How Christianity grew
The pattern of Christian growth – an essay in apologetic interpretation of history
By F.P.Barbieri

It is beginning to strike me that one thing that Christianity needs more than another is a whole work of apologetics-cum-history; answering and removing all the lies and fraudulent commonplaces sown across the face of historical writing by centuries of thoughtless freethinking, self-interested party politics and mere, instinctive anti-clericalism. A few popular writers such as the Italian Vittorio Messori are doing meritorious work, and a number of isolated giants have appeared from time to time. GK Chesterton has been, in this as in so many things, a pioneer, helped along by his friend Belloc; their reward for this has been to be called “liars” by a professional historian who apparently had no such issue with the frank and shameless anti-clerical lies of Coulson. But given that Christianity definitely is a historical religion, whose central statement is a historical fact or claim, I think that we need to get to the point where the study and interpretation of history are a part of the study of Christianity by Christians – in short, of theology and ecclesiology. This kind of historical writing should be addressed primarily to other Christian scholars and laity, but not exclude outsiders; just as the study of Christian theology, where it is not an excuse for demolition for its own sake, does not exclude non-Christian philosophers, but is mainly relevant to Christians.

In spite of the long tradition of anti-clerical historic writing, the Church has nothing to fear from history. The truth is that there is no need to force the facts to bring out the massively positive and peculiarly significant position of Christianity and the Catholic Church in the centuries of its existence; to the point where everything we love and value in the modern world, from equality of the sexes to patriotism to individual liberty to the rule of law, may be seen to be the direct result of Catholic influence. In this essay, I will begin with an indication of the directions historians ought to explore in investigating and analyzing the phenomenon itself of the rise of Christianity. You must understand that all its statements are made as suggestions rather than as certainties.

In the course of history, Christianity lost out to force, in particular in its former homelands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Anatolia and North Africa. By analogy, there is a general idea that it expanded by force, especially since it was repeatedly identified with conquering empires. Certainly the Spanish conquest of the empires of America did not allow any of them to keep its state religion. The attenuating circumstance of the sheer horror of Aztec religion (a factor which helped the Spanish conquer the Aztec empire, since the designated victims and enemies of the Aztec empire rose up against them and supported the invaders) only applies to Mexico; the Incas and the other states scattered from the isthmus to Peru did not sacrifice humans en masse or indulge in cannibalism. Other attenuating circumstances – the ghastly epidemics that devoured the population and weakened native traditions without any effort from the conquerors; the historically certified rush by several natives, including chieftains, to embrace the new faith, however little they might understand of it – do not detract from the fact that, when all is said and done, the Spanish never even seemed to consider the opportunity of leaving the natives to their religion.

When one starts looking for other such cases, however, the matter becomes less and less clear. The use of force is certain and certified in the case of the natives of the eastern Baltic – Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and the now extinct Prussians – which were subdued by conquering waves of Swedes and of German crusading knights. It is slightly more dubious in the case of the Saxons of present-day North Germany, where Charlemagne is supposed to have used extreme violence, including the massacre of 7000 prisoners, to break a tradition of stubborn and devious resistance. Reputable historians have found reason to doubt the notice of the massacre. Charlemagne not only never indulged in any such vengeance elsewhere, but even in Saxony he tended to leave the local nobility in charge once he had received due submission. Even the great leader of his enemies, Witikind, was allowed to live free once he had made his final submission; a couple of centuries later, one of his descendants was the historian Witikind of the great monastery of Corvey, one of the abbeys established by Charlemagne exactly in order to pacify and Christianize the Saxon countryside. It is therefore not surprising that many historians prefer to ascribe the notice of the massacre to a mistranscribed manuscript than to facts. Charlemagne was humane and kindly, to the point of letting his own daughters get away with behaviour that few other heads of a family at the time would accept, and he is never elsewhere shown as vindictive or butchering; manuscripts, on the other hand, could and did get mistranscribed. The one hypothesis is likelier than the other.

