TheMarketForIdeas

Western civilization, which emerged during the late Roman imperial period, is a mixture – perhaps even a synthesis – of Roman and Christian elements. Christianity rejuvenated the Roman world by introducing a dynamism and resilience lacking in earlier civilizations. The adoption and spread of the Christian faith inspired cultural, moral, and technological innovations within a Roman legal and administrative architecture which, through the generations, have transformed everyday life nearly everywhere. This article is drawn from the first part of chapter 3, “Early Christendom,” of Crossed Swords: Entanglements between Church and State in America (unpublished dissertation, University of Oregon, 1984), 101-19. It is a companion piece to “Early Christendom: Chrysalis of the West” published in the Mar./Apr. 2023 issue.

The emperor Constantine, who professed the Christian faith, developed a close working relationship with the church hierarchy. Even though he was not baptized until the last year of his life, he regarded himself as the bishop of external affairs. During his reign, Christian slaves were emancipated, bequests to churches were legalized, and members of the clergy were exempted from military and municipal duties. The German church historian, Augustus Neander, has shown that the results of this last policy were, at best, a mixed blessing:

This unconditional exemption of the clergy from those civil duties was destined to prove, however, the source of many evils both to church and state; since it was the natural consequence that numbers, without any inward call to the spiritual office, and without any fitness for it whatever, now got themselves ordained as ecclesiastics for the sake of enjoying this exemption; -- whereby many of the worst class came to the administration of the most sacred calling; while, at the same time, the state was deprived of much useful service.[1]

In particular, members of the curial class – who were middle-class landholders – were saddled with oppressive tax burdens they endeavored to foist upon others. Some took advantage of the clerical immunity to escape from them, while the wealthier gentry bought their way into the imperial Senate, where they enjoyed a tax exemption. Constantine simply continued the earlier taxation and public service programs. The consequences were disastrous, as Norman F. Cantor has concluded:

The “reforms” of Diocletian and Constantine did hold the fort for a century until the church was strong enough to take over leadership of society in the fifth century. However, the cure was really worse than the disease as far as the empire was concerned.[2]

Constantine and his successors also established a precedent for supremacy of the imperium over the sacerdotium – the state over the church – by summoning church councils and supporting various factions in church disputes. Constantine’s son, Constantius (350-361), was notorious in this regard because of his support of the Arian heresy and his persecution of pagans. But it is wrong to assume that the church simply became an appendage of the state. Although the emperor retained the office of pontifex maximus for a considerable time yet, John W. Burgess noted in his study of the sanctity of law that

. . . the principle of discrimination between church and civil office had become so fixed in the consciousness of nearly all Christians as to bring to naught any attempt of the Caesars having for its [benefit] the establishment of a claim on their part that through their office as Pontifex Maximus they transmitted God’s will to men for their government.[3]

At this early stage, the church had not become sufficiently centralized for the development of an office to replace this position, as it later did through the papacy.

According to Marcellus Kik, “the initiative . . . for civil meddling with internal affairs of the church came through the clergy rather than the Emperor.”[4] The Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine in the year 325 to resolved the Arian controversy. The Arians, who sought the intervention of the state on their behalf, found their views strongly condemned, instead. One result was that offenses against the church were classified as crimes against the state, setting a precedent for a long history of interference with religious liberty by the state. Even so, the Nicene Council preserved the independence of its deliberations, notwithstanding Constantine’s personal role. In Cochrane’s view, this “served to indicate that, in the organized Church, the empire was confronted not merely with a ‘corporation,’ a creature of the state, but with a co-ordinate, if not superior, spiritual power.”[5] Indeed, church leaders like Athanasius, Ambrose, and Augustine proved more than equal to the task of asserting the power of the church over the state when necessary. On one occasion, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, excommunicated Emperor Theodosius (378-395) for ordering reprisals against the citizens of Thessalonica following a riot in that city in 390. The emperor, a baptized Christian, was not readmitted to communion until, at last, he repented in public. This incident foreshadowed later public humiliations of kings by popes, as at Canossa in 1077.

It was under Theodosius that Christianity – in its orthodox or Nicene form – achieved the privileges of the state religion in 381. Gratian (367-383), a colleague of Theodosius who had earlier declined the robe of pontifex maximus, abolished most of the privileges of the old state priesthood and withdrew the subsidy for its support.[6] Ever since the reign of Constantine, official policy had wavered between the suppression of paganism, the favoring of various Christian sects, and a general toleration toward all religions. Theodosius, however, proved more decisive than his predecessors and passed legal measures against Christian heresies and paganism which carried severe penalties. Temple property was confiscated by the state. Religious images were destroyed by Christian monks. The loose alliance between the political and ecclesiastical authorities that had prevailed until that time was brought a step closer to organic union, although religious persecution was kept to a minimum. Even in the one instance where persecution briefly resurfaced, it was censured by Ambrose and other church leaders. But many of the old religious customs habits persisted, especially the Roman bent toward syncretism. Theodosius, for example, was posthumously enrolled among the gods by a grateful Senate. Cochrane concludes that the imperial policy of this period betrayed a “fatal confusion of ideas.”

