Constantine the Great

It is 330 AD and we are on the Bosporus. And the Bosporus is this small strip of land that connects the Black Sea to the Bosporus Sea, which then flows down into the Aegean Sea. And this strip of land in the ancient world provided a unique military advantage. If you are attacked by sea, you simply release your own fleet to defend the city. And those who would attack you by land have to come into the narrow strip and they are funneled into a smaller strip of land. And the city that would eventually be built on it would have nearly impregnable walls, making it one of the most defensible cities in the ancient world on into the Middle Ages. And it's 330 in Constantine, the new emperor of Rome, having united both East and West after the split between East and West under the Tetrarchy. And Constantine is walking with his entourage around the new city. Now, it had been an old city, but Constantine had decided, not long after coming to the throne and not long after uniting both East and West, that he wanted to found a new Rome. A new Rome that would rival the image and the mystique of the old classic Rome in the Italian peninsula. And in this year, 330, Constantine has arrived to dedicate the new city, with most of the principal construction now finished and with the hope that the city would grow to dominate the Eastern Empire as the new imperial capital. And newer students to history always wonder about this. Why would Constantine leave Rome? Anyone who travels to Rome today, of course, is aware of the fact that Rome is filled with all of these relics, all of these artifacts from the ancient past. Places like the Pantheon or the Capitoline Hill where the Senate was once housed. But you have to remember that Rome was not as much of a big deal as it is to us today, at least not in terms of cultural memory. In Constantine's day, Rome and its glories were not all that distant from the past. Moreover, Rome was not in an ideal location to run the empire. The gravity of the empire, the central pull of it, was to the East. Out East, you had the principal economic structures. You had more wealth. You had more population density. You had more important cities to the ancient world. And the core of intellectuals, of artists, of serious thinkers, always at this time, tended to come from the East. From a military standpoint, the East was more important as well. The major enemies that would plague the Roman Empire, and that had plagued the Roman Empire for centuries, were all out East. In particular, the Persian Empire was something that was always an enormous concern to the Roman imperial elites. They were concerned that if the Persian Empire was left alone for too long, if an eye was not kept on it, that the empire of Persia would rise up and would conquer or challenge the imperial state of Rome. And as Constantine is walking the limits of the city, and as he comes to the end of his tour, Constantine does something that no Roman emperor had done ever before. Constantine decides that he will enter Hagia Sophia, and he will attend a mass, a church service, part of the Christian liturgy. It is almost impossible to believe that in the centuries before this, even in the years before this, the decades before this, that any Roman emperor would ever participate in a church service at all. And yet here was Constantine, a Christian, and yet also emperor of Rome, having dedicated a new city, a new Rome, now giving thanks to God for that new city and for his conquest of the Roman Empire. Not thanking the gods, not thanking the pagan gods, not performing any ancient rituals of classic antiquity, but rather participating in the Christian liturgies that worship Christ as Lord, and that said, once and for all, our God reigns, and it is now part of the Roman Empire. This takeover by Constantine of the empire as a Christian signaled some of the most important changes that would shape not only the East, but also the West, for centuries, if not even longer, all the way down until today. This is called the Constantinization of the Roman world. This is the Christian man now becoming the Roman emperor, and now that he is Roman emperor, now that he is in charge, now that he is sovereign, Constantine is now supporting the church. But there is no mistaking that when you go to new Rome in 330, that this is going to be a Christian imperial city. If in 330 you were to go to old Rome, to the Rome of the Italian peninsula, you would actually find not much Christian influence there. You would find bishops and churches and clergymen now coming out from under the persecution. But what was still dominant in Rome and in much of the Roman imperial world was paganism. And so therefore, in 330, when Constantine is dedicating a city that seems to spring up from the soil out of nowhere, he is able to create an entirely Christian-focused city, a city that is dominated by Christian architecture, that is dominated not by one massive church, Hagia Sophia, but also by another one, Hagia Irene, holy peace, peace and wisdom. These were now the two dominant churches of the Constantinian world. There would be no whispers to