Even, however, allowing for the historicity of the massacre – which may have resulted from a moment of anger from a frustrated emperor, or from the ancient hatred between Saxons and Franks, which went back at least three centuries – the story of the conquest of Saxony by France is not merely a tale of brutal submission and violence. Saxony and the Saxon nobility were so swiftly united to the Frankish core of the Western Empire, that within a century and a half of Charlemagne’s final settlement, the Saxon Duke Otto was elected first Emperor of a new line, replacing the failed Carolingian dynasty. By then, the Saxons were themselves heavily engaged in the settlement and Christianization of their own pagan eastern border, building the great fortress (and archbishopric) of Magdeburg, and obviously nobody saw any reason to doubt their allegiance to the Carolingian and Catholic ideal.

The conquest of the Baltic, therefore, appears increasingly an isolated and unusual event, that does not form a pattern. Let me be clear: it represents in some ways the last and most powerful eastward thrust of a German, mostly Saxon, nobility that had begun to fight wars on its eastern borders as soon as Charlemagne, however he may have done so, had Christianized Saxony. The border of what are today Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Upper Saxony were then dominated by pagan Slav tribes which, far from any timidity in the face of mailed Christian knights, fought continuously and made the eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire peculiarly unsafe. The Germans subdued and absorbed them one by one, though the memory of their non-German origin lasted long. At the Congress of Vienna, 1815, Prussia was described as a “Slav kingdom,” according to Karl Popper; and a small nucleus in eastern Germany, called the Sorbs, have kept their Slavonic language to this day.

But with all its religious colouring on its head, this was mainly frontier warfare between raiding tribes and a more settled society, slowly becoming urbanized. The advance of the German language, and even of the Catholic religion, in this context, is comparable to the advance of the Scots dialect of English, and of the Presbyterian religion, as Highland culture and Gaelic were broken down: mainly a matter of the success of one more advanced material culture and the breakdown of another, more primitive and tribal. Unlike Scotland, however, the stage of this drama was a flat plain where no natural borders to the advance of the more civilized group could be identified. IN fact, the German advance largely ceased when they met with a large, organized Slavonic kingdom, Poland, different in kind rather than degree from the many small tribes they had conquered before. Where it continued, as in Polish Silesia, it was largely through the peaceful settlement of German farmers called by the local lords because of their greater ability to farm the land for profit.

So while the Baltic Crusades could be said to be a prosecution of this process of German advance, they were very different in kind. From Charlemagne until the closing of the Polish frontier, eastern German wars had been fought by local marcher lords intending mainly to settle their own borders and conquer territory for themselves. The Baltic Crusades were fought mainly by an organized military order, concerned themselves with much larger territories – whole nations – did not start from an existing German border (the great crusader fortress of Marienburg was far beyond settled German land) and had as their primary rather than secondary object the suppression of the local paganism. As a matter of fact, unlike nearly all the Slav territory settled by Germans in previous centuries, the vast majority of the Teutonic Knights’ conquests were never Germanized. Except for East Prussia, they kept their language and national identity even as they spent centuries under the rule of successive German-speaking aristocracies. And this should show that the Baltic Crusades, although arising from existing conditions and precedents, were something genuinely new in European history – something, too, which was not repeated anywhere else. They cannot be seen as typical when nothing else in the history of Christianity is quite like them.

(Unless the sudden conquering explosion of the Kingdom of Prussia, three to five centuries later, may be said to owe something to them. The Hohenzollern house of Prussia, after all, was the direct successor of the Teutonic Knights. This was quite a popular viewpoint in the early twentieth century, but it depends on overvaluing the importance of Prussia. In spite of the kingdom’s name, Prussia proper was a distant swampy borderland of little value except for the royal title it claimed – like Sardinia for the historically similar “Kingdom of Sardinia” of the house of Savoy. The core lands of the kingdom – Pomerania, Brandenburg, Silesia – had nothing to do with the Crusades. At any rate, given that Prussian conquest begins with the atheist homosexual Frederick II and ends with the incestuous pagan persecutor Hitler, it hardly can be said to have much to do with Christianity, especially Catholicism.)

