Authority,Legitimacy and Sovereignty: Religion and Politics in the Roman Empire before Constantine

Authority, Empire and Legitimacy

Luke’s Gospel locates the beginning of Jesus’ ministry ‘in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius’ (Lk. 3:1). ¹ Tiberius was only the second Roman emperor, and the imperial order inaugurated by Augustus in 27 bce was then just over half a century old. Rome had a tradition of handling political emergencies by appointing a ‘dictator’ with absolute power, but it had an equally ancient aversion to kings holding such power permanently. Augustus had therefore been careful to present himself to the Romans as princeps, the ‘first citizen’ of what was still nominally a republic. Few of those under his authority were Roman citizens, however, and to the rest of his vast domain, he was imperator, a military title whose holder maintained supreme power as the head of a chain of command over legions deployed from Gaul to Egypt. While the office of princeps was carefully grounded in republican precedents and solemnized by Roman rituals, there seems at first to have been little concern to provide legitimation for this unprecedented exercise of command over the empire as a whole. As long as obedience was forthcoming, the reasons for it were unimportant, and as long as local authorities were clearly subordinate, customary ways of doing things might remain undisturbed.

Initially, then, Christians would have had few reasons to resist this political authority in principle or, indeed, to suppose that it posed particular problems for their faith. The career of Paul is remarkable in this respect, since he was, after all, traveling the Roman world proclaiming a Savior who had been crucified by a Roman governor. If the record in Acts is reliable, he was regularly roughed up by local authorities, and he made it to Rome only because his arrest put him securely in the custody of a Roman officer. Yet he writes: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment’ (Rom. 13:1-2).

The authorities, moreover, were multiple. Anyone traveling the Roman world would encounter a wide range of authorities—local, imperial, civil, military, religious and commercial—and all of them would have to be honored in their respective spheres. Dealing with diverse powers was part of the common experience of urban life in the Roman world, and it does not appear that the first Christians took it much differently from anyone else. Jesus’ clever evasion of a loaded political question in Matt. 22:15-22 —‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s’—served as an adequate principle for resolving potential conflicts.

Clearly, one of the distinctive features of Jesus’ teaching was his insistence on non-resistance to evil (Matt. 5:38-48). But to see non-resistance as primarily about relations to governing authority draws too heavily on later experiences of persecution. Jesus’ idea of non-resistance is a comprehensive way of life that applies equally to dealing with judges and tax collectors and to relations with importunate beggars, delinquent debtors, nasty neighbors and self-righteous moralists. Early Christians would need the admonition to ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Matt. 5:44) soon enough, but their conflicts were initially with other religious cultures and communities. The Roman authorities paid attention only when these controversies provoked local disorders. ²

All this changed quickly. Paul’s injunction to obey the authorities probably dates from the middle of the first century ce. Christians in Rome may have experienced some persecution during Paul’s lifetime, during the reign of Nero, but the authorities probably did not sharply distinguish them from Jews and other foreigners whose presence in the capital made them convenient targets of suspicion. A few decades later, the First Letter of Peter appears to follow Paul in telling readers to ‘accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him’ (2:13), but it is hard not to notice that these human authorities are no longer described as ‘instituted by God’, and the solemn pronouncement that they are there ‘to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right’ (2:14) is subtly contradicted by a cryptic reference to ‘Babylon’ (5:13), by which the author probably identifies the city of Rome with the place of exile for the Jewish people. The Romans, too, were coming to see the Christians as something more than an odd group occasionally involved in local disturbances. By 112 ce, a Roman governor was asking the Emperor how to deal with those accused of practicing Christianity, seemingly an offense in its own right, for which a self-avowed Christian might be executed. ³

We should not suppose that this heightened opposition was simply the result of Christianity’s increased visibility. The church had grown rapidly and spread widely, but the empire was changing, too. Imperial authority rested initially on conquest but was maintained by power. The first emperors were very concerned to establish their legitimacy among the Roman people in relation to Roman law, but seem to have cared little how their power was understood in the farther reaches of the empire, provided that obedience was forthcoming. There was no reason for the empire to look too closely into the beliefs of those who behaved themselves, and as Paul’s Letter to the Romans pointed out, no reason for Christians to raise questions of conscience about their deference to Roman authority.

