CHRISTIANITY - THE IMPERIAL CHURCH (300-451)

CONSTANTINE AND THE GOD OF BATTLES

The year 306 was crucial for the Christian Church. It was then that the senior emperor in the west, Constantius I, died at the British military headquarters at Eboracum or York (the second Roman emperor to do so). The army there proclaimed his son Constantine emperor. In 293 Diocletian had instituted a team of four emperors under his leadership (the 'Tetrarchy'), with a senior and a junior emperor in east and west, in the hope that it would make the empire more manageable and stable; in fact, after he retired in 305, he had to watch the Tetrarchy trigger further civil war. Following a series of complex manoeuvres, in 312 Constantine led his army to face the army of his rival, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge, which crossed the River Tiber and was barring his passage into Rome. During what became a crushing victory for Constantine, his troops bore on their shields a new Christian symbol: the Chi Rho , the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek combined as a monogram.1 This striking device, with no precedent in scripture or early Christian tradition, was now to become an all-pervasive symbol of an imperial Christianity, soon even on the small change of imperial coinage jingling in the wallets of the emperor's subjects throughout his lands.

The following year, Constantine and the Eastern emperor, Licinius, his ally for the time being, made a joint declaration at Milan proclaiming equal toleration for Christians and non-Christians, which no doubt reflected a policy which Constantine had already been operating in the western half of the empire.2 When Constantine won further victories against his rival emperors still persecuting the Church in the East, he ordered his troops to say a prayer to the God of the Christians. Over the next decade, Constantine's alliance with Licinius cooled and they eventually clashed in open war. Now that Constantine was so obviously favouring Christianity, it was perhaps understandable that Licinius turned on prominent Christians at his Court. The Christian chronicler Eusebius of Caesarea, a fervent admirer of Constantine, came to produce the narrative which tells us most of what we know about these turbulent years, and revising his previous positive account of Licinius, he now had an excuse to portray Constantine's former colleague as the last great enemy of the Christian faith in the tradition of Valerian and Diocletian.3 Certainly Licinius's defeat and murder in 324 ended any immediate possibility of a new violent assault on the Church. The crisis which had begun in 303 with Diocletian's persecution was now decisively resolved.

Over the century and a half from Constantine's military victory in 312, emperors, armies, clergy, monks and excited mobs of ordinary Christians all contributed to a complex of decisions on which version of Christian doctrine was to capture the allegiance of the rulers of the world in the West and in Constantinople. The culmination of this process was a great council of Church leaders at Chalcedon in 451, under the control of a Roman emperor and his wife. We have already seen mainstream Christianity based on a series of exclusions and narrowing of options: Jewish Christians, gnostics, Montanists, Monarchians were all declared outside the boundaries. Chalcedon was to mark a new stage in this process of exclusion. As a result, after 451 many Christians who owed their allegiance to the Church of Antioch, that same Church where Bishop Ignatius had first used the word 'Catholic', were to find themselves on the wrong side of the line. We will meet these excluded folk in Chapters 7 and 8, but first we will see how the new imperial Church asserted itself as the one version of Christian truth for the world to follow, and, in the process, created a great deal of that truth for the first time.

What lay behind the Church's remarkable reversal of fortune in the Roman Empire? Constantine has often been seen as undergoing a 'conversion' to Christianity. This is an unfortunate word, because it has all sorts of modern overtones which conceal the fact that Constantine's religious experience was like nothing which would today be recognized as a conversion. It is worth remembering Septimius Severus, that other unscrupulous military commander who turned emperor a century earlier. Severus had promoted the cult of Serapis, encouraged the idea that Serapis represented a single supreme deity and then reaped the benefit by identifying himself with that God as a way of strengthening his monarchy. Constantine had learned enough about the jealous nature of this God not to make the mistake of trying to merge imperial and divine identities, but their association was still intimate. Most obviously, and for reasons which will probably remain hidden from us, the Emperor associated the Christian God with the military successes which had destroyed all his rivals, from Maxentius to Licinius. For Constantine, this God was not gentle Jesus meek and mild, commanding that enemies should be loved and forgiven seventy times seven; he was a God of Battles. Constantine himself told Eusebius of Caesarea that one of the crucial experiences in his Milvian Bridge victory had been a vision of 'a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and an inscription, CONQUER BY THIS'.4 The association of the sun and the Cross was no accident. A military leader and a ruthless politician rather than an abstract thinker, Constantine was probably not very clear about the difference between a universal sun cult and the Christian God - at least to start with. As he began showering privileges on the Christian clergy, it is unlikely that many of them considered whether the Emperor should be given a theological cross-examination before they accepted their unexpected gifts. What interested Constantine was the Christian God rather than the Christians. It would hardly have been worth his while from a political point of view to court favour from Christians, for, however one calculates their numbers, they were still a decided minority in the empire, and noticeably weak in those crucial power blocs, the army and the Western aristocracy. A simple grant of toleration would have been enough to delight the battered Church.

Constantine went much further than that. There is no doubt that he came to a deeply personal if rather capricious involvement in the Christian faith; according to Eusebius, he regularly delivered sermons to his no doubt slightly embarrassed courtiers.5 Over his reign, he gave the Church an equal place alongside the traditional official cults and lavished wealth on it. Christianity could now embark on its long intoxication with architecture, previously a necessarily restricted passion. Among his many other donations were fifty monumental copies of the Bible commissioned from Bishop Eusebius's specialist scriptorium in Caesarea: an extraordinary expenditure on creating de luxe written texts, for which the parchment alone would have required the death of around five thousand cows (so much for Christian disapproval of animal sacrifice). It is possible that two splendidly written Bibles of very early date, now called respectively the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus after their historic homes, are survivors from this gift.6 The Emperor favoured Christians in senior positions and went as far as being baptized just before his death. There were hesitations: the designs on imperial coinage were always a barometer of official policy and propaganda preoccupations because they were frequently changed, and some mints were still producing coins with non-Christian sacred subjects as late in his reign as 323.7 Traditionalists in Italy would have been pleased by Constantine building a new temple dedicated to the imperial cult, but the lion's share of imperial patronage was now going to the Christians, and at the same time many temples were being stripped of precious metals at imperial command.8

Most striking of all Constantine's symbolic associations with the new religion was his founding of a new capital for his empire. He had no emotional investment in the city of Rome. It is likely that he had hardly if ever visited it before his victory at the Milvian Bridge, and he found the city problematic. Its ruling class was unsympathetic to his new faith and clung to their ancient temples, and it was difficult to change the face of the city itself with monumental building for his new-found friends.9 Instead he looked to the eastern part of the empire to create a city which would be peculiarly his own, and would also mark his victory over the former ruler in the East, Licinius.10 He had considered refounding the city of Troy, original home of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, as his New Rome, but this association with pre-Christian Roman origins did not prove enough of an incentive.11 The site Constantine chose was an ancient city enjoying a superb strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea and the command of trade routes east and west: Byzantion. He renamed the city after himself, as previous emperors had done in imitation of Alexander's precedent: Constantinople. The old name persisted, eventually modified in academic Latin to Byzantium. It was destined to provide a new identity for the Eastern Roman state, whose capital it remained over the next millennium, in what has commonly become known in history as the Byzantine Empire.12 But for countless numbers of people of the eastern Mediterranean over that millennium and beyond, Constantinople would simply be 'the City', the dominant presence in their society, their religious practice and their hopes for the future.

Constantine quadrupled Byzantium in size, and although virtually none of the buildings which he provided survive, the Great Palace of the emperors remained on the same site from its first completion in 330 until the death of the last emperor in 1453. This new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others. Traditional religion was put in a subordinate place: the core centres of worship were Christian churches of great magnificence. They included a church in which Constantine proposed to gather the bodies of all twelve Apostles to accompany his own corpse: a mark of how he now saw his role in the Christian story, although the coffins alongside his own had to remain mainly symbolic in default of enough relics of the Twelve.13 For the most part the city churches were not exactly congregational or parish churches. They were designed like the contemporary temples of non-Christians with specific dedications or commemorations in mind, to concentrate on a particular saint or aspect of the Christian holiness. One of the greatest, close to the Imperial Palace, was dedicated to Holy Peace (Hagia Eirene). It was soon outclassed when Constantine's son put up an even greater church right beside it dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), whose successor building was to have a special destiny in Christian history, as we will discover. So Christian life in Constantinople straight away became based on a rhythm of 'stational' visits to individual churches at special times, the clergy linking them by processions which became a characteristic feature of worship in the city. To live in Constantinople was to be in the middle of a perpetual pilgrimage.14

Constantine's vigorous annexation of the Christian past for imperial purposes in Rome and Byzantium also bore fruit in a remarkable enterprise which was a huge boost to the growing Christian urge to visit sacred places: the recreation of a Christian Holy Land centred on Jerusalem.15 Palestine had been a backwater of the empire since its miserable century of rebellion and destruction from 66 CE. The former Jerusalem was a small city with a Roman name, Aelia Capitolina, some evocative ruins on the former Temple site, and a modest number of Christians who had unobtrusively returned to live around the area. In the middle years of Constantine's reign its provincial tranquillity began to be interrupted, much to the delight of its ambitious bishop, Macarius, who was pressing for appropriate honour to be done to the true home of Christianity. The bishop clearly attracted the Emperor's attention by some skilled self-promotion at the great Council of Nicaea in 325. He returned home armed with instructions to start an expensive programme of church-building, the preparations for which revealed a sensational double find beneath the stately imperial Capitoline temple built by Hadrian (see p. 107). What emerged was the exact site of Christ's crucifixion and the tomb in which the Saviour had been laid. It is possible that there had been a continuous Christian tradition as to the whereabouts of these sites and that therefore there was not much revealing to be done.16 Less plausibly, it was not long before the Jerusalem Church was announcing that the actual wood of the Cross had also been rediscovered, and within a quarter-century another enterprising Bishop of Jerusalem, named Cyril, was linking that discovery to an undoubted historic event: a state visit to the Holy City in 327 by Constantine's mother, the dowager Empress Helena.

Helena may not have found the wood of the Cross (certainly no one at the time said that she did), but her presence was important enough - important from the imperial family's point of view, in demonstrating their Christian piety in the wake of the unfortunate and unexplained recent sudden deaths of the Emperor's wife and eldest son, and vital to the Church in Jerusalem as a direct imperial endorsement of a new centre of world pilgrimage. It took nearly a century for pilgrimage to Jerusalem to gather momentum, partly because of the expense, but partly because not everyone was enthusiastic either for pilgrimage or for this particular destination. Eusebius's comments on developments in Jerusalem are reserved, including the lofty remark in his later years that 'to think that the formerly established metropolis of the Jews in Palestine is the city of God is not only base, but even impious - the mark of exceedingly petty thinking' - a remarkably risky statement in view of the enthusiasm of his imperial patrons for the Jerusalem project.17 One has to remember that Eusebius was bishop of a neighbouring Palestinian city, Caesarea, and the metropolitan (presiding bishop) within the whole province of Palestine, so he was not inclined to look favourably on his junior episcopal colleague's archaeological good fortune and all that stemmed from it. His comments continued to be echoed by such diverse major figures of the later fourth century Church as the brilliant preacher Bishop John Chrysostom, the scholar Jerome and the monk-theologian Gregory of Nyssa, who, after some unfortunate experiences when visiting the city, commented sourly that pilgrimage suggested that the Holy Spirit was unable to reach his native Cappadocia and could only be found in Jerusalem.18

That for many people was of course precisely and triumphantly what it did suggest. Scepticism was generally drowned out by the eagerness of people seeking an exceptional and guaranteed experience of holiness, healing, comfort - increasingly a self-fulfilling prophecy as the crowds swelled, to the delight of the souvenir traders and night-time entertainment industry in the Holy City.19 There was now a proliferation of relics of the wood of the Cross. Earlier the usual Christian visual symbol for Christ had been a fish, since the Greek word for 'fish', ichthys, could be turned into an acrostic for the initial letters of a Greek phrase, 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour', or similar devotional variants. Now the fish was far outclassed not only by the new imperial Chi-Rho monogram referring to the same word, but also by the Cross. Crosses had featured little in public Christian art outside written texts before the time of Constantine; now they could even be found as motifs in jewellery.20 Pilgrimage, from having played a seemingly minor role in Christian life, was now launched as one of its major activities. The life of Judaism had once revolved around one great pilgrimage: to Jerusalem. For Christians, Jerusalem would be only the principal star of a galaxy of holy places that has never since ceased to proliferate. Shrines have come and gone, but some, like Jerusalem itself, or Rome in the West, have never lost their appeal to the Christian faithful.

