THE Christianity as a political power

With the accession of Constantine to Christianity, the end of the persecutions and the recognition of freedom of worship, Christians found themselves in a radically different context; now, it was necessary to conceive the Roman Empire within the divine plan and a logic of salvation and rethink the relationship of the Christian sovereign with God and his place in the Church.

In the States of Antiquity, human royalty was conceived as the earthly image of the divine, and he who was invested with it was seen as the representative on earth of the heavenly ruler; the exercise of power was a sacralizing imitation of God's action. Rome itself, the rest, he had sanctified his emperors, both through the title of Augustus and through the imperial cult; l’emperor, in his capacity as pontiff maximum, era leader and manager of traditional religion.

The emperor as head of the church

Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea, in Palestine, 313-314, and near Constantine from 324. Apologeta, theologian and historian, was the first to formulate, in various speeches and works, a Christian theology of power and history, demonstrating how the incarnation of the Word of God (he Logos) in the person of Jesus was the crucial event in the history of humanity, the event capable of making sense of the whole. Also the fact that it had occurred in the Roman Empire, at the time of Augustus, it was no mere coincidence, but the implementation of God's plan; ever since, “A unique God had been proclaimed to all and a unique kingship, that of the Romans, it was established by making it flourish for all, simultaneously, a profound peace that embraced the universe ". Now there was only one God and one emperor: monotheism and monarchy went hand in hand; Roman peace was the objective sign of this providential achievement, though, for several centuries, the emperors had not been Christians and the Christians had been persecuted.

The Roman Empire was therefore fully accepted, because in God's plan he had the mission of ensuring the unity and harmony of the human race; the expansion of the empire and the Roman peace created the conditions necessary for the realization of the "go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son and the Holy Spirit ". With his reflection on history, Eusebius allowed his contemporaries to think of themselves fully as Roman and Christian, since "in our time" this empire's vocation finally came to fruition. By becoming a Christian, with Costantino, the emperor really rose to image of God on earth; his royalty was the image of the royalty of Logos, of that Son through whom the Father, universal and omnipotent ruler, exercised his kingship on earth: «The king loved by God, which bears the image of royalty from up there, holds the rudder and rules, in imitation of the Almighty, everything on earth ") "Beloved of God", the Christian emperor was endowed with charismatic virtues (reason, wisdom, goodness, justice, temperance, courage and above all pity: the same virtues as the ideal sovereign of tradition philosophical), which he did not consider personal merits, but thanks received from above. In this, he was really a "philosopher", because he "knows himself", recognizing one's subordinate position and aspiring to the Kingdom above, the emperor invoked the heavenly Father for his own salvation and that of the people entrusted to him. But what mission Constantine, who was baptized only on his deathbed, he had been concretely invested by the Church? Everything still had to be invented.

Whether to teach true doctrine, give the force of law to a formula of faith defined by a council, implement the decisions, order the construction of churches, taking measures against traditional cults were now tasks that belonged to the Christian emperor, what place he would have had in the Church if he had not been baptized or had been considered a heretic, or even worse if it had imposed an orthodoxy not accepted by all, in a context of serious theological disagreements?

First conflicts between bishop and emperor

Starting from the reign of the son of Constantine, Costanzo II (317-361), the bishops who defended the faith established by council of Nicaea (325) they came into open conflict with the definitions of the later councils imposed by the emperor. For this they were deposed from their post and sent into exile. The reactions were very violent: in a particularly heated libel, Ilario, bishop of Poitiers, treated Constantius as an Antichrist. The emperor's place in the Church and his competence in terms of defining the faith had therefore to be rethought. "The emperor is in the Church, not above the Church ": this formula of Ambrogio, bishop of Milan (339/340-397), it very well summarizes the thought of the bishops in the last decades of the fourth century, in particular in the Roman West. In 386, Ambrose firmly reminded the young emperor Valentinian II, not yet baptized, of the "rights of the priesthood": in matters of faith, "It is the bishops who are the emperor's judges" and not the other way around, especially if the emperor was suspected of heresy or had committed a grave fault. In 390, the bishop refused to welcome Emperor Theodosius into the church, guilty of having ordered in a fit of anger a massacre against the inhabitants of Thessalonica, if he had not done public penance; the emperor submitted, in a way of which Ambrose later did not fail to underline the edifying exemplarity. From an emperor "bishop of external affairs", as Constantine was defined, to an emperor "first of the laity" as Ambrose conceived him, it is clear that the idea of ​​the Christian emperor had undergone an evolution during the fourth century. More than Constantine, now, the model of the ideal Christian ruler was Theodosius, which had all the qualities: fear of God and mercy, clemenza, self-control and humility; therefore he deserved the victory and, for him and for his people, that "eternal happiness that God gives only to those who are truly believers". Humility now appeared to be the essential virtue of the Christian emperor. In imitation of Christ, who made himself "obedient unto death", the emperor had to be subject to God, but also to the Church, in matters of faith, of conduct and even in the way of exercising power.

however, if it had been possible to think of the Roman Empire as a kingdom willed by God and reached its fulfillment with the Christian empire, the disintegration following the attacks of the barbarians and the capture of Rome by the Goths in 410 they forced Christians to overcome the idea of ​​Rome's eternity, not to connect the fate of the Church to that of any earthly state, even if he were a Christian, and not to confuse "the ends of the earth" to be evangelized with the frontiers of the empire. "Horror, the Universe collapses ", he wrote but also, calling to penance: "It is our sins that make the barbarians strong".

For its part, Agostino he invited us to re-read the history of Rome and to reflect on the old age of the world, destined to disappear, but to whom Christ with his Incarnation had brought salvation. Overcoming the representations of the ideal city, dilated to the dimensions of the world, Augustine announces: «Two loves therefore gave rise to two cities, from earthly self-love to indifference to God, to heavenly love for God to the point of indifference for oneself ". It was not a question of contrasting an earthly and evil city with a celestial city out of time and disembodied: they were two distinct loves. The two cities were not in contradiction with each other: the earthly one, that could make peace and harmony reign, it was not despicable, but insufficient, and could not represent a fine; the heavenly city, on his journey on earth, it surpassed and transcended all forms of state: it "attracts to itself citizens of all nations […] from all parts of the earth "to guide them" towards the Kingdom that will have no end ".

Bibliographic sources

History of Christianity curated by A. Corbin

0

0