Divinity, Ethnicity, Identity: “Religion” as a Political Category in Christian Antiquity

Abstract

In the mid-fifth century, ruling a rump Roman Empire from Constantinople, the emperor Theodosius II decided to collect and to catalogue into one body the earlier and very varied records of Roman legal rulings. The fruits of his initiative, the Codex Theodosianus, embodies Late Roman culture’s concerns with ordering specialist knowledge, politics, and power.1 This is especially true for Book 16 of the Codex, “On Religion.” Like many of the legal archives upon which it draws, Book 16 is concerned with regulating relations between heaven and earth in order to ensure the wellbeing of the empire. Heaven’s denomination might have changed after 312 C.E., but the goal of religion remained the same: to secure divine patronage for the common weal. Thus, when Theodosius II, convening the Third Ecumenical Council in 429, expressed the hope that “the condition of the church might honor God and contribute to the safety of the Empire,”2 he echoed the kind of practical piety expressed almost half a millennium earlier by Cicero, who likewise opined that proper cult “is not only of concern to religion, but also to the well-being of the state.”3 In other words,