In the reigns of the Antonines, Pius and Marcus, who followed Hadrian, A. D. 138 to A. D. 180, despite the generally wise and beneficial administration of these two princes, who justly are deemed the noblest and best of the early line of Emperors, the situation of the Christian communities in the midst of the Pagan population of the Empire grew gradually more precarious. The dangers to which they were exposed increased in number, while the safeguards, which the wisdom and understanding of rulers like Trajan, and Hadrian in the earlier years of his reign, had provided against popular clamor, were often more or less disregarded or evaded.
Outwardly, at all events, the spirit of the rescript of Hadrian colored the letters addressed by Antoninus Pius to several of the Greek cities in the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia; wherein he gave orders that mere noisy clamor on the part of the people should not be counted as a formal accusation of the Christians to be taken official account of by the governor. Letters, too, bearing on the same points were sent to Athens and the Greek cities in general.
A good example of the effect of illegal popular clamor in the case of accused Christians occurs in the history of the martyrdom of Polycarp, already related in the sketch of the great Bishop's career, which took place in A. D. 155, when Antoninus Pius was reigning. We read that the proconsul wished to give the accused Bishop a fuller hearing and a formal trial, but that the tumult and shouting of the populace induced him to sanction immediate execution.
MARCUS AURELIUS Statue in Rome.
There appear to have been in the reign of Pius many of these popular outbursts of feeling in Greek cities against the Christians. This points clearly to the gradual revival of Paganism, which was so prominent a feature in the reign of Marcus, who followed Pius on the throne.
Although the Antonines made no ostensible alteration in the policy laid down by their predecessors on the questions connected with the relations of Christianity and the Empire, yet, as we have seen, the Imperial rescripts were of so general a nature that they could be interpreted in a sense favorable or unfavorable to the religionists to whom they referred, according to the disposition of the particular governor; in which no doubt the supposed bias, favorable or otherwise towards the Christian communities, of the all-powerful reigning Emperor at Rome, would be an important factor. The proconsul was certainly likely to shape his policy closely on the lines which he judged would be acceptable to the Emperor. Now the feeling of the Antonines was never favorable to the growing sect, and it became more hostile as time advanced. The policy of Antoninus Pius may be said to have been generally indifferent, but the indifference gradually shaded into dislike, into a fixed idea that Christianity was un-Roman; and in the Emperor Marcus this idea became more and more pronounced. The love of justice, the hatred of all oppression and tyranny, which so strongly characterized the rule of the Antonines, to some extent shielded these quiet and scrupulously loyal sectaries from all open cruelty and high-handed acts of oppression; but the evident dislike of the great Emperors, especially of Marcus, and their evident mistrust of the aim and object of Christianity, made the profession of the Faith in their reigns very burdensome, often very dangerous. Hence the roll of martyrs in Rome and the provinces became longer and longer in the times of the two noblest and most upright of the Emperors.
Among the early Christian writings that we possess in their entirety, the first "Apology" of Justin, presented to Antoninus Pius circa A. D. 145-50, holds a conspicuous place. It is the work of a scholar and thinker, a man versed in all the learning of his day and time, who had embraced Christianity only when he was, comparatively speaking, well advanced in life, and had already carefully examined the principal cults practised by the various peoples inhabiting the vast Roman Empire. The first "Apology" of Justin was addressed to Antoninus Pius, when that sovereign had been reigning some few years. In the course of his elaborate and deeply interesting plea for the one proscribed religion, the writer, among other points, presses upon the Emperor the wonderful loyalty to constituted authority always shown by the persecuted sect. They never hesitated, for instance, to pay at once the Imperial taxes. The only liberty they claimed was the liberty of conscience which bade them adore one God. In everything else they were ready to obey with joy. They recognized the royalty and supremacy of Rome, and were in the habit of praying that Divine help might be given to the Sovereign. Justin pleads, too, with great force that the sum of Christian teaching is that nothing escapes the eye of God, that He sees and punishes eternally the wicked man, the conspirator, the self-seeker, with a punishment exactly commensurate with his evil deeds; that the same God, too, rewards the virtuous man in proportion to his righteous works. Surely such teaching as this, he argues, is a real and substantial help to the laws of a good government like that of Imperial Rome, and gives stability to society.
