Forty legionaries serving on the Armenian frontier refuse an imperial edict to burn incense before idols of the ancient Roman gods. These men are Christians. The Augustus in the West, a young man named Constantine, recently declared their religion legal, but his authority does not command the whole of the vast Roman Empire. His counterpart in the East, Licinius, resentful of Constantine's growing power and of his growing enthusiasm for Christianity, has undertaken one last persecution. He is ignoring the lessons learned by emperors, governors, and prefects of Rome's past three centuries: persecution has only increased the resolve and numbers of this troublesome sect. He is ignoring the words of Tertullian that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Faith. The 40 soldiers appear before the local magistrate, who first tries persuasion. He warns them of the disgrace that will befall them should they not offer sacrifice before the pagan deities. He promises promotion to any of them that will. To the man they are adamant. No threat or bribe will induce them to forsake Christ.
With one long chain, they are bound together and locked in a small cell to await their sentence. During their lengthy imprisonment, one of their number, Meletios, writes a testament on behalf of his brothers-in-arms. Each is given his say. The young men, not long out of boyhood, salute their parents. One sends his prayers to his betrothed; one other, to his wife and firstborn, still an infant.
In their testament they exhort their fellow Christians to lay aside the passing things of this world and fix their hearts on the glories of heaven. Knowing that they are to be martyred, they urge their fellow Christians not to quarrel over their relics.
After weeks in jail, they are sentenced. They are to be stripped of their clothes, marched to the middle of a frozen pond, and exposed to the cold and wind of the Armenian winter until they are dead. Around the pond the local governor has posted guards and set up fires and warm baths to tempt the martyrs to lapse. However, "an insurmountable barrier" stands between them and the shore: the unseen Christ, whom they would have to deny "to grasp the life that is leaving their bodies moment by moment" (Riciotti, p. 212). The young soldiers pray that none of them will fail–that all 40 will gain the crown of martyrdom.
After hours and hours in the dark and cold the martyrs grow weak. The faith of one falters and he crawls for the bank. He is plunged in a bath by the guards, but after so many hours of exposure, the shock of the hot water takes his life. Another guard, inspired by the faith of the remaining 39, declares himself a Christian, tears off his clothes and runs out on the ice, restoring their number to 40. By morning they are all dead save the youngest, called Meliton, who dies soon after in his mother's arms.
The ordeal of the 40 Martyrs of Sebastia is the last snap of the dragon's tail. Constantine has declared Christianity legal in the West, and within three years Licinius will fall to forces on either side of him, Goths pouring across the Danube and the armies of Constantine marching east. In his life of Constantine, Eusebius presents the war between the two Augusti as a religious conflict, with Constantine the champion of Christianity and Licinius the last defender of the ancient pagan gods. Before Constantine's army is carried the labarum, his purple standard bearing the Chi Ro. The army of Licinius is lead by the victimarii–magicians, sorcerers, and fortune tellers whose secret rites implore the favor of the pagan gods. When Licinius is at last defeated and exiled, "the whole of the Roman Empire is now in the hands of Constantine, and he has no rivals" (Riciotti, p. 215).
Though it was Constantine who at last brought religious liberty to the early Church, his edicts and actions were not without precedent. It is a misunderstanding to think of the Age of the Martyrs as 300 years of persecution and torture by Roman brutes suddenly reversed by Constantine. But the image of state-driven Roman thuggery may be all too common. "The average layman," writes historian Marta Sordi, "is still convinced that the Christians were wanted outlaws in constant conflict with a state apparatus intent on wiping them out, a kind of subversive, if nonviolent, underground organization" (Sordi, p. 3).
I encountered this kind of comic-book understanding of the Romans when, some years ago, I was invited to sponsor a friend's conversion to Catholicism. On the first day, the layman who ran the RCIA class explained why the Jews so eagerly awaited the Messiah: They sought an earthly king who would deliver them from Roman rule. Fair enough, but then he went on to explain why: The Romans were the worst kind of tyrants who (and these were his words) "raped, pillaged, and plundered their way across the Holy Land."
