Decius & Valerian, Novatian & Cyprian: Persecution and Schism in the Making of a Catholic Christianity - Part I

Abstract

To be presented is a two-phased historical-sociological study of “turning points” (Part I) and altered “trajectories” (Part II). In the mid-third century, two successive persecutions of Christians would be unleashed by the emperors Decius and Valerian. Those coercive efforts at suppressing the offending "superstitio" were empire-wide in scale, unprecedented in planned efficiency. Under Decius, a universally mandated requirement to offer sacrifices to the gods was backed by monitoring commissions and compliance certificates that featured confirmations of accomplishment and, most ominously, sworn, signed, and notarized declarations of lifelong religious orthopraxy. Great numbers of Christians complied with those directives—either by offering the demonic sacrifices outright or by securing fraudulent certificates attesting to having done so—actions that voided, through idolatrous trespass, the “celestial promise” of eternal life that had been gifted in the baptismal rite of spiritual rebirth. Efforts at resolving the ensuing crisis of mass apostasy split the mainstream Church into competing factions of disciplinary hardliners who resisted, and pragmatic reformers who endorsed the readmission of apostates. Drawing upon Schismogenesis and Sect-Church theories, I examine the course of this schism—doctrinally and demographically—to show how the socially induced and expedited trend towards penitential lenity, as adopted by the majority Catholic variant, facilitated the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The persecution and the schism it provoked carried greater world-historical significance than has hitherto been realized.