A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The first official persecution of Christians by Christians thus came within a year or two of the Church’s first official recognition, and its results were as divisive as previous persecutions by non-Christian emperors.

Here, then, was Arius’s Christ: inferior or subordinate to the Father (as indeed Origen and other earlier writers had been inclined to say), and created by the Father out of nothing.

Some think that he actually presided at the council. It was he, probably on the recommendation of his ecclesiastical adviser, a Spanish bishop, Hosius or Ossius of Cordova, who proposed a most significant clause in the creed which emerged as the council’s agreed pronouncement: the statement that the Son was ‘of one substance’ (homoousios) with the Father.

This first Council of Constantinople saw the formulation of the fully developed creed which is now misleadingly known as the Nicene, and has come to be liturgically recited at the Eucharist in Churches of both Eastern and Western tradition.

The Council of Constantinople thus radically narrowed the boundaries of acceptable belief in the Church, creating a single imperial Christianity backed up by military force.

As an image to explain these different positions, the Alexandrian view of Christ’s humanity and divinity contained in a single Person has been likened (although not by Alexandrians themselves) to a vessel which contains wine and water, perfectly and inextricably mixed, in contrast to the view of Theodore and his associates, where the vessel of Christ’s person could be said to contain two natures as it might oil and water, mingling but not mixing.

a carefully balanced definition of how to view the mystery of Christ: ‘the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity …’

There is a common assumption among those Christians who are heirs of either Eastern or Western European theology that Chalcedon settled everything, at least for a thousand years. The stories which we are about to follow show how mistaken this is.

He created a Syrian Miaphysite Church which is often called Jacobite in acknowledgement of his founding energy, but which also insists on Orthodoxy in its official title, the Syriac Orthodox Church.

Sergius came habitually to be associated in partnership and iconography with his fellow soldier-martyr Bacchus, in a union so close as to be described as that of ‘lovers’, which has bequeathed an interesting image of same-sex love to Eastern Christianity, even though it has rarely felt able fully to explore the possible implications.

That led him to express his theology in liturgical form by adding to the Trisagion the phrase ‘crucified for us’ – so the Second Person of the triune God is liturgically acclaimed as having been crucified.

The imperial Church in Constantinople eventually rejected the addition, but the Armenians defiantly adopted it into their liturgical practice; so every congregation in the Armenian Church continues in this solemn prayer to affirm the intimacy of relationship of divine and human in Christ.

Thus from a very early date comes that peculiar Ethiopian arrangement which persisted for sixteen hundred years, as late as 1951: the presiding bishop (abun) in the Church of Ethiopia was never a native Ethiopian, but an import from the Coptic Church hundreds of miles to the north, and there was rarely any other bishop present in the whole country.28

King Ezana may have renounced traditional gods, but the worship of the Church over which he first presided has remained unique and unmistakably African in character.

Central to the complex of associations with Israel and Judaism is a foundational work of Ethiopian literature, the Kebra Nagast, the ‘Book of the Glory of Kings’. It is this work, difficult to date and composite in character, which sets out the origins of the Ethiopian monarchy in the union of King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, that legendary ruler of a Yemeni kingdom whom the Tanakh had recorded as visiting Jerusalem in great splendour.

Unlike most alphabetic scripts, neither this Nestorian script nor its western Syrian counterpart (Serto) developed a cursive or minuscule form for rapid writing, so it was possible for readers over several centuries to follow and understand very ancient texts written in it. It has been suggested that this is one of the reasons why Syriac Christianity has changed so little in its long existence.

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.

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.

Augustine thought that this was not what ‘One, Holy and Catholic’ meant. The Catholic Church was a Church not so much of the pure as those who tried or longed to be pure.

However, Orosius’s work seems thin stuff indeed compared with the response which Augustine was making at the same time: The City of God (De Civitate Dei). It was his most monumental work and it took him thirteen years from 413 to write.

Augustine and other like-minded contemporaries followed thoughts of Tertullian two centuries before and talked of humankind being wholly soiled by a guilt inherited from Adam which they termed ‘original sin’.

‘That we are able to see with our eyes is no power of ours; but it is in our power that we make a good or a bad use of our eyes … the fact that we have the power of accomplishing every good thing by action, speech and thought comes from him who has endowed us with this possibility, and also assists it.’44 The consequence was that Pelagius believed that the nature of a ‘Holy Church’ was based on the holiness of its members: exactly what the Donatists said about the Church, and so particularly liable to arouse Augustine’s fury.45

Pelagius’s followers pushed the implications of this further, to insist that although Adam sinned, this sin did not transmit itself through every generation as original sin, but was merely a bad example, which we can ignore if we choose.