When Mel Gibson released his Passion of the Christ, which portrayed, in accordance with the Gospel accounts, an enraged Jewish mob and Roman prefect whose appeals to restraint and the rule of law fall on deaf ears, a hue and cry arose in the popular press that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. But the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ was not an expression of Roman policy.
Nor was the stoning of St. Stephen, an event described by Sordi as one of "occasional acts of brutal popular justice which were unauthorized but which the Roman authorities could not always prevent" (Sordi, p.12). Indeed, in the very early years of the Church, Christians in Palestine enjoyed the protection of Roman law, central to which was the reality that the Romans reserved to themselves the authority to issue sentences of capital punishment. It is probable, Sordi argues, that when Caiaphas was deposed in the year 36 by an envoy from Tiberius, it was for the crime of executing Stephen. We read of that time in Acts, Chapter 9, that the "Church had peace throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria." It is significant that these three regions are named since they were the ones under Roman rule.
Justin Martyr describes correspondence between Pilate and the Emperor Tiberius in Rome. Pilate reports his troubles with the "illegal trials and executions organized by the intransigent Sanhedrin." It makes political sense that Tiberius would intervene on behalf of this new religion, which was gaining in popularity and replacing the anti-Roman messianic political culture of the Jews with moral and religious ideals. There is even an old tradition, taken from Tertullian, that Tiberius was so impressed with the peaceful nature of the Christians that he proposed to the Senate that Jesus Christ be declared a "god," in other words, that Christianity receive official recognition as a religion. The more conservative Senate, possibly out of irritation with Jews in general, refused and declared Christianity a supersititio illicita, an illegal cult. Tiberius responded with a veto "on any accusations being brought against the Christians in the future." While many historians reject this story, one reason to maintain it is that it is the only version of how Christianity came to be illegal. Despite the Senate's decree, Christians in Rome and in Judea for the next three decades enjoyed the protection of Tiberius's veto. Two exceptions in Judea prove the rule:
From 41-44, the Romans briefly surrendered rule of the Province of Judea to a local king, Herod Agrippa. It is during this period that we see the martyrdom of St. James the Great, the first Apostle to die for Christ, beheaded along with his accuser, who, according to St. Clement of Alexandria, moved by St. James's courage at his trial, repented of his accusation and declared himself a Christian. Herod Agrippa, Chapter 12 of the Acts of the Apostles reports, seeing that his execution of St. James "pleased the Jews," arrested and imprisoned St. Peter.
During a similar absence of Roman rule in 62, St. James the Lesser, first Bishop of Jerusalem, and other Christians were martyred. St. James was thrown from the roof of the Temple, then stoned, then at last dealt the death blow to the head with a club. Flavius Josephus reports that the Chief Priest, Ananius, and the Sanhedrin were taking advantage of the temporary vacancy in the Roman governor's seat caused by the death of Porcius Festus and the delayed arrival of his successor, Albinus. Agrippa II dismissed Ananius from his post for what was a clear abuse of power. Sordi concludes:
If in the year 62 AD the Chief Priest and the Sanhedrin took the absence of the Roman Governor as an auspicious moment for proceeding against Christ's followers, this must mean that in the preceding years the Romans had made it clear that they had no intention of ever giving way again to the pressure of the Jewish authorities, as they had done at the time of the trial of Christ. (Sordi, p. 13,14)
The treatment of St. Paul when he is brought by the local synagogue in Corinth before the Roman proconsul (Acts 18) and when he is twice brought before the Roman procurator in Judea by the Jewish authorities (Acts 21, 23, 25) is the same. The Romans refuse to intervene in a religious quarrel between Christians and Jews.
It is in this atmosphere of something between tolerance and benevolence that Sergius Paulus, proconsul of Cyprus, moved by the preaching of Paul and Barnabas "learned to believe" (Acts 13). Paulus became a close friend of St. Paul, and he and his whole family converted.
