347
Birth of a Trinitarian emperor.
In the fourth century Christianity had, at last, become a legally-tolerated religion, able to own property, preach openly and overtly influence Roman society. Though the royal family of Constantine had accepted Christianity, the majority of the empire was still pagan and, moreover, the faith was harshly divided theologically. On one hand were the Arians who asserted absolute monotheism and who denied full divinity to Christ; on the other were the Trinitarians who saw a single God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Council of Nicaea in 325 had decided emphatically for the Trinitarian position but the emperors after Constantine were largely Arian.
Theodosius, born in Spain in 347, became a general and fought his way to the imperial throne of the eastern empire in 379 and ruler of the whole empire by 393, the last emperor to rule an undivided Roman realm. His reign was largely spent battling Germanic invaders and usurping generals but his career had great consequences for Christianity.
In 380 he decreed that the Trinitarian position was to be the true form of religion; he expelled Arian bishops and acted strongly against paganism. He disbanded the Vestal Virgins, banned animal sacrifice, halted the Olympic Games, ended state subsidies to pagan cults and closed polytheistic temples, decreeing that “no one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labor of man”.
A riot in Thessalonica in 390 resulted in the murder of some of Theodosius’s troops; in retaliation he ordered a massacre of the civilian population. This outraged Christian leaders and the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, demanded that Theodosius do penance for the crime and excommunicated him until he did so. (see the Van Eyck painting above) The submission of the emperor to the bishop was often cited for the next thousand years as a symbol of the relationship between church and state.
The death of Theodosius in 395 was a disaster for the Roman imperium and civilization. Rule was split between two of his incompetent sons and within a generation the western empire had fallen to the barbarians.