The ideological conflict that defined the relationship between church and empire over the next two centuries reflected developments that changed the Roman emperor from an authority legitimated for Romans by Roman law and imposed on others by imperial power to a universal authority, the sole source of law and political legitimacy. Rome, in short, began to develop something like a claim to sovereignty in the modern sense. As this understanding of imperial power developed, it came into sharp conflict with Christian and Jewish ideas about the universal rule of God; and for Christians, especially, this conflict in turn shaped their ideas about the meaning of God’s rule in this world, as well as their eschatological hopes for the world to come.

The development of both Roman and Christian thought on these matters is difficult to follow in detail, partly because the composition of the canonical Christian scriptures ended just as the period of persecution was beginning. In 112 ce, Christianity was a minor annoyance for the Roman authorities, just beginning to be seen as the source of troubling ideas as well as the refuge of occasional troublemakers. Two centuries later, the church had become a major force in society, thought and culture, and it was on the verge of taking control of the very sources of political legitimacy that had been arrayed against it. We know less than we might like about the details of this transformation, but we can trace broad themes through both Roman law and the literature of Christian apologetics and Christian martyrdom. The question of how extensive the persecution of Christians actually was remains a particular point in question, with the current scholarly consensus suggesting limited, local and sporadic violence. But the ideological opposition between church and empire was real and constant through these centuries, and its outcome shaped the future of Christian Europe.

Monarch and Monotheism

The second and third centuries saw not only the rapid growth of Christianity, but extensive development of Roman claims for the universal significance of the emperor and the empire he sustained. In addition to the titles of imperator and princeps, Augustus and his successors took on the office of pontifex maximus. The legitimacy it conferred was an answer to those Romans who saw the imperial office as a dangerous innovation.

This Roman assertion of the emperor’s religious significance did not go unnoticed in the wider empire. The pluralism of the ancient world was not a modern secular indifference but the wary polytheism of those who know themselves subject to multiple, competing, somewhat inscrutable powers. All of these powers need to be propitiated, and the delicate balance between them is tied up not only with personal safety, but also with personal salvation and cosmic order. Recognized authorities are part of a settlement that is at once political and religious.

Especially in the early days of the empire, all kinds of people, even Christians and Jews, might participate in this ‘cultural polytheism’. ⁴ It is not surprising that bishops and teachers were more insistent on a principled separation from ordinary religious practices than the laity, but even among Christian leaders, we can see the withdrawal from customary social practices becoming more emphatic with the passage of time. Paul, for example, suggests that Christians could eat meat without inquiring too closely into its origins, though they should refuse it if their host tells them that it has been offered in sacrifice (1 Cor. 10:25-27). Only later did a more rigorous rejection of table fellowship with pagans become a common Christian practice. Even much later, when imperial authorities required that everyone offer sacrifices for the empire, some Christians in Alexandria and Carthage apparently thought they could resolve the issue with a perfunctory public conformity, much to the distress of their bishops. ⁵

If the bishops were distressed, the imperial authorities were by then likewise unwilling to admit exceptions. The Romans had begun early to accord divine honors to deceased emperors, and as the political and religious significance of the emperor grew, the claims of the office extended more widely. When Decius made sacrifice a legal requirement in 250 ce, he was giving expression to a general suspicion that was already directed against Christians, or anyone else who declined to participate. After 274 ce, when Aurelian associated himself with the worship of the Unconquered Sun (Sol invictus), the universal authority of the emperor acquired a solar symbolism that was not very different from that which Constantine used to mark his adherence to Christian monotheism.

We must take care not to view these developments through a modern lens. It is easy to see the imperial cult as a propaganda exercise. It would be more helpful to see it as a religious movement, concerned with theology rather than with theatrical effects. The imperial cult was interpreted against the wider background of polytheistic religious practices, but this did not dilute its importance. It was a sign that the imperial cult was religiously serious.

