A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

threatening Attila with death if he does not do so. (The truth is perhaps more
prosaic: Attila was running short of food, his army was weakened by disease and
he was aware that he was vulnerable to a counterattack at his rear.) In The
Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede (AD 731),
the first history of England, the Christian king Aethelfrith leads his army against
the city of Chester and slaughters some 1,200 pagan priests who assembled,
without weapons, to pray against him. ‘Thus’, wrote Bede, ‘the prophecy of the
holy bishop Augustine [the first missionary to England, not the theologian from
North Africa] was fulfilled, namely that those heretics would suffer the
vengeance of temporal death because they had despised the offer of everlasting
salvation.’ 11 This partisan history in which God intervenes at the right moment
to ensure the triumph, violent or otherwise, of Christianity entirely lacks the
psychological depth and intrinsic quality of the great historians of the classical
world. It reveals the dramatic changes to intellectual life brought about during
these years.
Theodosius died at Milan on 17 January 395, shortly after his victory at the
river Frigidus. His body was laid in state in the cathedral and Ambrose gave the
funeral oration in the presence of the ten-year-old Honorius, which claimed
Theodosius and his dynasty for the service of God. While traditionally the
funeral rites of an emperor would celebrate his military successes by reference to
the great victories of the Roman past, Ambrose evoked instead Old Testament
precedents such as the victory of Elisha over the Syrians in the Book of Kings.
The emperor’s campaign against paganism was highlighted. Theodosius had
‘imitated Jacob in uprooting the faithlessness of the usurpers, he put the images
of the pagans out of sight, for his faith put all the cults of the idols out of sight,
and consigned to oblivion all their religious celebrations’. He had defeated
Maximus and Eugenius, who had gone straight to hell, while he, Theodosius,
‘now enjoys perpetual light and lasting tranquillity... he has merited the
companionship of the saints’. Among these ‘saints’ were Gratian, Constantine
and his mother Helena (part of the oration dwells on the story of her finding of
the True Cross, the earliest account of this legend, and the placing of one of its
nails in the imperial diadem). Valentinian II gets no mention. A prominent place
was also given to the ceremony of penitence in the cathedral that Theodosius
underwent after the massacre at Thessalonika. ‘He wept publicly for his sin’,
Ambrose told his audience. ‘What private citizens are afraid to do, the emperor
was not ashamed to do ... nor did a day pass thereafter on which he did not