CHAPTER II.

ATHANASIUS TO HYPATIA.

CONSTANTINE the younger, who succeeded the first
Christian emperor, restored Athanasius to his primacy, and the archbishop immediately began to expel the Arians, and to restore the churches to the Catholic faith. This prince's brief reign was followed by that of his brother, Constantius, who proceeded to walk in their father's footsteps by murdering his relations. Being a semi-Arian, he also expelled Athanasius; but Constans, the emperor of the west, "who, in the indulgence of unlawful pleasures, still professed a lively regard for the orthodox faith," threatened if Athanasius were not at once restored to the archiepiscopal throne he would come with an army and a fleet and seat him there. A religious war was averted by the submission of Constantius, but on the death of his brother two Councils, at Arles (A.D. 353), and at Milan (A.D. 355), confirmed the expulsion of Athanasius, all the bishops who refused to subscribe to the sentence being suspended and banished. Athanasius, however, refused to abdicate, and his church was entered by Syrianus, the Duke of Egypt, at the head of five thousand soldiers.
"The doors of the sacred edifice yielded to the impetuosity of the attack, which was accompanied with every horrid circumstance of tumult and bloodshed; but, as the bodies of the slain, and the fragments of military weapons, remained the next day an unexceptional evidence in the possession of the catholics, the enterprise of Syrianus may be considered as a successful irruption, rather than as an absolute conquest. The other churches of the city were profaned by similar outrages; and, during at least four months, Alexandria was exposed to the insults of a licentious army, stimulated by the ecclesiastics of an hostile faction. Many of the faithful were killed, who may deserve the name of martyrs, if their deaths were neither provoked nor revenged; bishops and presbyters were treated with cruel ignominy; consecrated virgins were stripped naked, scourged, and violated; the houses of wealthy citizens were plundered; and under the mask of religious
zeal, lust, avarice, and private resentment were gratified with impunity, and even with applause."
Athanasius escaped, but many of his adherents were tortured and killed in the hope of finding him. Constantius offered a reward for him, dead or alive, denouncing him as "an impostor, a corruptor of men's souls, a disturber of the city, a pernicious fellow, one convicted of the worst crimes, not to be expiated by his suffering death ten times over." Athanasius retorted that the emperor was an Arian idolator, a hangman, and capable of all kinds of rapine, violence and murder.
Liberius, the Bishop of Rome, who had refused to sanction the exile of Athanasius, was himself banished, and Felix appointed his successor. But the people demanded the return of Liberius, and upon making his submission to the emperor, he was restored. Gibbon says:
"After some ineffectual resistance, his rival was expelled from the city by the permission of the emperor and the power of the opposite faction; the adherents of Felix were inhumanly murdered in the streets, in the public places, in the baths, and even in the churches; and the face of Rome, upon the return of a Christian bishop, renewed the horrid image of the massacres of Marius and the proscriptions of Sylla."
The archbishopric of Alexandria was filled by George of Cappadocia, the person who, after an infamous career, became the patron saint of England. Emerson thus describes him:
"George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphanin, in Cilicia, was a low parasite, who got a lucrative contract to supply the army with bacon. A rogue and informer, he got rich, and was forced to run from justice. He saved his money, embraced Arianism, collected a library, and got promoted by a faction to the Episcopal throne of Alexandria. When Julian came, A.D. 361, George was dragged to prison; the prison was burst open by the mob, and George was lynched, as he deserved. And this precious knave became, in good time, Saint George of England, patron of chivalry, emblem of
victory and civility, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world."
George had been placed in his position by military force, and it is remarked by Gibbon that:
"In the use, as well as in the acquisition of power, the tyrant George disregarded the laws of religion, of justice, and of humanity; and the same scenes of violence and scandal which had been exhibited in the capital were repeated in more than ninety episcopal cities of Egypt."
Not satisfied with violence against the clergy of the opposing faction, this worthy caused the widows of the Athanasian party to be scourged on the soles of their feet, the virgins to be stripped naked, and then flogged with the prickly branches of palm-trees, or to be slowly scorched over fires till they abjured their creed.
Athanasius had reason to complain of persecution yet he evidently thought it an excellent thing for others. In a letter to Epictetus, Bishop of Corinth, he says: "I wonder your piety suffers these heresies, and that you did not immediately put those heretics under restraint and propose the true faith to them; that if they would not forbear to contradict they might be declared heretics; for it is not to be endured that these things should be either said or heard amongst Christians." In another place he says "that they ought to be held in universal hatred for opposing the truth;" and comforts himself that the emperor, upon due information, would put a stop to their wickedness, and that divine justice would overtake them.
