Millennium by Holland, Tom (diy ebook reader .TXT) 📗

in animal skins and torn to pieces by dogs, or else set on fire to serve the imperial gardens as torches. Some sixty years after Christ had departed from the sight of His disciples, a revelation of His return was granted to a disciple named John, a vision of the end of days, in which Rome appeared as a whore ‘drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs’, mounted upon a scarlet beast, and adorned with purple and gold — ‘and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations.” Great though she was, however, the doom of the whore was certain. Rome would fall, and deadly portents afflict mankind, and Satan, ‘the dragon, that ancient serpent’, escape his prison, until at last, in the final hour of reckoning, Christ would come again, and all the world be judged, and Satan and his followers be condemned to a pit of fire. And an angel, the same one who had shown John the revelation, warned him not to seal up the words of the prophecy vouchsafed to him, ‘For the hour is near.’

But the years slipped by, and Christ did not return. Time closed the eyes of the last man to have seen Him alive. His followers, denied a Second Coming, were obliged to adapt to a present still ruled by Caesar. Whore or not, Rome gave to them, as to all her subjects, the fruits of her world-spanning order. Across the empire, communities of Christians spread and flourished. Gradually, step by tentative step, a hierarchy was established capable of administering these infant churches, just as Jesus had given to Peter the charge to be shepherd of His sheep, so congregations entrusted themselves to ‘overseers’: ‘bishops’. ‘Pappas’, such men were called: affectionate Greek for ‘father’. Immersed as they were in the day-to-day running of their bishoprics, such men could hardly afford to stake all their trust in extravagant visions of apocalypse. Though they remained passionate in their hope of beholding Christ’s return in glory, they also had a responsibility to care for their flocks in the present. Quite as much as any pagan, many came to realise, they had good cause to appreciate the pax Romano.

Nor was justification for this perspective entirely lacking in Holy Scripture. St Paul — although martyred, as St Peter had been, in Rome – had advised the Church there, before his execution, that the structures of governance, even those of the very pagan empire itself, had been ‘instituted by God’. Indeed, it struck many students of the apostle that the Caesars had a more than incidental role to play in his vision of the end of days. Whereas St John had portrayed Rome as complicit with the Beast, that demon in human form who was destined, just before Christ’s return, to establish a tyranny of universal evil, seducing men and women everywhere by means of spectacular miracles, chilling their souls and dimming the Church beneath a tide of blood, Paul, it seemed, had cast the empire as precisely the opposite: the one bulwark capable of ‘restraining’ Antichrist. Yet such an interpretation did not entirely clear up the ambivalence with which most Christians still regarded Rome, and the prospect of her fall: for if the reign of Antichrist was self-evidently to be dreaded, then so also might it be welcomed, as heralding Christ’s return. ‘But of that or that hour,’ as Jesus Himself had admonished His disciples, ‘no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.’ That being so, many Church fathers concluded, it could hardly be reckoned a sin to hold Rome’s empire in their prayers.

For redeemed though they hoped to be, even the devoutest Christians were sinners still, fallen and fashioned out of dust. Until a new heaven and a new earth had been established upon the ruins of the old, and a new Jerusalem descended ‘out of heaven from God’,” the Church had no choice but to accommodate itself to the rule of a worldly power. Laws still had to be administered, cities governed, order preserved. Enemies of that order, lurking in dank and distant forests, or amid the sands of pitiless deserts, still had to be kept at bay. As the fourth century of the Christian era dawned, followers of the Prince of Peace were to be found even among the ranks of Caesar’s soldiers. Later ages would preserve the memory of Maurice, an Egyptian general stationed at the small town of Agaunum, in the Alps, who had commanded a legion entirely comprising of the faithful. Ordered to put to the sword a village of innocent fellow Christians, he had refused. And yet, as Maurice himself had made perfectly clear to the infuriated emperor, he would have found in an order to attack pagan enemies no cause for mutiny. ‘We are your soldiers, yes,’ he was said to have explained, ‘but we are also the soldiers of God. To you, we owe the dues of military service—but to Him the purity of our souls.’

The emperor, however, had remained toweringly unimpressed. He had ordered the mutineers’ execution. And so it was that Maurice and the entire legion under his command had won their martyrs’ crowns.

Ultimately, it seemed, obedience to both Christ and Caesar could not be reconciled.

A New Rome

But what if Caesar himself were a servant of Christ? Barely a decade after Maurice’s martyrdom, and even as persecution of the Church rose to fresh heights of ferocity, the hand of God was preparing to manifest itself in a wholly unexpected way. In ad 312 a pretender to the imperial title by the name of Constantine marched from Gaul — what is now France – across the Alps, and on towards Rome. The odds seemed stacked against him. Not only was he heavily outnumbered, but his enemies had already taken possession of the capital. One noon, however, looking to the heavens for inspiration,