G. K. Chesterton observed that God chose for the Incarnation of His Son the moment in human history when the world was largely at peace. The baby killers in Carthage had first to be vanquished, and although the Infant Jesus escaped a baby killer, the man was not a Roman. This peace was a consequence of Roman policy and culture, one that was more tolerant than tyrannical. The Romans, though they were pagans who did not enjoy the benefit of Revelation that the Jews did, cooperated in a very real sense with the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the real reason for Augustus' census. Christopher Dawson notes that while Greece gave Europe all in it that is distinctly Western, it required the world of the Roman political and legal order to extend this tradition of higher civilization to Western Europe. The Romans cooperated with the prosperity of the early Church. So where did things first turn dark?
Things turned dark during the reign of Nero, though not right away. It is, after all, during Nero's reign that St. Paul is acquitted at his first trial. He continues to preach the Gospel throughout the praetorium, and even in the emperor's household. A contemporary trial further illustrates an atmosphere of toleration despite the senatorial decree of Tiberius' reign. A Christian woman of the senatorial class, Poponia Graecina, a convert to Christianity, was declared innocent in a public trial conducted by her own husband, a military hero and former consul named Plautius. She, Tacitus tells us, continued her austere way of life and passed on her Christianity to her descendants. A member of the family from the second century is buried at San Callistus on the Via Appia.
Other families of the aristocratic and senatorial classes were connected to Christianity. There is sufficient reason to believe that the Pudens family, on whose home Santa Pudenziana is built, housed and fed St. Peter during his time in Rome.
If Nero's probable excuse for his persecution of Christians, a great fire in Rome in the year 64, and Nero's probable responsibility for the fire are today subject to debate, what is certain is Nero's wickedness and cruelty. A rapist, sodomite, and murderer, Nero had one of his wives executed and another he kicked to death. With sexual appetites and enthusiasms that would make a Turkish Sultan blush, Nero needed no more motive for his actions than his own self-indulgence or his desire to be worshiped. But whether or not he started the fire, the rumor that he did, reports Tacitus, would not go away. Needing a scapegoat, Nero chose the Christian community in Rome, which by this time included members of prominent Roman families.
Christians made an easy scapegoat because they were hardly universally liked. Some viewed them as a Jewish sect, and the constant troubles in Judea were on the point of erupting into a full-scale rebellion. The Jewish religion, however, was officially protected, and Jews did not even have to serve in the Roman army because military service would conflict with their Sabbath observance.
Christians, however, did not enjoy the same protection or exemption. Christians were also resented for their severe morality, which partly explains why they were accused of misanthropy, or as Tacitus puts it, "hatred of the human race." In Chapter Four of his first epistle, St. Peter describes pagans slandering Christians in Rome for their unwillingness to participate in "lawless disorders." The rivals and enemies of the Christians, including Jews in Rome from whom the Christians, we know from the Acts of the Apostles, kept their distance, spread wild stories of criminal activities, particularly human sacrifice and cannibalism, which were deliberate misrepresentations of Holy Communion, as well as accusations of incest, a deliberate twisting of the Christian practice of referring to one another as brother and sister.
In his De Mortibus Persecutorum, the Roman historian Lactantius makes no mention of the fire, but blames the persecutions generally on the "vast" number of defections from the "worship of idols to the new religion." For Lactantius, the problem is one of a religious, not political, conflict, a problem that will reappear later. It is probable that the fire accelerated persecutions that were already gaining steam. Nero's two most famous martyrs, St. Paul and St. Peter, seem to have been martyred the former before the fire and the latter after it, though neither mention the fire in their correspondence.
When the storm at last broke, the first persecution was brutal. In his Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus, who himself was no friend of the Christians, tells the story thus:
Yet no human effort, no princely largess nor offerings to the gods could make that infamous rumor disappear that Nero had somehow ordered the fire. Therefore, in order to abolish that rumor, Nero falsely accused and executed with the most exquisite punishments those people called Christians, who were infamous for their abominations. The originator of the name, Christ, was executed as a criminal by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius; and though repressed, this destructive superstition erupted again, not only through Judea, which was the origin of this evil, but also through the city of Rome, to which all that is horrible and shameful floods together and is celebrated. Therefore, first those were seized who admitted their faith, and then, using the information they provided, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much for the crime of burning the city, but for hatred of the human race. And perishing, they were additionally made into sports: they were killed by dogs by having the hides of beasts attached to them, or they were nailed to crosses or set aflame, and, when the daylight passed away, they were used as nighttime lamps. Nero gave his own gardens for this spectacle and performed a Circus game, in the habit of a charioteer mixing with the plebs or driving about the racecourse. Even though they were clearly guilty and merited being made the most recent example of the consequences of crime, people began to pity these sufferers, because they were consumed not for the public good but on account of the fierceness of one man.
