The Rev Dr Andrew McGowan, who is the warden of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, and a scholar of early Christianity, led the 2010 theological hui in examining three standout early church characters  – Perpetua, Constantine and Augustine of Hippo – whose stories each throw a spotlight on the ways power was understood and used back then.

Dr McGowan said that the ancient church is the source not only of the fundamentals of Christian faith – the scriptures, the creeds, the sacraments and church order – but also “of the close relationship between Church and society… which has deeply shaped Western Christian assumptions about the meaning and exercise of power.” 

He suggested that church is now in a period “of unpicking the seams” that stitched it to society, and must now “learn to be a minority without being a sect.”

An “exemplary dissident”

Dr McGowan then spoke of Perpetua, who he describes as an “exemplary dissident”. She was born in 181 – and martyred in Carthage in 203 for her refusal to renounce her faith during the persecutions of Septimus Severus, the then emperor.

He read a section from an ancient text in which Perpetua is being urged by a Roman magistrate to renounce her faith:

“Pity the grey hairs of your father, pity the youth of your boy, offer sacrifice for the well-being of the emperors”.

She responded: “I am a Christian.” 

This short declaration, said Dr McGowan, was not a religious profession in the modern sense.

It was a declaration of exclusive social and political identity, that challenged and subverted her society. It was a speaking into existence of a new kind of space outside the civic, social and religious boundaries which had been marked out by the Roman authorities.

Because Perpetua refused to recant, she was doomed. Knowing that she was on the threshold of martyrdom, and therefore a figure of unusual spiritual power, her fellow believers had encouraged her to seek a vision.

“Her famous vision depicts a ladder to heaven,” said Dr McGowan, “but guarded by a great snake and festooned with sharp iron weapons to wound the unwary.

“At the top of the ladder she finds a different realm of tranquillity and plenty, where a shepherd offers her a morsel of milk. As others present say ‘Amen’ to her participation in this sacramental dream, she wakes: ‘we knew it should be a passion; and we began to have no hope any longer in this world’.

“At one level,” he said, “this dream depicts Perpetua’s hope for escape from earthly suffering.

“Yet it also depicts the difference, not so much between earthly and spiritual realms, but between the world of totalizing violence that had oppressed her and her companions, and the divinely-ordered realm of justice and peace.”

Hero? Or villain?

In the eastern Orthodox Churches, Constantine is regarded as a saint.

Yet many in the West see him as having co-opted or institutionalized Christianity.

He stands at the centre of one of the enduring myths of Christianity, said Dr McGowan – that the Church was fine until he underwent a supposed conversion in order to use the Church for his own cynical ends.

“This view is deeply questionable,” he said, “as is any view that presents a pristine Christianity succeeded by an institutionalized religion.

“At any point in its history, the Church has been both wonderful and terrible”.

Constantine’s achievement deserves a more nuanced reflection, he says.

Constantine did not create the institutional Church, nor enforce the canon of scripture.

He did not determine or impose the doctrine of Christ’s divinity, nor use the Church to impose religious uniformity in the Roman empire.

Although some of these misunderstandings are pop-culture mistakes, said Dr McGowan, “some are repeated in fairly respectable historical texts”.

The confusion about his role is summed up in frequent references to the “Edict of Milan”.

“In fact,” said Dr McGowan, “this was not an edict, not made in Milan, and hardly to do with Constantine at all.”

Christians had been granted tolerance since the time of the Emperor Gallienus in 260.

Diocletian, however, who had divided the empire into eastern and western administrative regions, reversed this and instituted the “Great Persecution” in 303.

When Constantine came to power in 306 in the western region, he restored the rights of Christians in his domain.

“The documents referred to as the “Edict” reflect the later agreement of his eastern colleague Licinius to follow suit.”

“So Constantine did not invent the toleration of the Church, which was earlier; nor did he enforce the observance of Christianity, which came later.

“What Constantine did that was new was to become a Christian himself – however deeply or sincerely we cannot be sure.”

Tolle lege… tolle lege

The writings of Augustine of Hippo (354-430), said Dr McGowan, “have had enormous significance and influence for Christians – although his struggles with his own sexuality have burdened his latter-day reputation.

“Some modern Christians”, he said, “are also understandably wary of his time-bound views about gender, and of his Neoplatonist philosophical leanings with their emphasis on the spiritual at the possible expense of the material.”

The story of Augustine’s conversion has a visionary quality to it, suggested Dr McGowan – he hears a voice like a child’s, calling him to “tolle lege, tolle lege… take and read, take and read”.

He took that to mean that he should pick up Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which was close to his hand at the time – and the reading of that letter helped seal his commitment to an ascetic Christianity and his progress to baptism.

“But for our purposes,” said Dr McGowan, “the vision at Ostia shared by Augustine and his mother Monica is more relevant:

“We then were conversing alone very pleasantly, and ‘forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before’, we were seeking between ourselves in the presence of the Truth, which Thou art, of what nature the eternal life of the saints would be, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man.

“But yet we opened wide the mouth of our heart, after those supernal streams of Thy fountain, ‘the fountain of life’, which is ‘with Thee’, that being sprinkled with it according to our capacity, we might in some measure weigh so high a mystery.

‘…we, lifting ourselves with a more ardent affection… did gradually pass through all corporeal things, and even the heaven itself, when sun, and moon, and stars shine upon the earth; yea, we soared higher yet by inward musing, and discoursing, and admiring Thy works; and we came to our own minds, and went beyond them, that we might advance as high as that region of unfailing plenty, where Thou feedest Israel forever with the food of truth, and where life is that Wisdom by whom all these things are made, both which have been, and which are to come; and she is not made, but is as she hath been, and so shall ever be.

‘And while we were thus speaking, and straining after her (ie Wisdom) we slightly topuched her with the whole effort of our heart; and we sighed and there left bound ‘the first-fruits of the “spirit’ and returned to the noise of our own mouth, where the word uttered has both beginning and end.”

This vision, suggested Dr McGowan, is not quite a dream like Perpetua’s – in that it is really a conversation about the divine order of the world, “but one which involves a shared transition from physical to spiritual speech, and contemplation of that divine Wisdom by whom all the world was made.”

Augustine’s vision at Ostia has at least two striking elements, he suggested.

“One is its presentation of Augustine’s view of the world as divinely-ordered beauty, extending from the gracious act of a transcendent creator.

“For Augustine the world is good, and evil is no-thing, not an essential reality.

“Sin is the disorder that comes through the improper exercise of power – libido dominandi – whereby we seek to use and abuse what is not ours rather than celebrating our true callings and responsibilities.

“This vision has much to offer Christian thinking about ecology, I suspect.

“Secondly, his vision is social, characterized by the love he shares with Monica.

“Augustine does not see spiritual enlightenment as the expression of personal spirituality but as the outgrowth of the practice of charity, or love.

“His hermeneutic of charity,” Dr McGowan suggested, “is a powerful test to apply to any quest for religious, or other, fulfillment.”