CONSTANTINE’S MEETING WITH LICINIUS at Milan marked the end of one phase of a spiritual journey that had begun for him, it seems, in 311. It had then gathered speed in the course of the Italian campaign when Lactantius said he was inspired by a dream to have his soldiers paint a new symbol of divine favor upon their shields before the battle of the Milvian Bridge. It was much later that Eusebius said Constantine had been moved to become a Christian because of the vision of the cross in the sky, which Eusebius says he had seen in southern France.1
The visions reported by Lactantius and Eusebius are not the only visions that are reported in Constantine’s career, and other reports are a good deal closer in time to 312 than are those of the two Christians. It is striking, for instance, that the panegyrist of 313 should write:
What god, what so present majesty, encouraged you so that with almost all your companions and generals not only silently muttering, but even openly fearful, to sense through yourself that the time had come for the liberation of the city against the warnings of the haruspices [diviners]. You do indeed have some secret understanding with that Divine Mind (Mens Divina), which has delegated our concerns to lesser gods and deigns to reveal itself to you alone.2
Mens Divina first appears in relation to Constantine in the panegyric of 311 and we may suppose the divinity started to become prominent at that time. The one that Constantine advertised meeting in 310 took the form of Apollo, who was decidedly male. Mens Divina, in Latin, is feminine and the scarce representations of her in the imperial tradition show her as female (divinities who are grammatically feminine and represent abstract qualities are also personally female). If the panegyrist was referring to a painting of this encounter, it would have shown Constantine face-to-face with a woman just as the Arch of Constantine shows him being welcomed to Rome by the female Roma and her companion Victoria, goddess of victory. Just as important is the setting: as in the vision of Apollo, Constantine is alone with the god, just as he is alone in Lactantius’ understanding of the encounter and Licinius is alone with God’s messenger.
The interpretation and presentation of dreams were significant aspects of imperial communication. Artemidorus, the author of a major work on the interpretation of dreams in the second century AD has this to say about “public” or “cosmic” dreams:
A man will not dream about things about which he has not thought. People do not see dreams about private things about which they have not thought. It is impossible for a person who is small to receive something outside of his power, to have a vision of great affairs, being powerless. It is contrary to reason since dreams are private and come true only for the dreamer unless he is a king, magistrate or of the great. These men have reflected about public affairs and may receive dreams about them, not as private men entrusted with small matters, but as rulers who are concerned about matters for the common good.3
Some dreams—many of them known through the career of Septimius Severus, who advertised the premonitions that made him think he might become emperor—needed to be understood through analogy. In Severus’ case, for instance, we are told that one day when he entered the Senate he dreamed that he had been suckled by a she-wolf as Romulus had been. In another dream water flowed from his hand as if from a spring—a good sign in an Artemidoran system of interpretation where clear flowing water could indicate power because streams do as they wish. In a third, when he was a governor, he dreamed that the Roman world saluted him and then later that he gazed down upon the earth from high above, laying his fingers everywhere as if on the strings of an instrument so that they all “sang together.” Finally, he dreamed that he replaced Pertinax (his predecessor as emperor) on a horse, a dream that was commemorated by a statue at Rome. In fact, the dreams of Severus represent not only his destiny but also his technical command of what was known in those days as dream interpretation, something that he combined with a well-advertised knowledge of astrology. He was well aware that dreams have to be described by the person who has them, and that he would be all the more impressive if his dream narratives made sense to professionals in the field.4
Severus, of course, was not the only dreamer or visionary to rule Rome in the century or so before Constantine, and his interest in the subject may have mediated earlier traditions into forms that his third-century successors could appreciate—one reason that imperial miracles all tend to seem a bit similar. One of the striking moments in the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180), who seems to have mentioned his dreams only in private, was the astonishing act of some divinity who intervened to save the day: in response to Marcus’ prayers, this god relieved a Roman army, cut off and suffering from thirst, from the hordes of barbarians who surrounded it by striking at a distance, smiting the barbarians with a terrible deluge.5 Marcus’ miracle, picked up by Severus, was later resuscitated by Probus. In addition to the story of Aurelian’s recognizing the god who saved his army at Emesa, that emperor’s entire campaign in the east was punctuated with signs of divine interest. One was a hostile prediction at a shrine in Lycia (southern Turkey) and an unfortunate series of events at the temple of Aphrodite at Aphaca near Baalbek in modern Lebanon. Such interventions were only natural since, as Artemidorus wrote, divine signs whether positive or negative should accompany important changes in the world order.6