As the Romans saw their world, it had to be so. The emperors were aware from the beginning of the fragility of their system. Communications were difficult, the loyalty of soldiers and subject peoples was uncertain, and the whole thing rested on an agricultural economic base that was poorly understood and subject to natural and human interruptions. For the Roman elites, moreover, the larger meaning of these structural problems was interpreted not in political or economic terms, but in a Stoic cosmological framework in which the empire in all its power was but a dim replica of the glories of the past, at best a Silver Age in contrast to a previous Age of Gold. Future decline was inevitable and present security could be preserved only by a pious attunement with the universe, such as might be enacted in the imperial cult.

[B]oth for the people and, in the end, for the Emperors themselves, there was a real fear of the abandonment of the ancient gods and of the loss of the protection which they extended to the cities, and the Empire as a whole … The persecutions cannot be explained in political terms, as demands for formal displays of loyalism. They were motivated by feelings which we must call religious; among those religious feelings the worship of the Emperor played a real, but a minor part. The most important conception which lay behind the persecutions was precisely the one which was to be the foundation of the Christian Empire: that the world was sustained, and the earthly government of it granted, by divine favour. ⁶

A movement that refused to participate in these observances had to be viewed as a real threat. The Christians’ indifference to the risks to which their impiety exposed the whole society earned the epithet that was frequently given to them: ‘haters of humanity’. ⁷

Martyrdom and Legitimacy

The Christians, of course, saw their disobedience to the edicts that required participation in the imperial cult in different terms. They were witnesses (martures) to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (Acts 3), and their willingness to suffer for their adherence to the witness gave evidence of the truth of their beliefs.

The risk of persecution was real, and some of these martures became, indeed, Christian martyrs, who died for their adherence to their faith. Their number is unknown, but their stories made a deep impression on the later church and on some of their contemporaries. The church not only survived these persecutions. It grew. In addition, the Roman Empire lacked the resources to drive the whole movement underground or wipe out its leadership entirely. Between the episodes of persecution, Christians proclaimed their faith openly, and even when their bishops were condemned to death, the faithful accompanied them on their road to martyrdom to attend to their needs and carry their letters to other churches. ⁸ Congregations in different cities remained in communication with each other, and their leaders developed a system of organization that could share information and coordinate action quite as effectively as their imperial adversaries. The two structures and even to some extent the two belief systems began to mirror each other. What emerged at the beginning of the third century, then, were two rival movements, each of them both religious and political, struggling for the soul of the empire. One or the other, Christ or Caesar, must prevail. Both sides agreed on that.

The contest was more evenly balanced than we might at first suppose. Power favored the emperor, who could coerce and, if need be, kill. But the church had its own way to deal with power. Jesus’ teaching of non-resistance now, in the time of martyrdom, provides a way to deal not with persistent beggars, bullying soldiers and aggressive neighbors, but with an imperial power that cannot, on any realistic calculus, be defeated. The point is not to seize power, but to suffer under it; not to struggle for the faith, but to die for it. ⁹ The emperor’s power to kill becomes a weapon in the hands of his victims.

The figure of the martyr that emerges during this period becomes a focal point of Christian faith and Christian aspiration. The courage and suffering of men and, especially, women who face horrible deaths without complaint are described in vivid detail, perhaps by eyewitnesses of the events. The canonical scriptures are, by comparison, very discreet about suffering for God, apart from the narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion. Peter is beaten for preaching about the resurrection, and Stephen is stoned to death by a mob. Paul narrowly escapes death at the hands of another mob by the intervention of Roman soldiers, who then illegally flog him because they do not know that he is a Roman citizen. Thus far, the power of the authorities looks pretty formidable, but the canonical narrative stops before Peter and Paul are actually killed in Rome. Even in the Revelation to John, those who have been slain for Christ are anonymous souls who cry out from under the heavenly altar (Rev. 6:9-10), not individuals with their own identities. Once the systematic persecution of Christians is underway, however, the story of Christianity is the story of exemplary individuals who willingly embrace suffering and death, rather than compromise with the demands of the emperor’s representatives. Their deaths are not the unfortunate outcome of a failed resistance effort. They do not fight against Rome, nor do they expect their deaths to inspire others to fight. They win the contest by losing it. Nothing that the authorities could promise or threaten them with is worth what they already have. The attraction of martyrdom became so powerful that it became necessary for Christian leaders to discourage those who courted it by deliberately provoking the persecutors. ¹⁰ Just as martyrdom cannot be a by-product of active resistance to authority, so it cannot be seized by willfully making oneself a victim. It can only be received as a gift.

