The fourth century saw cataclysmic changes in church-state relations, all of them hinging on the conversion of the emperor Constantine. Over the course of a mere eighty years, Christianity went from being under siege, to being tolerated, to becoming officially the state religion of Rome. Rarely has the world seen such a radical shift of opinion and policy in such a short time. By the end of the fourth century, approximately half of the empire claimed allegiance to the Christian faith.
In exploring the role of Constantine in this shift, we should recall that he was serving as a junior officer in Diocletian’s court when persecution began. Constantine was completely disingenuous—in fact, he was telling a bald-faced lie—when he claimed, some twenty years later, that he had watched Diocletian come to his fateful decision to persecute only when he himself was “still a boy.”1 He was no mere boy. This was in 303 CE. Constantine was born in 272 or 273. He was a thirty-year-old holding an important position in the emperor’s administration. He may not have been personally complicit in the opening years of the Great Persecution, but nothing indicates he expressed any disapproval either.
Soon afterward he served under Galerius, who was known to our Christian sources as particularly energetic in enforcing the decrees of persecution and possibly the one who urged their instigation in the first place. Galerius administered the eastern part of the empire, but in the West there was almost no enthusiasm for the edicts. Constantine’s father, Constantius, was the first western Caesar in the Tetrarchy and was himself probably a henotheist, although almost certainly a devotee of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, rather than the god of the Christians. He was not interested, in any event, in persecuting the Christian church.
Constantine joined his father in Gaul in 305 CE before being acclaimed Augustus himself on his father’s death in 306. The senior emperor of the West at his accession, Severus, was soon thereafter captured in his assault on Maxentius in Rome, and was replaced in the imperial college by a military man named Licinius, who was to play an important role in Constantine’s life for the next sixteen years.
The Great Persecution continued sporadically, mainly in the East, until the death of Galerius in 311. Immediately prior to his demise, Galerius—to everyone’s great surprise—issued the Edict of Toleration, in which he officially called the persecution to a halt. A copy of this edict has been preserved for us by the Christian historian Eusebius in his lengthy Church History. It is an intriguing document, in no small measure because it shows so clearly that Galerius pursued persecution not as a hater of religion but, quite the contrary, as an avid supporter of the gods.
In the document, Galerius argues that he had advocated persecution “for the advantage and benefit of the nation,” because “the Christians . . . had abandoned the convictions of their own forefathers and . . . refused to follow the path trodden by earlier generations.” The persecution was designed to compel the Christians “to go back to the practices established by the ancients.” But opposition to the religion had not had the desired effect. Christians “persisted in the same folly” and were not “paying to the gods in heaven the worship that is their due.” So the emperor chose to rescind the persecution: “In view of our benevolence and the established custom by which we invariably grant pardon to all people, we have thought proper in this matter also to extend our clemency most gladly, so that Christians may again exist and rebuild the houses in which they used to meet, on condition that they do nothing contrary to public order” (Church History 8, 17).
This was no deathbed conversion. But it was as close as one could get to admitting he was wrong. Galerius died soon thereafter, but his successor, Maximin Daia, resumed persecution with a vengeance for another two years before being defeated in battle by Licinius not long after the conversion of Constantine and the battle at the Milvian Bridge.
With all that upheaval in the imperial college, the Tetrarchy was no more. Maximinus, Severus, Galerius, Maxentius (never admitted into the college), and Maximin Daia were all dead. That left Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East. These two decided to broker a peace and met in Milan to cement their relationship. To create a family bond, Constantine arranged for Licinius to marry his half sister Constantia. More significant for our interests here, the rulers jointly agreed to bring the Great Persecution to a definitive and final end.
What emerged from the meeting was the so-called Edict of Milan. This was not an edict but a letter addressed to provincial governors in the East. It was not written from Milan but from Bithynia, after the imperial meeting. Moreover, it was published not by Constantine but by Licinius, even though it appeared under both their names.
The letter is significant for two particular reasons: it declared an official state policy of tolerance for all religions whatsoever—not just Christianity—and it stated the reason for the policy: to ensure that “whatsoever divine and heavenly powers exist might be enabled to show favor to us and to all who live under our authority.” In other words, prosperity in the human realm required peace with the divine. Precisely this view, of course, drove the persecutions of the Christians in the first place. Both current emperors, the Christian Constantine and the pagan Licinius, agreed that, for the empire to thrive, God, or the gods, needed to look favorably upon it. That required toleration of difference, to ensure that “respect and reverence for the Deity [be] secured.”2
Thus, the edict explicitly states a policy of complete tolerance for all:
We have given the said Christians free and absolute permission to practice their own form of worship. When you observe that this permission has been granted by us absolutely, [you] will understand that permission has been given to any others who may wish to follow their own observance or form of worship—a privilege obviously consonant with the tranquility of our times—so that everyone may have permission to choose and practice whatever religion he wishes. This we have done to make it plain that we are not belittling any rite or form of worship. (Church History 10.5)
This is a remarkable statement, unlike any seen before. In the words of Constantine scholar Harold Drake, it was “the first official government document in the Western world to recognize the principle of freedom of belief.”3 It is not that the Christians had now assumed control of the empire and were turning the tables on the pagans; it is simply that Christianity was being recognized as completely legitimate. So too were all the traditional religions of Rome. There was to be equality and toleration all around, a policy of complete noncoercion.
