On This Rock

When Culture Disrupted the Roman Community

E. A. Judge, A. D. Macdonald

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725260399
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The command of the risen Christ was to make students of all nations: "On this Rock I will build..." But the spread of the Pentecostal gospel disrupted the national values of eternal Rome, with her increasingly international citizenship. Loyalty to the Caesars, obligatory in the Roman world, could not break the Christians' trust in their Christ. In despair the government gave in to the unimaginable: Galerius tolerated the Christian "alternative communities" and their divergent outlook on life. One must now tolerate living in two incommensurate communities at once. This is at the heart of Late Antiquity. The Rock remains, but masked in the antique ceremonial of "religion." That late antique compromise has laid the foundation for the interaction of church and state in the modern West.Successor to Paul and the Conflict of Cultures (2019), this seventh collection of Judge's historical essays explores the development of Christianity in Roman society from the New Testament era to the time of Constantine and beyond--always with a view to the modern situation.

1

Diversity under Galerius and the Body Corporate under Licinius

In 311 and 313 respectively, Galerius and Licinius issued the two pieces of legislation that would define the legal status of Christians in the fourth century. This chapter attends to the details and background of these edicts. It first considers the meaning of Galerius’s ruling that Christians may operate “on divergent principles,” praying for the empire (res publica) but not participating in customary contractual sacrifice. Attention turns thereafter to Licinius’s (and Constantine’s) Edict of Milan, and especially its ruling on the restitution of confiscated property, which granted legal recognition to Christian assemblies rather than individuals—a phenomenon explored here in light of the third-century history of Christian corporate bodies. This chapter was first published as “Diversity Versus the Body Corporate,” in St. Mark’s Review 225.3 (2013), and is reproduced here with minor revisions.

The first official toleration of a collective choice to live differently, in spite of the law, was granted to “the Christians” by Galerius on April 20, AD 311. On June 13, AD 313, Licinius defined “the churches” as having corporate status in law. These two truly epoch-making rulings lean in opposite directions. The one reluctantly implies an open society (as we might now say). The other grandly exploits it by insulating the churches as bodies corporate apart from the legal status of their individual members. In the twenty-first century we are still distracted between the rival options, both internally amongst church members and externally across the tides of public debate.

Galerius: A Conditional Toleration

For the better part of a decade Galerius had been promoting the public campaign for everyone to sacrifice to the gods. He was himself now the senior Augustus in Diocletian’s tetrarchy. His decision to excuse the Christians from sacrificing was made on his death-bed. The edict is our only surviving official definition of what had been wrong with the Christians.

Among all the other arrangements which we are always making for the advantage and benefit of the state (res publica), we had earlier sought to set everything right in accordance with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Romans and to ensure that the Christians too, who had abandoned the way of life (secta) of their ancestors, should return to a sound frame of mind; for in some way such self-will (voluntas) had come upon these same Christians, such folly had taken hold of them, that they no longer followed those usages of the ancients which their own ancestors perhaps had first instituted, but, simply following their own judgement and pleasure, they were making up for themselves the laws which they were to observe and were gathering various groups of people together in different places (per diversa varios populos congregarent). When finally our order was published that they should betake themselves to the practices of the ancients, many were subjected to danger, many too were struck down. Very many, however, persisted in their determination and we saw that these same people were neither offering worship (cultus) and due religious observance to the gods nor practicing the worship of the god of the Christians. Bearing in mind therefore our own most gentle clemency and our perpetual habit of showing indulgent pardon to all men, we have taken the view that in the case of these people too we should extend our speediest indulgence, so that once more they may be Christians and put together their meeting places (conventicula sua) provided they do nothing to disturb good order. We are moreover about to indicate in another letter to governors what conditions they ought to observe. Consequently, in accordance with this indulgence of ours, it will be their duty to pray (orare) to their god for our safety and for that of the state and themselves, so that from every side the state may be kept unharmed and they may be able to live free of care in their own home.1

The term secta (“way of life”) clearly embraces both moral “discipline” and intellectual “frame of mind,” as now abandoned by the voluntas of the Christians. Creed translates this as “self-will”, rightly capturing the outrage of Galerius. (We might have said “commitment.”) Eusebius reports that the edict was published “in each city,” and translated it seems by himself, “as well as may be” (kata to dynaton).2 He gives for voluntas the Greek pleonexia (“presumption” perhaps), and for secta of course hairesis. Both “sect” and “heresy” were to become pejorative in Christian usage, but not yet. In the fourth century one spoke easily of “the Catholic secta.”

It is intolerable to Galerius that people should presume to make up laws for themselves to observe merely at their own discretion. He had no doubt been briefed on the argument of Origen that even the “common law” of civilized humankind might be rejected in the name of truth.3 Yet it was not the philosophical issue that concerned him, but the social one. The Christians were undermining national solidarity before the gods. Creed’s translation of per diversa varios populos, however, leaves Galerius with a fatuous anticlimax, it seems. Eusebius rendered both Latin adjectives with the Greek diaphoros, which should not imply “different” in the sense of “various”, but rather in the more contrastive sense of “differing,” hence “divergent,” or pejoratively “divisive” or “deviant.” So “diversity” (our contemporary ideal)...