Absolute Monarchs (2 page)

So what conclusions are we to draw from all this? It seems more likely than not that St. Peter did in fact come to Rome and was martyred there, probably somewhere on the Vatican Hill. There his remains may have been buried, the site being marked with greater or lesser accuracy by the shrine that grew up in the later second century; unfortunately, there are still too many question marks for any confident deductions to be made. What Peter most certainly did not do was found the Roman Church. He seems to have been in the city for only a very short time before his martyrdom, and he could not possibly have been a diocesan bishop as we understand the term and as the pope is Bishop of Rome today. The obvious reason for his subsequent elevation is that when, in the course of the second century, the Church of Rome acquired an effective primacy over its fellow churches—largely owing to the prestige of the imperial capital—it sought justification for its position; and there, lying ready to hand, was Matthew 16:18. It looked no further.

But let us return to St. Peter himself. What sort of a man was he? He certainly had his faults, which the Gospels—except Luke’s—make no attempt to conceal; his denial of Christ alone, had the Master been less forgiving, might have ended his career once and for all. He continued to be vacillating and unsure of himself; there is a curious passage in Paul’s Second Epistle to the Galatians telling of a row the two had at Antioch, when Peter at first ate with the Gentiles and later—caving in, as he so often did, to the opposition, in this case the hard-line Jewish Christians concerned about the kosher laws—refused to do so.
⁶
He could be impulsive and violent, as when he drew his sword and struck off the ear of the high priest’s servant.
⁷
Yet, from the very start, there can be little doubt that he was the generally acknowledged leader of Christ’s disciples. Every time that any of the three synoptic evangelists
⁸
refers to a small group, Peter is one of them and is named first. Consistently, too, it is he who is spokesman for them all. He was certainly no more educated than his fellows—how could he have been?—and we know that in later life he had great difficulty learning Greek; but he must have possessed certain innate and instantly recognizable qualities that singled him out from his fellows. Finally, he was the first of the disciples—if we are to believe St. Paul—to whom the resurrected Christ first appeared.
⁹

By the time of his martyrdom—if martyred he was—Peter could look back on a relatively long and by any standards an astonishing life. Beginning as a simple Galilean fisherman, he had been taken up by the most charismatic teacher the world has ever known and had almost immediately been selected as his right-hand man. Although his later mission was to the Jews, it was he, after the crucifixion, who first opened Christianity to the Gentiles, baptizing them without requiring them to be first circumcised and converted to Judaism—a concession which doubtless came as a considerable relief to middle-aged males considering conversion, but which aroused the furious opposition of the Jewish Christians and which may have been at least partially responsible for his imprisonment by Herod,
¹⁰
never properly explained. After his escape he seems to have left the leadership of the Church to James (“the brother of the Lord”) and to have embarked instead on missionary work in Asia Minor—accompanied, apparently, by his wife
¹¹
—and then, at some unknown date between
A.D.
60 and 65, to have settled in Rome, the only one of the original Apostles to have traveled to the West.

He was not, one suspects, a legend in his lifetime. Over the next two hundred years, however, he was gradually seen to be not just a hero of the early Church but an essential part of its mystique. It is the words—those twelve short words recorded in the Gospel (there are only ten of them in the Latin text)—that, rather than Peter himself, were the true rock upon which the Church of Christ was to be built. And when, in the early fourth century, the first great basilica began to rise over the spot presumed to contain his bones, there was no doubt as to the name that it was to bear.

1.
Matthew 18:17.

2.
A treatise known as
The Shepherd of Hermas
, written in Rome at the beginning of the second century, always speaks of “the rulers of the Church” or “the elders who preside over the Church.” It is hard to say who was the first true pope, or supreme bishop; but the process seems to have been complete by the time of Anicetus (c. 155–166), though until well into the third century the Christian community in Rome remained dangerously fissile.

3.
Later, at least according to legend, he was exiled to the Crimea and martyred by being tied to an anchor and hurled into the sea.