pagan gods thanking them for military prowess. In Constantinople, the city named after Constantine himself, the only god to be worshipped is Christ and the Trinity. We have to pick up where we left off in our last lecture. The Tetrarchy had arisen under Diocletian and in the end, despite its initial successes, it was a failure in terms of keeping Rome stable and under a hereditary regime of passing off power from one Augustus to one Caesar and so on. And at one point, we said in the last lecture, there were as many as six or even seven rival claimants to be Caesar or Augustus in all parts of the empire at large. One of the rivals in the early 300s was Constantine himself. Now, Constantine's father, Constantius Chlorus, had been the Caesar of the western half of the empire. Constantius Chlorus had ruled from Trier in northern Germany, and he had been quite adept at keeping order in his area. And he was such a success that when he was raised to the title of Augustus, he was largely hailed by the armies and by those in the western half of the empire. At one point, though, Constantius Chlorus goes up into Britain in order to put down a rebellion from the Picts, those who were in the modern day area of Scotland. And Constantine went with his father. And yet, while there in Britain, Constantius Chlorus dies in the city of York. And despite the fact that Constantine was barred from the succession, despite the fact that he was not appointed to be the Caesar of the West, the army knew a good thing when they saw it. And the army always believed that the son of a general, if he had proved himself in battle, would be the next best thing. And so in York, Constantine is proclaimed to be the Augustus of the West. Now, this is a usurpation. This is a breakdown of the Tetrarchy. Constantine had been barred, had been excluded from the Tetrarchy. Yet, because of his prowess in battle and in leadership, and because he was the son of Constantius Chlorus, Constantine was hailed as the Augustus. Down in the Roman peninsula, however, there was Maxentius. And by the time of 312, the only two claimants in the West are Constantine and Maxentius. And Constantine is going to seek to put all of the Western half of the Roman Empire under his umbrella of authority. And so Constantine travels from the northern part of Germany up in Trier, and he travels down into the Italian peninsula. And then he and Maxentius' armies meet at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. And the Battle of the Milvian Bridge is one of the most important turning points in the Western world. Constantine was a superior tactician. He knew how to lure Maxentius out. And so when they got to the Milvian Bridge, and he realized that Maxentius' army was there to meet Constantine's army, Constantine held back. He kept his troops undercover, held them back in a forest. And Maxentius was there to meet him. And he was lured over the bridge at one point. They weren't simply on the concrete bridge itself. Maxentius' army had also built pontoons of boats down on the water. And the problem of this is just as Maxentius' army seeks to go across the bridge, Constantine's army unfurls itself, it strikes, and it meets Maxentius' army on the bridge. And of course, anytime you're in battle, if you're caught in a narrow strait, if you're caught in a narrow pass, and particularly if you're caught on a bridge like this, any strength in numbers, any strength in battle, any strength in tactics that you might have had now go out the window. And Constantine's armies push Maxentius back onto the bridge. And in the end, Maxentius falls off of the bridge, down onto the pontoon bridge, the boat bridge down below. And that bridge collapsed and Maxentius drowns in the sea, leaving Constantine, now Emperor Augustus, over all of the West. Now that story would be important on its own, except for what had happened the night before that battle. On October 28, 312, Constantine had a dream or a vision. It's a bit unclear in the evidence which is which, but in either case, Constantine had a vision of some kind of Christ. And we are told that Christ comes to Constantine, and that he sees him, and that he gives Constantine a symbol, a sign. And that sign is the Christogram, the Cairo. And that is, you take the name of Christ in Greek, which is Cairo, the first two letters. And you take the Cairo, and you put them on top of each other, and you end up with this symbol, the Christogram, the Cairo, it's been called. And Christ, in this vision, tells Constantine to place the Cairo, the Christogram, onto his banner as he goes into battle, and that he will have success. Another version of the story says that Christ speaks to Constantine, and shows him that if he puts this sign onto his banner as he marches into war with Maxentius, he is told, In hoc sino vincis, which is Latin for, by this sign, conquer. In other words, the vision that Constantine has, the story that he tells his troops after the fact, is that he has seen the risen Lord Christ, that he has converted to the Christian faith, and that the God of Christianity has given him great success in battle. In fact, the