WAS THERE A PRINCIPLED TOLERATION OF RELIGION DURING THE REIGN OF CONSTANTINE?
BY
A. J. ESAU
DECEMBER 6, 2010
The boundaries of freedom of religion in liberal states are constantly being debated by scholars and tested in litigation.[1] Believing that this freedom is increasingly fragile, I think that one of the important sources of argument for current defenders of freedom of religion includes a better historical reconstruction of the history of the development of the concept in the first place. However, when turning to the literature on the history of religious toleration it appears that the story usually is prefaced with some reference to the medieval forerunners of the Reformation, and then the narrative only gains traction sometime after the Reformation period.[2] This limited time frame fails to capture how the roots of freedom of religion were sown in much earlier periods, even if they did not bear much fruit for many centuries.
I want to explore in this brief note just one of those earlier periods, namely the reign of Constantine from 306 to his death in 337.[3] Two questions come to mind. First, was there actually a period of religious toleration during the reign of Constantine? Second, assuming we did have a period of toleration, was this toleration of religious pluralism a principled toleration, or was it simply pragmatic? I am assuming that only a principled toleration is worth appealing to by a contemporary defender of religious freedom. If we do arrive at a conclusion that affirms the existence of a principled toleration under Constantine, there immediately arises a third question that goes beyond the scope of this note, namely when and why did this principled toleration end, as Christians evidently moved from being the persecuted to becoming the persecutors of others? That is a story for another day, although we may in conclusion hint at various lines of inquiry.
Let us begin then with the first question of whether there was actually a period of religious toleration during the reign of Constantine.[4] To answer this question requires a more focused examination of at least three different stages of the reign of Constantine: the period from 306 when Constantine was in Gaul and only governing a part of the tetrarchy; the period from 312 when he was Emperor of the West and Licinius was Eastern Emperor; and then the crucial period after 324 when Constantine became the sole Emperor.
As to the first stage, we turn to Lactantius, who in 313 wrote The Death of the Persecutors.[5] In this work Lactantius recounted how every Emperor who persecuted Christians had an ignoble death, as if God had already started to punish them in this lifetime for persecuting Christians. Lactantius then presented Constantine as God’s recently anointed agent to end the persecution of Christians. According to Lactantius, the first thing that Constantine did when he succeeded his father in 306 was to issue a command that reversed any persecution of Christians in the part of the empire that he now controlled.[6] Lactantius implied that Constantine, before any hint of his own renouncing of paganism, was already so tolerant of Christianity that he was restoring the church property of Christians that had been taken away during his father’s relatively benign reign.[7]
It is in the second period after Constantine announced his “conversion” to Christianity that we see even clearer evidence of religious toleration. According to the account by Lactantius, the co-emperors met in Milan in 313 and agreed to what has become known as the Edict of Milan.[8] This edict was incorporated in a letter by Licinius announcing to Christians in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire the same freedom from persecution that had already been enjoyed by the Christians in the West under the recent rule of Emperor Constantine.[9] What is significant, of course, is not only the movement from persecution to toleration of the Christian religion, but the lack of any hint that pagan religions would now be discriminated against or persecuted because of the Emperor’s new religious allegiance. While the welfare of the state was still tied to the worship of “divinity”, the edict on its face granted freedom of religion to all citizens:
..we should give both to Christians and to all men the freedom to follow religion, whichever one each one chose, so that whatever sort of divinity there is in heavenly regions may be gracious and propitious to us and to all who live under our government.... ...to others as well the freedom and full liberty has been granted, in accordance with the piece of our times, to exercise free choice in worshipping as each one has seen fit...[10]
Eusebius, writing about a decade after Lactantius, asserted that Licinius failed to live up to the terms of the edict of Milan, and this justified the subsequence “liberation” by Constantine in 324.[11]
It would seem that the real test of whether there was religious freedom under Constantine depends on what happened in the third period when Constantine became the “sole monarch” of the realm, so to speak. Here is where we find a division of opinion. That Constantine built many Christian churches and favoured Christianity is beyond doubt. However, the issue is the degree to which the edict of Milan was set aside after 324 to now persecute pagans and heretics. One commentator notes that Constantine now “prohibited sacrifice to the pagan gods, consultation of the oracles, and the dedication of new cult statues.”[12] Ramsay MacMullen, well known for his highly critical views of Constantine, hardly supports a tolerant image when he states, “The Empire had never had on the throne a man given to such bloodthirsty violence as Constantine.”[13] Yet in a recent book by French historian, Paul Veyne, a self-professed unbeliever, we are presented with a narrative that argues that while Constantine was a sincere believer, and while he did use a degree of state coercion on “heretics” in a failed attempt to enforce ecclesiastical unity, he was extremely tolerant of pagan religion. Actual persecution of both heretics and pagans was something that arose about fifty years after Constantine, and not during his reign.[14] A similar point was made many years ago by a German scholar who stated that there were only a few times that pagan temples were pulled down during the reign of Constantine and in each of these cases there was an issue of public decency in terms of the moral looseness associated with the cult in question.[15]
It seems to me that the best evidence that Constantine was actually tolerant in this third period is found by examining the law. About a hundred years after the death of Constantine we have the Theodosian Code of 439 which is a compilation of the various edicts of the Emperors starting with Constantine.[16] When you read book 16 of this collection dealing with the various edicts on religion, all dated, you can trace a path from Christianity being a favoured religion, to the point where “Catholic” Christianity becomes the official religion of the Empire, and then the point where it becomes the exclusive religion of the Empire. There is indeed a slippery slope argument to be made here, but the point is that violent persecution appears to be post-Constantine.
