God Against the Gods (18 page)

Some historians have argued that his allegiance to the solar god meant that Constantine, like Akhenaton in Egypt some 1600 years earlier, was a monotheist in pagan garb. But the evidence suggests that he was still a convinced and committed pagan on the eve of his battle with Maxentius. After all, he embraced the deification of his late father, who was regarded as having been elevated to “the celestial abode at the heavens’ very heart,” according to a court poet in service to Constantine, and thus entitled to worship as “Constantius the Divine.”
¹⁸
And the coinage of his early reign—a highly visible and enduring medium for imperial propaganda, both pagan and Christian—featured not only
Sol Invictus
but Jupiter, Hercules and Mars, sometimes in the very act of receiving the kind of pagan sacrifice that offended Christians so grievously that they were willing to die rather than offer it.

Even as he marched toward Rome, according to the ancient sources, Constantine was seized with anxiety over the outcome of the decisive battle to come. He regarded Maxentius as a magus with the skill to compel the attention and sympathy of the old gods and goddesses, and he worried that they would side with his enemy in the impending battle. He pondered the vexing question of which deity among the many gods and goddesses might be persuaded to break ranks and bestow favor on his army. Just as he had followed his father’s example in so many other ways, Constantine thus turned to the pagan deity whom Constantius the Pale had singled out for worship in preference to the other divinities of the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon—
Sol Invictus
.

But, as it turns out, Constantine did
not
need to rely on the patronage of the Unconquered Sun. The man who had once seen Apollo and Victory with his own eyes was now granted another divine vision—but, fatefully, it was not one of the pagan gods or goddesses whom he beheld. On the day before the decisive battle, Constantine looked up into the sky above his encampment and saw something new and remarkable—the symbol of the crucified god of the Christians, and the letters that spelled out the message
In Hoc Signo Vinces
(“In this sign, conquer”).

What Did Constantine See?

No single event in the history-making and history-changing life of Constantine the Great has provoked quite so much scrutiny and speculation as the question of what he actually saw in the midday sky outside the walls of Rome on the day before the battle with Maxentius. For true believers, it was the sign of the cross, miraculously displayed in the heavens, and no further explanation is necessary. For some secular scholars, it is more convincingly explained as the play of light on ice crystals in the atmosphere, a phenomenon that can produce the effect of a cross superimposed on a halo. For the most demanding observers, the whole incident is a pious fairy tale or something even more cynical.

Several versions of Constantine’s curious vision have been preserved, and—intriguingly—two are the work of contemporaries who may well have heard about the incident from Constantine himself. The first account was set down by Lactantius, who was serving in Constantine’s court within a year or so after the battle with Maxentius. The second account is found in an edition of
Life of Constantine
by Eusebius, written nearly thirty years after the fact by a man who was an intimate adviser of Constantine and an eyewitness to many other events in his life.

Lactantius refers to a dream rather than a vision. On the night before the battle with Maxentius, Jesus appears to Constantine in a dream and tells him to mark the shields of his soldiers with a “heavenly sign” of a very curious kind, a figure that resembles the letter P superimposed over the letter X. The same two letterforms are known in the Greek alphabet as
chi
and
rho
, and Lactantius explains the figure as “the monogram of Christ,” that is, the first two letters of
Christos
, the Greek word that meant “Messiah” and now unambiguously referred to Jesus of Nazareth. Thus did the symbol enter Christian iconography, where it is known as the
chi-rho
. “By this sign,” Jesus tells Constantine in his dream, “you shall be Victor.”
¹⁹

Eusebius preserves a different and more familiar version of Constantine’s epiphany, although he sets it during the march through the Alps from Gaul into Italy rather than on the eve of battle outside the gates of Rome. Constantine looks up into the sky and sees the figure of a cross and Greek letters spelling out the memorable phrase that has come down through history: “In this sign, conquer!” Still very much a pagan, Constantine is confounded by the sight, and his bafflement is only deepened when, the next night, he is instructed in a dream to inscribe the sign on a battle standard. When he awakens from the dream, he tells his courtiers about his strange dream, and a Christian among them explains that what Constantine has seen in the sky symbolizes the cross on which Jesus of Nazareth, the son of the Christian god, had been crucified. Constantine summons one of the craftsmen attached to his army and orders him to fashion a battle standard, known as a
labarum
, to rally the troops.

