The agreement shifted
Christianity from being an illicit, persecuted sect to being a welcome—and soon
dominant—religion of the Roman Empire.
David F. Wright is dean
of the faculty of divinity at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the
advisory board of Christian History.
It came out of a two-man
summit meeting in the northern Italian city of Milan in January 313. The two
men were the Roman emperors—Constantine ruling the West and Licinius the East. They met “under happy auspices,” as their joint
communiqué put it. After years of power struggles for the imperial purple, the
Roman world enjoyed a degree of peace. And after the failure of the Great
Persecution (initiated by the emperors Diocletian and Galerius in 303–304), the
Christian church had begun to recover its stability. Constantine and Licinius
turned their minds to matters affecting the general welfare of the Empire.
They determined first of
all to attend to “the reverence paid to the Divinity.” This required a
guarantee of full religious freedom to the Christians, setting them on a par
with those who followed other religions. The so-called Edict of Milan provided
for this. It marks the Roman Empire’s final abandonment of the policies of persecution
of Christians. The age of the martyrs was at an end. The transition to the era
of the “Christian Empire” had begun.
Provisions of the “Edict”
The conference at Milan
undoubtedly resulted in a concordat. But its terms are known to us only from a rescript
issued six months later by Licinius.
(This rescript was sent
from his capital in Nicomedia—now Izmit in Turkey, just east of the Bosporus—to
the governor of the nearby province of Bithynia. The Christian writer
Lactantius has preserved its original Latin, while the church historian
Eusebius gives it in Greek. )
Here are the rescript’s
main provisions:
“Our purpose is to grant both to the Christians and to all others
full authority to follow whatever worship each person has desired, whereby
whatsoever Divinity dwells in heaven may be benevolent and propitious to us,
and to all who are placed under our authority. Therefore we thought it salutary
and most proper to establish our purpose that no person whatever should be
refused complete toleration, who has given up his mind either to the cult of
the Christians or to the religion which he personally feels best suited to
himself. It is our pleasure to abolish all conditions whatever which were
embodied in former orders directed to your office about the Christians, that
every one of those who have a common wish to follow the religion of the
Christians may from this moment freely and unconditionally proceed to observe
the same without any annoyance or disquiet.”
The rescript goes out of
its way to ensure evenhanded treatment for all: “no diminution must be made
from the honor of any religion. ” But the strongly pro-Christian flavor is
tasted in the instructions to restore to the Christians all property that had
been appropriated during the persecution. This applied to property belonging to
individual Christians as well as to churches—and without regard for the present
owners, who could apply to the state for compensation.
In implementing these
rulings the governor was to give the Christians his “most effective
intervention,” making sure the terms were published to all.
These actions, Constantine
and Licinius concluded, would ensure that “the Divine favor toward us, which we
have already experienced in so many affairs, shall continue for all time to
give us prosperity and success, together with happiness for the state.”
Significance of the
“Edict”
In reality, the subjects of
Constantine in the Western Empire already enjoyed the toleration and property
rights spelled out in this rescript. Nevertheless, the “Edict’s” significance
stands unchallenged (even though we must recognize the inaccuracy of its
traditional title, since it was not an edict).
Only a
few months earlier Constantine had become the first Roman emperor to throw in
his lot with the Christians. Although the Milan summit decreed only strict
parity for Christians alongside other religionists, hindsight reads between the
lines and discerns the hint of things to come. Before the end of the fourth
century, orthodox Christianity had become the sole official religion of the
Roman Empire.
For
Christianity, the changes were momentous. To this day state churches perpetuate
the alignment between Christianity and the Empire worked out in the fourth
century. Meanwhile, Christians in independent, “free” churches have long
regarded the Constantinian revolution as little short of the fall of
Christianity, almost as calamitous as the fall of Adam and Eve.
One
thing is clear: The unqualified toleration for all decreed at Milan did not
last long, nor has it often prevailed in later centuries. The rescript’s noble
sentiments surely warrant our attention today for that reason alone.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