In 380 (more than forty years after the death of Constantine) “Catholic” Christianity is mandated and heretics are subject to “retribution.”[17] While there are various anti-pagan provisions in the 390’s, it is not until 435 that we have the edict to pull down all pagan shrines and temples and replace them with the “sign of the Christian religion” and with the ultimate penalty for disobedience attached:
All men shall know that if it should appear, by suitable proof before a competent judge, that any person has mocked this law, he shall be punished with death.[18]
While acknowledging that the law on the books is not necessarily the same as the reality on the ground, this view that Constantine was tolerant and that persecution was a later phenomenon is also supported by another commentator after his examination of the Theodosian Code.[19]
While any persecution at all is a violation of the boundary of toleration, persecution is still a relative term; all the way from milder forms of discrimination at one end, to death on the other. One scholar suggests that the first heretics to be actually executed were the Spanish bishop, Priscillian, and some of his followers in 385, and then supposedly there were no heretic executions again till the year 1022.[20] The pagan Hypatia was lynched in 415 in Alexandria in an illegal action.[21] The first anti-Jewish pogrom took place in the same city in 414.[22] MacMullen at one point states:
Government, too, at the urging of the bishops weighed in with threats, and more than threats, of fines, confiscation, exile, imprisonment, flogging, torture, beheading, and crucifixion.... Thus, over the course of many centuries, compliance was eventually secured and the empire made Christian in truth.[23]
Thus, intentionally or not, MacMullan actually gives us a good description of going down the slippery slope, and his reference to “many centuries” takes us to the Code of Justinian where the path of intolerance has indeed reached a new low of bloody hegemony.[24] All of this goes to the third question of why tolerance came to an end, but also supports the conclusion on the first question that during Constantine’s reign itself we do not have this kind of persecution. Constantine may have been less tolerant of heretics than he was of pagans, and his willingness to enforce to degree ecclesiastical decisions hardly models any modern notion of the separation of church and state.[25] I would certainly want to do more of an investigation of the life of Constantine before making a judgment, but from what I have presented here I think we can tentatively conclude that under the rule of Constantine there was a considerable degree of religious toleration.
This brings us to the second question, however, as to whether this toleration was principled or just pragmatic. Put another way, was there a genuine ideology on the part of Constantine to support religious tolerance and pluralism, or was it simply in the interest of Constantine to do so? Anthony Gill has recently applied a cost/benefit analysis to demonstrate how much expediency, rather than principle, has driven the development, or lack thereof, of religious freedom in various jurisdictions.[26] Whether we look at the time that Constantine adopted Christianity as his personal choice of religion, or we look to some much later period of time after Constantine showered Christianity with imperial blessing, the numbers of pagans, particularly in the elite classes of the empire, would always have outnumbered the Christians by a substantial number. Thus persecution of pagans would have been impossible, or at least exceedingly impractical and counterproductive. The possibility that Constantine’s toleration was simply pretence, born of necessity, is the easy side of the argument.[27]
The argument that Constantine might have adopted a principled toleration is harder to make out, and requires a preliminary argument as to what we mean by principled toleration.[28] While we might well celebrate religious freedom regardless of what circumstances or motives lie behind it, there is something to be said for the stability of grounding this particular freedom in three principles of toleration, which I will call forbearance, volition and reciprocity.
The Latin root for “toleration” is “tolerare” which means “to endure” and thus toleration may be defined as enduring the existence of opinions or activities “that one dislikes or disagrees with.”[29] We think of true toleration as carrying a burden or weight. Clearly at some stage society cannot tolerate some harmful activities and will seek to prohibit them. But we are nevertheless reminded that tolerance involves allowing beliefs and activities that we might well wish to prohibit, but we forbear from doing so, even when we have the power to prohibit. We do not dump the burden from our back by banishing it, but rather we carry it. If I do not care about your religious beliefs and practices, or if I think religions are all pretty much the same, I am actually not being tolerant. I am not carrying any weight of forbearance on my shoulders, if I am just indifferent to your beliefs and activities. Thus applying this principle of forbearance, as I call it, Constantine might be harshly critical of other religions, and he might be a sincere believer in the exclusive truth of Christianity, and yet still forbear from persecuting people of different faiths, because tolerance is itself a virtue every bit as important as finding and supporting truth.
The second principle, namely volition, engages the nature of religious truth itself. Freedom of conscience is necessary for religious faith to be authentic and effective. As supreme ruler, you might compel people to recite your religion’s creeds, or engage in certain worship activities, but nothing useful would be accomplished unless the person’s heart was actually converted to the truth of the religion you compel. You cannot actually coerce faith. Thus, for example, Constantine might wish that the vast majority of people would convert to Christianity, and indeed might believe that the security of the state itself was tied to the worship of the God of the Christians. However, such worship could only be authentic if it was volitional, and this would be a strong principled reason for toleration of religious plurality, even while supporting evangelization efforts.
The third principle is reciprocity. For example if you believed that it was wrong for pagans to persecute Christians, when Christians were a minority, you might argue from reciprocity that it would be equally wrong for pagans to now be persecuted by Christians, if and when the tables were reversed.
Before returning to Constantine, it is worth noting that all three of these principles of toleration (and more) were illustrated a century before Constantine in the writing of Tertullian, who may well be the real Christian father of religious freedom.[30] Written in 197, Tertullian’s Apology[31] contains a lengthy plea of fifty chapters presumably addressed to the Roman authorities in Carthage. Written in 212, To Scapula[32] is a brief petition to the new Roman Proconsul of Africa. While it is true that Tertullian in these two writings is primarily defending Christians from pagan persecution, he appeals to reciprocal principles of religious toleration. There is nothing particularly “tolerant” about Tertullian’s own Christian opinions as he argues with great harshness and biting sarcasm as to the falsity and even demonic quality of pagan religions, and elsewhere also directs his rhetorical thrusts against Christian heretics.[33] But the dogmatic, illiberal, Tertullian nevertheless does not support the use of state violence to suppress those he truly believes are in the wrong, should the tables ever be reversed.[34] As to volition, the whole link between freedom and the nature of faith was summarized nicely by Tertullian:
But, it is not proper for religion to compel men to religion, which should be accepted of one’s own accord, not by force, since sacrifices also are required of a willing mind. So, even if you compel us to sacrifice, you will render no service to your gods.[35]
Tertullian provides a model of the kind of principled toleration that we are asking about in terms of Constantine’s apparent toleration.