4.
Ecclesiastical History
, ii.

5.
Readers wishing to know more are referred to Toynbee and Ward-Perkins,
The Shrine of St Peter and the Vatican Excavations
.

6.
2 Galatians 11–14.

7.
John 18:10.

8.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all of whom share strong similarities. Luke was the first to be written and was used as a foundation for the other two. John, writing later, differs radically from them in content, style, and general outlook.

9.
I Corinthians 15:5. See also Luke 24:34.

10.
Acts 2:4.

11.
I Corinthians 4:5. It is worth remembering that all of Christ’s first disciples were married and remained so; Paul claims that he is an exception. Why, then, should the Catholic clergy be celibate?

CHAPTER II

Defenders of the City

(c. 100–536)

R
ome, the second century
A.D
. The Christians were growing in numbers and developing their own organization, but they still had a long way to go. Their composition, too, was changing. Their earliest communities were almost exclusively composed of Jews, but the Jewish population was now on the decline: many had emigrated from Jerusalem to Pella (in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan) in 66, after the execution of their leader, James. The Christian community in Rome was now overwhelmingly gentile and would become still more so with the passage of time.

How was it administered? Although St. Irenaeus of Lyons gives us the list of the first thirteen “popes,” from St. Peter down to Eleutherius (c. 175–189), it is important to remember that until at least the ninth century the title of pope (which derives from the Greek
papas
, “little father”) was applied generally to any senior member of the community—Rome was far from being a diocese as we understand the word today. Nor was the Roman Church, such as it was, generally accepted or even respected. The empire, after all, had its own official religion—though nobody much believed in it—and Christians everywhere were still well advised to keep a discreetly low profile. The Neronian nightmare was over, but outbreaks of persecution still could, and did, occur. There was, for example, a disagreeable period under the Emperor Domitian (
A.D
. 81–96), who himself had delusions of divinity and insisted on being addressed as
dominus et deus
, “master and god”; fortunately for the Christians, however, he was assassinated during a palace revolt, and they were quick to see his fate as a sign of heavenly displeasure.

The first half of the second century saw if not a more benevolent, at least a more indifferent attitude on the part of the emperors toward their Christian subjects: Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius, who together ruled from 98 to 161, were all inclined to let them be. But the empire by now covered a vast area, and not all its provincial governors took so enlightened a view. Excuses could always be found for the occasional bloodbath; besides, the public demanded its circuses, and the animals had to be fed. The two most brilliant churchmen of their day, St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (the first writer to use the Greek word “catholic,” or “universal,” in its religious sense), and his friend St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (a champion of St. Paul and the suspected author of several of the Pauline epistles), both met martyrs’ deaths—the former being fed to the lions in the arena in c. 110, the latter stabbed to death some half a century later at the age of about eighty-six, after the failure of an attempt to burn him at the stake.

Ignatius and Polycarp, both Levantines, illustrate another problem for the early Church in Rome: the fact that Christianity was essentially a Levantine religion, the greater part of which was still firmly centered in the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean. Considered from the perspective of history, the churches which, thanks to St. Paul and his successors, were springing up in Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and Greece were far more important than the relatively small communities in Italy. Alexandria was by now the second city of the empire, Antioch—where the word “Christian” was first used—the third. Intellectually, too, these cities were incomparably more distinguished. Despite the fact that Greek was, even in Rome itself, the first language of Christianity (and would continue to be dominant in the liturgy until the middle of the fourth century) and that the first- and second-century popes in Rome were nearly all Greeks, none of them proved to be thinkers or theologians—or even administrators—of any real distinction. Certainly they were not in the same intellectual league as the bishops of Antioch and Smyrna and their friends.