In Constantinople the triumph of Christianity ensured the same prevalence of fanaticism as at Rome and Alexandria. After the death of Alexander the episcopal throne was disputed by Paul and Macedonius. In the space of fourteen years the former was five times driven from his seat, to which he was more frequently restored by the violence of the people than by the permission of the emperor. He was eventually cast into prison, left six days without food, and then strangled.
The installation of Macedonius in the see of Constantinople was graced by the slaughter of about three thousand persons. So great was his zeal that he not only compelled the reluctant to attend church, but gagged their mouths and compelled them to receive the sacrament. As the civil and military forces were at his command, his cruelty was under no restraint. "The delicacy of virgins, guilty of no crime but non-conformity, was not allowed to shield them from violence; they suffered for their obstinacy by having their breasts squeezed between heavy and sharp pieces of wood, or scorched by the application of heated irons and roasted eggs. This mode of torture Socrates, the Church historian remarks, "was never practised even among the heathen, but was invented by those who professed to be Christians."
The same learned historian tells us that by the intestine war among the Christians Constantinople was kept in a state of perpetual turbulence, and the most atrocious outrages were perpetrated, whereby many lives were lost."
Africa was equally disturbed by the factions of the rival bishops Caecilian and Donatus, which afflicted its provinces above three hundred years, the feud being only extinguished when Christianity was overcome by Mohammedanism. Excommunicated by the Western Church, the Donatists boldly excommunicated all other churches than their own.
"Whenever they acquired a proselyte, even from the distant provinces of the East, they carefully repeated the sacred rites of baptism and ordination; as they rejected the validity of those which he had already received from the hands of heretics or schismatics. Bishops, virgins, and even spotless infants were subjected to the disgrace of a public penance before they could be admitted to the communion of the Donatists. If they obtained possession of a church which had been used by their Catholic adversaries, they purified the unhallowed building with the same jealous care which a temple of idols might have required. They washed the pavement, scraped the walls, burnt the altar, which was commonly of wood, melted the consecrated plate, and cast
the Holy Eucharist to the dogs, with every circumstance of ignominy which could provoke and perpetuate the animosity of religious factions."
Among the Donatists, the Circumcelliones for a time abstained, in obedience to the evangelical command, from the use of the sword, beating to death those who differed from their theological opinions with massive clubs, to which they gave the significant name of Israelites. The well-known sound of "Praise be to God," which they used as their war-cry, diffused consternation over the unarmed provinces of Africa. Many of these fanatics were possessed with the desire of martyrdom, which, in common with most of the early Christians, they deemed the sure passport to eternal bliss. They would rudely disturb the festivals and profane the temples of Paganism in order to excite revenge. Gibbon rightly observes:
"In the actions of these desperate enthusiasts, who were admired by one party as the martyrs of God, and abhorred by the other as the victims of Satan, an impartial philosopher may discover the influence and the last abuse of that inflexible spirit which was originally derived from the character and principles of the Jewish nation."
There was a striking contrast between the reign of Constantius and that of his pagan successor. Julian decreed universal tolerance. No Christian was visited with punishment on account of his religion. The only means he employed to combat the growing superstition was to write against it, and throughout his short but beneficent reign he afforded convincing proof of the superiority of his Paganism to the Christianity of his predecessors. His temper and his philosophy were so humane that he pardoned a band of Christian soldiers who conspired to assassinate him, and he forgave the people of Antioch for an insult such as the pious Theodosius avenged at Thessalonica by a wholesale massacre.
No sooner, however, was the Christian Jovian on the throne than once more the spirit of bigotry burst into open violence. In Rome the rival bishops, Damasus and Ursinus, disputed by force of
arms. Damasus prevailed at the head of his own clergy and hired gladiators, leaving one hundred and thirty-seven dead bodies in the church. No wonder Richard Baxter says of the bishops of this period:
"Their feuds and inhuman contentions were so many and so odious that it is a shame to read them. Multitudes of cities had bishops set up against bishops, and some cities more than two or three, the people reviling and hating each other and sometimes fighting tumultuously unto blood for their several prelates. The Christian world was made as a cock-pit, and the Christian religion made a scorn by the contention of the bishops."
Jovian made a disgraceful treaty with Persia, and retired to Antioch, where he indulged his disposition for pleasure. The contending leaders of various sects hastened to his court.
"The highways of the East were crowded with Homoousian, and Arian, and semi-Arian, and Eunomian bishops, who struggled to outstrip each other in the holy race; the apartments of the palace resounded with their clamors, and the ears of their prince were assaulted, and perhaps astonished, by the singular mixture of metaphysical argument and passionate invective."
