Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

IV

BELIEF

AD

177: L

YON

The churches of the Rhône valley were on the rack. News of their agonies could not help but shadow Irenaeus as he set out on his journey. Some years previously, travelling from his native Asia Minor, he had settled in Vienne, a city twenty miles south of Lyon. The Gauls – like their distant cousins the Galatians – had long since submitted to Roman arms. Vienne had originally been founded by Julius Caesar, while Lyon had been serving as the effective capital of Gaul since the time of Augustus. Irenaeus, arriving in the Rhône valley from the Aegean, had found a home away from home. Lyon in particular was proudly cosmopolitan. It possessed a temple complex dedicated to Augustus quite as impressive as anything to be seen in Asia Minor; it teemed with officers, administrators and merchants drawn from across the Roman world; it even had an altar to Cybele. Most significantly, from Irenaeus’ point of view, there were Christians. Their companionship had always provided him with the bedrock of his life. As a young man, he had sat at the feet of the local bishop, ‘a steadfast witness of truth’¹ by the name of Polycarp – and who, so Irenaeus reported, had in his turn known the gospel-writer John. ‘And I remember how he spoke of his conversations with John and with others who had seen the Lord, how he would recite their words from memory, and recall what he had heard from them concerning the Lord, his mighty works, and his teaching.’² Arriving in the Rhône valley, Irenaeus had brought with him something incalculably precious to the infant churches there: reminiscences, derived from a celebrated witness, of the generation of the apostles. The church in Vienne had welcomed him with open arms. His learning and his palpable commitment to Christ set the seal on his reputation. This was why, anxious to settle various disagreements that had arisen among the churches of the Rhône valley, and eager to consult with those of Rome, the elders of Lyon and Vienne had chosen Irenaeus as their ambassador to the capital. And so off he had set.

Arriving in Rome, Irenaeus found himself moved by the witness that Christians there had for so long borne to Christ. Twelve men in succession, so he reported, had presided over ‘the venerable and universally renowned church founded by those two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul’.³ The state-sponsored persecution unleashed by Nero had long since petered out. Christians in the city had, by and large, been left to their own devices – and had become, in their own turn, just that little bit more Roman. The heady days when Paul had preached the imminent return of Christ were by now a century and more in the past. Christians might still hourly expect the parousia, but the original, unsettling radicalism of Paul’s own message had been diluted. Letters written in his name and that of Peter now sternly instructed women to submit to their husbands, and slaves to obey their ‘earthly masters in everything’.⁴ The Christians of Rome were advised not to court death at the hands of Caesar, but rather to ‘honour’ him.⁵ Irenaeus himself, that seasoned traveller, knew full well on what the order of the world depended, and did not hesitate to acknowledge it. ‘It is thanks to them,’ he wrote of the imperial authorities, ‘that the world is at peace. It is thanks to them that we are able to walk along well-kept roads without fear, and take ship wherever we wish.’⁶

Efficiently organised transport infrastructure might, however, come at a price. Irenaeus knew, even as he carried out his mission, that the churches he had left behind stood in mortal peril. The lack of any systematic persecution did not mean that Christians could afford to relax. Despite a legal obligation on governors not to disturb the order of their provinces by rooting them out, mobs were perfectly happy to take on the task themselves. Christians, who prided themselves on the distinctiveness of their worship, were – unsurprisingly – the objects of much prurient gossip. They committed incest; they worshipped the genitals of their elders and bishops; they staged ‘monstrous rituals involving a tethered dog’.⁷ No matter how indignantly Christians themselves might refute these calumnies, the conviction that there was no smoke without fire proved difficult to rebut. Nor did it help, in Lyon and Vienne, that the churches were largely peopled by immigrants. Hostility towards foreigners who refused to engage in the cities’ rituals of sacrifice, who scorned so much as to swear by ‘the fortune of Caesar’,⁸ who hailed a crucified criminal as Lord, was easily stoked. In the Rhône valley, the threat was particularly severe. In 177, when the storm finally broke, so capriciously did the violence spread, and so savagely did it manifest itself, that it seemed to its victims to have erupted from a realm of darkness beyond the merely human. Thugs roamed the streets, hunting out Christians wherever they could find them. Men and women of all ages and of all classes were dragged through a rain of fists and stones to the central square of Lyon, then flung into cells. There they were kept, to await the pleasure of the governor.

It was from gaol that the elders of the two Gallic churches had given Irenaeus his commission; and it was from gaol, once the bravest of the arrested Christians had refused the governor’s offer to spurn Christ, and thereby secure their freedom, that they were led to an amphitheatre. Cities the size of Lyon possessed one as a matter of course: for it was in the arena, where cheering crowds would gather to watch criminals thrown to wild animals, or fight one another to death, or endure cruelly inventive forms of torture, that the Roman genius for making a show out of death attained its quintessence. Yet that genius met its match in the Christians of Lyon. ‘We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe.’⁹ So Paul, comparing himself to a man condemned to death in the arena, had once written. Opposed to the brutally coercive power of the Roman state, Christians brought a conviction as potent as it was subversive: that they were actors in a cosmic drama. They did not shrink from the blast of the crowd’s breath, nor cower before the revolting humiliations visited on them. On the contrary: they fashioned out of their ordeals a public display of their devotion to Christ. Whether gored by bulls, or savaged by dogs, or roasted on red-hot chairs of iron, they cried out only ‘the words they had repeated all along – the declarations of their faith’. So, at any rate, it was reported to the churches of Asia Minor, in an account written quite possibly by Irenaeus himself.* With this letter, a momentous discovery was being put into effect: that to be a victim might be a source of strength. Turn on their heads the guiding assumptions of the Roman authorities, and submission might be redefined as triumph, degradation as glory, death as life. In Lyon, over the course of that terrible summer, the paradox of a crucified king held the most public stage in Gaul.