The classic version, however, offers its own puzzling flaws and inconsistencies. Constantine needs a Christian to explain the significance of the cross that he has seen in the sky even though he had witnessed the Great Persecution, an empire-wide campaign of state terror that supposedly began when Christians in the court of Diocletian angered the gods by making the sign of the cross during rituals of pagan sacrifice. Even then, Constantine adopts the
chi-rho
, not the cross, as the emblem of the Christian god. Intriguingly, the
chi-rho
was not yet a Christian symbol when Constantine first uses it to decorate his
labarum
—it was more commonly employed by pagan scribes as an abbreviation for the Greek word
chreston
(“good”) in the margins of manuscripts to mark passages that they regarded as noteworthy or memorable.
²⁰

“Did the Emperor’s advisers suggest this clever abbreviation for ‘Christ’ (‘Chrestos’)?” muses historian Robin Lane Fox. “Like other symbols in the years after the conversion, it had a double meaning, one for pagans, one for Christians.”
²¹

Still, we are invited by Eusebius and other Christian sources to imagine that, when Constantine marched out to do battle with Maxentius, his troops carried shields that were marked with the cross, and they followed a battle standard that was decorated not with the golden eagle of pagan Rome but with the
chi-rho
in its new function as a sign of the Christian god. Eusebius describes the
labarum
that was displayed at the court of Constantine in detail, although the one he saw was surely fashioned after the fact—it was gilded with pure gold, surrounded by a laurel wreath, adorned with precious stones and surmounted with a portrait of Constantine himself.

“[A]ssuming the Supreme God as his patron and invoking Christ to be his preserver and helper, and setting the trophy of victory, the saving symbol, in front of his legions,” writes Eusebius, subtly conflating
Sol Invictus
and Jesus Christ, “[Constantine] marched with his whole forces in an attempt to regain for the Romans the freedom which they had inherited from their forefathers.”
²²

The Head on the Lance Point

On one point of historical fact, however, no debate is necessary. On October 28, 312, the armies of Constantine and Maxentius finally closed with each other—and the army that fought under the symbol of Christ was victorious, an event with profound implications for both Constantine and Christianity. Not even the most pious hagiographer claims that a deity, Christian or pagan, manifested in visible form on the field of battle. Indeed, Constantine’s victory can be attributed to the thoroughly human qualities that he had demonstrated in all of the military adventures that he had undertaken while still a pagan: he was a courageous, inventive and determined general who was capable of inspiring impressive feats of arms in the men who served under his command.

Then, too, the incident that resulted in the death of Maxentius can be understood as the result of a simple human error. To permit the army of Maxentius to cross the Tiber and reach the battleground in force, his field engineers bolted together a string of boats to supplement the narrow stone bridge known as the Milvian Bridge. At a crucial moment in the battle, when Constantine’s smaller army seemed to be gaining the advantage over the much larger forces of Maxentius, the rear guard began to fall back across the Tiber. The engineers, panicking at the sight of the pursuing army of Constantine, pulled the bolts and allowed the boats to float away, thus hoping to prevent Constantine’s army from crossing the river and reaching the gates of Rome. The unfortunate men on the boats, Maxentius among them, were thrown into the river—and, weighted down by their armor and equipment, they drowned.

To the true believer, of course, even a battlefield accident can be seen as the handiwork of God. Indeed, Eusebius encourages us to see Constantine as a new Moses, and Maxentius as a new pharaoh—he describes how Maxentius and his men “went down in the depths like stone,” echoing the words of Exodus and suggesting that the Battle of the Milvian Bridge was the scene of a miracle like the one God had performed at the Red Sea.