Some modern Christian scholars have thought that if Constantine refused to compel his pagan subjects to convert to his new faith, he must not have been a “real” Christian, except on the surface. That is a wrong reading of the so-called Edict of Milan and of the rest of Constantine’s reign. Throughout history there have been millions and millions of sincere Christians who have adopted a live-and-let-live policy toward people of other faiths. Constantine was one of them, even if he did happen to be the most powerful figure in the early history of the religion.4
It is also important to emphasize that when Constantine arrived at the conference in Milan in 313 he was a newly minted Christian. He had converted just months before. One cannot expect him to have had a full awareness of everything—or even anything—involved in his newly acquired faith. Learning an entirely new religion takes time. For Constantine it may have been a steep learning curve. But it did not take long for him to embark on his Christian education. He was forced to jump feetfirst into ecclesiastical life, almost immediately.
It may seem peculiar to modern minds that Constantine, a recent convert, should impose himself on affairs of the church right after he himself had joined its ranks. It is important to remember, however, that he, like most rulers before him, was deeply committed to religious ideology: social and political success—not just for him personally but for the entire empire—required divine support. And divinity required proper worship. Anything that affected divine worship was therefore important for the well-being of the state. Apart from the earlier Christian apologists, whom Constantine almost certainly had never read, no one was arguing for a separation of church and state.
Constantine himself certainly conceived of no separation of powers. In the very year he agreed on an empire-wide policy of toleration with Licinius, he became embroiled in a dispute threatening to tear the church apart, especially in the important region of North Africa. The Donatist controversy was Constantine’s first foray into ecclesiastical matters, and it is safe to say he had absolutely no idea what he was getting himself into. Unity of the empire was one of his chief ambitions, and a unified church could contribute to the cause. The church, however, was anything but unified. Constantine intervened in hopes of settling the controversy. As it happened, it would drag on for more than a century.5
The first decree of Diocletian in 303 CE—just ten years earlier—had required Christian clergy to hand over copies of the Scriptures for destruction. Most Christians saw this not only as an awful policy of the persecutors but also as an act of sacrilege for anyone who complied. The clergy who had done so were labeled traditores (“those who handed over”) and were not just castigated verbally but were dismissed from office. Their dismissal raised a crucial question of polity: What does their unsuitability for sacred position say about the efficacy of their earlier official actions? In the church at the time, Christian leaders conducted numerous ritual activities: performing baptism, administering the Eucharist, ordaining new members of the clergy, and so on. These were not actions just any Christian could perform. There was a sanctity inherent in the clergy that conferred the divine power associated with these sacramental rites. But traditores had obviously rescinded their sanctified status. Were the rites they performed while still in office legitimate?
The issue mattered a good deal. What if someone had been baptized by a traditor? Was the baptism still valid, or did it need to be performed a second time? What if a bishop had been ordained by the laying on of hands of a traditor? Was that person actually consecrated as a bishop?
The largest church of North Africa, Carthage, debated the issue with particular vigor. Some leaders of the church insisted that the sacraments were valid no matter who had performed them, whether traditor or not. The efficacy of the sacraments came from the power of God, not the worthiness of the one who administered them. But there was virulent—even violent—opposition to this view. The most vocal opponent was a man named Donatus, who had a large number of followers. In particular, Donatus argued that the bishop of Carthage, Caecilian, had not received a valid ordination. He could not be regarded as a true bishop. The church needed a different leader.
It is a long and complicated story that eventually involved such fifth-century stalwarts as the great Augustine. Constantine probably thought the solution was simple: he would have an established ecclesiastical authority judge the issue, he would sanction the answer, the church would accept it, and life would move on. But it was not to be.
His involvement began with a request for assistance from the Donatists themselves. Constantine turned the case over to the bishop of Rome, who appointed a kind of ecclesiastical court to rule on the matter. The Donatists lost the case, and Caecilian was exonerated. But the Donatists refused to accept defeat and appealed a second time to the emperor, who decided to take matters more directly into his own hands. He called for an entire council of bishops to meet in the city of Arles in 314 CE. Quite obviously this was the first time an emperor had called a council of bishops, and it set a precedent for things to come.
The bishops at the Council of Arles ruled decisively against the Donatists. Constantine himself had at first been somewhat inclined to their position, probably for practical reasons rather than because of any theological sophistication he could have brought to the table: he was certainly not well-read in the intricacies of sacramental theology. But when the Donatists refused the verdict of the council and appealed to him yet a third time, he saw them as obstructionists and set himself against them. Constantine was not particularly interested in the nuances of Christian theology or even of church polity. He was interested in unity. The Donatists were interfering with it. So he took the other side.
The other side could be seen as anti-rigorist. The Donatists took a hard line and were unforgiving of difference. That too did not sit well with Constantine. As Drake has observed, “Rigorists clearly were not the type of Christian he favored.”6 Moreover, this early dispute reveals that, all things being equal, in deciding a church issue Constantine preferred reasoned argument and considered opinion to the use of imperial force. Let the bishop of Rome make a sensible decision. If that does not work, have an entire council of bishops decide. Constantine was not interested in sending in the armies to bring the Donatists in line.
