The Tell Live
The Tell – Live is Sparky’s Alternative News section and has come online to help us bear witness and consider our place in the ‘bigger picture’. We seek here to identify fact and real evidence despite the misinformation and distracting and damaging sensationalism that abounds.
An effort to find original sources amongst so many games of ‘chinese whispers’ that distort, distract and twist important truths, messages and public opinion.
The way it is Sparky presents a timely curation depicting the state of humanity, as witnessed by our editors, contributing writers, thinkers, designers and scientists, et al, referenced on the web, trusted media sources and scientific research and theory..
The Power of Suggestion
Whether we like it or not we are influenced by what those around us say and do, and what Google and YouTube et al, TV advertising and podcasting, device-driven social media, or even a trip to the supermarket will ‘present’ to us, it is almost continuous. It has become hard to tell truth from deceit, or fact from fiction, amidst the abuse of our ‘freedom of speech’ and overwhelming and daily news coverage and competitive, invasive delivery.
As human nature becomes even more manipulatable and events that influence our perception of life in our societies are occurring daily – the first steps in how to recognise misinformation or disruptive statement and misleading opinion are straightforward enough (1. Be more aware) it can be detrimental to allow or depend on the ‘AI’s to provide fact-checked news, well-balanced analysis, data, stats, educated opinion and proper feedback.
1. Tune in to the moment. This is good advice for just about anything. But as with so many things, awareness is required to help us identify the suggestions that are coming our way in the first place. If you are not aware of the messages you’re sending or receiving from others, it’s tough to counteract the negative suggestions you hear. So tune into what’s going on around you. Get more curious, and the suggestions that could influence you will be easier to spot. Then you can give special attention to those that are most helpful or encouraging.
2. Create a network of support. Identify the people that believe in you and stay close to them. Psychologists have shown that we are influenced by both deliberate and non-deliberate suggestions. How people talk to us—their gestures, tones, and implications—matter just as much as their words. Positive influence begets positive suggestions. Think about whom you spend the most time with, and make sure that they bring positive energy—that alone will help to create more positive outcomes in your life.
Think too about how your behavior is suggestive. When you are interacting with others (or, especially, parenting), you are making non-deliberate suggestions with your body language, attitude, and attention. These subtle suggestions can build people up and inspire them—or tear them down, all without you saying a word.
3. Maintain a flexible mindset. When we are locked into a fixed mindset we tend to take failure personally and see little opportunity for improvement. This is limiting. Better to remain open to any outcome, and when suggestions or influences come into your life, consider those that take you closer to your goals. With flexible thinking ou continue to learn, grow, and improve, and draw things into your life that will influence your progress.
4. Understand that the power of suggestion is always working. If you expect something to happen—if someone or something suggests to you a specific outcome—your expectations of that outcome play a major role in its occurrence. The expectation or suggestion alone, often unconsciously, changes your behavior and your responses to help bring into reality the outcome you are expecting
The four points on suggestion are from Polly Campbell who speaks and writes about success, resilience, and personal development. She is the author of Imperfect Spirituality.
The Divided Brain
Our divided brains are far more complex and remarkable than a left/right split
The notion that the brain’s right hemisphere is responsible for emotion and its left hemisphere is responsible for reason has been debunked. But the two hemispheres are indeed distinct, albeit in much more complex ways than we once thought. Animated by Cognitive Media with audio excerpted from a lecture given at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) by the British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain takes a deep dive into the real differences between our two brain hemispheres.
This video is published under the RSA open-access licence.
For more information, visit the RSA website’s disclaimer and policies page.
Godspeed Stephen
Godspeed Stephen
Professor Stephen Hawking (1942 – 2018). Widely regarded as one of the world’s most brilliant minds, Stephen Hawking, who died this week at the age of 76, was known throughout the world for his contributions to science, his books, his television appearances, his lectures and through biographical films. He leaves three children and three grandchildren. All of us at Cambridge University will miss him greatly.