For to envisage the faith as a political principle was not so much to christianize civilization as to ‘civilize’ Christianity; it was not to consecrate human institutions to the service of God but rather to identify God with the maintenance of human institutions, i.e. with that of the pax terrena. And, in this case, the pax terrena was represented by the tawdry and meretricious empire system which, originating in the pursuit of human and terrestrial aims, had so far degenerated as to deny men the very values which had given it birth; and was now held together only by sheer and unmitigated force. By so doing, it rendered the principle purely formal while, at the same time, it suggested the application of conventional political’ methods for its realization. While, therefore, under governmental pressure, the empire rapidly shed the trappings of secularism to assume those of Christianity, it remained at heart profoundly pagan and was, to that extent, transformed merely into a whited sepulchre.[7]

Mutual struggle

A new phase in the relationship between church and state began with the official establishment of the Christian – or Catholic – Church in the Roman Empire. In their mutual struggle for power and self-preservation, the balance between them tilted first to one side, then the other. Sanford H. Cobb identified five stages of development in their relations:

1. That of Alliance, from Theodosius and Augustine to Gregory the Great.
2. That of ecclesiastical effort for supremacy, from Gregory the Great to Charlemagne.
3. That of the distinct Supremacy of the State, from Charlemagne to Hildebrand.
4. That of Church Imperialism, from Hildebrand to Boniface VIII.
5. That of Nationalism, from the time of Boniface VIII to the present day.[8]

In St. Augustine’s defense of the faith, The City of God, the heavenly city (as opposed to the earthly city) is not identified with either church or state, although his views have been used to support a variety of positions. In fact, Augustine believed that both cities are mingled, like tares and wheat, in this world until they are finally separated at the last judgment.[9] Christians are citizens of both cities because human nature is twofold: physical and spiritual.[10] Jesus is the Lord of both realms.

During the fifth century, the papacy began to come into its own. The bishop of Rome grew in prominence as a political figure by filling the power vacuum left by the weakening of imperial control over Italy and the western provinces, which were falling under the domination of successive groups of nomadic invaders.

Pope Leo I (440-461) took the offensive to consolidate the powers of his office as bishop of Rome – the only western patriarchate – and strengthened the authority of the church during the middle years of the fifth century. In 448, Leo wrote his famous Tome upholding the orthodox position on the nature of Christ as true God and true man. After suffering a temporary setback, he called the Council of Chalcedon into session in 451. R. J. Rushdoony asserts that the doctrine of the trinity as defined at the Council laid the “foundation of western liberty” while it resolved the ancient problem of the one and the many:

Since both the one and the many are equally ultimate in God, it immediately becomes apparent that these two seemingly contradictory aspects of being do not cancel one another but are equally basic to the ontological trinity, one God, three persons. Again, since temporal unity and plurality are the products and creation of this triune God, neither the unity nor the plurality can demand the sacrifice of the other to itself. Thus, man and government are equally aspects of created reality. The locus of Christianity is both the believer and the church; they are not independent of or prior to one another.[11]

In the East, the emperor, Justinian (527-565), introduced oriental pomp and splendor to the imperial court during his long reign and briefly checked the decline of imperial power. Deeply interested in theological questions, Justinian took a role in religious controversies and tended to dominate the church leaders in the capital city of Constantinople, or Byzantium. He intensified the trend toward caesaropapism, which introduced a new extreme of oriental despotism into the eastern or Byzantine empire.

Justinian is perhaps best remembered for the codification of Roman law in the Codex, Novenae, Institutiones, and Digestum, which were later known collectively as the Corpus luris Civilis when reintroduced into medieval Europe in the twelfth century and which gave renewed impetus to the theory of absolute monarchy. Justinian and later emperors liberalized the law of slavery and reformed family law by equalizing the position of women before the law, requiring consent of both spouses for marriage, stiffening divorce requirements, and restricting the absolute paternal authority – patria potestas – over children.[12]

But Justinian was unable to hold the West, despite his reconquest of Italy early in his reign. Three years after his death, the rift in the empire became permanent. Again, the church rose to the challenge. By the end of the sixth century, the centralization of the church hierarchy had begun to mature under Pope Gregory I (590-604), who asserted the jurisdiction of the Roman patriarchate over all others and himself as the apostolic successor of Peter.[13]

The Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire increasingly showed the effects of a neoplatonism that deprecated the mundane at the expense of the spiritual realm. While veneration of icons became increasingly popular in the East and the West, it became an issue of especial political significance in the East as a phase of the struggle between church and state. By perpetuating the imperial cult, the emperors claimed to be priests as well as kings and proclaimed that the empire was the visible kingdom of God on earth. René Guerdan characterized the later Byzantine emperors as icons themselves:

Such megalomania had inevitable consequences: when the real sovereign is pure spirit, what can the emperor of flesh and blood in fact represent? He must necessarily be a materialization, a symbol: the materialization in our tangible world of an incorporeal substance, the symbol by which it can express itself here below. So it is that we find a State which had for its monarch neither a god nor a man, but an actor, a figurine. The Byzantine Empire was, in effect, nothing but the great scene of a spectacular drama, a mystery or passion play, in which the consecrated dynast as the leading character played through the centuries the part of Christ.[14]

Veneration of the emperor’s image – like the genius of Caesar – was supplemented by efforts to destroy the rival images of the church.[15]

In 725, Emperor Leo Ill (717-741) issued the first edict against images and touched off the iconoclastic controversy, which grew into a dispute between the emperor and the pope as both sides sought to assert ultimate religious authority. The destruction of religious images became an important part of the imperial plan to reduce the independence of the church. In 753, Constantine V Copronymous (741-775) pursued a vicious policy of confiscating the monasteries, secularizing their buildings, and persecuting monks and nuns. R. J. Rushdoony summarizes the imperial program as follows:

As Ladner pointed out, the imperial party, with reference to the church, saw that “narrowing the extension of Christ’s government in the world widened the extension of the emperor’s worship.” The iconoclastic controversy was a phase of a larger imperial program. As Finlay noted, “It embraces a long and violent struggle between the government and the people, the emperors seeking the central power by annihilating every local franchise, and even the right of private opinion, among their subjects. . . . The emperors wished to constitute themselves the fountains of ecclesiastical as completely as that of civil legislation.” The undergirding philosophy of the struggle was Hellenism.[16]

The leaders of the powerful monastic party in the East eventually recovered the privileges and wealth of the monasteries after the pope threatened to declare the independence of the church from the state. The regent Theodora finally rescinded the iconoclastic legislation in 842.

Paul Lemerle believes the iconoclastic controversy hastened the political and religious split between the two halves of the empire:

When Pope Stephen II was instructed by Constantine V to seek help against the Lombards from Pepin the Short, he turned traitor to the cause of the heretic emperor. In 754 he contrived to have recognized his personal right to administer the territories of Rome and Ravenna, which had been reconquered by Pepin. This meant the loss of Italy for the empire.[17]

It was during this period that disagreements between the eastern and western churches were intensified by a dispute over the Nicene Creed which culminated in a final schism in 1054.[18] Byzantium resisted the advance of Islam for four more centuries before it fell but the relations between East and West were never healed.

The Papal revolution

For this concept of dual sovereignty to work effectively, there remained the problem of institutionalizing the selection of the pope. This was accomplished through the papal curia. The prestige of the papacy had lately declined as it came to be regarded as a sinecure for ambitious families. Rival factions, precursors of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, struggled to control the see. A succession of popes and anti-popes followed the removal of Pope John XII (955-963) by Otto, whom John had crowned. Profligacy and degradation riddled the papacy as the second millennium began.[19]

Pope Leo IX (1049-1055) began introducing reform with the help of monks associated with the abbey of Cluny, a center of monastic reform since the early tenth century. Leo expanded the circle of cardinals and surrounded himself with activists. Within a short time, a new class of celibate clergy – the spiritual or regular clergy – was created for the sake of attacking such age-old problems as simony and clerical unchastity. It was with such troops at his command that Hildebrand, the youngest of Leo’s reforming cardinals, was later able to set the stage for the period of the papacy’s greatest power and, after being elevated to the papacy by popular acclamation, set in motion the great clerical revolutions of the following two centuries. Hildebrand took the name Gregory VII (1073-1086) to vindicate an earlier pope, Gregory VI, who had been deposed by the emperor.[20]

In 1075, Gregory issued the Dictatus Papae, a manifesto proclaiming virtually unlimited authority for the papacy. He attacked the sacramental conception of kingship and claimed that he alone could use the imperial insignia. Furthermore, he asserted the primacy of the pope in mundane as well as spiritual affairs, the infallibility of the Roman church and the pope, and claimed authority to depose emperors, ordain all clerics, and absolve subjects from their fealty to unjust rulers.[21]