Artemidorus also notes that the most important dreams were ones in which a man saw an actual god. Such experiences, narrated at various times and in various ways, all stress the extraordinary power of the moment for the dreamer. In one striking case, that of a doctor named Thessalus who claimed to have been taught an ancient form of healing by a god,
When the third day had come, setting out at dawn, I came to the high priest. He had prepared a pure chamber and everything else for the vision. I, because of the great eagerness of my soul, without the knowledge of the high priest, had brought a papyrus and a pen to write down, if the opportunity arose, whatever was said. The high priest asked me if I wished to speak with the soul of a dead man or with a god. I said “Asclepius” [the Greek god of healing], and that it would be the culmination of his kindnesses if he allowed me to speak with the god, one on one. He promised this to me without pleasure, as his expression showed. Calling me into the room, and ordering me to sit facing the throne upon which the god would sit, and summoning the god through secret names, he left, closing the door. I was sitting there, shaking in body and soul because of the astonishment of the vision, for no human words are able to describe either the sight or the beauty of his adornment. Taking my right hand he began to speak, “O blessed Thessalus, today a god has honored you, and when they learn what you have done, men will give you honor as if you were a god; ask me therefore about the matters for which you have come and I will answer all your questions.” On my side, I heard him with difficulty—I was astonished and my mind was entranced by the beauty of the god—nonetheless I asked him if I had erred in the prescriptions of Nectanebo, to which the god responded that King Nectanebo, an immensely wise man and one embellished with all virtues, had not received from a divine voice anything that you want to learn.7
In another case, this one described by a Greek intellectual of the second century AD, Aelius Aristides, we are told:
Athena appeared to me not long after that, holding her aegis [shield] and her beauty, size and whole form were that of the Athena of Pheidias in Athens. There was a scent from the aegis that was sweet, and it was like wax, and it was amazing and beautiful and great. She appeared to me alone, standing in front of me so that I could see her as well as possible. I showed her to the people who were standing with me—they were two of my friends and my foster sister—and I called out and named her Athena, saying that she was in front of me and that she spoke to me and I pointed to the aegis. They did not know what to do, but were at a loss and feared that I had become delirious until they saw that my strength was being restored and heard words that I heard from the goddess.8
Encounters of the sort described by Thessalus and Aristides are just the kind that Constantine allowed it to be known that he was experiencing. Moreover, they are more powerful, more intense than Aurelian’s moments of recognition or the dreams in which Severus put his faith. Constantine claims not to be a practitioner of the technical arts of dream interpretation, but to be the sort of person who could enter the presence of a god. The divinity who gave him the confidence to invade Italy was present before him. Speaking a few years after the event to a meeting of bishops, he writes:
The eternal and incomprehensible religious piety of our God will not allow the human condition to wander uselessly for long in the shadows, nor does it allow the hateful desires of certain men to prevail for long so that he should not allow them to be saved, opening a path with his shining beams of light to turn them to the rule of justice. I have learned this through many examples and I measure these things through myself. For there were of old things in me that seemed to be lacking in justice, nor did I think that the heavenly power could see those secrets that I bore within my breast. Verily what should have been allotted to these things? Plainly one abundant with all evils. But the all-powerful God who sits in the watchpost of heaven gave me what I did not deserve; truly I cannot say, nor can those things be enumerated which heavenly benevolence granted to me its servant.9
What did this god reveal to him and what did the god look like? The first question is perhaps easier to answer than the second. God revealed to Constantine how to leave behind the error of his ways and thus succeed in the future. This vision is not the one Lactantius mentions before the battle of the Milvian Bridge that resulted in the new embellishment of the army’s shields, but one that showed Constantine a new way—surely the one that the panegyrist of 313 placed before the decision to invade Italy. The truth of this vision was proven to Constantine by his victory, but even then he could not reveal to those assembled listeners that what he saw was not Mens Divina, but rather the Christian god, a god of light who could see into his very heart. Indeed, the light imagery that he uses links with the imagery of shadow that precedes it; but the reference to “the watchpost of heaven” may imply that the god he met was in heaven (and glowing or giving off shafts of light that could be interpreted metaphorically).
