Sacramentum et Imperator

Sacramentum et Imperator April 9, 2015

In a 2005 article, Daniel Van Slyke explores the use of sacramentum in non-Christian writers from the ancient world. He reiterates the common observation that the term is most often used in military contexts to describe the engagement of soldiers to military service. Livy, for instance, writes that during a military crisis of the fourth century BC, “The dictator, after he had proclaimed a cessation of public business because of the Gallic disturbance, bound all those of military age by the sacrament, and going out of the City with a great army, set camp on the nearer bank of the Anio” (169). 

The sacrament bound the individual soldier to his commander, imposed certain responsibilities, conferred certain privileges. Van Slyke suggests that the “moral and relational” dimensions of the term commended it to Christian writers: “The military sacrament put one into a new set of responsibilities occasioned by a new set of relationships: with the emperor, with one’s fellow soldiers, with the citizens of Rome, and even with Rome’s enemies. It obliged soldiers to serve exclusively the emperor in whose name they swore. The emperor in turn rewarded them for their service with land or money. The sacrament also entailed mutual obligations among the soldiers themselves. It was a more or less fixed verbal formula periodically renewed and recited by the troops communally. Above all, fidelity to it, which entailed fidelity to the emperor and to one’s fellow soldiers, was required even in the face of death; the soldier who preserved fidelity unto death was rewarded with glorious renown” (205). The sacramentum enlisted the soldier to a life of fidelity, fides, a life of faith.

Mutatis mutandis: “Through the Christian sacrament, one enters upon a new set of relations and responsibilities with Christ, with one’s fellow Christians, and with the enemies of Christ. The very concept of sacrament provided a means of Romanizing or Latinizing the covenantal relationship that Christians perceived between themselves and their God, and likewise amongst themselves, enabling them to express it in the discourse of Roman culture. Entering into a sacrament with God entailed responsibilities on the part of the Christian, but it also entailed promises on the part of God, which are manifest in the typology of scripture and the rites of early Christian communities. This may explain why, from an early point in the history of Latin Christian literature, so many dimensions of the faith came to be called sacraments” (205-6).

As Owen Phelan has argued with respect to the Carolingians (The Formation of Christian Europe), sacramentum did not lose its political, imperial, or military character when it was transposed into a Christian key. The conversion of Martin of Tours involved an exchange of one sacramentum for another, that of Rome for that of Christ, but the term still carried analogous force, at least for Alcuin, who wrote of Martin that he was determined “not to contend with secular arms for the Roman Empire, but to enlarge the Christian empire (imperium christanum) with particular teachings; and not to throw wild peoples under the hard yoke of the Romans, but to put the light yoke of Christ on the necks of many nations” (quoted in Phelan, 8). Jesus is the emperor, Christians are His soldiers, the sacrament an enlistment into His army and His imperial mission.

(Van Slyke, “Sacramentum in Ancient Non-Christian Authors,” Antiphon 9:2 [2005] 167-206.)


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