This was a position he continued to take throughout his lengthy reign, even when it came to the much more weighty matter of whether to compel nonbelievers to adopt the Christian faith. A decade later, after he had established himself as sole ruler of the empire, he sent a letter to his subjects in the East in which he stated unequivocally, “It is one thing to take on willingly the contest for immortality, quite another to enforce it with sanctions.”7
A year after Constantine wrote this letter in 324 CE, another ecclesiastical crisis came to a head. This one involved a dispute of theological importance. At least, it seemed important to the participants at the time, as it has to theologians in the centuries since. But to Constantine—and many others till today who have stood outside the ranks of the professional theologian—it seemed picayune and immaterial. This was the famous Arian controversy, a dispute that had arisen in Alexandria, Egypt, between a priest in the church named Arius and his bishop, Alexander.
There had been heated debates for generations among Christian theologians over the true nature of Christ. From almost the beginning, Christians had maintained that Christ was not just a human (even though, for most theologians, he was certainly that) but also the Son of God. In fact, already in our earliest Christian author, Paul, Christ was understood to be a divine being who existed in the heavenly realm prior to his birth (Philippians 2:6–8). In some sense he was God. But in what sense?
This was an issue that had never been satisfactorily resolved, in no small part because most Christians had always wanted to affirm with vigor four different propositions that, at least on the surface, appear to create a contradiction: Christ is God. God the Father is God. Christ is not God the Father. And there is only one God. So if Christ is God and God is God, how is it that Christians can say there is only one God? In short, how can Christians be monotheists?
It all hinges on what it means to say that there is only “one” God, and on how the Son of God is understood to relate to the Father. It is on these issues that Arius disagreed with his bishop, Alexander. Arius held a view in wide circulation among Christians for a long time, even if no one had articulated it with the same clarity and force. Christ, for him, was certainly a divine being, the Logos (the Greek word for “word”) of God, and he certainly existed before he came into the world as Jesus Christ. Moreover, he was the agent of all creation. As the Gospel of John affirms: it was through the Logos that God created the heavens and the earth (John 1:1–3). So he was divine, but he was separate from God. Then how do the two relate to each other?
Arius maintained that Christ, the Logos, could not be equal with God the Father. The Father himself is almighty. There cannot be two beings who are both almighty, since then neither of them is “all” mighty. For Arius, only God the Father is almighty. Originally, in eternity past, God existed alone, by himself. He then, prior to the creation of the universe, begot a Son, a second divine being, who, since he was begotten of God, was secondary and subservient to him, as a son is to a father. This was the Logos, through whom the world was made and who much later took on human form and came into the world in order to bring salvation. The Logos, then, is a subordinate divinity who was brought into being at some point: he had not always existed. God the Father is superior to God the Son by an “infinity of glories.”
Arius’s bishop, Alexander, could not disagree more. He took a hard line that Christ was not subservient to God the Father as a subordinate being. Christ himself had said, “I and the Father are One” and “If you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 10:30; 14:9). The two are equal. They are not identical, to be sure: the Son is a separate being from the Father. But they are equally omnipotent and have both existed forever. There never was a time that the Logos did not exist.
Those taking Alexander’s side in the debate could point out that, by definition, if something is perfect it can never change. If something changes, necessarily it becomes either better or worse from the change. But if it becomes better, it was not perfect before; and if it becomes worse, it is not perfect after. Since God is perfect, he can never change. That means he could not become the Father by begetting a Son, since this would involve a change in his status from not-Father to Father. Necessarily, then, God had always been the Father. If he was always the Father, then the Son must always have existed.
Thus, Alexander’s side of the debate maintained that the Son was coeternal with the Father and all-powerful along with him. He was not merely “like” the Father, of a “similar” kind of divine substance. He was “equal” with the Father, of the “same” substance. In the Greek terms used in these debates, the idea of being of the “same substance” is expressed by the word homoousias. By contrast, the word for “similar substance” is homoiousias. As you can see, they are very similar words, different only with the letter i, or in Greek, the iota, in the middle. Some observers have noted that the theological controversy threatening to fracture the church was a debate over an iota.
That is certainly what Constantine personally thought. Because the dispute was causing such turbulence, he felt compelled to intervene, and did so first by writing the two principals a letter. In it he clearly states his ultimate concern, which had never been about theological niceties but about unity: “My first concern was that the attitude towards the Divinity of all the provinces should be united in one consistent view.”8 Constantine did not care which view emerged from the debate. He simply wanted one side to concede to the other and thereby effect unity. Personally, he indicated that he considered the matter “extremely trivial and quite unworthy of so much controversy.” For him, these were “small and utterly unimportant matters,” involving a “very silly question.” He urged Alexander and Arius to settle the matter between themselves.
They were unable to do so. It was not simply that they were at odds with each other. Both sides had numerous supporters who engaged in vitriolic attacks on the theological ignorance of the other. The debate was racking the church. Constantine decided to intervene in a major way by calling for the first worldwide, or ecumenical, council of bishops to meet and resolve the issue. This was the famous Council of Nicaea of 325 CE, named after the city in Asia Minor where the meeting was held. Later records indicate that some 318 bishops from around the world came to participate, most of them from the eastern provinces. (As we have seen, the church was not nearly as well established in the West9).
Constantine himself attended the meeting. He gave the opening address and participated in the discussions. At the end the bishops took a vote. Arius lost. The council devised a creed, a statement of faith that expressed its understanding of the nature of both the Father and the Son and related important theological matters. Included in the creed were a number of “anathemas,” or “curses,” on anyone who took a contrary position. That creed ultimately came to form the basis of the Nicene Creed, still recited in many churches today. At the council, only twenty participants ended up on the Arian side. Constantine pressured the naysayers to concede the case and convinced nearly all of them to do so. The only two recalcitrant bishops—along with Arius himself—were sent into exile.
