The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (27 page)

Eventually, in 335, Constantine summoned Arius to Constantinople and ordered the bishop there to admit him to communion. However, there was a bizarre ending to the affair. The bishop, an opponent of Arius, apparently prayed that God should show who was right in the controversy by allowing only either himself or Arius to live to attend the service. The day before the service, Arius died, somewhat dramatically, of a haemorrhage in a public latrine in Constantinople. It was a convincing enough sign of God’s will for some (the pro-Nicene Ambrose of Milan went so far as to claim that the fact that Arius’ bowels spilled out showed that God equated him with the traitor Judas, who had suffered the same undignified end [Acts 1:18–19]), but the Arian tradition did not die with him. When Constantine himself was finally baptized it was at the hands of an Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia (not to be confused with the Eusebius who was Constantine’s biographer). The Nicene Creed appeared to be dead—even, in terms of what Constantine had hoped to achieve, a failure. If the issues had not been revived in the 350s, the council might have occupied no more than a footnote in history.

Those impressed by Constantine’s adoption of a Christian God might have hoped that he would have adopted Christian ethics. However, he appears to have shown no interest in the message of the Gospels. Rather, he attempts to use Christianity as a means of bringing order to society. In a letter issued to the peoples of the eastern empire in 324, Christianity is described as “the Law,” the basis of a regulated way of life under the auspices of a single god.
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Constantine did make divorce more difficult, requiring stated offences to be given as a reason, and he included infanticide in a law on murder. He banned crucifixion and public branding (and he may have banned sacrifices, although there is some scholarly dispute about this),
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but in many other of his laws he maintained a traditional Roman brutality—he shows none of the studied saintliness of the more devout medieval kings of Europe, for example. If a free woman had a sexual relationship with a male slave, both were to die, the slave by being burnt alive. Slaves who were found to be an accessory to the seduction of a young girl were to have molten metal poured down their throats. Christians played very little part in Constantine’s administration, and the army remained pagan. Nor did Constantine show any interest in creating a society of greater social equality, being concerned rather to maintain traditional distinctions. He enlarged, rather than diminished, the senatorial order, and at Constantinople, his “new Rome,” he created a second Senate as well as according the city one of the empire’s two consuls. Constantine’s personal brutality was shown in a mysterious incident in which his second wife, Fausta, and Crispus, his son by his first wife, Minervina, were executed in Italy in 326. According to the pagan historian Zosimus (writing much later), Crispus was suspected of having an affair with Fausta, his stepmother. Crispus was disposed of, but Constantine’s mother, Helena, took the death of her grandson so badly that to appease her Constantine had Fausta killed as well, drowned in an overheated bath. The event shocked non-Christians as much as it did Christians. One pagan source even suggests that it drew Constantine closer to Christianity because the Christians offered forgiveness for an offence no pagan would condone. It has also been suggested that Helena’s famous expedition to the Holy Land was a penance demanded by the church for her part in the affair.
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The murders certainly overshadowed the visit to Rome that Constantine made in 326 as part of the celebrations to mark the completion of his first twenty years in power. Quite apart from the tensions caused by the death of his son and his wife, Constantine found it difficult to know which ceremonies to attend. He had retained the ancient title of
pontifex maximus,
the head of the priesthood, but, under pressure from Bishop Ossius of Cordoba, who appears to have acted as his ecclesiastical adviser, it is said that he refused to carry out the traditional sacrifices on behalf of the army on the Capitoline Hill and that many were offended. Inside the city his benefactions were conventional ones. He completed a great basilica begun by Maxentius on the edge of the Forum and graced it with an enormous statue of himself, the head of which survives in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The impressive ruins of the basilica also stand. He also rebuilt parts of the Circus Maximus, the great hippodrome that ran alongside the Palatine Hill. His sensitivity to the pagan traditions of Rome was shown by the way in which he directed his patronage to the Christian communities of the city. The earliest Christian churches were confined to sites outside or on the edge of the city (the churches of St. John Lateran [originally dedicated to Christ the Redeemer] and St. Peter’s on the Vatican Hill), and, although their interiors were extraordinarily opulent, their exteriors appear to have been kept deliberately plain so as to avoid offending pagans.

