Apostacy Ascendent

If the word, “apostacy” has you guessing our topic is Christianity, you’re right. If you think that means we are re-engaging The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you’re right again…and you may be reading ahead.

This month we do indeed take up Volume II of Edward Gibbon’s estimable work. In it, Gibbon considers the question of Christianity as a state religion…when last we left the scene in Volume I, we had the early Christian church struggling for survival and a voice in an empire that largely ignored it. This month we’re on to how the Church became recognized by the government as well as the personal religion of the emperor, and how paganism resisted that transition. Big Issues, in other words, ones that crowd themselves into a surprisingly short interval: most of the book is concerned with the years A.D. 300-375.

As preamble, Gibbon briefly discusses the growth of the Church in the centuries preceding and considers the question of just how the government reacted to a new and popular religion. Roman persecution of the Christians came and went depending on the emperor’s political needs. For example, we encounter Nero (r. A.D. 54-68), who neither set Rome afire, nor fiddled while it burned; and who exercised all civic effort to fight the fire and care for the dislocated. But when the post-fire complaining began to attach to Nero personally, the emperor shifted the blame for the fire to the Christians. By the end of the third century, at which point the main action of our current volume opens, pagan persecution of the Christians came to a high (or low) point with the emperor Diocletian. Diocletian had a long and eventful rule (A.D. 284-305), during which he took two actions of interest to Gibbon and thereby to us. He made the first division of the Roman Empire into halves, the West (including the city of Rome) and the East (including Diocletian’s capital, Nicomedia), each with its own emperor. And he made persecution of the Christians imperial policy…whereupon he promptly retired, to grow truck. This left the persecution of Christianity in the hands of his successors. However, the emperor Galerius decided that after six years of oppression official policy had done nothing to suppress the Christians, so he issued an edict giving them freedom to express their religion, as long as they obeyed Roman law.

Thus was the stage set for the arrival of Emperor Constantine in A.D. 306. Christian, cross-in-the-sky, “by this you shall conquer” Constantine. That one.

The guy does come with a great deal of positive press, much of it deserved. He reunited the Roman Empire, which appeals to those of us who value order, and he made Christianity one of the state religions of Rome, so naturally he is one of the Church heroes. And there is that oh-so-filmable conversion story. Gibbon, however, takes a more skeptical view. Constatine murdered his eldest — and perhaps illegitimate — son, Crispus, in A.D. 326, and followed that up with the assassination of Crispus’s stepmother, Constantine’s second wife, Fausta, shortly thereafter. Crispus had been named co-emperor with his father and proved popular, drawing Constatine’s jealousy. Fausta began to complain that Crispus was making sexual passes at her, and that proved the breaking point. Crispus was executed without trial. Crispus’s grandmother, Constantine’s mother Helena, did not appreciate losing a grandson that way, and soon Helena “discovered” an illicit link between Fausta and a stableman. Shortly thereafter, Fausta was found dead, steamed to death in a bath that “had been heated to an extraordinary degree.”

It was not, however, Constantine’s colorful personal life that causes Gibbon pause. Constantine is the guy who moved the imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople on the belief that the Empire’s opportunity for growth lay to the East. This move was part of a larger shift of focus for Constantine, apparently. Gibbon accuses him of going native, in much the same way Marc Antony is said to have gone native in Egypt during his affair with Cleopatra. For Gibbon, a Roman general, Antony, adopting the dress and manners of the “effeminate East” was bad enough; for a Roman emperor, Constantine, to do so was a major debasement. Gibbon even compares Constantine — one of the great Roman generals — to Elagabalus, the gay, teenage emperor who attained the purple just because he looked good in it. (True story, check Volume I.) Since Gibbon’s topic is the fall of the Empire, he sees the debasement of Constantine as a major step in its decline.

Whatever his dress, Constantine had to contend with one theological issue throughout his reign: the Arian heresy.

At least it became heresy…this was the great debate about the nature of Christ, God the Son. (And it had nothing to do with Hitler, that was something else entirely.) The language of philosophy cast the debate as to whether Christ was of the same substance as God the Father (in Greek: homoousios) or of like substance as God the Father (in Greek: homoiousios). Or for us low church types, was Jesus “begotten” (homoousios) or “made” (homoiousios). It mattered to the people at the time because it gets to the central mystery of Christianity, God made human. If Christ were made (homoiousios), not begotten, then He could be construed as just a highly inspired prophet. To orthodox Christians, it was the “begotten” part, the homoousios, that captured the essence of divine revelation through Christ.