Further, he contrasts the pure morals of the Christian sect with the disgraceful examples set by the Pagan gods. He indignantly repudiates the scandalous charges made against the Christian worship, and paints in a few simple and eloquent sentences its most sacred portion, the solemn Eucharistic service. Pious, pure, peace-loving—surely Christians had the right of protesting before the Emperor against the crying injustice of the Roman laws against their religion; laws by which the bearing of the name of Christian was proscribed and punished with death. In their case no inquiry was necessary, whether or not they had committed crimes. The mere fact of their being Christians was sufficient to condemn them. They were judged and put to death simply on account of the Name they bore, whilst, on the other hand, the mere renouncement of the Name procured their immediate acquittal. In the name of justice and mercy, he argued, let not Rome judge and punish a word or Name, but let her judge and punish acts, if any such be found worthy of punishment. When a Christian is haled before Rome's tribunal, at once let his life be subject to a rigid examination, let the court inquire carefully if he has done aught amiss, but do not let the mere name of a Christian, which embraces so much that is beautiful and good, be imputed to him as a crime. Let not one who has never injured any, who is a loyal subject of the Empire, be regarded as a criminal deserving of the severest punishment; let the Christian be given the common privilege which the Roman law gives to all accused persons. It is surely monstrous that a special law should exist in the solitary case of one only charged with being a Christian.
It was some years after the presentation of his first "Apology" for Christianity that the second of these appeals that common fairness should be shown to the accused Christians was addressed to the Emperors (Pius and Marcus) and the Senate. When Justin wrote his second "Apology" in or about the last year of the reign of Antoninus Pius, things looked very dark for Christianity throughout the Empire. The reigning Emperor had no sympathy with the worshippers of Jesus, who resolutely stood aloof from all the religions favored and sanctioned by the State. His adopted son and successor, Marcus, was known openly to dislike them, though the reason has ever been a subject of wonder and inquiry. No new rescripts on the Christian question had indeed been put out. But the old Imperial directions, which issued from the chanceries of Trajan and Hadrian, were still in force; and their vagueness, which left much to the discretion of the provincial governor, was now sadly inimical to Christians, when it was understood that the Emperor himself was personally hostile to the sect. The interpretation now of the old rescripts by the provincial governor was apt to be very different from the interpretation of the same Imperial commands when the reigning Emperor was known to be opposed to persecution in any form, and when men were conscious that he only reluctantly acquiesced in extreme measures if the fact of the accused being a Christian were forced upon the magistrates and officials of the Empire.
In the middle of the second century there was already an active propaganda of Christianity carried on in numberless families by means of Christian slaves, confidential servants, teachers of various arts and accomplishments, physicians and others who had access to the inner life of families. It is an error to suppose that Pagan society in the second century had to seek instruction in Christianity secretly in some little chapel of a wealthy Roman's house, or in a sepulchral crypt of a dark and narrow catacomb. That teaching and preaching, probably of a high order, under the charge of some learned and devoted master, was constantly to be found in their most secret and hidden places, was no doubt the case; but the propaganda of the Faith was by no means confined to these little centers. There were few families in Rome after a time that did not count among their numbers one or more Christians. Often these members filled only humble positions, but their widespread influence was incalculable. Justin, in his second "Apology," as the crown of his argument, showing the great and lofty influence of the Faith, gives us a striking example of how Christianity influenced the home life. A Roman citizen and his wife, of the middle class but evidently in good circumstances, had been for some time living a disorderly sinful existence; a life too common in that age of luxury and vice, when the popular Paganism was almost powerless as a teacher of the nobler life, or as an influence for good. Through some of those quiet, powerful influences of which we have spoken the wife became a Christian, and at once her old life became changed. Not so her husband. He went on in his evil ways, plunging even deeper into disgraceful sin, till at length the union became insupportable to the wife, who applied for a divorce. Then the wicked husband, seeking for the reasons which had influenced his wife, divined that she had become a Christian. The Pagan in that age, when fairly unprejudiced, swiftly appraised the purifying influence of Christianity. At once, if any marked change of life was apparent, if any open opposition to fashionable vice or sin was made, the true cause was forthwith suspected. So it happened in the case of the couple of Justin's story; the angry husband at once publicly charged his wife with being a Christian. The Christian woman, through interest or possibly bribes, contrived to delay the trial. In the meantime her husband, through some outside persuasion, dropped the charge against his wife; and having learned that one Ptolemaeus had been the instrument of her conversion, made him the object of accusation. This charge was pressed, and although no persecution was raging and no special desire just then existed to hunt down Christians, Ptolemaeus was tried and sentenced to death. A bystander in the court named Lucius, listening to the Roman Prefect's sentence, appealed to the judge, asking him how he could condemn to death a man convicted of no crime, simply because he had confessed himself a Christian—surely such a sentence was unworthy alike of a pious Emperor and the sacred Senate? The Prefect deigned no reply to the bold inquirer other than, "You, too, seem to be a Christian." "Yes," said Lucius, "I am," upon which open confession Lucius too was led to immediate capital punishment. A third Christian present in the court, fired by these examples, confessed his faith, and the three died together.
