The Christian church
In the last decade of the 4th century the harsh laws against the perpetuation of the old pieties promulgated by Theodosius gave impetus and justification to waves of icon and temple destruction, especially in the East. It is, nonetheless, likely that a majority of the population was still non-Christian in 400, although less so in the cities and in the East and more so in rural and mountainous areas and the West. Efforts by the church to reach them were intermittent and lacked energy. Bishops generally expected rural magnates to do their job for them; and the church leadership was, in any case, of a social class that viewed the peasantry from a great distance and wanted to keep it that way. Except by such unusual figures as Martin of Tours or Marcellus of Apamea, little effort was made to convert people who were hard to reach. As always in antiquity, it was in the cities where changes occurred—with the exception of monasticism.
Only in the reign of Constantine, and about simultaneously in Egypt and Palestine, had monasticism, a religious movement whose followers lived as hermits and pursued a life of extreme asceticism, become more than the little-regarded choice of rare zealots. Near Gaza and in the desert along the eastern side of Jerusalem a number of tiny clusters of cells had been made from caves and taken as residence by ascetics, from whose fame and example that way of life later spread to many other corners of the Levant. The bishop of Jerusalem, Cyril, by mid-century could speak of “regiments of monks.” But it was in the desert on both sides of the Nile that similar ascetic experiments of much greater importance were made, by the hero of the movement, St. Anthony, and others. True monasticism, tempered only by weekly communal worship and organizing, established itself on Anthony’s model and under his inspiration in the first decade of the 4th century; it took root above all in the desert of Scete just west of the base of the Nile delta. Coenobitism, joint life in enclosed communities, was the model preferred by St. Pachomius around 330, vigorously directed and diffused by him until mid-century, when both he and Anthony died. Basil of Caesarea was to establish monastic communities in Cappadocia under the influence of what he saw in Egypt on his visit there in the year of Anthony’s death; and Athanasius was shortly to write a biography of that saint of enormous influence and to carry word of his life to Italy and Gaul during his own exile there. The biography was soon translated into Latin and inspired a scattering of experiments in asceticism or coenobitism in the West—in Vercellae in Italy, for example, by 330, and at Tours in the 370s under Martin’s direction. Tours became the first monastery in the West comparable to those in the East, but development subsequently was slow compared to the 10,000 or more monasteries founded in Egypt by ad 400.
The most distinct and well-reported phenomenon during the century after the conversion of Constantine was the continued religious rioting and harrying in the cities, both in all the major ones and in dozens of minor ones. The death toll exceeded the toll among Christians at the hands of pagans in earlier persecutions. It was rarely of Jews or pagans at the hands of Christians or of Christians at the hands of pagans, but ordinarily of Christians at each others’ hands in the course of sectarian strife. For a time, no one sect enjoyed a majority among Homoousians, Arians, Donatists, Meletians, and many others. Bishoprics were fiercely contested and appeals often made to armed coercion. The emperors had assumed the right to interfere and often did so; but under Theodosius, Pope Damasus and St. Ambrose reacted: the state was to restrict itself to furnishing the “secular arm,” while the church, in the name of evangelical ethics, claimed the right to judge the emperors, a policy that had grave implications for the future. The “caesaro-papism” of Constantius later gained adherents under the Byzantine emperors. In the meantime, the Goths had been converted to Arianism by Ulfilas during the period of Constantius and Valens, thus presaging conflicts that were to come after the great invasions. Orthodox missionaries had converted Osroëne, Armenia, and even some countries on the Red Sea.
The Christian literature of the 4th century is remarkable. Its first representative is Eusebius of Caesarea, a friend and panegyrist of Constantine and a church historian whose creation of a “political theology” sealed the union between the Christian emperor and the church. St. Athanasius wrote apologetic works and a life of St. Anthony. Also prominent were the great Cappadocians: St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. John Chrysostom of Antioch, the greatest preacher of his time. The Westerners, too, had great scholars and brilliant writers: St. Hilary of Poitiers, enemy of the Arians and of Constantius; St. Ambrose, administrator and pastor, whose excessive authority was imposed on Gratian and even on Theodosius; and St. Jerome, a desert monk and confessor of upper-class Roman ladies, a formidable polemicist who knew Greek and Hebrew and made the first faithful translation of the Old and New Testaments (the Vulgate) as well as of a chronicle of world history, which was a translation and continuation of the work of Eusebius. Finally, St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, was a great pastor, a vigorous controversialist, a sensitive and passionate writer (the Confessions), and the powerful theologian of The City of God. The century that developed these great minds cannot be considered decadent.