Throughout the early 320s, as Constantine was busy crushing the last remnants of opposition to his rule and drawing up plans for his new capital, the Church had been tearing itself to pieces over that veritable mystery of mysteries: the identity of Christ Himself. In 318, an austere and impeccably learned priest by the name of Arius had ripped open an old wound by arguing—with seemingly impeccable logic but against the authority of his own bishop—that God must have preceded His Son. Tertullian, of course, had made the same identical point; but decades of persecution had decisively altered the terms of the debate. As Arius’s opponents were all too uncomfortably aware, any hint that the Son might be a secondary god, inferior to the Father, risked something truly monstrous: a blurring of what divided Christians from their pagan adversaries. If God were anything less than One, after all, why not go the whole hog and fall to worshipping Athena or Artemis? Inevitably, then, Arius’s teachings provoked outrage: outrage which in turn only encouraged Arius and his supporters to dig in their heels all the more. The result was deadlock. Yet again, it seemed that Christians were utterly incapable of reaching consensus on even the most fundamental points of their belief. There existed not one but a multiplicity of Christianities.
But this was to reckon without a powerful new factor in the equation. To Constantine, the squabbling among the leaders of the Church was, quite simply, intolerable. Self-evidently, God had appeared to him and granted him victory because it was the divine will that Rome’s empire be set on a new and heavenly footing. Who were Arius and his opponents, then, Constantine wished to know, to undermine his mission with their “subtle disputations on questions of little or no significance”?104 After the failure of an initial attempt to restore harmony by knocking the two sides’ heads together, Constantine moved with his customary decisiveness. Briskly, in 325, he summoned bishops from across the empire, and from Iranshahr too, to something wholly unprecedented: an oecumenical, or “worldwide,” council. The venue chosen for this historic event, ostensibly because of its pleasant climate but in reality because of its location just south of Constantinople, was the city of Nicaea. Here, materialising in a blaze of gold and purple, “like some heavenly messenger of God,”105 the emperor left the assembled bishops in no doubt as to what he wanted: an agreed and readily comprehensible definition of Christianismos. The bishops, suitably overawed, scrambled to obey. The followers of Arius, who constituted a decided minority in the council, found their protests being brutally sidelined. The Son, it was agreed, was “of one Being with the Father.” Furthermore, He had been both God and man in equal proportions: “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Finally, just for good measure, the bishops made sure to add a mention of the Holy Spirit in their mutually agreed statement of belief. From now on, there was to be no more debate: God was definitively a Trinity.
It was not only Arius’s followers who were branded heretical as a result of this momentous decision: so too were a host of other Christian sects and factions. Like the ancient street-plan of Byzantium, even then vanishing beneath the imperious grid of Constantinople, the venerable sprawl of their beliefs was put on notice of obliteration. The presence at the great council of bishops from throughout the Christian world—not to mention the faintly menacing figure of Constantine himself—had given its deliberations an unprecedented degree of heft. In the wake of Nicaea, the Church found itself possessed, for the very first time, of a creed that it could plausibly promote as “catholic”—as universal. The dream of Ignatius—that there might be such a thing as “Christianity”—appeared suddenly and dazzlingly fulfilled.
True, the show of unity quickly fractured. A bare few months after the bishops had gone their separate ways, and a whole slew of them began to backslide. While Arius himself, if the gleeful reports of his enemies were to be trusted, was soon brought to an aptly salutary end, voiding his guts in a back alley amid a quite spectacular explosion of shit, there were many, to the frustration of the orthodox, who failed to draw the obvious moral from this. Far and wide the ordure of the arch heretic’s teachings had been splattered: even beyond the borders of the empire, where the Goths, although brought to Christ, had also been brought to believe with Arius, and against the creed formulated at Nicaea, that He was subordinate to the Father. Deviancy such as this, perhaps, was only to be expected from barbarians—but plenty of others had no such excuse. Many bishops, scorning what they had agreed at Nicaea, began openly to glory in the name of “Arian.” Even a son of Constantine had not disdained the title.
Then, in 361, something far worse happened. Julian, a nephew of Constantine, seized control of the empire and promptly proclaimed himself a pagan. Bold, charismatic and brilliant, the new emperor made a conscious attempt to reverse his uncle’s revolution. He restored subsidies to temples. He sought to undermine the Christian monopoly on charitable giving by organising his own. He even grew a beard. Such monstrous actions made it certain, of course, that the Almighty, provoked beyond endurance, would strike the apostate down. Sure enough, when Julian was duly killed on campaign in Mesopotamia just two years after coming to the throne, his death was received with a complacent satisfaction by Christians everywhere. Indisputably, however, they had been given a terrifying jolt. The leaders of the orthodox Church—nervously eyeing heretics on one flank and pagans on the other—lived in perpetual fear that the legacy of Nicaea, and their own authority with it, lay under mortal threat. This dread, over the course of the near century that separated the death of Julian from the appearance of the seven sleepers in Ephesus, saw them press hard for the rout of their many foes. Too much was at stake for them to do otherwise. Not just for the sake of Rome’s empire, not just for the sake of humanity even, but for the sake of the heavens themselves, they needed a truly crushing victory—one that would leave the demons, and their mortal agents with them, in full and terminal retreat.
And such a victory, sure enough, was precisely what they had achieved. To the seven sleepers, gazing around them in stupefaction at what their one-time pagan city had become, this would have been most apparent, perhaps, in the sheer physical ubiquity of churches, in the market place, on the main streets, even on the hill overlooking the ruined temple of Artemis. However, much more astounding—and more impregnable by far—was a structure that could not be seen. So novel was it, so revolutionary in its implications, that even the word increasingly used to describe it—religio—had quite lost its original meaning. Back in the time of Decius, there had been many different ways for mortals to bind themselves to the gods: for each and every sacrifice, if properly sanctioned by tradition, had ranked as a religio. That, however, was not at all what Christians meant by the word.106 “What binds and ties us to God is piety.” Much else inevitably flowed from the presumption. Deep in their souls, Christians knew, as pagans did not, that “it matters not how you worship, but what you worship.”107 Staining an altar with blood was not religio but superstition, plain and simple. Demons should be paid no honours, no sacrifices, no dues. There was One God, and One God only—and so there could be only one religio.