Herman Doerries argues that Constantine’s toleration was indeed driven by principle and not by pragmatics.[36] Constantine may well have believed that only Christians worshipped the true God, but nevertheless to make people worship the true God against their will would not amount to true worship and therefore would not help the Empire. Even as to Christian heretics, Doerries presents a picture of Constantine enforcing various church decrees, but not resorting to anything approaching the death penalty to do so, and indeed at times Constantine, in the name of peace, actually left church property in the hands of the Donatists.[37]
A more recent attempt to argue the same view has been taken by Elizabeth Digeser, who argues that the Christian apologist, Lactantius, influenced Constantine to be tolerant of other religions.[38] Lactantius (ca. 250-325) was a teacher of rhetoric in North Africa about a century after Tertullian. Lactantius gained such prominence that he was appointed by Emperor Diocletian to a teaching post in Nicomedia, the Imperial capital city in the East.[39] We do not know when Lactantius converted to Christianity, but in 303 he witnessed the beginning of what would become a decade of severe persecution of Christians in many parts of the Empire, and because of his Christian faith, he was dismissed from his teaching post. Eventually, after years of poverty, he ended up in Trier in the West where he was hired by Constantine to tutor his son Crispus in around 310. In the period between these engagements, Lactantius wrote a seven volume work called The Divine Institutes.[40] Then, as we have already noted, just after the rise of Constantine he wrote The Death of the Persecutors.[41]
In The Divine Institutes, particularly Book 5, “On Justice”, Lactantius defends Christianity during the height of the persecution against it.[42] Again we see some of the components of a principled toleration in this defence. Volition is certainly one aspect as Lactantius states:
There is no need for violence and brutality: worship cannot be forced; it is something to be achieved by talk rather than blows, so that there is free will in it... An unwilling sacrifice is no sacrifice. Unless it come from the heart spontaneously, it is blasphemy when people act under threat of proscription, injustice, prison and torture.”[43]
There is also the principle of reciprocity:
Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by endurance, not by sin but by faith... If you want to defend religion by bloodshed, torture and evil, then at once it will not be so defended: it will be polluted and outraged... We by contrast make no demand that our God, who is everyone’s God willy nilly, be worshipped by anyone unwillingly, as we do not get cross if he is not worshipped. We are confident of his supreme power; he can avenge contempt for himself just as he can avenge the unjust sufferings of his servants.[44]
Like Tertullian before him, there is nothing here in Lactantius that looks like some forerunner of the separation of church and state. Lactantius vehemently objected to polytheism as the state religion, partly because he believed that monotheism provided the only foundation for natural law- we are all children of one God and therefore equal. The point here is not Lactantius’ political philosophy but the basic notion of forbearance that he extended to polytheism should the tables ever be turned. And, of course, they were turned in Lactantius’ lifetime.
Digeser argues that Lactantius read the Divine Institutes to Constantine at the court and that as to toleration after 324, there are several letters from Constantine as found preserved in Eusebius that have the mark of Lactantius all over them.[45] In essence in these letters Constantine directs that the “sanctuaries of lies” should be tolerated both because worship of the true God should not be compelled and because people will eventually move to the worship of one God anyway, and concord will then be achieved in the future. Digeser grants that there were a few times during the reign of Constantine that pagan temples were torn down, but she argues that there were special circumstances in each case that do not disprove the general tolerance for pagan religion.[46] In conclusion then, we are not debating the historical credibility of Digeser’s assumptions about the influence of Lactantius, but rather affirming that her work also supports the view that Constantine’s toleration was principled.
If the history of having a Christian political ruler actually started with principled tolerance, why was that path not taken in subsequent generations? To begin to answer that question might include an examination of the reaction to the brief reign of Julian,[47] and it would certainly have to include an examination of the views of Augustine who provided a theological argument for coercion. Perhaps Augustine’s “sword of love” morphed into the “sword of hate” as we descended the slippery slope.[48] But that is another chapter.
In conclusion let me note personally that in my tradition Constantine marks the stage at which the church fell, and thus writing this note in which we give some credit to Constantine has been a good counterweight for me. After this text was finished, I was walking through the Regent bookstore and discovered a just published work by Peter J. Leithart.[49] I look forward to reading it in due course.
[1] See, for example, A.J. Esau, “Living by Different Law: Legal Pluralism, Freedom of Religion, and Illiberal Religious Groups” in R. Moon, ed., Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008) 110-139; A.J. Esau, The Courts and the Colonies: The Litigation of Hutterite Church Disputes (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004).
[2] T. Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2003); Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1967); Noel B. Reynolds and W. Cole Durham Jr., eds., Religious Liberty in Western Thought (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996); John Christian Laursen, and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Penn. Press, 1998); Douglas Laycock, Religious Liberty (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). As well as various Anabaptist dissenters, the figure of Sebastian Castellio looms large. In 1515 he protested the killing of Servitus by the Calvinists of Geneva. It is to Castellio that we attribute the famous slogan, “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.”
[3] For a basic biography see Hans A. Pohlsander, The Emperor Constantine, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004); Ramsay MacMullen, Constantine (London: Croom Helm, 1969).
[4]There were certainly earlier periods of Roman rule which included fairly rich periods of religious tolerance. For example as to the religious tolerance of Gallienus after 260, see John Bray, Gallienus: A Study in Reformist and Sexual Politics (Adelaide: Hyde Park Press, 1997); Lukas de Blois, The Policy of the Emperor Gallienus (Leiden: Brill, 1976).
[5] Lactantius, The Death of the Persecutors, trans. Sr. Mary Francis McDonald (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Of America Press, 1965). One wonders how historically accurate this account really was. For example, the story in chapter 30 of how Constantine’s father-in-law fell into the trap of killing a eunuch placed in Constantine’s bed instead of Constantine seems worthy of a theatre production. The story in chapter 33 of Galerius’ horrible and prolonged death that started with a worm like infection of the genitals is “wonderful revenge” on a supposedly persecuting letch, but is it historical?
[6] Lactantius, Persecutors, Ch. 24.
[7] T. D. Barnes, “Lactantius and Constantine” The Journal of Roman Studies 63 (1971) 29-46.
[8] Lactantius, Persecutors, Ch. 48.