Jerusalem and the spectacularly large Church of the Holy Sepulchre begun by Constantine became host to a liturgical round which sought to take pilgrims on a journey alongside Jesus Christ through the events of his last sufferings in Jerusalem, his crucifixion and resurrection. Already in the 380s the Jerusalem liturgy had arrived at a state of elaboration lovingly described by an exotic visitor, Egeria, a member of one of the first western European communities of nuns, who had travelled all the way from the Atlantic coast of Spain (we are lucky that a single manuscript of her account written for her sisters turned up in Italy in 1884).21 Interestingly, it is clear from Egeria's description that the Church authorities made little attempt to commemorate the other events of Jesus's life which associated him more positively with the old life of Jerusalem, such as his presentation in the Temple in adolescence, or his angry expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple. Any liturgical reminiscences around these events might have provided opportunities for Jews to make unwelcome polemical points, and they would also have compromised one of the best-attested predictions of the Saviour himself, that not one stone of the Temple would remain on another.22 The silence continued in later centuries, during which the site of the Temple remained a wilderness; its rehabilitation awaited those who listened to the prophet Muhammad (see pp. 255-61).

According to Luke's Gospel, the Mother of God celebrated her pregnancy with a song praising God for putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away.23 Now Christianity was becoming the religion of the powerful and it was entering what might be seen as an increasingly cosy alliance with high society. Power in the Graeco-Roman world lay in cities. Christians had acknowledged this by making them their own centres of power as they gradually created the uniform system of leadership by bishops and when they identified their leading bishops as 'metropolitans': those who presided over the Christian community of a 'metropolis'. This became so much a habit in both the Roman and the Greek Churches that when Rome started sending missionaries into northern Europe during the sixth and later centuries, it still encouraged bishops to find cities as bases and take their title from them, although there were hardly any communities recognizable as cities.

Even in the second century, long before the alliance with Constantine, the Apologists and Logos-theologians were witnessing to Christian willingness to express itself in the terms of conventional Classical culture (see pp. 141-3). Eventually the Latin and Greek Churches became so identified with the Graeco-Roman world that within living memory in the Christian West, almost fifteen hundred years after the disappearance of the last Western Roman emperor, schoolboys and schoolgirls learned Latin as a necessary qualification for entry in any subject to two of England's leading universities. The crucial stage in this extraordinary cultural saga was the reign of Constantine. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea so identified Constantine's purposes with God's purposes that he saw the Roman Empire as the culmination of history, the final stage before the end of the world. Gone was any expectation of a thousand-year rule of the saints, which he felt to be a deplorable falsehood, associated with the Book of Revelation, which he mistrusted. But this Christian historian felt very differently about the nature of the empire from the great Latin historians of the past, such as Tacitus or Suetonius. The city of Rome meant little to him and he took a comparatively restrained interest in its history; the empire had become something greater, more universal in God's plan.24

Significantly, imperial Christianity came to follow the political division of the empire which had originally been established by its arch-enemy Diocletian, when he split the administration of his empire between east and west, with a dividing line running through central Europe to the west of the Balkans, and a separation of North Africa and Egypt. In Europe, that boundary is very largely that existing today between Orthodox and Catholic societies, with fairly minor adjustments, even to the division of Slavic peoples between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Moreover, the Church started using a technical administrative term which Diocletian had adopted for the twelve subdivisions he created in the empire: 'diocese'. In the Western Latin Church, this has become the term for an area under the control of a bishop. The Churches of Orthodox tradition reserve it for the territories of the whole group of bishops who look to a particular metropolitan or patriarch, such as the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, or the Bishop of Constantinople, who is now known as the Oecumenical Patriarch. For the area presided over by a single bishop, they use a word which the West has redeployed for much smaller pastoral units served by a single priest: the parochia or parish. The West has another term equivalent to diocese, from a Latin word for a chair, sedes, which comes into English as 'see'.

This new vocabulary reflected the fact that the role of a bishop had been radically transformed now that he was not the leader of a small intimate grouping which might be scarcely larger than a household. That was what the Pastoral Epistles (see pp. 118-19) had described when they considered how a bishop should lead his people, but now the situation had radically changed. Willy-nilly, but mostly without much protest, bishops were becoming more like official magistrates, because their Church was being embraced by the power of the empire. Less than a century before, the heap of charges against Bishop Paul of Samosata had included the complaint that he had sat on a throne like a 'ruler of the world'; now all bishops did this.25 The idea of a seated bishop presiding over the liturgy but also pronouncing on matters of belief and adjudicating everyday disputes, became so basic to Western Christian ideas of what a bishop represented that the Church annexed a second Latin word for 'chair', cathedra, previously associated with teachers in higher education, and used it for the city church in which the bishop's principal chair could be found: his cathedral. The buildings which the Church now put up for the worship of their great congregations reflected the bishops' role as politicians and statesmen: churches borrowed their form not from the temples of the Classical world, which were not designed for large congregations, and which in any case had inappropriate associations with sacrifice to idols, but instead from the secular world of administration.

The model chosen was the audience hall of a secular ruler, called from its royal associations a basilica. Conventionally it was a rectangular chamber big enough to hold large numbers, with an entrance through one of the long sides to face the chair of the presiding magistrate or ruler, often housed in a semicircular apse in the other long wall. Interestingly, although the new Christian basilicas took this architectural form, they made two radical modifications to it. One of the earliest examples of this major re-envisioning of the basilican plan can still be seen in Rome at Constantine's church now dedicated to St John Lateran, and it is splendidly instanced in the slightly later pair of basilicas dedicated to Sant' Apollinare in Ravenna (see Plate 4), but there are countless others. The plan was applied in a remarkably uniform fashion throughout the imperial Church, and indeed beyond its borders as far away as the Church in Ethiopia in its early years. The first Christian innovation was, wherever possible, to 'orient' the building: that is, to lay out its long axis west to east, with an apsidal end at the east to contain the eucharistic table or altar with the bishop's chair behind it. There are a host of biblical justifications for east-west orientation, from the eastern entrance of the Garden of Eden leading to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3.24) to the angel of Revelation 7.2 who rises from the east and gives safe passage to the chosen - but one feels that none of them would have had a decisive architectural effect without the plain fact that the sun rises in the east, regardless of the Bible and its preoccupations. Second, instead of an entrance in a long side wall, the west gable of a Christian basilica now housed the entrance. So those coming into the building had their gaze directed throughout its length, both to the bishop's chair and to the altar in front of it, which increasingly frequently contained or stood over the remains of some Christian martyr from the heroic era of persecution.

The purpose of this replanning was to turn the basilica into a pathway towards all that was most holy and authoritative in Christian life: the pure worship of God. If it is in the fourth century that we first get substantial numbers of surviving Christian church buildings, it is also from this period that we first have substantial evidence about the worship for which they had been designed as theatres. Despite the efforts of much liturgical scholarship, it is remarkably difficult to get a coherent picture of what Christian worship looked like or felt like before the time of Constantine; throughout the Christian world, probably only the present-day liturgy of the Syriac Churches is anything like a form which predates that period (see p. 184). In a brilliant miniature study, the twentieth-century liturgical scholar R. P. C. Hanson indeed established that in general, up to the end of the third century, bishops were free to improvise a form of words around set themes which would be considered appropriate for the great drama of the Eucharist. They were after all the Church's teachers, as their cathedra chair came to symbolize, and they could be trusted to include the right material. In the fourth century the situation changed: the liturgy, like the buildings in which it was celebrated, became more fixed and structured. From that era onwards, architecture and manuscript evidence come together for the first time to offer a flood of light on these matters at the heart of Christian experience.26

Armed with this combination of knowledge, we could enter a basilica to look eastwards towards the table of the Lord's death and resurrection. We would remember the martyred servant of Christ whose bones were incorporated in it, and who by his or her suffering had a place guaranteed close to the Lord in Heaven. In the great services of the Church's year, we would also see the living representative of God on earth, the bishop sitting in his chair, flanked by his clergy. This was a model of the Court of Heaven; and naturally everyone at the time would expect splendour at a Court. It was an age when clergy began to dress to reflect their special status as the servants of the King of Heaven. The copes, chasubles, mitres, maniples, fans, bells, censers of solemn ceremony throughout the Church from East to West were all borrowed from the daily observances of imperial and royal households. Anything less would have been a penny-pinching insult to God.

Although the Church celebrated God's banquet, the Eucharist, by annexing countless symbols of worldly triumph, there remained a difference from imperial feasting. The triumphal atmosphere was edged with the memory that the Eucharist was a meal of 'Last Supper' which had led directly to Christ's suffering and death, and which had then been re-enacted in joy in the presence of the risen Christ at that table in the village of Emmaus (see pp. 94-5). The Cross which was now becoming universally familiar as a visual symbol of Jerusalem, of crucifixion and resurrection, was never far from the portraits of the imperious Christ staring down from the walls on his servants celebrating below. And like the imperial Court, some people must be excluded from the festivities because they were not authorized to enter. Those who had not fulfilled the requirements for baptism and were still under instruction (catechesis) were the 'catechumens'. They were dismissed before the Eucharist began and restricted to the entrance area of the church, which often developed as a separate chamber at the west end of the basilican building.

And for all Christians, there was a time of preparation before the great festivals which became longer and more elaborate in direct proportion to the elaboration of the festivals themselves. From early days, the time of anxiety and tragedy which led up to the Resurrection was marked out by abstinence and vigil. By a natural progression of ideas, this was linked to the story in the Synoptic Gospels that Christ had retreated from his active life and ministry into the desert for forty days and nights. It was the perfect time of the liturgical year for catechumens to spend a last rigorous preparation before their triumphal reception into the Church during the celebration of Easter. This forty-day period, first explicitly mentioned without much fanfare in the Canons of the Council of Nicaea and therefore probably of long standing, was the season which in English is known as Lent.27 Christ's birth and the celebration of the Christ Child's adoration by non-Jewish astrologers (his 'showing forth' or 'Epiphany') came over the next centuries also to be observed with a similar introductory period of fasting and austerity, during which the faithful could act out their longing for the Saviour's arrival or 'Advent'. That forty-day season would make all the more joyful the Christmas and Epiphany festivals at the darkest time of the calendar, when the days were at their shortest, as the release came at last from the time of preparation.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MONASTICISM

It seemed that episcopal authority had now triumphed in the Church. But worshippers at the Eucharist, seeing the bishop seated before them with his presbyters, might be aware that there was an alternative source of power and spirituality in the Church: an institution which had only gradually emerged during the third century. The closer the Church came to society, the more obvious were the tensions with some of its founder's messages about the rejection of convention and the abandonment of worldly wealth. Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death. It is not surprising that many have sought a radical alternative, a mode of life which is in itself a criticism of ordinary society. Worldly goods, cravings and self-centred personal priorities are to be avoided, so that their accompanying frustrations and failures can be transcended. The assumption is that such transcendence has a goal beyond the human lifespan, the goal which some term God. The movement known as monasticism is a way of structuring this impulse.