Nowhere else in Europe can we be certain that the Christian religion was imposed primarily by force and from outside; in fact, almost everywhere else we can be certain of the opposite. Episodes such as that of the civil war in Norway where King St.Olaf died are more to do with internal splits among the ruling classes, not even necessarily between Christians and pagans. And the more one looks at the history of Christianity in its various homes, and especially in its extraordinarily successful and conquering Western one, the less does it seem obvious that military conquest went hand in hand with religious conversion. Western colonial empires rarely did anything to force their religion on the conquered; at most – and not even this was always the case – they opened the conquered country to missionaries. The only credible exception, apart from Spain, was in a few episodes in the history of the Portuguese Empire of the Indian Ocean in such places as Goa. And the Spanish and Portuguese conquests are historically separate from the majority of European conquest; by the time the sudden conquering impulse of Portuguese fleets and Spanish regiments had spent itself, coming to rest on an enormous and barely manageable booty like a tired dragon, the conquering career of other notable European colonizing countries – Netherlands, France, England, Russia – had barely begun. Spanish conquests were as good as over by about 1550; English, Dutch and Russian overseas or Siberian settlement had barely begun by 1600, France’s started even later (Quebec was established in 1636). They also took a lot longer to fully develop, and lasted much longer in time. Culturally, chronologically, politically, we are speaking of two different things.

It must also be remembered that, however much imperial force might be bent to obtain the conversion of local in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, nonetheless the process of conversion still assumed the free choice of the individual converts. The justification behind the oppression of natives in Portuguese India or Spanish Yucatan was that the Inquisitors assumed that over-quick, superficial or ignorant converts really had meant what they said when they had taken a hurried Baptism; and that they were therefore entitled to treat the unfortunate natives – in that age of terror in which the Catholic Church was under vicious Protestant and Turkish assault all over Europe – as severely as any conscious adult European graduate from a great university. The missionary and inquisitor who did most to destroy the records of the Maya civilization of Yucatan had at first been collecting them and copying them with enthusiasm; it was when he found that his supposed Catholic converts could not be rid of their habit of pagan and often bloody rituals, that he changed his mind and began to destroy everything he could. It may well be that the very sense of an endangered Church and a rampant enemy in Europe drove the early Spanish missionaries to gather in as many souls as possible by any means however disreputable; whereas later waves of European colonization began when the fires of religious warfare and persecution had begun largely died down, and developped as the principle of toleration was taking hold all over Europe. The French and British gentlemen who fought for control of India and North America in the eighteenth century no longer had any concern that their vision of Christianity could be wiped out from one day to the next by armed violence; in so far, of course, as any of them bothered with Christianity at all.

Portugal, Spain and the Baltic represent a tiny part in space and time of the action of Christianity across the world. Once we begin to take the facts – all the facts, spread over twenty centuries and seven continents – into consideration, it is hard to resist the conclusion that these events were eccentric. The Baltic episodes may well be ascribed to anger at the obstinate – and violent – resistance of some small nations, located in strategic areas, to the advance of a religion that was already old and traditional in all surrounding countries – Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Russia. Spain and Portugal are homogeneous in culture and time and in their relationship with the larger body of Christianity; and it is more reasonable to ascribe their use of violence to force conversion to local and temporary peculiarities than to any feature of Christianity as such. At no other point in the history of Christianity do we find any such large-scale effort at military conquest connected with religious conversion. The hosts of France, Holland, England, Russia, the autonomous white settlers of North America and South Africa, flooded every corner of the known world, without any kind of Spanish-style forced or encouraged mass conversion. India emerged from two centuries of British rule having absorbed and adopted every kind of British political and cultural feature – except Christianity. In Africa, indeed, Christian conversion has gained momentum after the colonial empires folded away their tents, leaving the locals to deal with a modern world in their own way. The most successful episode of Christianization in recent history, that of South Korea, happened in a country that had never been occupied by any Christian power at all.