Published by Cambridge University on YouTube Mar 13, 2018
Big Think – Think Big
SURPRISING SCIENCE - PERSONAL GROWTH - MIND & BRAIN - SEX & RELATIONSHIPS - TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION - CULTURE & RELIGION - POLITICS & CURRENT AFFAIRS
On Being Podcasts
On Being is a Peabody Award-winning public radio conversation and podcast, a Webby Award-winning website and online exploration, a publisher and public event convener. On Being opens up the animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? We explore these questions in their richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. We pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact. SaveSave
Millennials Observed
Making Sense: Were you born in the last 30 years or so - Listen up!
Excerpt of Simon Sinek from an episode of Inside Quest. 15 minutes worth watching and 27 million plus views on Twitter, and over 7 million on YouTube.http://www.insidequest.com/
This clip published on YouTube Oct 29, 2016
Millennials
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Generations - Lost Generation - G.I. Generation - Silent Generation - Baby boomers - Generation X - Millennials
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Millennials (also known as Generation Y) are the demographiccohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates for when this cohort starts or ends. Demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years.
Millennials, who are generally the children of baby boomers and older Gen X adults, are sometimes referred to as "Echo Boomers" due to a major surge in birth rates in the 1980s and 1990s. The 20th-century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued, however, so the relative impact of the "baby boom echo" was generally less pronounced than the original post–World War II boom.
Millennial characteristics vary by region, depending on social and economic conditions. However, the generation is generally marked by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies. In most parts of the world, their upbringing was marked by an increase in a liberal approach to politics and economics; the effects of this environment are disputed. The Great Recession has had a major impact on this generation because it has caused historically high levels of unemployment among young people, and has led to speculation about possible long-term economic and social damage to this generation.
The Theory of Beauty
TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton's provocative theory on beauty — that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply "in the eye of the beholder," are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.
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Uploaded on YouTube Nov 16, 2010
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot with English & Arabic Subtitles
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Waiting for Godot (/ˈɡɒdoʊ/god-oh[1]) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for the arrival of someone named Godot who never arrives, and while waiting they engage in a variety of discussions and encounter three other characters.[2]Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) "a tragicomedy in two acts".[3] The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949.[4] The premiere was on 5 January 1953 in the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris. The English language version was premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1990 it was voted the “most significant English language play of the 20th century”.[5]
-Source: Wikipedia with thanks - Remember, Wikipedia is run and produced by volunteers so remains free with no advertising - please consider a donation, are, medium or small.-Video published on YouTube Jul 19, 2015
Education for Change
In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.
This RSA Animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award. The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to driving social progress and spreading world-changing ideas.
Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike the RSA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsoff...Listen to RSA podcasts: https://soundcloud.com/the_rsaSee RSA Events behind the scenes: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/
------ This audio has been edited from the original event by Becca Pyne. Series produced by Abi Stephenson, RSA.
Animation by Cognitive Media. Andrew Park, the mastermind behind the Animate series and everyone's favourite hairy hand, discusses their appeal and success in his blog post, 'Talk to the hand': http://www.thersa.org/talk-to-the-hand/
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Noam Chomsky (Credit: Getty/William B. Plowman)
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Noam Chomsky's Essay - February 23, 1967
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Noam Chomsky’s “Responsibility of Intellectuals” after 50 years: It’s an even heavier responsibility now
Written amid rising opposition to the Vietnam War, Chomsky's greatest essay has added resonance in the age of Trump
TOPICS: 1960S, DONALD TRUMP, DONALD TRUMP RESISTANCE, FOREIGN POLICY, GEORGE W. BUSH, IRAQ WAR, LEFTISTS, NOAM CHOMSKY, THE LEFT, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, VIETNAM WAR, POLITICS NEWS
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There are determining events, especially when we’re young and formulating our sense of the world: Times when we learn how to take ourselves, where to stand, how to move forward in a fresh way. For me, a key moment was stepping into the periodicals room of my college library in late February of 1967 — I was a sophomore — and reading an article in the New York Review of Books that caught my eye. It was “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” written by Noam Chomsky.