Something like monastic systems are found at the margins of several world faiths - Jains, Taoists, Hindus and Muslims - but Buddhism and Christianity have made monasticism a central force within their religious activity. It is more surprising that Christianity should make monasteries part of its tradition than that monasticism should have developed in Buddhism, for Christianity affirms the positive value of physical human flesh in the incarnation of Christ, while Buddhism has at its centre nothingness and the annihilation of the self. Christianity's parent religion, Judaism, is actively hostile to celibacy, one of monasticism's chief institutions, and Jewish groups which practised a form of monasticism are fairly marginal in Jewish history: the Essenes and the shadowy sect of the Therapeutae mentioned by the Jewish historian Philo. Descriptions of monasticism are notable by their absence in both Old and New Testaments, and we have seen that the one recorded attempt in Christianity's first generation to practise community of goods was short-lived, if indeed it happened at all (see pp. 119-20).

The spiritual writer A. M. Allchin called one episode in monastic history 'the silent rebellion', and this happy phrase can be more widely applied.28 All Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church's decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization. In its early years, the Christian Church was a small community which found it easy to guard its character as an elite consisting of spiritual athletes proclaiming the Lord's coming again. Later, the gnostic impulse in Christianity encouraged this tendency, pushing Christians in the direction of austerity and self-denial, just like much contemporary non-Christian philosophy. The stance became increasingly hard to maintain as Christian communities grew and all sorts of people began flocking in; even the long process of instruction and preparation for baptism and admission to communion then customary for converts and born Christians alike could not prevent this process. There were arguments about this in Rome as early as the end of the second century, when the austere priest Hippolytus (see p. 172) furiously attacked his bishop, Callistus, for what he regarded as laxity in imposing penances on Church members who had fallen into serious sin.29 At the root of this quarrel, which resulted in Hippolytus severing his links with the mainstream Church, was the issue of whether the Church of Christ was an assembly of saints, hand-picked by God for salvation, or a mixed assembly of saints and sinners. The same dilemma lay behind the schisms of the Novationists, Melitians and Donatists in the third and fourth centuries (see pp. 174-5 and p. 212), and it was all the more obvious when Christians generally ceased to have the opportunity to be martyred at the hands of non-Christians after the time of Constantine.

It was probably inevitable that the hardliners from Hippolytus to Donatus should lose the argument and leave the mainstream, since from its beginnings, at least as described in the Book of Acts, Christianity had a voracious appetite for converts. If the sort of rigorous moral standards which the purists wanted were applied, there would hardly be anyone left in the Church. But might there be a solution short of schism for those who wanted something more? The impulse to separate while remaining in communion with the mainstream Christian body is already perceptible during the third century, before the great surprise of Constantine's 'conversion'. Underlining the uneasy relationship between monasticism and the mainstream Church, its origins are in the lands from which gnostic Christianity had also emerged: the eastern border-lands of the Roman Empire in Syria, and in Egypt. Moreover, the first moves to founding monastic communities were made at much the same time as the emergence of that new rival to Christianity, Manichaeism, with its ethos of despising physical flesh. It may be that the famous austerities of Christian monks (see pp. 206-8) were imitations of similar feats of spiritual endurance by Indian holy men and that Manichees were responsible for bringing the idea westwards into the Christian world.

One text, known as The Acts of Thomas, hovered on the borders of acceptability in Christian sacred literature until the sixteenth century, when the Council of Trent (justifiably in its own terms) dismissed the book as heretical. Purporting to describe the life of Thomas, one of Christ's original Apostles, its preoccupations suggest a much later date than Thomas's time, probably early third century, so much later than the so-called Gospel of Thomas (see p. 78). Nevertheless, like that probably late-first-century text, Acts belongs to the Christian penumbra of gnostic works, and it is likely to have been written in Syria, at much the same time that the Syrian theologian Tatian was praising a life of abstinence and austerity (see pp. 181-2). Amid its descriptions of Thomas's adventures on his mission to India are fervent commendations of celibacy: the Apostle's first major move was to persuade two newlyweds to refrain from sexual relations. On another occasion, his eloquence on the subject of 'filthy intercourse' was such that the wife of an Indian prince repelled her husband with the equivalent of pleading a headache.30 The testimonies in this work and in Tatian's writings to the emergence of an ascetic (world-denying) impulse come at much the same time as the first evidence of organized celibate life inside the mainstream Church. Likewise, this was in Syria. Groups of enthusiasts called Sons (or Daughters) of the Covenant vowed themselves to poverty and chastity, but they avoided any taint of gnostic separation by devoting themselves to a life of service to other Christians under the direction of the local bishop. Their role in the Syrian Church continued for several centuries alongside developed monasticism.31

In Egypt there is a similar ambiguity about the first monastic institutions. It is worth noting that the richest modern find of gnostic literature, from Nag Hammadi, came from a Christian monastic community of fourth-century date. Egypt was peculiarly suited to a Christian withdrawal from the world because of its distinctive geography: its narrow fertile strip along the Nile, backed by great stretches of desert, means that it is easy literally to walk out of civilization into wilderness. It was here towards the end of the third century that the monastic movement first securely tied itself into the developed Church of the bishops and left a continuous history in conventional Christian sources, through the lives of two powerful personalities who could be presented as founder-figures: Antony and Pachomius, representatives respectively of two different forms of monastic life, that of the hermit and that of the community. The reality was more complicated. Much of this story of origins was an effort by Egyptian monks to claim priority for themselves in the monastic movement, in the face of their competitors and probable predecessors in Syria. Yet without such founding myths, it might have been less easy to integrate the new movement into the Church.

In fact the biography of Antony written by the great fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria Athanasius makes it clear that he was not the first Christian hermit; from his boyhood in the 250s and 260s, Antony was already seeking out in fascination individual Christians in neighbouring villages who had taken to a solitary life or practised an ascetic discipline. 32 Eventually his desire to live a Christian life out of touch with anyone else led him into the desert or wilderness: from the Greek for wilderness, eremos, comes the word 'hermit'. After twenty years of solitude, Antony was faced with a new problem: hordes of people were coming out to join him in the desert. Diocletian's persecution of Christians and the sheer burden of taxation in ordinary society were powerful incentives to flee into the wilderness. As persecution ceased, not everyone wanted to go to such an extreme. So the community life already in existence in Syria found its parallel in Egypt, where groups of people withdrew from the world in the middle of the world, founding what were in effect specialized new villages in the fertile river zone: the first monasteries. They owed their existence principally to Pachomius, a soldier who converted to Christianity during the Great Persecution, impressed by Christians' ready support for suffering fellow Christians even if they had not previously known them.

Life in the army was self-selecting and communal, with clear boundaries and conventions, and it may be that the ex-soldier Pachomius drew on that experience when he devised a simple set of common rules for hermits to preserve their solitude while becoming members of a common group living together. An example of the practical good sense of his arrangements was the stipulation that seniority in his communities was acquired simply by the date at which the individual joined. This would be important when those joining began to include people from the upper end of the social scale, who might seek to perpetuate their status.33 Notably, Pachomius set up his first community not in the desert, but in the deserted houses of a village which he found conveniently abandoned close to the bank of the Nile. A second takeover of a deserted village followed; one might therefore see Pachomius's movement as an effective way of remedying third-century social disruption, to which the growing tax burdens had significantly contributed. Pachomius's sister is given the credit for founding female communities along similar lines, with a programme of manual work and study of scripture.34

Remarkably soon, the word monachos ('monk') gained its specialized religious meaning in Greek: the earliest known use is in a secular petition in an Egyptian papyrus dating from 324.35 There is a significant curiosity in the implication of this word, because the Greek/Latin monachos/ monachus means a single, special or solitary person, but a truly solitary way of life is not the most common form of monasticism. Nor was that first-designated Egyptian monachos living in a wilderness, since the reason that we know about him is that he was a passer-by in a village street who stepped in and helped to break up a fight. Historically, most Christian monks and nuns have lived in community, ever since the time of Pachomius, rather than becoming hermits. Indeed, 'monachus' with its cognates is a particularly inappropriate piece of Christian lexical imperialism when it is applied to Buddhism, whose concept of monasticism, the Sangha, centres firmly on community, and where hermits are even more in a minority than among Christian monks.

It is perhaps difficult for modern observers of Christianity, who accept hermits, monasteries and nunneries as a traditional feature of Christianity, to see that this acceptance was not inevitable. The Church might well have seen the 'silent rebellion' as a threat, not simply because of the dubious and possibly gnostic origins of monasticism, but because the most 'orthodox' of hermits, simply by his style of life, denied the whole basis on which the Church had come to be organized, the eucharistic community presided over by the bishop. Indeed, that worry was translated by the Eastern Church authorities into a vague menace called 'Messalianism', a deviant enthusiasm for emphasizing one's own spiritual experience in asceticism rather than valuing the Church's sacraments - and the 'Messalian' accusation frequently hung over early ascetics or ascetic communities.36 How could Antony receive the Eucharist out in the desert, and how therefore did he relate to the authority of the bishop? Moreover, he was not part of the dominant Greek culture of the urban Church - he did not even speak Greek, but the native Egyptian language, Coptic. Pachomius came from an even humbler Coptic background.37 As it happened, Antony amply proved himself in the eyes of the Church authorities, first by leaving his isolation during Diocletian's persecution to comfort suffering Christians in Alexandria. He then became a great friend of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, who wrote an admiring biography of him, which has been described as 'the most read book in the Christian world after the Bible': a risky claim, but certainly in the right order of magnitude.38

Athanasius painted a portrait of Antony which suited his own purposes: an ascetic who was soundly opposed to Athanasius's opponents, the Arians (see pp. 211-22), and was a firm supporter of bishops such as Athanasius himself. The biography was specifically addressed to monks beyond Egypt; the bishop's aim was a triumphant assertion of Egypt's spiritual prowess, providing a model for all monastic life. Its first half was a dramatic account of the solitary's twenty years of lonely struggle with demons of the desert, often in the shape of wild animals, snakes and scorpions; worse still, in the form of a seductive woman. At the end of the first great contest, the Devil, deranged in his exhaustion and frustration, was reduced to the shape of a little black boy from Ethiopia, and Antony was able to sneer at the 'despicable wretch . . . black of mind, and . . . a frustrated child'. That was an unfortunate literary conceit, since many early monks in imitation came to use the same image for the Prince of Darkness, with a conscious racism directed towards Africans: a backhanded compliment to the success of Athanasius's work, and not the best of stereotypes for promoting good relations with the Church of Ethiopia.39 It was not the last time that Christians would associate black races with evil and fallenness (see pp. 867-8).

If anything bonded monasticism into the episcopally ordered Church, it was this pioneering hagiography ('saint-writing') from one of the most powerful bishops of the fourth century. It also established Egyptian monasticism in its image of desert solitude, encapsulated in that paradoxical word 'monachos', and equally in Athanasius's gleeful paradox that 'the desert was made a city by monks'.40 The image was a significant and useful one, because Christian cities were presided over by bishops; it was a symbol of victory over the Devil's city and his rebellion against the purposes of God (not to mention the purposes of God's bishops). As a description of the origins and development of monasticism, however, it was to a large extent a fabrication. Athanasius deliberately emphasized the desert as he told Antony's story, and the accidents of later history have subsequently reinforced his distortion: when Egyptian and Syrian Christianity faced being marginalized by conquering Islam (see pp. 261-7), it was indeed the remoter desert monasteries which were best placed to preserve monastic life and culture, and hence the common description of the spiritual literature from this society as being written by 'the Desert Fathers'. But that does not represent the earlier reality of the fourth- and fifth-century Church or the place of monasticism in it: far more part of the everyday experience of urban and farming landscapes.