[9] There had been an earlier edict ending the persecution of Christians supposedly made by Galerius on his deathbed in 311. At least one author has doubted that Galerius was responsible for this edict. See David Woods, “The Deathbed Conversion of Galerius Maximianus to Religious Tolerance: Fact or Fraud?” Studia Patristica XLIV (2010): 85-89. For the view that Galerius admitted defeat and sincerely ended the persecution, see Bill Leadbetter, Galerius and the will of Diocletian (New York: Routledge, 2009).
[10] Lactantius, Persecutors, Ch. 48. My emphasis.
[11] Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965) Book 10.
[12] Pohlsander, Constantine, 46.
[13] Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 50.
[14] Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312-394 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
[15] Herman Doerries, Constantine and Religious Liberty (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1960), p.45.
[16] The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions, trans. Clyde Pharr, (New York: Greenwood Press Reprinting, 1969).
[17] Ibid., 16. 1. 2.
[18] Ibid., 16. 10. 25.
[19] David Hunt, “Christianizing the Roman Empire: The Evidence of the Code” in Jill Harris and Ian Wood, eds., The Theodosian Code: Studies in the Imperial Law of Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1993), 143-158.
[20] E. Gregory Wallace, “Justifying Religious Freedom: The Western Tradition” Penn. State Law Review 114 (2009): 485-570.
[21] MacMullen, Fourth to Eighth, 15.
[22] A. James Reimer, “Constantine: From Religious Pluralism to Christian Hegemony” in Michael R. Ott, The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 71-90, referencing James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) 176, 213.
[23]Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1997), 72. My emphasis.
[24] Matthew C. Mirow and Kathleen A. Kelly, “Laws on Religion from the Theodosian and Justinian Codes” in Richard Valantasis, ed., Religion of Late Antiquity in Practice (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2000) 265-274.
[25] H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Also see, Karen Jordan, “Church and State: The Origins and Implications of Separate Jurisdictional Spheres” Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion 11 (2009) 61. Jordan views Ambrose as a central early player in this regard.
[26] Anthony Gill, The Political Origin of Religious Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2008).
[27] Pohlsander, Constantine, 26, 46.
[28] Jay Newman, Foundations of Religious Toleration (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); Andrew R. Murphy, “Tolerance, Toleration and the Liberal Tradition” Polity 29 (1997) 593-623; John R. Bowlin, “Tolerance Among the Fathers” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 26 (2006) 3-36.
[29] Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson, eds., Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd revised edition, (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2005).
[30] I thought Tertullian was a lawyer, but this has been rejected by most scholars since the landmark work of Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: a Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). That he was well educated in rhetoric is beyond dispute as best illustrated in Robert D. Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1971). That his Christian thought was unpolluted by Greek philosophy has been vigorously denied as the influence of Stoic philosophy is pervasive, as suggested by Eric Osborn, Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1997). As to his later Montanism, David Rankin, Tertullian and the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1995), suggests that Tertullian was not formally schismatic. For an interesting contextual work, see David E. Wilhite, Tertullian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).
[31] Tertullian, Apology, edited by Robert D. Sider, Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 8-70. The Sider version is very readable but much abridged. For the full version, see the 1709 translation by W.M.Reeve, The Apology of Tertullian (London: Griffith Farran, 1889).
[32] Tertullian, To Scapula, translated by R. Arbesmann, The Fathers of the Church: Tertullian, Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix, Octavius (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1950), 151-161.
[33] Eric Osborn, Tertullian, especially Ch. 5, “Against Marcion”, 88-115.
[34] In addition to the violation of the kind of natural law arguments for toleration we find in Tertullian, we must admit that reciprocity is a bit theoretical because in rejecting all violence by Christians, Tertullian appears to have believed that you could not be a true Christian and an Emperor. Sider, Apology, 45.
[35] Tertullian, To Scapula, 152. There is a wider issue about whether this was a good argument in the specific context of what Roman authorities really objected to when Christians rejected pagan sacrifice. The point has been made that the real issue was the act of loyalty demonstrated by civic sacrifice, and that belief in the god sacrificed to was quite irrelevant from a Roman point of view. Alan Watson, The State, Law and Religion: Pagan Rome (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992) 58.
[36] Doerries, Constantine.
[37] Ibid., 102-103.
[38] Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
[39] J. Stevenson, “The Life and Literary Activity of Lactantius” Studia Patristica 1 (1957): 661-667.
[40] Lactantius, Divine Institutes, trans. Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey (Liverpool: Liverpool U. Press, 2003).
[41] Lactantius, Persecutors.
[42] Compared to Tertullian, Lactantius adopted a more conciliatory tone, appealing to what might be shared premises between pagans and Christian before stepping into the territory of difference. He used natural law arguments from Cicero and ancient monotheistic philosophic thought from Hermes to argue that the ancient tradition of Rome was actually philosophical monotheism before it took a wrong path to polytheism and the Emperor cult, and that Christianity was the true path of monotheism.
[43] Lactantius, Institutes, 5. 19. 11. and 5. 20. 7.
[44] Lactantius, Institutes, 5. 19. 22-23. and 5. 20. 9.
[45] Digeser, Making Christian Empire, 126
[46] Ibid., 129.
[47] Adrian Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2003)
[48] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); E. M. Atkins and R, J. Dodaro, Augustine: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[49] Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: I.V.P. Academic, 2010).
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Murphy, Andrew R. “Tolerance, Toleration and the Liberal Tradition” Polity 29 (1997): 593-623.
Newman, Jay. Foundations of Religious Toleration. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
Osborn, Eric. Tertullian, First Theologian of the West. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1997.
Pohlsander, Hans A. The Emperor Constantine, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Rankin, David. Tertullian and the Church. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1997.
Reeve, W. M. The Apology of Tertullian. London: Griffith Farran, 1889.
Reimer, A. James. “Constantine: From Religious Pluralism to Christian Hegemony” in Michael R. Ott. The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society. Leiden: Brill, 2007: 71-90.
Reynolds, Noel. B., and Durham Jr., Cole W., eds. Religious Liberty in Western Thought. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996.
Sider, Robert D. Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1971.
Sider, Robert D., ed. Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire: The Witness of Tertullian. Washington: Cath. U. of America Press, 2001.