This Christian readiness to suffer at the hands of hostile powers becomes a paradigm for the Christian life in subsequent centuries. Indeed, at intervals it becomes the paradigm, reducing all other forms of discipleship to pale imitations of its uncompromising non-resistance. Each missionary enterprise includes its stories of martyrs who died spreading the faith. Conflicts between Christians, no less than conflicts against them, produce their narratives of martyrdom, as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs kept alive the stories of Protestants who died for their faith during the struggles of the Reformation. The paradigm of Christian non-resistance thus applies against all kinds of authority, religious and political. The true Christian on this view prefers martyrdom to active resistance and passive withdrawal to participation in a corrupt system of political authority. Christian non-resistance also becomes associated with the authority of conscience against powers that would impose a religious or political orthodoxy against the judgement of the individual. Those developments have significance both for Christianity and for the wider world of politics, but in relation to the conflicts of the second and third centuries, they lie far in the future.

What is important for our present inquiry is that this non-resistant approach arose in a context where the opposing powers were rather closely balanced, despite the overwhelming physical force in the empire’s hands. Martyrdom requires an opposing power that makes moral and religious claims for itself, rather than merely asserting its power. Otherwise, the confrontation produces corpses, not martyrs. The possibility discerned by the early church was a narrow one, indeed, depending as it does on non-resistance before an authority that thinks itself too good and too just to kill simply to assert its own power. The martyrs called into question the legitimacy that the imperial cult was supposed to embody, and the result was a moral and political vacuum that could be filled from the Christian side. The witness of the martyrs provided legitimacy for a new center of authority, separate from the authority of the emperor, but fully a part of Roman society.

Once again, we can understand the outcome only by remembering that this was a context very different from our own. In a modern totalitarian state, there can be no public alternative to the prevailing ideology and no public argument about its claims. But in the Roman Empire, we find a vigorous literature of Christian apologetics directed against the authorities who staged the persecutions. Tertullian’s Apology, ¹¹ written around 197 ce, may serve as an example of the genre, although Tertullian himself later abandoned mainstream Christianity for a more charismatic and ascetic version of the faith.

Tertullian addresses his text directly to the Roman magistrates who were conducting the persecution of Christians at the end of the second century. It takes the form of a legal defense, as befits a trained orator who was probably also a lawyer. But the argument is not primarily a legal one. The evidence for the martyrs and against their persecutors is found in the beliefs to which their lives were witness. Christians are willing and able to suffer because they know the one true God, and ‘all of us are his, whether we would wish it or not’. ¹² In effect, Tertullian’s case against persecution, which was also made by other apologists, is this: A sober assessment of the truth claims of the pagans and the Christians shows that the order of the universe and the peace of the empire are sustained, not by the Romans with their rites, but by the Christians with their prayers to the one true God. ¹³ Tertullian’s main argument is that the beliefs of the pagans are wrong and the beliefs of the Christians are right. What clinches the case are the sufferings of the martyrs.

What Tertullian expected, no less than the Roman magistrates, was that in this religious argument, one side or the other would prevail. In Tertullian’s view, the pagans might hold on by sheer power for a time, but because the soul is in its very nature Christian, ¹⁴ power must eventually pass to a ruler who is himself persuaded of the Christian truth.

The practical contradictions in the role of a Christian Caesar no doubt seemed insurmountable to Tertullian, but by the beginning of the fourth century, when Constantine began to surround himself with Christian advisors and symbols, it no doubt seemed more plausible. But the outcomes still seemed limited, precisely by the theological character of the argument, to the triumph of one side or the other. This was not the sort of conflict that could be settled by an agreement to live under secular authority in a loose framework of religious pluralism. Too much was at stake for both sides for that kind of compromise. It was not so much that religious claims had invaded the sphere of politics as that there was no separate sphere of politics that could be insulated from religion. So once universal claims were made—and they were made both by the church and by the empire—it seemed that they would have to be settled comprehensively.