We can choose to turn to God. We ha...

Eventually he could say not simply that all human impulses to do good are a result of God’s grace, but that it is an entirely arbitrary decision on the part of God as to who receives this grace.

Father, Son and Spirit corresponding to three aspects of the human mind itself: respectively memory, understanding and will – in the same way, these were ‘not three substances, but one substance’.56

Through this double procession from Father and Son, the Spirit represented to humanity ‘that mutual charity by which the Father and the Son love one another’.

Among the first was Martin, who became one of the most important saints in Western Latin devotion.

it is not easy to recover what Priscillian actually believed, although it is likely that his rejection of the world went beyond mainstream ascetic preoccupations into some form of gnostic dualism.

in an effort to build up support in the Christian establishment, Maximus had the ascetic leader and some of his close circle executed for heresy, the first time that this had happened within the Christian community.

Frequently bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed.

Western canon law was one of the West’s intellectual achievements long before its systematization in the twelfth century

Western theology has been characterized by a tidy-mindedness which reflects the bureaucratic precision of the Latin language: not always to the benefit of its spirituality.

It continued to stand aloof from the Arianism of the Gothic peoples, but it increasingly distanced itself from Constantinople, and it developed an increasing focus on the Bishop of Rome.

If the balance of preferences among barbarian monarchs had been swayed by the Spanish Visigoths rather than by Clovis of the Franks, European Christianity could have remained a decentralized Arianism rather than a Roman monarchy; and the consequences are incalculable. No wonder Clovis remained so celebrated.

Gregory was the first monk to become pope, although this was not monasticism as Pachomius or even Martin had known it: Gregory financed the foundation of the monastery which he entered, built on a family property within the city, and a later tradition asserted that his mother, Silvia, customarily sent him vegetables to his monastery on a silver dish.

It may have been in order to highlight the pride embodied in the Oecumenical Patriarch’s title that Gregory adopted one of aggressive self-deprecation, which his successors have used ever since: ‘Servant of the servants of God’.

Gregory is the first writer whose work has survived who spends much time discussing how clergy should offer pastoral care and preach to laypeople:

We are lucky to know a great deal about Augustine’s English mission because of the brilliant and engaging Ecclesiastical History of Bede, a Northumbrian monk who lived a century after Augustine’s mission (c. 672–735).

Bede is the equal of Thucydides in this respect, and a good deal less credulous than Herodotus

So what was different about Augustine’s mission? Chiefly, but crucially, its emphasis on Roman obedience.

Pope Gregory I rather than Augustine is the hero of Bede’s tale of the conversion of the English.

The first life of Gregory was written by an Englishman in the early eighth century in the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby, and it was two centuries after Gregory’s death before Rome caught up with his cult, enshrining the Pope alongside Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine as one of the ‘Big Four’ theologians of the earlier West, the four Latin Doctors.

most evangelists were what we would call gentry or nobility, and they normally went straight to the top when preaching the faith. That way they could harvest a whole kingdom, at least as long as local rulers did not have second thoughts or take a better offer.

Aethelwold, a courtier of King Aethelstan, who had become a monk and from 963 was bishop in Edgar’s royal capital of Winchester, was a scholar and dynamic teacher who inspired a series of decaying monasteries to adopt the Benedictine Rule as their standard of life, having himself translated that Rule from Latin into Old English. His unusual impact on the English Church left it one individual feature not often found elsewhere in Europe, and which was even extended after the Norman Conquest of 1066: the creation of cathedral churches which, up to Henry VIII’s sixteenth-century dissolutions, were also monasteries, with a prior and monks instead of a dean and canons.

What happened in the eleventh century was a Reformation, but unlike the more familiar Reformation of the sixteenth century, it was not a rebellion in the ranks but directed from the top, resulting in the most magnificent single structure of government which Christianity has known.

A large proportion of the rural population was reduced to serfdom: farmers became the property of their lords, with obligations to work on the newly intensive agricultural production.

Trade naturally benefited from the new prosperity and the rulers of peoples on the margins of Christian Europe, drawn further into trading networks, saw the advantages of adopting the faith of their neighbours, in a remarkable series of parallel developments.5

The ideal of a parish was a territorial unit which could offer literally everyday pastoral care for a universally Christian population; its area should be such that a parish priest could walk to its boundaries in an hour or two at most.