An Apology of Rome: Empire, Incarnation, and the Making of Christianity.
Being a Civis Romanus, a Roman citizen, by both vocation and inheritance, I have always found quite a strong sense of disappointment at how Rome is seen in the wider Christian narrative. Often, it is portrayed as a convenient villain, the powerful empire that murdered our Lord and crushed its first followers and which conveniently disappeared once the Gospel triumphed. I have always found this argument extremely unsatisfying from both a historical and theological perspective. The following is therefore an apologia. I won’t play into the usual narrative of Rome’s cruelty (was it really the worst the world had to offer back then?), my argument is without Rome, the providential economy of Christianity would be quite different. My hope is to inspire my reader to have a renewed sense of gratitude towards Rome’s role as a necessary condition to the development of the Christian story.
From the very start, Christian scholars believe that God entered history and with it his narrative of salvation at a specific moment intime and within the most influential empire the world had ever known (I am a great anglophile but there would be no Britannia without Rome). The Gospels assume this was a providential time and not an accidental one for the Incarnation of God’s own Son to take place, something that would change the whole course of history. The Roman Empire provided a unique and unified world in which law, language, roads, politics could facilitate the development of that story. It was in one of the humblest corners of it, while the empire was at its height, that God sent his own Son, not to remain local, but to influence history universally.
Even according to the Gospels, the Romans are not seen as the primary villains in the story of Jesus Christ. They are reluctant participants in a story that defies their knowledge and understanding. This is also not accidental. The Evangelists carefully avoid portraying Rome as the embodiment and root of all that is evil, their theological goal is much larger than mere politics. Christ himself does not come to defeat Rome, he comes to reveal a kingdom that operates within it, within history, while transcending it.
Let us think of that very first, quiet, Roman witness at the foot of the Cross, that we have in Pontius Pilate. He condemns Jesus out of fear in the face of religious fanaticism, he fades back into the history because of his ambiguity and pragmatic political resolve rather than malice, Machiavelli would have agreed with him. Alongside him is Longinus, he pierced Christ’s side and at his death he confesses: “truly, this was the Son of God”. The first explicit confession of Christ’s divinity is not made by an apostle but by a Roman. This is a profoundly symbolic detail of the role Rome plays within Christianity. Power and violence become recognition and faith. At the Calvary, Rome the cross and instrument of death, becomes Rome the beginning of the Gentile conversion.
In the Gospels, Roman authorities are steadily pragmatic rather than dogmatically hostile. Pilate declares Jesus as innocent more than once, he only authorizes his crucifixion under the pressure of the religious fanatics. He does what he has always done, working towards stability, following the law, rather than feelings. However, his restraint does matter, it prevents Christianity from becoming an anti-imperial sect or a nationalist revolution. The villain within the Gospel narrative is therefore sin, fear and the rejection of evident truth, rather than Rome.
Roman involvement is a necessary mean for the revelation of Christ to humankind. The crucifixion itself is not a private penalty but a public one. Rome executes Jesus so that his death, written in the divine plan, can become visible historically and universally. Our Lord is framed as “King of the Jews”, his death is framed in both cosmic and political terms. The inscription is written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as a sign of God’s revelation to both Jew and Gentile. This provides that stage that can allow the universal revelation that is Christianity.
This sense of universality is embodied in Jesus Christ through his teaching about political power. He speaks of rendering unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God. He does not come to abolish Roman law. He puts it in proper scale. Caesar’s power is limited while God’s is absolute. In recognizing Caesar’s role, Christ allows freedom in both rebellion and sanctification. Rome can and should exist as part of the world in which God enters to redeem.
Early followers of the Way (of Christ) who then became known as Christians, even saw a certain sense of support within Roman tradition itself. A legend from late antiquity tells us that Octavian Augustus consulted the Tiburtine Sibyl, who then revealed to him a vision of a woman with child, greater than any ruler. Whether a legend or not, this narrative was important because it suggested Rome itself sensed a limit to its power, certainly Augustus was of the opinion Rome should have not become any bigger. Roman prophecy and law became an unlikely preparation for Christ.
Even Roman religious life was hugely influential in preparing the ground for the development of Christianity’s public form. Temples became churches, pagan shrines that stood at the corners of streets and in homes became Marian shrines, embedding devotion into private, daily life in a new way. The structure remained, while the meaning changed, this was not dilution, it does not make Christians pagan (what would a removed northern European reformer of the 17th century be able to understand about this lived history). Christianity learned how to live visibly in Rome. The Forum and its basilicas became Rome and its churches.
