GALERIUS’S PASSING AND HIS DEATHBED AVOWAL OF TOLERANCE meant that the question of Christianity was now in play. A reasonable general grasping for the throne would have to consider whether there was more advantage in posturing against the Christians or in showing them generosity. Constantine is distinguished among the various claimants for the throne in the next few years by the clarity of his choice in favor of Christianity and by the moderation with which he worked out the implications of that choice.
Some famous stories obscure his motives—a bridge and a battle await us in a few paragraphs. When we ask about Constantine’s own religious activities, we know very little that we can trust. Scholars divide over the intensity and date of onset of Constantine’s piety, but the debate is mostly irrelevant. What an emperor might be in the privacy of his soul is of much less interest and importance than what he presents himself to be and how he performs his role. In these respects, we know enough about Constantine to make some judgments.
Whatever his private thoughts, he began by accepting homage and loyalty from people who honored the traditional gods, who saw him and his behavior in traditional ways. A fine and formal speech made in his honor in the military capital of Trier in 310, honoring his fifth year of rule and the anniversary of the founding of that city, describes him as already seeking to draw closer to the gods, who invited him to join them—as any court flatterer of the last centuries would have said.
The orator proudly reveals the story of a godly vision—also perfectly ordinary. There was a grand shrine in northern Gaul dedicated to the Celtic god Grannus, patron of healing hot springs, known ambitiously by then as Apollo Grannus. The shrine was a walled sanctuary covering some 175 acres around the springs, built up since the first century CE to include a basilica and an amphitheater and a little plumbing to manage the springs. Pilgrims came from afar, and inscriptions in honor of this site appear as far away as Spain, Turkey, Romania, and Sweden.1
Constantine arrived with much pomp and was, apparently, favored with a vision of Apollo side by side with the goddess Victory. Like his father, Constantine put himself under the patronage of the glamorous sun god, even when the god had gotten a little mixed up with a local healing deity. Here’s the local orator telling the story of this visit to…
. . . the most beautiful temple in the whole world, . . . to the deity made manifest, as you saw yourself. For you saw—I believe it—O Constantine, your Apollo, joined by Victory, offering you laurel crowns, each signifying a portent of thirty years. This is the number of mortal years owed to you to live, beyond the age of Nestor. And indeed, why do I say “I believe it”—you saw him and you recognized yourself in his image, the one to whom (so sing the divine hymns of the prophets) all the kingdoms of the world belong. This happens now because, I think, you are like him, a happy and beautiful youth, a savior, our general. You rightly honored that most sacred shrine with such wonderful gifts that the ones there of old are unnecessary. Every temple now beckons to you, especially those of our Apollo…2
Traditional stuff of the most predictable kind, you would say, and rightly so. That was in 310. Two years later, all the stories, ancient and modern, agree, something changed.
As Constantine had accepted the throne from his father’s soldiers, so Maxentius, the son of Maximian, had been acclaimed to high power by the Praetorian Guard at Rome in 306. Neither was officially recognized by Galerius and Severus, the linear successors of Diocletian and Maximian. The state of affairs in 306–312 was a common one during the Roman Empire, rule divided among several claimants.
Constantine and Maxentius first squeezed Severus from opposite sides and overthrew and murdered him. Ungentle cooperation ensued, with Maxentius controlling Italy and Africa, Constantine Gaul, Britain, and Spain. By 311, east and west, the empire was in an uncertain state, with Maximinus and Licentius, the eastern rivals, each jockeying for alliance with the westerners and Constantine and Maxentius considering their own positions. In 312, Constantine brought matters to a head by crossing the Alps and working his way through skirmishes with Maxentius’s troops to reach Milan and stay there for a few months. Maxentius remained in Rome.
Late in the fighting season, Constantine began to move south. Reasonable observers expected Maxentius to stay within the city walls, confident that it was easier to defend the city than besiege it from outside. Maxentius instead foolishly marched out about three miles north of the city on the Flaminian Way, the main highway to northern Italy, and gave battle just across the Milvian Bridge. Backs to the river, Maxentius’s men fought their way to disastrous defeat, Maxentius himself, either in flight or in despair, plunging into the river to his death. His body was fished out and decapitated.