The power of monks and hermits was dependent on their reputation in following Antony's heroic austerity. They had the inspiration of Christ's words in the Beatitudes (see p. 88), but there were also more contemporary reasons propelling them. Like the ascetics of Syria, they would know of the terrible continuing sufferings of Christians in the fourth-century Sassanian Empire, and they would also be uncomfortably aware that such suffering was no longer available in the Roman Empire. In default of any more martyrdoms provided by Roman imperial power, they martyred their bodies themselves, and thus they annexed the esteem which martyrs had already gained among the Christian faithful. They were extending the category of sainthood. There was quite conscious competition in this between Egyptians and Syrians, what Athanasius in his biography was happy to describe as 'a noble contest'.41 During the fourth century, Egyptian hermits and monks became famous for their self-denial, vying like athletes in such exercises for God's glory as standing day and night, or eating no cooked food for years on end.42 This spirit was equalled in Palestine and Syria, where monks and hermits performed terrifying feats of endurance and punishment of their worldly bodies by squeezing into small spaces or living in filth. Jerome, the Latin scholar-immigrant to the East who had tried their lifestyle and did not take to it (see p. 295), did his best to put them down with the comment that Syrian monks were as much concerned for the dirtiness of their bodies as with the cleanliness of their hearts.43 Syrians would probably have retorted that in view of the continuing appalling sufferings of their fellow Syrians at the hands of the Sassanians (see pp. 185-6), they had rather more grasp of what martyrdom meant than he did.

One Syrian word for monk is abila, 'mourner'. One of the many Christian spiritual writers who sought to borrow respectability for his works by placing them under the name of the much-honoured Ephrem the Syrian maintained that Jesus had cried but never laughed, and so 'laughter is the beginning of the destruction of the soul'.44 Nevertheless, it was in this same Syrian setting in the fifth century that there evolved a particular form of sacred self-ridicule or critique of society's conventions: the tradition of the Holy Fool. It was a specialized form of denying the world. Behind its Syrian origins lurked a Greek archetype from before the coming of Christianity: Diogenes of Sinope (see pp. 29-30). The first well-known reviver of Diogenes's deliberate attempt to flout all convention was Simeon, who came to be known in Syrian as Salus ('foolish'). Simeon outdid Diogenes in active rudeness: when he arrived in the city of Emesa (now Homs in Syria), he dragged a dead dog around, threw nuts at women during church services and gleefully rushed naked into the women's section of the city bathhouse ('as if for the glory of God', his biographer optimistically commented). Not unnaturally he caused considerable offence, then somewhat illogically himself took offence at a group of girls who mocked him, miraculously leaving a number of them permanently cross-eyed. His affectionate chronicler a century later was Leontius, a Cypriot bishop. Bishops are not normally associated with antisocial behaviour; perhaps Leontius was writing in the same satirical spirit as Dean Swift. Certainly Diogenes 'the dog' lurked in some of Leontius's literary allusions - not least in the dead dog hanging from Simeon's belt. The Holy Fool was destined to have a long history in the Orthodox tradition (although for some reason the Serbs never took to him). His extrovert craziness is an interesting counterpoint or safety valve to the ethos of prayerful silence and traditional solemnity which is so much part of Orthodox identity. Not all Orthodox theologians have been very comfortable with that contrast.45

One of the most extraordinary practices adopted by some ascetics in Syria was to spend years on end exposed on top of a specially built stone column, living on a wicker platform which resembled the basket of a modern hot-air balloon. This form of devotion was pioneered in the early fifth century by another Simeon, therefore nicknamed the Stylite ('pillar-dweller'). Once established on his column, he reputedly never descended from it before his death. Since the column was successively extended in height to some sixty feet, special arrangements were presumably made for the alterations; while detailed investigation has solved one obvious practical question by revealing evidence that this and subsequent pillars were en suite. Otherwise, Simeon's frugal needs were met by an eager entourage of admirers who hoisted food up to him from the ground. His pillar survives in part, surrounded by a massive ruined basilica in the Syrian hill country beyond Aleppo, within sight of the modern border with Turkey. The column has literally been eaten away by its devotees, who over centuries chipped off small portions which they then ground to powder and swallowed for healing purposes. The remnant, now whittled down to man height from its original sixty feet, resembles a well-sucked lollipop (see Plate 3).

Over the next seven centuries, around 120 people imitated Simeon's initiative in Syria and Asia Minor. They were like living ladders to Heaven, and even if hermits, they were far from remote. St Simeon himself had chosen one of the most elevated sites in his portion of northern Syria next to a major road, dominating the view for scores of miles, and preaching twice a day.46 Stylites often became major players in Church politics, shouting down their theological pronouncements from their little elevated balconies to the expectant crowds below, or giving personalized advice to those favoured enough to climb the ladder and join them on their platform. There was little love lost between some rival pillars of different theological persuasions. Simeon the younger Stylite (521-97) is rather implausibly said to have insisted on spending his infancy on a junior pillar, but there is no doubt that he eventually graduated to a full-scale pillar near Antioch, of which there are remnants even more substantial than those of his elder namesake. It was possible for pilgrims to get there without too much trouble from the city, making for an edifying day out. Simeon does not seem to have protested while a large expensive church (whose ruins also still survive) was being built round his pillar, thus making this ragged hermit into a bizarre living relic, sole exhibit in a Christian zoo.47 It is plausible that one of the most important symbols of Islam, the minaret, was inspired by the sight of the later representatives of these Syrian Christian holy men summoning the faithful to worship God from their pillars. The first known minaret, after all, was part of the great Ummayad mosque in Damascus, well within the cultural zone of the Stylites.

Pillar-dwelling made it briefly into the Balkans, but in the climate of Europe westwards, it proved impracticable. Likewise in Asia Minor the winters were much harsher than further south, and even most ascetics were inclined to community life rather than the individualism of Antony or Simeon. It was here that most of the monastic rules were devised which form the basis of modern Eastern monasticism. Chief among their formulators was the monk Basil, who, unlike many talented theologians, combined wisdom and practicality, so that his influence was decisive not only in monastic life but also in one of the greatest doctrinal crises of the fourth century (see p. 218). He has come to be called 'the Great', and he was one of the first to set a pattern which became a norm in the Eastern Churches (see p. 437): he was first a monk, but was then chosen as bishop of his native Caesarea in Cappadocia, the modern Kayseri in Turkey. Basil, then, can be given much of the credit for uniting the charisma of monk and bishop, one of the potential problems for the fourth-century Church. He had gentle but firm words discouraging the hermit lifestyle in favour of community: 'the solitary life has one aim, the service of the needs of the individual. But this is plainly in conflict with the law of love, which the apostle fulfilled when he sought not his own advantage but that of the many, that they might be saved.'48 Basil's rules for monastic life were imitated and adapted to local conditions in the West, when only a few decades later Western Christians began experimenting for themselves with the monastic life (see pp. 312-18).

Basil's importance for the future of monasticism was equalled by that of his contemporary and acquaintance Evagrius/Evagrios, from the province of Pontus on the southern shores of the Black Sea (hence 'Evagrius Ponticus'), who travelled far from his homeland and a later popular ministry in Constantinople to become a monk in the deserts to the west of the Nile Delta. He and Basil were among the first monks to turn to writing alongside the physical struggles through which ascetics built up their spiritual life, yet the writings of Evagrius illustrate once more how uncomfortably the monastic movement might sit within the structures of the Christian Church. He was an admirer of Origen, and consequently suspect to many; in fact 150 years after Origen was first posthumously condemned by a Church council in 400, the same fate befell Evagrius, accused of 'Origenism' alongside Origen himself and condemned by the fifth Council of Constantinople in 553 (see p. 327). What made Evagrius's ideas particularly suspect later was his distinctive pronouncement that the highest level of contemplation could produce no image or form when it reached to the divine, in order that a true union with God could take place: 'Never give a shape to the divine as such when you pray, nor allow your mind to be imprinted by any form, but go immaterial to the Immaterial and you will understand.'49 By the eighth and ninth centuries, that sounded dangerously like fuel for the image-haters, the 'Iconoclasts' (see pp. 442-56), and Evagrius's memory gained renewed condemnation. It has taken the work of modern scholars to recover much of his work from Armenian or Syriac manuscripts and reassess him as one of the greatest founding fathers of Christian spiritual writing. His immediate impact was profound, and his ideas quietly worked away among communities of monks able to transmit them if only by word of mouth from generation to generation.

Even when it was impolitic to admire, let alone name, Evagrius, his descriptions of progress in the spiritual life could not be and were not ignored, because they resonated in the experience of generations of monks to come. Like so many others, he started on a road of inner exploration: a pattern in which the ascetic faced struggles and torments, to arrive at a state of serenity (apatheia) and then a final state achieved by the true master of the spirit, for which Evagrius was not afraid to use the resonant word gnosis. In all this Evagrius pointed, like a physician prescribing a programme of exercise, to an essential frame for spiritual progress: a rhythm of each day in structured monastic life, the orderly recital from the Psalms of David followed by a short time of silent prayer (in his case, a hundred times a day), and meditation on the Bible, which provided the seedbed in which prayer could grow. He was a strong believer in the human ability to receive God's generosity and mercy and grow in grace: 'we come into [this] life possessing all the seeds of the virtues. And just as tears fall with the seeds, so with the sheaves there is joy.' In an echo of Origen's universalism, he repeatedly asserted that even those suffering in Hell kept those imperishable seeds of virtue. No wonder his Church decided that he was dangerous.50

The very fact of the deliberate competition between Egyptian and Syrian monks in striving for holiness demonstrates their consciousness of the wider world; they were far from detached from the life and concerns of the Church. Monks and monastic leaders now often complicated political struggles and exercised power in ways which seem far from the Saviour's admonitions to humility, love and forgiveness. First in the Eastern and then the Western Church, they proved to be key players in theological confrontations, beginning with the struggles which erupted in the wake of Constantine's new ecclesiastical alliance.

CONSTANTINE, ARIUS AND THE ONE GOD (306-25)

Very quickly the Emperor Constantine I learned to his cost that Christians were inclined to imperil the unity which their religion proclaimed. The first instance of this came as a result of the Great Persecution: renewed quarrels about how to heal the wounds to the Church's self-esteem. In Egypt, hardliners were so shocked at the Bishop of Alexandria's willingness to forgive the repentant lapsed that around 306 one of them, Bishop Melitius of Lycopolis, founded his own rival clerical hierarchy, which disrupted the Church in Alexandria for decades.51 An even more serious split took place in the North African Church, where equally issues of forgiveness were combined with the problem of who had legitimate authority to forgive. A disputed episcopal election took place in Carthage, product of complicated arguments about who had done what in the crisis, combined with personality clashes. The Churches in Rome and elsewhere recognized Caecilian as bishop - one of the prices of recognition being his abandonment of the view of baptism which Cyprian had upheld independently in North Africa (see pp. 174-5). The opposition, furious at what they saw as this final proof of Caecilian's unworthiness, rallied behind the rival bishop, Donatus. The centuries-long Donatist schism in the North African Church had begun.52

Constantine's interventions in this intractable dispute have a remarkably personal quality, as the ruler of one of the most powerful empires in world history suddenly found himself confronted with subjects who appealed to a higher principle than his power. The dissidents were of course used to doing so, but the Emperor had not expected such ingratitude after he had ended the Great Persecution. If he knew nothing else about the Christian God, he knew that God was One. Oneness was in any case a convenient emphasis for the emperor who had destroyed Diocletian's Tetrarchy to replace it with his own single power, but there is more to the annoyance and apprehension apparent in Constantine's official correspondence than cynical political calculation. Anything which challenged the unity of the Church was likely to offend the supreme One God, and that might end his run of favour to the Emperor. Faced with petitions from the Donatists, in 313 Constantine made a decision of great significance for the future. Rather than make a judgement for the Christians with the help of the traditional imperial legal system, as the non-Christian Emperor Aurelian had once done before him (see p. 175), he would use the expertise of Church leaders, asking them to bring the matter 'to a fitting conclusion'.53 So he adapted the North African Church's well-established practice of submitting disputes to councils of bishops, with the difference that now for the first time they were gathered from right across the Mediterranean.

