Toleration Is Not Establishment

The distance between 313 and 380 is the distance between two entirely different arrangements, and collapsing them is the commonest error made about this period. In 313 Christians were granted the same freedom as everyone else. In 380 the empire required its subjects to hold a specified form of Christianity and named those who did not as heretics liable to punishment. Sixty-seven years separate them.

What happened in between was not primarily legal but material and social. Constantine gave the church money, buildings, judicial privileges for bishops and exemptions for clergy. He and his successors involved themselves in doctrinal disputes, convening councils and enforcing their outcomes. Careers began to depend on the right religious affiliation. Traditional cults lost subsidy long before they were prohibited.

Understanding the sequence matters for reading everything downstream in this atlas. The persecuted church of 300 and the established church of 400 are the same institution a century apart, and it acquired coercive power gradually enough that no single decision can be pointed to. The bishops who had argued for toleration when they were the minority did not, for the most part, argue for it once they were not. Whether that transition was a corruption or a fulfilment is one of the oldest arguments in Christian historiography and it is not settled.