Constantine now ruled the west. Another decade of patience, deceit, cooperation, and betrayal would see him triumph over his eastern rival Licinius and achieve sole rule by 324. For now, a panegyric speech like the one that celebrated his vision of Apollo greeted his formal arrival in the city:
As you deserved, Constantine, the senate has just dedicated an image of the god to you, and a little while back Italy gave you a shield and crown, all made of gold, to pay back a little of what we know you are owed. Such an image is and always will be owed to divinitas, as the shield is owed to strength and the crown to loyalty.3
Divinitas by now was a word regularly used of emperors, to speak of them in their special godly or god-favored role.4 Nothing new or surprising here. It’s even said, probably correctly, that Constantine then ascended the Capitoline Hill as part of his grand entry to the city and offered a sacrifice at the temple of Jupiter.5
To celebrate the event less rapidly, but more grandly, the mighty Arch of Constantine that still stands a few yards from the Colosseum in Rome was erected in honor of the now dominant ruler. Just as emperors were most successful when they imitated and borrowed from those who had gone before, so too with architecture and sculpture. This example was more direct than most, reusing physical pieces of sculpture and images from earlier memorials and other circumstances. The assemblage gives us a sequence of images of Constantine, first approaching Rome in a carriage drawn by four horses alongside an image showing Apollo as sun god rising from the ocean in his own chariot-and-four. Another panel shows Constantine at the siege of Verona in northern Italy, armed and trousered among his soldiers, but the scene for the Milvian Bridge surrounds him, now in armor, with ambiguously divine figures—Victory among them—and then he appears before the Senate and people appropriately dressed in the old toga.
The language of the great inscription on the arch is impressive.
TO THE GREATEST, LOYAL, PROPITIOUS, SACRED EMPEROR
CAESAR FLAVIUS CONSTANTINE:
BECAUSE BY DIVINE INSPIRATION6 AND GREAT WISDOM,
WITH HIS ARMY IN ONE JUST MOMENT
DID HE AVENGE THE REPUBLIC WITH HIS ARMS
FROM BOTH A TYRANT AND ALL OF HIS FACTION,
THE SENATE AND THE ROMAN PEOPLE
HAVE DEDICATED A SPLENDID ARCH TO HIS TRIUMPHS.
All of this, with names changed, could have been said and done for a success of Vespasian or Hadrian or Septimius Severus or Diocletian. Then, gradually, in the 310s and 320s it got about that something else had happened just before the battle of the Milvian Bridge.
There are two main versions of this. Nearly contemporary, in an entirely polemical history of which Constantine is the hero, Lactantius in his Deaths of the Persecutors tells it this way:
Constantine was cautioned in a dream to mark the heavenly sign of God on the shields of his men and only then engage battle. He did as he was told and he marked Christ on the shields with a turned letter X with the very top bent around. The army took up weapons under that sign.7
Soldiers putting protective designs on their shields was nothing new; if this one weren’t Christian, we would have no second thoughts calling the practice magic or superstition.
Then this Christian writer tells us how Maxentius came to make his strategic blunder in marching out to face Constantine and in so doing gives us a classical rendition of a misread oracle.
The city was in an uproar and the emperor was mocked for neglecting the people’s wellbeing. Then all at once the people attending the circus in honor of the emperor’s anniversary cried out with one voice that Constantine could not be beaten. Embarrassed, Maxentius calls together a few senators and orders the Sibylline books to be examined. In them is found the claim that on that day the enemy of the Romans would perish. Seduced thus to hope for victory, Maxentius went out to join his army.8
Each competitor gets his own divine advice. Constantine’s turns out to be the right advice and his god is the sponsor of victory. The story of divine approval probably began to circulate immediately. Constantine and many others would certainly remember which god had favored him. The god in question emerged in time as the one true monotheistic god of Christianity, but the mode of thought that Lactantius represents and accepts is still entirely traditional. A good emperor picks the right god, is protected by that god, and prevails.