Not that the Christian concept of martyrdom – original though it certainly was – would have seemed altogether unfamiliar to spectators in the amphitheatre. Greeks and Romans were no strangers to tales of self-sacrifice. Their more edifying histories were rife with them. A philosopher might gnaw off his own tongue and spit it in a tyrant’s face; a warrior, captured by an enemy, might demonstrate his resolve by plunging his hand into a blazing fire. Exemplars such as these had always been a feature of the Roman schoolroom. The values that they instilled in the young were precisely what had enabled Rome to conquer the world. They served to illustrate the qualities of steel that had made the Roman people great. All the more grotesque, then, that criminals condemned to the arena, obliged to submit to the ministrations of torturers, penetrated by spears or swords, should have presumed to lay claim to them as well. Indeed, to the Roman authorities, the pretensions of martyrs were liable to seem so ludicrous, so utterly offensive, as to verge on the incomprehensible. Had the governor who sentenced to death the Christians of Lyon and Vienne read the account of his actions sent to the churches of Asia, he would only have been the more disgusted. ‘Those things reckoned by men low, and invisible, and contemptible,’ so the letter proclaimed, ‘are precisely what God ranks as deserving of great glory.’¹⁰ In illustration of this subversive message, it dwelt particularly on a slavegirl named Blandina. Every torture inflicted on her, every torment, she had fearlessly endured. The radiance of her heroism had put even her fellow martyrs in the shade. Blandina’s mistress, although sentenced to the arena as well, did not merit being named. Other Christians, those who had lost their nerve and renounced Christ, were dismissed as ‘flabby athletes who had failed to train’.¹¹ It was Blandina who had won every bout, every contest – and thereby secured the crown.

That a slave, ‘a slight, frail, despised woman’,¹² might be set among the elite of heaven, seated directly within the splendour of God’s radiant palace, ahead of those who in the fallen world had been her immeasurable superiors, was a potent illustration of the mystery that lay at the heart of the Christian faith. In the arena, so it was reported to the churches of Asia, Blandina’s broken body had seemed transfigured. Her fellow martyrs, in the midst of their own agonies, ‘had looked upon their sister, and seen in her person the One who was crucified for them’.¹³ Irenaeus had no doubt that a woman such as Blandina, when the lash bit her, felt pain just as Christ had done. This was the assurance that steeled a martyr for death. The willingness of Christians to embrace excruciating tortures – which to those who sentenced them could only appear as lunacy – was founded on an awesome conviction: that their Saviour was by their side. More than the temples and the fields for which the antique heroes of Rome had been willing to sacrifice themselves, Christ’s presence was something real. He was there in the arena, as once he had been nailed to the cross. To emulate his sufferings was to impose a meaning on the blankness and inscrutability of death.

But what if he had not suffered? Here was a question, as Irenaeus knew all too well, infinitely more unsettling than any that a Roman governor might think to demand. For some Christians, the teaching within Paul’s letters, and within the four earliest gospels – that Jesus, a man tortured to death on a cross, was also, in some mysterious way, a part of the identity of the One God of Israel – was simply too radical to tolerate. Who, then, might he actually have been? Rather than commingling the earthly with the heavenly, some Christians argued, was it not likelier that his humanity had been mere illusion? How could the Lord of the Universe possibly have been born of a mortal woman, still less have experienced pain and death? Various Christian teachers attempted solutions to these puzzles. In Rome, Irenaeus had come across a range of schools, each with their own opinions: their own haereses. Some taught that Christ was pure spirit; others that the mortal Jesus ‘was merely a receptacle of Christ’;¹⁴ others still that Christ and Jesus, although distinct from one another, were both of them supernatural entities, part of a bewilderingly complex cast of divine beings who, far beyond the bounds of the material earth, inhabited what was termed the pleroma, or ‘fullness’. One thing, though, these various ‘heresies’ did tend to have in common: revulsion at the idea that Christ might literally have suffered death. ‘The man who believes that is still a slave.’¹⁵ Such was the opinion of Basilides, a Christian living in Alexandria, who taught that Jesus, when the time came for him to be crucified, had swapped his form with that of an unfortunate passer-by. ‘And Jesus had stood laughing, as the man, through ignorance and error, was crucified in his place.’¹⁶ To Irenaeus, in his determination to define for the Christian people the true path of belief, the orthodoxia, doctrines such as Basilides’ constituted a treacherous diversion. They made a mockery of any notion that Christ might be imitated. Those who taught that he had been nothing but spirit, so Irenaeus reported, ‘go so far as to mock the martyrs’.¹⁷ The implications were devastating. Blandina, far from sharing in Christ’s glory, had been pathetically deluded. Her agonies had been in vain. She had died a slave.

That different Christians might have different views on the nature of their Saviour was, perhaps, inevitable. Irenaeus knew perfectly well that he was competing for customers in an open market. Hence his enthusiasm for the momentous new concept of orthodoxy. Beliefs, after all, did not patrol themselves. They had to be promoted, and upheld against their rivals. This was no less the case in Gaul than it was in Rome. There were Christians in Lyon, even after the devastating persecution of 177, who mocked the ideal of martyrdom, and denied the authority of the local bishop. Irenaeus, who had been elected to the post following the death of his predecessor in a prison cell, was predictably dismissive of them in turn. Their teachings he despised as high-flown gibberish; their rituals as an excuse to foist aphrodisiacs on gullible women. ‘The cunning of necromancers is joined to buffoonery.’¹⁸

Yet Irenaeus, despite his occasional expostulations of contempt, never doubted that he was engaged in an authentic battle of ideas. To condemn wild and unfounded haereses was to approve orthodoxia. Truth shone the brighter for being framed by lies. Such was the conviction that Irenaeus brought to his systematic cataloguing of those teachings by self-proclaimed Christians that he condemned as false. If he was unfair in deriving them all from a single source – a Samaritan necromancer named Simon, supposedly converted by Peter – then he was not entirely so. Teachers like Basilides had made sure to trace the origin of their doctrines back to the time of the apostles. This, though, was a battlefield on which Irenaeus found it easy to train overwhelming force. When Basilides claimed that he had received his gospel from a single follower of Peter, by means of a secret channel of communication, it inevitably highlighted how plentiful and public were the sources for the authority claimed by bishops such as Irenaeus himself. ‘Although dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, the church has received from the apostles, and from the disciples of the apostles, one single faith.’¹⁹ To Irenaeus, who in his native Asia had sat at the feet of Polycarp, and in Rome had traced whole generations of bishops back to the time of Peter, the continuity of his beliefs with the primordial beginnings of the Church appeared self-evident. He did not claim any privileged source of wisdom. Just the opposite. Irenaeus, in his attempt to define orthodoxy, was defiantly contemptuous of radical speculations. The Church that he defended rested on foundations that spanned the entire Roman world. Decades earlier, while travelling through Asia Minor on his way to Rome, Ignatius, a bishop from Syria, had proudly defined it as katholikos: ‘universal’.²⁰ This – the catholic Church – was the one with which Irenaeus identified.