Soanes, Catherine, and Stevenson, Angus, eds. Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2005.
Stevenson, J. “The Life and Literary Activity of Lactantius” Studia Patristica 1 (1957): 661-667.
The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions. Trans., Clyde Pharr. New York: Greenwood Press Reprinting, 1969.
Tertullian. To Scapula. Translated by R. Arbesmann. The Fathers of the Church: Tertullian, Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix, Octavius. Washington: Catholic University Press, 1950: 151-161.
Veyne, Paul. When Our World Became Christian: 312-394. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.
Wallace, Gregory. “Justifying Religious Freedom: The Western Tradition” Penn. State Law Review 114 (2009): 485-570.
Watson, Alan. The State, Law and Religion: Pagan Rome. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Wilhite, David E., Tertullian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007.
Woods, David. “The Deathbed Conversion of Galerius Maximianus to Relgious Tolerance: Fact or Fraud?” Studia Patristica XLIV (2010): 85-89.
Zagorin, Perez. How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Princeton NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2003.
BY
A. J. ESAU
DECEMBER 6, 2010
The boundaries of freedom of religion in liberal states are constantly being debated by scholars and tested in litigation.[1] Believing that this freedom is increasingly fragile, I think that one of the important sources of argument for current defenders of freedom of religion includes a better historical reconstruction of the history of the development of the concept in the first place. However, when turning to the literature on the history of religious toleration it appears that the story usually is prefaced with some reference to the medieval forerunners of the Reformation, and then the narrative only gains traction sometime after the Reformation period.[2] This limited time frame fails to capture how the roots of freedom of religion were sown in much earlier periods, even if they did not bear much fruit for many centuries.
I want to explore in this brief note just one of those earlier periods, namely the reign of Constantine from 306 to his death in 337.[3] Two questions come to mind. First, was there actually a period of religious toleration during the reign of Constantine? Second, assuming we did have a period of toleration, was this toleration of religious pluralism a principled toleration, or was it simply pragmatic? I am assuming that only a principled toleration is worth appealing to by a contemporary defender of religious freedom. If we do arrive at a conclusion that affirms the existence of a principled toleration under Constantine, there immediately arises a third question that goes beyond the scope of this note, namely when and why did this principled toleration end, as Christians evidently moved from being the persecuted to becoming the persecutors of others? That is a story for another day, although we may in conclusion hint at various lines of inquiry.
Let us begin then with the first question of whether there was actually a period of religious toleration during the reign of Constantine.[4] To answer this question requires a more focused examination of at least three different stages of the reign of Constantine: the period from 306 when Constantine was in Gaul and only governing a part of the tetrarchy; the period from 312 when he was Emperor of the West and Licinius was Eastern Emperor; and then the crucial period after 324 when Constantine became the sole Emperor.
As to the first stage, we turn to Lactantius, who in 313 wrote The Death of the Persecutors.[5] In this work Lactantius recounted how every Emperor who persecuted Christians had an ignoble death, as if God had already started to punish them in this lifetime for persecuting Christians. Lactantius then presented Constantine as God’s recently anointed agent to end the persecution of Christians. According to Lactantius, the first thing that Constantine did when he succeeded his father in 306 was to issue a command that reversed any persecution of Christians in the part of the empire that he now controlled.[6] Lactantius implied that Constantine, before any hint of his own renouncing of paganism, was already so tolerant of Christianity that he was restoring the church property of Christians that had been taken away during his father’s relatively benign reign.[7]
It is in the second period after Constantine announced his “conversion” to Christianity that we see even clearer evidence of religious toleration. According to the account by Lactantius, the co-emperors met in Milan in 313 and agreed to what has become known as the Edict of Milan.[8] This edict was incorporated in a letter by Licinius announcing to Christians in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire the same freedom from persecution that had already been enjoyed by the Christians in the West under the recent rule of Emperor Constantine.[9] What is significant, of course, is not only the movement from persecution to toleration of the Christian religion, but the lack of any hint that pagan religions would now be discriminated against or persecuted because of the Emperor’s new religious allegiance. While the welfare of the state was still tied to the worship of “divinity”, the edict on its face granted freedom of religion to all citizens:
..we should give both to Christians and to all men the freedom to follow religion, whichever one each one chose, so that whatever sort of divinity there is in heavenly regions may be gracious and propitious to us and to all who live under our government.... ...to others as well the freedom and full liberty has been granted, in accordance with the piece of our times, to exercise free choice in worshipping as each one has seen fit...[10]
Eusebius, writing about a decade after Lactantius, asserted that Licinius failed to live up to the terms of the edict of Milan, and this justified the subsequence “liberation” by Constantine in 324.[11]
It would seem that the real test of whether there was religious freedom under Constantine depends on what happened in the third period when Constantine became the “sole monarch” of the realm, so to speak. Here is where we find a division of opinion. That Constantine built many Christian churches and favoured Christianity is beyond doubt. However, the issue is the degree to which the edict of Milan was set aside after 324 to now persecute pagans and heretics. One commentator notes that Constantine now “prohibited sacrifice to the pagan gods, consultation of the oracles, and the dedication of new cult statues.”[12] Ramsay MacMullen, well known for his highly critical views of Constantine, hardly supports a tolerant image when he states, “The Empire had never had on the throne a man given to such bloodthirsty violence as Constantine.”[13] Yet in a recent book by French historian, Paul Veyne, a self-professed unbeliever, we are presented with a narrative that argues that while Constantine was a sincere believer, and while he did use a degree of state coercion on “heretics” in a failed attempt to enforce ecclesiastical unity, he was extremely tolerant of pagan religion. Actual persecution of both heretics and pagans was something that arose about fifty years after Constantine, and not during his reign.[14] A similar point was made many years ago by a German scholar who stated that there were only a few times that pagan temples were pulled down during the reign of Constantine and in each of these cases there was an issue of public decency in terms of the moral looseness associated with the cult in question.[15]
It seems to me that the best evidence that Constantine was actually tolerant in this third period is found by examining the law. About a hundred years after the death of Constantine we have the Theodosian Code of 439 which is a compilation of the various edicts of the Emperors starting with Constantine.[16] When you read book 16 of this collection dealing with the various edicts on religion, all dated, you can trace a path from Christianity being a favoured religion, to the point where “Catholic” Christianity becomes the official religion of the Empire, and then the point where it becomes the exclusive religion of the Empire. There is indeed a slippery slope argument to be made here, but the point is that violent persecution appears to be post-Constantine.
