Notes on Church History

Constantine's Influence and Caesaropapism

Some individuals, such as the Bishop of Caesarea, considered Constantine's reign as the advent of the Christian kingdom. However, others were concerned about the alliance between the church and politics under Constantine's influence, questioning the spiritual motivations behind it. Later, Theodosius replaced Constantine and established Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. However, he had to divide the Empire into two parts because he could not manage it as a whole, with the Western part having its capital in Rome and the Eastern part in Constantinople. Eusebius was the bishop of Caesarea during this time.

Constantine's generosity came at the cost of caesaropapism, which meant monarchical control over the church. Constantine used the church to control Christians within his empire. Bishops became advisors to Constantine and followed his will, often because their positions depended on his favor, leading to a system of reciprocal favors.

Constantine granted religious and judicial powers to the bishops. He also influenced the priorities of the geographical areas they served. For instance, the Bishop of Constantinople, under Constantine, gained higher rank than other bishops in the East and rivaled the Bishop of Rome. However, this involvement of the church in worldly affairs led to a reaction, with some individuals retreating to the deserts to pursue a hermetic life, which led to the rise of monasticism.

Arianism and Constantine's Response

Arianism, founded by Arius, taught that Jesus was inferior to God the Father. Constantine intervened in this dispute, leading to the Council of Nicaea, which aimed to resolve the matter. Constantine also worked to weaken paganism by banning pagan sacrifices and confiscating wealth from temples to fund his building projects.

By the end of his reign, Constantine significantly weakened paganism to the point that Theodosius I eventually made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine initiated a campaign of evangelism, focusing on the conversion of Germanic Sarmatian tribes. He demanded conversion to Christianity in newly conquered territories and showed interest in Christians within the Persian Empire, offering them his protection. Byzantine emperors later followed this example.

The Rise of Monasticism

Monasticism is considered to have originated in the deserts of Egypt as a response to Constantine and the imperial church. Early hermits and monastics practiced asceticism, which involved spiritual training focused on communion with God through repentance, prayer, worship, fasting, abstinence, obedience, and work. The monastic movement flourished in the desert.

Ancient documents suggest that the term "monk' was casually used for people from a small Egyptian town. Before official monks, there were "monokoi" or solitaries living in Egyptian towns and villages. In the second century, Greek physician and philosopher Galen noted a Christian community where men and women refrained from cohabitation, practiced self-control in diet, and lived on the edges of towns or villages.

Monastic asceticism was a reaction to the growing worldliness of the church. Even before the union of church and empire, the church was becoming wealthy, leading to Christians becoming obsessed with wealth. Bishops held lucrative state offices, made fortunes, and lent money with interest. Monasticism was a response to this.

A devout minority believed that Christianity was going in the wrong direction and needed to return to spiritual matters. They thought the only way to do this was to renounce worldly possessions and retreat to the desert. Hermits and monks became a permanent expression of piety in Christian church history.

Saint Paul of Thebes, considered the first hermit and desert dweller, fled persecution and lived in a desert cave near an oasis, supposedly fed by ravens. He mentored Saint Anthony the Great, who is considered the founder of monasticism in church history. However, it might be more accurate to call him a renewer, and his iconic status is attributed to his biographer's literary skills.

Anthony was raised in a prosperous family in a Coptic-speaking village in Lower Egypt. After his parents died, he gave away his possessions, inspired by the Acts of the Apostles, and followed the example of an old man in a neighboring village who had practiced a solitary life from his youth, Saint Paul of Thebes. Anthony then went deeper into the desert to seek more solitude, working to weave baskets to earn money for his diet.

He lived on bread seasoned with salt and water and devoted himself to prayer, reciting memorized passages from the scriptures. He separated himself to combat temptation, learning that detachment magnifies sins and doubts. After about twenty years in the desert, he emerged, saying he had reached equilibrium and was ready to teach others. Anthony lived to be about 105 years old, and Athanasius wrote his biography shortly after his death.

Communal Monasticism

Although Anthony was the most famous monk, others followed. Pachomius organized monks into communities. Pachomius is remembered as the most enterprising symbol of communal or synagotic monasticism, in contrast to Anthony's anchoretic (solitary) monasticism. Pachomius's monks trained themselves in close-knit communities under a single head, following a regime of prayer, work, and meals.

Pachomius composed the first monastic rule, which was a collection of directives and precepts to govern their common life. They lived in a complex of buildings, including a kitchen, bakery, dining hall, infirmary, assembly hall, and church. The community was divided into houses with space for about forty monks, each with his own cell. They wore a habit, a sleeveless tunic belted at the waist with a hood and a goat skin cloak.

The community gathered in the early morning for communal prayer and spent the day weaving reeds into baskets while reading scripture, as well as performing manual labor such as baking, gardening, and sandal making. They gathered again in the evening for communal prayer. Eucharist was celebrated twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays. Meals were simple, but included cooked vegetables, cheese, olives, and fruit. Wednesdays and Fridays were fast days.

Synabetic monasticism is still present today in terms of monasteries and abbots. At this time, monasticism was still a lay movement outside the control of the official church leadership. Though it originated in Egypt, it took root in other parts of the world, especially Syria.