Thus began a new period of struggle within and between church and state – popularly known as the Investiture Contest – that profoundly altered the course of European politics. Not long afterwards, Pope Urban II (1088-1099), launched the first of a dozen crusades – in 1095 – in an effort to reunite Christendom. Urban began by declaring a truce – the “Truce of God” – in all wars of Christians against Christians.[22] In several kingdoms, war propagandists inflamed popular passions with accounts of Moslem and Jewish atrocities. Milton Himmelfarb believes that European Jews, who up until then had been active proselytizers, were terrorized into passivity by the crusaders as systematic persecutions began.[23]

The issue that became most identified with this dramatic energizing of religious and political militancy was lay investiture: the control of church appointments by kings and local magnates. From the viewpoint of the church, lay investiture subjected church officers and church property to the feudal authority of civil rulers. Like simony, which involved the purchase or sale of church services, sacraments, and offices, the practice was thought to usurp spiritual powers entrusted to the church, bringing corruption into the Body of Christ. From the viewpoint of the ruler, the authority for lay investiture was based on a divine ordinance given to Otto I and his brother, the archbishop Bruno.[24] But more important were the practical considerations behind the jurisdictional issue. The state bureaucracies were then staffed by clerics, who were the lawyers of the day. The subjection of the secular clergy to monastic rules meant weakening the control of rulers over their own civil servants.

At the time of Gregory’s election to the papacy, the young German emperor, Henry IV (1056-1106), was seeking to continue Otto’s program to unite Germany under the Frankish monarchy but met resistance from the nobility, led by the Saxons. After defeating the Saxon barons, Henry was preparing to create a unified German state when he received a papal decree from Gregory prohibiting lay investiture and threatening to remove him if he failed to comply immediately. With the support of the German clergy, Henry sent a barbed reply to Rome and demanded the pope’s resignation:

Henry, king not by usurpation but by God’s grace, to Hildebrand, henceforth no pope but false monk, -- Christ has called us to our kingdom, while he has never called thee to the priesthood. Thou hast attacked me, a consecrated king, who cannot be judged but by God himself. Condemned by our bishops and by ourselves, come down from the place that thou has usurped. Let the see of St. Peter be held by another, who will not seek to cover violence under the cloak of religion, and who will teach the wholesome doctrine of St. Peter. I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my bishops, say unto Thee – “Come down, come down.”[25]

Gregory promptly deposed the emperor and threatened to excommunicate anyone who supported him. Within months, Henry found himself isolated. The German nobility took advantage of the opportunity to reassert its electoral powers. Then, in the dead of winter in 1077, Henry traveled to northern Italy, where the pope was staying in a castle near Canossa owned by the Countess Mathilda of Tuscany, whose immense 114 holdings were later donated to the church and became the Papal States. Henry stood outside the castle in the snow for three days until Gregory’s hostess and his godfather prevailed upon the reluctant pope to grant an audience. As a result, Henry was restored – thwarting Gregory’s hope for a decisive victory – and the struggle continued. Indeed, Henry succeeded in having Gregory deposed several years later after taking Rome in 1084. But the following year, one of Gregory’s supporters drove Henry out and sacked the city.

Time showed that both sides lost more than they won. Cantor writes that, on the one hand, the incident “dealt a fatal blow to the ideology of theocratic kingship” but, on the other hand, it also cast doubt on the good intentions of the papacy and propelled the kings of Western Europe along a more independent course.[26] The Investiture Contest ended indecisively decades later with the Concordat of Worms in 1122 but its ramifications took centuries to clarify. Roman law was revived and the reorientation of church and state gave rise to new, centralized institutions. Out of the dying dream of empire, nationalism began to emerge.

Photo source: PxHere [1], PxHere [2].

Notes:

[1] Augustus Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. 3, trans. Joseph Torrey (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1852), p. 85.

[2] Norman F. Cantor, Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 29.

[3] John W. Burgess, The Sanctity of Law: Wherein Does It Consist? (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1927), p. 18. See also Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (London: Oxford University Press, 1957 [1940]), p. 335, on the sanctity of law.

[4] J. Marcellus Kik, Church and State: The Story of Two Kingdoms (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), p. 42.

[5] Cochrane, Christianity, p. 209. See George Huntston Williams, “Christology and Church-State Relations in the Fourth Century,” Church History, 20 (December, 1951): 21 -22, on the importance of church freedom: “Caesar, merely for being a Christian, could not usurp the place of God.” See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future: or the Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946; Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 145-51.