In point of fact, the opposite must be said. Christianity’s first great victory, the Christianization of the Roman Empire (and of the kingdom of Armenia), set a pattern that has lasted ever since: missionary penetration, discussion, debate, and impact on a day-to-day, social level. To put it simply, Christianity won the argument, again and again, until it swept the Empire. And I would argue that this was what happened elsewhere, later, again and again.

A particularly cunning way to argue the opposite has recently been put forward by the historian Robin Lane Fox. His otherwise excellent and thought-provoking history of “Pagans and Christians” includes in a tiny footnote an extraordinarily important claim – one which, once you have seen what he is aiming at, dominates his narrative from end to end. This claim is that, at the time of Constantine’s conquest of the Roman Empire, only about three to five per cent of the Empire’s population were Christian.

In my view, this claim is so ridiculous that only his authority as a genuinely brilliant historian allows it to be spoken without derision. Think about it, if you please. Constantine took fifteen years to become sole Emperor, starting from a very dubious claim and from the armies of Britain alone. He had to knock down a half-dozen opposing pretenders. He only ruled over the core of the Empire – the eastern half – for twelve years. How easy would it have been for any of his enemies to make his Christianity the issue – to point at him and say: “Here is a rebel, from a rebellious religion, a religion you all hate and despite, a religion that insults the immortal Gods”? Compare, if you will, the career of Henry IV of France. In spite of an undeniable claim to the crown, of eminent and widely known personal qualities, of a devoted party of supporters, and of the backing of the massive and pugnacious Huguenot minority, holding large regions and important towns by force of arms, nevertheless he could not become king of France, as was his right, until he had accepted the religion of the majority of the people. In England, the indubitable legal right of the house of Stuart was denied, and a series of usurpers called in more or less out of nowhere, merely because of the suspicion of Catholicism. Many other cases might be mentioned.

The importance of Lane Fox’ claim is that it goes to the heart of my argument. Lane Fox would have us believe that Christianity would never have conquered the Roman Empire if not for the historical accident of the military adventurer, Constantine. That is nonsense, and nonsense designed to deny a fact that is not only obvious, but that every other part of his work makes more and more obvious: that Christianity, starting from nowhere and from no legal position, and in spite of ferocious persecutions (which Lane Fox, typically, declines to describe) and of being in clear opposition to all the religions of the state, came in no more than three centuries to be the religion of the state and the people.

Lane Fox has to take this ridiculous position, because he himself has demolished all the previous excuses for Christianity’s success – all the excuses, I mean, that try to find a reason for its triumph other than Christianity’s own success in argument and example. It is commonly said that paganism was declining and no longer believed; Fox shows all too clearly that it was living, popular and emotionally satisfying, that it served the purposes of Empire and people well, and that it had a core of emotional and moral values – “anger, and honour, and the appeasing advice of oracles” – that was not only highly satisfactory in itself, but can still be found in basic attitudes around the Mediterranean to this day. It is commonly said that the criticism of philosophers had left it a mere set of popular superstitions, whom the educated no longer believed; a notion that a brief perusal of Plutarch, Plotinus, Iamblichus or Salust (the court philosopher of Julian the Apostate, not to be confused with Sallust, the historian of Catiline and Jugurtha) should blow to atoms. Even those professional philosophers who were not, like Plutarch or Iamblichus, priests themselves, were constantly working on and within the traditions of popular paganism, and felt the pull of the great figures of paganism, gods and heroes, as much as anyone.

That being the case – a case which Lane Fox makes admirably, so that his work should be read, as much as anything, for its genuine insights into Greco-Roman paganism – the situation must be described as follows: a new religion, arisen among a distant and not very respected minority, took on the traditions and glories of thousands of years of religious traditions and vigorous intellectual life, armed and supported by the greatest and most efficient state structure the Mediterranean had ever known, with nothing except its own message and its autonomous bishop-led Church structure; and, within five centuries, conquered it altogether.