Nothing was quite the same for me after reading that piece, which I’ve reread periodically throughout my life, finding things to challenge me each time. I always finish the essay feeling reawakened, aware that I’ve not done enough to make the world a better place by using whatever gifts I may have. Chomsky spurs me to more intense reading and thinking, driving me into action, which might take the form of writing an op-ed piece, joining a march or protest, sending money to a special cause, or just committing myself to further study a political issue.
The main point of Chomsky’s essay is beautifully framed after a personal introduction in which he alludes to his early admiration for Dwight Macdonald, an influential writer and editor from the generation before him:
Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us.
For those who think of Chomsky as tediously anti-American, I would note that here and countless times in the course of his voluminous writing he says that it is onlywithin a relatively free society that intellectuals have the elbow room to work. In a kind of totalizing line shortly after the above quotation, he writes: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”
This imposes a heavy burden on those of us who think of ourselves as “intellectuals,” a term rarely used now, as it sounds like something Lenin or Trotsky would have used and does, indeed, smack of self-satisfaction, even smugness; but (at least in my own head) it remains useful, embracing anyone who has access to good information, who can read this material critically, analyze data logically, and respond frankly in clear and persuasive language to what is discovered.
Chomsky’s essay appeared at the height of the Vietnam War, and was written mainly in response to that conflict, which ultimately left a poor and rural country in a state of complete disarray, with more than 2 million dead, millions more wounded, and the population’s basic infrastructure decimated. I recall flying over the northern parts of Vietnam some years after the war had ended, and seeing unimaginably vast stretches of denuded forest, the result of herbicidal dumps – 20 million tons of the stuff, including Agent Orange, which has had ongoing health consequences for the Vietnamese.
The complete picture of this devastation was unavailable to Chomsky, or anyone, at the time; but he saw clearly that the so-called experts who defended this ill-conceived and immoral war before congressional committees had evaded their responsibility to speak the truth.
In his usual systematic way, Chomsky seems to delight in citing any number of obsequious authorities, who repeatedly imply that the spread of American-style democracy abroad by force is justified, even if it means destroying this or that particular country in the effort to make them appreciate the benefits of our system. He quotes one expert from the Institute of Far Eastern Studies who tells Congress blithely that the North Vietnamese “would be perfectly happy to be bombed to be free.”
“In no small measure,” Chomsky writes in the penultimate paragraph of his essay, “it is attitudes like this that lie behind the butchery in Vietnam, and we had better face up to them with candor, or we will find our government leading us towards a ‘final solution’ in Vietnam, and in the many Vietnams that inevitably lie ahead.”
Chomsky, of course, was right to say this, anticipating American military interventions in such places as Lebanon (1982-1984), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), the Persian Gulf (1990-1991) and, most disastrously, Iraq (2003-2011), the folly of which led to the creation of ISIS and the catastrophe of Syria.
Needless to say, he has remained a striking commentator on these and countless other American interventions over the past half century, a writer with an astonishing command of modern history. For me, his writing has been consistently cogent, if marred by occasional exaggeration and an ironic tone (fueled by anger or frustration) that occasionally gets out of hand, making him an easy target for opponents who wish to dismiss him as a crackpot or somebody so blinded by anti-American sentiment that he can’t ever give the U.S. government a break.
I like “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” and other essays from this period by Chomsky, because one feels him discovering his voice and forging a method: that relentlessly logical drive, the use of memorable and shocking quotations by authorities, the effortless placing of the argument within historical boundaries and the furious moral edge, which — even in this early essay — sometimes tips over from irony into sarcasm (a swerve that will not serve him well in later years).
Here, however, even the sarcasm seems well-positioned. He begins one paragraph, for instance, by saying: “It is the responsibility of the intellectuals to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective.” He then refers to the 1938 Munich Agreement, wherein Britain and other European nations allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland — one of the great errors of appeasement in modern times. He goes on to quote Adlai Stevenson on this error, where the former presidential candidate notes how “expansive powers push at more and more doors” until they break open, one by one, and finally resistance becomes necessary, whereupon “major war breaks out.” Chomsky comments: “Of course, the aggressiveness of liberal imperialism is not that of Nazi Germany, though the distinction may seem rather academic to a Vietnamese peasant who is being gassed or incinerated.”