In the course of an argument on the strength of the attachment of Christians to their Master Jesus, and on the numbers and varieties found among the martyrs of his day, Justin beautifully remarks that "Socrates (whom Marcus revered) never had a disciple who was willing to die for him. Jesus, on the other hand, has a crowd of such devoted witnesses. Artisans, men and women drawn from the very dregs of the people; philosophers, too, and cultured men, who were all willing and ready to die for His doctrine. The power which strengthened these was not from human wisdom. It was the strength of God." These martyrs, to whom Justin was specially alluding, belonging to all sorts and conditions of men, won their crown, be it remembered, in a period of comparative stillness.
The events narrated had taken place in the reign of Antoninus Pius, when persecution was inactive. But when Pius passed away, the nineteen years (A. D. 161 to A. D. 180) of the reign of his successor, the noblest of the Pagan Emperors, proved nevertheless the hardest period of trial the followers of Jesus had as yet experienced. More Christian blood flowed under the rule of the Imperial Philosopher, whose "Thoughts" or "Meditations" reveal apparently one of the tenderest of consciences, than was shed in the sharp but comparatively brief persecutions of Nero and Domitian, or during the long reigns of Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius.
A new and harsher interpretation was given to the Imperial rescripts of Trajan and Hadrian, and to the still earlier precedents of Vespasian and the Flavian princes, in the difficult questions of procedure against accused Christians. No doubt, too, the spirit which prompted the government of Marcus to persecute, emanating as it did from so revered and admired an Emperor, not a little influenced Septimius Severus at the close of the century when he issued his sterner anti-Christian rescripts. From the accession of Marcus onwards, whenever an Emperor on the throne was not favorably inclined to the followers of Jesus, the persecution of the Christians assumed a more general as well as a more deadly aspect.
But the effect of these harsher measures, the result of this bitter opposition, was very different from what the Imperial Government contemplated. The general proscription exercised an enduring and powerful influence on the scattered communities. It had the effect of uniting the persecuted and harassed Christians more and ever more closely together, while it never seriously diminished the number of Christians; the new converts being far more numerous than the martyrs and the "lapsed." As the years passed on, the Church thus tried became through adversity more strong, more bravely patient.
Hitherto we have passed over all events, however interesting, connected with the secular chronicle of the Roman world, unless such events were closely connected with the history of Christianity. We have dismissed with only a very brief notice the careers of those great men who played the part of Masters of the World in the first and second centuries, excepting so far as their policy specially affected Christianity; as was the case with Augustus, who may be said to have first built up that Paganism which for so long made an effectual stand against the religion of Jesus, and with Hadrian, whose name will be ever connected with the last great Jewish war.
The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, however, demands a special study, since his policy introduces a new and specially unfriendly departure in the relations of the Roman world with the many Christian communities, which more or less affected Christianity until the hour of its final triumph about a century and a half after his accession.
We know much of the inner life of Marcus, since we possess a private diary of his, revealing to us the innermost thoughts which guided and influenced much of his public life. These "Thoughts," or "Meditations," are private memoranda, written often hastily, without arrangement, more often in the tent when he was with his aim than in the palace. As a kind of commentary on this "diary" we have some charming letters addressed to him by his friend and teacher Fronto, letters comparatively recently discovered. The intense "religiousness" of Marcus is striking. Here, face to face with Christianity, we have a Pagan who apparently believed in the Roman gods rehabilitated by the pious calculating care of Augustus. We will give just a few extracts from Fronto's correspondence. The teacher writes without fear to the absolute master of the world.