[6] Arthur E. R. Boak and William G. Sinnigen, A History of Rome to A.D. 565, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 500.

[7] Cochrane, Christianity, p. 336.

[8] Sanford H. Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America: A History (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902; Burt Franklin, 1970), p. 36.

[9] Saint Augustine, The City of God, abridged, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel J. Honan (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1958), p. 465. See https://www.themarketforideas.com/early-christendom-chrysalis-of-the-west-a848/.

[10] Cantor, Medieval History, p. 97. William Carroll Bark believed Augustine helped Christianity make a “crucial” break with the Roman view of church and state. William Carroll Bark, Origins of the Medieval World (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1958), pp. 104-06, 146.

[11] Rousas John Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978), p. 10. See also Rousas John Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978), p. 151.

[12] Harold J. Berman, “The Origins of Western Legal Science”, Harvard Law Review, 90 (1977): 903-04. Berman elsewhere underscores the Christian character of the laws of Justinian and his successors: “The Christian emperors of Byzantium considered it their Christian responsibility to reform the laws, as they put it, ‘in the direction of humanity’ – to eliminate iniquity, to protect the poor and oppressed, to infuse justice with mercy.” Harold J. Berman, “The Influence of Christianity Upon the Development of Law”, Oklahoma Law Review, 12 (1959): 91.

[13] Paul Lemerle, A History of Byzantium, trans. Anthony Matthew (New York: Walker and Company, 1964), pp. 47-49, 62-64; Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), pp. 278-83, 337-41 .

[14] Rene Guerdan, Byzantium: Its Triumphs and Tragedy, trans. D. L. B. Hartley (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962), p. 18. The caesaropapism of the Byzantine Empire was largely preserved in Russia. See Nicolas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 50-51: “The doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome became the basic idea on which the Muscovite state was founded. The kingdom was consolidated and shaped under the symbol of a messianic idea. . . . Ivan the Terrible, who was a remarkable theoretician of absolute monarchy, thought that a Tsar must not only govern the state, but also save souls.” Berdyaev recognized a strong continuity between the Bolshevik and Tsarist regimes. In both cases, the church was subordinated to the state. “The monism of a totalitarian state . . . turns the state into a church.” Ibid. p. 187. On the position of the church in the Soviet Union, see Vladimir Gsovski, “The Legal Status of the Church in the Soviet Union,” Fordham Law Review, 8 (January 1939): 1-28; M. Searle Bates, Religious Liberty: An Inquiry (New York: International Missionary Council, 1945), pp. 2-9; Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-Il, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 34-52. Religious oppression, however, is by no means confined to the East, as the suppression of churches in revolutionary Mexico, for example, shows.

[15] Rushdoony, Foundations, pp. 148-60.

[16] Ibid., p. 151.

[17] Lemerle, Byzantium, p. 85.

[18] Rosenstock-Huessy, Christian Future, pp. 145-55.

[19] Latourette, History of Christianity, pp. 46-066.

[20] Rosenstock-Huessy, Revolution, p. 594. A letter by Anselm of Lucca showed “how radical the new revolutionary ideology was.” Anselm argued: “A perversion introduced by the princes of the world can be no prejudice to the right form of government, through whatever length of time it may have prevailed. Otherwise, our Lord God himself would be guilty, since he left mankind in bondage to the devil, to the deformation of true government, only redeemed it by his own death after the lapse of five thousand years!” Ibid., p. 523. See also David Knowles and Dmitri Obolensky, The Christian Centuries, vol. 2: The Middle Ages (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968), pp. 165-83.

[21] On the “Truce of God” and its use of the liturgy of Holy Week as a model for restoring the peace of the land, see Rosenstock-Huessy, Revolution, pp. 506-07.

[22] Tierney, Crisis, pp. 49-50. Some scholars believe the Dictatus Papae was not a manifesto but, rather, an index to passages from existing canons. See Knowles and Obolensky, Christian Centuries, vol. 2, p. 175 n2.

[23] Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. 4: The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization – Christian, Islamic, and Judaic – from Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325-1300 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), pp. 585-92.

[24] Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970 [1959]), pp. 90, 134-35.

[25] T. F. Tout, “Empire vs. Papacy: Henry IV at Canossa”, in The World’s Great Events: A History of the World from Ancient to Modern Times, B.C. 4004 to A.D. 1903, vol. 2: Mediaeval, ed. Esther Singleton (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1903). pp. 689-90.

[26] Cantor, Medieval History, p. 329. For a brief discussion of the jurisdictional conflicts between the ecclesiastical and secular courts, see Michael E. Tigar and Madeleine R. Levy, Law and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), pp. 30-42.