Even so, despite his claim to be defending primal Christian tradition, he was not above appropriating the innovations of his rivals when it suited his purpose. Although most of them, as he dismissively pointed out, alleged that ‘truth was to be derived elsewhere than from written documents’,²¹ the most formidable had not. Marcion was a Christian from the Black Sea coast, a wealthy shipping magnate whose arrival in Rome some four decades before Irenaeus travelled there had generated a sensation. Outraged that the churches in the capital refused to accommodate his teachings, he had indignantly turned his back on them and founded his own. Marcion, like numerous other Christian intellectuals, was revolted by any notion that Christ might have had a human body, with human limitations and human functions – but that was hardly the most eye-opening of his teachings. Altogether more so was his take on the God of Israel, who, so Marcion had insisted, was not the supreme deity at all. Instead, he was the lesser of two gods. The supreme God, the God who was the true father of Christ, had not created the world, nor ever had anything to do with it, until, in his infinite mercy, he had sent his son to redeem it. A novel and startling doctrine – but manifest, so Marcion had claimed, in the contradictions between Jewish scripture and the letters of Paul. Rather than struggle to square these differences, he had instead proposed, as a means of calibrating God’s true purpose, a precise and infallible measuring device, like the chalked string used by carpenters to mark a straight line: in Greek, a canon. Christians, so Marcion had taught, should regard as definitive only a closed selection of writings: ten of Paul’s letters, and a carefully edited version of the gospel written by his follower Luke. Here, in place of Jewish scripture, was a witness to the divine purpose that Christians could authentically regard as their own: a new testament.²² It was a momentous innovation. Never before – so far as we know – had a Christian proposed a canon. The concept was one that Irenaeus found too suggestive to ignore.

Naturally, not sharing Marcion’s contemptuous attitude towards Jewish scripture, he made sure to reinstate it at the head of his own canon. It was, so he declared, essential reading for all Christians: ‘a field in which hidden treasure is revealed and explained by the cross of Christ’.²³ Yet Irenaeus, even as he sought to repudiate Marcion’s influence, could not help but betray it. In what role, after all, was he casting Jewish scripture, if not as an ‘old testament’? What hope of finding treasure in it, except by the light of a new? This was why, just as Marcion had done fifty years previously, Irenaeus promoted a corpus of writings from the age of the apostles. Alongside Luke’s gospel, he included John’s, and the two others most widely accepted as authoritative: one attributed to Matthew, a tax-collector summoned by Jesus to follow him, and the second to Mark, the reputed founder of the church in Alexandria. Compared to these, so Irenaeus declared, all other accounts of Christ’s life and teachings were but ‘ropes woven out of sand’.²⁴ As the generations passed, and the memories of those who had known the apostles with them, so could the faithful find in the gospels of Irenaeus’ canon a sure and certain mooring to the bedrock of the past: a new testament indeed.

‘I am a Christian.’²⁵ So a prisoner from Vienne arrested in 177 had replied to every question put to him by his interrogators. Rather than tell them his name, or where he had been born, or whether he were slave or free, he had instead repeatedly insisted that he had no status save that of a follower of Christ. Such obduracy, to his judges, was baffling as well as infuriating. The refusal of Christians to identify themselves as belonging to one of the familiar peoples of the earth – the Romans, or the Greeks, or the Jews – branded them as rootless, just as bandits and runaways were. Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. ‘To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland.’²⁶ And yet, for all that, Christians did believe they belonged to a common ethnos: a people. The bonds of their shared identity spanned the world, and reached back across the generations. When the martyrs of Lyon and Vienne embraced death for the sake of their Lord, they knew themselves bound in fellowship with others who had suffered a similar fate: in Jerusalem, in Asia Minor, in Rome. They knew themselves as well to stand in a line of descent from those martyrs who had gone before them: Polycarp, and Ignatius, and Paul. They knew their citizenship to be that of heaven.

The feat of Irenaeus, labouring in the wake of their deaths, was to give substance and solidity to these convictions. Already, within his own lifetime, his achievements and those of Christians who thought like him were becoming apparent even to hostile observers. They led an organisation that, in its scale and scope, was not merely one among a crowd of churches, but something altogether more imposing: the ‘Great Church’.²⁷ Never before had there been anything quite like it: a citizenship that was owed not to birth, nor to descent, nor to legal prescriptions, but to belief alone.

Living Stones

The Roman elite, of course, had their own views on how a universal order should properly be constituted. The surest way to shape one out of all the manifold peoples of the world – as Posidonius had long before pointed out to Pompey – was for Rome to rule the lot. In 212, an edict was issued that would have warmed the old Stoic’s heart. By its terms, all free men across the vast expanse of the empire were granted Roman citizenship. Its author, a thuggish Caesar by the name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, was a living embodiment of the increasingly cosmopolitan character of the Roman world. The son of an African nobleman, he had been proclaimed emperor in Britain, and was nicknamed Caracalla – ‘Hoodie’ – after his fondness for Gallic fashions. He understood, as only a man who had toured the world could, how various were the customs of humanity – and it perturbed him. Caracalla, who had seized power over the corpse of his murdered brother, knew what he owed the gods for their backing, and did not care to think that sacrifices made on his behalf might be failing to please them. This was why, despite the sneers of his critics that he was only interested in broadening the tax-base, he had granted a common citizenship to all the peoples of the empire. The more Roman they became the more pleasing to the heavens their cults were bound to be. ‘So it is that I think my act worthy of the majesty of the gods.’²⁸ Caracalla’s divine patrons, who had bestowed on him and on Rome the rule of the world, were at last to receive their proper due: their religio.

The word came incense-trailed in the imaginings of pious Romans by a sense of deep antiquity. It conjured up for them visions of primordial rites: of the honours paid to the gods back in the very earliest days of their city, and which had first served to win divine favour for Rome. As in Greek cities, the abiding dread was of what might happen should rituals be neglected. Any obligation owed the gods in exchange for their protection, any tradition or custom, constituted a religio. ‘Sacrificial offerings, the chastity of virgins, the whole range of priesthoods garlanded with dignity and titles’:²⁹ all were religiones. But even Rome was merely one among a vast number of cities. Caracalla knew that as well as anyone. Hence the need for religiones that could join all the peoples of the world. The emperor, in his decree, boasted that he would lead them in a single procession ‘to the sanctuaries of the gods’. That he had one sanctuary particularly in mind was made clear when, in the autumn of 215, he arrived in Egypt. His night-time entry into Alexandria, complete with ‘torch-lit processions and garlands’,³⁰ shared in the splendour of the city’s most celebrated festival, when the dark streets would be lit up in honour of Serapis. The god held a particular place in Caracalla’s affections. Even before travelling to Egypt, he had commissioned a Serapeum in Rome. Inscriptions in Alexandria proclaimed him Philoserapis: ‘Devoted to Serapis.’ The appeal of the city’s most multi-cultural god was evident. Nevertheless, the cult the emperor wished to promote was not primarily that of Serapis. On coins, the god was shown passing the sceptre of the cosmos to another figure: the emperor himself. Just as Serapis, the divine father, ruled in the heavens, so did Caracalla, haloed and radiant, exercise a rule no less universal on earth. In the wake of his grant of citizenship to all the peoples of the empire, it was Caesar alone who could worthily mediate between them and their various gods. The great web of dues and obligations that had always bound the Roman people to the dimension of the supernatural now spanned the world. To poke a hole in it was not merely sacrilege but treason.