Roman piety also deeply shaped Christian devotion. In the pagan religion: ritual, consistency, tradition, duty, the ordering of this world and the next were deeply important. Christianity developed these further, Roman pietas became devotion to God and one’s neighbor. Household religion was now domestic Christianity. Rome created Christianity and taught it in its embodiment, its rhythmic nature, its communal rather than inward nature. Our own theology is rooted in that Roman love for defining anything through the use of law.
Festivals show this process clearly. Christianity entered the world through religious syncretism (and there is nothing wrong with it). Saturnalia celebrated light amidst the darkness of winter, gift-giving, but also feasting and the reversal of social roles. Christianity fully embraced this tradition centering it around the birth of Christ Jesus. Christmas spoke the language already understood by the Romans while proclaiming its new meaning. Darkness was now pierced by the light of the Incarnation. Christianity triumphed by conversion not destruction.
The influence of Rome is remarkably visible in Christianity’s elaborate liturgies. The Church inherited that sense that the public rituals were rooted in solemn, well-ordered beauty. Processions, vestments, incense, calendars, and ceremonial language that reflect Rome’s civic and religious practises. Religion became something that transcended the private, in time and space. This ritualistic inheritance allowed Christianity to preserve a communal memory that lasts to this day.
Our central act of worship, the eucharist, although rooted in the Jewish religion, does reflect a sacrificial language which, in its formality, not only as an act of suffering but also of transition, is foundational to the liturgy of the Church. In the Roman religion, sacrificium, was not necessarily something which involved pain or renunciation, but it was a juridical act which defined something as the passage from human into divine property, sacer and facere literally mean “to make something sacred”.
This is quite clear among Roman authors: “sacred is what has been given to a god”, it is a definition of ownership rather than emotion, according to Festus, while Varro defines “sacrifice is to make something sacred”, what matters is not the worshipper’s interior state by how one is affected by the rite, once something is made sacred, it is no longer in the human sphere, it is placed from ordinary use into divine ownership. This is why Roman law distinguished the Res Sacrae from other profane goods.
The Roman sacrificial liturgy prayers make this quite clear. Cato’s formulas identify the act of offering and its divine response: Iuppiter pater, te hoc ferto obmovendo bonas preces precor… uti sies volens propitius mihi domo familiaeque meae. This formula accompanies the liturgical act and effects its consecration, the words are not mere prayers, they do something.
When looking at the original text of the Latin Mass, which finds its origins in the same centuries in which the pagan religion is dying out, the continuity is unmistakable. The words of consecration are clearly derived from the Roman rites. The Canon of the Mass is not simply the recount of the narrative, a thanksgiving, it starts as a sacrifice as officialized, first by Gregory the Great in the 6th century. It performs the actual act in which the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ… over the bread: “here is my body”, and over the blood: “here is my blood, of the new and eternal covenant, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins”. Like the consecratory forms of the Roman religion, these are performative acts pronounced over proper matter by a proper officiant, thus changing the ontological nature of a certain element. Bread and wine are no ordinary food and become something set apart, much unlike the Jewish blessings of bread and wine. Why did Jesus become incarnate in the Roman world one might wonder?
This is reinforced in the epiclesis: "quam oblationem tu, Deus, in omnibus, quaesumus, benedictam, adscriptam, ratam, rationabilem, acceptabilemque facere digneris"… adscriptam, ratam, acceptabliem are terms which belong to the Roman language of legal recognition, the need for the sacrifice to be valid so to be accepted by the gods. The Jewish blessings instead act as forms of thanksgiving, blessing God. It is a doxology rather than a divine transaction, even at the Passover. From Judaism, we inherit the structure, the elements, the covenant, and the theology of thanksgiving, the memorial, the eucharist. But what allows it to develop is the ritual language of Rome, whose culture allows words to change the matter, inheriting Rome’s view of the sacrificium. Similarly, this logic applies to priestly vestments, one example is the alba vestis. Everyday Romans used wear the tunic, a normal garment, a Roman shirt, which the Church inherited and filled with symbolism within the most sacred of rites. The very orans position of the celebrant in the eucharist is inherited from pagan Rome. Rome's liturgical language was wholly embraced by the new faith which made it is own, in all of its rich heritage.
