Quaker Heritage Press > Historical Essays > The Council of Arles
My interest in the Council of Arles (A.D. 314) derives from J.-M. Hornus' contention that its third canon ("De his qui arma proiciunt in pace, placuit abstineri eos a communione") represents a politically motivated change in church discipline regarding military service by Christians (Hornus, 1960, pp. 171-178; Hefele, 1894, pp. 185-186; Munier, 1963, p. 9). In order to evaluate this interpretation it will be useful to examine the council in its political setting.
The Council of Arles followed a ten-year period (303-313) of almost continual chaos for Christians in the Roman Empire. During most of this time Christians had been severely persecuted by the Roman government in all or part of the empire. Further, the government itself had been a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of joint emperors and rival emperors ever since the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in 305. At the climax of this period, the two most implacable of the persecuting emperors, smitten with what they interpreted as divine punishments (Galerius by mortal illness in 311, Maximin Daia by crushing military defeats in 313), called off the persecutions, asked the Christians to pray for them, and promptly died (Jones, 1948, pp. 68-69; MacMullen, 1969, pp. 64, 94-95). In 312 Constantine, having just adopted a Christian monogram as his battle standard in response to a personal revelation, captured Rome by defeating Maxentius' superior forces at Milvian Bridge (Jones, 1948, pp. 79-82, 94-99; MacMullen, 1969, pp. 72-78; Jones, 1948, pp. 100-117); and in 313, Constantine and Licinius, preparatory to the latter's attack on Maximin Daia, agreed on a joint policy of religious toleration (Jones, 1948, pp. 84-89; Baynes, 1930, p. 9). The rapid alternation of favorable and unfavorable events for the Christians had thus ended in a sudden series of what looked like divine interventions. Yet in August of 314 it was too soon to be certain that the new state of affairs would last. Constantine's religious pronouncements were somewhat ambiguous, and emperors had often changed their minds; further, civil war was about to break out afresh between Constantine and Licinius in October (MacMullen, 1969, p. 107; Smith, 1971, p. 129; Jones, 1948, p. 127). The bishops gathering at Arles on August 1 might be moved simultaneously by hopes of the undreamed-of possibilities opened up by a Christian emperor, and by anxiety lest Constantine's new affection for the Christians be alienated by some political misstep.
The summoning of the council was itself a result of the new political situation. Constantine, wanting to restore property of the Catholic church that had been confiscated during the persecutions, discovered that a recent separation in North Africa had created a question as to which was the legitimate body with a rightful claim to church property. This separation of the African church into rigorists and moderates was itself a fruit of the persecutions: the basic question concerned the degree of church discipline applicable to Christians who had in various ways compromised their faith under pressure. The Donatist party charged that Caecilian, the new bishop of Carthage, had been illegitimately installed because one of the bishops who consecrated him had automatically forfeited his office by surrendering copies of Scripture to the authorities. Hearing that Constantine intended to return the confiscated properties to Caecilian, the Donatists petitioned to have their claims adjudicated by judges from Gaul, who would probably be impartial since the Christians there (protected by Constantine and his father before him) had not been polarized by the persecutions. Constantine's first attempt to settle the question was to refer it to a committee of Gallic and Italian bishops headed by Pope Miltiades; when the Donatists appealed their decision (claiming that Miltiades was prejudiced), Constantine summoned bishops from most of his territories to a council at Arles in Gaul (Baynes, 1930, pp. 9-11; Jones, 1948, pp. 103-112; Frend, 1952, pp. 142-150; Stevenson, 1957, pp. 301-305; Doerries, 1960, pp. 82-87; MacMullen, 1969, pp. 101-106; Smith, 1971, pp. 136-146).
Constantine's attitude to the Catholic clergy at this time, as expressed in his letters about the Donatist controversy, is confusing to modern scholars1 and may have been equally so to the bishops at the time. In one letter (written just after the council, but possibly reflecting an attitude he could have expressed earlier) he speaks of the assembled bishops as divinely authorized to pronounce on such disputes, so that the Donatists' subsequent appeal to Constantine himself was inappropriate (Baynes, 1930, pp. 11-12). Yet in another letter he addressed the pope as "Your Carefulness" - the polite term for an emperor to use in addressing a subordinate civil official (Stevenson, 1957, p. 302, cf. p. 304; Jones, 1948, p. 108). This could have made the bishops somewhat nervous about what the emperor might expect of them. At a minimum he seemed to expect that the church should keep its own extremists in line.