At which point, Lane Fox remembers that he is supposed to be, after all, an enemy of the Church, an admirer of Gibbon, a successor of the paganizing traditions of British academia and upper classes – in short, a Lane Fox (the Lane Foxes are an English dynasty). And, having left himself no way out of admitting the obvious but one, he deploys it. After all, the Roman Empire is gone; its once copious census records long since mulched; so it is relatively safe to make any claim one likes about its population – including that, by 310AD, only about three to five per cent of them were Christians. When any document says the opposite – such as the life of the famous bishop of Neocaesarea, Gregory the Wonder-worker, which claims that he found his diocese with but seven Christians in it, but left it with but seven Pagans – it can be dismissed, in this case because the life was written sixty years after the Saint’s death and has some obvious legendary features. Now Neocaesarea was an enormous diocese that included eastern Anatolia, northern Syria and the Roman border with Persia – a strategic and wealthy area, essential to the Empire. And when Lane Fox himself observes that Gregory ruled on matters of civil and criminal law as if the Roman governor did not exist and his own rulings were valid, he makes an observation which has something to tell us about the very foundations of the Empire and the security of its borders. We do not need to believe in a literal seven Christians at the beginning, seven Pagans at the end, to believe that the area concerned had undergone a profound change. This was in the middle third century: Gregory the Wonderworker died some time after 270, well before the great persecution of Diocletian and his successors, let alone the military adventures of Constantine.

Three to five per cent of the total population? Let’s not be ridiculous. As soon as the Edict of Milan was proclaimed through the Empire and Constantine’s first major victory became known, the kingdom of Armenia – a state that sheltered from Persian aggression under the shadow of Roman swords – immediately declared Christianity the state religion. How can anyone read this except to mean that this state, whose life depended on Roman support, had only kept up a pretence of paganism as long as the Emperors of the protecting power were Pagan themselves? Evidently, most or all Armenians were by then Christian, and their kings – used from long habit to move according to the mood of their mighty Roman or Persian neighbours – had only kept up a Pagan front because this was the age of Diocletian and his successors, in which Armenia’s Roman protector was bending the full power of its bureaucracy and army to destroying its Christians. Incidentally, let us notice a couple of things. First, if the Romans had felt certain of their power, they would not have tolerated anything but full support in their persecution from the Armenians. On the contrary, the facts suggest that the Armenian kingdom was left untouched by the great persecution and may well have become a shelter for Christians. It follows that the Romans did not feel sure either of their own eastern border or of being able to compel the Armenians. They may even have feared that if they pushed the Armenians too far, they might start a Christian revolt, with unpredictable results. All this, of course, hardly suggests that Christianity was weak in the eastern Roman Empire; and we may as well point out that the kingdom of Armenia bordered on Gregory the Wonderworker’s diocese.

And if the facts strongly suggest that – at least in the Empire’s essential eastern half – the percentage of Christians was much higher than Lane Fox wishes to believe, they also completely contradict the underlying trend of argument behind that statement – that the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire was a random accident caused by the victories of Constantine. It is more reasonable to argue that it caused those victories; that the large Christian minority, weary of persecution and oppression, made the position of an otherwise minor usurper from Britain, faced with the resources of the Empire’s central provinces, much stronger than it would otherwise have been. At any rate, Constantine only ruled the Empire’s most important provinces – the eastern ones – from 325 to his death in 337. If anyone is willing to argue that twelve years of reign, gained by rivers of blood and not necessarily popular, would be enough to turn an insignificant minority ("three to five per cent of the population”) into a dominant majority, beyond the reach of any reaction, I have a couple of nice bridges to sell them.

More: not only is it impossible in itself, but it is made doubly impossible by the events that followed. The Constantinian dynasty proved as corruptible and liable to internal strife as any that had preceded it, and did not last long. Its period in power corresponded with the height of the so-called Arian schism – not so much a single schism as a sequel of violent breaks under successive teachers preaching the most extravagant heresy. The Catholic doctrine and organization had no sooner been clearly defined by the council of Nicaea – summoned in response to the first schism, that of Arius – than it was under attack so sustained and many-headed as was not to happen again until the days of the Reformation. And it survived: which it never could have done if it was a matter of a minority over-promoted by a successful military usurper. Imagine that Prince Charles Edward had kept his nerve at Derby, taken London, and regained the crown of his fathers. Does anyone believe that this would have been able to make England Catholic? Let us be serious.