It is understandable, however, that with his personal position in Rome so insecure, Constantine would have looked elsewhere for a city in which to make his centre of government. Rome had, of course, the additional disadvantage of being far from the empire’s borders and useless as a base for defending the empire. Constantine might have expanded one of the major cities of the north, Trier, Milan or Nicomedia, all suitable for the defence of the northern borders, but he wanted to craft a new foundation to celebrate his own glory. He chose an ancient Greek city, Byzantium, which occupied a stunning and well-defended site overlooking the southern end of the Bosphorus and had an important strategic position on the main routes between east and west. Byzantium had been enlarged by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus in the 190s, but it remained small enough to be completely replanned.

As its name suggests, Constantinople was Constantine’s city.
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This is an important point because there has been considerable debate over whether Constantinople was founded as a Christian city or not. The issue arose because of Eusebius’ misleading claim, in his attempt to assert the Christian commitment of Constantine, that Constantinople was always wholly Christian and without a single pagan temple. For its founder this was not relevant; this was the city of Constantine, not of Christ, and Constantine may even have deliberately chosen a city without a Christian history to stress the point. Many elements of the foundation were traditional. According to the fifth-century historian Philostorgios, Constantine traced the line of the future walls of the city with a spear just as a Greek founder would have done. Pagan statues and monuments were brought from all over the empire to grace the public spaces, and the hippodrome, where the finest were grouped, appears to have been modelled on the Circus Maximus in Rome. Jerome tells of whole cities being stripped of monuments—among those known to have been taken by Constantine were the column commemorating the Greek victory over the Persians in 479 B.C. from Delphi (the base survives today in Istanbul), statues of Apollo, one of them possibly also from Delphi, and of the Muses from Mount Helicon in Boeotia. Eusebius is deeply embarrassed by these pagan imports, and he resorts to suggesting that Constantine used them as “toys for the laughter and amusement of the spectators,” but there is no evidence for this and, rather, ample evidence that many pagan statues remained in place as respected monuments for centuries to come. This was simply another example of Constantine using pagan symbolism when it suited his purpose.
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In fact, Constantine recognized that Byzantium’s protecting goddesses had to be respected. The most ancient of these was Rhea, the mother of the Olympian gods. Another important deity was Tyche, the personification of good fortune, who was believed to be able to protect and bring prosperity to cities. Constantine honoured them both with new temples. His most ambitious plans, however, were to create a central complex of forum, hippodrome and imperial palace as a setting for his own majesty. The hippodrome (enlarged from one built by Severus) had an imperial box placed halfway along its length that could be entered directly from the palace. The emperor and his successors were able to stage-manage their own imperial displays. In the circular forum, on one of the highest hills of the city, Constantine erected a great porphyry column twenty-five metres high and arranged for it to be crowned by a gold statue of himself; the column still stands, in battered form, today. Here the emperor was again associated with the sun, whose rays spread from the statue’s head.
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There was another forum built in honour of Constantine’s mother, Helena (whose status appears to have been elevated after the death of Crispus and Fausta), and a major basilica in which the newly created Senate would meet.

All this was dedicated on a great day of celebration in May 330, as much a celebration of Constantine as of his city. A gold coin was struck to mark the occasion, and it showed Constantine gazing upwards in a pose made famous by Alexander the Great. Around his head ran an opulent diadem. The day’s ceremonies began in the presence of Constantine with the lifting of the great gold statue of the emperor onto its column. Dressed in magnificent robes and wearing a diadem encrusted in jewels, Constantine then processed to the imperial box. Among the events that followed one stood out: the arrival in the hippodrome of a golden chariot carrying a gilded statue of the emperor. The statue held a smaller figure of Tyche. For the next 200 years, the ritual drawing of the statue and chariot through the hippodrome was to be re-enacted on the anniversary of the dedication. (The gilded horses, which stood with the chariot between ceremonies and said to be already ancient at the time of the ceremony, may well be the same ones which the Venetians plundered for St. Mark’s when they sacked the city in 1204.)
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Where did Christianity fit into all this? In the original celebrations hardly at all. Space was, however, reserved in the centre of the city for churches, but their titles—
Hagia Sophia,
Holy Wisdom,
Hagia Eirene,
Holy Peace, and
Hagia Dynamis,
Holy Power—suggest that Constantine was once again deliberately using formulas that were as acceptable to the pagan world as to the Christian. According to Eusebius, statues of the Good Shepherd were erected on fountains in the city. “The Good Shepherd,” like the sun, was a symbol used by both pagans and Christians.
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It was keeping the consensus which was important: the only saints honoured with churches were local martyrs, and it was not until the end of the century that Constantinople could be seen as a fully Christian city.