Besides ruling that Caecilian was the legitimate bishop of Carthage (Stevenson, 1957, pp. 306-307; Munier, 1963, pp. 4-5), the council dealt with 22 miscellaneous matters of church discipline (Hefele, 1894, pp. 184-196; Munier, 1963, pp. 9-13; I use Hefele's numbering of the canons). Seven of these seem to be related to the Donatist problem or other aspects of the political situation.
Canon 13 states that clergy who have surrendered copies of Scripture, sacred vessels, or membership lists should be deposed.2 But it adds two important reservations: the only admissible evidence of such surrender is official government records (actis publicis), not the mere statement of other Christians; and even if a bishop must be deposed by this rule, his official acts in the meantime are valid, specifically including the ordination of other bishops. Either of these reservations was enough to reject the Donatist charges against Caecilian. The rule about admissible evidence reveals a division of attitudes among Christians. The rule presupposes not only that the present government is willing to make such records accessible, but that the former persecuting government kept accurate and reliable records of the behavior of Christians. Christians whose social niche caused them to have routine dealings with pagan officialdom might well feel that public records were a natural source of highly reliable information. But those with an above-average level of scruples against participation in the forms of pagan society, already suspicious of their more compromising brethren, would be scandalized by the suggestion that the records kept by persecuting pagans were more trustworthy than the testimony of Christians. The Donatists had not foreseen that they would be asked to substantiate their case from official records and had not brought any. (When they finally presented such documentation on a later appeal, it turned out to be forced; Jones, 1948, pp. 113-115; Frend, 1952, pp. 150-151; Stevenson, 1957, p. 307).
Canon 14 provides lifelong excommunication for those who falsely accuse other Christians.3 Since this directly follows canon 13 it probably refers to accusations of surrender during persecution. False accusation is a serious offense, tending to destroy trust within the church; but so is the surrender of membership lists to persecutors. The difference in penalties applied to these two offenses indicates a distinct anti-Donatist reaction by the council. Rigorist Christians who make life difficult for moderates are to expect more severe church discipline than moderates who make life difficult for rigorists.
Canon 20 reaffirms the rule, already in effect in North Africa, that a new bishop should be ordained by seven other bishops, but that three will do in an emergency.4 Since Caecilian had been ordained by three bishops in the "emergency" that waiting for four others might cause them to be outvoted, it is unclear whether the council intended by this rule any comment on the Donatist case.
Canon 8, with specific reference to Africa, states that converts from heresy are not to be rebaptized unless their heretical baptism did not use the trinitarian formula of Matt. 28.5 The African church is thus instructed to abandon its distinctive practice, traditional since Cyprian's time (Frend, 1952, pp. 142-143), and conform to the wider Catholic church. When this is combined with the clause of canon 13 on ordinations performed by a lapsed but not yet deposed bishop, it appears that the council wishes to impose an ex opere operato view of the sacraments on the Donatists, whose position depended on their ex opere operantis view. This would tend to deemphasize the importance of clerical ethics.
Canon 7 provides that Christians appointed to public office should not be barred from communion until they actually transgress church discipline.6 The council presumably expected that under Constantine it might become possible to perform the duties of public office without transgressing Christian principles. At first glance this seems only logical; but if the background presupposition is canon 56 of the Canon of Elvira (which seems likely, since Arles directly repeats six other canons of Elvira),7 it becomes clear that a rule already reduced to formalism is here further weakened. (Canon 56 of Elvira allows public officials to return to communion at the end of their term of office, without penance or penitence or any attention to their actual violations of church discipline; Hefele, 1894, p. 161). Note that any and all violations of church discipline, not only those due to idolatrous ritual, are covered. This may well have included imposition of capital punishment (prohibited by Hippolytus' discipline, art. 17; see Helgeland et al., 1985, p. 37) and the judicial use of torture (still remembered in A.D. 373 as enough of a sin that Ambrose tried to use it to escape being made bishop! - Dudden, 1935, p. 67).