Constantine’s story implies that the revelation that God awarded him in person, saving him from the errors and moral dilemmas that had troubled him, was not one that could be discussed in great detail (as the single reference to Mens Divina in the panegyric of 311 and the absence of specificity in the panegyric of 313 may indicate). Mens Divina may have been sufficiently abstract a concept to allow multiple interpretations. What we can be sure of, though, is that it was one thing for an emperor to be kind to Christians, but quite another to publicly acclaim the power of their god before the world. It’s unfortunate that we hear nothing from those Christians who were closest to Constantine at the time. But four bishops, at least, were with his army by the time it reached Rome: three from Gaul, a fourth from Spain. The presence of these bishops—Maternus from Cologne, Reticius from Autun, Marinus from Arles, and Ossius of Cordoba—suggests both that Constantine may have added them to his retinue as he moved south from Trier, and that his decisive revelation occurred before he opened the campaign, as the panegyrist says.10
As time passed, the conversion narrative would change, as Constantine himself would change and become ever more confident in his new God. At first, this new God was a new facet to a spiritual life that did not require the abandonment of other gods, or even strict adherence to Christian doctrine. Constantine felt apparently that he could recognize the God of the Christians as powerful without subjecting himself to the discipline of the church—something, it is worth noting, he would never do. Still, the private moment would someday become public, and when it did, a new element would be added to the story.
It is this process of change that is reflected in the tortured prose of the most famous of all the conversion narratives for the modern world: the one that appears after Constantine’s death in Bishop Eusebius’ biography that included the tale of the cross in the sky. Eusebius grafted this story onto another account suggesting a mental journey that Constantine undertook as he sought the god who would help him in the struggle against Maxentius. The fact that Eusebius says Constantine told him the tale “much later” is, sadly, a poor guarantor of anything, as he uses exactly the same language to describe miraculous events in a later campaign that could have been learned only through Constantine himself, given that there was a shortage of other witnesses at the time.11
Eusebius’ account begins in the twenty-seventh chapter of the biography’s first book: when he was thinking about the invasion of Italy, Constantine reflected that those who had placed their faith in many gods had failed, while Constantius (albeit never an invader of Italy) “had, throughout his whole life, honored the god who was the savior and protector of his kingship and the provider of every good thing.” Constantine therefore “decided that it was necessary to honor only his ancestral god.”12 What Eusebius does not point out is that the “ancestral god” was none other than Sol Invictus, as the panegyrist of 307 had already observed: “Surely you see and hear these things, Divine Constantius, whom Sun himself took up in an almost visible chariot to heaven while he was seeking his nearby sunrise.”13
The god of Constantine’s father, Constantius, was a god of light who could guide him forward, but, as Constantine suggests in his letter to the bishops at Arles, the god that he may have known as Sol Invictus was also “our God,” the God of the Christians. In chapter twenty-seven, he already knows who God is, but in the next he seems not so sure, for Eusebius comments: “He then invoked this god in prayers, asking and begging him to show him who he was and to stretch out his right hand to assist him in his plans. As he was praying and making earnest entreaties there appeared to the emperor a most astonishing divine sign.”14
The question that springs to Constantine’s mind at this point is a standard oracular one: the individual approaches a god to ask him who he is as a way of getting information about proper cult observance. The most famous, which occurs several times in slightly different forms, involves people who know perfectly well that the god they are consulting is Apollo.15 The vision of the cross in the sky, which Eusebius says was witnessed by the entire army, is simply delivering to Constantine a sign that will win him a battle: the answer to his question is that the god he is looking for is the god who gives visions in the sky and promises victory. Constantine doesn’t fully understand what this means so he is granted a dream in which Christ tells him how to make the battle standard; the emperor explains the heavenly vision to his followers and tells them to make the battle standard that is described. Then, oddly, Eusebius says that Constantine did not know who the god was who gave him the sign in the sky, so he asked others in the hope they might be able to tell him what he had seen. They then assure him that he had seen the Christian God.16 At this point Eusebius has reinterpreted the dream: in this version it has inspired a conversion that he says has already taken place. In so doing he restates the original question, making it clear once and for all that Constantine does indeed already know which god is at issue here.