A far less pious scene is recorded in the ancient chronicles. The body of Maxentius washed up on the shores of the Tiber. The head of the corpse was hacked from the body, fixed to a lance point, and held aloft as a symbol of the victory that Constantine had won over his rival for the imperial crown. And so it was a grisly kind of
labarum
behind which the army of Constantine marched into the ancient capital of the Roman empire. But a severed head, as it turned out, was a wholly fitting symbol for the new age that was about to begin.

CHAPTER SIX

THE HARLOT IN THE BISHOP’S BED

The War Within the Christian Church over the Divinity of Christ

From the time that Christianity was invested with the supreme power, the governors of the church have been no less diligently employed in displaying the cruelty, than in imitating the conduct, of their Pagan adversaries.

—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Constantine had vanquished both Maximian and Maxentius, his father-in-law and brother-in-law, but he was not yet the only man in the Roman empire to wear the imperial diadem. Licinius (c. 265-325) still reigned the east as coemperor, and Constantine was not ready to challenge him. Rather, he adopted the favorite tactic of generals and emperors in ancient Rome—a tactic that both he and his father had mastered—by brokering a diplomatic marriage and thus bringing himself into kinship with his rival.

A soldier of peasant stock from Transylvania, Licinius had fought his way to a generalship. As a comrade in arms and boon companion of Galerius, he was granted the title of Augustus in 308. According to the intricate workings of the imperial civil service that Diocletian had invented, Licinius outranked Constantine. After the victory at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine sought to make the senior Augustus into a brother-in-law by offering his half sister, Constantia, in marriage.

Licinius returned the favor by agreeing to recognize Constantine’s sovereignty over the western half of the empire, including not only Gaul, where Constantine was the lawful emperor, but also the lands he had “liberated” by force of arms. So it was that Constantine and Licinius both showed up at Mediolanum (Milan) in February 313 to celebrate the arranged marriage and, not incidentally, seal their deal to reign as “brother emperors.” The fact that Licinius was a dutiful worshipper of the old gods and goddesses apparently mattered not at all to Constantine.

By now, the imperial edicts that had provided the legal framework for the Great Persecution under Diocletian were a dead letter. Galerius, the arch-persecutor who had once urged Diocletian to engage in mass murder of Christians, formally renounced the anti-Christian decrees on his deathbed in 311. The last of the pagan rigorists to engage in active persecution of Christianity, a rival emperor named Maximinus Daia, was defeated in battle by Licinius and died of cholera in 313. Licinius adopted a policy of grudging toleration toward the Christians under his rule. Constantine himself, like his father, had avoided any participation in the Great Persecution even before he turned from
Sol Invictus
to the Christian god on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

Still, soon after the nuptials of Licinius and Constantia had been celebrated at Milan, Constantine prevailed upon his new brother-in-law to sign the document that formally dismantled the machinery of the Great Persecution. The imperial decree has been enshrined in the history of monotheism as the Edict of Milan, but a close reading reveals it to be an embodiment of the purely pagan virtue of religious toleration.

The Peace of the Church

Strictly speaking, the Edict of Milan was a letter to the governor of Bithynia, a province of the Roman empire in what is now Turkey, that revoked the anti-Christian laws of Diocletian. The missive was issued jointly in the names of Constantine and Licinius, and recites their statesmanlike concern for the promotion of “public well-being and security.” No particular deity, pagan or Christian, is mentioned—the brother emperors refer only to “the highest divinity,” a phrase that was crafted with care to avoid giving offense to either monotheists or polytheists. Above all, the Edict of Milan restores the status quo of paganism as it existed before the Great Persecution—
all
gods and goddesses may be freely worshipped, and the Christian deity is put in a position of parity with Apollo, Isis, the Great Mother, Mithra and the other gods and goddesses.

