Why are we Christians? Part 4

“turning the battlefield into a church”

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6

This series of articles “Why are we Christians?” is a response to the claim that Christianity won Europe by its own merits, a misconception which must be dispelled as a prerequisite for a sound discussion on the real merits and downsides of Christianity (and among the major downsides, in my view, is Christians’ incapacity to get to the bottom of the Jewish Question). Christianity won by state terrorism; there is no more appropriate term to describe the process documented in the previous articles. This article is about the civil wars between so-called “pagans” and Christians, and their toll on the Roman Empire.

“Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature is the degree to which it was forged,” Bart Ehrman writes in Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Throughout the first four centuries C.E., he says, forgery was the rule in Christian literature, and genuine authorship the exception. Forgery was so systemic that forgeries gave rise to counterforgeries, that is, forgeries “used to counter the views of other forgeries.”[1]

The Vita Constan­tini, attributed to Eusebius of Caesarea, is possibly a forgery, just as fake as the Constitutum Constantini (the Donation of Constantine). Its recent editors warn that some scholars are “highly skeptical.”[2] Regardless of its real authors, it is typical of the kind of “history” to expect from Christian propagandists of Late Antiquity—stories, not histories.

The Vita hails Constantine as “resplendent with every virtue that godliness bestows,” while Maxentius, his rival defeated at the Milvian Bridge in 312, was allegedly a debauched idolater and sorcerer, “sometimes for magic purposes opening women with child, at other times searching into the bowels of newborn infants” (Book 1, chap. 36).

Thus the civil war between Constantine and Maxentius is set as a religious war between Christianity and “paganism”. This was not clearly the case, as Constantine had not yet made his Christian coming-out, and Maxentius was not a persecutor of Christians. But had Maxentius won, chances are Christianity would never have become the Empire’s official religion.

The second civil war fought by Constantine did have an unmistakable religious background: his enemy Licinius had reportedly banned Christians from his army, and the edifying story of the forty Martyrs of Sebaste—Christian soldiers exposed naked on a frozen pond for refusing to sacrifice to the gods (top picture)—is considered to have some grain of historical truth.

Sometime after the death of Licinius, the poet Palladas wept for the ruin of traditional religion and values: “We Hellenes are men reduced to ashes, holding to our buried hopes in the dead; for everything has now been turned on its head,” he wrote in an epigram.[3] Note that Palladas called himself a “Hellene”, not a “pagan”. “Pagan” is one of those words, like “heretic”, that historians should only use with quotation marks. And why not just call them “Hellenes” since this is how they called themselves? It is not only fair, but perfectly appropriate for those Romans who cherished the wisdom, poetry, science, myths, rites and festivals that they had mostly inherited from Hellenistic civilization.

After Constantine’s death in 337, a series of civil war between Christians and Hellenes continued to tear the Roman Empire for a century and a half. In his book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins argues for a strong correlation between those civil wars and the fall of the Western Roman Empire, traditionally dated in 476 C.E., with the deposition of the last western emperor:

Invasions were not the only problem faced by the western empire; it was also badly affected during parts of the fifth century by civil war and social unrest. During the very important years between 407 and 413, the emperor Honorius (resident in Italy) was challenged, often concurrently, by a bewildering array of usurpers [another word that should have quotation marks, or be replaced by “unhappy pretender”] … With the benefit of hindsight, we know that what the empire required during these years was a concerted and united effort against the Goths (then marching through much of Italy and southern Gaul, and sacking Rome itself in 410), and against the Vandals, Sueves, and Alans (who entered Gaul at the very end of 406 and Spain in 409). What it got instead were civil wars, which were often prioritized over the struggle with the barbarians.[4]

Not every civil war had religious motives. And not all modern historians count the struggle between Christians and Hellenes as a factor in the fall of Rome. In The Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 2005, Peter Heather hardly covers the process of Christianization at all, and casually opines that “the transition to Christianity had been surprisingly smooth.”[5] In Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, published 18 years later, he gives more thoughts to the complexities of the process, but still doesn’t connect it to the fall of the western Empire, which in his view is entirely due to the Barbarian invasions. I am a great fan of Heather’s works, but I feel that he is missing a piece of the puzzle here. For even the relationship between Romans and Barbarians had some religious underpinning (the Goths adopted the Homoean creed as part of their original deal with emperor Valens, which made them heretics under Theodosius, and they remained so until the Third Council of Toledo in 589). It is not really possible to prove that the Christian doctrine substantially weakened the patriotic and military spirit of the Romans, as Edward Gibbon, and before him Machiavelli, have figured. What can be argued, however, is that the religious civil wars between Christians and Hellenes were an aggravating factor in the collapse of the West, and this is what I will argue here. Whether I succeed or not, I will, at least, have documented one further aspect of the violence of the Christianization.