In fact, the Arian age and the Reformation have much in common. Arius’ stubborn and temperamental character has much in common with Luther’s; and unusually for schism leaders, neither of them came close to the office of bishop before their revolt. Just as Arius was by no means the head of all the rebellious strands of teaching and organization that appeared in the following decades – Donatists, Apollinarians, Sabellians, Macedonians, Semi-Arians, and resurgent old schisms such as Montanists and Novatians – so did Luther have nothing to do with Baptists and Anabaptists, Calvinists, Socinians, Zwinglians, Anglicans, and resurgent old schisms such as Hussites and Waldensians. In both cases, the revolt of one led to the revolt of all, in a way that, to me, argues more for a basic weakness of the Catholic Church than for anything else. In both the Arian and the Protestant ages, revolt was a mood rather than a cause: people kicked at the apparently substantial structure of the Church, and found, to their delighted surprise, that they could go on kicking. But above all, the common element is that the various strands of schism were supported, sword in hand, by secular powers, either genuinely devoted to the cause or which found it useful to back this or that reformer against the official Church. In the case of the Arian period, a succession of emperors of the house of Constantine consistently backed this or that Arian bishop – consistent not in the doctrine, which changed from emperor to emperor, but in the revolt against Catholic doctrine.

If this situation had become stabilized, it would have reduced the Christian religion to a kind of loose grouping of temples, each with its own wisdom tradition, its succession of teachers and its philosophical school. In fact, it would have become structurally if not doctrinally like Paganism; and this, I am disposed to suggest, may well have been the underlying psychological reason of this age of revolt. The people of the Empire, after millennia of temple worship tradition, localized, immemorial, and mild, had spent the last century or two entering en masse into a common religious structure, universal, recent, clearly defined, and demanding. Mass psychology does not allow such a total shift of perspective without a reaction. One of the bases of the old pagan traditions is the succession of sages, following from an original teacher, in a local school. The Academy of Plato in Athens – still robustly active in the Arian age – was the most illustrious but far from the only one of these successions of wise men; and I would imagine that many people who had accepted Christianity intellectually still found it easier to adhere to a local wisdom tradition to which they could have an emotional attachment, than to a worldwide doctrine and organization – whatever it was that the two opposing terms actually taught. Doctrine as such was not the issue, so much as the emotional and organizational aspects of the adherence to someone’s doctrine; it is no wonder that the word “heresy” meant, originally, simply “teaching”.

Of course, if I say that the “loose organization of temples” with wide variations of doctrine and an emphasis on individual succession and the founding sage – a set-up not unlike that of modern Protestantism, in effect – was or would have been an innovation, I am also saying the opposite: that the Church was the original, traditional structure. Well, of course I am. The Catholic organization of mutually recognized monarchic bishops, validated by the teaching of common doctrine and by communion with the Bishop of Rome, was in place long before the Arian schism. Amazingly, as early as 268AD, forty-two years before the Church was even allowed freedom of worship, the principle that communion with the bishop of Rome validates the holders of other episcopal sees had become Imperial law.

In 268 the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, was excommunicated by other bishops for heresy, abuse of funds, and self-promotion. His opponents consecrated another bishop of Antioch, and the rival claimants appealed to the Emperor Gallienus. Now Gallienus was no friend of the Church; however, he could not ignore disorder in Antioch. Antioch was the Empire’s third city, one of its intellectual centres, and one of the richest markets in the world. Its Christian community was itself prosperous (as shown by the enormous expenditure indulged by Paul of Samosata according to his opponents) and had the claim to be the first Christian diocese, established by the Apostle Peter himself before he went to Rome – a claim that no Catholic has ever challenged. Antioch was also scarily close to the border of the Persian Empire, whose resurgent military strength had just recently inflicted an unprecedented humiliation on Rome by taking prisoner, for the first time in history, a Roman Emperor – Gallienus’ father, Valerian. It is probably for this reason that the Emperor even accepted to hear a suit from members of a Church he hated. This, however, means that he had no stake in the proceedings and no favoured party: they were all one to him.