“We thought it right that the Christians should be given full liberty to follow the religion of their choice,” the emperors explain in the Edict of Milan. “This is why we thought that, with wholesome and just purpose, we should embark upon this policy of not refusing to anyone the opportunity of devoting himself either to the cult of the Christians or to whatever religion he feels is most suited to him, so that the highest divinity, whom we freely worship, may in all things bestow upon us his customary favour and goodwill.”
¹

The Christians were to be granted “complete and total freedom . . . to practise their religion”—but, notably, they were granted no special status and no special privileges. Indeed, they were to be treated with precisely the same degree of tolerance that was enjoyed by every other faith in pagan Rome, both foreign and domestic: “[O]pen and free liberty has likewise been extended to others, too, that they should be utterly free to follow whatever cult they choose,” the emperors pause to point out in the edict. “We have done this lest we should appear to diminish any worship or any religion.”
²

The theological rationale of the Edict of Milan, in fact, was purely and characteristically pagan. The same anxiety over offending
any
particular god that prompted the erection of altars “to the Unknown Gods” now prompts the emperors to welcome the worship of
all
gods “so all that is divine in the celestial seat may be appeased and propitious towards us and towards those under our authority.” For that reason, the edicts and decrees of the Great Persecution strike the two emperors as “unfortunate” and “altogether alien to our clemency”—or, to put it another way, they were more fitting to a rigorous monotheism than an open-minded polytheism—and “should be utterly abolished.”
³

The Edict of Milan was only the first and least of the revolutionary changes that Constantine was prepared to work in the faith and politics of the Roman empire. Constantine and Licinius were seeking to reestablish the “peace of the gods,” the old bargain between gods and mortals by which Rome had traded prayer and sacrifice for divine favor. But it is also true that the document put an end, once and for all, to the policy of state terror that had afflicted the Christians in pagan Rome for several centuries. That is why Christian tradition credits the Edict of Milan for establishing the so-called Peace of the Church.

Over the three centuries since the apostles Peter and Paul first came to Rome, the Christian church had grown into an impressive religious institution. Christians still represented only a fraction of the population of the Roman empire, probably no more than 10 percent of the 50 to 60 million people over whom Constantine reigned. Even so, the church possessed an elaborate and extensive hierarchy of bishops, priests and deacons; a collection of sacred writings that included both the Old Testament (that is, the Hebrew Bible) and the Christian scriptures known as the New Testament; a series of sacramental rites such as baptism and communion; an ornate and distinctive liturgy; and a welfare system that even its pagan persecutors admired and envied. But the persecutions that had afflicted the Christians over the three centuries since Nero had forced the church to operate behind closed doors.

Now, thanks to the Edict of Milan, the Christian church was granted the same freedom of religion that pagan cults had long enjoyed. No longer were Christians forced to worship by night and in secret—they could gather openly in churches rather than in the basements and back rooms of private houses. Christians were now entitled to publish their writings, to bequeath property to the church, to hold public office. Indeed, Constantine welcomed Christians into his army, his court, even his intimate family circles—Lactantius, the chronicler and church father who is the source of so much firsthand testimony about the reign of Constantine, was hired to tutor the emperor’s children in the Christian faith.

Not every Christian, however, regarded the Peace of the Church as an unalloyed blessing. By the greatest irony of all, the freedom of religion that Licinius and Constantine established at Milan was the source of a wholly new kind of terror. For the true believer in monotheism, as we have already seen, the freedom to embrace
any
faith raised the risk that some benighted men and women would embrace the
wrong
faith. For the Christian rigorists, that risk was itself intolerable: “So, in the century opened by the Peace of the Church,” explains Ramsay MacMullen, “more Christians died for their faith at the hands of fellow Christians than had died before in all the persecutions.”
⁴
With the Peace of the Church begins a new, remarkable and terrible phenomenon—some Christians hastened to turn themselves from the persecuted to the persecutors.

The Church of the Martyrs

The blessing of official toleration that was bestowed upon the Christians by Constantine raised a new and ugly question. What was to be done about the Christians who had betrayed the faith during the Great Persecution—and who was empowered to decide whether and how they should be punished?