Of the seven canons related to the political situation, only canon 22 has a rigorist slant. It refuses communion to apostates who have put off repentance to their deathbeds.8
This brings us to canon 3 and its relation to earlier church discipline regarding military service.9
There seems to be no longer any question that the phrase arma proiciunt refers to abandonment of military service, possibly in violation of military regulations. The 19th-century proposal to translate it "hurl weapons at (someone)" (Hefele, 1894, pp. 185-186) is rejected by nearly all 20th-century scholars, apparently on linguistic grounds (Hornus, 1960, p. 173).10
The phrase in pace is more puzzling (and was so to medieval scribes, as attested by the variant readings in bello and in proelio). There are two questions here. First, is "peace" the opposite of war or of persecution? And second, does the distinction imply that resignation/desertion during war/persecution is (a) acceptable (perhaps even obligatory in some circumstances), (b) beyond the church's disciplinary reach because instantly punished with death, or (c) already treated as unacceptable (so that the Arles decision extends the prohibition to peacetime)? To this second question, option (c) seems impossible: since the church was already honoring some soldier martyrs (Helgeland et al., 1985, pp. 56-66), including some whose military offense was refusal to serve, the bishops can hardly have believed that all refusal to serve was sinful. For the same reason option (b) is irrelevant. The bishops, therefore, believing that refusal to serve was sometimes the honorable act of a martyr, nevertheless insisted that the line must not be drawn too soon, when the situation did not make martyrdom the only morally acceptable choice. Thus the canon looks very much like an attempt by moderates to keep rigorists from rocking the political boat, motivated by a fear lest some Christians' overscrupulosity alienate Constantine and bring further persecution on the church as a whole. This is true regardless of whether in pace means "except during wartime" or "except during persecution." Which of these two meanings was intended, and how much of a change in church discipline this represented, depends on what the church had taught about Christian military service before Constantine.
Unfortunately there is still no scholarly consensus on what position the church had taken in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The present decade [1980s] has brought some complaints that previous scholars' conclusions were all too well correlated with their confessional commitments (Helgeland et al., 1985; Wright, 1985; Megivern, 1985; Ruyter, 1982; also Fontaine, 1965). This problem plagues other topics in the history of theology as well; it is too soon to tell whether it will be corrected in this instance as easily as it is lamented. The one work that laments it the loudest (Helgeland et al., 1985) seems to me to make the least progress toward its correction.11
Perhaps the biggest difficulty in assessing the degree of pre-Constantinian Christian pacifism is the small quantity of evidence that bears on the question one way or the other. Essentially the same group of quotations from early theologians is repeated from one study to the next (the core of the collection probably goes back to Erasmus), and only the treatment varies.
In particular it is especially difficult to assess how many Christians were in the Roman army, and why, and how they stood in respect to church discipline; and similarly how many Christians (of those for whom it was a live issue) refused to enter the army or (if already in) to perform military duties. The difficulty is that Christian apologists were capable, at different points in their argument, of appealing both to the existence of Christian soldiers12 and to the scarcity of them13 as readily granted facts. It is therefore easy, by mere selection of data, to give quite different impressions. For those who wish to emphasize the presence of Christians in the military, the often-avoided challenge is to explain the factual presupposition of the continually repeated apologetic proof from prophecy using Isa. 2/Mic. 4. For a pacifist interpretation, the difficulty is to decide whether Christians in the army were in violation of church discipline; whether discipline was lax, or perhaps made a distinction between combatant and non-combatant duties for soldier converts; or whether the church was pacifist only in its prevailing ethos, not in its discipline. (The answer might of course vary with time, place, and individual soldiers.)14
Church discipline itself is poorly documented for the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The only item relevant to our problem is in the Apostolic Traditions of Hippolytus (ca. A.D. 200), which categorically refuses permission for Christians to join the army, and which demands that soldier converts refuse to kill even if so ordered (art. 17-19; in Helgeland et al., 1985, p. 37). Since it is a deliberately conservative document of a separatist group, there is some room for disagreement about whether it was typical of Catholic discipline in general, or at least of an earlier period.