Twenty-five years later, Eusebius, in the official Life of Constantine published at the end of Constantine’s life, has the story of the vision a little differently. This was how Constantine had told it to Eusebius—Eusebius says—long after the fact.9
Just at noon one day, Constantine saw with his own eyes, standing over the sun in the sky, the image of a cross formed from light and a text attached to it that read, “By this conquer.” He and his whole army were astonished by the sight. He wondered what it meant and took that wonder with him to bed that night. While he slept, the “Christ of God” appeared to him, showing again the sign that had shone in the sky, and told him to copy it as protection against enemy attacks.
When he awoke, he told his colleagues what he had seen, then called in jewelers and goldsmiths to make a copy of the design for him out of precious materials. This he carried with him ever after and had shown it to Eusebius once. It was a tall pole covered with gold and crossed with a bar forming the image of a cross. At its top, they fastened a wreath made of gold and precious stones. On the wreath now appeared the two letters from the beginning of the name of Christ as a monogram, Greek rho intersected by chi. The emperor also used to wear these letters on his helmet in after years. From the transverse bar of the cross there hung an imperial tapestry covered with precious stones, glittering with their rays of light, woven with gold. Everyone who saw it (and wanted to stay on the emperor’s good side) agreed it was beautiful beyond description.
Also mounted on the pole was a central golden portrait of the emperor, flanked by the images of his sons. In later years, the emperor always carried this image into battle, and he commanded that copies of it be carried at the head of all his armies.
At the moment of the vision, Eusebius says, Constantine was baffled and wanted to worship this god. So he called upon “those who were expert in his words.” They told him that the god was the only-begotten son of the one and only god and that the sign represented immortality, an abiding trophy of victory over death. Then they told him the story of Jesus’s life. Impressed by what he heard, he took those priests as his advisers and chose to honor with every appropriate ritual the god who had appeared to him.
This vision is dated not on the eve of battle but at the outset of the campaign against Maxentius. What Eusebius recounts of the campaign adds little to what we already have from Lactantius and other less detailed sources, and Eusebius’s account of Constantine’s arrival in the city of Rome is concise. Eusebius does say that Constantine erected his new standard in the middle of the city to impress both the Senate and the people. He then had a statue built of himself holding the standard. On it was posted this message: “By these saving insignia, the true sign of bravery, I set free the city from the tyrant’s yoke, restoring senate and people of the city to their ancient glory and brilliance.”
This second story obviously differs by elaboration from the first but it is still theologically ambiguous. By the 330s, Constantine and his spin doctor know better how to describe their Christian god, but even at that distance and with those advantages this is still a very traditional scene. The priests and advisers tell him that what he sees is a sign of immortality and victory over death—which does not quite insist on resurrection in any Christian sense and certainly allows a traditionalist interpretation. Both the banner and the precious trophy speak to good-luck charms and what we might still be crude enough to call superstition and magic more than to any influence of the gospel narrative and teachings of Jesus. So even when the mature Constantine sets out to tell the story of his conversion through the pen of a Christian bishop, the form and substance are traditional.
Does what I’ve just recounted, now, amount to a story of “conversion”? Did Constantine “convert to Christianity” as history books say he did?
What if we make the question a little more specific? Did he accept Jesus as his personal savior? Did he become a Bible-reading Christian believer? Did he accept baptism and join the sacramental community? Did he have a fundamental transformation of heart and mind? On available evidence, the answers are maybe/maybe not, probably not, certainly not, and probably not. What kind of conversion is it if it doesn’t measure up to modern Christian definitions of that phenomenon? Perhaps we need to leave the word conversion aside.
What we do know is that Constantine found the Christian god sufficiently powerful to attract his allegiance. If the war with Maxentius and the battle of the Milvian Bridge had gone differently, the implicit bargain (“wear my insignia and I will support you”) would have been null and void, but Constantine himself would have been most likely dead and irrelevant in that case. People gave their allegiance to gods who showed their power. A god who failed to show his power would not expect allegiance. Taking on Christ as his god, then, is not quite what a modern Christian would mean by conversion; at best it was a provisional contract. What an emperor expected of his god wasn’t so much a personal relationship as a diplomatic one. Nothing suggests he needed to have a particular emotional disposition about religion. The bargain sufficed.