As was true of the Donatist controversy, the council called by Constantine did not finally resolve the matter. Arians continued to press their case and made converts to their cause. Emperors after Constantine—including his own offspring—adopted the Arian view and exercised their authority to cement its stature in the church, even though, as we will see, it eventually lost. Our concern here, however, is with Constantine himself and his relation to the Christian faith. By 325 CE he had learned more about the intricacies of Christian theological discourse than he ever expected. He wanted unity, but he was not willing to impose it by sending troops to de-convert the Arians by the sword. When it came to matters of the church, he believed in persuasion.
In terms of civil governance, on the other hand, he remained very much a military man, quite willing to lead the armed and dangerous forces himself when it was to his political advantage.
By 313 CE, Constantine and Licinius had reached a temporarily amicable decision to co-rule the empire. Diocletian’s brainchild, the Tetrarchy, was a thing of the past. One might think the two-emperor solution imposed by the resolution of the civil wars would prove practicable. Constantine could rule the West and Licinius the East. It was not to work out that way in the long run, however, in no small measure because Constantine was a man never satisfied. He knew how to wait for what he wanted, but ultimately he was driven by massive ambition. From early he had set his sights on being the sole ruler, the first since the early days of Diocletian’s reign some four decades earlier.
The next decade saw the rise of antagonism with Licinius and occasional military flare-ups as relations frayed. According to Eusebius, the final straw came in 324 CE with Licinius’s decision to renew the persecution of Christians in the East. This was all the excuse Constantine needed—in fact, some modern scholars think it is an excuse he himself manufactured for the occasion. Constantine chose to move against his co-emperor and “rescue” his co-religionists. He defeated Licinius in a major battle, sent him to retirement in Thessalonica, and eventually ordered his death. Constantine was now in complete control.
Not everyone was joyful at the prospect. When Constantine traveled to Rome to celebrate his twentieth anniversary as emperor in 326 CE, he chose not to follow the centuries-old custom of making a token sacrifice to Jupiter upon entering the city as conqueror. That decision has always made perfect sense to Christian commentators, but it proved disastrous for imperial public relations, incensing pagan members of the Roman senate. Constantine’s ties with the ruling elite soured. He had already by this time begun building a new capital city for the empire, a kind of “New Rome” that he named after himself, “Constantinople”—that is, “Constantine’s City”—now modern Istanbul. He was to spend much of his final years in residence there, never again even visiting Rome.
For the new capital he chose a strategically important location, something that Rome itself, obviously, never had: the city of Byzantium on the Bosphorus strait. From there it would be much easier to oversee troop movements both east and west, and the site itself was relatively easy to defend and difficult to assault. Constantine had Byzantium destroyed and then he carried out a carefully conceived architectural plan for its replacement.
He built his capital as an explicitly Christian city.10 There were to be no temples to pagan divinities and no sacred idols, with one exception: in order to adorn his city with statuary, a typical feature of the ancient urban environment, Constantine had sacred sites from around his empire pillaged, with bronze statues brought back and installed in public spaces throughout the city. This decision had a triple function: it deprived pagan religions of their revered cult images, it desacralized the statues and made them “secular” objects of art, and it raised the aesthetic appeal of his new capital. In the process, it gave the opportunity for Christians, whether resident or visiting, to mock the religious views of pagans. In Eusebius’s Life of Constantine we are told that the emperor “used these very toys”—that is, the pagan playthings, their idols—“for the laughter and amusement of the spectators” (Life of Constantine 3.54). If Eusebius is right, we can assume the despoiled pagans were not amused. Acts such as this, and the attendant mockery, foreshadowed much worse things yet in store for devotees of traditional pagan religions.
This was not the end of the mischief, however. Constantine also stripped the doors and roofs off temples throughout the empire. He had other uses for the fine metal. So too with cult statues plated with gold. He sent several members of his inner circle on a destructive campaign “to every province” of his reign, to go “city by city, country by country” and order “the consecrated officials themselves to bring out their gods with much mockery and contempt from their dark recesses into daylight.” They then had the gold plate stripped off and melted down for other uses. After denuding the statues, they left the “superfluous and useless” remnants to “the superstitious to keep as a souvenir of their shame” (Life of Constantine 3.54).
How the tide had turned. Now it was not the Christians who were superstitious; it was the pagans. It was not the Christians who embraced a religion open to public mockery; it was the pagans. It was not the Christians who suffered from the imperially sponsored violence; it was the pagans. The tide would continue to turn against the pagans in years to come, and it would never turn back, except for one brief moment under the reign of the emperor Julian.
Constantine thus built his city and adorned it with the spoils of the pagan empire. It was a city built to last. It remained the capital of Christendom for over a millennium, until the assault of the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
There should no longer be any doubt about the sincerity of Constantine’s devotion to the god of the Christians, despite the incredulity of some scholars over the years.11 Of course, it is technically possible that it was all a front. But his deep and personal commitment to Christian causes, if nothing else, should lay all suspicions to rest. As should his own words, found repeatedly throughout the sources, as in a letter he sent to those living in Palestine: “Indeed my whole soul and whatever breath I draw, and whatever goes on in the depths of the mind, that, I am firmly convinced, is owed by us wholly to the greatest God” (Life of Constantine 2.29).