The full implications of this were soon to drench the streets of Alexandria in blood. Caracalla, who was rumoured to put to death anyone who so much as urinated in the presence of his portrait busts, was not a man to disrespect. The Alexandrians, who found his affectations risible, and made sure to let him know it, discovered this too late. Caracalla, summoning them to a public meeting, had the crowd surrounded by his troops and cut to pieces. The lesson could not have been more brutally rubbed home. Sacrilege was intolerable. To be a Roman citizen brought responsibility as well as honour. Any insult to Caesar was an insult to the gods. All that winter, Caracalla’s indignation continued to smoulder. His soldiers, roaming the streets, killed and plundered at will. Most Alexandrians had no option save to cower, and wait for the emperor’s departure. Not all, though. Some – those able to find refuge abroad – opted to slip away. Among them was a man particularly renowned for his meditations on the nature of the divine, and on the proper relationship of mortals to the heavens: the most brilliant scholar in a city renowned for its scholarship.

Yet Origen enjoyed no cushy billet, as intellectuals in Alexandria had traditionally done. Well before the arrival of Caracalla, he had learned to dread the Roman state’s capacity for violence. In 202, when he was only seventeen, his father had been arrested and beheaded; Origen himself, in the years that followed, frequently had to evade angry mobs, ‘moving from house to house, driven from pillar to post’.³¹ The son of Christian parents, his precocious commitment to the defence of his faith was steeled by adversity. Like Irenaeus – whose writings had reached Alexandria within only a few years of their composition – he dreaded that the Great Church was under constant siege. Only by delineating its frontiers so that none could ever mistake them, and lining them with fortifications, could it hope to be defended. The need was as pressing in Alexandria as anywhere in the Christian world. The city teemed with adversaries. It was where Basilides had founded his school. It was where, for many centuries, Jewish society had shown its most cosmopolitan face. Above all, it was where the great conqueror who had founded the city boasted his ultimate monument, a vision of Greece stamped on Egyptian soil, so that there was nowhere, not in Athens, not in Rome, where the study of Homer and Aristotle was more fruitfully nourished. To live in Alexandria – even for the most devout follower of Christ – was to experience the full dazzling potency of Greek culture.

Origen, though, was nothing daunted. Christians might have no monuments to compare with those that had drawn Caracalla to the city, no rivals to the massive bulk of the Serapeum; but they did not need them. ‘All of us who believe in Christ Jesus are said to be living stones.’³² Here, constructed out of the world’s Christians, and with Christ himself as ‘the chief cornerstone’,³³ was the great temple that Origen aimed to buttress against its adversaries. Unlike the homelands of other peoples, that of the Christian people existed beyond the dimensions of altars, and hearth-fires, and fields. Indeed, without their belief in Christ as Lord, it would not have existed at all. It was Ignatius, a century before Origen, who had first given it the name that would endure for ever after.³⁴ Christianismos, he had called it: ‘Christianity’.

‘Every time we understand,’ wrote Origen, ‘we owe it to our faith that we understand.’³⁵ So novel was what Christians meant by Christianismos that it could not help but colour the way that they saw the rest of the world. The various haereses taught by Basilides and his ilk did not, in the opinion of Origen, constitute simply a range of different opinions and philosophies, but rather a hydra-headed parody of the one True Church. Ioudaismos, a word that in the centuries before Christ had sometimes signified a Jewish way of life, and sometimes its propagation and defence, had come to possess for Christians a much more precise meaning, one that cast Jews as the citizens of a presumed counter-point to ‘Christianity’: ‘Judaism’. Most baneful of all, though, were the cults of those whom Paul had termed ‘outsiders’:³⁶ those who, from the rising to the setting of the sun, set up idols. Christians, precisely because they defined themselves in terms of their faith, could not help but assume the same of those who worshipped other gods. That a Philoserapis like Caracalla was concerned pre-eminently not with whether Serapis existed or not, but rather with honouring him in the mandated way, with respecting the taboos that hedged about his worship, and with paying him the correct dues of sacrifice, tended to pass them by. Even Origen, who knew perfectly well that many of those who made offerings to idols ‘do not take them for gods, but only as offerings dedicated to the gods’,³⁷ shuddered before the horror that such rituals seemed to imply. To spatter an altar with gore betrayed much about the beings that could demand such an offering. That they battened onto carcasses. That they were vampiric in their appetites. ‘That they delighted in blood.’³⁸ To propitiate them was to feed the very forces that threatened humanity with darkness.

Yet there was a paradox. Origen, for all his hostility towards the seductions and the assumptions of the great city in which he lived, remained a native of it through and through. More completely, perhaps, than anyone before him, he blended Alexandria’s various traditions within himself. The city – multi-cultural though it was – had never been a true melting pot. The interest that many Greeks took in Jewish teachings, and that many Jews took in philosophy, had always been circumscribed by the prescriptions of the Mosaic covenant. Christianity, though, provided a matrix in which the Jewish and the Greek were able to mingle as well as meet. No one demonstrated this to more fruitful effect than Origen. A devotion to Christianity’s inheritance from the Jews was manifest in all he wrote. Not only did he go to the effort of learning Hebrew from a Jewish teacher, but the Jewish people themselves he hailed as family: as the Church’s ‘little sister’, or else ‘the brother of the bride’.³⁹ Marcion’s sneer that orthodox Christians were Jew-lovers was not one that Origen would necessarily have disputed. Certainly, he did more to embed the great body of Jewish scripture within the Christian canon, and to enshrine it as an ‘Old Testament’, than anyone before or since. A critic as honest as he was subtle, he did not deny the challenge that this represented. That the sacred books of the Jews, their biblia, were rife ‘with riddles, parables, dark sayings, and various other forms of obscurity’⁴⁰ he readily acknowledged. Yet all of them derived from God. Contradictions only hinted at hidden truths. The challenge for the reader was to access them. Scripture was like a mansion with an immense number of locked rooms, and an equal number of keys, all of which lay scattered about the house. This haunting image, so Origen declared, had been suggested to him by his Hebrew teacher; and yet, in his own efforts to track down the keys, to open the locked doors, he relied on methods that derived from a very different source. In the great library of Alexandria, scholars had long been honing methods for making sense of ancient texts: treating their subject matter as allegory, and their language as an object of the most methodical study. Origen, in his own commentaries, adopted both techniques. Jewish the great mansion of the Old Testament may have been; but the surest method for exploring it was Greek.

