Christianity as the Roman state religion

• 1. Introduction

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  Christianity as the Roman state religion did not arrive quietly. On the 27th of February 380, the emperors Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II issued a decree from Thessalonica that redrew the map of belief across one of history's greatest empires. They called it the Edict of Thessalonica, and its language was blunt: those who did not follow the faith as defined by Pope Damasus I of Rome and Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, were to be branded heretics and stripped of the right to call their meeting places churches.

  Before that moment, Christianity had spent three centuries negotiating a tense, often violent relationship with Rome. By the year 300, scholars estimate Christians made up roughly 10% of the Roman population. Within fifty years, Rodney Stark put that figure at 56.5%. The question the documentary will answer is not simply how Christianity conquered Rome. It is how the union of church and empire created new fractures, forged rival institutions that persist today, and left Eastern bishops unable to imagine Christianity without an emperor sitting at its center.

• 2. From Persecution to Partnership

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  Emperor Nerva drew the first legal line separating Christians from Jews around the year 98, granting Christians exemption from the Fiscus Iudaicus, the annual tax levied on Jewish subjects. Pliny the Younger, serving as propraetor in Bithynia in the year 103, noted in his letters to Emperor Trajan that this exemption confirmed Christians were not Jews in the eyes of the law.

  That legal separation carried a cost. Because Jews could demonstrate loyalty through tax payments, Christians had to find other ways to show they were not enemies of Rome. Church Father Tertullian argued that Christians were not inherently treasonous and that their prayers for the emperor's well-being were a worthy substitute for the sacrifices Rome expected. The empire was not persuaded. Periodic persecutions followed, the most severe of which, the Diocletianic Persecution, ran from 303 to 313.

  The turn came with Emperor Galerius, who in 311, dying, issued the Edict of Serdica to end the persecution he had helped instigate. Two years later, in 313, Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christians and others the right of open and free observance of their worship. Constantine began using Christian symbols, including the Chi Rho, early in his reign, though he continued encouraging traditional Roman religious practices including sun worship. He established Constantinople as the new imperial capital in 330, a city that would become the intellectual and cultural center of the Christian world.

• 3. The Battle Over Orthodoxy

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  In 325, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea to settle the most divisive theological dispute the young empire had ever faced: whether the Father and the Son were of one substance, as the homoousian view held, or whether the Father was greater than the Son, as Arian theologians insisted. Athanasius of Alexandria championed the Nicene position; the Arian view found powerful backers in the imperial court.

  Constantine backed the Nicene Creed at Nicaea, yet was baptized on his deathbed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, a bishop with Arian sympathies. His successor Constantius II supported Arian positions, and the Council of Constantinople in 360 endorsed the Arian view under his rule. After the brief interlude of Emperor Julian, who attempted to restore pagan Roman religion, Arianism remained dominant in the east under Emperor Valens.

  It was Emperor Theodosius I who finally called the First Council of Constantinople in 381, which rejected Arianism and reasserted the Nicene position in a revised creed. The year before that council, the Edict of Thessalonica had already made Nicene Christianity the law of the empire. In 391, Theodosius went further, closing all non-Christian and non-Jewish temples and formally forbidding pagan worship. The debate over who the Son of Christ was had taken more than half a century to resolve. The debate over Christ's nature would take even longer, and it would break the church apart.

• 4. Councils That Split the World

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  Emperor Theodosius II called two councils at Ephesus: one in 431 and another in 449. The first condemned the teachings of Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople, who had argued that Christ's divine and human natures were distinct persons, which meant Mary was the mother of Christ but not the mother of God. The second council upheld the opposite extreme, the view of Eutyches, who taught that Christ had a single nature unlike that of ordinary human beings.

  The Council of Chalcedon, convened by Emperor Marcian two years after the second Ephesian council, overturned the Eutychian position. Rejection of Chalcedon then triggered one of the most consequential fractures in Christian history. The majority of Christians in Egypt and many in the Levant preferred Miaphysite theology and walked away from the imperial church. They came to be called Melkites by their opponents, from the Syriac word malkâniya meaning imperial. The churches that departed formed the communion today known as Oriental Orthodoxy, including the Egyptian, Syrian, Ethiopian, and Armenian churches.