What he says about the gassed, incinerated victims of American military violence plucks our attention. It’s good polemical writing that forces us to confront the realities at hand.
What really got to me when I first read this essay was the astonishing idea that Americans didn’t always act out of purity of motives, wishing the best for everyone. That was what I had been taught by a generation of teachers who had served in World War II, but the Vietnam War forced many in my generation to begin the painful quest to understand American motives in a more complex way. Chomsky writes that it’s “an article of faith that American motives are pure and not subject to analysis.” He goes on to say with almost mock reticence: “We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders.”
The Original Christians
A fresco inside the catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, November 2013. The catacomb was used for Christian burials from the late 2nd through the 4th century CE. Photo by Reuters/Max Rossi
Christians were strangers
The Roman empire became Christian during the fifth century CE. At the century’s start, Christians were – at most – a substantial minority of the population. By its end, Christians (or nominal Christians) indisputably constituted a majority in the empire. Tellingly, at the beginning of the century, the imperial government launched the only sustained and concerted effort to suppress Christianity in ancient history – and yet by the century’s end, the emperors themselves were Christians, Christianity enjoyed exclusive support from the state and was, in principle, the only religion the state permitted.
Apart from the small and ethnically circumscribed exception of the Jews, the ancient world had never known an exclusivist faith, so the rapid success of early Christianity is a historical anomaly. Moreover, because some form of Christianity is a foundational part of so many peoples’ lives and identities, the Christianisation of the Roman empire feels perennially relevant – something that is ‘about us’ in a way a lot of ancient history simply is not. Of course, this apparent relevance also obscures as much as it reveals, especially just how strange Rome’s Christianisation really was.
That a world religion should have emerged from an oriental cult in a tiny and peculiar corner of Roman Palestine is nothing short of extraordinary. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, though an eccentric one, and here the concern is not what the historical Jesus did or did not believe. We know that he was executed for disturbing the Roman peace during the reign of the emperor Tiberius, and that some of his followers then decided that Jesus was not merely another regular prophet, common in the region. Rather, he was the son of the one true god, and he had died to bring salvation to those who would follow him.
Jesus’s disciples began to preach the virtues of their wonderworker. Quite a few people believed them, including Saul of Tarsus, who took the message on the road, changing his name to Paul as a token of his conversion. Paul ignored the hardscrabble villages of the Galilee region, looking instead to the cities full of Greeks and Greek-speaking Jews all around the eastern Mediterranean littoral. He travelled to the Levant, Asia Minor and mainland Greece, where he delivered his famous address to the Corinthians.
Some scholars now believe that Paul might have gone to Spain, not just talked about wanting to go. What matters is not whether Paul went there, or if he really was executed at Rome during the reign of the emperor Nero, but rather the person of Paul himself. When he was arrested as a threat to public order, his Jewish enemies having complained to the Romans, Paul needed only two words to change the balance of power – cives sum, ‘I am a citizen’ – a Roman citizen. The fact that he was a Roman citizen meant that, unlike Jesus, he could neither be handed over to the Jewish authorities for judgment nor summarily executed by an angry Roman governor. A Roman citizen could appeal to the emperor’s justice, and that is what Paul did.
Paul was a Christian, perhaps indeed the first Christian, but he was also a Roman. That was new. Even if the occasional Jew gained Roman citizenship, Jews weren’t Romans. As a religion, Judaism was ethnic, which gave Jews some privileged exemptions unavailable to any other Roman subjects, but it also meant they were perpetually aliens. In contrast, Christianity was not ethnic. Although Christian leaders were intent on separating themselves physically and ideologically from the Jewish communities out of which they’d grown, they also accepted newcomers to their congregations without regard for ethnic origin or social class. In the socially stratified world of antiquity, the egalitarianism of Christianity was unusual and, to many, appealing.
