That is, are God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit the same thing, or is Jesus just a prophet sent by a God who was not actually his father? That is, was it in Jesus’s very nature to be able to sin? Differences ultimately involved issues like how monks should cut their hair, how to calculate when Easter should be celebrated and the more complex question of Jesus’s nature. Its complex vocalization and rhythms incorporated the rituals of Islamic devotion many of them had to leave behind. Americans raised in a religious tradition who identify as politically liberal are over four times more likely to leave religion than are those who identify as conservative. Three more instances where Nostradamus supposedly predicted future events include the 1789 French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and the creation of the atomic bomb. From this point on my historical command becomes foggier and events stop happening quite as fast so the rest of this history will be in more of a vignette style. How will this leadership stop the students. Suffice to say that any ideology will tend to conform to the culture it inhabits with time. The pope was running the civic business in Rome for some time at this point in history and it had also since picked up a nice little swath of territory.

If you ask me, I think it’s actually really neat to see the Catholic Church emulating Rome in this way. With that, let’s jump back in time to Rome. Back to the point. Pope Urban saw a brilliant opportunity to help out the Byzantines and get their land back for them in the hope that Byzantium would recognize the benefits of sticking with the pope and Catholicism and that all that business of splitting off was just a phase. Three years into his papacy he saw a golden opportunity to end this recently formed schism. What this means is that just like our old Roman government that saw church and state as one entity, the papacy in the seventh odd century had become as much a political position as it was a religious one. And remember, this is all just for having a different point of view than the central church did. This mutually assured silent treatment is known as the Great Schism of 1054, the point where the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches split up for good.

So at this point paganism was still in charge but Constantine effectively said that Christianity can contribute to securing the pax deorum too. Non-Trinitarian Christianity, however, was a home run in the north, and brushing over a number of historical hiccups for the sake of time, a decent number of people were converted from both Paganism and non-Trinitarianism into Trinitarian Catholicism in a few centuries. He had to earn that particular title by fighting one of Rome’s very peculiar 4-way civil wars which happened every now and again throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries. While the empire was getting irrevocably cleaved between east and west, the church has slowly but surely been drifting farther apart along those same lines for centuries. It’s important to note here that the church in the west had formed what’s called the Papal States in central Italy in 754, which was really just a formal recognition of the political power the pope had enjoyed in the region for over a century already. Our friend Theodosius made the brilliant decision to split the empire between his two sons, which had only been the cause of, oh, about, I don’t know, like five civil wars in the past century.

It didn’t become the official state religion until the emperor Theodosius made it so in 380 CE. Since Christianity was now the official religion of the empire, it needed a new Roman makeover, so it would fit. Now Constantine wasn’t born as the heir to the whole empire. The night before a battle with the ruler of one such fourth of the empire which contained Italy and North Africa, Constantine had a dream in which he was instructed to paint the Christian Chi-Rho symbol, the first two Greek letters of Christ, onto his army’s shields, so he did and they won and in 313 he delivered the edict of Milan which legalized Christianity with in the empire. On one side, the monophysites – Greek for “one nature” – they said no, it’s only divine, it was impossible for Jesus to sin. The other side said that Jesus’s nature was both human and divine, so he could sin, but didn’t.