These many confusions are tell-tale signs that stories of somewhat different origins are being conflated, and it is all the more striking that in his earlier History of the Church, one draft of which was completed in 313 (and the last one shortly after 324), Eusebius seems not to have heard of the moment of conversion—indeed, as he admits, he only learned the story of the cross in the sky from Constantine himself “much later.” How much later is unknowable, though it does seem that Eusebius refers to it in 336 when he delivered a speech in honor of Constantine. Had he just learned it then? The reference is not well developed and is linked with another story that he says he learned well after the events in question from Constantine himself.17
In his ignorance at the time, Eusebius is no different from Lactantius, who, at the end of his Concerning the Deaths of the Persecutors, reveals himself to be delighted that vengeance was wreaked upon the persecutors, but he is not so delighted that the emperors are now Christian. For Lactantius the victorious emperors are assisted by the Christian god and are friendly to Christians, but he stops short of saying that either one is a Christian. His understanding here is in line with that of others, for very few could have known what Constantine had learned from his contact with Divine Mind that gave him the confidence needed to win the battle. Years after the event, the author of a panegyric delivered at Rome would offer a long paean to the mysterious divine force that guided Constantine—and again in language that bespeaks an inward-looking experience:
God the arbiter of all things looks upon us from on high, and although human minds bear deep recesses for their thoughts, divinity will nonetheless wend its way in and explore the whole; nor is it possible, since the divine will imparts to us the breath which we draw, when we are nourished by so many good things, that he will hide himself away from the cares of the earth and does not judge between the lives of those whose good he governs. That force, that majesty that distinguishes right and wrong, which weighs, tests and examines all the actions of those who are deserving, that divinity protected your piety, that divinity broke the madness of that tyrant, that conscience aided your invincible army, burning with chests full of so many victories with such strength as much as a god is able and your love ought to provide, so that the splendid army overturned the frightful battle lines, the unknown strength of men and steel, so that you were able to consume in fortunate combat whatever the long cogitation of crime was able to devise.18
The moment of divine inspiration as described here differs from another vision, the apparition of a heavenly host, which was the talk of “all the Gauls,” appearing “even though heavenly things are not accustomed to come before the eyes of mortals.”19 Constantius sent these heavenly warriors, it was said, and would turn the tide in Constantine’s favor during the battle at the Milvian Bridge as they fought (albeit invisibly) at his side (where they had been earlier in the campaign is not made clear).20 The visions of 312 reflect earlier stories, showing that the dramatic events of the original campaign remained open to improvement. The variations stemmed, of course, from the fact that there was never one authorized, consistent public version of the story for the simple reason that Constantine’s original vision was not a public event. His encounter with his new God, like other imperial visions, was a profoundly important moment for the emperor. The details would be communicated to others only on a need-to-know basis.
Constantine was aware of the way gods communicated with emperors: they did so in person, with no one else present, or they made their presence known to the emperor in their dedicated temple—as when Aurelian recognized that Elagabal had helped him in his fight with Zenobia. It was to Constantine and Constantine alone that Apollo appeared in the vision of 310. Aelius Aristides’ encounter with Athena showed that a person could see a god who was invisible to those around him. Constantine first revealed his own experience to other Christians, and it was also to his new co-religionists that he revealed the nature of his personal journey toward the new faith and the enlightenment that his new God offered. As for what he saw in his vision, there may be a reflection of it in the language of the letter to the Christians at Arles—for his God was “in the watchpost of heaven.” To this extent the vision revealed a heavenly God drawing Constantine to his new faith; but at least for now, it was a heaven that had appeared only in the recesses of his own mind. The process whereby the god of his vision became the Christian God was not going to be immediate.
The question “who is God” could be answered in terms of identifying one divinity with another. In 312, Constantine’s god was both the Sun and the Christian God. It may not have been hard to make this leap, for in some Christian communities the sun god was already equated with Christ. And it is with solar imagery that he is depicted in two third-century paintings in the Roman catacombs, as well as on a sculptural depiction of the story of Jonah, which was understood by some Christians to be an allegory for the Resurrection. Other Christians had noted that some of their fellows understood the rising and setting of the sun as a metaphor for the resurrection, and some others saw the sun as their god, facing the rising sun when they prayed. Lactantius himself would observe that “the east is attached to God because he is the source of light and the illuminator of the world and he makes us rise toward eternal life.”21 Was it knowledge of this kind of equation that enabled Constantine to see that the God his father had followed, the God who had received his father into the heavens, was actually the God whom the Christians revered, the God whom Galerius and Diocletian despised? Was it this knowledge that enabled him to answer in a new way the question of who God was?
As Constantine pondered his future, certain things may gradually have fallen into place to convince him that as the man who would cast away the world of Diocletian he would be doing it as the agent of the God who most obviously was not part of that emperor’s vision of the world. For Constantine, conversion was not the result of a sudden momentous revelation, but a journey over time and in his own mind.