The emperor declared for the orthodox doctrines established at the Council of Nice, and his decision led to the conversion of many Arian bishops. Although professing tolerance, he repealed the wise edicts of Julian, which moderated the power of the clergy; and he restored and enlarged their ecclesiastical immunities from the duties of citizenship. He re-established Athanasius on the archiepiscopal throne of Alexandria. In return he was promised by that prelate that his orthodox devotion would be rewarded with a long reign. The prophecy failed. Jovian died after reigning seven months. Yet the success of Christianity was assured, and all the emperors who succeeded him continued, though with unequal zeal, the extirpation of Paganism. Gibbon tells us that already, in many cities, the temples were shut or deserted, and the philosophers who had taught in the reign of Julian "thought it prudent to shave their beards and disguise their profession."
In the reign of Valens, the Trinitarian party set up Evagrius as patriarch of Constantinople. The Arian party elected Demophilus. A contest ensued in which the Arians triumphed. Evagrius was driven out and his adherents were subjected to a variety of outrages. Eighty presbyters of the party went to carry a complaint to Valens, then in Nicomedia, but the ship they returned in was purposely set on fire and deserted, and the whole company of ecclesiastics perished.
About the same time, Gregory Nazianzen complained of being attacked by the Arians of Constantinople. Ancient women, he says, worse than Jezebels, young nuns, common beggars, and monks like old goats, issuing out of their monasteries, armed with clubs and stones, attacked him and his flock in their church, and wrought much mischief. He did not scruple to retaliate and advocate the persecution of the Arians. He also incited Nectarius to persecute the Apollinarists, which was done accordingly.
Upon the accession of Theodosius (379), the orthodox party again triumphed. He convoked the Council of Constantinople, which admitted the Holy Ghost to all the honors of the Trinity, and anathematised all heretics, denouncing by name the Eunomians, the Anomians, the Arians, the Semi-Arians, the Eudoxians, the Marcellians, Photinians, the Apollinarists, the Macedonians, the Sabbatians, the Novatians, the Montanists, the Quarto-decimani, the Tetratites, and the Sabellians.
When the Council was ended, the emperor issued two edicts against heretics, the first prohibiting their holding assemblies in public places or private houses, the second forbidding them to meet in fields or villages, and ordaining that the building or ground used for that purpose should be confiscated.
"In the space of fifteen years, he promulgated at least fifteen severe edicts against the heretics, more especially against those who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity; and to deprive them of every hope of escape, he sternly enacted that, if any laws or rescripts should be alleged in their favor, the judges should
consider them as the illegal productions either of fraud or forgery."
The penal statutes were directed both against heretical ministers and their congregations. The former were exposed to the heavy penalties of exile and confiscation if they presumed to preach the doctrines or to practise the rites of their "accursed" sects; the latter were disqualified from the possession of honorable or lucrative employments. "Their religious meetings, whether public or secret, by day or by night, in cities or in the country, were equally proscribed by the edicts of Theodosius; and the building or ground which had been used for that illegal purpose was forfeited to the Imperial domain."
All who did not agree with Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, and Peter the Bishop of Alexandria, were ordered to be exiled and deprived of civil rights.
In Constantinople, where there were many Arians, especially among the Goths, who had been converted by Ulfilas, Gaina, one of the officers, petitioned for a church for his co-religionists. Saint Chrysostom bitterly inveighed against the tolerance of heresy, and urged the laws of Theodosius. The saint carried his point, and the consequence was an insurrection of the Goths in the city, which nearly ended in the destruction of the imperial palace and the murder of the emperor, and actually led to the extermination of all the Gothic soldiers and the burning of their Church, with great numbers of persons who fled thither for safety and were locked in to prevent their escape.
Similarly, at Milan, the empress Justina, a patroness of Arianism, and a Jezebel, as St. Ambrose calls her, interceded with her son, Valentinian II, to permit the Arians to have one church for worship in that city. St. Ambrose flatly refused, declaring that all the churches belonged to the bishop; and, as the orthodox populace threatened insurrection, the haughty prelate prevailed.
St. Epiphanius boasted of having caused by his information seventy women, some of high rank, to be sent into exile for their
Gnostic heresies, from which he had himself recanted. He saved himself from the fate of his co-religionists by turning evidence against them on the outbreak of the persecution. When the empress Eudoxia recommended to his prayers her son Theodosius the younger, who was dangerously ill, this fanatical saint sent her word that the child should recover if she would get the Origenists and the works of Origen condemned. St. Epiphanius pursued even the orthodox St. Chrysostom with his malice, and piously wished that he might die in banishment, as he actually did. St. Chrysostom was not behind him in Christian courtesy. "I hope you will not live to return to your own city," he declared; and the kindly wish was equally fulfilled.
