Constantine the Great and Christianity

• 1. Introduction

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  Constantine the Great ruled the Roman Empire from 306 to 337 AD, and during his reign Christianity moved from a persecuted faith to the dominant religion of the empire. For centuries, Christians had faced arrest, torture, and death in arenas for refusing to worship the Roman gods. Then, within a single generation, an emperor was commissioning church buildings, granting clergy tax exemptions, and ordering fifty bound volumes of scripture for the churches of his new capital. How did that happen? Was Constantine a sincere believer, or a shrewd politician who saw in Christianity a tool for holding a fractious empire together? Historians have debated these questions ever since. The answers turn out to be complicated, and perhaps unanswerable. What is clear is that Constantine's choices set in motion the entire idea of a Christian state, one that would shape law, politics, and daily life across Europe and beyond for well over a thousand years. That story begins not with Constantine but with a fire in Rome during the reign of Nero.

• 2. Before Constantine

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  In AD 64, the Emperor Nero reportedly blamed Christians for the Great Fire of Rome, an accusation recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus. Church tradition holds that it was during Nero's reign that both Peter and Paul were martyred in the city. Whether the Roman government consistently distinguished between Christians and Jews before the year 96, when Emperor Nerva modified the Fiscus Judaicus tax, is something modern historians still debate. After that reform, practising Jews paid the tax and Christians did not, a distinction that gave Christians a more clearly separate legal identity. What followed was two and a half centuries of sporadic, localized persecution. Christians refused to take part in the imperial cult, which Rome treated as an act of treason punishable by execution. The worst of those persecutions came under Emperor Diocletian, who in 303 ordered Christian buildings and homes demolished, their sacred books collected and burned, and believers imprisoned, tortured, and thrown to gladiatorial contests for the entertainment of spectators. That campaign, known as the Great Persecution, officially ended in April 311 when Galerius, the senior emperor of the Tetrarchy, issued an edict of toleration granting Christians the right to practice their faith, though it returned none of the property seized from them. Constantine, then caesar in the Western Empire, and Licinius in the East, were both signatories to that edict. Some scholars have speculated that the pressure from one or both caesars may have nudged Galerius toward his reversal.

• 3. Visions and the Milvian Bridge

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  In 310, a panegyric delivered at Trier for the joint occasion of the city's birthday and Constantine's quinquennalia described a vision the emperor reportedly experienced while traveling between Marseille and Trier. The god Apollo appeared to him alongside Victoria and together they presented him with three wreaths representing thirty years of power. This vision may have occurred during a period of incubation at the shrine of Apollo Grannus in Grand, Vosges. Two years later came the moment that has defined how history remembers Constantine's relationship to Christianity. At some point between his father Constantius Chlorus's death in 306 and the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on the 28th of October 312, Constantine reported a dramatic series of events. Writing in his Life of Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea records that around midday Constantine saw "a cross-shaped trophy formed from light" above the sun, accompanied by the words "By this conquer." The Greek phrase is often rendered in Latin as in hoc signo vinces. Eusebius says Christ then appeared to Constantine in a dream and urged him to reproduce the sign as protection in battle. Eusebius himself admitted he had heard the story from Constantine long after it happened, and notably he did not include it in his Church History written shortly after 313. Lactantius, writing between 313 and 315, tells a different version: no vision in the sky, only a dream the night before the battle instructing Constantine to mark a heavenly sign on his soldiers' shields. Lactantius describes it as "a letter X turned sideways, with the top of its head bent around," which scholars have interpreted as a staurogram. The exact symbol remains uncertain; Eusebius's later account, written after 324, describes a more elaborate chi-rho standard. What followed the battle was unmistakable. Constantine defeated Maxentius and became the undisputed emperor in the West. Entering Rome in a ceremonial adventus, he bypassed the altars on the Capitoline Hill entirely and went straight to the imperial palace, forgoing the customary sacrifices to Jupiter.

• 4. The Edict of Milan

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  In 313, Constantine and Licinius jointly announced that Christians and all others should have liberty to follow whatever religion appeared best to each of them. The Edict of Milan went further than Galerius's earlier toleration edict by actually returning confiscated Church property. It did not make Christianity the state religion; that would come later, with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. What the Edict of Milan did was declare the empire officially neutral on religion while raising the standing of Christianity within it. Most of the empire's influential figures, including senior military officers, had not converted and still practiced traditional Roman religion. Constantine's approach at this stage showed a willingness to accommodate them. Coins minted up to eight years after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge still bore images of Roman gods. Early monuments he commissioned, including the Arch of Constantine, contained no Christian imagery, though they also omitted the customary image of Constantine sacrificing to Jupiter. Constantine only declared himself a Christian after issuing the Edict of Milan, and in his communications with Christians he made clear that he believed his successes came from the protection of a High God. His coinage and official imagery, however, continued to associate him with the pagan cult of Sol Invictus until 325.

