Ancient letter written by Roman emperor leads archaeologists to "monumental" discovery in Italy

A letter written by a Roman emperor helped lead a team of archaeologists to an ancient temple that "adds significant insights into the social changes" from pagan beliefs to Christianity in the Roman Empire, experts announced recently.

The lead archaeologist on the expedition, Douglas Boin, Ph.D., announced the "monumental discovery" at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, according to a news release from St. Louis University, where Boin is a professor of history.

Boin said he and his team discovered "three walls of a monumental structure" that appears to have been a Roman temple from the Constantine era, which ranged from A.D. 280 to 337. During Emperor Constantine's rule of the empire, he made the persecution of Christians illegal and bankrolled church-building projects, among other efforts, helping usher in the spread of the religion throughout the empire, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The temple was found in Spello, a medieval hilltop city about two and a half hours away from Rome and near the town of Assisi. A fourth-century letter from Constantine helped lead Boin and his team to the area, he said. The letter, found in the 18th century, allowed the people of the town to celebrate a religious festival rather than travel to another event, as long as they built a temple to what Constantine considered his "divine ancestors."

An aerial photograph of the newly-discovered Imperial Cult ruins by Douglas Boin, Ph.D., and his team. DOUGLAS BOIN, PH.D.

Boin said that the discovery of the pagan temple shows that there were "continuities between the classical pagan world and early Christian Roman world that often get blurred out or written out of the sweeping historical narratives."

"Things didn't change overnight. Before our find, we never had a sense that there were actual physical, religious sites associated with this late 'imperial cult practice,'" Boin continued. "But because of the inscription and its reference to a temple, Spello offered a very tantalizing potential for a major discovery of an Imperial cult underneath a Christian ruler."

"Imperial cult" refers to the belief that emperors and their families should be worshipped as divine, according to the Harvard Divinity School. The practice began with the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and Boin said that the 4th-century temple shows the "largest evidence ever" of the practice in the late Roman Empire.

"There's evidence from other places throughout the Roman world that Christian rulers supported imperial cult practices," Boin said. "We've known that pagans worshiped at their temples in the fourth century, but those findings have all been small and inconsequential. And we've known that Christians supported the imperial cult, and we've known that without any sense of where it would have happened."

Boin said that the temple would feature prominently in further research into the practice of imperial cult. He said that he and his team will return to the area next summer for further excavations and research in the temple.

"This changes everything about how we perceive the pace of social change and our impression of the impact of social and cultural change," Boin said. "This building, in a very radical way on its own, shows us the staying power of the pagan traditions that had been on the ground for centuries prior to the rise of Christianity, and it shows us how the Roman emperors continued to negotiate their own values, their own hopes and dreams for the future of the emperor and the Empire without knocking down or burying the past."

Meanwhile, Rome is seen to have progressively extrapolated a Caesario-papacy out of the humble, non-assertive street-level leader among brethren (for whom no preparation for a successor is manifest in Scripture). Paul Johnson, educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, author of over 40 books and a conservative popular historian, states,

The Church was now a great and numerous force in the empire, attracting men of wealth and high education, inevitably, then, there occurred a change of emphasis from purely practical development in response to need, to the deliberate thinking out of policy. This expressed itself in two ways: the attempt to turn Christianity into a philosophical and political system, and the development of controlling devices to prevent this intellectualization of the faith from destroying it. The twin process began to operate in the early and middle decades of the third century, with Origen epitomizing the first element and Cyprian the second.

The effect of Origen’s work was to create a new science, biblical theology, whereby every sentence in the scriptures was systematically explored for hidden [much prone to metaphorical] meanings, different layers of meanings, allegory and so forth.....

Cyprian [c. 200 – September 14, 258] came from a wealthy family with a tradition of public service to the empire; within two years of his conversion he was made a bishop. He had to face the practical problems of persecution, survival and defence against attack. His solution was to gather together the developing threads of ecclesiastical order and authority and weave them into a tight system of absolute control...the confession of faith, even the Bible itself lost their meaning if used outside the Church.

With Cyprian, then, the freedom preached by Paul and based on the power of Christian truth was removed from the ordinary members of the Church, it was retained only by the bishops, through whom the Holy Spirit still worked, who were collectively delegated to represent the totality of Church members...With Bishop Cyprian, the analogy with secular government came to seem very close. But of course it lacked one element: the ‘emperor figure’ or supreme priest...

[Peter, according to Cyprian, was] the beneficiary of the famous ‘rock and keys’ text in Matthew. There is no evidence that Rome exploited this text to assert its primacy before about 250 - and then...Paul was eliminated from any connection with the Rome episcopate and the office was firmly attached to Peter alone...

...There was in consequence a loss of spirituality or, as Paul would have put it, of freedom... -(A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, pp. 51 -61,63. transcribed using OCR software)

Eamon Duffy (Former president of Magdalene College and member of Pontifical Historical Commission, and Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge) provides more on the Roman church becoming more like the empire in which it was found as a result of state adoption of (an already deformed) Christianity:

The conversion of Constantine had propelled the Bishops of Rome into the heart of the Roman establishment...They [bishops of Rome] set about [creating a Christian Rome] by building churches, converting the modest tituli (community church centres) into something grander, and creating new and more public foundations, though to begin with nothing that rivaled the great basilicas at the Lateran and St. Peter’s...

These churches were a mark of the upbeat confidence of post-Constantinian Christianity in Rome. The popes were potentates, and began to behave like it. Damasus perfectly embodied this growing grandeur. An urbane career cleric like his predecessor Liberius, at home in the wealthy salons of the city, he was also a ruthless power-broker, and he did not he did not hesitate to mobilize both the city police and [a hired mob of gravediggers with pickaxes] to back up his rule…

Self-consciously, the popes began to model their actions and their style as Christian leaders on the procedures of the Roman state. — Eamon Duffy “Saints and Sinners”, p. 37,38

• The Bishop of Rome assumed [circa sixth century] the position of Ponlifex Maximus, priest and temporal ruler in one, and the workings of this so-called spiritual kingdom, with bishops as senators, and priests as leaders of the army, followed on much the same lines as the empire. The analogy was more complete when monasteries were founded and provinces were won and governed by the Church. - Welbore St. Clair Baddeley, Lina Duff Gordon, “Rome and its story” p. 176

• Avery Dulles considers the development of the Papacy to be an historical accident:

“The strong centralization in modern Catholicism is due to historical accident. It has been shaped in part by the homogeneous culture of medieval Europe and by the dominance of Rome, with its rich heritage of classical culture and legal organization” (Models of the Church by Avery Dulles, p. 200)

• Pope Gregory was concerned that the Patriarch of Constantinople, St. John the Faster, had accepted the title of Ecumenical (or Universal) Patriarch. He condemned any such title for the following reasons:

First, anyone who would use such a title would have fallen into pride, equal to the anti-Christ. He wrote: “I say it without the least hesitation, whoever calls himself the universal bishop, or desires this title, is by his pride, the precursor of anti-Christ, because he thus attempts to raise himself above the others. The error into which he falls springs from pride equal to that of anti-Christ; for as that wicked one wished to be regarded as exalted above other men, like a god, so likewise whoever would call himself sole bishop exalteth himself above others” (Ibid., 226).

Second, St. Gregory believed that such a title would be perilous to the Church. “It cannot be denied that if any one bishop be called universal, all the Church crumbles if that universal one fall” (Ibid., p. 223).

More, by the grace of God.

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