Inconveniently, the Arians saw Constantine as one of them, his cross in the sky was believed to be an Arian miracle. In Gibbon’s telling, Constantine thought himself quite the academic theologian and took both the matter and his role in resolving it seriously. He convened the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, which issued the Nicene Creed to resolve the matter. Constantine considered the Creed his greatest accomplishment.

If only. The heresy and discussion of same raged for another eleven hundred years or so.

Constantine died May 22, A.D. 337. The guy who had reunited the empire divided it again in his will, leaving it split among his three surviving sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius II, who were elevated to Augusti, co-emperors, on September 9th of that year. From a pure gossip standpoint, Constans is our man...our very gay man. Gibbon drops (with a thud) two hairpins about the boy. Speaking of Constans at the time of his accession, Gibbon tells us that Constans displayed “fond cordiality” to select German captives based solely on “the charms of youth.” So he liked them young…he, himself was 27 at the time. Shortly thereafter, Constans was ambushed and killed while pursuing the pleasure of the hunt, “or perhaps some pleasures of a more private and criminal nature.” So apparently he enjoyed romping al fresco.

After two decades of dense and less than uplifting history, the sons of Constantine wound up dead in civil wars, various: Constantine II was killed by Constans’s troops in A.D. 340; Constans himself was killed by then-general, later-emperor Magnentius in A.D. 350; and Constantius II was at war with the self-declared emperor Julian when he died of a fever in A.D. 360.

These deaths left the Empire in the sole hands of Julian. Julian the Apostate.

Julian represented the pushback of paganism against Christianity, although nobody realized that when he was first elevated. A nephew of Constantine, Julian spent his childhood at court as a Christian. He was, however, a big fan of philosophy and of the Greeks…which led him to Plato and the pagans. (Is it too much to call Julian a Classics scholar gone bad? You decide.) Plato, in fact, heavily influenced Julian’s reign: when the emperor did revert to paganism, many expected a bloodbath of revenge against the Christians, who they thought had become haughty and entitled under Constantine and his sons. (One of Constatine’s claims was that his new capital, Constantinople, had never been sullied by idol worship…it was founded after his conversion to Christianity. That sort of thing.) Instead, Julian promoted toleration.

Two other handy facts about Emperor Julian: first, he was a vegetarian; and second, he was gay.

Gibbon merely notes the vegetarianism, for which we can all be thankful. But he makes a point of telling us Julian, “…never shared his bed with a female companion.” Later he informs us that Julian, “practiced, without effort…the habitual qualities of temperance and sobriety. …(H)e sternly refused himself the indulgence of the most natural human appetites…nor was Julian ever tempted, even by a motive of curiosity, to visit his female captives of exquisite beauty….” O.K., we get it. In fact, some of us know exactly how Julian felt. If the idea of a Greek-loving, Plato-quoting, vegetarian gay man has you thinking a willowy number drinking mineral water, think again: Julian was extremely hairy (quit hyperventilating) and took great pride in always having dirty hands (everything’s a fetish for somebody).

Julian met his end at the end of an arrow, injured in the Battle of Samarra with the Persians in June A.D. 363. He was succeeded by Jovian, the emperor under whom orthodox, homoousios Christianity, “obtained an easy and lasting victory.” The Christians were here to stay, although it was at that point that the Arians began to cause trouble again. Sheesh.

The Empire, however, was not to stay. Jovian was succeeded by Valentinian and his son, Valens, as co-emperors. Their reign calmed the pagan/Christian wars, but the rulers also, “executed the solemn and final division of the Roman Empire” into West and East. The rapid turnover in emperors (recall that most of this action happened in a span of seventy-five years) took its toll on the legitimacy of the Augusti. After Constantine’s offspring, rule passed by popular acclaim and senatorial vote rather than bloodline and succession. Looming at the edges of the empire were the Goths, who had respected Constantine’s strength and refrained from attacking Rome’s borders during his lifetime and that of his sons. Their respect did not extend to the “elected” rulers (Julian and following) who came thereafter.

Which is pretty much where Gibbon leaves us at the end of Volume II. The man’s writing continues to delight…if you haven’t sampled him yet, it’s a bit like reading serious history as written by Jane Austen. The comparison is not entirely flip: this volume of Gibbon’s Decline was published in 1781; Pride and Prejudice was published only thirty or so years later, in 1813. If you’re not afraid of Elizabeth Bennet, you shouldn’t be afraid of Edward Gibbon. It is a fact universally acknowledged.

As to the Goths, in literature it’s called foreshadowing, on TV, it’s a season cliffhanger. Will the Goths attack? Will the Romans prevail? Only Volume III will tell.