Two Authorities

Because both sides shared this understanding of the debate, no one quite expected what actually happened. During the course of the persecutions, Christians seized the initiative institutionally, as well as theologically. Alongside a defense of their faith in philosophical terms that would have made sense to educated Romans, ¹⁵ Christians developed a network of disciplined and interconnected communities that sustained the faithful against official, and sometimes popular, opposition. Their churches were not local cultic communities or secretive societies of gnostic initiates. They organized and disciplined Christian life as a whole, encouraging persecuted fellow Christians in other places and providing for both material and spiritual needs among the faithful in major urban centers. They developed a generally accepted canon of scripture that provided normative guidance for the Christian life. It was also during this time that the leadership role of the bishop came to be defined, along with the subsidiary tasks of presbyters and deacons—an effective, logical and hierarchical division of labor that survives in some form in many Christian communities to this day. ¹⁶

For all their desire to distinguish themselves from the surrounding culture, the Christians proved themselves Romans in several ways. They became philosophers as well as prophets, and they had the same genius for organization and communication that shaped the imperial system. ¹⁷ The empire, though powerful, was materially overextended from the beginning and its rulers were always conscious of its fragility. Rome lacked the resources to prevent the spread of Christianity and found itself increasingly in need of the kind of theological legitimacy that Christianity, despite its powerlessness, seemed to possess. Increasingly, the two great opposing forces became mirror images, each one shaping the other—sometimes consciously, sometimes through the culture that they continued to share while they struggled for control of it.

Even in the worst times of persecution, Christians were confident of the outcome. If this was initially expressed in an apocalyptic expectation that Christ would return to establish his own rule in place of the Beast with the (hint) seven heads, an optimistic Christian at the beginning of the fourth century might have seen a Christian emperor as a more immediate way to the fulfillment of God’s promise. The structure and forms of authority in the empire were so much like those of the church that the system seemed made for a Christian ruler who would assume authority in the church, placing its teaching and administration under an emperor who, if not quite a god, would at least have a special relationship to the one true God.

Perhaps Constantine, the first Christian emperor, imagined something like that. Certainly he and many of his successors, from Rome to Byzantium and beyond, often acted as if that was how they understood things. Even the authorities of the church at first accorded Constantine a quasi-apostolic status and accepted his right to convene church councils. ¹⁸ But Constantine and his successors discovered that the alternative system of belief and authority that had been created during the time of persecution could not be easily set aside, even by theologians such as Eusebius of Caesarea, who became the apologist of Christian empire as Tertullian had been the apologist of Christian non-resistance. The Christian bishops as a body were not prepared to surrender their organizational achievements and their authority to imperial administration.

So without precedent and without a fully developed theology or legal theory to give direction to events, two distinct systems of authority achieved legitimacy within the Roman Empire. If there was no distinction between civil and religious authority at the beginning of the era of persecutions, that distinction certainly existed at its close. Not even a Christian emperor could render it superfluous. By the close of the fifth century ce, the arrangement had taken on the aura of a principled order of things. In a famous letter dating from 494 ce, Gelasius I, bishop of Rome, undertook to explain the matter to the emperor in Constantinople: ‘There are two, august Emperor, by which this world is governed, the sacred authority [auctoritas]of priests and the royal power [potestas]’. ¹⁹

These powers were not conceived on either side as antagonists. They were complementary parts of a larger system of authority established by God. But precisely because both powers identified themselves with this cosmic order, each was concerned to define their relationships in ways that gave itself the upper hand. Gelasius in his letter goes on to argue that the authority of the priest is superior, since priests must render account even for kings at the divine judgement. ‘Indeed, you know, most clement Son, that though you have received the power to govern mankind, nonetheless, you must bow your head to those who have charge of divine affairs and must seek from them the means of your salvation.’ ²⁰ Byzantine emperors and European kings, despite this instruction, regularly sought to appoint bishops and settle theological questions. The confrontations between the representatives of these two authorities have provided us with historical dramas set in times and places down to the Protestant Reformation and beyond, but it was seldom apparent to the participants that the issues internal to Christian theology about which they argued were related to a structure that had emerged from a very different kind of theological conflict between Christian bishops and Roman magistrates.