symbol that Christ gives him now on the banner is now the thing that allowed Constantine to have success in battle against Maxentius. And so, at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, you now have a newly converted Constantine facing off against Maxentius, who is a pagan, who is, if he had won, would have continued the pagan practices of old Rome and the western half of the empire until he died or was killed himself. In other words, at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, because Constantine has converted, you now have a Christian versus a pagan. When Constantine wins, now the Christian emperor is in charge of the west. Now, the telling of the story is complicated by the fact that we don't have any contemporary accounts or eyewitness accounts of Constantine himself at the Battle of Milvian Bridge telling the story. The two accounts we have actually come from a great deal of time after the fact of the Battle of Milvian Bridge. In fact, they come from about the time when Constantine has come to unite both east and west. The first account we have is from Lactantius. Now, again, Lactantius was not there himself. He was actually off in the east when the Battle of Milvian Bridge occurred. And the story that he is telling then is gotten through secondhand accounts. Perhaps the more historically accurate account comes from Eusebius, who wrote a book called The Life of Constantine. And Eusebius tells us that he got the story from Constantine directly, that he had inquired of Constantine directly, and that Constantine had told him the story about his conversion before the Battle of Milvian Bridge. The problem here, though, is that Eusebius by this point, when he is interviewing Constantine, is interviewing a Constantine who is actually a great deal older, who has been ruling for some time and whose Christian faith has matured, at least in some ways. And so it is hard to take Eusebius fully seriously because he is taking Constantine at his word. Still, there is no room for cynicism here. Some historians will go so far as to say that this did not happen, that this is a story made up by Christians after the fact to kind of baptize the Roman Emperor Constantine as themselves. Some historians have tried to argue that Constantine had used a pagan symbol on his banner and that after the battle some Christians sort of snuck in and said, oh, Constantine, by the way, that's actually a Christian symbol and had somehow convinced him otherwise after the fact. Well, that cynicism from historians is really unnecessary. For one, we actually now do have archaeological evidence that proves that Constantine knew what he was doing and that the Cairo, the Christogram, was actually on the banners. We do have archaeological evidence that Constantine had put this on his banners because within an immediate amount of time, a few short years afterwards, Constantine does in fact show on the coinage and on other artifacts and on other relics around this time that he had now put the Christogram on the banners and we see this in the archaeological evidence. So even if the story that comes down to us from Lactantius and Eusebius is a bit embroidered, still there is no need to be cynical. The main reason though why it makes virtually no sense to believe that Constantine has either falsely converted or as some have argued in the past, that he converted because, well, maybe there were a lot of Christians in the army or maybe there were a lot of Christians in the populace of the West and therefore Constantine sort of cynically adopts the Christian posture in order to rule and to galvanize the Western Empire behind him now that he has taken over after the defeat of Maxentius. But there really is not much evidence for this either. In fact, Christianity is still a profoundly minority faith at this point. During the Diocletian Revolution, for example, during the Diocletian persecutions of Christians, most of the Christian presence both in the government and in the armies was eviscerated. Diocletian on multiple accounts had called for any Christians in the army or in the noble houses to be removed. Now that is evidence that there was some presence of Christians in these realms but they were removed at least in part and, more importantly, there does not seem to be an overwhelming surge of Christians at both the lay level and at the government level. And so what Constantine is actually doing is taking on a faith that is the minority faith, that is the extreme minority faith. And this is not the faith that would galvanize just about anybody in the Western world. If anything, it runs quite contrary to the Western world. And we see the fact that it runs contrary to the Western world because of the way Constantine conducts his business and his policies after the Battle of Milvian Bridge. In 313, Constantine and Licinius get together at Milan and they issue what's called the Edict of Milan. And this edict is often misunderstood. It's sometimes believed that the Edict of Milan makes Christianity the official religion of the Roman world. It doesn't do that. Rather, what the Edict of Milan does is it takes