Constantine's first summons of a council was to Rome, in 313. The Donatists ignored the result, since it went against them; so Constantine tried again the following year, this time summoning an even more widely recruited council to the city of Arles in what is now southern France. The bishops, travelling on imperial passes, even included three from the remote province of Britannia, one of the first indications of Christian activity in that island. Once more the council did not succeed in appeasing the Donatists, and in the course of much muddled negotiation with Donatist leaders, the Emperor was provoked into ordering troops to enforce their return to the mainstream Church. The first official persecution of Christians by Christians thus came within a year or two of the Church's first official recognition, and its results were as divisive as previous persecutions by non-Christian emperors. Most Donatists stayed out and stayed loyal to their own independent hierarchy, nursing new grudges against the North African Church, which remained in communion with the rest of the Christian Mediterranean Churches and which thus arrogated to itself the title of Catholic. The split was never healed, and it remained a source of weakness in North African Christianity for centuries until the Church there faded away (see p. 277).

The councils of Rome and Arles were thus not a promising precedent, but over the next century the use of councils to resolve Church disputes became firmly established as a mechanism of Church life. It represented a notable concession by the commander of Rome's army to the officers of God's army, and it meant that throughout the rest of the long history of the Catholic Church and beyond, the principle persisted that its bishops had a power and jurisdiction independent of the emperors. Rulers and Church leaders continued to work out this complicated and conflicted relationship. What was nevertheless now apparent was that the Catholic Church had become an imperial Church, its fortunes linked to those of emperors who commanded armies, to sustain or extend their power in the ways that armies do. That had implications for Christians who lived beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire in territories where they or their ruler might regard the empire as an enemy. They might well also feel that about the imperial Church.

Constantine next sponsored a council in an attempt (again not blessed with short-term success) to solve a dispute sparked in the Church of Alexandria. This was yet another episode, and in many ways one of the most decisive, in the long debates about Christology (that is, discussion of the nature and significance of Jesus Christ), and the relationship between Father and Son. An austere and talented priest there called Arius was concerned to make his presentation of the Christian faith intellectually respectable to his contemporaries. To achieve this, he would have to wrestle with the old Platonic problem of the nature of God. If God is eternal and unknowable as Plato pictured him, Jesus Christ cannot be in the same sense God, since we know of him and of his deeds through the Gospels. This means, since the supreme God is one, that Christ must in some respect come after and be other than the Father, even if we accept that he was created or begotten before all worlds. Arius's opponents accused him of using as a slogan 'There was when he was not'.54 Moreover, since the Father is indivisible, he cannot have created the Son out of himself; if the Son was created before all things, it would therefore logically follow that he was created out of nothing.

Here, then, was Arius's Christ: inferior or subordinate to the Father (as indeed Origen and other earlier writers had been inclined to say), and created by the Father out of nothing. In many respects, Arius was the heir of Origen and should be thought of as among theologians of Alexandrian outlook. It has been argued that Arius was not merely preoccupied by logic and that he had a warm concern to present Christians with a picture of a Saviour who was like them and participated in human struggles towards virtue; his Christ was part of the created order, not simply an image of God.55 Arius certainly found an affectionate following among ordinary Alexandrians, whom he taught simple songs about his ideas. Whatever his motives, by around 318 he had provoked an infuriated opposition in Alexandria, including his bishop, Alexander. Alexander would not be the last bishop to turn the fact that one of his clergy was a rather more acute thinker than himself into a matter of ecclesiastical discipline. His feelings cannot have been eased by the fact that Arius seems to have been previously associated with the rigorist schism of Melitius of Lycopolis.56

Finding himself condemned by a synod (local council) of Egyptian bishops, Arius appealed to a significantly large number of friends further afield, not least the wily and politically minded Bishop of Nicomedia, a city which, until the founding of Constantinople, had been the Eastern imperial capital. The bishop was called Eusebius, not to be confused with his contemporary the historian who was Bishop of Caesarea - Eusebios ('pious') was then a common name among Christians. The Bishop of Nicomedia was in a powerful position to rally support for Arius, so the dispute began overtaking the entire Church in the eastern Mediterranean. Constantine was now consolidating his power in the East after eliminating his last imperial rival, Licinius, and he was determined to reunite the warring churchmen. His instinct was to try the tactics of a decade earlier as at Arles, summoning a council of bishops to solve the dispute, but his first plans in 324 to summon a council to the city of Ancyra were pre-empted by Arius's enemies, who seized the chance of the death of the Bishop of Antioch to gather there, both to choose one of their supporters as the new bishop for that key diocese and once more to condemn Arius's views. They also issued what they claimed was a definitive creed: a precedent for many more official statements which would make the same claim.57

Furious, Constantine now summoned a council at which nothing could go amiss.58 He chose the city of Nicaea (now the pleasant lakeside town of Iznik, still contained in its grand imperial walls), conveniently near his headquarters at Nicomedia. He told the delegates that they would enjoy the climate and also, with a hint of menace, that he intended to 'be present as a spectator and participator in those things which will be done': the first time in Christian history that this had happened. Some think that he actually presided at the council. It was he, probably on the recommendation of his ecclesiastical adviser, a Spanish bishop, Hosius or Ossius of Cordova, who proposed a most significant clause in the creed which emerged as the council's agreed pronouncement: the statement that the Son was 'of one substance' (homoousios) with the Father. Faced with the awe-inspiring presence of the emperor of the known world, there could be little opposition to this: only two bishops are recorded as standing out against it. A large accumulation of other matters controversial in the life of the Church were discussed at this council. They included precedence among the leading bishops, a prohibition on moneylending among the clergy and over-hasty promotion of recent converts to the episcopate, the reconciliation of schismatics, even a ban on voluntary eunuchs being ordained as clergy. There was much for subsequent ecclesiastical lawyers to pore over and argue about. Thanks to the Emperor's forceful role as travel agent, the council had attracted unprecedented attendance and geographical coverage among its participants; the traditional but mystically inspired number of 318 delegates is probably not far wrong. Nicaea has always been regarded as one of the milestones in the history of the Church, and reckoned as the first council to be styled 'general' or 'oecumenical'.59 As we will see, that status did not win ready consent, and twelve hundred years later there once more emerged Christian Churches which looked askance at the work and consequences of Nicaea (see p. 624).

COUNCILS AND DISSIDENTS FROM NICAEA TO CHALCEDON

Arius himself faded from public life and, although pardoned by Constantine, eventually died obscurely, reputedly as the result of an acute attack of dysentery in a latrine in Constantinople, which circumstance afforded his enemies some unchristian pleasure, and was eventually commemorated with exemplary lack of charity in the Orthodox liturgy.60 He had tried to exercise the sort of independence of mind and as a teacher which had been possible in the Alexandria of Origen's day, but which was becoming dangerous in an age when bishops were seeking to monopolize control of instruction; nevertheless, he had raised questions which would not go away. There were problems with the word homoousios (the Homoousion). To begin with, and most troublingly, it was not a word used in the Bible. Second, it had a history, which we have already touched on when discussing the Monarchian disputes (see pp. 146-7). Arius had asserted to his bishop that it expressed the views of the hated Manichaeans about Christ's nature, and it is likely that his known detestation of the term was a major factor in dragging it into the new creed. Likewise for Eusebius of Nicomedia, it was a word tainted by the likes of Paul of Samosata, and he spared no effort to place like-minded bishops in positions of power over the next decades. The campaign to get rid of the Homoousion from Christian credal statements split the Church in the empire for another half-century and more.61

Constantine was initially furious with Eusebius of Nicomedia for his obstructiveness, but he may have come to realize that the Homoousion which he had effectively imposed at Nicaea was an obstacle to his aim of unity in the Church. He may also have been galvanized by accusations of misconduct, substantiated or trumped up by the Eusebians, against Eustathius, Bishop of Antioch, a key figure among the voting majority at Nicaea.62 So Eusebius and his sympathizers were remarkably successful in building up influence with the Emperor in his last years - the most remarkable feature having been the pardon granted to Arius - and they also gained support from a succession of emperors who came after him in the East when the imperial power was divided once more. At the height of their success they managed to harry and make fugitives out of most of their opponents in the Church's leadership. Chief among these was Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who allied ruthlessness to an acute theological mind. Athanasius was fixedly determined to defend the doctrinal consensus on the nature of divinity achieved at Nicaea (although it is noticeable that even he was very cautious about using the term homoousios until around 350). He had an ear for a memorable phrase which would stick in the mind: the equality of Son and Father was 'like the sight of two eyes'.63 At the heart of his thinking was a potent and paradoxical idea which he inherited from Irenaeus, one that has been much echoed since, particularly in the Orthodox world, and sums up the fascination of Christianity's idea of an incarnate God: the Son of God 'has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming himself man'.64 Athanasius was also a genius at categorizing in order to damn: he styled all those who disagreed with him 'Arians', and the term has stuck. In the end, many of his opponents in the next generation were prepared to wear the label with pride.65

In the course of the struggle, some Arians became ever more extreme, saying that the Son was actually unlike the Father (hence their being called 'Anomoeans' in Greek, or 'Dissimilarians' in Latin). In reaction, a middle party was concerned to unite as much of the Church as it could, and backed the formulation of creeds which said merely that the Son is 'like' the Father (from which comes the party's name 'Homoean', from the Greek word homoios for 'like'). Its greatest triumph was to win the backing of the Emperor Constantius II, who through his military victories reunited the whole empire, and who was therefore able in 359, after much negotiation and previous drafting, to dictate a Homoean formula to two councils representing East and West. This statement, an effort to settle the dispute once and for all, was named the Creed of Ariminum after the Western council which was steamrollered into accepting it. In the end it failed to stick, and survived only as a rallying statement of those who came to think of themselves as Arians.66

Maybe the Homoean formula of Ariminum would have succeeded in uniting the Church if Constantius had not unexpectedly died in his mid-forties in 361. He had been leading an army to defend himself against his cousin, the Caesar Julian, who was propelled by Constantius's death as sole emperor on to the imperial throne. Christianity was now thrown into confusion as Julian, whom Christians subsequently angrily labelled 'the Apostate', startlingly abandoned the Christian faith. He had been brought up a Christian under the tutelage of Eusebius of Nicomedia, but had come to be sickened by what he regarded as Christianity's absurd claims, and he discreetly developed a deep fascination for Neoplatonism and the worship of the sun; he may have been initiated into the worship of Mithras.67 He was a subtle and reflective man, perhaps too much of a philosopher for his own good, and he employed the devastatingly effective strategy against Christianity of standing back from its disputes to let it fight its internal battles without a referee, a mark of how quickly the emperor had become a crucial player in the Church's disputes. There was widespread support for his reversing the humiliation of traditional cults, and some violence against Christians, which seems to have included the lynching of George, the recently arrived Bishop of Alexandria, although it is not clear whether partisans of the previous bishop, Athanasius, were in fact the main perpetrators of this outrage.68

