Christianization of the Roman Empire and Romanization of the Christian Church

Constantine the Great (a.D. 311-37) set in motion a series of basic changes in both Roman government and the Christian Church. By the Edict of Milan in 313, Constantine proclaimed a policy of religious toleration.

During Constantines reign and those of his sons and successors, Christians secured numerous social and political advantages. By the end of the fourth cen­tury the Roman government, with the enthusiastic cooperation of Church au­thorities, was beginning to persecute pagans and other non-Christians, as well as Christians whose beliefs differed from the norms of an orthodoxy that was continuously engaged in defining itself. Early in the fifth century, Christianity became in law what it had for several generations been in fact: the official reli­gion of the Roman state.^[333]

The transformation of Christianity from a persecuted minority sect to a le­gally established majority religion was accompanied by institutional restructur­ing of the Church itself. With enlarged membership and expanded civic respon­sibilities, the Church’s leaders found it necessary to create an administrative system to match the new situation. Christian bishops became public function­aries, managers of sizeable assets, and controllers of increasing amounts of po­litical power.

At the same time, Roman government itself changed as the Church gradually became for practical purposes a new branch of the administrative system. By the end of the fourth century, provincial governors, and even the emperors themselves, could ignore the wishes and policies of Christian bishops only at their peril. The Church had become a power within the state, one whose inter­ests and aims government officials must accommodate, whether they agreed with them or not.

This dual process, whereby the Christian Church adapted itself to the appa­ratus of government, while civil administration modified its workings in order to assimilate the Church, involved momentous changes for both institutions. By A.D. 400, bishops were important, hard-working civil functionaries who at­tempted to act at the same time as spiritual leaders and spokesmen for the moral and religious values that the Church embodied. In their twin roles as government administrators and as religious authorities, bishops during the fourth and fifth centuries became burdened with power, laden with honors, and weighed down with responsibility. Lesser Church dignitaries, notably priests, deacons, and other clerics, also bore a share of the rights and duties that this transformation entailed.^[334]

As Christianity grew in power, wealth, and respectability, and as the aims of the Church became increasingly entwined with the interests of the Roman state, it is scarcely surprising that some committed believers found the new situation disquieting. The growth of Church power bothered sensitive souls; many idealistic Christians felt themselves called to live a more demanding form of religious life than that led by the majority of the faithful. Dissatisfaction with ordinary routines of religious observance led them to create ascetic and monas­tic movements that came to play major roles in the spiritual life of the late an­cient and early medieval world.

Christian asceticism involved renunciation of the pleasures and rewards of

ordinary human society. The ascetic voluntarily chose to live a life of solitude, prayer, and discipline in the belief that only through subduing his body’s yearn­ing for comfort and denying its cravings for pleasure could a Christian hope to save his soul. Chief among the disciplines of asceticism was the renunciation of sex in favor of celibacy. Rejecting carnal pleasures and the usual social expecta­tion that every free person would marry and reproduce, Christian ascetics dedicated themselves to total sexual abstinence. In place of children and family life, ascetics exalted the importance of virginity. Ascetics who considered vir­ginity a cardinal virtue often deprecated the role of sex and marriage in the Christian life. Monks and hermits frequently looked down on married persons as spiritually inferior to those who sacrificed sexual pleasure in order to gain spiritual merit. As for sex outside of marriage, the unanimous verdict of Chris­tian ascetics was that carnal transgressions inexorably doomed their perpetrators to the torments of Gehenna. The writings and teachings of monks and other ascetics did much to make Christians fearful and suspicious of sexuality.

At the same time, Christianity was experiencing a profound intellectual transformation. Christian writers in the first three centuries had begun the process of defining their religious doctrines; now Christian intellectuals were compelled to fashion more rigorous explications of their faith. Efforts to con­vince their Jewish and pagan rivals of the superiority of Christianity required them to present their religious views in terms to which rational persons could subscribe without blushing. Up to the beginning of the fourth century Chris­tians had not yet created a systematic theology; now they felt the need to devise coherent and Sophisticatedjustifications for their religious teachings in terms of current scientific and philosophical thought.

The Church Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries took up this task with zest and vigor. They were determined not only to justify the teachings of their religion to others, but also to demonstrate to their own satisfaction that Chris­tian beliefs accounted for the world and mankinds place in it more adequately than alternative explanatory systems. Out of the writings of such teachers as Sts. Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335-ca. 395) and John Chrysostom (ca. 344-407) in the Greek-speaking East and Sts. Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the Latin-speaking West, there would emerge by the sixth century a Christian world view that was far more systematic and rigorous than anything that had gone before. The theologizing of Christianity began in earnest during this pe­riod. This process required Christian intellectuals, among other things, to ac­count for the place of sex in the scheme of creation and to define the role that sexual relations ought to play in the Christian life.

All of these developments—the acceptance of Christianity by the Roman emperors, its incorporation into the governmental system, its growth in num­bers, wealth, and influence, the structural changes in its organization, the growth ofasceticism and monasticism, and the intellectual refinement of Chris­tian thought and belief—combined to produce basic changes in the ways that Christians dealt with sex and the place of sex in the Christian value system.