• 5. Patron of the Church

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  Constantine's patronage of Christianity translated into concrete material support on a scale the Church had never seen. He funded the Church directly, had basilicas constructed, returned property seized during Diocletian's persecution, granted clergy exemptions from certain taxes, promoted Christians into high offices, and endowed the Church with land and wealth. Between 324 and 330, he built an entirely new city at Byzantium on the Bosporos. Named Constantinople, it was designed from the outset with Christian architecture at its core: churches stood inside the city walls, and there were no pre-existing temples from other religions to contend with. Constantine required non-Christians to help pay for the construction, and chroniclers record that he expressed a wish to discourage his subjects from their old rites and lead them away from temples. The chronicler Theophanes later claimed the temples were annihilated, but contemporary historians regarded that as untrue. Constantine instead worked through financial pressure: temples lost support, their wealth flowed into the imperial treasury, and he did not need to resort to force. Even so, Constantine respected men of learning and his court included many from leading Roman families who had not converted. Two-thirds of his top government officials remained non-Christian until the end of his life. Several of his laws carried a Christian inflection. Crucifixion was abolished on grounds of Christian piety, though it was replaced with hanging. On the 7th of March 321, Sunday was declared an official day of rest, recognizing it as sacred both to Christians as the day of the resurrection and to worshippers of Sol Invictus. Publicly displayed gladiatorial games were ordered eliminated in 325. A prisoner could no longer be kept in total darkness but had to be allowed outdoors and daylight. A condemned man could not be branded on his face because, as the edict explained, God was supposed to have made man in his image.

• 6. Scripture, Buildings, and the Biblical Canon

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  In 331, according to Eusebius, Constantine commissioned him to deliver fifty volumes of scriptures for the churches of Constantinople, to be bound in leather and easily portable. Only three or four churches were certainly known to exist during Constantine's reign, but others appear to have been planned, accounting for the large commission. The volumes were almost certainly gospel books containing the Canonical Gospels of the Four Evangelists rather than complete Bibles, which were extremely rare in antiquity. Some scholars have speculated that this imperial commission may have provided impetus for the formal listing of canonical books, and that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are possible examples of the Bibles produced. Together with the Peshitta and Codex Alexandrinus, those manuscripts are among the earliest surviving Christian Bibles. In Constantinople, Socrates Scholasticus records that Constantine commissioned the first Church of Hagia Irene on the site now occupied by the later Justinian church of the same name. The church commemorated the peace won by the victory of Constantine and Crispus over Licinius and Licinius II at the Battle of Chrysopolis in 324, and its name, meaning Church of the Holy Peace, deliberately recalled the Altar of Peace built by Augustus, the first deified Roman emperor. Two other large churches were dedicated to Saint Mocius and Saint Acacius, both reportedly martyred at Byzantium during the Diocletianic Persecution. Christian liturgies were also performed in Constantine's own Mausoleum, the site of which later became the Church of the Holy Apostles.

• 7. Orthodoxy, Nicaea, and the Arian Question

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  Constantine's patronage came with an expectation: that the Church would maintain a unified doctrine. In 316, he was asked to arbitrate a dispute involving the Donatist sect in North Africa, a group that had begun by refusing obedience to any bishops who had yielded during the persecutions and had come to regard all bishops outside their sect as spiritually contaminated. That dispute foreshadowed a larger crisis. In 325, Constantine summoned the First Council of Nicaea, effectively the first ecumenical council in Christian history. All previous Church councils had been local or regional affairs; Nicaea was the first major attempt to define orthodoxy for the entire Church. The central controversy was the Arian question: whether Christ was of the same substance as God the Father, or of a similar but lesser substance. Constantine was torn between the Arian and Trinitarian camps. After the Council concluded against Arianism, he eventually reversed course, recalled Arius from exile, and banished Athanasius of Alexandria to Trier. When Constantine was baptized just before his death in May 337, it was reportedly by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, his distant relative. Eusebius of Nicomedia occupied a position of lasting influence: he enjoyed the confidence of both Constantine and Constantius II, and served as tutor to the future Emperor Julian the Apostate. Constantine's son and successor Constantius II was himself an Arian, as was the later Emperor Valens. Hans Pohlsander, professor emeritus of history at the State University of New York at Albany, described Constantine's conversion as a matter of realpolitik, aimed at keeping the empire united. The prevailing character of his government, Pohlsander argued, was conservative: his support of Christianity ultimately served the preservation and continuation of the empire rather than transforming it.

• 8. The Constantinian Shift

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  The term Constantinian shift describes the process by which Constantine integrated imperial government with the Catholic Church, a process that gathered momentum with the First Council of Nicaea. It was popularized by the Mennonite theologian John H. Yoder. Whether any such shift actually occurred is contested. The historian Peter Leithart has argued that there was a brief and ambiguous Constantinian moment in the fourth century, but no permanent or epochal shift. Constantine's position on traditional Roman religion changed visibly across his reign. He started by encouraging temple construction and tolerating sacrifices. By the end of his life he had ordered temples pillaged and torn down. His influence reached beyond Roman borders as well. In 324, Constantine reportedly wrote to the Sasanian king Shapur II urging him to protect Christians living under his rule. With Catholicism becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christians in Persia came to be viewed as allies of Persia's ancient enemy. An anonymous Christian account records Shapur II instructing his generals to arrest Simon, chief of the Christians, and extract a double tax and double tribute from the Christian community on the grounds that they had repose and pleasure while his own people bore the trials of war. Constantine is venerated as a saint and isapostolos in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Church, and various Eastern Catholic Churches. The question of whether he was a sincere believer or a calculating statesman may never be resolved; what is documented is that his decision to stop persecuting Christians, formalized in the Edict of Milan in 313, set in motion the era of the state church of the Roman Empire, declared by edict in 380.