‘Whatever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.’⁴¹ That God had spoken to the Greeks as well as to the Jews was not a theory that originated with Origen. Just as Paul, in his correspondence, had approvingly cited the Stoic concept of conscience, so had many Christians since found in philosophy authentic glimmerings of the divine. No one in the Church, though, had ever before rivalled Origen for his sheer mastery of the discipline. Schooled in the classics of Greek literature since childhood, and familiar with the most cutting-edge work of his philosophical contemporaries, he identified in it the same quest to which he had devoted his own life: the search for God. Christianity, in Origen’s opinion, was not merely compatible with philosophy, but the ultimate expression of it. ‘No one can truly do duty to God,’ he declared, ‘who does not think like a philosopher.’⁴² Sure enough, even when Origen left Alexandria he never forgot his roots in the capital of Greek learning. First in 215, in temporary flight from Caracalla, and then again in 234 on a permanent basis, he settled in Caesarea, a port on the coast of what he termed the ‘Holy Land’ – and established there a school that embodied the very best of his native city. ‘No subject was forbidden us,’ one of his students would later recall, ‘nothing hidden or put away. Every doctrine – Greek or not – we were encouraged to study. All the good things of the mind were ours to enjoy.’ ⁴³

Naturally, Origen did not propose that philosophy be studied as an end in itself. That, he warned his students, would be to wander for ever lost in a swamp, or a labyrinth, or a forest. Shot through with errors though the speculations of philosophers might be, they nevertheless could still help to illumine Christian truth. Just as traditions of textual inquiry honed in Alexandria had helped Origen to elucidate the complexities of Jewish scripture, so did he use philosophy to shed light on an even more profound puzzle: the nature of God himself. The need was urgent. The gospel proclaimed by Paul, the conviction that had animated him and all the first generation of Christians, the revelation that a crucified criminal had in some unspecified but manifest way been an aspect of the very Creator of the heavens and the earth, constituted the molten heart of Christianity. Yet it raised an obvious question. How, when Christians accorded Jesus a status that was somehow divine, could they possibly claim to worship only the single god? Greek philosophers no less than Jewish scholars, when they deigned to take note of the upstart faith, would relentlessly home in on this point. The challenge could not be ducked. The struggle, then, was to find an adequate way of expressing a mystery that seemed to defy expression. It was not just Jesus who had to be integrated into the oneness of God, but his Spirit as well. The solution, by the time Origen came to this puzzle, was already clear in its outline. The unity of God came, not in spite of his Son and Spirit, but through them. One was Three; Three were One. God was a Trinity.

It was Origen, though, more comprehensively and more brilliantly than anyone before him, who drew on the resources of philosophy to fashion for the Church an entire theologia: a science of God. The language he used to explore the paradoxes of the divine was deployed in the full knowledge of the uses to which it had long previously been put by a Xenocrates or a Zeno. His school in Caesarea, for all its insistence on the Christian canon as the ultimate summit of wisdom, was recognisably in a line of descent that reached back to Aristotle, and beyond. No one, after Origen’s labours in the service of his faith, would be able to charge that Christians appealed only to ‘the ignorant, the stupid, the unschooled’.⁴⁴ The potency of this achievement, in a society that took for granted the value of education as an indicator of status, was immense. Contempt for those who lacked a grounding in philosophy ran deep. Knowledge – gnosis – was widely viewed as a definitive marker of class. Even Christians were not immune to this prejudice. When Irenaeus described teachers such as Basilides as ‘Gnostics’, he was identifying as their defining characteristic their claim to be better informed than everyone else. ‘Tradition they scorn, insisting that they know things that neither the elders of the Church knew, nor even the apostles – for they alone have identified the unadulterated truth.’⁴⁵ This was the temptation against which Origen, in labouring to shape a theology that could satisfy the learned, had to guard. Much was at stake. Cults, after all, were rarely categorised as philosophies; nor philosophies cults. The claim of Christianity to a universal message could not rest merely on the presence of churches from Mesopotamia to Spain. It had to appeal to people of every class, and of every level of education. In a society that ranked philosophy alongside vintage statuary and exotic spices as one of the perks of the rich, Origen was a living, breathing paradox: a philosopher who defied elitism.

That an identity might be defined by belief was in itself a momentous innovation; but that the learned and the illiterate alike might be joined by it, ‘becoming – despite their multitude – one single body’,⁴⁶ was no less startling a notion. The genius of Origen was to create out of the inheritance of Greek philosophy an entire new universe of the mind – one in which even the least educated could share. When he hailed God as ‘pure intelligence’,⁴⁷ he was arguing nothing that Aristotle had not long previously said. Philosophy, though, was only the beginning of what Origen had to teach. The divine nous, far from lingering in the motionlessness of a chilly perfection, had descended to earth. The mystery of it was at once beyond the comprehension of even the greatest of scholars, and a cause of wonder that labourers and kitchen maids could admire. If Origen, drawing on the great treasury of Greek and Jewish literature, would sometimes describe Christ as divine reason, and sometimes as ‘the stainless mirror of the activity of God’,⁴⁸ then there were times as well when he confessed himself quite as stupefied as the littlest child. When contemplating how the Wisdom of God had entered the womb of a woman, and been born a baby, and cried for milk, the paradox of it all was too much even for him. ‘For since we see in Christ some things so human that they appear to share in every aspect in the common frailty of humanity, and some things so divine that they are manifestly the expression of the primal and ineffable nature of the Divine, the narrowness of human understanding is inadequate to cope. Overcome with amazement and admiration, it knows not where to turn.’⁴⁹