While theologians have always been able to render Christianity subtle to the point of incomprehensibility, to many it has always appeared breathtakingly simple: ‘Believe exclusively in the Christian god, who is the one and only god, and you will find eternal life.’ On earth, Christianity offered community, and it offered support – dining, celebrating, working and playing together, people who would bury you if you died. In a cosmopolitan Roman empire, where cities sucked in expendable labour from the countryside, and where artisans and craftsmen had to travel a very long way from home, that kind of community could not be taken for granted or created casually. Christians would and did look after one another, sometimes exclusively so. Stricter Christians didn’t mix with non-Christians. More importantly, they didn’t worship other gods along with their one god. Much of ancient civic life – the holidays and public festivities which were many people’s only opportunity to eat any quantity of meat – was wrapped up in sacrifice to the various deities of a flexible and syncretic Greco-Roman pantheon. Good Christians were expected to shun these celebrations, the festivals and ceremonies their fellow townsfolk kept at the centre of their social lives. That made Christians very strange.
Technically, for a time, Christianity was illegal (its god had been nailed to a cross like a common bandit after all)
The Jews had kept themselves separate for as long as anyone could remember, but Greeks and Romans were used to that. Jewish communities were concentrated, nowhere large, and they were exempt from mandatory participation in a public cult. Around the Mediterranean, people could look at Jews with a sort of tolerant, if uncomprehending, disdain. But Greeks and Romans sitting out the traditional cult of their own cities made no sense. Were these monotheist Christians pretty much the same as atheists, refusing to give the divine its due? What exactly did they get up to in their exclusive meetings? What was this business about eating their lord’s body? Were they cannibals? Probably it was all just another eccentric. The world of ancient Rome, after all, was one in which initiates of one cult bathed in the spurting blood of a freshly slaughtered bull. Those of another passed the night in temples awaiting divine revelation and sleeping with the sacred priestesses.
Of course, the eccentricity of neighbours begins to look more sinister when life gets difficult and livelihoods grow tenuous. A Christian exclusivity that was also status-blind could look suspicious – so there were occasional pogroms, though surprisingly few: the pornographic violence of martyrologies, the tormented saints of a million works of Catholic art, were the loving harvest of later centuries, not any ancient reality. Like all empires, the Roman state hated disorder more than anything, and violence that disturbed the public peace was not encouraged. Technically, for a time, Christianity was illegal (its god had been nailed to a cross like a common bandit after all). But a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was easier on everyone, not least the emperors. As the letters of the emperor Trajan make crystal clear, Christians were not to be sought out or persecuted unless they made themselves a conspicuous nuisance, at which point they had no one but themselves to blame for their fates.
By the third century, Christian communities had grown. One would have been hard-pressed to find even a modest town without a Christian household or three. From a fringe movement, Christianity had become a central fact of urban life. Yet the religion’s normalisation made it suddenly vulnerable in the middle of the third century, when – thanks to dynastic instability, epidemic disease and military incompetence – imperial government went into a potentially terminal decline.
The last dynasty to have any real claim to legitimacy was that of Septimius Severus (who reigned 193-211). Its last scion was murdered in a mutiny in 235. For 50 years thereafter, no emperor could make any lasting claim to the throne. Combined with devastating military failure on the empire’s eastern front with Persia, and a plague (probably an Ebola-like haemorrhagic fever) that cut densely packed urban populations to ribbons, it seemed to many that the divine order of the universe had come undone.
The emperor Decius, with a shaky claim to a throne he’d won in an officers’ putsch, thought it prudent to assure himself of divine favour. In 249, he ordered every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice to the gods of the state, and to prove it by producing the same sort of certificate that local magistrates issued to document the payment of annual taxes. Decius might not have actually meant to target Christians specifically, but his edict could not help but have that effect. Forbidden to worship any god but their own, many Christians refused to sacrifice. For their obduracy, some were executed. When Decius was killed on the battlefield in 251, Christians rejoiced that their god had protected them.
