Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (49 page)

Western Christians have forgotten that before the coming of Islam utterly transformed the situation in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, there was a good chance that the centre of gravity of Christian faith might have moved east to Iraq rather than west to Rome. Instead, the ancient Christianity of the East was nearly everywhere faced with a destiny of contraction in numbers, suffering and martyrdom which still continues. But there was one practical consequence of the fifteenth-century Latin delusion that Prester John might unite with Western Christians. The myth generated an optimism which had a vital galvanizing effect on Latin Christianity, so it played a part in that surprising new expansion worldwide which from the end of the fifteenth century led Western Catholicism and Protestantism to become the dominant form of the Christian faith into modern times (see Chapter 17). It is towards Rome that we now turn, to begin exploring how this unlikely turn of events took place.

PART IV

The Unpredictable Rise of Rome (300-1300)

9

The Making of Latin Christianity (300-500)

THE ROME OF THE POPES (300-400)

Two bishops in the universal Church still use an ancient Latin title which started as a child's word of affection for its father: '
Papa
' or, in English, 'Pope'. One is the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, supposedly a successor to the Gospel writer Mark, and certainly successor to Cyril, Dioscorus and the brutally murdered Proterius. The other is the Bishop of Rome, only slightly less supposedly a successor to the Apostle Peter, and leader of the largest single grouping within world Christianity. Of all the various Christian understandings of the word 'Catholic', the most commonly used is a description for the Church over which the pope in Rome presides, and with that usage there go claims for an overriding and objective authority among all other Christian bodies, which the contemporary papacy has so far done nothing to repudiate.
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A more neutral description of the 'Catholic Church' would be 'the Western Church of the Latin Rite'. The point of this admittedly cumbersome label is that it acknowledges the equal historic status of the various Churches of Orthodoxy in eastern Europe and the Middle East, whom we have still to meet, not to mention the various Churches of Asia and Africa which decided after the fifth century to ignore or repudiate the Chalcedonian Definition of the nature of Jesus Christ.

We now explore how this Latin-speaking Christianity evolved and flourished in western Europe up to the fourteenth century, when the pope's steady accumulation of authority began to falter. That was followed by a crisis in the sixteenth century, when much of Western Christianity with a Latin heritage broke away from its acknowledgement of the pope's leadership and gained yet another label as 'Protestantism'. The surviving Church under the Roman obedience still sustains one of the world's oldest monarchies, based on the claim to succeed Peter as Bishop of Rome and to be the guardian of his tomb. As we have noted (see pp. 134-5), such a claim bore the price of a gradual marginalization of the memory of Rome's other apostolic martyr, whose death was more certainly placed in the city, Paul of Tarsus. But that change was part of a momentous shift in the story of Christianity. From being the poor relation of the Greek- and Semitic-speaking Churches of the East, Latin Christianity survived largely unscathed the eruption of Islam, and embarked on adventures which turned it into the first world faith. It should not be forgotten how unpredictable this outcome was.

Peter's charisma was the most useful resource at the disposal of Roman bishops as, from the third century, they increasingly claimed to be arbiters of doctrine in the wider Church. No pope before mid-fifth-century Leo the Great at the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and virtually none after him, could claim the authority of being a major theologian, nor did the city prove to be a centre of lively theological discussion or controversy. It is significant that the one exception to this rule, the disputes over Monarchian views of Christ (see pp. 145-7), had occurred in the late second century while the Church in Rome's predominant language was still Greek and links to the East were still strong. After that, the two outstanding theologians writing in Latin up to the fifth century, Tertullian and Augustine, were both natives not of Italy but of North Africa. The pope's claim to a special place in the life of the universal Church came rather from the tombs of the Apostles, and from the end of the third century it was reinforced by a further accident of history.

The Emperor Diocletian's reorganization of the whole empire would not have seemed particularly relevant to the popes in Rome when it took place in the 290s; he was after all about to become one of the Church's most dangerous enemies. Nevertheless, it had a major and permanent effect on the city. Diocletian removed the real centre of imperial government to four other capitals more strategically placed for emperors to deal with the problematic northern and eastern frontiers of the empire - Nicomedia in Asia Minor, Sirmium in what is now Serbia, Mediolanum, the modern Milan, and Augusta Trevorum, the modern Trier. Emperors never again returned to Rome for extended residence. Once the Church became the ally and beneficiary of emperors rather than the victim of their persecution, that vacuum in secular power in the ancient capital meant that the Christian bishop was given an opportunity to expand his power and position. By the end of the fourth century this combination of advantages made it worthwhile for Greek Christians in their various intractable disputes to appeal to popes for support, the most outstanding example being the place of Pope Leo I's Tome at Chalcedon.

Constantine I mightily helped the process along when he gave Christianity official status. In Rome he nevertheless had a handicap: he was working within the restrictions of a city whose heritage of monuments and temples reflected the glory of Christianity's enemies. Even though Rome was no longer in any real sense his capital, Constantine gave the Church in the city a set of Christian buildings which in some important respects set patterns for the future of Christian architecture, and in others remained deeply idiosyncratic. In any case, their splendour formed a major element in the fascination which Rome came to exercise for Western Christians, and it is worth considering in some detail these buildings which so seized the imagination of generation on generation of pilgrims. First, the property inheritance of Constantine's wife, Fausta, enabled him to build one monumental church inside the city boundaries: a basilica dedicated to the Saviour which became and remains the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome, and was rededicated much later as St John Lateran. Many basilicas in centuries to come followed its plan and architectural forms at various levels of magnificence or modesty, but at the time this church was not on a prominent or especially visible site compared with the city's ancient architectural wonders, and the Emperor's other major Christian building projects had to be beyond the city walls.
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The sense of something radically new happening to Christianity in these other architectural gifts is accentuated by the fact that, in terms of Christian architecture, they were not much imitated. The gruesomely martyred deacon St Lawrence, who had won his martyr's crown in the mid-third century by being roasted alive, was honoured with a monumental building of U-shaped plan like a truncated Roman circus, forming a large covered cemetery for those wishing to benefit in death through burial close to this very popular saint.
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The handful of circus-shaped churches of Constantine in Rome seemed to have been designed also just like the circuses of old Roman society as meeting places for great numbers of Christian believers, not just during the time of service. Perhaps they also provided a deliberate, triumphant reminiscence of the use to which circuses had occasionally been put: to torture and murder Christians before the new dispensation. The new regime was not shy of reminding Rome of the tally of past Christian martyrs, and their numbers were destined to swell a good deal in legend beyond those who had actually died.