In 380 (more than forty years after the death of Constantine) “Catholic” Christianity is mandated and heretics are subject to “retribution.”[17] While there are various anti-pagan provisions in the 390’s, it is not until 435 that we have the edict to pull down all pagan shrines and temples and replace them with the “sign of the Christian religion” and with the ultimate penalty for disobedience attached:
All men shall know that if it should appear, by suitable proof before a competent judge, that any person has mocked this law, he shall be punished with death.[18]
While acknowledging that the law on the books is not necessarily the same as the reality on the ground, this view that Constantine was tolerant and that persecution was a later phenomenon is also supported by another commentator after his examination of the Theodosian Code.[19]
While any persecution at all is a violation of the boundary of toleration, persecution is still a relative term; all the way from milder forms of discrimination at one end, to death on the other. One scholar suggests that the first heretics to be actually executed were the Spanish bishop, Priscillian, and some of his followers in 385, and then supposedly there were no heretic executions again till the year 1022.[20] The pagan Hypatia was lynched in 415 in Alexandria in an illegal action.[21] The first anti-Jewish pogrom took place in the same city in 414.[22] MacMullen at one point states:
Government, too, at the urging of the bishops weighed in with threats, and more than threats, of fines, confiscation, exile, imprisonment, flogging, torture, beheading, and crucifixion.... Thus, over the course of many centuries, compliance was eventually secured and the empire made Christian in truth.[23]
Thus, intentionally or not, MacMullan actually gives us a good description of going down the slippery slope, and his reference to “many centuries” takes us to the Code of Justinian where the path of intolerance has indeed reached a new low of bloody hegemony.[24] All of this goes to the third question of why tolerance came to an end, but also supports the conclusion on the first question that during Constantine’s reign itself we do not have this kind of persecution. Constantine may have been less tolerant of heretics than he was of pagans, and his willingness to enforce to degree ecclesiastical decisions hardly models any modern notion of the separation of church and state.[25] I would certainly want to do more of an investigation of the life of Constantine before making a judgment, but from what I have presented here I think we can tentatively conclude that under the rule of Constantine there was a considerable degree of religious toleration.
This brings us to the second question, however, as to whether this toleration was principled or just pragmatic. Put another way, was there a genuine ideology on the part of Constantine to support religious tolerance and pluralism, or was it simply in the interest of Constantine to do so? Anthony Gill has recently applied a cost/benefit analysis to demonstrate how much expediency, rather than principle, has driven the development, or lack thereof, of religious freedom in various jurisdictions.[26] Whether we look at the time that Constantine adopted Christianity as his personal choice of religion, or we look to some much later period of time after Constantine showered Christianity with imperial blessing, the numbers of pagans, particularly in the elite classes of the empire, would always have outnumbered the Christians by a substantial number. Thus persecution of pagans would have been impossible, or at least exceedingly impractical and counterproductive. The possibility that Constantine’s toleration was simply pretence, born of necessity, is the easy side of the argument.[27]
The argument that Constantine might have adopted a principled toleration is harder to make out, and requires a preliminary argument as to what we mean by principled toleration.[28] While we might well celebrate religious freedom regardless of what circumstances or motives lie behind it, there is something to be said for the stability of grounding this particular freedom in three principles of toleration, which I will call forbearance, volition and reciprocity.
The Latin root for “toleration” is “tolerare” which means “to endure” and thus toleration may be defined as enduring the existence of opinions or activities “that one dislikes or disagrees with.”[29] We think of true toleration as carrying a burden or weight. Clearly at some stage society cannot tolerate some harmful activities and will seek to prohibit them. But we are nevertheless reminded that tolerance involves allowing beliefs and activities that we might well wish to prohibit, but we forbear from doing so, even when we have the power to prohibit. We do not dump the burden from our back by banishing it, but rather we carry it. If I do not care about your religious beliefs and practices, or if I think religions are all pretty much the same, I am actually not being tolerant. I am not carrying any weight of forbearance on my shoulders, if I am just indifferent to your beliefs and activities. Thus applying this principle of forbearance, as I call it, Constantine might be harshly critical of other religions, and he might be a sincere believer in the exclusive truth of Christianity, and yet still forbear from persecuting people of different faiths, because tolerance is itself a virtue every bit as important as finding and supporting truth.
The second principle, namely volition, engages the nature of religious truth itself. Freedom of conscience is necessary for religious faith to be authentic and effective. As supreme ruler, you might compel people to recite your religion’s creeds, or engage in certain worship activities, but nothing useful would be accomplished unless the person’s heart was actually converted to the truth of the religion you compel. You cannot actually coerce faith. Thus, for example, Constantine might wish that the vast majority of people would convert to Christianity, and indeed might believe that the security of the state itself was tied to the worship of the God of the Christians. However, such worship could only be authentic if it was volitional, and this would be a strong principled reason for toleration of religious plurality, even while supporting evangelization efforts.
The third principle is reciprocity. For example if you believed that it was wrong for pagans to persecute Christians, when Christians were a minority, you might argue from reciprocity that it would be equally wrong for pagans to now be persecuted by Christians, if and when the tables were reversed.