"Be careful not to play the Caesar—do not plunge into the waters of Imperial enticements; keep yourself simple, good, serious, the friend of justice, ready for all duties, kind. . . . honor the gods. Save men, life is but short. There is but one prize to be won in our earthly career, to have striven after a holy aim, and to have lived a life which has been useful to others. In all things be a follower of your adoptive father, Antoninus Pius. Call to mind his unresting love of work, his steady friendships. Think of his piety, never superstitious" (there was, perhaps, a warning here of a danger Fronto suspected); "so order your life that the end will find you as it found him, living in the peace of a good conscience." And again, "Love all men, yes, and from your heart. Be patient with the wicked man, be sorry for him. . . . You never can be quite sure if something hidden from you cannot be fairly urged as a plea for his conduct. And you—are you perfectly pure yourself? Even if you are free from the faults and errors you condemn, is it not perhaps from a vanity which preserves you from them?"
In Fronto's advice, in Marcus' "Thoughts" or "Meditations," there is much that reminds us of Christianity; unsuspected Christian influences are dimly perceptible. Indeed, there is very little in ancient philosophy or teaching at all comparable to or even resembling the lofty conceptions which we meet with continually in these "Thoughts" or "Meditations" and correspondence of Marcus. But everywhere, in "Meditations" and in letters alike, constant references to the gods meet us again and again. Yet the good Emperor had no fixed belief; at times he even seemed to doubt the very-existence of the gods whose names were ever on his lips. Longing intensely to believe in a guiding and directing Power, he would in his superstitious anxiety even turn from the ancient gods of Rome to the Eastern deities, with their corrupt and corrupting rites, with their occult mysteries; sympathizing with all religions save one. For towards Christianity he was ever cold, ever hostile: once only he alludes to it in his "Meditations," and then with accents of petulant scorn. It is difficult to guess the reasons for this hatred which the great, earnest, devout Emperor constantly showed to Christianity. The only explanation possible is that Marcus was trained in the school of Roman statesmanship, which regarded Christianity as utterly opposed to all the cherished traditions of Roman government, which taught that to be a Christian and at the same time a Roman was simply impossible, that the peculiar and exclusive tenets of the sect held them generally aloof from all offices in which they could serve the State, and play the part of good citizens; that they were in fact as citizens apvoi (useless). It does not seem as though the Emperor ever took the pains to examine the principles of a faith which he thoroughly distrusted and disliked, or ever really read a weighty document like the second "Apology" of Justin which was addressed to the Emperors, or that he ever came in contact with any really great Christian personality, who might have influenced him at least to give the Christian cause a fair and patient hearing.
In spite of his unfeigned devotion to the gods of the old religion, in spite of his earnest piety, which, it is evident, at times shaded into strange superstitious notions, Marcus had no definite views as to the "hereafter," he never alludes to elaborate gradations of rewards and punishments, such as we find in the magic pages of Augustus' poet, the loved Virgil, but dwells rather on the idea of "rest in God" for the soul, which, as Marcus understood it, seems to have involved the loss of all personal identity.
The modern traveller—as he stands on the Palatine in the midst of the vast and melancholy ruins of the palaces of the Caesars, and looks over the Roman Forum with its immemorial story, with its now shapeless piles of mighty stones, dominated by a few graceful columns, by a solitary arch or two, by a fragment here and there of a once mighty wall; as, painfully and wearily, he reconstructs in imagination the matchless group of sacred buildings once crowded together in that strange square or "place," for several centuries the center of the world and its eventful story—begins to comprehend something of the feelings of a Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who gazed day by day on this wondrous scene, still in its fair beauty, at the height perhaps of its superb magnificence. Those stately temples, with their golden roofs gleaming and flashing beneath the rays of an Italian sun, were the chief earthly symbols of the deities whom he had been taught to revere, as the gods of the men who had been makers of the proud Empire over which he ruled, as the inspirers of their great deeds, as the Providence of their fortunes, as the Immortals who loved Rome with a peculiar love. These gorgeous fanes were the representative sanctuaries of such deities as Jupiter of the Capitol, Mars the Avenger, Vesta with her sacred lire, Venus, Juno, Saturn, or the "great Twin Brethren" who fought for Rome in her day of trial. All that was great and glorious in Rome had sprung—he had been taught—from the fact of the mighty protection of these venerated Immortals. The past, the present, the future of the Empire was bound up in their cult. Not only Italy, but the whole of the enormous Roman world in the East and in the West more or less acknowledged their sovereignty and adored their changeless majesty. Only one strange sect stood aloof from the cosmopolitan crowd of worshippers at these awful shrines, a sect comparatively speaking of yesterday—for when his great predecessor Augustus reigned it existed not—a sect which claimed for the Being it worshipped not toleration but solitary supremacy. It was verily an enormous, a stupendous claim, for it involved regarding the great gods of Rome as shadows, as mere phantoms of the imagination. Well might one like the Emperor Marcus shudder at a claim, at an assertion which would seem to a true patriot Roman, whose heart was all aflame with national pride, to involve the most daring impiety, the most shocking blasphemy, the most tremendous risks for the future of his people. And this sect of yesterday, his ministers would tell him, was steadily increasing not only in Rome, where curious strange faiths abounded, but in all the provinces, in the home-lands of Italy, in Greece, in Syria, far away even in the Euphrates valley, in Egypt the seat of mysteries, in North Africa with its wealthy sea-cities, in the vast province of prosperous Gaul. They would tell him how this hateful sect of Christians was adding daily converts to its extraordinary and dangerous belief, converts drawn from the humblest traders, from freedmen and slaves—converts drawn too from the noblest houses of Rome, even from the families of those patricians whose exalted rank gave them perpetual access to the sovereign's inner circle. The Christians, when Marcus followed his adoptive father Pius on the throne, from their great numbers, their unity, their organization, had become a real power in the State, a power with which statesmen assuredly would have sooner or later to reckon, a power which threatened every day to grow more formidable.