In April 337 Constantine realized he was dying. Only then did he allow himself to be baptized. In the last weeks of his life (he died on May 22) he discarded the imperial purple and dressed himself in the white of the newly baptized Christian. He had already built his final resting place within Constantinople, and it provided an apt testimonial to how he saw himself in relation to the Christian God. He was buried in a circular mausoleum, his tomb lying under the central dome. Placed around the tomb were twelve sepulchres—each the symbolic burial place of one of the original Apostles; Constantine was to be the thirteenth. To orthodox Christians this might seem blasphemous, but it is consistent with Constantine’s perception of himself in relation to the “supreme deity.” After all, as Constantine had once told a meeting of bishops: “You are bishops of those within the church, but I am perhaps a bishop appointed by God over those outside.”
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His position and his strategy required that he keep his distance from the institutional church. It is remarkable that there is no evidence that Constantine ever attended a church service. (The records suggest that bishops were summoned to attend him in his palaces.) After his death his sons issued a coin to commemorate their own
consecratio.
On one side it bore Constantine’s veiled head and an inscription, “The deified Constantine, father of the Augusti”; on the other Constantine is seen ascending to heaven in a chariot with God’s hand reaching out to welcome him, a portrayal similar to those of his pagan predecessors.
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His links to the traditions of pagan Rome were preserved to the last.

Constantine’s impact on the empire was dramatic, not least through his reassertion of the empire as a single political unity under one emperor. He had allowed Christianity to consolidate itself within his empire in a way that would not have seemed possible thirty years before, and he had achieved the remarkable feat of doing this without alienating those “pagans” drawn to monotheism, as many now were. However, by bringing Christianity so firmly under the control of the state, even to the extent of attempting to formulate its doctrine at Nicaea, Constantine was severing the traditional church from its roots. A host of new tensions—over the nature of Christian authority and where it lay, the appropriate use of material wealth for Christians now the subject of state patronage, the basis on which doctrine rested (the scriptures or imperially controlled councils)—had been created. Even today, 1,600 years later, many of them have not been resolved.

One of the most important of Constantine’s legacies was the creation of a relationship between Christianity and war. Constantine was a brilliant and effective soldier, and he associated his continuing success with the support of the Christian God. Once he had used the victory at the Milvian Bridge as a platform for the granting of toleration to Christians, each new victory strengthened the link. Eusebius makes the point succinctly, describing him as:

the only Conqueror among the Emperors of all time to remain Irresistible and Unconquered, Ever-conquering and always brilliant with triumphs over enemies, so great an Emperor . . . so God beloved and Thrice blessed . . . that with utter ease he governed more nations than those before him, and kept his dominion unimpaired to the very end.
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In his
Ecclesiastical History,
Eusebius refers to Constantine as “God’s Commander-in-Chief.” So a new element enters the Christian tradition. When the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church came under sustained attack for the first time in the Reformation, the Medici pope Leo X (pope 1513–21) ordered a great room to be built in the Vatican. Known as the Sala di Constantino, it had an unashamedly propagandist purpose. Its frescoes, by Raphael, show the early popes from Peter onwards and then, in four great scenes, the achievement of Constantine. One fresco shows the vision of the cross, another the battle of the Milvian Bridge itself. Leo associated himself with the victory. The
palle
from the Medici coat of arms are on Constantine’s tent, and lions, a reference to Leo’s name, are also found on the tent, with another depicted on a standard. At a moment of crisis and confrontation, this was the event the pope chose to highlight. As late as 1956 Pope Pius XII refused the right of conscientious objection, acknowledging in effect the overriding power of the state. “A Catholic may not appeal to his conscience as grounds for refusing to serve and fulfill duties fixed by law.”
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Constantine would have approved.