Here, in this fusion of deeply read sophistication and wide-eyed awe, was something recognisably of the seed-bed of Alexandria – and yet also disconcertingly new. By scorning to see the contemplation of heaven’s mysteries as philosophers had traditionally done, as the exclusive preserve of the educated and the wealthy, Origen had created a matrix for the propagation of philosophical concepts that would prove to have momentous reach. Far from damaging his reputation, his refusal to behave in the manner of a conventional philosopher ended up only enhancing his fame. Turning sixty, Origen could reflect with pride on a career so influential that even the mother of an emperor, intrigued by his celebrity, had once summoned him to instruct her in the nature of God. Such fame, though, was as likely to stoke hostility as admiration. The age was a treacherous one. The violence brought by Caracalla to the streets of Alexandria had been an ominous portent of even darker times ahead. In the decades that followed, sorrows had come not single spies, but in battalions. Caracalla himself, murdered while relieving himself on campaign, had been just one of a succession of emperors slain in a blizzard of assassinations and civil wars. Meanwhile, taking full advantage of the escalating chaos, barbarian warbands had begun to seep across the frontiers. On the empire’s eastern doorstep, a new Persian dynasty – the most formidable to have emerged since the time of Darius – visited a succession of humiliations on Roman power. The gods, it seemed, were angry. The correct religiones were manifestly being neglected. The fault, in the wake of Caracalla’s mass grant of citizenship, lay not just in Rome, but in the empire as a whole. Accordingly, early in 250, a formal decree was issued that everyone – with the sole exception of the Jews – offer up sacrifice to the gods. Disobedience was equated with treason; and the punishment for treason was death. For the first time, Christians found themselves confronted by legislation that directly obliged them to choose between their lives and their faith. Many chose to save their skins – but many did not. Among those arrested was Origen. Although put in chains and racked, he refused to recant. Spared execution, he was released after days of brutal treatment a broken man. He never recovered. A year or so later, the aged scholar was dead of the sufferings inflicted on him by his torturers.

The magistrate presiding over his case, respectful of his reputation, had taken no pleasure in the torments inflicted on such a brilliant man. As they had ever done, the Roman authorities found the refusal of Christians to make sacrifice to the gods as pig-headed as it was subversive. Why citizens who insisted on their loyalty to the empire should refuse to demonstrate it and simply make a pledge of allegiance bewildered them. That a ritual sanctified by both tradition and patriotism might cause anyone offence was an idea that they struggled to comprehend. Origen had been put to torture as much in sorrow as in anger.

How different it would have been, of course, had the empire itself been Christian! A remote, a fantastical possibility – and yet, just a couple of years before his arrest, Origen himself had thought to float it. ‘Should the Romans embrace the Christian faith,’ he had declared, ‘then their prayers would see them overcome their enemies; or rather, having come under the protection of God, they would have no enemies at all.’⁵⁰

But to believe that a Caesar might be won for Christ was indeed to believe in miracles.

Keeping the Faith

In the summer of 313, Carthage was a city on edge. An ancient rival of Rome for the rule of the western Mediterranean, destroyed by the legions and then – just as Corinth had been – refounded as a Roman colony, its commanding position on the coastline across from Sicily had won for it an undisputed status as the capital of Africa. Like Rome and Alexandria, it had grown to become one of the great centres of Christianity: a status much seeded, in the words of one Carthaginian Christian, by ‘the blood of the martyrs’.⁵¹ In Africa, the Church had long treasured the scars of persecution. The judicial execution in 258 of Carthage’s most celebrated bishop, a noted scholar by the name of Cyprian, had confirmed them in a peculiarly militant understanding of their faith. Purity was all. There could be no compromising with the evils of the world. Belief was nothing if it was not worth dying for. This was why, in 303, when an imperial edict was issued commanding Christians to hand over their books of scripture or face death, Africa had been at the forefront of resistance to the decree. The provincial authorities, determined to break the Church, had expanded on the edict by commanding that everyone make sacrifice to the gods. Recalcitrant Christians were rounded up and brought in chains to Carthage. Batches of them had been executed. By the time, two years later, that the persecution finally petered out, the conviction of Christians across Africa that God demanded a purity of belief, absolute and untainted, had been fertilised with yet more martyrs’ blood. Ten years on from the most savage persecution endured by the church of Carthage, the mood in the city was anxious, fractious, fraught. The death of its bishop, Majorinus, served as a lightning rod for various tensions. One question predominated. How, in the wake of a concentrated effort to wipe the Church from the face of Africa, were Christians best to defend the sanctity of their faith?

Three centuries on from the birth of Christ, this was an issue with ramifications far beyond the Church itself. Bishops in the great cities were well on their way to becoming public figures. If the state was prone to targeting them with persecution, then so also, on occasion, might an emperor opt to grant them favours. Back in 260, only a decade after the arrest and torture of Origen, a change of regime had seen churches granted a particularly significant privilege: the right to own property. Bishops, already armed with considerable powers of patronage, had thereby accrued an even greater heft. That they were elected only served to enhance the potency and scope of their leadership. Authority such as theirs, exercised over growing flocks, was something that any Roman official might grudgingly respect. The devastating persecution launched in 303 had done nothing to diminish this. Indeed, if anything, the failure of the provincial authorities to uproot the Church served only to enhance the prestige of those leaders who had defied it. When, in the summer of 313, a new bishop was elected in succession to Majorinus, he might not have seemed, by the traditional standards of the Roman ruling classes, an impressive figure. Donatus came from Casae Nigrae, an obscure town far to the south of Carthage, perched on the fringes of the desert, ‘where the burnt land bears nothing but venomous snakes’.⁵² Yet this stern and rugged provincial – precisely because he rejected all markers of status – could lay claim to an influence in Carthage that owed nothing to either wealth or breeding. Power rendered him dangerous – and being dangerous made him feared.

The bishop’s bitterest enemies, however, were not the provincial authorities. They were his fellow Christians. Donatus was not the only man to have claimed the leadership of the Carthaginian church. He had a rival. Caecilian had won the bishopric two years previously – but his election had been furiously contested. Able though he was, a forceful and experienced administrator, he was notorious for scorning the pre-eminence of martyrs as God’s favourites. This reputation, even at the best of times, would have rendered him unacceptable to many Christians in Carthage; but the times were not the best. The church in Africa was riven from top to bottom. While many of its leaders had upheld the conviction of one bishop that it was better for him ‘to be burned in the fire than the holy scriptures’, others had not. There were Christians who, in the heat of persecution, had handed them over. This, to Donatus and his followers, was a betrayal that could not be forgiven. Those who had surrendered the scriptures in their keep – the traditores, as they were contemptuously termed – were no longer seen as Christian. They had saved their skins at the cost of their souls. Their very voices were cancerous with infection. Only re-immersion in the waters of baptism could hope to cleanse them of their sin. Yet the traditores, far from acknowledging their fault, had installed as their bishop Caecilian, a man darkly rumoured not merely to have been a traditor himself, but to have colluded in the persecution of those who had refused to hand over the scriptures. Between two such opposed points of view, between those who insisted on defiance of the world and those who preferred to compromise with it, between Donatists and Caecilianists, what reconciliation could there possibly be? A grim and unsettling truth stood revealed: that shared beliefs might serve to divide as well as bring together the Christian people.