Imperial fortunes did not improve. A decade after Decius’s death, the emperor Valerian renewed religious persecution, this time targeting Christians explicitly. Many wondered why Valerian singled them out: the Roman senate went so far as to query whether the emperor really meant what he appeared to mean with his edict. He did. More martyrdoms followed, but then, in 260, Valerian was taken prisoner on the battlefield by the Persian king, going on to die in captivity. His son and successor Gallienus immediately ended persecution and restored the legal rights of Christian churches. That legal measure demonstrates something significant. Churches had become prosperous, socially integrated corporate entities, able to possess and dispose of property. Christianity was no longer a clandestine and minority religion.
The policing of what did and did not constitute true belief has always preoccupied Christian theologians and been a central dynamic in Christian politics
The years between 260 and 300 offered little reprieve to those who wanted to become emperor and govern, but they did amount to the first golden age for Roman Christians. Although it is likely that we’ll never have sufficient evidence to tell just how many Christians there were at any one time, or just how fast the religion spread, we can say for certain that Christian numbers grew dramatically. By the 290s, there were Christians in the senate, at court, and even in the families of emperors.
The middle and late third century also witnessed the first dramatic outpouring of Christian theological works. Some of these theological works focus on detailing heresies – wrong beliefs – of which there was already a rich variety. Because Christianity centred so much on beliefs rather than ritual behaviours, the policing of what did and did not constitute true and acceptable belief has always preoccupied Christian theologians and been a central dynamic in Christian politics.
The rulings (‘canons’) of the first council of Christian leaders to survive provide more insight into the Christianity of this period. Held in the obscure Andalusian town of Elvira, the council shows us a world in which the gathered church leaders found it necessary to legislate against a large number of mundane activities that they determined were prejudicial to Christian wellbeing. The council decided, for instance, to forbid the holding of certain kinds of public office (such as the office of duumvir, effectively the local mayor, as the role might require inflicting punishment or abusing other Christians). What this tells us is that Christians were integrated into the fabric of social and political life, serving in public office, and so forth. Clearly, both Christians and non-Christians found that integration quite normal – Christians had come a long way since the days of the last persecution.
Then, ironically, within just a couple of years of Elvira, the imperial government launched the most virulent anti-Christian persecution in the history of the ancient world. The causes were multiple. As Christianity’s appeal spread among the more educated sort of Greek and Roman, non-Christian intellectuals began to find the upstart religion more threatening. Though the third century saw a trend towards monotheism among intellectuals, the philosophical and theosophical varieties embraced by Neoplatonists and other philosophers were clearly incompatible with Christian exclusivity. So these pagans crafted sophisticated anti-Christian arguments, and their criticisms gained ground among the political class. Then, rivalry over an imperial succession provided the occasion for anti-Christian polemic to gain new political life.
Towards the end of the third century, an emperor named Diocletian (r. 284-305) had finally proved able to stabilise imperial government after 50 years of regime change and violence. In 293, he established a college of four emperors, all senior generals unrelated to one another except by marriage. The idea was to ensure that one emperor would always be on hand to deal with any outbreak of violence and to prevent rebellion or civil war. Diocletian intended for himself and his senior colleague to retire, after which their junior partners would bring two new emperors into the imperial college to replace them. The goal was to ensure a handover of power at a convenient and peaceful moment so that the framework of government would remain undisturbed. But Diocletian’s intentions were thwarted by rivalries, in which Christianity played an important role.
That is where things foundered: only two of Diocletian’s emperors had adult sons, and everyone expected them to join the college of four emperors when the two senior emperors retired. But the childless emperor Galerius was a ferocious anti-Christian, while his colleague Constantius – who had a son – was known to be sympathetic to Christians. In fact, Constantius even had Christians among his family and household, and that fact gave Galerius an opening to revise the succession plans in his own favour. By targeting Christians for renewed persecution, Galerius would damage Constantius and exclude his son from the succession. He could enhance his own power, and also gratify his hatred of Christianity.