Not only did Constantine take a vital interest in internal Christian affairs; he also took considerable steps to improve the lot of the church and the clergy who ran it. Most of the staffing and funding of ancient urban societies came from local aristocracies, not through high taxes but through enormous demands placed on their time, energy, and resources. Public office was an oft-noted burden for the wealthy, involving considerable outlays of cash—not just expected but demanded—for public buildings and public services. These official positions did provide real status for its occupants, but the large outlays of personal resources could obviously have been put to other, more personal uses.
Constantine issued legislation that absolved Christian clergy—who by this time tended to be among the local aristocracies—from having to serve in civic capacities, relieving them of such duties and financial obligations. Moreover, he provided them with extensive funds out of the imperial treasury for use in their congregations. Most famously, Constantine himself arranged for the building of major churches throughout his empire, including the Lateran in Rome.
In some instances he had these churches constructed on sites that had previously boasted famous and important pagan shrines. That required, of course, the destruction of temples. As Eusebius reports with approbation in his Life of Constantine, Constantine took shrines that pagan priests had “splendidly adorned” and stripped them bare, so that he “completely destroyed” temples that had been “most highly prized by the superstitious” (Life of Constantine 3.1).
It has sometimes been thought, based on this passage, that Constantine went on an empire-wide rampage, but Eusebius can specify only five sites that suffered this fate, three of them involving the worship of Aphrodite, one connected with the famous opponent of Jesus, Apollonius of Tyana, and another on the sacred site of Mamre, a place that was to be revered because it was connected with the Jewish patriarch Abraham in the Old Testament (see Genesis 18). One of the temples of Aphrodite was also located on holy ground: the place of Jesus’s passion. The temples of Aphrodite were suspected as places of sacred prostitution, providing Constantine all the excuse he needed to send in the wrecking crews. Thus, Constantine may have had good reasons for these particular destructions. They do not, however, indicate a trend. As one recent scholar has observed, “There is no reason to generalize from these cases to an empire-wide policy of temple destruction.”12 Still, once more we see a foreshadowing of things to come.
The religious zeal behind these demolition and building projects can be seen in Eusebius’s account of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It is sometimes thought that Constantine’s mother, Helena, herself very Christian by this time, instigated the building of the church, but that is almost certainly not the case. Eusebius indicates that Constantine himself “decided that he ought to make universally famous and revered the most blessed site in Jerusalem of the Savior’s resurrection” (Life of Constantine 3.25). Unfortunately, there was already a shrine on the spot. And not just any shrine, but an unholy, vile, pagan shrine built by “wicked men” who had been driven by demons to cover over the place where Jesus had been buried. They had brought in dirt from elsewhere and “covered up the whole place, then levelled it, paved it, and so hid the divine cave somewhere down beneath a great quantity of soil.” Above it, they had built a terrible “tomb” of their own for “dead idols.” It was a “gloomy sanctuary to the impure demon of Aphrodite.” There they “offered foul sacrifices . . . upon defiled and polluted altars.” Constantine’s solution? A demolition and refurbishing of the site. The shrine was torn down and destroyed, the place dug up, and the cave where Jesus had been buried uncovered. On the spot Constantine had built a magnificent structure in honor of the savior, at the site still visited by millions of pilgrims and tourists to this day.
Helena is not said to have had any hand in the affair. But she was active as a Christian ambassador in other ways. She is indeed most famous for her pious journey as a septuagenarian to the Holy Land, back in the days when it had never occurred to the faithful of Christendom to “walk where Jesus walked.” But she did so, and brought with her funding from the imperial treasury to recapture the place for Christ.13 It is not true that Helena claimed to have discovered the wood of the True Cross. That is the stuff of later legend. Eusebius, who discusses key events of her visit, says nothing of the sort. But Helena did choose two auspicious sites for special church buildings: one, the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, where Jesus was believed to have been born; the other, the Church of the Ascension, just outside Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, the site of his being taken up into heaven after his resurrection. In these projects, needless to say, Helena had the full backing of her avid Christian son.
In contrast to those scholars who have argued that if Constantine were a “real” Christian he would have been even more avid, some modern experts have argued that Constantine was so thoroughly committed to the Christian cause that his ultimate goal was to convert the entire empire.14 However, that is almost certainly not the case. Even if he himself was firmly committed to the Christian god, Constantine had imperial reasons for not forcing the issue or compelling his subjects. He had seen well enough what would come of coercion. He had lived through the Great Persecution, observing it up close as a member of the courts of both Diocletian and Galerius. It did not work. Constantine obviously was heavy-handed when he felt a need to be, as with the bishops at Nicaea. He was not, however, inclined to compel the religious preferences, or even practices, of his predominantly pagan empire.15
In the next chapter we will see that some of Constantine’s successors did not share his commitment to tolerance: by the end of the fourth century serious legislation issued from the imperial throne banning pagan practices altogether on pain of severe judicial penalty. One particularly thorny historical question involves Constantine’s tolerance of traditional cultic practices, or his lack of it. Did he try to shut down pagan religious activities by criminalizing animal sacrifice? There is no doubt about his personal views. He despised animal sacrifice: the blood, the gore, the stench, and, in fact, the entire practice. He repeatedly said so. The historical issue is whether this is one instance in which he forced his views on all others by disallowing sacrifice throughout his empire.16
Some prominent experts have claimed he did, and in support they can cite some important evidence. For one thing, this is explicitly what his biographer Eusebius states. According to the Life of Constantine, after defeating Licinius in 324 CE, Constantine passed a law that “restricted the pollutions of idolatry which had for a long time been practiced in every city and country district, so that no one should presume to set up cult objects, or practice divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all” (Life of Constantine 2.45). Later Eusebius indicates again that by imperial injunction “for all those under Roman rule, both civilian and military, access was universally blocked to every form of idolatry, and every form of sacrifice banned.” Moreover, “in successive laws and ordinances he prohibited everyone from sacrificing to idols, from practicing divination, and from having cult-figures erected” (Life of Constantine 4.23, 25).
