Arian Baptistery
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
The Arian Baptistery takes us into a Christian dispute that modern visitors can miss because both sides used familiar Christian imagery. Theodoric and his Gothic court followed a form of Christianity usually labelled Arian, while the Roman population was largely Nicene, or orthodox in later Catholic terminology.
Theodoric had the baptistery built around the end of the fifth century. Its dome shows Christ’s baptism and a procession of apostles. After the Byzantine reconquest, the building was converted to orthodox use.
The word “Arian” here refers to doctrine, not ethnicity. It has nothing to do with the modern racist term “Aryan”, despite the unfortunate similarity in English spelling.
This is a small monument carrying a large political problem: how does a ruler govern people who worship the same God but disagree over the nature of Christ? Ravenna’s answer was not theological peace. It was parallel institutions, later followed by conquest and reassignment.