the Christian religion and it puts it into the status of illicit religion, illegal religion. Now, there were only a certain number of religions in the ancient world, of the Roman world, that were illicit, that were allowed, that did not have state control or state persecution or oppression. Christianity had always been illicit. It had always been persecuted or oppressed or at least marginalized in Roman society because of its illicit status. But in 313, the Edict of Milan has to put the Christian faith into the category of the illicit religion. It makes it one of the options in the Roman world. But what it doesn't do is allow Constantine to sort of shove Christianity down on top of all of the populace, which is still largely pagan. If you look at some of the coinage and some of the other cultural artifacts of this day, we still see lots of paganism on all of these elements of society. Historians have always pointed out that there were, for example, images of Constantine with the sun god on a coin. And they said in this that Constantine was some kind of amalgam of paganism and Christianity. Or they look at other factors in Constantine's life, of his personal morality or sometimes the lack thereof. The fact that Constantine had one of his sons killed in a military coup. A lot of things that certainly don't point to a very Christian saintly man. But again, all of these things are certainly problematic. But again, it is one thing to say that someone is a bad Christian or that they are not truly Christian in the way that they live their life out. But it is another thing to say that they have not converted or not at least somewhat sincere about their faith. So in other words, what we have with the conversion of Constantine is we have a Christian Constantine, a man who is at least seeking the Christian faith in some overt way, ruling over a Western province, over a Western part of the Roman Empire that is profoundly pagan. And so what Constantine is unable to do is churn the tide overnight. So instead, what Constantine does is he supports the Christian faith at first indirectly and then overtly. He supports it again. He does not force it upon the populace. He does not make it somehow the only official religion of the Roman Empire. That will happen at a later date with Constantine's successors. But at this point, all that Constantine can do is simply make the Christian religion illicit part of the faith and then support the Christian faith as the emperor himself. Okay, so let's ask the question now. If Constantine has come to the throne and he is a Christian, but he is also the Roman emperor, how does this change the church? And this question is usually handled in one of two ways by either historians or by the popular conception of this period. On the one hand, it's simply brushed over. The idea that Constantine has come to the throne and that the Roman world, the Roman Empire, has been merged now with the Christian faith. It's just seen as a nice triumphal kind of manifest destiny of the Christian church. That what Constantine did was really not all that much. Really, all he did was simply add a level of stability to the church. On the other hand, though, there are those who simply recoil to see the mingling, the coming together of the political Roman Empire and the pacifist Christian faith. The Christian faith that had been the martyrs now being those who are in power and as the centuries wear on, become those who do the martyring or those who do the oppressing in some occasions. And without pitching the case too strongly on one side or the other, I do want to describe some of the ways that Constantine began to shape and change the church. Even those of us who are the most optimistic about what Constantine achieves during his reign and about the ways in which the Christian Roman Empire will move forward for the next several centuries and on into the medieval West and into the world of Byzantium. Still, Constantine coming to the throne does change things. The church after Constantine does not look like the same church, at least on the externals, as it did before. The church for the first time under Constantine has to deal with the problem of power, the problem of wealth, the problem of the relationship between Christian faithfulness in the church and public faithfulness in a world that is pluralistic and pagan. Well, we can talk about at least a few of the cosmetic changes right off the bat. First and foremost, the bishops of the church take on a new status in the Roman Empire now that they are a licit religion. Prior to Constantine, pagan priests and rulers, those who were really instrumental in the shaping of pagan identity, had certain legal rights that were unique to them. They were free of certain taxation. They were free of certain legal action against them. They had a privileged position, not always at the inner court of the emperor, but certainly on the wider orbit of the Roman world. With the power being of the emperor, the leaders of the pagan world were always at least on the periphery, at least moving towards the center of power. Well, with the coming of Constantine, the