Diocletianic Persecution - Legacy

Legacy

The Diocletianic persecution was ultimately unsuccessful. As one modern historian has put it, it was simply "too little and too late". Christians were never purged systematically in any part of the empire, and Christian evasion continually undermined the edicts' enforcement. Some bribed their way to freedom. The Christian Copres escaped on a technicality: To avoid sacrificing in court, he gave his brother power of attorney, and had him do it instead. Many simply fled. Eusebius, in his Vita Constantini, declared that "once more the fields and woods received the worshippers of God". To contemporary theologians, there was no sin in this behavior. Lactantius held that Christ himself had encouraged it, and Bishop Peter of Alexandria quoted Matthew 10:23 ("when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another") in support of the tactic.

The pagan crowd was more sympathetic to the Christians' sufferings than they had been in the past. Lactantius, Eusebius and Constantine write of revulsion at the excesses of the persecutors—Constantine of executioners "wearied out, and disgusted at the cruelties" they had committed. The fortitude of the martyrs in the face of death had earned the faith respectability in the past, though it may have won few converts. The thought of martyrdom, however, sustained Christians under trial and in prison, hardening their faith. Packaged with the promise of eternal life, martyrdom proved attractive for the growing segment of the pagan population which was, to quote Dodds, "in love with death". To use Tertullian's famous phrase, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.

By 324, Constantine, the Christian convert, ruled the entire empire alone. Christianity became the greatest beneficiary of imperial largesse. The persecutors had been routed. As the historian J. Liebeschuetz has written: "The final result of the Great Persecution provided a testimonial to the truth of Christianity which it could have won in no other way." After Constantine, the Christianization of the Roman empire would continue apace. Under Theodosius I (r. 378–95), Christianity became the state religion. By the 5th century, Christianity was the empire's predominant faith, and filled the same role paganism had at the end of the 3rd century. Because of the persecution, however, a number of Christian communities were riven between those who had complied with imperial authorities (traditores) and those who had refused. In Africa, the Donatists, who protested the election of the alleged traditor Caecilian to the bishopric of Carthage, continued to resist the authority of the central Church until after 411. The Melitians in Egypt left the Egyptian Church similarly divided.

In future generations, both Christians and pagans would look back on Diocletian as, in the words of theologian Henry Chadwick, "the embodiment of irrational ferocity". To medieval Christians, Diocletian was the most loathsome of all Roman emperors. From the 4th century on, Christians would describe the "Great" persecution of Diocletian's reign as a bloodbath. The Liber Pontificalis, a collection of biographies of the popes, alleges 17,000 martyrs within a single thirty-day period. In the 4th century, Christians created a "cult of martyrs" in homage to the fallen. Hagiographers portrayed a persecution far more extensive than the real one had been, and the Christians responsible for this cult were loose with the facts. Their "heroic age" of martyrs, or "Era of Martyrs", was held to begin with Diocletian's accession to the emperorship in 284, rather than 303, when persecutions actually began; they fabricated a large number of martyrs' tales (indeed, most surviving martyrs' tales are forgeries), exaggerated the facts in others, and embroidered true accounts with miraculous details. Of the surviving martyrs' acts, only those of Agnes, Sebastian, Felix and Adauctus, and Marcellinus and Peter are even remotely historical. These traditional accounts were first questioned in the Enlightenment, when Henry Dodwell, Voltaire, and, most famously, Edward Gibbon questioned traditional accounts of the Christian martyrs.

In the final chapter of the first volume of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Gibbon claims that Christians had greatly exaggerated the scale of the persecutions they suffered.

After the church had triumphed over all her enemies, the interest as well as vanity of the captives prompted them to magnify the merit of their respective suffering. A convenient distance of time and place gave an ample scope to the progress of fiction; and the frequent instances which might be alleged of holy martyrs, whose wounds had been instantly healed, whose strength had been renewed, and whose lost members had miraculously been restored, were extremely convenient for the purpose of removing every difficulty, and of silencing every objection. The most extravagant legends, as they conduced to the honour of the church, were applauded by the incredulous multitude, countenanced by the power of the clergy, and attested by the suspicious evidence of ecclesiastical history.

Throughout his history, Gibbon implies that the early Church undermined traditional Roman virtues, and thereby impaired the health of civil society. Some of Gibbon's contemporaries were displeased with the irreligious tendencies in his work, and attacked it in print. The contemporary classical scholar Richard Porson mocked Gibbon, writing that his humanity never slept, "unless when women are ravished, or the Christians persecuted".

Later historians, however, took Gibbon's emphases even further. As Marxist historian G.E.M. de Ste. Croix put it in 1954, "The so-called Great Persecution has been exaggerated in the Christian tradition to an extent which even Gibbon did not fully appreciate." In 1972, the ecclesiastical historian Hermann Dörries was embarrassed to admit to his colleagues that his sympathies lay with the Christians rather than their persecutors. W.H.C. Frend estimates that 3,000–3,500 Christians were killed in the persecution. Although the number of verifiably true martyrs' tales has fallen, and estimates of the total casualty rate have been reduced, some modern writers are less skeptical than Gibbon of the severity of the persecution. As the author Stephen Williams wrote in 1985, "even allowing a margin for invention, what remains is terrible enough. Unlike Gibbon, we live in an age which has experienced similar things, and knows how unsound is that civilised smile of incredulity at such reports. Things can be, have been, every bit as bad as our worst imaginings."