Before returning to Constantine, it is worth noting that all three of these principles of toleration (and more) were illustrated a century before Constantine in the writing of Tertullian, who may well be the real Christian father of religious freedom.[30] Written in 197, Tertullian’s Apology[31] contains a lengthy plea of fifty chapters presumably addressed to the Roman authorities in Carthage. Written in 212, To Scapula[32] is a brief petition to the new Roman Proconsul of Africa. While it is true that Tertullian in these two writings is primarily defending Christians from pagan persecution, he appeals to reciprocal principles of religious toleration. There is nothing particularly “tolerant” about Tertullian’s own Christian opinions as he argues with great harshness and biting sarcasm as to the falsity and even demonic quality of pagan religions, and elsewhere also directs his rhetorical thrusts against Christian heretics.[33] But the dogmatic, illiberal, Tertullian nevertheless does not support the use of state violence to suppress those he truly believes are in the wrong, should the tables ever be reversed.[34] As to volition, the whole link between freedom and the nature of faith was summarized nicely by Tertullian:
But, it is not proper for religion to compel men to religion, which should be accepted of one’s own accord, not by force, since sacrifices also are required of a willing mind. So, even if you compel us to sacrifice, you will render no service to your gods.[35]
Tertullian provides a model of the kind of principled toleration that we are asking about in terms of Constantine’s apparent toleration.
Herman Doerries argues that Constantine’s toleration was indeed driven by principle and not by pragmatics.[36] Constantine may well have believed that only Christians worshipped the true God, but nevertheless to make people worship the true God against their will would not amount to true worship and therefore would not help the Empire. Even as to Christian heretics, Doerries presents a picture of Constantine enforcing various church decrees, but not resorting to anything approaching the death penalty to do so, and indeed at times Constantine, in the name of peace, actually left church property in the hands of the Donatists.[37]
A more recent attempt to argue the same view has been taken by Elizabeth Digeser, who argues that the Christian apologist, Lactantius, influenced Constantine to be tolerant of other religions.[38] Lactantius (ca. 250-325) was a teacher of rhetoric in North Africa about a century after Tertullian. Lactantius gained such prominence that he was appointed by Emperor Diocletian to a teaching post in Nicomedia, the Imperial capital city in the East.[39] We do not know when Lactantius converted to Christianity, but in 303 he witnessed the beginning of what would become a decade of severe persecution of Christians in many parts of the Empire, and because of his Christian faith, he was dismissed from his teaching post. Eventually, after years of poverty, he ended up in Trier in the West where he was hired by Constantine to tutor his son Crispus in around 310. In the period between these engagements, Lactantius wrote a seven volume work called The Divine Institutes.[40] Then, as we have already noted, just after the rise of Constantine he wrote The Death of the Persecutors.[41]
In The Divine Institutes, particularly Book 5, “On Justice”, Lactantius defends Christianity during the height of the persecution against it.[42] Again we see some of the components of a principled toleration in this defence. Volition is certainly one aspect as Lactantius states:
There is no need for violence and brutality: worship cannot be forced; it is something to be achieved by talk rather than blows, so that there is free will in it... An unwilling sacrifice is no sacrifice. Unless it come from the heart spontaneously, it is blasphemy when people act under threat of proscription, injustice, prison and torture.”[43]
There is also the principle of reciprocity:
Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by endurance, not by sin but by faith... If you want to defend religion by bloodshed, torture and evil, then at once it will not be so defended: it will be polluted and outraged... We by contrast make no demand that our God, who is everyone’s God willy nilly, be worshipped by anyone unwillingly, as we do not get cross if he is not worshipped. We are confident of his supreme power; he can avenge contempt for himself just as he can avenge the unjust sufferings of his servants.[44]
Like Tertullian before him, there is nothing here in Lactantius that looks like some forerunner of the separation of church and state. Lactantius vehemently objected to polytheism as the state religion, partly because he believed that monotheism provided the only foundation for natural law- we are all children of one God and therefore equal. The point here is not Lactantius’ political philosophy but the basic notion of forbearance that he extended to polytheism should the tables ever be turned. And, of course, they were turned in Lactantius’ lifetime.
Digeser argues that Lactantius read the Divine Institutes to Constantine at the court and that as to toleration after 324, there are several letters from Constantine as found preserved in Eusebius that have the mark of Lactantius all over them.[45] In essence in these letters Constantine directs that the “sanctuaries of lies” should be tolerated both because worship of the true God should not be compelled and because people will eventually move to the worship of one God anyway, and concord will then be achieved in the future. Digeser grants that there were a few times during the reign of Constantine that pagan temples were torn down, but she argues that there were special circumstances in each case that do not disprove the general tolerance for pagan religion.[46] In conclusion then, we are not debating the historical credibility of Digeser’s assumptions about the influence of Lactantius, but rather affirming that her work also supports the view that Constantine’s toleration was principled.
If the history of having a Christian political ruler actually started with principled tolerance, why was that path not taken in subsequent generations? To begin to answer that question might include an examination of the reaction to the brief reign of Julian,[47] and it would certainly have to include an examination of the views of Augustine who provided a theological argument for coercion. Perhaps Augustine’s “sword of love” morphed into the “sword of hate” as we descended the slippery slope.[48] But that is another chapter.
In conclusion let me note personally that in my tradition Constantine marks the stage at which the church fell, and thus writing this note in which we give some credit to Constantine has been a good counterweight for me. After this text was finished, I was walking through the Regent bookstore and discovered a just published work by Peter J. Leithart.[49] I look forward to reading it in due course.
[1] See, for example, A.J. Esau, “Living by Different Law: Legal Pluralism, Freedom of Religion, and Illiberal Religious Groups” in R. Moon, ed., Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008) 110-139; A.J. Esau, The Courts and the Colonies: The Litigation of Hutterite Church Disputes (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004).
[2] T. Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2003); Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1967); Noel B. Reynolds and W. Cole Durham Jr., eds., Religious Liberty in Western Thought (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996); John Christian Laursen, and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Penn. Press, 1998); Douglas Laycock, Religious Liberty (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). As well as various Anabaptist dissenters, the figure of Sebastian Castellio looms large. In 1515 he protested the killing of Servitus by the Calvinists of Geneva. It is to Castellio that we attribute the famous slogan, “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.”
[3] For a basic biography see Hans A. Pohlsander, The Emperor Constantine, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004); Ramsay MacMullen, Constantine (London: Croom Helm, 1969).
[4]There were certainly earlier periods of Roman rule which included fairly rich periods of religious tolerance. For example as to the religious tolerance of Gallienus after 260, see John Bray, Gallienus: A Study in Reformist and Sexual Politics (Adelaide: Hyde Park Press, 1997); Lukas de Blois, The Policy of the Emperor Gallienus (Leiden: Brill, 1976).
