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

bemoan that fault of his. 12 To Ambrose, the emperor had recognised the
supremacy of the Church over temporal power.
In fact, the story was a very different one. It was the power of the emperor that
had defined the Church. It was Theodosius who had provided the legal
framework within which Christianity had been given dominance over paganism
and the Nicene Creed precedence within Christianity. This was recognised by his
Christian admirers from Ambrose onwards when they portrayed Theodosius as
the quintessentially orthodox emperor who had seen off both Christian heretics
and pagans. But Ambrose’s rewriting of history in favour of the Church obscures
the political reality. It was the emperor, not the bishops, who was seen by many
as representing God on earth. The military historian Vegetius, whose account of
military practice, the Epitoma rei militaris, was probably addressed to
Theodosius when he was in Italy between 388 and 391, records a recruit’s oath:
‘By God and Christ and the Holy Spirit and by the emperor’s majesty, which, by
God’s will, ought to be beloved and venerated by the human race... For when the
emperor receives the name of Augustus, faithful devotion must be given to him,
as if to a deity present in the flesh [sic] ... For the civilian or soldier serves God
when he loves faithfully him who reigns with God’s authority.’ 13
In contrast to the picture presented by Ambrose, Theodosius had not been
rigid in the way he imposed his faith. When he became aware of the resilience of
the ‘Arians’, he proposed a compromise solution that, if successful, would have
created a broader and more tolerant Church. He did try to rein in his more
fanatical officials. But he had also initiated a policy, radically different from any
that had gone before it, that allowed power to shift towards the ‘Catholic’
Church at the expense of other traditional beliefs - ‘Arian’ Christian, Jewish and
pagan. In the assessment of the historian R. Malcolm Errington, Theodosius
‘created a general climate of opinion within which highly-placed Christian
extremists, whether bishops or court officials, could act virtually
uncontrolled’. 14 Throughout the empire, debate that had been lively until 380
now withered and within Christian communities respect for authority was now
placed above intellectual freedom. The consequences for the future of European
thought would be immense.