Only Julian's early death on campaign on the empire's eastern borders in 363 restored the alliance of imperial throne and imperial Church. Not everyone said that the spear that killed him had been wielded by enemy forces, and there was indiscreet rejoicing in the city of Antioch, whose Christian majority had been a particular source of distress to him.69 This was Athanasius's moment of opportunity, particularly since his rival George was now dead. The Homoeans were in disarray; the theological radicalism of the Anomoeans concentrated the minds of their opponents, while Julian's exposure of Christian insecurity made the more statesmanlike leaders of the Eastern Churches realize that they must find a new middle way. Among them was a group whom the Cypriot Bishop Epiphanius, an even more assiduous labeller of undesirables than Athanasius, christened the 'semi-Arians'. They shifted the language at issue, trying to avoid further argument by rallying the Church to a word which differed from homoousios by one iota: so they declared that the Son and the Father are not 'the same in essence' but similar in essence (homoiousios).70

Fortunately for Athanasius and his scheming, the semi-Arians included some of the most reflective and constructive theologians of their day. Chief among them was a trio who have come to be known as the Cappadocian Fathers. The monk-bishop Basil of Caesarea ('the Great') we have already met (see p. 209): he said sadly about the state of the controversy that it was like a naval battle fought at night in a storm, with crews and soldiers fighting among themselves, often in purely selfish power struggles, heedless of orders from above and fighting for mastery even while their ship foundered.71 Associated with him were his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and their lifelong friend, Gregory of Nazianzus. Athanasius and the remaining champions of the homoousios view now found them unexpected allies, and the Cappadocian Fathers provided a way of speaking about the Trinity which would create a balance between threeness and oneness.72

The problem for many Eastern leaders had been their uncertainty about the philosophical implications of the word ousia (essence, or substance). The eventual solution to their worries was to take a different Greek word, hypostasis, which previously had been used with little distinction in meaning from ousia, and assign to the two different words two different technical meanings.73 As a result of this verbal pact, the Trinity consists of three equal hypostaseis in one ousia: three equal Persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) sharing one Essence or Substance (Trinity or Godhead). The arbitrariness of this decision, for all its practical convenience, will be realized by comparing the Greek word hypostasis , 'that which lies under', with its nearest equivalent in Latin, substantia. From now on, when used in reference to the new trinitarian formula, these synonyms in Greek and Latin were corralled in opposite theological categories, like families divided by a frontier in some political act of partition beyond their control. A more exact Greek equivalent than hypostasis for the Latin persona would have been prosopon, since both words mean in their respective languages 'theatrical mask'; and in fact theologians in the tradition of Antioch did indeed use prosopon in preference to hypostasis, further confusing the international theological tangle. It was not surprising that Western Latin-speaking Christians were inclined over the next few centuries to feel that the Greeks were too clever by half; but a great deal of this suspicion was the result of clumsy translation of intricate theological texts on both sides. We will meet other examples.

The disintegration of the Arian party in the East was completed by a political revolution in 378: the Eastern emperor, Valens, an upholder of the Homoean settlement of 359, was killed in a major Roman defeat on the frontier at Adrianople (to the west of Constantinople), and the Western emperor, Gratian, sent a retired Spanish general to sort out the resulting chaos as the Emperor Theodosius I. Theodosius had no sympathy for the Arians, reflecting the general Latin and Western impatience with Greek scruples about language; he convened a council at Constantinople in 381 at which Arian defeat was inevitable, and Nicaea's formulae would definitively be vindicated. In the same year, a Western 'council' at Aquileia in north-east Italy, actually little more than a rigged trial, condemned and deposed the remaining recalcitrant Western Homoean leaders.74 This first Council of Constantinople saw the formulation of the fully developed creed which is now misleadingly known as the Nicene, and has come to be liturgically recited at the Eucharist in Churches of both Eastern and Western tradition. The main imperial Churches in the Latin West and Greek East, but also the Armenians and Syrians on the imperial frontier, all agreed on the outcome: Jesus Christ the Son of God is not created and is equal to the Father in the Trinity. At much the same time, the creed which came to be known as the Apostles' Creed was evolved in the West, embodying the same theology in shorter form.

The Council of Constantinople not only outlawed Arianism from the imperial Church, but also blocked two other directions in which the doctrine of the Trinity might have been led. The first came to be known (for reasons still obscure) after an Eastern Church leader called Macedonius, but the 'Macedonians' are more accurately described by their nickname of Pneumatomachi ('fighters against the Spirit'), because their development of subordinationist ideas took them in a different direction from Arius. While accepting the Nicene proposition of the equality of Father and Son, they denied the equal status of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead, seeing the Spirit as the pinnacle of the created order. This was not a proposition without precedent or contemporary respectability. Origen had been vague on the exact status of the Holy Spirit (see pp. 152-3), and even the most respected contemporary Latin theologian from the Western Church, Hilary of Poitiers, was notably tight-lipped on the subject, observing that the Bible never actually called this Spirit 'God' and following suit by his own silence.75 The Council of Nicaea, preoccupied by Father and Son, had not extended its quarrels to the Spirit, and so it was not surprising that a large question remained for judgement in 381.

The second initiative to be crushed in 381 was ironically an effort to combat Arianism by a distinguished Lebanese theologian who became Bishop of Laodicea, Apollinaris, who was a great admirer of Athanasius, to the extent that some of his writings were subsequently attributed to the great Alexandrian, causing much confusion among the faithful.76

Apollinaris wanted to emphasize Christ's divinity and hence the truth of the Homoousion, Christ's consubstantiality with the Father, by saying that in Jesus Christ there had indeed been a human body and soul, but rather than possessing a human mind 'changeable and enslaved to filthy thoughts', the Divine Logos had simply assumed flesh. The danger of this anti-Arian enthusiasm was therefore that any real idea of Christ's humanity would be lost - an example of the difficulty of sustaining the balance between the two truths which most Christians passionately wished to affirm: that Jesus Christ was both divine and human.77

The Council of Constantinople thus radically narrowed the boundaries of acceptable belief in the Church, creating a single imperial Christianity backed up by military force. It was one half of a profound transformation in Christian status in the empire in the 380s. The declaration of Constantine and Licinius at Milan back in 313 had proclaimed general toleration. That had been a reaffirmation of traditional Roman practice, with the one great exception of Christianity, which had leapt from persecuted to favoured religion. Now 'Catholic' Christianity was given monopoly status, not just against its own Christian rivals but against all traditional religion: ancient priesthoods lost all privileges and temples were ordered to be closed even in the most remote districts. The process began with a decree in Constantinople in 380, but politics intervened to accelerate the new situation. In 392 a barbarian general of the Roman army named Arbogast backed a coup d'etat in which the legitimate Western emperor, Valentinian II, was murdered and replaced with a modest and competent academic of traditionalist sympathies named Eugenius.

Moves to restore honour and equal treatment to the old religions had not got very far when, in 394, Theodosius intervened from the East and destroyed the usurping regime. His conclusion, naturally enough, was that his policy, already launched in the East, should be extended throughout the empire. The Olympic Games were no longer celebrated after 393. Further decrees after his death banned non-Christians from service in the army, imperial administration or at Court.78 This was backed up by ruthless action: some of the most beautiful and famous sacred places of antiquity went up in flames, together with a host of lesser shrines. Monks were prominent agitators in the crowds which exulted in the destruction, and dire consequences are always likely to follow rampaging mobs. Perhaps the most repulsive case was the death in 415 of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia, so well respected for her learning that she had overcome the normal prejudices of men to win pre-eminence in the Alexandrian schools. Christian mobs were persuaded that she was instrumental in preventing the Prefect of Egypt from ending a quarrel with Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, so she was dragged from her carriage, publicly humiliated, tortured and murdered. The perpetrators went unpunished. It was a permanent stain on the episcopate of Cyril and few Christian historians have had the heart to excuse it.79 Nearly fifteen hundred years later, the breezy Anglican clerical novelist Charles Kingsley used Hypatia's story to annoy Roman Catholics, casting them in a none-too-veiled parallel in the role of the intolerant Alexandrian killers.

Although Arian Christianity was now harried to extinction in the imperial Church, significantly where imperial repression could not follow, across the northern frontier, it flourished - among the 'barbarian' tribes known as the Goths and their relatives the Vandals. Eusebius of Nicomedia had proved that he was not merely a politician with short-term goals when he had encouraged a mission to the Goths, led by one of their own called Ulfila. Ulfila translated the Bible into his native language, though he omitted to translate the Books of Kings on the grounds that their content was too warlike and might give the Goths ideas.80 It was not a stratagem crowned with success: the Goths remained enthusiastic for war, as the Roman Empire was to find out to its cost, and they came to see their theological difference from the imperial Church as an expression of their racial and cultural difference. When they eventually occupied large sections of the former Western Empire, they kept their faith intact and unsullied by Nicene Christianity for a long time (see pp. 323-4). Arianism might well have formed the future of Western Christianity.

It will be immediately obvious, even from this brief summary of the Arian entanglement, how much imperial politics now affected Church affairs; but the emperors were deeply involved not so much because of their own religious convictions (though these might play a significant part), but because so many other people cared so much about the issues. Naturally clergy were passionately involved, and it is difficult to disentangle their righteous longing to assert the truth from their consciousness that the clerical immunities and privileges granted Christian clergy by Constantine and his successors were only available to those who had succeeded in convincing the emperors that they were the authentic voice of imperial Christianity. The play of forces was in more than one direction: emperors had no choice but to steer the Church to preserve their own rule, while few in the Church seem to have perceived the moral dangers involved when mobs took up theology and armies marched in the name of the Christian God. It may seem baffling now that such apparently rarefied disputes could have aroused the sort of passion now largely confined to the aftermath of a football match. Yet quite apart from the propensity of human beings to become irrationally tribal about the most obscure matters, we need to remember that ordinary Christians experienced their God through the Church's liturgy and in a devotional intensity which seized them in holy places. Once they had experienced the divine in such particular settings, having absorbed one set of explanations about what the divine was, anything from outside which disrupted those explanations threatened their access to divine power. That would provide ample reason for the stirring of rage and fear.

MIAPHYSITES AND NESTORIUS

The entanglement of politics, popular passion and theology is even more painfully apparent in a new set of disputes which go under the name of the Miaphysite or Monophysite controversy. In these, the focus of theological debate shifted away from the relationship of Son to Father, as in Arianism, or of Spirit to the Trinity as a whole, as in the views of the Pneumatomachi. Now the argument was about the way in which Christ combined both human and divine natures - that issue which the ultra-Athanasian Apollinaris had already raised, to his eventual misfortune. Behind the theological debate lay several hidden agendas which were as much to do with power politics as with theology. Once Jerusalem had been eliminated, the Church in the eastern Mediterranean had looked to two great cities, Antioch in Syria and Alexandria, the seats of major 'metropolitan' bishops or patriarchs with jurisdiction over other bishops. Now added to this was the new power of the Bishop of Constantinople, which the bishops in more long-standing Churches resented, particularly as Constantinople preened itself on the title 'the new Rome', and had made sure that this was officially affirmed at the council in 381, to general annoyance. Three times in seventy years after the Council of Constantinople, successive Bishops of Alexandria contributed to the downfall of successive Bishops of Constantinople.81 Since the Bishopric of Jerusalem had also greatly benefited from its promotion under Constantine and his mother as a centre of pilgrimage (see pp. 193-5), the Bishops of Jerusalem had ambitions to match their guardianship of the greatest shrine of the Saviour. All these four cities would therefore be jostling for power at the same time as they fought to establish what the most adequate view of Christ's humanity and divinity might be. Alongside them was the Bishop of Rome, increasingly assertive of his charismatic position as successor of Peter (see pp. 290-94), yet also generally slightly marginal to the cut and thrust of Greek theological debate in the eastern Mediterranean.

