Martyrs, east and west

In his classic study of Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Stories of Faith & Fame) , p. 418 , W. H. C. Frend concludes that “The ultimate legacy of the persecutions was the lasting division of Christendom into its eastern and western parts.” In the east, a “more optimistic view of the destiny of man and his relations to his Maker” made it easy to incorporate the Emperor and his empire into Christianity: “The Emperor was accepted as the earthly manifestation of that Divine Reason which guided, instructed, chastened but would finally save the huan race.”

In the west, Augustinian skepticism prevailed and, more importantly for Frend, apocalypticism persisted. He points to the influence of Lactantius’s treatise on the death of the persecutors (p. 407) and remarks:

“Rejection of pagan society characteristic of the west did not easily fade. Quite the contrary, Lactantius in his Ciceronian prose could appeal to human reason as the basis of his criticism of the outworn pagan past, but the purpose of conversion was as much the avoidance of God’s anger as the attainment of justice. The historical theory of the De mortibus is based on the existence of manifest proofs that God takes vengeance on the persecutors of Christians. The background . . . is Apocalypse, and in the Great Persecution apocalyptic is reborn, if in the west it ever died. Divine ultio combining vengeance and correction, inherited from the historiography of the writers of Maccabees and from Josephus, found lasting place among the Christian historians of the west.”

The fact that the emperor was converted didn’t necessarily change this: In Lactantius, “Decius was described simply as ‘execrabile animal qui vexaret Ecclesiam.’ Lactantius’ expression would find its imitators among the western clergy, but now directed at the House of Constantine.” And Lactantius himself discouraged Christians from longing for political power “lest he inflict injury on anyone.” And he claimed that “it is always unlawful to put to death a man whom God willed to be a sacred animal.” As Frend comments, Tertullian’s de corona haunts even the Christian west.