One cannot underestimate how significant such legislation would be. If the rates of growth and figures provided in chapter 6 are relatively correct, by 325 CE there would have been something like five million Christians in the empire. If there were also some four million Jews, we might round up and say that of the sixty million inhabitants of the empire, fifty million were still pagans practicing their traditional cults. Did Constantine bring the worship of five-sixths of his empire to a crashing halt? If so, would other sources have failed to mention some such little incident?
One other reference does seem to confirm the act. It comes in a law passed in 341 CE, four years after Constantine’s death, by his emperor son Constantius, who clearly did indeed attempt to abolish pagan sacrificial practices. Here is what the law said, according to the later compilation of legal injunctions made early in the fifth century known as the Theodosian Code:
Superstition shall cease; the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished. For if anyone in violation of the law of the sainted Emperor, Our Father, and in violation of this command of Our Clemency, should dare to perform sacrifices, he shall suffer the infliction of a suitable punishment and the effect of an immediate sentence. (Theodosian Code 16.10.2)17
We have already seen that it was far easier in the Roman Empire to issue legislation than to enforce it, and the enforcement even of this explicit condemnation of pagan sacrifice appears to have been lax indeed—virtually nonexistent. It was another fifty years—and millions more Christian conversions later—before anti-pagan legislation took any serious hold. But for our purposes, the important point is that Constantius II in 341 CE indicates that his father had already ordered a cessation of sacrifice. That coincides with what Eusebius claimed just two years earlier in the publication of his Life of Constantine. Are these two Christian sources, one an imperial biographer and the other an actual emperor, to be trusted?
It has proved to be one of the most hotly debated issues of Constantine’s religious activities. On one hand this is because there is no hard evidence of any such law. Eusebius, who claims it existed, never cites it, either in his Life of Constantine or in his Church History, in both of which he was more than a little eager to celebrate the triumph of the church over the evils of paganism, and especially to trumpet the victories of the faith over the powers of darkness achieved by the emperor Constantine. Why would he not cite the actual law if he had something to cite?
Moreover, there is no such law in the Theodosian Code. This was a collection of legislation made by legal scholars under the reign of Theodosius II, published in 438 CE. It is a very large book containing laws passed by emperors starting with Constantine himself in 313 CE and continuing for the next 125 years. The laws are arranged topically and represent, to be sure, only a selection of legislation: the compilers had to choose what to include and what not to. But the final book of the code is devoted to important laws connected with religion—almost exclusively related in one way or another to Christianity, of course—and there is a section of the book that focuses on legislation against pagan practices. No law of Constantine is cited forbidding sacrifice.
The case against such legislation is even stronger than that: we have the direct testimony of the famous Roman rhetorician Libanius, a major figure in Roman imperial life toward the end of the fourth century. Libanius was an avid pagan and advocate of traditional religions. Living during the reign of the über-Christian Theodosius I, he felt the pressure from the empire on his personal commitments and issued a plea for religious tolerance in the face of imperial legislation against pagan practices. In the course of his eloquent oration, Libanius urges the precedent of Constantine himself for toleration, reminding the emperor that Constantine “made absolutely no alteration in the traditional forms of worship” (Oration 30.6).18
That would have been a very foolish argument to make if there was any solid evidence that in fact Constantine had shut down, or tried to shut down, the entire apparatus of pagan worship. How, then, can we explain all the evidence, some that says he did (or attempted to) outlaw sacrifice, and other that indicates he did not?
Numerous solutions have been proposed over the years, including attempts to reconcile the statements in various sources, so that both Eusebius is right that Constantine passed such a law and Libanius is right that he did not.19 Most of these reconciliations are a bit forced, however, and possibly it is best to adjudicate the matter by considering what Constantine himself says about it in a letter that he directed to inhabitants of the eastern provinces in 324 CE. Here Constantine states directly that the “doctrines of the divine word”—that is, the tenets of the Christian faith—are held firmly by “those who think aright and who are concerned with genuine merit.” It simply cannot be helped, he indicates, if non-Christians refuse to come to the truth for salvation: “If any prevents himself from being cured, let him not blame it on someone else, for the healing power of medicines is set out, spread openly to all.”
Here Constantine intimates a doctrine of tolerance for those foolish enough to refuse the healing salve provided by Christ. But he goes on to insist explicitly on toleration for those who choose to continue practicing pagan cults:
Let no one use what he has received by inner conviction as a means to harm his neighbor. What each has seen and understood, he must use, if possible, to help the other; but if that is impossible, the matter should be dropped. It is one thing to take on willingly the contest for immortality, quite another to enforce it with sanctions. (Life of Constantine 2.6)
Constantine clearly and directly opposes the use of sanctions to enforce religious practices on those who are unwilling, or to disallow practices. His own comments show that Harold Drake, a leading expert on the reign of Constantine, is probably right: Constantine opted for persuasion, not coercion.