Donatus, in his ambition to heal the schism, naturally turned to the heavens. His followers believed with a devout literalism the claim of their bishop to have a direct line of communication with God. Nevertheless, in the absence of a divine response sufficient to persuade the Caecilianists, Donatus found himself with a pressing need for an alternative source of authority. Fortunately, only a year before his election as bishop, a miracle had occurred. Or so, at any rate, the events of 312 appeared to startled Christians. In that year, a renewed bout of civil war had shaken Italy. A claimant to the rule of Rome named Constantine had marched on the city. There, on the banks of the river Tiber, beside the Milvian Bridge, he had won a decisive victory. His rival had drowned in the river. Constantine, entering the ancient capital, had done so with the head of his defeated enemy held aloft on a spear. Provincial officials from Africa, summoned to meet their new master, had dutifully admired the trophy. Shortly afterwards, as a token of Constantine’s greatness, it had been dispatched to Carthage. But so too had something much more unexpected. A package of letters arrived in the city, which betrayed clear Christian sympathies. The governor was instructed to restore to the church any possessions confiscated from it; Caecilian – who, shrewd operator that he was, had already made sure to write to Constantine, offering his most profuse congratulations – was personally assured of the emperor’s sympathies for ‘the most holy Catholic Church’.⁵³ Shortly afterwards, another letter from the emperor arrived in Carthage. In it, the governor was instructed to spare Caecilian and his fellow priests the burden of civic dues. Donatus, scandalised by the favouritism shown his rival, was nevertheless alert to its broader implications. Constantine was not merely gracing the Church with toleration: it was almost as though he had written as a Christian.

And so it proved. Over time, remarkable stories would be told of how Constantine had been won for Christ: of how, on the eve of his great victory at the Milvian Bridge, he had seen a cross in the sky, and then, in his dreams, been visited by the Saviour himself. For the rest of his life, the emperor would never doubt to whom he owed the rule of the world. Nevertheless, devoutly grateful though he was, it would take him time properly to fathom the full radical and disorienting character of his new patron. Initially, he viewed the Christian god as merely a variant upon a theme. The claim that there existed a single, all-powerful deity was hardly original to Jews or Christians, after all. Philosophers had been teaching it since at least the time of Xenophanes. That the Supreme Being ruled the universe much as an emperor ruled the world, delegating authority to functionaries, was an assumption that many in the Roman world had come to take for granted. Caracalla, arriving in Alexandria, had essentially been auditioning Serapis for the role. Others had awarded it to Jupiter or to Apollo. The ambition, as it had been for a century, was to define for all Roman citizens a single, universally accepted due of religiones – and thereby to provide for the empire, amid all the many crises racking it, the favour of the heavens. Constantine, by acknowledging the primacy of Christ, aspired to see Christians join with their fellow citizens in the pursuit of this urgent goal. In 313, issuing a proclamation that for the first time gave a legal standing to Christianity, he coyly refused to name ‘the divinity who sits in heaven’.⁵⁴ The vagueness was deliberate. Christ or Apollo, Constantine wished to leave the choice of whom his subjects identified as ‘the supreme divinity’⁵⁵ to them. Where there were divisions, he aimed to blur.

But then, sailing from Carthage, came Donatus. A man less committed to compromise it would have been hard to imagine. Even before his election as bishop, he and his followers had taken the momentous step of complaining to Constantine about Caecilian, and demanding his deposition. The emperor, puzzled at finding such divisions among Christians, nevertheless permitted Donatus to make his case before a panel of bishops in Rome – who promptly found against him. Donatus appealed; and again had his case rejected. Still he pestered Constantine with complaints. When, in 316, he managed to slip the guards who had been placed on him by the weary emperor, and make it back to Africa, his escape only confirmed Constantine’s dark opinion of the bishop’s contumacy. Henceforward, in the bitter clash between Donatists and Caecilianists, it was the latter who would have the might of the Roman state on their side. ‘What business has the emperor with the Church?’⁵⁶ Donatus’ question, suffused with outrage and resentment though it might be, was in truth rhetorical. Constantine, no less than any bishop, believed himself entrusted with a heavenly mission to uphold the unity of the Christian people. The tradition embodied by Donatus, the conviction that the Church was most pleasing to God when its members repudiated those of their fellows who had fallen into sin, perplexed and infuriated him. ‘Such squabbles and altercations,’ he fretted, ‘may perhaps provoke the highest deity not only against the human race, but against myself.’⁵⁷ By giving Caecilian his support, Constantine was assuring bishops across the empire that, provided only that they assented to the emperor’s desire for a unified Church, they too could rely on his backing. Donatus, meanwhile, had to live with the painful knowledge that his claim to the leadership of Christians in Africa was accepted by few beyond the limits of the province. It was the followers of Caecilius, in the eyes of the world, who were the authentic ‘Catholics’; those of Donatus were ‘Donatists’ still.

Yet if bishops had to scramble to adjust to the new circumstances heralded by Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, so too did the emperor himself. Fully committed as he was to understanding what it meant to be a servant of Christ, he found himself embarked on a steep learning curve. His altercations with Donatus had brought home to him just what he faced in the Church: an organisation over which, despite his rule of the world, he had no formal control whatsoever. Unlike the priests who traditionally had mediated between Rome and the heavens, bishops did not bother themselves with rites in which he, as the heir of Augustus, could take the lead. Instead, to Constantine’s intense frustration, they insisted on squabbling over issues that seemed better suited to philosophers. In 324, alerted to the inveterate taste of theologians in Alexandria for debating the nature of Christ, he did not bother to conceal his impatience. ‘When all this subtle wrangling of yours is over questions of little or no significance, why worry about harmonising your views? Why not instead consign your differences to the secret custody of your own minds and thoughts?’⁵⁸ Yet it was dawning on Constantine that these questions might be naïve. The issues of who Christ had truly been, in what way he could have been both human and divine, and how the Trinity was best defined, were hardly idle ones, after all. How could God properly be worshipped, and his approval for Rome’s rule of the world thereby be assured, if his very nature was in dispute? Constantine’s predecessors, with their attempts to appease the heavens by offering them their ancient dues of sacrifices and honours, had grievously misunderstood what was required of an emperor. ‘It matters not how you worship, but what you worship.’⁵⁹ True religio, Constantine was coming to understand, was a matter less of ritual, less of splashing altars with blood or fumigating them with incense, than of correct belief.