Nor did he have to be an “active churchgoer” in anything like a modern sense. Constantine himself, whatever happened to him in 312, did not take baptism until his deathbed in 337. On strict theology, he was not a Christian—a “faithful Christian” was sometimes the expression—until that baptism. His status as catechumen, a candidate for membership, associated him with the community but kept him distinctly on the outside. So he was never eligible to attend and participate in the formal eucharistic ritual of the Christian church.
Postponing baptism made perfect sense. The ritual of water and blessing washed away the guilt and stain of sin, a necessary cleansing in order to be admitted to the presence of God in the afterlife. A young person who underwent that ritual—which could only be performed once in a lifetime—was then at risk for the rest of their life of falling again into sin. Waiting, cautiously, till the last possible moment was an effective guarantee of salvation, at risk only in case of sudden unbaptized death.
Christianity’s opponents in this period found this practice shocking. It seemed to offer a divine license for living an immoral and irresponsible life. For traditionalists, gods and morality had little enough to do with one another. One worshipped for the benefits worship brought; one conducted oneself appropriately for the benefits such conduct brought in society. To use religion as a pretext for immorality was unseemly. There were surely people angling for that deathbed baptism who made those accusations only too credible. A powerful and occasionally bloodthirsty emperor would have contributed to the problem.
Constantine did offer his support to the new god. He commissioned churches and poured money into the coffers of Christian clergy—at the clear expense of other gods and communities. Taking care that his god was appropriately worshipped was his job, but that did not mean that he personally had to engage in the worship with any depth or personal agency.
Sometimes that patronage worked to the disadvantage of existing religious practices—but infrequently. The handful of documented measures that Constantine took against traditional religion were few and self-serving. In a law of 320, he made it clear that nocturnal consultation of soothsayers was to be forbidden—but emperors had always been nervous about such behavior, hoping to prevent soothsayers from prophesying against the reigning emperor.10 (That same law calmly told the prefect of the city of Rome to consult the traditional haruspices on the meaning of a disturbing recent lightning strike that had damaged the Colosseum.)
Scholars have long asserted that Constantine banned traditional sacrifice, but the evidence is slight.11 Four years after his death, two of Constantine’s sons, including the peremptory and unpleasant Constantius, issued a short decree banning “superstition” and “the madness of sacrifices” and claimed the authority of a law of their divine father (divi principis parentis nostri, where divi, the same word used to speak of Julius Caesar as a god in the phrase divus Iulius, is rendered in the standard modern translation from 1952 as “our sainted father”—a stretch, to say the least). This is a flimsy basis for the claim that Constantine banned sacrifice. “Superstition” is the first marker in that law that whatever was in question was not the general run of public religious behavior but religious activities that were commonly, by traditionalists and Christians alike, thought to be beyond the pale—magic, curses, and fortune-telling about the emperor’s prospects. The surviving law from Constantius and his brother, moreover, cannot have been as brief in its original form as the single short paragraph it now presents; but the copy we have was made a hundred years after the fact in a devoutly Christian court at Constantinople.
If we do accept the testimony of that law (and there are exemplary scholars who do12), it changes little, for the range and reach of that proclamation was not great. Calling these imperial declarations “laws” overstates their impact. Most “laws” of this period are statements from an emperor, responding to one or another request for guidance and usually addressed to a governor or prefect of a single region of the empire.13 Many had all the legal effect we attribute to presidential proclamations about “Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends Week” and the like. Constantine himself clearly abhorred, or came to abhor, blood sacrifice—but so did many other people.
The evidence that Constantine supported attacks on temples as some have claimed is very limited: four temples, one the temple of Aphrodite on the site of Christ’s tomb and two other temples of Aphrodite where ritual prostitution was practiced. That evidence comes from Eusebius’s Life of Constantine written after Constantine’s death with a great eagerness to portray him as a fierce enemy of paganism. If even that source can only find four examples, there can scarcely have been any concerted campaign. Campaigns would come later. (The traditionalist orator Libanius writing almost half a century later made it clear that he believed Constantine starved the temples of money but did not interfere in ritual.14)
What we really know about Constantine’s religious attention is what he did for Christianity, not what he did to restrict or eliminate other practices. His most ambitious construction project—the city of Constantinople—was built to advance not a particular religion but an emperor. Religious consistency took second place to his political ambitions.
