The Roman Persecutions had not stopped the Church within the borders of the Empire, but neither had they allowed it to expand freely. With the peace of Constantine, it grew extraordinarily among many peoples, who accepted it without great difficulty.
An unanswerable question is always asked
How many inhabitants did the Roman Empire have? Nobody knows. At most, they throw a hundred million at him. It seems too much. Maybe you have to be content with about sixty million. So how many were Christians at the time of the last persecution of Diocletian and Galen? Maybe six million, long story short. The truth is that no one knows either. But let’s play with these calculations.
The decree of Milan in 313
gave tolerance to Christianity in the Empire. Constantine did the most since the persecutions could no longer be justified, which were outside the law: Christianity had the same rights as paganism. But Christians were a small minority, although there was very rapid growth, as greater and greater facilities were given to the Church while privileges were cut off from paganism.
In the years 341-346, sacrifices to pagan gods were prohibited and the temples were forced to close, although this was a dead letter, since pagans were still the vast majority. The Emperor Constantius, a convinced Christian but unfortunately an Arian, ordered and commanded more than any bishop, and, naturally, many became Christians out of convenience. Julian the Apostate renewed paganism and tenaciously and cunningly persecuted the Church, but he could not do much harm because he did not last on the throne for more than two years (361-363). From 363 to 368, with various emperors, all Christians, but several of them Arians, the Church grew, although in a manner contradicted by the fatal heresy.
Until 379, Theodosius the Great remained
the only emperor, declaring: “It is my will that all peoples subject to my empire profess the faith that the Roman Church received from Saint Peter.” The laws followed one after another: closure of all pagan temples, which were to become Christian churches; the tolerance of the Milan decree was being changed to obligation; The statue of the goddess Victoria was permanently removed from the Capitol of Rome, and, a year before Theodosius died in 395, Christianity was declared the official Religion of the Roman Empire. Naturally, there came a spectacular growth of the Church, although with the defects that are to be expected.
We hinted at these “defects” of the Church
from the Milan decree in 313. Yes; They are true. The bad thing is that many exaggerate what came and had to come by force. Emperor Constantine acted with the best will and in the best way. But, when the Persecutions ceased, that indomitable energy of the Christians ceased. Constantine granted bishops the same privileges that pagan priests had, and this made many adapt to a light and courtly life. Notable in this is the paragraph written by Blessed John Newman, the English cardinal who converted to Catholicism:
«We know from Eusebius that Constantine, to attract the pagans to the new religion, transposed to it the external ornaments to which they were accustomed… The use of temples dedicated to particular saints, sometimes ornamented with tree branches; incense, lamps and candles; votive offerings to regain health; Holy Water; festivals and seasons, processions, blessings to the fields; priestly vestments, the tonsure, the wedding ring, the images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, the Kyrie eleison, all this has a pagan origin and was sanctified by its adaptation in the Church.
Yeah; But let’s not exaggerate. Religion has had its particular forms in all peoples, and the Church would have had its own to express faith. She would have inherited many things from Judaism in the Bible, such as priestly vestments, and manifested her beliefs with religious elements of the evangelized peoples. Even during the Persecutions she already had her temples, erected in the long periods that she enjoyed peace.
Yes, much Christian vigor was lost
with the favor of the Empire and Christian life was relaxed; But that same 4th century was that of the great and innumerable anchorites and monks of the deserts who continue to amaze us today.
With the emperors – and the same will happen in the future with many kings – Caesaropapism appeared, that is, the involvement of civil authority in the affairs of the Church. Constantine above all, rather than meddling in the Church, what he did was seek peace between the factions that appeared in the Church due to heresies.
This was the reason why some ecumenical Councils, such as that of Nicaea in 325, were the initiative of both the emperor and the Pope, and the emperor, in exchange for achieving peace, bore all the enormous expenses that a Council entailed.
However, that good intention became an evil that lasted for many centuries, especially in the East, since the emperor ruled in Constantinople as much or more than the Patriarch.
Persia
is the first country that draws our attention outside the borders of the Empire, while the Persecutions were still raging. Christianity came to her soon. Around the year 250, there was already a very flourishing Church, since by the year 300 it had the Archbishopric of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and it grew a lot until the middle of the 4th century.
But, it seems that for political reasons, and instigated by Jews and the magicians of the idols, Shapur II in the year 340 launched an attack against the Christians, and the martyrs were many since the historian Sozomeno says that up to 16,000 were counted name by name.
Under Isdejerjer I, from 401 to 420, the Church enjoyed peace and grew again, until under Bahram (420-438) persecution broke out again and Christians, many at least, died under atrocious torments, such as those they were sawn in half. These last Persian persecutions were due to the Monophysite heretics. In the 7th century, late in the reign of Chosroes II (591-628), the Church almost completely disappeared.
Armenia,
located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, is a case in point. In the year 302 Tiridates III converted to Christianity and declared the Catholic faith as the State religion, and the Church reached great development before the end of the 4th century. The great apostle of this Church was Gregory the Enlightened, consecrated bishop in the year 302. He had many martyrs under Maximinus Daia, who ignored the edict of Milan in the year 313 and unleashed a furious persecution against the Church. But peace finally came. That Church reached great splendor under Bishop Saint Isaac the Great, who governed it from 390 to 440, although it was fatal for it to lose its dependence on Rome and pass almost completely under Persian rule.
Saint Isaak found that the people could not be educated in religion because they could not speak Greek, Syriac, or Persian. He then counted on the monk Saint Mesrob, trained in those languages, and undertook the titanic task of translating the Bible of the Seventy, for which he had to invent his alphabet for Armenia. The greatness of this man, so similar in many ways to Saint Jerome, was something off the charts. A solitary monk, he had led a life of almost inexplicable penance. Providence had prepared him for a great mission. Emperor Chosroes III entrusted him with the translation of decrees and documents into Greek, Syriac, and Persian; while Bishop Saint Isaak commissioned him to complete the translation of the Bible. With the invention of the new alphabet, with 36 letters, the people were educated, to which Mesrob also dedicated himself with an admirable apostolic zeal. Isaak died at the age of 92 in 440, after signing the minutes of the Council of Ephesus which he was unable to attend. Six months later, his faithful disciple Mesrob followed him, and both were recognized as Saints by the Armenian Church. Unfortunately, the Persian conquerors were Nestorians, and many Armenian Christians defected to the Monophysite heresy.
Georgia,
a neighboring country in the Caucasus like Armenia, had very curious beginnings. A Christian slave, Nunia, with her goodness – and from her, they say about her, also with her charisma of performing miracles – converted her queen, and through her, King Mireo was also converted. Missionaries from Antioch arrived, and they organized the Church there, Christianity advanced very quickly, and from Georgia, the Catholic faith spread throughout Asian countries.
Unfortunately this time too, many of those evangelizers fell into Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism, heresies that we know well from previous lessons, and their evangelization was fatal for those very promising countries.
The barbarian invasions were upon us.
They produced terror, naturally. But from the beginning, some thinkers saw the Providence of God in that incomprehensible social phenomenon. We can summarize here the thoughts of Orosio, an important Spanish priest of those times:
– Barbarians are capable of perfection. God places them within the reach of the Church to lead them to the true faith. Now the great expansion of the Church was going to come. Paganism in Europe was about to disappear. And God would offer the Germanic peoples the most effective means for their enlightenment in faith and their human formation.