Galerius convinced Diocletian that Christians were to blame for a series of calamities, including a mysterious fire in the palace and the silencing of famous oracles. Thus, in the year 303, the emperors began what we call the Great Persecution. The campaign against the Christians was bitterly violent in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, more benign in the lands that Constantius controlled in the West. But it produced many heroic martyrdoms and appalling suffering among Christian communities, and left scars that would linger for centuries. The Great Persecution ultimately failed to expunge Christianity from the face of the earth. Christians were simply too numerous, and many were too stubborn to be turned away from their beliefs. Even Galerius, the most committed of persecutors, came to accept the failure of his plans, and in 311 issued an edict of toleration. By 313, persecution had ceased.
In the meantime, in 306, Constantius’s son Constantine had succeeded his father in the imperial college. Within five years, Constantine had made himself master of the western Roman empire and openly embraced Christianity. Always sympathetic to Christians, he claimed to have had a divine vision that helped lead his troops, flying Christian symbols on their standards, to victory in civil war in 312. The most reductionist reading of the evidence would say that, in 310, Constantine saw a solar halo, a rare but well-documented celestial phenomenon, in the south of France and in the company of his army, but Constantine’s account of events changed over the years and we can’t be sure. We can say with greater certainty that for several years he wavered between Christian and non-Christian interpretations of the sign. He eventually decided, to the delight of the Christian leaders in his entourage, that he had been sent a sign by the Christian God. He became a Christian, as a matter of belief and perhaps policy too.
We will never know for sure what Constantine’s true motives were in converting to Christianity. What is certain, however, is that from the moment he had sole power in the West, he ruled as a Christian. He restored Christian property seized during the Great Persecution and enacted legislation that favoured Christians. When he became sole ruler of the empire in 324, he extended similarly pro-Christian policies to the eastern empire, where he not only favoured Christians, but actively discriminated against non-Christians, restricting their ability to worship or fund their temples.
Patronage, factionalism, political advantage, social cliquishness can all play a role in the formation of intellectual positions and in continuing attachments to them
Even more momentously, though, Constantine intervened personally in conflicts among Christians over questions of discipline and right belief. In North Africa, Egypt and other parts of the Greek East, problems arose over such things as how to treat Christians who had cooperated with the authorities during persecution (the traditores, ‘handers-over’ of Christian holy books), or the correct relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Such disputes mattered, not least because Christians who believed the wrong thing would forfeit eternal life – or worse, ensure their own eternal damnation. Right belief, by contrast, opened the path to eternal salvation.
By placing the authority of the Roman state and the imperial office to police and enforce right belief, Constantine created a model that would have a long and ambiguous history. Councils of bishops, ostensibly informed by the Holy Spirit, would henceforth define what was orthodox. Those who chose to believe otherwise would find themselves branded heretics, and excluded from the communion of orthodox Christians. Bishops and theologians would find an almost limitless number of problems to debate – over the relationship of God the Father and God the Son, over the divine nature of Jesus, over what that meant for the status of his mother, and so on. Each solution opened up a whole new set of problems.
As most people know from their own experience, intellectual differences can harden into intractable convictions for all sorts of non-intellectual reasons. Patronage, factionalism, political advantage, social cliquishness can all play a role in the formation of intellectual positions and in continuing attachments to them. From the fourth century onwards, Roman history is filled with bitter religious conflicts, state persecution of heretics, and the perpetual alienation of communities whose Christian beliefs pitted them against official orthodoxy. Since the time of Constantine, in fact, Western history has been plagued by the impossibility of policing belief rather than practice. After all, how do you decide what someone really believes, or does not believe?
That problem would not have come to have its historic, and tragic, consequences had Constantine’s conversion not rapidly brought much of the imperial population with him. As social advancement came to depend on being a Christian, and as the civic calendar of non-Christian beliefs was increasingly dismantled, the majority of urban Romans actively thought of themselves as Christians by the end of the fourth century. Rejecting Christianity now stood as the marked and unusual choice that embracing it had been 200 years before. How Christianity went on to become not just a state religion, but the central fact of political life, and how Christian institutions of the Middle Ages both maintained and distorted the legacy of the ancient world, is another, different story.
Source: How an obscure oriental cult converted a vast, pagan Roman empire | Aeon Essays
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