That should not be taken to mean that Constantine was soft in his rule of the empire. Roman social historian Ramsay MacMullen has raised the question of what practical difference it made to the empire that the emperor became Christian.20 Working through the legislation found in the Theodosian Code, one finds penalties enacted by Constantine that reveal clearly his “judicial savagery.” It is true that most of these laws were meant to promote social decency and to advance basic principles of morality. But the punishments! Imperial bureaucrats who accepted bribes were to have their hands cut off (Theodosian Code 1.16.7); ineffective guardians of girls who had been seduced were to have molten lead poured down their throats (Theodosian Code 9.24.1); tax collectors who treated women tax delinquents rudely were to “be done to death with exquisite tortures”; anyone who served as an informer was to be strangled and “the tongue of envy cut off from its roots and plucked out” (Theodosian Code 10.10.2); slaves who informed on their masters were to be crucified (Theodosian Code 9.5.1.1); anyone guilty of parricide “shall not be subjected to the sword or to fire or to any other customary penalty, but he shall be sewed in a leather sack, and, confined within its deadly closeness, he shall share the companionship of serpents” and then thrown into a river or ocean “so that while still alive he may begin to lose the enjoyment of all the elements” (Theodosian Code 9.15.1).
How is one to account for such judicial cruelty from a Christian emperor? MacMullen suggests that by the fourth century Christianity was revealing an increasingly cruel streak. He notes in particular the heightened popularity of the Christian literature we previously considered that delights in recounting in graphic detail the torments of hell for those who refuse to do God’s will.21 Possibly what applied to heaven applied to earth: If this is how God handles sin, then who are we to act differently? As MacMullen puts it: “Religious beliefs may have made judicial punishment specially aggressive, harsh, and ruthless.”22
In a similar vein MacMullen also stressed one of the key differences between Christianity and traditional pagan religions that we too have already seen: the centrality of religious ethics. True, pagans were as a rule no more or less ethical than Christians. But in pagan circles ethical teachings fell under the province of philosophy, not religion, with rare exceptions, such as cases of parricide. For that reason pagan cults did not take a stand on matters of daily behavior or misbehavior. Not so Christianity. And that, MacMullen asserts, meant that strong Christian commitments among imperial powers led to harsher punishments for ethical misbehavior. In his words: “For pagans, only correct cult mattered. Christian zeal in contrast was directed over all of daily life. Hence, threats and torture, the stake and the block, spread over many new categories of offense.”23
Constantine’s harsh judgments did not fall only on anonymous inhabitants of his empire. They were felt by his own kin. We have already seen how, upon his accession to power, he had his ten-year-old nephew, the son of his rival Galerius, executed. More shocking still, and the source of considerable puzzlement, were the deaths, possibly on his orders, of his eldest son, Crispus, and his wife, Fausta.
Constantine had four sons, the first, Crispus, with Minervina (possibly his concubine), and the other three with his wife, Fausta, daughter of the emperor Maximian, whom he had married in 307 CE. As a young man—we are not certain of the year of his birth—Crispus was made a junior emperor, or Caesar. This was in 317 CE. He became an entrusted officer in Constantine’s military and played a key role in several armed conflicts, most notably as a leader of the naval forces in the defeat of Licinius in 324 CE. But two years later, in July 326, both he and his stepmother died under mysterious circumstances, one after the other. Their deaths were obviously connected. Crispus was either murdered or executed on order of the emperor; soon thereafter Fausta suffered a grisly fate, cooked to death in a steam bath overheated for the occasion.24
Attempts to explain the two deaths go back to ancient times. The sixth-century pagan historian Zosimus and the twelfth-century Zonaras both provide salacious details. In the fuller version, Fausta attempted to seduce her stepson, only to be repudiated. In her fury she accused him of attempted rape, and Constantine had him executed. When he later found the accusation was false, he ordered for her a particularly gruesome execution.
Many modern historians doubt the story. But Noel Lenski points out that Constantine did have a highly moralistic streak (see the legislation above) and that he was especially averse to adultery. So Lenski supposes that “there may then be a kernel of truth in this pagan version.”25
On the other hand, Timothy Barnes, one of the most prolific and controversial modern scholars of Constantine, has worked out an alternative scenario, less sexy, equally speculative, but entirely plausible. He begins by arguing that Crispus was indeed executed on order of the emperor. But since none of our sources reveals the charges, Barnes concludes there must not have been a public trial. It was a private affair carried out by Constantine himself, “with only his most trusted advisers present.” Fausta, on the other hand, could not have been executed. Emperors, including Constantine, never resorted to massively overheated steam baths for their executions. What, then?
Barnes considers but rejects the various options, including an even more titillating theory that Crispus and Fausta had in fact consummated a tryst. When she unintentionally became pregnant, he was executed and she attempted to facilitate an abortion through the excessive heat of a steam room, inadvertently dying in the process.26 But Barnes is not convinced. There is no real evidence for sexual misconduct, and there are other plausible and far more common reasons for an emperor to execute a son who was the future claimant to the throne. Barnes thinks Fausta told Constantine that Crispus was planning a coup, inventing the story so as to remove the heir to the throne and make way for one of her own sons. Constantine responded as tyrants do: he had his son executed. But then Constantine’s mother, Helena, informed him of Fausta’s insidious plot. Rather than face what would surely be a gruesome execution, Fausta committed suicide in a steam bath. It may not have been the most sensible choice, but frantic people are not always rational.