[5] Lactantius, The Death of the Persecutors, trans. Sr. Mary Francis McDonald (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Of America Press, 1965). One wonders how historically accurate this account really was. For example, the story in chapter 30 of how Constantine’s father-in-law fell into the trap of killing a eunuch placed in Constantine’s bed instead of Constantine seems worthy of a theatre production. The story in chapter 33 of Galerius’ horrible and prolonged death that started with a worm like infection of the genitals is “wonderful revenge” on a supposedly persecuting letch, but is it historical?
[6] Lactantius, Persecutors, Ch. 24.
[7] T. D. Barnes, “Lactantius and Constantine” The Journal of Roman Studies 63 (1971) 29-46.
[8] Lactantius, Persecutors, Ch. 48.
[9] There had been an earlier edict ending the persecution of Christians supposedly made by Galerius on his deathbed in 311. At least one author has doubted that Galerius was responsible for this edict. See David Woods, “The Deathbed Conversion of Galerius Maximianus to Religious Tolerance: Fact or Fraud?” Studia Patristica XLIV (2010): 85-89. For the view that Galerius admitted defeat and sincerely ended the persecution, see Bill Leadbetter, Galerius and the will of Diocletian (New York: Routledge, 2009).
[10] Lactantius, Persecutors, Ch. 48. My emphasis.
[11] Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965) Book 10.
[12] Pohlsander, Constantine, 46.
[13] Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 50.
[14] Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312-394 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
[15] Herman Doerries, Constantine and Religious Liberty (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1960), p.45.
[16] The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions, trans. Clyde Pharr, (New York: Greenwood Press Reprinting, 1969).
[17] Ibid., 16. 1. 2.
[18] Ibid., 16. 10. 25.
[19] David Hunt, “Christianizing the Roman Empire: The Evidence of the Code” in Jill Harris and Ian Wood, eds., The Theodosian Code: Studies in the Imperial Law of Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1993), 143-158.
[20] E. Gregory Wallace, “Justifying Religious Freedom: The Western Tradition” Penn. State Law Review 114 (2009): 485-570.
[21] MacMullen, Fourth to Eighth, 15.
[22] A. James Reimer, “Constantine: From Religious Pluralism to Christian Hegemony” in Michael R. Ott, The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 71-90, referencing James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) 176, 213.
[23]Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1997), 72. My emphasis.
[24] Matthew C. Mirow and Kathleen A. Kelly, “Laws on Religion from the Theodosian and Justinian Codes” in Richard Valantasis, ed., Religion of Late Antiquity in Practice (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2000) 265-274.
[25] H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Also see, Karen Jordan, “Church and State: The Origins and Implications of Separate Jurisdictional Spheres” Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion 11 (2009) 61. Jordan views Ambrose as a central early player in this regard.
[26] Anthony Gill, The Political Origin of Religious Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2008).
[27] Pohlsander, Constantine, 26, 46.
[28] Jay Newman, Foundations of Religious Toleration (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); Andrew R. Murphy, “Tolerance, Toleration and the Liberal Tradition” Polity 29 (1997) 593-623; John R. Bowlin, “Tolerance Among the Fathers” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 26 (2006) 3-36.
[29] Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson, eds., Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd revised edition, (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2005).
[30] I thought Tertullian was a lawyer, but this has been rejected by most scholars since the landmark work of Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: a Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). That he was well educated in rhetoric is beyond dispute as best illustrated in Robert D. Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1971). That his Christian thought was unpolluted by Greek philosophy has been vigorously denied as the influence of Stoic philosophy is pervasive, as suggested by Eric Osborn, Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1997). As to his later Montanism, David Rankin, Tertullian and the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1995), suggests that Tertullian was not formally schismatic. For an interesting contextual work, see David E. Wilhite, Tertullian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).
[31] Tertullian, Apology, edited by Robert D. Sider, Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 8-70. The Sider version is very readable but much abridged. For the full version, see the 1709 translation by W.M.Reeve, The Apology of Tertullian (London: Griffith Farran, 1889).
[32] Tertullian, To Scapula, translated by R. Arbesmann, The Fathers of the Church: Tertullian, Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix, Octavius (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1950), 151-161.
[33] Eric Osborn, Tertullian, especially Ch. 5, “Against Marcion”, 88-115.
[34] In addition to the violation of the kind of natural law arguments for toleration we find in Tertullian, we must admit that reciprocity is a bit theoretical because in rejecting all violence by Christians, Tertullian appears to have believed that you could not be a true Christian and an Emperor. Sider, Apology, 45.
[35] Tertullian, To Scapula, 152. There is a wider issue about whether this was a good argument in the specific context of what Roman authorities really objected to when Christians rejected pagan sacrifice. The point has been made that the real issue was the act of loyalty demonstrated by civic sacrifice, and that belief in the god sacrificed to was quite irrelevant from a Roman point of view. Alan Watson, The State, Law and Religion: Pagan Rome (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992) 58.
[36] Doerries, Constantine.
[37] Ibid., 102-103.
[38] Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
[39] J. Stevenson, “The Life and Literary Activity of Lactantius” Studia Patristica 1 (1957): 661-667.
[40] Lactantius, Divine Institutes, trans. Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey (Liverpool: Liverpool U. Press, 2003).
[41] Lactantius, Persecutors.
[42] Compared to Tertullian, Lactantius adopted a more conciliatory tone, appealing to what might be shared premises between pagans and Christian before stepping into the territory of difference. He used natural law arguments from Cicero and ancient monotheistic philosophic thought from Hermes to argue that the ancient tradition of Rome was actually philosophical monotheism before it took a wrong path to polytheism and the Emperor cult, and that Christianity was the true path of monotheism.
[43] Lactantius, Institutes, 5. 19. 11. and 5. 20. 7.
[44] Lactantius, Institutes, 5. 19. 22-23. and 5. 20. 9.
[45] Digeser, Making Christian Empire, 126
[46] Ibid., 129.
[47] Adrian Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2003)
[48] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); E. M. Atkins and R, J. Dodaro, Augustine: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[49] Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: I.V.P. Academic, 2010).
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