Curiously, and surely significantly, Constantine seems to have done little for the martyred St Paul, at best modestly rehousing the saint at his rural shrine, but he gave sudden promotion to the cult of Peter far beyond the Apostle to the Gentiles, through a massive investment in what became the largest church in Rome. It was to survive until the sixteenth century, when its rebuilding had a momentous consequence (see pp. 608-9).
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Like Constantine's work at St Lawrence's shrine, the Emperor's gift to Peter was not a conventional basilica or a congregational church or cathedral, but a huge structure intended for burials, funeral feasts and pilgrimages, all under the patronage of the saint. It eventually ended up with a plan in the shape of a T-cross, its altar in a semicircular apse at the junction-head of the T. A cruciform plan for a church building, although much developed by both East and West in different ways in later centuries, was unusual in the early Church, and although this plan of 'Old' St Peter's has often been taken as a reminiscence of Constantine's victory through the Cross, it was in fact an architectural accident. The head of the T was the original building, the shrine of Peter being located (with considerable difficulty because of the hillside site) at its centre point, in front of the altar-apse. Later, a monumental nave with two aisles on either side was added to the west, giving a vast space which, like the circus-shaped churches such as St Lawrence, was capable of holding thousands of people (see Plate 26).
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We should imagine this aisled nave used as the ultra-pious multi-millionaire Pammachius did in the early 390s, commemorating the death of his wife with a vast banquet for a crowd of the poor, who filled the whole place, St Peter brooding benevolently over the gargantuan feast from his grave beyond to the east. Christian charity combined harmoniously with the public assertion of a great aristocratic family's place in the city.
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St Lawrence's and St Peter's churches thus witnessed to the newly Christian Emperor's special concern for death and honourable burial, a contrast to the attitude of the Saviour himself. War and death seem to have been Constantine's chief motives for interest in the Christian faith, although one might argue that his busyness in matters of burial stemmed from the title of Pontifex Maximus which he held as emperor. This high priest of Rome had traditionally been concerned with the administration of burials, so perhaps Constantine regarded his provision of Christian burial places as a reflection of that duty. Even with that possibility, it is still interesting that burial was the aspect of the high priest's duties which particularly exercised him. Constantine only ever attended Christian worship on very special occasions, as was the case with some of his successors as emperors right up to the end of the fourth century, so it is unsurprising that congregational churches were not his prime interest.
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Besides his own burial church of the Twelve Apostles in Constantinople and his family's concern with the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (see pp. 193-4), the Emperor built in all six funeral churches in Rome, capable of accommodating thousands of Christians in death as well as in life. They seem to have been a gift to his Christian subjects to parallel his gift of privileges solely granted to their clergy. Regardless of any personal considerations, the Emperor's generosity showed a lively awareness that the Christian religion (and therefore presumably its God) had long paid particular attention to providing properly for burial.
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The Emperor's preoccupation with death also encouraged a different variety of building which, by contrast, did have a long future in Christian architecture: circular-plan structures. These took their cue from a great non-Christian funeral building, the mausoleum of the emperors which Hadrian had built in Rome, back in the second century - it survives as the papal fortress known as the Castel Sant'Angelo. Constantine's own first projected tomb outside Rome, which actually came to house his mother, Helena, is circular in this fashion. A design associated with imperial death was therefore appropriate both for shrines to martyred saints, who won a crown worthy of an emperor in Heaven by their death on earth, and for the death to sin which every Christian experienced in baptism. The most famous example was the circular-plan structure which during the fourth century was built around the tomb in Jerusalem designated as that of Christ, as part of the giant 'martyrium' pilgrimage complex of the Holy Sepulchre.
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There were eventually two such circular 'martyria' alongside the Basilica of St Peter commemorating particular saints, while beside the Cathedral Church of St John Lateran Constantine himself had built a spectacular circular baptistery centring on a sunken font; for most of the fourth century, it was the only place of baptism for the whole Church in Rome. It still stands, although the vastness of its eight-sided space is now reduced by a later inner ring of columns.
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The great new building at St Peter's was bound to be good news for the Bishop of Rome. The most significant pope to exploit the new possibilities was Damasus (366-84). After a highly discreditable election, in which his partisans slaughtered more than a hundred supporters of a rival candidate, and some very shaky years following that while he established his authority, Damasus sought to highlight the traditions and glory of his see.
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He was the first pope to use the distant language favoured by the imperial bureaucracy in his correspondence. He took a keen interest in the process of making Rome and its suburbs into a Christian pilgrimage city, financing a series of handsomely sculpted inscriptions at the various holy sites in indifferent but lovingly and personally composed Latin verse, some of which survive. They gave accounts of the importance of each place, generally with details about them that improved generously on the scanty reality of genuine facts about early Christian Rome, while sometimes cheerfully admitting that there was not much to tell: 'Time was not able to preserve their names or their number' was his comment on one group of skeletons.
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