Of course the key issue is the teaching of the theologians. A scholar's perception of the relevant passages often seems to be colored by his presuppositions. (This is sometimes exacerbated by a shrillness of praise or blame that tends to drown out the material being interpreted.) I suppose I am no exception; but as one who is particularly familiar with the literature of Radical Reformation sectarian pacifism in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries I think that much of the debate would be clarified if scholars were more aware of the great variety within historic Christian pacifism. Pacifist historians dealing with the 2nd and 3rd centuries sometimes err by reading into their texts various modern attitudes (such as a concern to influence foreign policy by mobilizing public opinion) that could not occur within Christian pacifism before the rise of the major democracies. Nonpacifist historians, I think, err even further in not recognizing varieties of pacifist expression merely because they are not common in the 20th century. The theological use of military imagery, for instance, though rare in modern pacifism, was a commonplace in early Quaker and Anabaptist writing. Similarly, a double standard of morality for Christians and for the world (as in Origen, Against Celsus 8:73-74, in Helgeland et al., 1985, pp. 40-41) need not represent hypocrisy or a lack of commitment to the full Christian standard: for a minority religion it can simply be a way of coping with the fact that the majority culture will go its own way whatever the church does (cf. Origin, Against Celsus 8:69-72). Even such an apparent oddity as Tertullian's devoting more attention to a detail of military attire than to the ethics of warmaking (On the Crown, in Helgeland et al., 1985, p.. 25-29) can be paralleled by the Quaker apologist Robert Barclay's burying his pacifist doctrine in a chapter "Concerning Salutations and Recreations, &c." (Apology 15:13-15): a minority sect ethically opposed to the surrounding culture at a hundred points can be sincere about them all without emphasizing the ones that seem most important to some of their modern descendants.
Returning then to Arles, it seems to me that canon 3 means to lump together all possible reasons why a Christian soldier might throw down his arms, and insists that none of them be applied unless strictly necessary. In pace, in tranquil times, might then mean in times when there was neither war nor religious persecution. If the soldier was called on to perform the fully unacceptable duties of killing or offering pagan sacrifice, the moderate majority of bishops could not object to his refusal. But if he merely had a more sensitive conscience than the average Christian (like the soldier Tertullian praised for refusing to wear a garland), then the bishops meant to hold a lid on his behavior as firmly as possible.
Given Paul's instructions on mutual forbearance of "strong" and "weak" brethren, it seems somewhat inappropriate to use excommunication as a primary means of controlling those whose understanding of Christian ethics is somewhat stricter than most Christians'. But the bishops were facing an unprecedented situation for the Christian church, and probably felt that the welfare of Christians throughout the empire depended on maintaining good relations with Constantine. The pressures of the immediate situation must have seemed enormous. They could not know that the church would be so changed by its political victory that a century later their decision would be almost unintelligible. When Theodosius II excluded pagans from the Roman army in 416 (Moffatt, 1918, p. 672), who would remember that the question for Christians had once been how far to carry their pacifism?
1. According to Baynes (1930), Constantine from the time of his conversion consistently favored the Catholic church as maintaining the correct cult of the supreme God, though for a while he also favored solar monotheism as a sort of first approximation to the truth. According to Doerries (1960), Constantine's political position was always toleration of all religions. MacMullen (1969, p. 113) calls him "decidedly a Christian - but on his own terms," which included both a willingness to countenance the solar cult and an assumption of his own right to decide ecclesiastical questions when he saw fit. Smith (1971, pp. 116-117) considers Constantine in 312 to have been institutionally committed to Catholicism but not personally committed to Christ, though he believed himself a chosen instrument of God. Jones (1948, p. 102) calls Constantine's conversion "religious" but not "spiritual," and holds that the emperor did not become a genuine Christian until many years later.
