Imperial and Juridical Christianity

For nearly three centuries the church had been an illegal association. Then, between Constantine's toleration in 313 and Theodosius's legislation at the century's end, it became first protected, then privileged, then the empire's official religion — and had to work out, very fast, what to do with that. Bishops found themselves hearing civil lawsuits, administering public building funds, and travelling to councils at imperial expense; emperors found themselves summoning those councils and expecting the results to hold.

Three answers competed for where final authority over the church now actually lay, and this world's own window closes without settling which was right. Rome traced its authority to Peter; Constantinople claimed rank because it sat beside the throne — a claim the Council of Chalcedon extended in 451 over the protest of Rome's own delegates, at the same council that received, as the last word on Christ's two natures, a letter Leo of Rome had written two years before. Ambrose of Milan staked a third claim entirely: that the emperor stood inside the church, not over it. He said those exact words from inside his own basilica in 386, besieged by the soldiers of a Homoian imperial court that wanted the building for its own worship. He would not give it up, and his congregation stayed inside with him — prepared, an eyewitness later wrote, to die with their bishop. It was there, waiting through the night, that Milan's people first sang hymns the way the Eastern churches did, a custom that, by that eyewitness's account, never stopped and spread to churches across the world. Four years later Ambrose proved the same claim again, against Theodosius himself, refusing the emperor the sacrament until he did public penance for a massacre at Thessalonica.

The hardest evidence against this world is not what was done to it, but what it did. In 366, a disputed election to the bishopric of Rome left the city so violent that a hundred and thirty-seven people were killed in a single day — the same Damasus whose reign then built the city's great martyr shrines. The same sacramental refusal that later humbled an emperor over Thessalonica had already been used once before, two years earlier, for the opposite end: protecting a bishop who had incited a mob to burn a synagogue at Callinicum from having to pay for it, and leaving the burned community no recourse at all.