The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 by John Julius Norwich Read Free Book Online

claimants to the title of Augustus, it was surely cheap at the price.
    The Adoption of the Faith
    [323-6]
    For my own part, I hold any sedition within the Church of God as formidable as any war or battle, and more difficult still to bring to an end. I am consequently more opposed to it than to anything else.
    Constantine the Great, opening the Council of Nicaea, ad 325
    During the years of civil war, throughout which the holy labarum was invariably carried before him into battle and never failed - as he saw it - to bring him victory, Constantine turned more and more exclusively towards the God of the Christians. For some years, as we have seen, he had been legislating in their favour. Confiscated property was restored; the clergy were exempted from municipal obligations; episcopal courts were given the right to act as courts of appeal for civil cases. Other laws, too, suggest a degree of Christian inspiration, such as that of 319 prohibiting the murder of slaves, regardless of their offence; that of 320 forbidding prison authorities to maltreat those in their charge; or - most celebrated of all - the law of 7 March 321 proclaiming Sunday, 'the venerable day of the Sun', as a day of rest. (This might be thought to be a throwback to the worship of Sol Invictus; in fact, Sunday had been gradually replacing Saturday as the Christian sabbath since the days of St Paul, and had been already enjoined on the faithful by a church council held at Elvira in Spain fifteen years before.) But in none of this legislation even then, is the name of Christ himself mentioned or the Christian faith in any way professed.
    Now at last, with the Empire safely reunited under his sole authority, Constantine could afford to come into the open. In the long prayer quoted at the end of the previous chapter he makes his persuasion clear:
    Although mankind has fallen deeply, and has been seduced by manifold errors, yet hast Thou revealed a pure light in the person of Thy Son (lest the power of evil should utterly prevail) and hast thus given testimony to all men concerning Thyself.
    On the other hand, there must be no coercion: pagans must be allowed to continue in the old faith if they choose to do so. The prayer goes on:
    Let those, therefore, who are still blinded by error be made welcome to the same degree of peace and tranquillity which they have who believe . .. Let no man molest another in this matter, but let everyone be free to follow the bias of his own mind . . . For it is one thing voluntarily to undertake the struggle for immortality, another to compel others to do likewise from fear of punishment.
    But, though paganism might be tolerated, there must be no heresy. If the Church were to stand henceforth as the spiritual arm of an indivisible Empire, how could it itself be divided? Unfortunately it was. For years Constantine had battled in vain against two schismatic groups, the Donatists in North Africa and the Meletians in Egypt. These fiercely intractable Christians refused to accept the authority of any bishop or priest who had defected from the Church during the Persecutions and returned to it later, thus denying the orthodox view that the moral worthiness of the minister-who, as St Augustine had pointed out, was only a surrogate for Christ - had no effect on the validity of the sacrament. (The Donatists indeed went even further, maintaining that all who communicated with the traditores were themselves infected, and that consequently, since there was but a single holy Church, it consisted of Donatists alone.) Now there had emerged a third faction - which, to judge by the number of adherents that it was collecting inside and outside the Church and the vociferousness with which it was upheld or denounced, threatened to sow more discord than the other two put together.
    This group had formed itself around a certain Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, a man of immense learning and splendid physical presence who had been a disciple of the famous St