bishops begin to take these places. Now, they don't do it overnight. Again, the Constantinian Revolution is not so much a revolution as, say, the French Revolution, which seemed to change France overnight from a constituted monarchy to suddenly a republic of some kind. Rather, the Constantinian Revolution was really more piecemeal. Bishops began to make their way in to the power structures simply by their relationship with Constantine. For example, in local cities, often the decurians, or those who were the elites out in the cities, would be those who would be called on to rule or to render verdicts in certain cases. Maybe they would be in charge of legal issues with settling a dispute in the local community. Under Constantine, increasingly, it is the bishops who begin to take on these roles. They have a certain power, a certain status, a certain dignity now in local communities. We also see changes in just simply the structure of the church itself. The Roman world had always compartmentalized its politics into what we call diocesan arrangements. That is to say, a ruler or a set of rulers would be in charge of a diocese in the Roman world, in the pagan Roman world. That diocese would be a regional governance. They would manage all the affairs in this regional area. Well, lo and behold, after Constantine, suddenly the church takes on a diocesan formula. Now, there had always been bishops. But bishops, prior to the coming of Constantine, were more often in charge of their churches. And then by their role as a bishop is supposed to be, a pastor to the pastors, they would have regional influence and authority in a region that was connected to churches. In other words, it wasn't necessarily a strictly geographical region. We see bishops that are of a certain stature or of a certain dignity, those who are more learned, let's say, often sometimes extending their influence and rendering their opinion to churches in other areas that are not immediately under their subordination. In many ways, this is how the papacy begins to develop its own understanding of its authority. The bishop of Rome, because he has a privileged position in the early church, begins increasingly in the West to offer his verdict or his opinion to diocese around the Western world and increasingly even into the Eastern world. After Constantine, though, the diocesan structure becomes more fixed. Suddenly, we have bishops that are over a diocese and they have regional jurisdiction over this area. Now, it is somewhat ambiguous, again, given Constantine's takeover of the state, where spiritual authority begins and where secular authority ends. Another factor that Constantine brings, it's a small one, but it is an important one, is that the church begins to take on a new architecture. Now, the church had always resisted using pagan temples or shrines in the architecture of these places as their own places of worship. We have virtually no evidence, for example, of churches with these strong Corinthian columns out front mimicking a pagan architectural style. Instead, what the church begins to look more and more like, though, is the Roman senate house, the Roman places of politics. We call this the basilica. A basilica is a long corridor building, usually with an entrance on one flat side, that goes all the way down to the end and then on the far end, you have a curved structure. This is a basilica. Well, not surprisingly, if you've ever seen a basilica church or a cathedral church, very often, at least before the Gothic Renaissance in the high Middle Ages, these places would take on a basilica style of structure. Now, these may sound cosmetic, but they are important, at least in general. The church begins to look more and more political, more and more Roman. It takes on structures that were not natural to the church, structures that were straight out of pagan Rome. And so, therefore, the question is only natural to ask, is this a sign that the church itself is changing? Now, initially, I think the answer is no. Just because Constantine is converted, you don't have mass conversion of the pagan world. You certainly don't have forced conversion. Still, over the course of Constantine's life and on beyond Constantine and his successors, all of whom were Christian except for one, Julian the Apostate. And even Julian reigned only for a short period of time and was, at least in general, largely unpopular. But after Constantine, what you begin to see is a more permeable barrier between the outside world and the church world. It's not a stretch to say that in order to become part of the influential circles of the Roman Empire, one needed to be Christian. It's not unlike certain parts of America over its earliest centuries in which people had to be Christian in order to run for office. And as we all know, there have always been people who have feigned conversion or have feigned a certain faithfulness in their religious life in order to gain political favor. Well, that's not a 20th or 21st century invention. That is there all the way back to the beginning. That is there with Constantine. We do see people begin to come into the church