The basic theological differences lay between Alexandrian and Antiochene viewpoints. Theologians do not always behave like successfully trained sports teams, but there were clear differences in approach between Christian scholars in the two cities; we have already noted the greater literalism of Antiochene comment on the text of the Bible (see p. 152). At issue once more was the question of Christology: that three-centuries-old puzzle of how a human life in Palestine could relate to a cosmic saviour, or more exactly be a single person who was both human and cosmic saviour. Now the Arian controversy had been settled by asserting that Christ was of one substance with the Father, what did that say about his human substance - as seen in his tears, his anger, his jokes, his breaking of ordinary bread and wine in an upper room? How far should one distinguish the human Christ from the divine Christ? Successive theologians associated with Antioch offered their own answer, first Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus, and then his student Theodore, a forceful and subtle theologian, and a native Antiochene, who became Bishop of Mopsuestia (now dwindled to a small Turkish village called Yacapinar).

Alexandrian theologians, following Origen's line, tended to stress the distinctness of the three persons of the Trinity, so they were reluctant to stress a further distinctness within the person of Christ. Diodore and Theodore, familiar with an Antiochene literal and historical reading of the Gospel lives of Jesus, were ready to emphasize the real humanity of Christ; they also tended to stress the oneness of the whole trinitarian Godhead, so they were much more prepared to talk of two natures in Christ, truly human and truly divine, in a way which Alexandrians were inclined to think blasphemous. As an image to explain these different positions, the Alexandrian view of Christ's humanity and divinity contained in a single Person has been likened (although not by Alexandrians themselves) to a vessel which contains wine and water, perfectly and inextricably mixed, in contrast to the view of Theodore and his associates, where the vessel of Christ's person could be said to contain two natures as it might oil and water, mingling but not mixing.

Diodore and Theodore were particularly galvanized to defend their point of view by their horror at Apollinaris's assertion that Christ was indwelled by the Logos, which replaced a human mind in him. They determinedly affirmed Christ's real human nature alongside his divinity. For Theodore, it was vital to remember that Christ was the Second Adam, who had effected human redemption by offering himself as a true human being - that emphasis lay behind the frenetically self-destructive attitudes of contemporary Syrian monks towards their bodies, determined to get as close as was possible to the self-denial of the human Jesus. God had become a particular man, not humanity in general, Theodore insisted: 'to say that God indwells everything has been agreed to be the height of absurdity, and to circumscribe his essence is out of the question. So it would be naive in the extreme to say that the indwelling [of God in Jesus] was a matter of essence.' It was therefore vital to keep the distinction between the man Jesus, despite his 'outstanding inclination to the good', and the eternal Word, which partook of the essence of the Godhead.82

The real flashpoint came in 428, when an energetic and tactless priest called Nestorius was chosen as Bishop of Constantinople. Nestorius was a devoted admirer of Theodore, having been his pupil in Antioch. His promotion did not please Bishop Cyril, successor to Athanasius in a line of resourceful and power-conscious politician-bishops of Alexandria, a prelate whom we have already met in connection with the lynching of the philosopher Hypatia (see pp. 220-21). Cyril, though unlikely to have been a pleasant man to know, was more than simply an unscrupulous party boss.83 When he contemplated his Saviour Jesus, he could see only God, mercifully offering his presence to sinful humanity, especially every time the Church offered Christ's flesh and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist; why otherwise had Cyril's much-revered predecessor Athanasius fought so hard for an equality of Persons in the Trinity? Encouraged by a theological work which he thought was by Athanasius but (disastrously) was actually by Apollinaris of Laodicea, Cyril could see no reason to make a distinction between two words which for him both referred to the 'person' and 'nature' of Jesus Christ: these were the term used by the Cappadocian Fathers for 'person', hypostasis, and a word for 'nature', physis.84 By contrast, and offensively to Cyril's ears, Theodore and those who thought like him spoke of two physeis in Jesus Christ, and made a distinction between those two natures and the one person, the theatrical mask, prosopon.85

The Bishop of Alexandria was particularly outraged when Nestorius aggressively promoted his Antiochene views by attacking a widely popular title of honour for the Virgin Mary: Theotokos, or Bearer of God. Devotion to Mary was now becoming prominent throughout the Roman Empire: enthusiasts for the Nicene settlement of doctrine encouraged it, as a way of safeguarding Christ's divinity against Arianism, since it emphasized the unique favour granted his earthly mother. It was true that such Marian enthusiasm had developed in the Syrian Church precociously quickly (see pp. 182-3), but Nestorius's concern to distinguish the two natures of Christ outweighed this in his desire to be clear about what her role should be and how it should be described. Provoked in his new home of Constantinople by hearing a devotional sermon on Mary which he regarded as fatuous, he snappily responded that talk of Theotokos was nonsense: 'The Word of God is the creator of time, he is not created within time'. He was in effect saying that the title could only be used if one simultaneously balanced it by calling Mary Anthropotokos , Bearer of a Human, and he insinuated that those who overpraised Mary were reviving the worship of a mother-goddess.86 Even many educated in the Antiochene tradition blanched at his reckless precision. Various victims of Nestorius's sharp tongue and reforming zeal rallied to the cause, and with grim satisfaction Cyril exploited a groundswell of devout indignation against his rival bishop.87

The ensuing row once more plunged the entire Eastern Church into a bewildering welter of intrigue and complication which drew in the Eastern emperor, in sheer self-defence, to stop his empire being ripped apart. After a council at Ephesus in 431 and negotiations over the next two years, Theodosius II forced a compromise on the opposing sides. It vindicated the title Theotokos, ruined Nestorius's career for good and left 'Nestorian' theology permanently condemned, but it also left many supporters of Cyril's theology outraged that their own theology had not been fully vindicated with the full triumphalism that they would have wished. The death of Cyril in 444 did nothing to diminish their militancy. Their discontent was given practical expression in further political manoeuvres led by Cyril's aggressive admirer and successor, Bishop Dioscorus, which culminated in a second Council of Ephesus (449), humiliating all opponents of Alexandrian claims and outlawing all talk of two natures in Christ.

Such was the Alexandrians' determination to assert their position that this council ignored a statement of the Western view on the natures of Christ presented by delegates from Leo, the Bishop of Rome (the 'Tome' of Leo). This infuriated and permanently alienated a see which had been Alexandria's long-term ally against other Eastern bishoprics; yet the fault was not entirely on the Alexandrians' side. The Pope had not quite understood Nestorius's position aright, and it was easy for the hypersensitive to see in the 'Tome' an affirmation that there were two agents in Christ. Leo and indeed the later Roman Church always maintained the absolute authority of his statement, a stance which was now becoming a habit in Rome, but the fact that Leo himself later wrote a revised statement on the same subject for an Eastern audience probably indicates that he privately recognized its shortcomings. In the words of one of the latest studies of his thought, the 'Tome' 'contributed to bitter divisions which continued for sixteen centuries'.88

Once more a political revolution intervened and proved the downfall of the Alexandrian party. A palace coup on the death of Theodosius in 450 brought to power his formidable sister, Pulcheria, a bitter enemy of the 'one-nature' theologians who had found political backing in Constantinople. She selected Marcian as a biddable husband for herself to occupy the imperial throne (biddable enough to respect her previous vows of chastity), and in 451 the new regime with Marcian as emperor called a council to a city where the imperial troops could keep an eye on what was going on: Chalcedon, near Constantinople. The main concern at Chalcedon was to persuade as many people as possible to accept a middle-of-the-road settlement. The council accepted as orthodoxy the 'Tome' presented to Ephesus by Pope Leo's envoys two years before, and it constructed a carefully balanced definition of how to view the mystery of Christ: 'the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity . . .' This still remains the standard measure for discussion of the person of Christ, in Churches otherwise as diverse as Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and mainstream Protestants. So, like Nicaea in 325, 451 remains an important moment in the consolidation of Christian doctrine into a single package for much of the Church.89

But by no means all. The Chalcedonian agreement centred on a formula of compromise. Although it talked of the Union of Two Natures, and took care to give explicit mention of Theotokos, it largely followed Nestorius's viewpoint about 'two natures', 'the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union'.90 Meanwhile, to satisfy his enemies, the unhappy former Bishop of Constantinople was condemned once more: an ecclesiastical stitch-up, dictated by imperial power. Nestorius was already completely isolated from public affairs, in a remote Egyptian location (which the Egyptian government still uses for a high-security prison); he endured his humiliation at the hands of his enemies with stoicism. He is reputed to have died the day before a message arrived inviting him to participate in the Council of Chalcedon; regardless of this impulse to reconciliation, the Emperor then ordered Nestorius's writings burned, and children bearing his name were rebaptized and renamed. His last and most extensive work, written in prison, a dignified defence of all that he had done, was only rediscovered in a manuscript in 1889, in the library of the East Syrian Patriarch, whose Church's separate status originated in its unhappiness with the results of Chalcedon.91

The Chalcedonian Definition certainly proved to have staying power, unlike the Homoean compromise solution to the Arian dispute at Ariminum in 359, but it still won much less acceptance than the credal formula of Constantinople from 381. In the manner of many politically inspired middle-of-the-road settlements, it left bitter discontents on either side in the Eastern Churches. On the one hand were those who adhered to a more robust affirmation of two natures in Christ and who felt that Nestorius had been treated with outrageous injustice. These protestors were labelled Nestorians by their opponents, and the Churches which they eventually formed have habitually been so styled by outsiders ever since. It would be truer to their origins, and more considerate to their self-esteem, to call them Theodoreans, since Theodore of Mopsuestia was the prime source of their theological stance and Nestorius hardly figured in their minds as a founding father. In view of their insistence on two (dyo) natures in Christ, they could with justice be called 'Dyophysites', and we will trace their subsequent history primarily as 'the Church of the East' using this label.

By contrast, on the other side the history of the winners has likewise given those who treasure the memory of Cyril and his campaign against Nestorius a label which they still resent: 'Monophysites' (monos and physis = single nature). This latter group of Churches has always been insistent on claiming that title prized among Eastern Churches: 'Orthodox'. In an age where both Churches of the Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox traditions and the various Catholic and Protestant heirs of the Western Latin Church have increasingly sought to end ancient bitterness, these sensitivities have been respected, and the label 'Monophysite' has widely been replaced by 'Miaphysite'. That derives from a phrase for 'one nature' (mia physis) which Bishop Cyril habitually and undeniably used, in writings which retained a wide esteem in both Greek East and Latin West. I will respect that change of usage, although Miaphysites themselves might brush it aside as an unnecessary vindication of their obvious claim to Orthodoxy.92 Nevertheless, to use the 'Miaphysite' label is to point to the fact that Cyril was not crudely talking about 'one nature' in Christ; he would have said that Christ's nature might be single, but it was also composite. The difference between two Greek words for 'one' may seem small, but in a millennium and a half of brooding on ancient insults, it can mean a great deal. In the next chapters, we will follow the adventures of those Churches whose rejection of the Chalcedonian formula from either point of view led them into extraordinary histories of Christian mission, endurance and suffering. There is a common assumption among those Christians who are heirs of either Eastern or Western European theology that Chalcedon settled everything, at least for a thousand years. The stories which we are about to follow show how mistaken this is.

NOTES

1 Stevenson (ed., 1987), 283.

2 Ibid., 284-6.

3 Ibid., 315-16.

4 Ibid., 283-4.

5 Eusebius, 547-8, 554 (Life of Constantine, XXIX, LV). For further discussion of the nature of Constantine's faith, see pp. 291-3.

6 A. Grafton and M. Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 215-21.

7 A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (London, 1948), 93-4.

8 Herrin, 9.

9 For what Constantine did achieve in Rome, see pp. 291-3.

10 E. D. Hunt, 'Constantine and Jerusalem', JEH, 48 (1997), 405-24, at 409.

11 Herrin, 5.

12 See H. C. Evans (ed.), Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557) (New Haven and London, 2004), 5, 523, and for comment, see p. 495.

