
It was unfortunate that, like Marcus Aurelius, this mild philosopher-emperor was unable to remain at home and devote himself to his literary works. The barbarians were still knocking at the door; he had only been emperor for two years when, on his way back from a successful campaign in Persia, he died from an infected lance wound. The Christians breathed a sigh of relief and went back to denouncing and killing one another, and to persecuting the pagans.
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