  Those who had broken with the empire after the First Council of Ephesus, the followers of Nestorius, fled persecution within Roman territory and joined the Sassanid Church in Persia, the institution that would become the Church of the East. By the time Justinian I took the throne in 527, the Nicene church that the empire officially sponsored had already lost hundreds of thousands of believers to these two separate communions, and political differences between Rome and the Persian Sassanid Empire had pushed the Church of the East into full separation in 424.

• 5. The Emperor as Theologian

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  Justinian I, who became emperor in 527, did not merely govern the church; he claimed the right and duty of regulating by his laws the minutest details of worship and discipline, and of dictating the theological opinions to be held in the Church. The term orthodox itself, according to Liddell and Scott, first appears in Justinian's own legal code, the Codex Justinianus, where he directed that all Catholic churches throughout the entire world be placed under the control of orthodox bishops who had embraced the Nicene Creed.

  Justinian recognized five patriarchates, those of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, as the supreme authorities in the state-sponsored Chalcedonian church. He launched a military campaign in 533 to reclaim the western provinces from Arian Germanic rulers, starting with North Africa and moving into Italy. Rome was held as part of the Exarchate of Ravenna until 751, a period known in church history as the Byzantine Papacy.

  Yet even Justinian could not fully control the church within his own borders. Oriental Orthodox churches had already departed. In Western Europe, Christianity operated under the laws of kingdoms that owed nothing to Constantinople. Eastern-born popes continued to be loyal to the emperor as their political lord, but Pope Gregory III, who served from 731 to 741, was the last Bishop of Rome to ask a Byzantine ruler to ratify his election. The crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on the 25th of December 800 made the political split between East and West irrevocable.

• 6. Islam and the Shrinking Church

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  The Rashidun conquests began pushing Islam beyond Arabia in the 7th century, first clashing with Roman forces in 634. Both the Roman Empire and the Sassanid Persian Empire were exhausted by decades of war with each other, and neither was in a position to mount a sustained defense. By the late 8th century the Umayyad caliphate had conquered all of Persia and broad stretches of Byzantine territory, including Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.

  The new Muslim rulers offered something the imperial church had rarely managed: religious tolerance to Christians of all sects. They also provided a straightforward path to membership in the new order. Subjects who declared belief in a single deity and reverence for Muhammad, the act known as the shahada, were accepted as Muslims. Within a few generations, the peoples of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria had largely accepted their new rulers, and many had declared themselves Muslims.

  The shrinkage mattered structurally as well as numerically. Early Muslim conquests eliminated the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem from effective power, leaving only Rome and Constantinople as functioning centers of imperial church authority. In 732, Emperor Leo III responded to Pope Gregory III's resistance to iconoclast policies by transferring to Constantinople the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over territories in Greece, Illyria, Sicily, and Calabria that had been under Rome, reducing the bishop of Rome's remaining lands within the empire to almost nothing. The Patriarch of Constantinople had by then already adopted the title of ecumenical patriarch, a claim to authority over the whole Christian world.

• 7. Schism, Legacy, and the Idea of Unity

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  In 751, the last Exarch of Ravenna was defeated and killed, ending Byzantine control of Rome. The popes, now needing protection, turned to the Franks, and on the 25th of December 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Imperator Romanorum, transferring papal political allegiance to a rival claimant to the Roman title. Disputes between Rome, which claimed authority over all other sees, and Constantinople, which was now without rival within what remained of the empire, ended in the mutual excommunications of 1054.

  Efforts to heal the breach came twice: at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1439. In both cases, agreements reached by eastern delegations and the emperor were rejected by the vast majority of Byzantine Christians. As late as 1393, just sixty years before the fall of Constantinople, Patriarch Antony IV of Constantinople wrote to Basil I of Muscovy that it was not possible among Christians to have a Church and not to have an emperor, because the empire and the Church had great unity and commonality and it was not possible to separate them.

  The Ottoman Turks took Constantinople in 1453. The Turkish authorities then placed all Orthodox Christian subjects of whatever ethnicity within a single administrative unit headed by the Patriarch of Constantinople. In the West, membership in a universal church had already replaced citizenship in a universal empire; from Italy to Ireland, a new society centered on Christianity had formed around the idea of a church linked to no particular state. The Serbian church, which Stephen Uroš IV Dušan had elevated to a patriarchate in 1346 and which Constantinople recognized in 1375, maintained that rank even after the empire whose model it had followed ceased to exist.