who are certainly not those who would have been there during the age of persecution. Now, again, we don't have to see in this some great perversion of the church. We today, who have churches that are permeable, don't simply think the church has fallen to the wayside. We actually welcome unbelievers into our churches. We hope they come. We hope they seek out the faith or at least come and inquire. So it's not necessarily all that bad to have a church that is actually attracting people in some ways. But of course, what is unique is the way in which Constantine has brought power to bear. And the clearest example of Constantine's somewhat ambiguous role in the church is the Council of Nicaea. Now, if you grew up in any kind of liturgical church or if you grew up in a more traditional church and increasingly even non-denominational or broadly evangelical churches are doing this, many of us grew up saying at some point the Nicene Creed during our services. Now, a couple of things to clarify. When we say the Nicene Creed in full, we are not actually saying the Nicene Creed itself. Rather, we are saying, historically, the Nicene Constantinople Creed. The Nicene Creed itself, first and foremost, was only about the doctrines of Arianism. And Arianism was this belief that Jesus was somehow not fully God. I always tell students that the easiest way to understand Arianism is to draw a hard line and call this the creator-creature distinction. Above the line, you have God. And below it, you have everything else. Anything that is not God belongs on the bottom. Well, according to Arianism, at least technically, Christ is on the bottom. Now, Arianism will say that Christ is exalted, that he is the highest of creation, that he is something like God, that he has significantly more elements to him that are godlike or godly than any of us. He is elevated. But still, according to Arianism, Christ is on the other side of the line. He is not on the God side. He is not God himself. He is a creature made by God the Father. Well, the Council of Nicaea was summoned during Constantine's early reign to address this issue. And without going into the theological issues right now, we have to look at the issue in terms of the new situation that Constantine has brought. Now, the church had met dozens of times prior to Constantine. It always met in council form in order to deal with issues. This is not the first council that the church has ever called. There is something of a myth there that this is some new political idea that the church would meet in a council and impose its will on people. Well, if that's the case, in the Book of Acts, in the Jerusalem Council, is to be ignored, as well as the dozens of others between the Jerusalem Council and the Council of Nicaea. But what is important to note about the Council of Nicaea is that situated in it, seated in it at times, is Constantine himself. Now, Nicaea is the first ecumenical council, we say. That is to say, it is the first attempt to bring all Christians or representatives from all of the areas of the church from around the known world to one meeting in order to discuss something. But seated there, the elephant in the room, is Constantine. Now, Constantine did not run the debate. He was not theologically in charge of anything. But still, what the Council of Nicaea brought was this new position of power. The Council of Nicaea, whatever its decisions, on Arianism and other matters, now had with it the power of the Roman Empire. Now again, the church had power before. The church has the keys. It has the ability to bind and loose, to make decisions, to ratify, to say this is true according to scriptures and this is either less true to the point of being false, or it is an outright lie. The church has always done this. But what is happening now is the decisions of the church are now being wrapped up in to the political magisterium of Constantine himself. Now, Constantine holds back on this. This is an important thing to understand. Constantine himself does not bludgeon the Arians after the Nicene decision to reject the Arian understandings of Christ as a creature and not as God. Constantine does not scourge them. He does not destroy the Arians. In fact, in some ways, he leaves them be. And then for far too long, the Arian faith continues to flourish and develop into the Eastern and eventually into the Western world. Still, Constantine has power. And power brings with it a greater degree of seriousness whenever the church is meeting. And so there are a number of ways in which the conversion of Constantine, as it's synced up with his takeover of the Roman establishment, brings change to the church. In fact, it is hard to even understand the church today and its ambiguous role in politics and its ambiguous understanding of power without looking back to the Constantine world. Even with all these ambiguities and with all the problems that Constantine brought, for those who were there when Constantine converted and suddenly the church went from being pretty ravaged by persecution to now being cherished by the one in charge, for them, this was little more than a miracle.