Gallienus ruled, one, that no city could have more than one Christian Bishop, and, two, that the right Bishop was the one who was recognized by – that is, in communion with; communion was not a Roman legal term – the bishops of Italy. This must mean the bishop of Rome. (The Emperor, in my view, spoke of the bishops of Italy rather than the bishop of Rome because of the schismatic Novatian, or Puritan, succession. A few decades before, one Novatianus, an extremist church leader, had had himself consecrated bishop of Rome by three Italian bishops, one of whom later returned to the Catholic obedience. Sixteen Italian bishops consecrated the legitimate bishop, Calixtus I. However, Novatianus had successors until the seventh century, and clearly any of his successors had as much claim to the see of Rome as he had. Evidently “the bishops of Italy” stood for the bishop of Rome of the legitimate succession, along with those who consecrate him.)

Gallienus’ rulings are not arbitrary: they reflect the order of the Catholic Church as described by Church writers who had been dead before he was born, with one bishop per city and bishops in communion with one another. Indeed, if he had wanted to follow his instincts, he would have, like some anti-Christian writers, placed all contending parties on an equal footing, and dismissed the Christians as irredeemably litigious and credulous. That this enemy of the Church ruled according to the law of the Church means that the law of the Church was already established in his time; indeed, that is shown by the fact that neither Paul of Samosata nor his enemies were satisfied with simply excommunicating each other. Paul was immensely popular among his community and could easily have set up as an independent leader, as many a later Christian splittist would have. He was not: he wanted to be recognized as the legitimate leader of the Antiochene Church within the Catholic Church – and that was his downfall.

One century before the Paul of Samosata affair, as Lane Fox (again) points out, the supremacy of the bishop of Rome over that of Antioch had been shown by the fact that the heresiarch Montanus, excommunicated by Antioch, had appealed to Rome. It is even possible to read it in the letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, condemned to death in 100AD (at a time when people who had met the Lord Himself still lived), who writes in authoritative and magisterial terms to the churches of Tralles, Ephesus, Magnesia, Philadelphia and Smyrne – glorious, already ancient communities over which hovered the great names of Paul, John and the Blessed Virgin – but in humble and submissive ones to the church of Rome. The importance of these letters to Church history is such that some Protestants still, to this day, insist in denying the historicity of Ignatius himself and in calling them a Papist fake!

This will not do. Four centuries of Protestant polemic against Roman supremacy have done nothing but establish that it can be found among the most ancient writers. The presiding rank of Rome among bishoprics is clearly described in the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, the first true giant of Christian thought after the Apostolic age, and in those of Tertullian (until he became a heretic himself) and St. Cyprian, both of Carthage. Irenaeus himself was practically a Catholic unity in his own person. Born and educated to the highest standards in the Greek-speaking East (as a Christian, he had learned at the foot of St John’s own disciple Polycarp; and as far as Pagan learning is concerned, he was educated enough to play the virtuoso game of placing together separate verses of Homer to produce a perfectly turned-out heroic poem that Homer never wrote), he somehow ended up in the capital of Gaul, in the Empire’s far West, as one of the ugliest anti-Christian pogroms in history was taking place, and was elected Bishop in place of the murdered Pothinus. That such a man should value Catholic unity and the unanimity of Bishops is not exactly surprising; that he should value Rome above all others – considering that he came from the area of Antioch – is rather more interesting.

