Imperial Cult (ancient Rome) - The Imperial Cult and Christianity

The Imperial Cult and Christianity

To pagan Romans a simple act of sacrifice, whether to ancestral gods under Decius or state gods under Diocletian, represented adherence to Roman tradition and loyalty to the pluralistic unity of Empire. Refusal was treason. Christians, however, identified "Hellenistic honours" as parodies of true "worship". Under the reign of Nero or Domitian, the author of the Book of Revelation represented Rome as the "Beast from the sea", Judaeo-Roman elites as the "Beast from the land" and the charagma (official Roman stamp) as a sign of the Beast. Some Christian thinkers perceived divine providence in the timing of Christ's birth, at the very beginning of the Empire that brought peace, laid paths for the spread of the Gospels, and destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple to punish the Jews for refusing the Christ. With the abatement of persecution Jerome could acknowledge Empire as a bulwark against evil but insist that "imperial honours" were contrary to Christian teaching.

As pontifex maximus Constantine I favoured the "Catholic Church of the Christians" against the Donatists because:

it is contrary to the divine law... that we should overlook such quarrels and contentions, whereby the Highest Divinity may perhaps be roused not only against the human race but also against myself, to whose care he has by his celestial will committed the government of all earthly things. Official letter from Constantine, dated 314 AD.

In this change of Imperial formula Constantine acknowledged responsibility to an earthly realm whose discord and conflict might arouse the ira deorum but recognised the power of the new Christian priestly hierarchy in determining what was auspicious or orthodox. Though unbaptised, Constantine had triumphed under the signum of the Christ (probably some form of Labarum as an adapted or re-interpreted legionary standard). He may have officially ended – or attempted to end – blood sacrifices to the genius of living emperors but his Imperial iconography and court ceremonial outstripped Diocletian's in their elevation of the Imperial hierarch to superhuman status. Constantine's permission for a new cult temple to himself and his family in Umbria is extant: the cult "should not be polluted by the deception of any contagious superstition". At the First Council of Nicaea Constantine united and re-founded the empire under an absolute head of state by divine dispensation and was honoured as the first Christian Imperial divus. On his death he was venerated and was held to have ascended to heaven. Philostorgius later criticised Christians who offered sacrifice at statues of the divus Constantine. His three sons re-divided their Imperial inheritance: Constantius II was an Arian – his brothers were Nicene.

Constantine's nephew Julian, Rome's last non-Christian emperor, rejected the "Galilean madness" of his upbringing for a synthesis of neo-Platonism, Stoic asceticism and universal solar cult and actively fostered religious and cultural pluralism. His restored Augustan form of principate, with himself as primus inter pares, ended with his death in 363, after which his reforms were reversed or abandoned. The Western emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus and, against the protests of the senate, removed the altar of Victoria (Victory) from the senate house and began the disestablishment of the Vestals. Theodosius I briefly re-united the Empire, officially adopted Nicene Christianity as the Imperial religion and ended official support for all other creeds and cults. He refused to restore Victoria to the senate-house, extinguished the sacred fire and vacated their temple yet accepted comparison with Hercules and Jupiter as a living divinity and commended his heirs to its overwhelmingly Hellenic senate in traditional Hellenic terms. He was the last emperor of both East and West. After his death the sundered Eastern and Western halves of Empire followed increasingly divergent paths: nevertheless both were Roman and both had emperors. Imperial ceremonial – notably the Imperial adventus or ceremony of arrival, which derived in greater part from the Triumph – was embedded within Roman culture, Church ceremony and the Gospels themselves.

The last Western divus was probably Libius Severus, who died in 465 AD. Very little is known about him. His Imperium was not recognised by his Eastern counterpart and he may have been a puppet-emperor of the Germanic general Ricimer. The ineffectiveness and eventual collapse of Western Imperium was partly replaced by the spiritual supremacy and political influence of the Roman Catholic Church, whose popes could anoint or excommunicate kings and emperors.

In the Eastern empire Christian orthodoxy became a prerequisite of Imperial accession – Anastasius signed a document attesting his obedience to its doctrine and practices. He is the last emperor known to be consecrated as divus on his death (518 AD). The title appears to have been abandoned on grounds of its spiritual impropriety but the consecration of Eastern emperors continued: they held power through divine ordinance and their rule was the manifestation of sacred power on earth. The adventus and the veneration of the Imperial image continued to provide analogies for devotional representations (Icons) of the heavenly hierarchy and the rituals of the orthodox Churches.