We will never know what really happened or why. It is one of the many puzzling episodes of Constantine’s relatively well-documented reign.
For some historians of antiquity, the most telling aspect of Constantine’s final days is his decision to wait until the last minute to be baptized. Would he have done so if he had really been a Christian for twenty-five years? As we have already seen, however, not only would Christians conceivably delay baptism; they often did so. Constantine’s own son, the vigorously Christian Constantius II, who was theologically Arian, did the same thing. The afterlife was much safer for those with no time to commit post-baptismal sins before arriving at the Pearly Gates. And so they both delayed.
Less puzzling is the sequence of events leading up to Constantine’s demise. Throughout his long reign, Constantine had to deal with the problems of foreign invasion. In 337 CE, when the Persians began to flex their expansionist muscles in the East, Constantine decided once more to lead his armies to the frontier. Conveniently for his purposes, the march would take him north of Palestine, allowing him to make a detour en route to be baptized in the Jordan River, just like Jesus himself. Constantine knew he was on his last legs. But his legs were not destined to last even that long. Constantine took ill soon after beginning the journey and was forced to stop in Nicomedia, in the western part of what is now Turkey. There he called in the bishop of Nicomedia and was baptized on his deathbed. He died on May 22, 337. His sons were to take over the reins of the empire, and the Constantinian dynasty would last to 363 CE.
In summing up the rule of Constantine, it is simplest to begin by again emphasizing what Constantine did not do, contrary to what many people have thought and some scholars have argued. He did not make Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. He almost certainly would not have objected to doing so had he been in a position to make it happen, but that was not the case. If our numbers are correct, no more than four million of the empire’s sixty million inhabitants shared his religious preference when he himself converted to the Christian faith. He was vastly outnumbered and it probably never occurred to him to legislate Christianity for all his subjects.
On the contrary, Constantine had no mission to convert the masses of pagans who continued to follow traditional religious practices. He remained remarkably open to those of other persuasions, especially to those who, like his father, embraced some kind of pagan henotheism. He was content to practice Christianity himself, to support and promote the activities of the church, to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs when issues of unity arose, to fund the building of churches, and to provide social and economic advantages to Christian clergy. It may have been his duty to be Christian, in some sense, as an emperor, but it was not his duty to proscribe pagan practices, shut down large numbers of temples throughout the empire, or prohibit the practice of sacrifice, even though he personally detested it.27
During Constantine’s reign, Christianity was certainly a favored religion, and it probably did not require extraordinary intelligence for members of the imperial elite to realize that converting to the faith would not hurt their chances for advancement. This was especially true for elites who were then tabbed for official church service, given the economic privileges enjoyed by the Christian clergy. In any event, most of the pressure Constantine applied came through acts of persuasion, either overt or subtle, but not through force.
This much we can say about what Constantine did not do. Obviously more important is what he did do. He certainly converted to worship the Christian god alone in 312 CE, in connection with the battle at the Milvian Bridge, even if it took a long time to realize fully what it meant to embrace the Christian faith. Still, this was a genuine conversion. At that point Constantine dedicated himself to honoring and obeying the god of the Christians. He did not do so with complete success, if being a faithful Christian means loving your enemies and turning the other cheek. Then again, he was not the sort of figure Jesus would have envisioned while preaching in rural Galilee. Constantine was an emperor with enormous burdens and responsibilities. Harsh legislation and the occasional ruthless act were all part of the job.
Possibly the most important thing Constantine did for the future of the religion is that he saw that his sons were raised in the Christian tradition in preparation for what was to come next. The Tetrarchic experiment of Diocletian had died nearly as soon as its policy of meritorious succession was carried out. Constantine returned to the dynastic principle that emperors had regularly followed, or tried to follow, since the early days of the empire. In his case, that meant succession would come to Christians. With the exception of the nineteen-month reign of Constantine’s nephew, Julian, in 361 to 363 CE, every remaining Roman emperor was Christian.
Constantine also set an important precedent in his decision to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs. His intervention makes perfect sense in a Roman imperial context. All of Constantine’s predecessors had been the chief priest, the pontifex maximus, of the religions of Rome—as was he, despite the fact he was a Christian. The Roman emperor, like the Roman state, was not removed from the religious sphere but was at the very center of it. And so, even though he was a complete neophyte, a theological child, Constantine thrust himself into matters of Christian polity and theology. A unified church was important for a unified empire. And a disunified church—or at least parts of it—obviously failed to carry out the will of the God over all. That could lead to disaster. Constantine entered into the fray with what might look like wild and naïve abandon, but his decision to do so makes sense both politically and theologically.
These interventions may have seemed good and natural at the time, but they were to have a domino effect in the years and decades to come. If emperors actively dictated the direction of religion in the empire, and of the church in particular, what might happen when the Roman world experienced a sea change, when the Christians overtook the pagan majority, and when there was no longer any real fear of massive uprisings or reprisals against the Christian cause? What might happen should emperors more aggressive than Constantine arise—rulers with no qualms about using the power of state to promote the purposes of faith?
It was almost bound to happen. By the end of the fourth century the first Christian emperor’s decision to prefer persuasion to coercion had become a thing of the past. Christianity was declared the state religion. Traditional pagan practices were proscribed, temples were leveled, and sacred cult objects and art were destroyed.