Tried by Fire

Author:William J. Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2015-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE GOTHS CONVERT

Although the Romans had fought the barbarians (initially, a term that merely meant peoples who were non-Greeks, and later, also non-Romans) for generations, it wasn’t until the third century that the Goths, a tribe from east of modern-day Romania, migrated into Roman lands. Trace amounts of Christianity coming from Roman Christians in captivity permeated the Gothic tribes in the first few decades of contact with the Romans, but it wasn’t until the reign of the emperor Valens, an Arian, that any form of Christianity started to permeate the barbarian tribes en masse. As much as the barbarians fought the Romans, they also fought one another. On one occasion, a faction of Goths, embroiled in a civil war, beseeched Valens for help in vanquishing the other side. Valens agreed and sent troops to help them. When the Roman-backed side proved victorious, many of the Goths, at the behest of their leader, Fritigernes, “converted” to Arianism as a sign of respect for Valens. A half-Gothic, half-Greek Arian named Ulfilas (“little-wolf”) was installed as the Gothic bishop and invented a written alphabet of the Gothic language in order to copy down the Scriptures. Of course, the transformation from pagan to Arian Christian was a highly questionable one, since the Goths knew next to nothing about who their new God really was.

But even Arian Goths from time to time suffered persecution from their own people because of their decision to forsake the pagan traditions of their ancestors. One of the most famous persecutors of Gothic Christians was a leader named Athanaric. In one episode, Athanaric placed a statue of a Gothic god in a chariot and drove it around from tent to tent, forcing people to worship it. Those who would not worship the statue were burned alive in their tents, including some women who were “nourishing their new-born infants at the breast.”2

In time, as the Goths spread out over Europe, their Arian theology spread to other barbarian tribes like the Vandals, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Ostrogoths. The differences between the Arianism of the barbarians and the Nicene beliefs of the Roman world sometimes contributed to cultural friction between the two ethnicities. The most extreme case of this is the Vandal conquest of North Africa. The Vandals initially came from Eastern Germany and Southern Poland, and by the 430s had found their way to North Africa, where they encountered the Catholic communities of the Romans. Under their king, Genseric, they set up a kingdom across modern-day Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. The establishment of their new homeland came with a merciless persecution of the church there. Victor of Vita, a historian of the Vandal persecution in North Africa, remembered that “the storm of their rage has been like the wind of a tempest . . . why the hangings, why the fires, why the claws and the crosses? Why has the serpent-like progeny of the Arians devised for use against the innocent such tortures?”3 In proportion to the brutality of the Vandals was the mercy of Deogratias, the Nicene bishop of Carthage.

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