A decisive moment. In 325, only a year after he had been advising rival theologians to resolve their differences, Constantine summoned bishops from across the empire, and even beyond, to a council. Its ambition was fittingly imperious: to settle on a statement of belief, a creed, that churches everywhere could then uphold. Canons, measures to prescribe the behaviour of the faithful, were to be defined as well. The venue for this great project, the city of Nicaea in the north-west of Asia Minor, was pointedly not a Christian powerbase. Constantine himself, ‘clothed in raiment which blazed as though with rays of light’,⁶⁰ welcomed his guests with a display that mingled graciousness with just the faintest hint of menace. When at length, after an entire month of debate, a creed was finally settled upon, and twenty canons drawn up, those few delegates who refused to accept them were formally banished. The fusion of theology with Roman bureaucracy at its most controlling resulted in an innovation never before attempted: a declaration of belief that proclaimed itself universal. The sheer number of delegates, drawn from locations ranging from Mesopotamia to Britain, gave to their deliberations a weight that no single bishop or theologian could hope to rival. For the first time, orthodoxy possessed what even the genius of Origen had struggled to provide: a definition of the Christian god that could be used to measure heresy with precision. In time, weighed in the balance against the Nicaean Creed, Origen’s own formulations on the nature of the Trinity would themselves be condemned as heretical. A new formulation, written, as Origen’s had been, in the language of philosophy, declared the Father and the Son to be homoousios: ‘of one substance’. Christ, so the Nicaean Creed proclaimed, was ‘the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made’. Never before had a committee authored phrases so far-reaching in their impact. The long struggle of Christians to articulate the paradox that lay at the heart of their faith, to define how a man tortured to death on a cross could also have been divine, had at last attained an enduring resolution. A creed that still, many centuries after it was written, would continue to join otherwise divided churches, and give substance to the ideal of a single Christian people, had more than met Constantine’s hopes for his council. Only a seasoned imperial administrator could possibly have pulled it off. A century after Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to the entire Roman world, Constantine had hit upon a momentous discovery: that the surest way to join a people as one was to unite them not in common rituals, but in a common belief.

Yet faith, as he had already discovered, could divide as well as unify. His triumph at Nicaea was only a partial one. Bishops and theologians continued to quarrel. Even Constantine himself, in the final years of his life, found his loyalty to the provisions of the Nicaean Creed starting to fray. On his death in 337, he was succeeded to the rule of the eastern half of the empire by a son, Constantius, who actively rejected them, and promoted instead an understanding of Christ as subordinate to God the Father. Disputes that previously had been of concern only to obscure sectarians were now the very stuff of imperial politics. Approval or repudiation of the Nicaean Creed added to the endless swirl of dynastic ambitions an entirely new dimension of rivalry. At issue, though, was not merely personal ambition. The entire future of humanity, so Constantine and his heirs believed, was at stake. The duty of an emperor to secure the stability of the world by practising the correct religio meant, increasingly, that theologians were as likely to feature in his concerns as generals or bureaucrats. Unless the favour of God could be secured, what value armies or taxes? Christianity was ‘the true worship of the true god’,⁶¹ or it was nothing.

In Carthage, of course, they had long known that. In 325, when Caecilian returned from Nicaea, his part in the great council held there did nothing to temper the loathing felt for him by the followers of Donatus. Even when Donatus died in exile some three decades later, the schism refused to be healed. This was hardly surprising. It was not the personal ambitions of the rival bishops that had stoked the mutual hatreds of their followers – nor anything else that provincial officials, desperate to keep order in Africa, could readily understand. When Donatists stripped a Catholic bishop naked, hauled him to the top of a tower and flung him into a pile of excrement, or tied a necklace of dead dogs around the neck of another, or pulled out the tongue of a third, and cut off his right hand, they were behaving in a manner that might have appeared calculated to baffle the average Roman bureaucrat. That differences of doctrine might divide the Christian people was a realisation that Constantine had fast had to come to terms with; but it was not doctrine that divided them in Africa. The hatred ran much deeper than that. Donatists who seized a church from Catholics would make sure to paint its walls white, scrub its floors with salt and wash its furnishings. Only in this manner, they believed, could the building be cleansed of contamination: the contamination of opponents who had compromised with the world.

What was the surest way to plant anew the Garden of Eden on earth? Was it, as the Donatists argued, to raise a wall against the clutching of briars and nettles, and to tend only those narrow flower beds that were manifestly clear of weeds? Or was it, as their opponents insisted, to attempt the planting of the whole world with seeds? ‘Grant to God that His garden be spread far and wide.’ So one Catholic bishop, responding to the Donatist charge that he had made common cause with the world as it was, rather than as it should be, urged his opponents. ‘Why do you deny to God the Christian peoples of East and North, let alone those of the provinces of the West, and of all the innumerable islands with whom you share no fellowship of communion, and against whom you – rebels that you are, and few in number – range yourselves?’⁶² The hatreds roused by this bitter disagreement – perplexing though they might seem to anyone not raised in the traditions of the African church – proved impossible to resolve. Constantine himself, after his brief foray into the Donatist controversy, had ended up distracted by more pressing issues. The terrorism practised by Catholics and Donatists, endemic though it fast became, was not of an order to disturb the transport of grain from the province to Rome – and so, by and large, they were left alone. Decades on from the deaths of both Caecilian and Donatus, the killings continued, the divisions widened, and the sense of moral certitude on both sides grew ever more entrenched.

For the first time, two fundamental dimensions of Christian behaviour had been brought into direct conflict on the public stage of an imperial province. Whether God’s people were best understood as an elect of the godly or as a flock of sinners was a question without a conclusive answer. For all the ultimate success of the Catholic leadership in isolating their rivals from the mainstream of the Church, the appeal of the cause represented by the Donatists could not entirely be suppressed. A signpost was pointing to a new and radical future. Throughout Christian history, the yearning to reject a corrupt and contaminated world, to refuse any compromise with it, to aspire to a condition of untainted purity, would repeatedly manifest itself. The implications of this tendency would, in time, be felt far beyond the Church itself. A pattern had been set that, over the course of millennia, would come to shape the very contours of politics. Constantine, by accepting Christ as his Lord, had imported directly into the heart of his empire a new, unpredictable and fissile source of power.