13 Goodman, 548.

14 Stringer, 65-6.

15 Excellent accounts of this event and its consequences are provided by Hunt, 'Constantine and Jerusalem', and E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312-460 (Oxford, 1984), esp. Chs. 1 and 2. For the archaeology of Constantinian Jerusalem, see J. Murphy O'Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide (Oxford, 1980), esp. 49-61.

16 C. Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West from the Beginning to 1600, (Oxford, 2005), 28-31.

17 P. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1990), esp. 371.

18 On Gregory and Jerome, B. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 2005), Chs. 1 and 2, esp. 52.

19 On the gradual development of the Jerusalem pilgrimage and mixed motives of the pilgrims, see C. Mango, 'The Pilgrim's Motivation', in E. Dassmann and J. Engemann (eds.), Akten des XII. Internationalen Kongresses fur Christliche Archaologie (2 vols. and Register, Munster, 1995), I, 1-9.

20 F. M. Young, 'Prelude: Jesus Christ, Foundation of Christianity', in Mitchell and Young (eds.), 1-35, at 5, and on crosses in texts in the form of 'staurograms' (representations of the Cross), see L. W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids, 2006), esp. 135-6, 139, 151-4.

21 Stevenson (ed., 1989), 258-62.

22 Matthew 24.2; Luke 19.44: cf. Jesus's predictions with a different and apparently symbolic thrust that he would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days, Matthew 26.61; 27.39-40; John 2.19.

23 Luke 1.52-3.

24 H. Inglebert, Les Romains chretiens face a l'histoire de Rome: Histoire, christianisme et romanites en Occident dans l'Antiquite tardive (IIIe-Ve siecles) (Paris, 1996), 169-73. A balanced, not to say astringent, introduction to Eusebius as historian is F. Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon (London, 1983), 1-23.

25 Stevenson (ed., 1987), 258; on Paul, see p. 175. 26 R. P. C. Hanson, 'The Liberty of the Bishop to Improvise Prayer in the Eucharist', Vigiliae Christianae, 15 (1961), 173-6. A very useful summary of what we can know about early liturgy is B. Spinks, 'The Growth of Liturgy and the Church Year', in A. Casiday and F. W. Norris (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity II: Constantine to c. 600 (Cambridge, 2007), 601-17.

27 For the retreat to the wilderness, Matthew 4.1-11; Mark 1.12-13; Luke 4.1-13. On Nicaea, see Stevenson (ed., 1987), 339-40 (Canon 5).

28 The title of his book The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities, 1845-1900 (London, 1958).

29 Stevenson (ed., 1987), 146-53.

30 A. F. J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (2nd edn, Leiden, 2003), 70-73, 110-11 [paras. 11-16; 87-90].

31 S. A. Harvey, 'Syria and Mesopotamia', in Mitchell and Young (eds.), 351-65, at 358.

32 T. Vivian and A. N. Athanassakis with R. A. Greer (eds.), The Life of Antony by Athanasius of Alexandria (Kalamazoo, 2003), 60-63 [para. 3].

33 H. Chadwick, 'The Early Church', in Harries and Mayr-Harting (eds.), 1-20, at 13.

34 Good discussion of Pachomius's initiatives in J. E. Goehring, 'Withdrawing from the Desert: Pachomius and the Development of Village Monasticism in Upper Egypt', HTR, 89 (1996), 267-85, at 275-7.

35 E. A. Judge, 'The Earliest Use of Monachos for "Monk" (P. Coll. Youtie 77) and the Origins of Monasticism', JAC, 20 (1977), 72-89, at 73-4.

36 C. Stewart, 'Working the earth of the heart': The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts and Language to AD 431 (Oxford, 1991), esp. 2-4, 12-24.

37 Hastings, 6.

38 Binns, 109.

39 Vivian and Athanassakis with Greer (eds.), The Life of Antony by Athanasius, 68-71 [para. 6].

40 Ibid., 92-3 [para. 14.7]; cf. ibid., 78-9 [para. 8.2]. For useful discussion of the manipulation of the Egyptian story of monastic origins, see Goehring, 'Withdrawing from the Desert', 268-73.

41 Vivian and Athanassakis with Greer (eds.), The Life of Antony by Athanasius, 50-51.

42 For examples, see Stevenson (ed., 1989), 169-70.

43 Baumer, 112.

44 Ibid., 113.

45 D. Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley and London, 1996), esp. 41, 43-4, 90-103. See also A. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford, 2006), esp. on Orthodox disapproval, at 2, and on Simeon in the bathhouse, at 115, and on Serbian silence, at 252-3.

46 A. Hadjar, The Church of St. Simeon the Stylite and Other Archaeological Sites in the Mountains of Simeon and Halaqua (Damascus, [1995]), 16-17, 22-3, 26-7, 31, 49.

47 Dalrymple, 57-60. Simeon's infant pillar-dwelling is recorded by the sixth-century historian Evagrius, who had known him: W. Smith and H. Wace (eds.), Dictionary of Christian Biography (4 vols., London, 1877-87), IV, 681.

48 Stevenson (ed., 1989), 99.

49 A. M. Casiday (ed.), Evagrius Ponticus (London, 2006), 193 ['On Prayer', 67]. Casiday provides a fine selection from Evagrius's writings.

50 L. Dysinger, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (Oxford, 2005), 6, 193-5. On his enthusiastic development of medical imagery, ibid., 104-23. For his influence on John Cassian, see pp. 315-16.

51 Stevenson (ed., 1987), 277-8. For Athanasius's angrily distorted version of Melitius's break with colleagues, ibid., 357-8.

52 Events usefully summarized ibid., 297-312.

53 Ibid., 304; for these events generally, ibid., 302-7.

54 Ibid., 330.

55 R. C. Gregg and D. E. Groh, Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (London, 1981), esp. 14-19, 28-9, 68-70, 114-15. For a balanced assessment of Arius, see R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (2nd edn, London, 2001).

56 Cf. the comments of the church historian Socrates, interestingly sympathetic to Arius, in Stevenson (ed., 1987), 321, and on Arius and Melitius, ibid., 277-8 and 321; though see doubts in Williams, Arius, 37-41.

57 Stevenson (ed., 1987), 334-5.

58 M. Edwards, 'The First Council of Nicaea', in Mitchell and Young (eds.), 552-67, at 561 and n.

59 The course and results of the council are usefully presented in Stevenson (ed., 1987), 338- 51. The term 'oecumenical', with one of those incongruities which enrich the study of history, was (as Henry Chadwick discovered) borrowed from the title of the empire-wide association of actors and athletes given privileges by third-century emperors: Chadwick, 73.

60 See p. 428.

61 For Arius and his bishop, Stevenson (ed., 1987), 326-7.

62 The traditional picture of bishops at Nicaea voting according to the emperor's wishes and then revealing their true 'Eusebian' colours is significantly qualified in S. Parvis, Marcellus of Ancyra and the Lost Years of the Arian Controversy, 325-345 (Oxford 2006): she detects little overlap between those voting at Nicaea and later 'Eusebian' bishops, and a good deal of evidence of ruthless politicking by Eusebius of Nicomedia after Nicaea. See esp. ibid., 5-7, 39-50, 100-107, 133, 255-64.

63 Frend, 524.

64 A. Robertson (ed.), Select Writings and Letters of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria (NPNF, ser. 2, IV, 1891), 329, and cf. 412-13 (Four Discourses against the Arians, 1.39, 3.34). For Irenaeus's formulation, see A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (eds.), The Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus (Ante-Nicene Fathers I, 1885), 526 (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, bk. 5, preface): 'our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself'.

65 L. Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to 4th-century Trinitarian Orthodoxy (Oxford, 2004), esp. 431-2. See also D. M. Gwynn, The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the Arian Controversy (Oxford, 2007).

66 Various drafts and councils usefully presented in Stevenson (ed., 1989), 13-21, 39-41, 45-8.

67 An introduction to Julian with primary source material is S. Tougher, Julian the Apostate (Edinburgh, 2007), and a notably lively novelistic imagining of Julian is G. Vidal, Julian: A Historical Novel (New York, 1964). See also Stevenson (ed., 1989), 52-68.

68 Frend, 602-3.

69 J. Huskisson, 'Pagan and Christian in the Third to Fifth Centuries', in Wolffe (ed.), 13-41, at 31.

70 For another example of Epiphanius's labelling and smearing, see p. 124.

71 P. Schaff (ed.), Basil: Letters and Select Works (NPNF, ser. 2, VIII, 1895), 48 (Oration on the Holy Spirit, Ch. 30).

72 A fine introduction to the Cappadocian Fathers is Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, 92 - 122.

73 See Basil the Great's explanation of the difference: Stevenson (ed., 1989), 105.

74 For proceedings at Constantinople and Aquileia, see ibid., 111-19, 124-5.

75 A point noted by that acute and deliberately unfathomable scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam: see p. 602, and S. Snobelen, ' "To us there is but one God, the Father": Antitrinitarian Textual Criticism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-century England', in Hessayon and Keene (eds.), 116-36, at 118.

76 For this confusion in the mind of Cyril of Alexandria, see below, n. 84.

77 Stevenson (ed., 1989), 87-93, esp. 88.

78 Ibid., 150-54.

79 Ibid., 284; see Frend, 744.

80 Stevenson (ed., 1989), 77.

81 A. Hastings, '150-550', in Hastings (ed.), 25-65, at 39.

82 Stevenson (ed., 1989), 291-5.

83 For careful assessments of Cyril which some may find occasionally overgenerous in their sympathy, see T. G. Weinandy and D. A. Keating (eds.), The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Critical Appreciation (London, 2003). Cyril's character caused even his admirer John Henry Newman some pause, and profitable reflection on the paradoxical quality of holiness. 'David was the "man after God's own heart", but as this high glory does not oblige us to excuse his adultery or deny his treachery to his friend, so we may hold St Cyril to be a great servant of God without considering ourselves obliged to defend certain passages of his ecclesiastical career. It does not answer to call whity-brown, white': J. H. Newman, 'Trials of Theodoret', in Historical Sketches (3 vols., London, 1872-3), II, 303-62, at 342.

84 See Stevenson (ed., 1989), 308-9, n. on para. 73d: a treatise written by the condemned Apollinaris circulated under the name of Athanasius and Cyril therefore it took to be acceptable. Cf. also Frend, 838.

85 Cf. Theodore on prosopon, Stevenson (ed., 1989), 292. See p. 218.

86 N. Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1-5, Texts and Translations (2003), 52-69. For the whole sequence of events, see Stevenson (ed., 1989), 287-91, 295-308.

87 For useful comment on Antiochene horror at Nestorius's rejection of Theotokos, see D. Fairbairn, 'Allies or Merely Friends? John of Antioch and Nestorius in the Christological Controversy', JEH, 58 (2007), 383-99, at 388-93.

88 B. Green, The Soteriology of Leo the Great (Oxford, 2008), ix, and see ibid., 206-8, 221-5, 230-47, 252. For documents in the affair, see Stevenson (ed., 1989), 309-21, 332 - 49.

89 Proceedings, and Nestorius's relation to them, summarized in Stevenson (ed., 1989), 349 - 68.

90 Ibid., 352-3.

91 Baumer, 49-50.

92 On Cyril and miaphysis, T. G. Weinandy, 'Cyril and the Mystery of the Incarnation', in Weinandy and Keating (eds.), The Theology of St Cyril of Alexandria, 23-54. At my interview in October 2008 with His Holiness Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East (of the Syriac Orthodox Church), I was made aware of his irritation at the 'Miaphysite' label.

By Diarmaid MacCulloch in "Christianity, The First Three Thousands Years",Penguin Group, USA, 2009, excerpts pp.237-288 and 1286-1293. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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