Cogere Intrare: The Fourth-Century Abandonment of Christian Pacifism and the Rise of the Militant Church

Abstract

The fourth and fifth centuries of the Common Era saw the Christian Church, such as it can be uniformly described during a time of great internal turmoil, transform from an influential minority long despised by pagan leadership to the most powerful religious institution in the Roman world. One noteworthy result of this transitional phase was the abnegation by Church leaders of the corporate ethic of non-violence, traditionally rooted in Christ’s response to persecution, in favor of coerced fidelity to the ecclesiastical institution. Because of his indisputable influence over the systematic justification of religious coercion, historians and theologians have traditionally traced the Christian approbation of holy violence to Augustine of Hippo. Those who do not typically offer an alternative scenario in which the Church was never really pacifist to begin with, but rather had always embraced the legitimacy of violence to the extent that their status as a persecuted minority allowed.

My argument responds to both perspectives. I first illustrate that the persecuted Church did indeed espouse a unified and principled pacifism. I then argue that the ecclesiastical transition from pacifism to coercion was more or less complete by the year 408 when Augustine composed his defense of cogere intrare. Finally, I offer an account of how this transition came about, ultimately focusing upon how ecclesiastical leaders such as Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea began to redefine the tertium genus identity as well as the eschatological tenets of patience, martyrdom, and divine wrath in response to the unanticipated conversion of Constantine. In Part One I demonstrate that during the era of persecution these elements had been used to empower non-violence in the face of Roman brutality. In Part Two I then examine how the fourth-century reformulation of these elements, in combination with Constantine’s transition from pax deorum to pax dei, facilitated the rapid transition from pacifism to coercion. I conclude that, as a result of this new confluence, by the mid-fourth century the justification of violence in the name of Christ had been established, and the groundwork laid out for later systematic apologies for holy Christian violence.