This was the organization that, upon Constantine’s victory, began to represent the official religious outlook, if not yet the official religion, of the Roman Empire. The Church had always had a high percentage of converts, and been strongly under the influence of Pagan thought and philosophy (that Irenaeus, the best and most original of its early thinkers, should be so Hellenistic as to play Homeric games, says all that needs be said). However, its political success meant rooting itself in Roman reality in quite another manner. The status of a minority among an alien and all too often hostile majority can lead the faithful to focus on the life to come, as one can experience by reading Bunyan. Conversely, the sudden end of the great discrimination between a basically non-Christian world, rooted in ancient laws and beliefs, and a Church which has only the shallowest kind of purchase on its soil, must mean a sudden crisis of identity, caused not by a loss, but by too rich a gain, in multiple identities. The Empire founded by pagan heroes, under the eye of pagan gods, and compounded of even more ancient nations each of which was immemorially under its own pagan stars, suddenly starts offering incense and Hosts to the Holy Trinity. But the identification can never be complete; while a minority remains pagan – reading the life of the pagan philosopher Marinus, you would be forgiven for thinking that there were no Christians in his time – the Church with its structure of bishops, presbyters and deacons expands beyond its borders. Bishops and active communities are found in Persia, in the Caucasus, in Ethiopia, among the Goths, in Ireland. And even those supposedly Christian lords, the emperors of the house of Constantine, are heirs to a tradition where the Emperor was also the Supreme Pontiff, and religion was a matter for the high authorities of the State. No wonder that they clumsily meddle in Church affairs; no wonder that they promote their favourites and their favourite doctrines, as an Augustus or a Hadrian would have done. And no wonder that they cannot comprehend the idea that the Church should be one, and should, in religious matters, independent of the State. No wonder, finally, that the last of them, Julian, takes refuge in a dreamland of Stoic pagan virtue which even contemporary pagans fail to understand, tries to move towards a persecution, and finally dies in a crazed attempt to resurrect ancient Roman glories now possible only in books. A great deal of experimentation and of running to and fro was necessary before the Church found even an experimental kind of balance in the world at large.

It is not until the reign of Theodosius, come from a Christian family and reigning in an age in which pagan rule is no longer a living memory except to very old men (Theodosius rose to power in 379), that the independence of the Church and its Catholic unity can be said to be definitely established. The former becomes clear when the Emperor himself is threatened with excommunication – and not even by a Pope or Patriarch, but by the Bishop of Milan, Ambrosius – and accepts the rebuke without even giving a thought to beheading or exiling the insolent prelate. The latter is established by the Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 381), which puts a full end to the age of disruption, though at the price of losing the Arians (mostly, by this time, Goths and other Germans), the Donatists of North Africa, and other schismatics. The phenomenon of breakaway churches is the inevitable concomitant of the establishment of Catholic unity; indeed, it was not exactly novel – the Montanists, the Novatians, the followers of Paul of Samosata, had been expelled from the Church long before.

This was the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Christian religion; and in spite of the socio-political turmoil inevitably caused by such a revolution, it really was as peaceful as it could very well be in any human polity. The triumph of Constantine was, in my view, more a symptom of the triumph of Christianity than its cause; Christianity was already the majority religion in the Roman protectorate of Armenia and probably in large areas of the Roman East – then the core of the Roman Empire. The grave religious and political crises that attended its success were never, except once, attended by religious warfare. There was no war between Catholics and Arians, between Arians and Apollinarians, between Christians and Pagans.

The only exception was North Africa, where the Donatist schism, which according to the acts of the Council of Cirta (315) had been attended by murder from the beginning, swiftly developed into a guerrilla revolt. A century later, with the Donatist-Catholic struggle still unresolved, North Africa was invaded by the Vandals, one of the Germanic tribes that had kept alive the Arian heresy when the Roman world finally rejected it. Elsewhere in the Roman world, Arian Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Longobards managed to live side by side with Catholic Romans – even with the Pope of Rome in person – with no more than a certain amount of unpleasantness; in the kingdom of the Vandals, and in that alone, the contrast developed into a vicious persecution. There seems to be something about North Africa that makes it peculiarly liable to religious violence; fifteen centuries later, Algeria was to be devastated by a religious insurgency whose ferocity has no parallel anywhere in the Muslim world.