2. De his qui scripturas sanctas tradidisse dicuntur vel vasa dominica vel nomina fratrum suorum, placuit nobis ut quicumque eorum ex actis publicis fuerit detectus, non verbis nudis, ab ordine cleri amoveatur. Nam si idem aliquos ordinasse fuerint depraehensi, et de his quos ordinaverunt ratio subsistit, non illis obsit ordinatio. Et quoniam multi sunt qui contra ecclesiam repugnare videntur et per testes redemptos putant se ad accusationem admitti debere, omnino non permittantur, nisi ut supra diximus, actis publicis docuerint.
3. De his qui falso accusant fratres suos, placuit eos usque ad exitum non communicare.
4. De his qui usurpant sibi solis debere episcopum ordinare, placuit ut nullus hoc sibi praesumat, nisi assumptis secum aliis septem episcopis; si tamen non potuerit septem, infra tres non audeant ordinare.
5. De Afris quod propria lege sua utuntur ut rebaptizent, placuit ut si ad ecclesiam aliquis de haeresi venerit, interrogent eum symbolum, et se perviderint eum in Patrem et Filium et Spiritum Sanctum esse baptizatum, manus ei tantum imponatur ut accpiat Spiritum Sanctum; quod si interrogatus non responderit hanc Trinitatem, baptizetur.
6. De praesidibus qui fideles ad praesidatum prosiliunt, ita placuit ut, com promoti fuerint, litteras accipiant ecclesiasticas communicatorias, ita tamen ut, in quibuscumque locis gesserint, ab episcopo eiusdem loci cura illis agatur, et com coeperint contra disciplinam agere, tunc demum a communione excludantur. Similiter et de his qui rem publicam agere volunt.
7. Arles 4-5 || Elvira 62; A. 6 || E. 39; A. 9 || E. 25; A. 12 || E. 20; A. 14 || E. 75; A. 16 || E. 53. For Elvira (A.D. 305 or 306), see Hefele, 1894, pp. 131-172.
8. De his qui apostatant et nunquam se ad ecclesiam repraesentant, ne quidem paenitentiam agere quaerunt et postea, infirmitate arrepti, petunt communionem, placuit eis non dandam communionem, nisi revaluerint et egerint dignos fructus paenitentiae.
9. De his qui arma proiciunt in pace, placuit abstineri eos a communione.
10. Hefele's interpretation is rejected without argument by Moffatt (1918, pp. 670-671) and is not even mentioned by Jones (1948, p. 112), Helgeland et al. (1985, pp. 71-72), Campenhausen (1960, p. 168), Bainton (1946, pp. 200-201), Helgeland (1974, p. 163), Ruyter (1982, pp. 68-69), Ryan (1952, p. 28), and Harnack (1905, pp. 99-101). Only Cadoux (1919, pp. 256-257), with an air of allowing for the improbable, mentions Hefele's interpretation as one of three possibilities.
11. This book claims to be a collaboration of authors of different viewpoints (p. 93), in contrast to the usual confessionally-determined studies (pp. 10-11). But if the authors' institutional affiliations are an accurate guide (see back cover, and cf. Helgeland, 1974, p. 149), they are two Roman Catholics and one Lutheran - all from state-church traditions.
12. Tertullian, Apology 37:3, 42:3 (in Helgeland et al., 1985, p. 22).
13. Especially Origen, Against Celsus 5:33, cf. 8:73-75 where Celsus has objected to the lack of Christian patriotism (in Helgeland et al., 1985, pp. 39-41); but the same argument from fulfilled prophecy (Isa. 2:2-4) occurs in Justin Martyr, Apology 1:39, Dialogue with Trypho 109-110; Tertullian, Against the Jews 3; and Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4:34:4.
14. The status of Julius Africanus is particularly perplexing (Moffatt, 1918, p. 667; Cadoux, 1919, pp. 206-207; Thee, 1984, esp. pp. 461-465). The suggestion of dating his writings on military tactics before his conversion (Thee, 1984, p. 49) is chronologically difficult (Thee, 1984, p. 85). In any case his views on magic were unusually liberal, and his military ethics would be hardly more acceptable to a just-war theorist than to a pacifist: hence if he shows anything at all about early Christian ethics he shows an unexpected laxity.
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