And to the patriot Emperor, whose pious nature ever loved to dwell on the unseen protection of the Immortals, in whom he strove with intense earnestness to believe, to whom he prayed daily, hourly, these Christians and their aggressive uncompromising belief, for which, strangely enough, they were only too ready to die, were abhorrent. They constituted in his eyes an ever-present danger to Rome, her institutions, her ancient religion.
The Emperors he had followed on the throne, mighty sovereigns such as Vespasian and Trajan and Hadrian, noble princes, such as was his (adoptive) father Pius, had pronounced these Christians outlaws, had decided that the public confession of Christianity, without further investigation into the life of the accused, involved the punishment of death; but with the pronouncement, these Emperors had in some degree protected them from prosecution. In view of the present grave peril to the State, its most cherished institutions, and its ancient religion, the Imperial policy must be somewhat changed. The old rescripts of Trajan and his successors, which declared that the profession of Christianity incurred the penalty of death, might remain unaltered; but the Imperial mantle of protection which discouraged all persecution, hitherto spread over the communities of Christians, must be withdrawn. Henceforth the prosecution of Christians must not depend on some chance event or information: these dangerous sectaries must be actively sought for, hunted down, and on conviction summarily dealt with.
The following dry historical records of contemporary writers referring to and briefly chronicling the persecutions of Christians specially active in the days of Marcus, will be the justification of a portion at least of the foregoing reflections on his anti-Christian policy.
Celsus, in his writing "The True Word," circa A. D. 177-180, or possibly a very few years earlier, but still in the same reign, speaks of Christians as being sought out for execution. Melito, Bishop of Sardis, circa A. D. 170-171, writes of new edicts which directed that Christians were to be pursued. For such persecution no precedent, he stated, existed. We have already expressed the opinion that no new edicts were promulgated by Marcus Antoninus, but that the old procedure was still carried on in the matter of Christian prosecutions, only with greater harshness and with an evident bias against the religion of Jesus. The "new decree" alluded to by Melito would, if this conclusion be accepted, signify fresh instructions or explanations from the Emperor rather than legislation. Athenagoras, circa A. D. 177-180, dwells on the harrying, robbery, and bitter persecution of the Christians. Following the argument of Justin Martyr, he inveighs against the Christian being condemned simply because of the "Name," no further evidence of guilt being required. Theophilus of Antioch, circa A. D. 180, also tells us that Christians were sought out and hunted down like dogs.
"The Acts of Martyrs" and records of martyrdom of the period, some absolutely genuine, others translations from the original proces verbaux, with little or no addition, speak to the same effect. In the "Acts of S. Felicitas and her Sons," the genuineness of which will be briefly discussed when we come to speak of some of the martyrdoms of the reign, the anti-Christian policy of Marcus is sadly evident. In the famous account of the "Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne" in Gaul we read how the Christians of the great Gallic province were sought out. A similar inference must be drawn in the case of the martyrdom of Justin, related in the "Acta Justini."
It was this official hunting-down, this police seeking-out of Christians, which was the new feature in the policy of the Emperor Marcus towards the sect. It does not seem to have been ever practised in the reign of Antoninus Pius, and by Trajan and Hadrian it was explicitly forbidden, lest the rescripts should be misunderstood by over-zealous magistrates. The change introduced by Marcus Aurelius was complete and fundamental.