Monasticism in Syria and the Cappadocian Fathers

By the end of the fourth century, the deserts of Syria were filled with devout Christians. Notable figures included Simeon the Stylite and Euthatius. Saint Basil the Great, after studying in Constantinople, formed a small community of prayer with friends. He offered a theological rationale for the aesthetic life, which he called the philosophical life, and set up ways of training people to practice virtues. These moral exercises became the spiritual exercises of the monks, and served as the basis for Saint Benedict's rule.

Basil's rule, the Azkatan or the Book of Asceticism, stressed poverty, obedience, renunciation of worldly temptations, and self-abasement. Basil believed that the community should be closely associated with the church and that the bishop should have ultimate authority over the monastery. Basil the Great combined the spiritual with concerns for education and medical treatment for the poor.

Basil belonged to a large Christian family with roots in Cappadocia in Central Asia Minor. He was one of ten children, and two of his brothers became bishops: Peter of Savas and Gregory of Nyssa. It's his theological works that stood against the Arian controversy and these Christological controversies. The other two Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory bishop of Nonsonus and Gregory bishop of Gnesa, also influenced early monastic writings. All three Cappadocians helped defeat Arianism at the Council of Constantinople.

Basil's older sister, Macrina, had the greatest influence on him besides his parents. Macrina pioneered household aestheticism, which included prayer, a simple diet, and household works. From her efforts, a new kind of monasticism took shape that served the community, including caring for orphan girls. Due to Macrina's influence, Basil's views became more oriented toward society, and he criticized self-absorbed hermits. As bishop, he sought ways to adapt the monastic vision of devotion to God to life in the city, where the solitary life of prayer could be complemented by activity in the town or village. Macrina emerges as a key figure in the history of asceticism, reminding us that women were leaders and made their own distinctive contributions to the new Christian society from the beginning.

Women like Denime also became public figures admired for their virtue, piety, learning, and wisdom. There was a lot taking place in aestheticism and monasticism at this time.

Controversies: The Preeminence of Rome and Donatism

Rome was regarded as preeminent among all the different churches in this time. This was because the apostles Peter and Paul had both taught and died there, and the Roman church possessed a confession of faith accepted by some of the other churches in the West. Heretics were kept out of the Roman church more successfully than in Alexandria and Constantinople.

Thus, Rome became looked upon as the guardian of the unity of Christianity around an orthodox view. And Rome was also starting to become the political center of the empire. Callistus, the bishop of Rome from 217 to 222, established a precedence for the idea that the Roman bishop is above all other bishops. He proclaimed titles for himself such as "pontificus maximus," the highest pontiff, the bishop of bishops. Tertullian resisted those claims and insisted that all churches and bishops are equal. Callistus argued that the power of the keys was given to Peter as a representative of the bishops, and since Peter is generally conceded to be the first bishop of Rome, the monarchical episcopate, the sixth apostolic succession, hierarchy believed that Rome represents the church in the Roman hierarchy, believing that Rome represents the unity of the church universal, based upon that scripture related to Peter.

Callistus was pushing the idea of titles for the Roman bishop, and this power dynamic was at work in the church as it developed as an institution.

Donatism

In 311, a new bishop of Carthage, Sicilian, was appointed. However, one of the bishops who consecrated him was accused of handing over copies of the scripture to the Roman authorities during the persecution. Therefore, the consecration of Sicilian was declared invalid. Remember back to when you had the traitors and the handers of scriptures.

The large contingency of rigorous believers in North Africa refused to accept Sicilian as the bishop of Carthage because the person who consecrated him had allegedly been a Trenitor. After Sicilian refused to appear before a council of these hardline bishops, they elected a new bishop, Majoranas, who led a group of churches in North Africa into a formal schism. These rigid African bishops consecrated someone else as a rival to Sicilian, and soon afterward, he was succeeded by Donatis, from whom the schism is named. For a few years, there were two churches in North Africa: the Catholics and the Donatists. At the core of this controversy was not whether you were a traitor, but who had the ecclesial authority to administer the sacrament because baptisms and ordinations have to be performed by the clergy.

Donatists are refusing to approve the stringent creed, which led them to setting up their own rival church with their own rival bishops. Throughout the fourth century, efforts were made to reconcile the two groups, but the Donatists were fiercely loyal to their bishops, and the schism persisted up until the time of Augustine. The Donatists saw themselves as the true church, the community of the pure. That is, they rejected those contaminated Catholic churches. The core question raised by Donatism is: Is the church the community of the righteous, or is it a body made up of both the pure and impure?

The Circumcellions

A group called the Circumcilians arose around the time of the Donatist controversy. They were enthusiasts who spoke Punic or Berber and joined the ranks of the Donatists. They were called the agnosticide, the soldiers of Christ, but they were really gangsters. They used no swords, but they committed acts of violence. In Augustine's time, they took up swords and weapons and became their own militia for the Donatists. They frequently sought death, counting it as martyrdom, and they often flung themselves from precipices or into water or fire. Women also became part of the group eventually.

During controversies with the Catholics, the des bishops were not proud of these supporters, but yet they were glad to get sort of the strong arms of the circumcilians, if you will, with them.