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In the condition of minds and parties in Gaul at the end of the fifth century the marriage of Clovis and Clotilde was, for the public of the period, for the barbarians and for the Gallo-Romans, a great matter. Clovis and the Franks were still pagans; Gondebaud and the Burgundians were Christians, but Arians; Clotilde was a Catholic Christian.
The Arians had the Roman Emperor on their side, but the pen of Athanasius was more powerful than the armies of Constantius. "God will comfort you," he wrote to his people in Alexandria on hearing that the churches were in the hands of the Arians. "If they have the temples, you have the Faith of the Apostles.
The ancient Latins were very attached to Saturn; there was not a village in Latium called Saturnian: on the contrary, the disciples of the God of truth taking their master's title, and calling themselves "anointed" like Him, declared, as soon as they could, an eternal war on all the peoples who were not anointed, and made war among themselves for fourteen hundred years, taking the names of Arians, Manicheans, Donatists, Hussites, Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists.
"You?" she said with bitter melancholy. "Are not you one of the Bishop's priests?" "I am a deacon, and Theophilus is the head of my church; but for that very reason..." "No," said Agne sharply, "I will deceive no one. My parents were Arians, and as my beliefs are the same as theirs the Bishop has driven me away as an outcast, finally and without pity." "Indeed," said Eusebius.
It is less the shame of his sins he confesses, than the glory of God. After that, he never thought again of anything but Truth and the Church, and the enemies of Truth and the Church: the Manichees, the Arians, the Pelagians the Donatists, above all. He lets no error go by without refuting it, no libel without an answer. He is always on the breach.
It may be presumed that the Catholic clergy, the bishop of Rheims, or the bishop of Langres was no stranger to the repeated praises which turned the thoughts of the Frankish King toward the Burgundian princess, and the idea of their marriage once set afloat, the Catholics, priesthood or laity, labored undoubtedly to push it forward, while the Burgundian Arians exerted themselves to prevent it.
His firm attachment to the Nicene creed, which has given Paul a place in the calendar among saints and martyrs, exposed him to the resentment of the Arians.
The Eustathians formed a separate and strongly Nicene congregation under the presbyter Paulinus, and held their meetings outside the walls. Athanasius communicated with them on his return from exile, and agreed to give the Arians a church in Alexandria, as Constantius desired, if only the Eustathians were allowed one inside the walls of Antioch.
Twenty years after, under Pope Symmachus, the attempt of Odoacer had been condemned. But what the Herule and the Gothic ruler, both Arians, had begun, the Byzantine emperor, when he recovered possession of Rome, carried on, and the original freedom of election was subjected to the control of the eastern emperor for hundreds of years.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic.
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