Chapter 18: Novatian, the Apostate Clergy and the Anti-Montanist Reaction

The breath of popular Christianity stirred up the pyres in which the faithful were consumed and which nourished the resentment of the crowds accustomed to pogroms and hunting for Jews. The imperial power would impute, according to custom, responsibility for the disorders not to the executioners, but the victims. The State’s persecutions triggered cunningly fomented lynchings, which indiscriminately struck all of the partisans of a God who was hostile to the other divinities.

In 202 — contrary to the wishes (or so one says) of his wife, Julia Mammea, who was favorable to the new religion — Septime Severe promulgated an edict that prohibited proselytism, whether Jewish or Christian. The death of the emperor suspended this repression; it was revived under Maximin, not without sporadically rekindling in the ordinary flames of the pogroms. One of them exploded in Cappadoce, at the instigation of the governor. The pogrom in Alexandria in 249 inspired increased rigor on the part of Dece. Thus he dreamed of restoring the ancient religious values and reinvogorating the unity of the Empire through the annihilation of the Jews and the Christians. A similar project revolved in the heads that the influential bishops kept on their shoulders. Little by little, a new doctrine was formed, a realistic and political Christianity: Catholicism.

Among the small number of victims of the trials begun in 250, the philosopher Origen, an adept of Montanist asceticism, died following prolonged torture.

A rescript by Valerian, promulgated against the Christians in 257, suggested not a repudiation of their cult, but sacrifices that needed to be made to the ancient gods. The edict of tolerance issued by Gallian reestablished the peace in 260. Nevertheless, the idea of a national religion pursued its course. Emperor Aurelian, penetrated by the desire to revive the brilliance of Rome, through the radiance of a universal belief, readjusted the old monotheism of the Sol invictus, the cult of the Sun King, for his own uses. Death prevented him from regilding a scepter that ecclesiastical propaganda would soon recuperate: it assimilated Jesus-Christ into the unconquered Sun. Under the ferule of the bishops who were stuck on their perogatives and on the look-out for all profitable compromises the austere Christianity of the Essenes, the Nazarenes, the Gnostics and the Marcionites, the New Prophecy prepared to prostitute itself devotedly to the State.

Starting with Galian’s edict, the exercise of Christianity was tolerated by the police and the governors. But the truce was brutally interrupted to create room for the last and bloodiest of the repressions, that of Diocletian, who from 303 to 305 pursued Christians and Manicheans in an equally crazy fury. Those who abjured — and they were many — ceased to be worried.

The edict of tolerance issued by Galere in 311 suffered a brief interruption under Maximin, but he was vanquished in 313 by Licinius, whose victory announced the triumph of Christianity as the religion of the State.

Eusebius of Cesarea, the incense-bearer of the emperor, who, through cunning and flattery, assured his credit with the court, had good reason to undertake the exaltation of the faith and the firmness of the martyrs, whom he estimated to number in the tens of thousands. Frend, a historian of the persecutions, enumerates between 2,500 and 3,000 victims in the East and 500 in the West over the course of more than a century.[282] (The catacombs of La Via Latina date from the years 320–350 or 350–370. Contrary to the assertions of the Saint Sulpician legends, no known Christian sarcophagus is anterior to the Third Century.) Priests and bishops in the vicinity of Rome thus abjured more willingly than the Easterners, who were in solidarity with the local churches, whose the hostility to Roman power would not soon be disarmed and would arouse Donatism and Arianism before provoking the schism of Byzantium.

Eusebius’s hyperbolic cult of the martyr makes one think of Stalin, who allied the glorification of the original Bolsheviks with the massacre of their survivors. Who worked more effectively for the triumph of Eusebius and the clerical bureaucracy, the net of which would be set down on the world? The lapsi, the apostates, the backsliders. As far as authentic Christianity, the party of the New Prophecy (the only holder of the palms of the martyrs), it would fall — under the name Montanism — into the trashcans of “heretical perversion.”

From the beginning of the Third Century, the tension grew between the fervent Christians, who were more attached to the law than to life, and the bishops, whose sense of reality preferred a renegade priest to a dead priest. Passing through torment, the renegade actually disposed — for the greatest glory of the Church — the leisure to exploit the work of the martyrs for edifying ends. This was an old argument in which principles ceded place to necessity. The delirious masochism of the Christians of the Second Century offered to moderate spirits, it is true, several reasons for re-seizing and re-proving many of the offerings to death. All right. But the “party of the bishops,” which was scorned by Hermas, Origen and Tertullian, employed itself — while Rome increased the amplitude of its repression — in the safeguarding of an ecclesiastical power that moderation made into a double blow by protecting itself from the furies of the police and by condemning an asceticism that was hardly compatible with Greco-Roman license.

Tertullian had already stigmatized the laxity of certain bishops and their taste for power. “Episcopatus semulatio schismatum mater est,” he wrote in his Adversus Valentinos: “The rivalry of bishops is the source of schisms.”

Callixte, one of the principal bishops of Rome between 217 and 222, drew the reprobation of another bishop, Hippolyte, sometimes identified as the author of the Elenchos. Accused of laxity because he accorded ordination to remarried priests (Tertullian and Montanism prohibited remarriage), Callixte entered into the category of heretic for the author of the Elenchos: “A Christian from another school sinned; this sin, whatever it was, was not imputed to him, they say, provided that the guilty one embraced the school of Callixte.” The school of Callixte — whom the historians take to be a pope and whose name was given to the catacombs — was, according to the Elenchos, in the hands of the henchmen of abortion: “It was then that the women, self-avowed Christians, began to make use of medications capable of preventing conception and bandages destined to make them have abortions.”[283]

Pseudo-Hippolyte did not hesitate to situate Callixte in the line of the Elchasaitism that had been born in the third year of Trajan’s rule (around 100); a certain Alcibiade possessed the Elchasaites’ sacred book. The heresy, as it appeared here and as would be confirmed later, at first circumscribed a category in which anything that opposed or contested the bishop’s authority was pushed in an opprobrious manner. Assassinated during a riot in 222, Callixte incurred the displeasure of the Elenchos for the “lax” politics that would open the doors of holiness for him. Even better, the dictionaries would consecrate Callixte the sixth Pope of Rome, although the papacy did not appear until the Seventh Century.