Theodosius ordered that the heretics called Encratites, Saccophori and Hydroparastatae, should be punished summo supplicio et inexpiabili poena. And for the detection of such persons he appointed Inquisitors, who were thus instituted for the first time.
The guilt of the Quartodecimani, who perpetrated the atrocious crime of celebrating Easter on the day of the Jewish Passover, and that of the Manichaeans and Audians, was esteemed of such magnitude that it could only be expiated by the death of the offenders.
In the West, after the Council of Saragossa (381) had condemned the errors of Priscillian, Bishop of Avila, he and his followers were prosecuted, chiefly at the instigation of Ithacius, Bishop of Sassuba, and charged with magic and numerous impieties. Priscillian and his friends went to Rome to justify themselves, but Damasus would not admit them even into his presence. They then repaired to Milan to beg the same favor of St. Ambrose. He also refused to receive them. Ithacius, and other bishops of like mind, managed so well with the western usurper, Maximius, that he condemned Priscillian and his chief followers to be tortured and executed. Among these were Matronius (called Latronian by Sulpicius Severus and Gibbon), a poet who is said to have rivalled the fame of the ancients; Felicissimus, Julianius, and a noble,
learned lady, named Enchrotia. Others had their goods confiscated and were banished to the Scilly Islands.
From this treatment of heretics we may infer the sentiments held towards Jews and Pagans. St. Ambrose, who by his zeal and inflexibility, acquired supremacy over the mind of Theodosius, induced that monarch to abolish the altar of Victory which remained the symbol of Paganism in the hall of the Roman Senate. Symmachus, the Pagan who opposed him, was disgraced and banished. Theodosius then proposed to the Senate, according to the forms of the republic, the important question whether the worship of Jupiter or that of Christ should be the religion of the Romans.
"The liberty of suffrages, which he affected to allow, was destroyed by the hopes and fears that his presence inspired; and the arbitrary exile of Symmachus was a recent admonition that it might be dangerous to oppose the wishes of the monarch. On a regular division of the Senate, Jupiter was condemned and degraded by the sense of a very large majority; and it is rather surprising that any members should be found bold enough to declare, by their speeches and votes, that they were still attached to the interest of an abdicated deity."
The proof of the ascendancy of St. Ambrose over Theodosius was seen not only in his making him do penance for the wanton massacre of seven thousand persons at Thessalonica, but in a matter much less to the Father's credit. The Governor of the East reported to the emperor that a synagogue of the Jews and a church of the Valentinians had been burnt by the Christian populace at the instigation of the bishop. Theodosius gave orders that the synagogue should be rebuilt at the bishop's charge. Thereupon St. Ambrose wrote to him a letter which is still extant, declaring that the order was not consistent with the emperor's piety, defending the action of the bishop and those who burnt the synagogue, and maintaining the unlawfulness of rebuilding it. He further declared that he would have done the same thing at Milan if God had not anticipated him by burning the Jewish synagogue himself, and
even threatened to deprive the emperor of communion if he did not recall his order. The pious monarch complied with the will of the haughty ecclesiastic and excused the incendiaries from making restitution. The same saint, in advocating the plunder of the vestal virgins and the Pagan priests, maintained the doctrine that it is criminal for a Christian state to grant endowments to the ministers of any but the orthodox religion, and expressly praised and recommended the zeal of Josiah in the destruction of idolatry.
Dean Milman assigns to St. Ambrose all the credit or discredit of extinguishing Paganism.
"It was Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who enforced the final sentence of condemnation against Paganism; asserted the sin, in a Christian Emperor, of assuming an Imperial title connected with Pagan worship; and of permitting any portion of the public revenue to be expended on the rites of idolatry. It was Ambrose who forbade the last marks of respect to the tutelar divinities of Rome in the public ceremonies."
When Theodosius had become sole master of the Roman Empire, he proceeded with the utmost zeal to extirpate the Pagan religion. The inspection of the entrails of victims and magical rites had already been capital offences, but in A.D. 391 he issued an edict forbidding all sacrifices by the most severe punishment, and even prohibiting entrance into a temple. In A.D. 392 all immolations were forbidden to any person of whatever rank, under pain of death, and all other acts of idolatry under forfeiture of the house or land in which the offence was committed. The harmless garlands, frankincense, and libations of wine were condemned. To hang up a simple chaplet was to incur the forfeiture of an estate. Even the Lares and Penates, the household gods, around which clustered the tender ancestral associations of Paganism, were included in these rigorous proscriptions, and those who failed to reveal and denounce offenders were threatened with penalties. Jortin candidly remarks:
"One would think that the Emperor intended to turn all his Christian subjects into informers and pettifoggers, and to set