The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]

Roman Door Keys, in the British Museum

Three rescripts have been drawn up which Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius successively are said to have made out in favour of the Christians, and from one to the other of these edicts there is, as it were, a crescendo of kindness and toleration. The first of these princes forbids the legates to condemn the Christians to satisfy the clamouring of the people. The last, Marcus Aurelius, testifies to the power of the Christians, whose kindness he has experienced and whom he fears to see turned against him, and grants them full liberty of worship. In our opinion these edicts are manifestly apocryphal, although it is perhaps true that the emperors, supreme guardians of the law, saw with displeasure the violent caprices of popular brutality take the place of legal measures, and violate, as it were, the majesty of Roman justice; and they may have written in this sense to their agents. Hadrian especially, the most vigilant guardian of order in the provincial administration, may have done this.

But the sentences pronounced against the Christians under the rule of the Antonines, and the numerous defences in which the apologists, even at this moment, make an appeal to the justice of the emperors, claiming common law for the Christians, prove clearly that the law which condemned them on account of their profession of faith had not been repealed.

The Antonines invariably made kind and humane princes, lovers of justice, sparing of the lives of their subjects. Marcus Aurelius, in particular, went too far in his complaisance and goodness of heart. The principle of the stoical philosophy he had embraced, and which he was proud to follow, taught the inviolability of liberty in private life, and far from advising the persecution of opinions, it must rather have taught respect for them.

On the other hand, in spite of a visible tendency on the part of the authorities at this time to restore or to strengthen the old Roman discipline, in spite of the alliance entered upon between philosophy and the popular religion, multifarious worships flourished freely throughout the empire. The emperors, whose official devoutness has nothing exclusive, are admitted, like Hadrian, into the alien churches; or, like Marcus Aurelius, do not fear to make an appeal in urgent cases to all known religions. Amongst the philosophers, some, regarding such matters with contempt, state that the diversity matters but little provided that the heavenly sentiment is in the soul; others, incredulous and sceptical like Lucian, scoff with impunity at all the gods and religious symbols, sparing none. There is nothing in the empire resembling a state religion; it would even be difficult to say precisely which is the religion of the majority of the citizens.

Polytheism means diversity and confusion. There is no common formulary, or catechism, nothing resembling the doctrinal teaching of a fixed and definite theology. All the gods are accounted good, and the newest seem to possess extraordinary virtues. Whence comes it that Christianity alone is excluded from universal toleration and is legally without the rights of the law? Whilst striving to answer this question, there is the risk of defining and exaggerating ideas which hovered vaguely in the minds of the princes and statesmen of that time, and of reducing dim notions to too fixed formulas. The Christians in the second century are usually taxed with atheism and impiety. It is certain that the apologists have fair play in replying to this imputation, and answer it triumphantly. The fact however remains that Christianity was the absolute negation of all the symbols of pagan naturalism, that it condemned and repudiated without exception all the gods and all worships, and aspired to destroy and replace them. Lucian, it is true, was not more respectful to the various prevailing superstitions, but Lucian’s invectives were an individual piece of wit. He did not attempt to raise altar against altar, he did not do the work of destruction in view of propaganda. He did not work against the institutions in the name of a new community. He remained faithful to the old philosophical tradition. His burst of laughter was as the last hostile note uttered by philosophy, before disarming and offering a hand to the popular religion.

The Christian objectors, also bitter, were far more in earnest and more formidable. Their attacks amounted to a general assault, and cloaked a manifestly subversive design. They did not scoff for the mere sake of scoffing, but to overthrow and to make a distinct place for their own community, establishing it on new foundations. Authority respects the individual conscience, and grants it the greatest license, but the general conscience is what is called conspiracy.

There is here no room for doubt. Impiety and atheism are in fact not purely religious names, in the modern sense, but political imputations. Religions in the empire are matters of state, or rather religion and the state form only one commonwealth, of which the emperor is the head. Lucian was free to be impious or atheistical. No inference is to be drawn from this, however, though he may here and there have either imitators or disciples.

But the Christian is not an individual unit, his name is legion; he is a member of an association, a party which cannot be confounded with a philosophical school. He belongs to an organised body which has its members everywhere; which possesses a distinctive language, rallying signs, a hierarchy, and a common purse maintained by voluntary contributions; which holds clandestine meetings, celebrates nocturnal rites of which popular imagination is afraid, and possesses certain means of operation at a distance by means of delegates or circulars. And what an organisation it is! Its members in Gaul have communication with Rome, and with the cities of Asia and Phrygia. It covers the entire empire with an invisible network. Philosophy, the daughter of curiosity and the work of the brain, divides; Christian belief unites.