When Constantine did set out to advantage his cult, he encouraged the idea of the “holy land” in and around Jerusalem. Constantine’s own mother, Helena, was the first real pilgrim to Jerusalem, but she was soon followed by other believers seeking the original sites of the Christian faith. The problem that Jerusalem already presented in the fourth century was that there were no original Christian sites to view, only rumors and traditions. We do see Constantine sponsoring the destruction of temples in that region, but only to create new tourist attractions. The temple devoted to Aphrodite built on the site that Constantine, or Helena, or their ministers determined to be the authentic site of the burial of Jesus was merely inconvenient. What Constantine’s men built in its place became the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that now stands in Jerusalem.
Constantine likely did not fully realize the strengths the Christians already had. When an earlier general had favored a god—think again of Jupiter Dolichenus—he might introduce that god to new places. Christianity’s early adaptation of the written word—an imitation of Jewish practice—offered those who would spread Christianity yet keep it theologically unified a particular advantage.
The books of the old religious communities were in the main special and secret. The Sibylline books, concealed in one temple or another in Rome, were veiled in a mystery which gave them their power. Books that could be freely copied, read, and preached from publicly, books that were debated in other books that were themselves copied and transmitted turned Christianity into something resembling the loose but tenacious organization of a philosophical school. Disciples of Plato could quarrel with one another, but they were reading the same books as their fellow students hundreds of miles away. Christians in the great cities of the east, especially Alexandria, built a community of consciousness on that model. Nothing but tradition and conservatism prevented other cults and religious communities from using books that way.
As long as the formal practice of Christianity was officially disregarded or discouraged, this broad common Christian consciousness was nebulous. When money and imperial support were added, the Christians’ common trove of books and ideas animated a lively, extensive community unlike any the ancient world had ever known. Call it the high-tech religion of late antiquity and call their papyrus books and letters the social media of the time and you won’t be far wrong.
Specific Christian communities were still locally organized and managed, with big cities taking the lead over small, towns over country villages. Bishops were elected by the clergy and the people they would lead. A neighboring bishop would come to lay on hands to ordain the new bishop, so smaller towns looked to large neighboring cities for influence and guidance. A charismatic or unscrupulous city bishop could exercise significant influence well beyond the bounds of his own community—and that influence would be increasingly accepted and codified as churches became public, official, and authoritative.
Just the word church is a marker here. The Greek word for it, ekklesia, means something like “assembly” or “convocation”—a group of people called together for a purpose. Decisively, the word came to be applied in the singular not only to specific local communities, but to the wider Christian community of a province, a region, or the world. From strikingly early on, Christians could refer to the community of people who revered Christ, wherever they might live, not as “churches” but as “church.” It is not far from that point down the path to speaking of “the church” or to recognizing the insight of Lenny Bruce, who envied the Catholic kids in his neighborhood because “they belonged to the only the church” going. That definite article is a sign of immense power that Christianity would discover for itself in the years after Constantine.
With governmental approval, money and influence began to flow toward Christian communities, especially in the larger cities. The emperor gave gifts, so other dignitaries followed suit. Wealthy men offered support for building fine new buildings and left gifts in their wills. Gifts to the church of productive agricultural property were a kind of endowment, guaranteeing continuing income. Just as an old master painting, once it gets to a museum, is unlikely to move again, so as wealth flowed to the ancient or medieval church, it stayed there, undivided by descendants.15
People began to join those communities in greater numbers, some because they heard and accepted the message. Others followed suit because this god seemed to be a powerful god with whom they were better off maintaining good relations. Still others joined because they frankly wanted to be seen in the right religious places to curry favor with other, more powerful people. As these communities grew and flourished, they became more aware of one another and the reputations of their leaders and teachers spread. This sudden influx of money and power would seem to be good for a religious community on the make, but it had its costs.
Christian communities had emerged out of a sense of history and out of the books that recorded that history. The stories of Jesus and his disciples were central, and this kind of wealth was antithetical to many of Jesus’s teachings.16 The heritage of Judaism was vital to the new religion, but it was very much an open question which elements of Judaism to integrate into new doctrine. In a world that had known not so much a unified church as a collection of communities, prosperity brought such schisms to light and made building a real unity of doctrine and practice difficult. The theological quarrels that followed were intense and reverberate even today.