Relief for the Christians came with the assassination of the crazed emperor, though by allowing Christians to be accused of Superstitio illicita, Nero created a situation that until then had only existed on the books–Christians could be brought to trial for the fact of their religion alone.
It would be some time, however, before such accusations reappeared because the first two rulers of the Flavian dynasty, Vespasian and his son Titus, rejected emperor worship and tolerated the growing number of Christians, even in their own households, including Vespasian's brother, Flavius Sabinus. Vespasian had come to know Christianity during his time in Palestine, where his own investigation concluded that Christian descendants of the House of David were not a political threat to the Empire.
When Vespasian's younger son Domitian (81-96) revived the idea of the emperor as a god, he reignited the persecution of Christians, including his own cousin Flavius Clemens, a consul. Domitian, in fact, was the first emperor to deify himself while still living, and the "book of the Apocalypse was written in the midst of this storm" (Catholic Encyclopedia); thus, references, for example, to the woman "drunk with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus." But when Domitian was assassinated, his successors, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (the period from 96 to 161), while they enforced the laws against Christianity, did not undertake any general campaign of persecution. Until the reign of Decius, persecutions were sporadic and mostly local.
We get a glimpse into relations between the Church and the Empire during the reign of Trajan (98-117). Trajan was a great soldier and hardworking administrator. When troubles broke out in the province of Bithynia (in northwestern Asia Minor), he sent one of his most trusted advisors, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, or the younger Pliny, to troubleshoot. Pliny writes the emperor for advice on handling the Christian problem. The penalty for being a professing Christian was death, though enforcement was neither strict nor uniform. Their correspondence resulted in the document we know as Trajan's Rescript.
Pliny marvels at the number of Christians:
For the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, especially because of the number involved. For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms.
Because so many are becoming Christians an economic problem has arisen: the temples are doing bad business because there is less demand for sacrificial animals. Thus Christians had made enemies of, not only pagan priests, but also livestock dealers.
Pliny, wanting to go by the book, asks Trajan for instructions. Since he has "never participated in trials of Christians" he does not know what "offenses it is the practice to punish or investigate." Is age a factor? Should pardon be granted for repentance? He asks "whether the name itself [that is, Christian], even without offenses, or only the offenses associated with the name are to be punished." He outlines the procedure he has been following when accusations are brought before him. He would interrogate the accused, and if he or she confessed, he would repeat the questioning several times in hopes of gaining repentance. The stubborn were executed, though Roman citizens were transferred to Rome, just as St. Paul had been decades prior.
Pliny can find no evidence of actual wrongdoing, and he describes the Christian ceremonies:
They were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing together a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food–but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden secret societies. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, extravagant superstition.
One serious problem Pliny has to deal with is anonymous denunciations, and he seeks counsel from Trajan, who tells him in his famous rescript:
You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who had been denounced to you as Christians. For it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out (Conquirendi non sunt); if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it–that is, by worshiping our gods–even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution. For this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age.
So the practice of Christianity carried the death penalty, but the criminals were given every opportunity to repudiate their error, and no effort was made to seek them out. More particularly, no anonymous accusations could lead to an arrest. Here we see Roman bureaucracy at its best and worst: dedicated public servants working for the good of the peoples of a vast empire but trapped by precedents into killing innocent men and women for the insufficient reason of practicing a new religion. Trajan is unwilling to repudiate a law going back to the time of Tiberius, but, on the other hand, he gives Pliny a way out.