Considering that it satisfied the ambitions of neither popes nor emperors, the concept of two powers representing different sources of authority and legitimacy in a single social and political order proved surprisingly durable. It survived the disintegration of the Roman Empire and provided a starting point for the ideal of symphonia, the harmony of civil and religious authority that plays an important role in Orthodox political theology down to the present. ²¹ In Western Europe, the Gelasian duo sunt provided a mediaeval distinction between royal and papal power that became the starting point for a fully developed Christian idea of kingship. ²² This, in turn, made way for an idea of the modern state that limits sovereignty by rights and makes a distinction between state and civil society. More broadly, the idea of two legitimate authorities with different kinds of authority in a single political order allowed the emergence of conciliar theories of governance in the church ²³ and the modern distinction between legislative and executive power.

Through these later developments, the separation and balance of powers that was the outcome of the martyrs’ struggle against the empire provided a formula for constitutional stability that the Roman Empire never achieved by investing sovereignty in a single individual. It is plausible, then, for those who have inherited these constitutional ideals to see separate and balanced powers, divided government, and a distinction between state and civil society as in themselves criteria of legitimacy for a political system. Constitutions that have these measures deserve recognition and support. Those that lack them must be called into question. Sovereign authority in a single person or party or a religious law that cannot be changed by a representative legislature somehow defies the accumulated political wisdom of all the centuries that have elapsed since the martyrs challenged the legitimacy of Rome. Or so it seems to those whose experience of law and government has been shaped by this history and these ideals.

Kingdoms and Caliphates

As a starting point for comparative study, however, it is important to remember that even in its modern, secular forms, this is a Western account of political legitimacy that began during a particular time in the development of Christianity. In slightly different circumstances, imperial authority might have crushed the church of the martyrs, or the church might have withdrawn from the society in which it was trying to claim a place. Indeed, the church has done this periodically since the time of the martyrs, whenever its social position became too desperate or too comfortable. ²⁴

Islam from the outset undertook the very different task of forming a whole social, political and religious order that would break decisively with tribal loyalties, religious traditions, and the remnants of the empires that preceded it. As Anver Emon points out, the guide to this comprehensive reordering of social life was divine law, conceived as God’s will. ²⁵ Theological voluntarism sets the terms of law independently of natural order and limits the scope of rational interpretation. But it also establishes an undeniable difference between the authority of the law made by God and the authority of the ruler who administers it. The caliph wields power and his decrees deserve respect, but the fons et origio of law he cannot be.

The Islamic martyrs, like their Christian counterparts, are a witness (shahῑd) but in the formation of the pre-modern Islamic community, what they bear witness to is the unity of the law against those who would usurp its authority and divide the community. Unlike their Christian counterparts, therefore, they are often engaged in a struggle to wrest political authority from their opponents, whether these are Muslims with a different account of divine law and political authority or non-Muslims who oppress their Muslim subjects.

The witness of the martyrs and the writings of the apologists created a space for Christianity within the political order of the Roman Empire, even against the hostility of imperial power. The resulting ideas of divided power and multiple sources of legitimacy provide a starting point for thinking theologically about politics even today, when Christian commitments are diverse and secular powers may be hostile or indifferent. But where the political task is to create a political order with legitimate leadership that can unify a fragmented and disordered society, the distinction between sacred and secular authority is an answer to a question that has not been asked. That was often the circumstance in the first centuries of Islam, as it has often been since in the Islamic world in the aftermath of dynastic rivalries, political corruption or colonial exploitation. If comparative studies of pre-modern Islamic and Christian political thought have anything to contribute to the urgent contemporary questions of political legitimacy, it begins with this detailed understanding of the contexts from which modern political principles emerged and a more precise formulation of the questions they were designed to answer.