Roman religion gives us that infrastructure at the basis of the Western idea of sacrifice. Christianity does not abolish it; it inherits it and remodels it. The public transaction between Rome and divinity, becomes one between Church and God. It retains the formal, verbal, and performative, grounded in formality rather than feelings. It is within this context that the Christian liturgy has to be understood, with its gestures, words, vestures – a symbolism that is not seeking to be mere individualistic embellishments but the means through which something truly does become sacred, formally removed from our human sphere and fully changed into the divine one. Following the rules, is not just Roman pedantry, but the condition that allows the transaction to occur.
As the liturgy was developing so was the distinctive symbiosis between Church and state which found its apotheosis in Constantine the Great. Christianity was no longer merely tolerated but it was seen as a religion that could play a role in the public life of the empire. The state did not collapse into the Church nor vice versa, but the symbiosis of the state religion was preserved, it established a perfect balance between spiritual authority and temporal power. The emperor protected the Church; the Church dwelt in a spiritual reality beyond imperial control. This became one of Rome’s most enduring legacies. The Church even became a tool to strengthen the empire, for example, the Council of Nicaea in 325 also helped unite West and East through the Church.
Before Constantine, Christian martyrdom was one of our faith’s most compelling witnesses. The early Christians’ refusal to sacrifice their loyalty to the emperor gave a strong Christianity a moral compass and weight. Yet, it is helpful to remember that Roman authorities rarely demanded Christians to renounce Christ, they merely asked for participation in public religion as a form of civic loyalty. The commendable courage and zeal of the early Christians sometimes mingled in ways that later centuries would temper with pastoral prudence. Once Constantine had established a real Pax Romana Christiana – this posture also softened massively. The figure of the empire became that not of the persecutor but that of a guardian, allowing faith to mature into a public responsibility.
A clear descendant of this relationship between Church and State can be seen in the Ecclesia Anglicana with its structure, ceremonial life and that relationship between crown and Church, parliament and episcopacy, echoing this ancient language, through the centuries from Rome, via Byzantium, Holy Roman Empire, France, to our day. Including the very rite of anointing and coronation of the monarch.
What started in Galilee as a relatively rural and unsophisticated religious movement, expressed in a language of fields, nets, villages, was never thought to remain within that very narrow and raw world. As the Gospel moves into the cities of the Mediterranean world, it encounters the philosophy of Greece, the institutional power of Rome, giving Christianity the ability to navigate a school of through while being able to express it in a coherent manner. It also gave it discipline, structure and timeliness. The local faith becomes universal through Rome, it does not erase the rustic religion of Galilee, it refined it through Greek reason and Roman authority so that it could address both philosopher and emperor, thus enduring across history rather than generations.
Rome’s contribution was in its scale, the empire could provide roads, cities, law, trade networks, a shared sense of belonging to one world. Once Christianity spread within this system, it spread beyond what any apostle could have ever imagined or achieved and with a greater speed! Roman order became missionary infrastructure, its globalism, its catholicity. The Pax Romana truly created the space for that continuity.
Later in history, certain reforming movements in northern Europe, shaped by harsher landscapes and a thinner cultural inheritance struggled to perceive the wealth of centuries worth of Roman tradition, its beauty, ritual, and memory. From places removed from the civic, artistic, ecclesial formation of Rome, came an audacity and presumption to undo what they were not born into or could patiently try to understand. Their confidence was certainly sincere, but also naïve, unaware of the Mediterranean landscape, its lived history, it mistook distance with knowledge and freedom. It presumed that reform could come at the expense of formation and ignorance of that inherited collective, cultural memory. How can one understand the faith without breathing the air once breathed by emperors and apostles alike?
It never was an accident that Christianity was refined in Rome, where the Church learned hierarchy, law, liturgy, doctrine and that historical memory the apostolic Church (which includes us) knows as “tradition”. The faith which began in Galilee was made universal through Rome. The empire which crucified the Christ later spread its Gospel, elaborated his teaching, and carried his name across the most influential empire the world had ever known, this is how we became a global religion.
And so, naturally Rome does deserve more gratitude than it receives. The Romans are not the baddies in the Gospels as they are not the ultimate agents of this story. They merely represent the world as it is with its power, its flaws, its unawareness, yet it can be used by God. Rome governed people. But Christ claimed their souls, Caesar ruled time, Christ reveals himself through eternity. It all started in Rome. Christianity used Rome to conquer the world, there can be no honest conclusion to the Christian story that does not walk through the triumphal arches of Rome, without it, there would be no Christianity as we know it.
As Virgil writes in the Aeneid: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, mementohae tibi erunt artes.