It is difficult to generalize about the lot of the Christian during this period, the Age of the Antonines. On the one hand, he could always be ratted out by an informer with a cynical or malicious motive. On the other hand, informers were not very highly thought of in Roman society, and, moreover, they ran the risk of bringing down the full weight of Roman justice on themselves should their accusations go unproved. Thus, the level of persecution varied by region. In an area with a large Christian population, as Bithynia had, only a fool would openly denounce a neighbor, so Christians who laid low could well enjoy comparative security. Recall St. Paul's injunction that Christians should not deliberately seek martyrdom.
In Lyons, however, under the Antonines, matters were worse. Far worse. There is a correspondence between Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and the Roman officials in Lyons similar to that between Trajan and Pliny. In Lyons, however, where the Christian population comprised immigrants from Asia Minor, they were deeply despised by the local Gallic population.
The account of the Lyons Martyrs, a contemporary letter copied over in Eusebius, describes in great detail the torture and execution in the circus of the leaders of this Christian community:
We cannot accurately tell or describe in detail the magnitude of the distress in this region, the fury of the heathen against the saints, or the sufferings of the blessed Witnesses...confinement in the darkest and most foul-smelling cells of the prison...in which a great many suffocated...the stretching of the feet on the stocks...the fixing of red-hot plates of brass to the most delicate parts of the body...exposure to wild beasts and roasting over a fire in an iron chair.
Yet the martyrs remained firm in their confession.
Most famous is Blessed Blandina. First, she was beaten and tortured to the point that her torturers were exhausted and her whole body torn open with lacerations. Next she was fastened to a stake and exposed to the wild beasts. Then she was scourged and then roasted in an iron chair. Finally, she was at last enclosed in a net and cast before a bull. She was tossed by the bull, but she didn't feel the things which were happening to her,
because of her hope and firm hold of what had been entrusted to her and her communion with Christ. Thus, she also was sacrificed. The heathens themselves confessed that never among them did woman endure so many and such terrible tortures.
Sporadic persecutions continued throughout the Age of the Antonines, which came to an end with the assassination of Commodus, the depraved adopted son of Marcus Aurelius. One effect, in fact, of Commodus' cruel policies against his political rivals was the diversion of attention from the Christians. There were even Christians in the court of Commodus, and his concubine, Marcia, who later conspired in his murder, was sympathetic. Her intervention caused the setting free of Christian slaves in the mines in Sardinia.
Commodus' successor, Septimius Severus (193-211) was generally tolerant in keeping with Trajan's rescript, but he did seek to check the growth of Christianity by making conversion to Christianity a crime. The famous convert martyrs of this period, mentioned in the Canon of the Mass, are Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas of Carthage.
For decades, beginning with the reign of Caracalla (211-217) the Christians enjoyed peace. There was even a Christian Emperor during this period. Philip the Arab has been regarded as one of the Empire's worst emperors, but the opinion may be more the result of subsequent anti-Christian propaganda than an honest account of his administration, which lasted five years–unusually long for this period of unrest. He was murdered by Decius (249-251), who probably killed his reputation as well.
During the barbarian invasions and struggles for the throne of the middle of the third century, Decius, believing that the growth of the sect was bringing down disfavor from the gods, tried to unify the empire against the Church. He issued an edict requiring all Christians to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods on a certain day.
Two decades later, Emperor Aurelian, who was also a great soldier, wished to unite the empire under the cult of Sol Invictus (the unconquered sun). He was willing, however, to tolerate the Christian Church and, on one occasion in Antioch, intervened in a dispute over ownership of a church building, ruling in favor of those Christians who were in union with the Bishop of Rome. Though the worst was yet to come under Diocletian, the way was already being cleared for peaceful coexistence.
The final, bloodiest, and best documented of the great persecutions came under Diocletian (284-305) at the beginning of the fourth century, though this emperor for whom the persecution is remembered was not, at least at first, its instigator, and for most of Diocletian's reign, Christians enjoyed peace and prosperity.