But this view, not altogether surprisingly, failed to appeal to the Church of Rome. For the first two centuries of their existence, the popes had their work cut out to establish their supremacy. Rome, as they were forever pointing out, was not only the imperial capital, it was also the burial place of Peter and Paul, the two towering giants of the early Church. Oddly enough, the most vocal and persuasive champion of the Roman cause was another Levantine, St. Irenaeus, who as a boy had heard Polycarp preach and is therefore thought to have been, like him, a native of Smyrna. He had settled, however, in the West, becoming Bishop of Lyons immediately after the hideous persecutions which took place there in 177 (instituted by the violently anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius, a philosopher-emperor who should have known better). For Irenaeus, the Church of Rome was “the great and illustrious Church, to which, by reason of its supreme status, every church, which is to say the faithful wherever they may be, must turn.”

The son and successor of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, is generally considered one of the most vicious of the Roman emperors. Edward Gibbon, the first great historian to combine scholarship with a sense of humor, tells us that

his hours were spent in a seraglio of three hundred beautiful women, and as many boys, of every rank and of every province; and, whenever the arts of seduction proved ineffectual, the brutal lover had recourse to violence. The ancient historians have expatiated on these abandoned scenes of prostitution, which scorned every restraint of nature or modesty; but it would not be easy to translate their too faithful descriptions into the decency of a modern language.
¹

As he grew more and more unbalanced, the emperor identified himself with Hercules and gave regular performances in the arena, slaughtering wild animals in prodigious numbers and even entering the lists as a gladiator. In this capacity he is said to have made no fewer than 735 appearances, all of them—it need hardly be said—victorious. Assassination, sooner or later, was inevitable, but it was somehow appropriate that the man who strangled him on December 31, 192, should have been a champion wrestler.

For the Christians, however, life under Commodus was a good deal easier than it had been under his father, to the point where a eunuch named Hyacinthus became the first and almost certainly the last man in history to combine the duties of controller of a three-hundred-strong harem and presbyter of the Christian Church. It was thanks to him and Marcia, the emperor’s favorite concubine, that Pope Victor I (189–199)—in the intervals when he was not furiously quarreling with all the churches outside Rome over the date of Easter—was able to infiltrate the imperial palace and so further the interests of his flock. On at least one occasion he was to do so with signal success, when he saved a company of Christians from the nightmare fate of forced labor in the Sardinian iron and copper mines.

BY THE BEGINNING
of the third century, the Church in Rome was still working to establish its authority over the churches of Asia and making steady progress. Sporadic periods of persecution varied according to the attitude and occasionally even the mood of the reigning emperor; but the reputation of the Christians was greatly increased by the fact that the two most hostile rulers, Decius
²
and Valerian, both came—as had Domitian—to unpleasant ends: the first massacred by the Goths in 249, the second captured eleven years later by the Persian King Shapur I, who used him for the rest of his life as a mounting block. Fortunately Gallienus, Valerian’s son and successor, very sensibly reversed his father’s policies, allowing Christians throughout the empire not only to worship in freedom but to proselytize. There were by this time several competing religions, including the cult of Mithras, that of Sol Invictus—the Unconquered Sun—and of course the old worship of the Olympian gods, which was kept going by an official priesthood more as an ancient tradition than as a living faith, but in Rome the Christians by now outnumbered them all.

There was one problem only: the fact that Rome itself was in rapid decline, growing more and more out of touch with the new Hellenistic world. Throughout the Italian Peninsula populations were dwindling, and the empire’s principal enemy, Persia, was several weeks, if not months, away. Even when in 293 the Emperor Diocletian split his empire into four, he made his capital at Nicomedia—now Izmit, in the northeastern corner of the Sea of Marmara—and none of his other three tetrarchs dreamt of living in what was still technically the imperial capital. The whole focus of the empire had shifted to the east. Italy had become a backwater. In the absence of the emperor, the pope was the most important man in Rome; but Rome itself was now a sad and distinctly seedy city, decimated by malaria and showing little trace of its former splendor.