Only a few Christians had been willing to defy the imperial authorities during the Great Persecution, and the greater number managed to avoid martyrdom by going along and getting along. Some succeeded in fooling an inattentive or ignorant official by turning over secular or heretical writings in place of Christian holy books— and some friendly officials, whether bribed or not, knowingly went along with the charade. Others simply saved their own lives by obeying the command to offer a sacrifice to the pagan gods and goddesses. Still others, as we have seen, bribed a greedy magistrate to leave them unmolested. And some escaped the Great Persecution by moving to towns and villages where the authorities were more easygoing.

“I ran before
that
storm,” says one Christian schoolmaster who was accused of being a
traditor
in 320. Remarkably, we have the transcript of his examination by a pair of inquisitors who urge him to save his own life by testifying against a high-ranking bishop who was charged with the same crime. If the schoolmaster affirmed that he had seen the bishop turning over sacred books to the pagan authorities, he would be spared. “Just admit it,” urges one of the two inquisitors who questioned him in an early example of good cop/bad cop. “If you will not, you have to be interrogated under torture.”
⁵

Thus were the lapsed Christians forced to present themselves to the reconstituted authorities of the church: the bishops who had returned from their places of exile, reclaimed their old clerical titles and offices and set themselves to the task of judging and punishing any congregant accused of a crime against the faith. Excommunication was reserved for the worst offenders—the ones who betrayed the faith by betraying their fellow Christians to the pagan authorities—but most of them were required only to perform an act of penance, ranging from almsgiving to fasting to public humiliation, all according to a scale that varied according to the seriousness of the crime against the church. Even those among the laity who sacrificed to the pagan gods or turned over Christian writings might be readmitted to communion after a suitable punishment for their sins.

Some of the highest-ranking clergy, however, were themselves accused of the same misdeeds. The rigorists in the Christian community of Carthage, for example, declared themselves to be scandalized at how readily their own bishop, Mensurius, complied with the decrees of the pagan authorities by surrendering the holy books that had been entrusted to him. To use the vocabulary of church politics, he was a traitor rather than a martyr, a coward who had turned over the Bible for burning rather than confessing his faith and suffering the consequences.

Yet it was Mensurius who now acted on behalf of the church in Carthage in deciding what punishment, if any, the other lapsed Christians must endure in order to reenter the congregation. For those who had suffered the worst tortures—and for those who had suffered no torture at all but who admired the confessors and detested the
traditores
—Bishop Mensurius was compromised beyond redemption by his own betrayal of Christianity. They rejected his claim that the books he had turned over to the authorities were, in fact, not Holy Writ but rather heretical writings that deserved to be burned. In their eyes, the bishop was no better, and arguably worse, than the pagans who had carried out the Great Persecution in the first place.

The recriminations among the Christians only grew sharper when Mensurius died and his archdeacon, Caecilian, was elected as bishop. Caecilian was regarded by the rigorists as an even greater traitor to the faith because of an incident that supposedly took place when Mensurius was in exile and Caecilian was in charge of the Christian community at Carthage. Under the penal system of ancient Rome, prisoners relied on their friends and families to feed them while in confinement. Caecilian, however, was accused of aiding and abetting the pagan authorities by preventing his fellow Christians from bringing food to the prison where a band of confessors had been locked up—he posted guards outside the prison, it was charged, and they used leather whips to drive off the good-hearted Christians. The food they carried was fed to the dogs, and the prisoners died slowly of starvation as their heart-rending pleas were cruelly ignored.

Here is an example of the sparks that are struck whenever zeal and true belief come into conflict with the spirit of compromise and accommodation. Caecilian indignantly denied the charges against him, but he may well have been among the pragmatic churchmen who sought to save the lives of his congregants during the Great Persecution by discouraging them from engaging in acts of provocation. Ultimately, fewer Christians would be tortured or killed if they saw that they could not count on the encouragement and support of their fellow Christians when they decided to defy the pagan authorities—or so a man like Caecilian may have believed.