There is, in fact, much to admire in Diocletian. He was a courageous general. His political innovation, the tetrarchy, which divided rule of the massive Roman Empire between two Augusti, one in the East and one in the West, and their Caesars, or executive officers, restored order to an empire that had for five decades suffered chaos, rebellious legionaries, praetorians in revolt, and full-bore civil war. Of the 28 emperors who had preceded Diocletian, 22 had been murdered.
He moved the imperial capital from Rome to Nicomedia, near the Bosporus, on the grounds that the emperor was most needed on the frontier. Under Diocletian, building and public works began again in earnest throughout the Empire, including the extraordinary baths named for him in Rome. He brought inflation under control. He even issued an edict promoting the institution of marriage, holding that chastity would bring down the favor of the gods on the empire. At the end of his reign, the old emperor abdicated and went off to his farm to grow cabbages.
There were Christians in Diocletian's household. His wife, Prisca, and his daughter, Valeria, according to Lactantius, were catechumens. Officers of his court, including two chamberlains appointed by Diocletian himself, Gorgonius and Peter, were openly Christian. What is more, Diocletian had appointed Christians as governors of various provinces. Diocletian's Caesar, however, Galerius, was a lesser soldier and a man of lesser character altogether, though he was a skilled self-promoter. A violent and very large man, he rose from illiterate shepherd to Caesar in the East, and eventually Augustus, following Diocletian's abdication. Today we would admire his capacity to climb the corporate ladder. He even knew when to grovel. After leading a disastrous campaign against the Persians in Mesopotamia, he abased himself before Diocletian imploring a second chance, one he did not waste. His swift victory over the Persians and the subsequent expansion of the empire's eastern border, greater than ever, endeared him to his Augustus, who gave him his daughter, Valeria, in marriage.
It was not Valeria the catechumen, however, but Galerius' mother, a Corybantic priestess, that influenced his motives. She and other diviners, oracles, and soothsayers had seen–as in Trajan's day–their businesses suffer as Christianity spread throughout the empire. Galerius also took to heart the work of pagan pamphleteers who, sometimes with honest motives and other times with cynical ones, spoke and wrote about the threat to the empire caused by Christianity's explicit rejection of the traditional Roman deities. In addition, Galerius viewed Christians serving in the army as a threat to unit cohesion and discipline, though there is no evidence that this was anything more than prejudice. (Many soldiers lost their lives during these persecutions, including Alexander of Bergamo.)
At first Diocletian was reluctant to open a new round of persecutions. His motives were less ones of Christian sympathy than practical politics. By this stage, Christians were well integrated into all levels of Roman society, and a persecution could be political suicide. When at last Galerius prevailed on the old emperor, the result was a series of four edicts beginning in 302, each more severe than the one before.
The first was similar to an edict of Valerian's from four decades prior. Eusebius reports that this first edict ordered the tearing down of churches and the destruction of "Sacred Scriptures by fire." It also commanded that "those who were in honourable stations should be degraded if they persevered in their adherence to Christianity." The subsequent three edicts ordered first the imprisonment of bishops and clergy, next the torture of imprisoned bishops and clergy, and finally the torture and imprisonment of the laity.
This persecution was fierce and truly empire-wide. The accounts from Eusebius are horrifying. Martyrs in Egypt, for example, had their legs tied to two young trees bent toward each other and then allowed to snap back, tearing the victim in half. The persecution continued in the East through Galerius' reign and through that of Licinius, under whom the 40 Martyrs with whom we began were frozen to death.
The case of Diocletian makes an interesting lesson for political leaders concerning their place in history. The final persecution is named for him, although he was not its true author and although it continued long after his abrogation. The current president of the US will be remembered for an unjust and politically foolish war costing the lives of many thousands of innocents. George Bush's Galerius may be Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld or a combination of all three, but history will remember President Bush for the catastrophe called the Iraq War.
In conclusion, a few final points:
1) The relationship between the Church and the Roman Empire for the first three centuries cannot accurately be described as outlaws perpetually hounded by a hostile state. There is little data to suggest that the government of Rome ever regarded Christians as a political threat.