One more burst of persecution was still to come. For the first twenty years of his reign Diocletian, who had succeeded to the imperial throne in 284, seemed willing enough to tolerate his Christian subjects—both his wife and daughter were almost certainly baptized—but then, in 303 and 304, he suddenly published four separate edicts against them. By all accounts a normally humane and merciful man, he specifically laid down that there should be no bloodshed; but his second in command, Gallienus, and his brother officers, unwilling to be deprived of their pleasures, went ahead regardless, and for two years a monstrous wave of violence surged across the empire. It might have lasted longer, but to its victims’ relief the emperor abdicated in 305 and retired to grow cabbages in his palace on the Dalmatian coast. And once again the pendulum swung.

It could hardly have swung faster, or further. In 306 a young general named Constantine was acclaimed by the army at York on the death of his father, Constantius Chlorus, who had been reigning there as one of Diocletian’s tetrarchs. Nowadays he is known to us as Constantine the Great, and with good reason: with the exceptions of Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed, and the Buddha, he was to be perhaps the most influential man who ever lived. It is given to few men to make a decision which changes the course of history; Constantine made two. The first was religious: his adoption, both personally and imperially, of Christianity. He needed a few years to establish his supreme authority—Diocletian’s system of the four tetrarchs appealed to him not at all—but by 313 he and his coregent Licinius were able to issue the Edict of Milan, which granted total freedom of religion to every imperial citizen. Two years later crucifixion was abolished, and in 321 Sunday was named a legal festival. By the time of Constantine’s death in 337—less than thirty-five years after Diocletian’s persecutions—Christianity was effectively the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The second decision was political. Constantine moved the imperial capital away from Rome, to a new eastern city built expressly for it on the shores of the Bosphorus, occupying the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium, a city which he originally intended should be named New Rome but which from the start was always called after him, Constantinople. He inaugurated it on May 11, 330—dedicating it, incidentally, to the Virgin—and on that day the empire, too, acquired a new description, the Byzantine; but it is important to remember that neither he nor his subjects recognized any qualitative change or break in continuity. To them the empire was what it had always been, the Roman Empire of the Emperor Augustus and his successors; and they, regardless of the language they spoke—and as time went on Latin died out and Greek became universal—remained in their own eyes Roman through and through.

TO POPE SYLVESTER I
and his flock in Rome, the news of the emperor’s second decision must have done a good deal to mitigate that of his first. Christianity might now be smiled upon, persecution a thing of the past, and on Constantine’s only visit to Rome in 326 he had not only refused to take part in a pagan procession (causing considerable offense to the traditionalists) but had chosen the sites of several of the great basilicas that he intended to build—and to endow lavishly—in and around the city. First among these was, of course, that which was to be dedicated to St. Peter, above the saint’s shrine on the Vatican Hill. Then there were to be a second cathedral and baptistery next to the palace on the Lateran, occupying the site of the old barracks of the imperial cavalry.
³
Next was the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, commemorating the finding of the True Cross by the emperor’s mother, St. Helena, and raised on the ruins of her former palace; and finally the great church on the Appian Way marking the traditional spot to which the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul had been transferred in 258 but now dedicated—somewhat unfairly, it may be thought—to St. Sebastian.

All this was excellent news; on the other hand, as Sylvester was well aware, Constantine had almost simultaneously ordered the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem,
⁴
together with others at Trier, Aquileia, Nicomedia, Antioch, Alexandria, and several other cities—to say nothing of the Great Church of St. Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, in his new capital. How now was the Bishop of Rome to further his claim to supremacy over the whole Christian Church? It was not he but the Patriarch of Constantinople who would henceforth have the emperor’s ear. For well over six hundred years it was firmly believed that Constantine, in gratitude for his miraculous healing from leprosy by Sylvester, had sugared the pill by handing over to the pope and his successors “Rome and all the provinces, districts and cities of Italy and the West as subject to the Roman Church forever.” Alas for the Papacy, he did no such thing. The so-called Donation of Constantine is now known to have been a forgery—fabricated, probably during the eighth century, within the Roman Curia; it was, however, to prove of inestimable value to the territorial claims of the Papacy until the fraud was finally exposed (by the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla) in 1440.