2) From time to time, throughout the empire, depending on the temperament of the officials and the moods of the people, the Roman state found itself in the position of being a secular arm intervening in a religious conflict between Roman paganism and Christianity, but guided, even if erroneously, for the most part by legal precedent and a strong devotion to social order.
3) Most persecutions were local. Only two were empire-wide, those of Valerian and Diocletian, and even in the case of Diocletian's, Constantius, Augustus in the West and father of Constantine, did not participate–leaving Britain, Gaul, and much of Spain at peace.
4) With the exception of Nero, the truly horrible and large-scale persecutions did not take place in Rome. Real Romans, argues the great Italian archaeological historian Rodolfo Lanciani, were simply too civilized.
5) The comic-book version of three centuries of Roman thuggery may derive from, among others, anti-classical and anti-Catholic, that is, Protestant quarters, seeking to separate the Church from the Eternal City. Such an eventuality is historically, liturgically, spiritually, traditionally, and metaphysically impossible.
Concerning the Martyrs themselves, a few reflections:
The Church has for two millennia made much of the study and emulation of the lives of saints, even if in recent decades the devotion and practice has been regrettably under-emphasized. What are the lessons to take to heart from martyrs of the Roman Empire? Doubtless there are many. The privations and tortures patiently endured by the martyrs bear reflecting on when minor discomforts and inconveniences move us to fits of self-pity. The extraordinary courage of the martyrs, always seasoned by charity, can inspire and guide us when we are confronted with the unpleasant tasks and persons of ordinary human life.
The less courageous, among whom I count myself, can take comfort from the stories of the lapsi, those who denied Christ rather than face martyrdom, but were welcomed back into the fold after repenting. From the beginning, the Church fulfilled her role as mother, ever ready to dispense understanding and forgiveness to the repentant.
Above all, perhaps, it is useful to reflect on the fact that the early martyrs were not martyrs to the cause of religious freedom or religious liberty, ideas that, at least as we understand them in the modern world, had no meaning to the ancients. They were martyrs for the First Commandment. In an empire with all manner of pagan deities and syncretist philosophies reconciling so many gods and systems all to the satisfaction of most citizens, Christianity insisted on its exceptional nature: proclaiming one God in Three Persons before whom there were no others. No early Christian martyr declared to his pagan fellow citizens, "You call him Sol Invictus or Jupiter Imperator and I call him Jesus Christ, but we basically worship the same God."
Too many Christians today, however, behave as if a few insignificant semantic and doctrinal differences should not stand in the way of sharing with Muslims the same worship space at O'Hare Airport, to say nothing of permitting Islamic mosques and schools to flourish in the West. What reaction there was to the Trade Tower attacks of September 11 has largely subsided, but we might ask what few Christians are left in France how well institutionalized syncretism has served that once great nation.
Even if America is not as far gone as France, it is a nation where tolerance has been elevated to the status of a dogma. Indeed, it is the only dogma. Religious tolerance of a practical sort has political value, as more than one Roman official learned, but dogmatic tolerance is a modern idea born in the Renaissance and spread by cannon and sword after the French Revolution. Those who cannot see this distinction are in no position to judge, for example, the Spanish Inquisition, much less to defend their Faith, but a time may be fast approaching when they will be called to in circuses the horror of which rivals that of Nero's or Domitian's. The difference will be no periods of relief from the authority of Roman law.
A good prayer to offer at the bones of the Martyrs is for the clarity of intellect to appreciate the singularity of Christianity and the strength of will to defend it, if called to, even unto death.
Christopher Check is executive vice-president of the Rockford Institute. A version of the above reflections was originally delivered in January 2006 as a talk at the Rockford Institute's Inaugural Winter School in Rome, "Lions and Christians: Christians in a Pagan Empire." The author gratefully acknowledges the guidance of Dr. Thomas Fleming in preparing these remarks.
Sources:
Sordi, Marta. The Christians and the Roman Empire. Translated by Annabel Bedini. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
Riciotti, Abbot Giuseppe. The Age of the Martyrs: Christianity from Diocletian (284) to Constantine (337). Translated by Rev. Anthony Bull, C.R.L. Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, 1999.