Constantine: from persecution to toleration

The Milvian Bridge, 312

In 312 the Great Persecution that began in 303 had not yet ended in the East, and rival emperors were fighting over the Roman world (see Persecution and the martyrs). Constantine, proclaimed emperor by his troops at York in Britain in 306, crossed the Alps into Italy in 312. On 28 October, at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber north of Rome, he defeated the army of Maxentius, who held the city, and Maxentius drowned in the river.

Two Christian writers tell what happened before the battle. Around 315 Lactantius writes that Constantine was told in a dream, the night before, to mark the heavenly sign of God on his soldiers' shields, and did so Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 44. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, tells a different story in his Life of Constantine, written around 337–339, as the emperor himself had told it to him: at midday Constantine saw a cross of light above the sun, bearing the inscription "Conquer by this", and had a standard made in its likeness.

The two accounts differ, a dream and a vision in the sky, shields and a standard, and Eusebius's was written down a quarter of a century after the battle. Historians are divided: some think Constantine saw something like a halo around the sun, others that the story grew in the telling. What is certain is that from then on Constantine displayed the sign of Christ and favoured the Christians. Yet he kept the title of high priest of the old Roman religion, and was baptised only in 337, as he was dying.

From Milan to Nicaea

In February 313 Constantine met Licinius, emperor in the East, at Milan, and they agreed to give Christians and everyone else the freedom to follow whatever religion each preferred. Lactantius gives the text as Licinius published it in the East that summer Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 48. It is usually called the Edict of Milan, but it did not make Christianity the religion of the state: it was an agreement granting freedom of worship to all.

Constantine gave the church a great deal. He had great churches built at the Lateran in Rome, on the Vatican hill where Peter's grave was remembered, and in Jerusalem at the place remembered as Jesus' tomb, and he freed the clergy from public burdens. In 321 he ordered the courts and the city workshops to rest on ‘the day of the sun’, Sunday. After defeating Licinius in 324 he ruled alone, and in 330 he dedicated a new capital in the East, Constantinople.

When Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, taught that the Son was a created being and the Eastern churches were shaken, the emperor called the bishops to Nicaea in 325. The council confessed the Son of one being with the Father, truly God, and through the council of Constantinople in 381 that confession became the Nicene Creed the churches confess together today. The controversy and the confession are the Theology course's Nicaea: is the Son truly God?; what this lesson notes is the emperor's place. It was the emperor who called the council, the emperor who exiled Arius and the two bishops who would not sign, and the emperor again who, after a string of charges, exiled Athanasius in 335.

Constantine's own life has deep shadows. In 326 he had his eldest son Crispus put to death, and soon afterwards his wife Fausta died. Why is still not clearly known.

Thessalonica, 380: what was gained and what it cost

In February 380 the emperor Theodosius issued an edict at Thessalonica commanding all the peoples of the empire to hold the faith the apostle Peter had handed down to the Romans, one Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Only those who held it were to be called catholic Christians; the rest were heretics, to suffer God's punishment and the emperor's. The agreement of 313 had given freedom to all; this edict made the faith of Nicaea the faith of the empire. With a Christian on the throne, the church read Paul with new eyes:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which is from God. The authorities that exist have been appointed by God.

Romans 13:1

But the church also remembered what Peter and the apostles told the Sanhedrin: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). Preaching at Antioch late in the fourth century on the command to give Caesar what is Caesar's, John Chrysostom said: "But when you hear this command to render to Caesar the things of Caesar, know that such things only are intended which in nothing are opposed to religion" Chrysostom. He later became bishop of Constantinople, clashed with the imperial court and died in exile.

Little by little the persecuted became persecutors. Theodosius' laws of 391 and 392 forbade pagan sacrifice and temple worship, and temples, the Serapeum of Alexandria among them, fell to Christian crowds. In 388 at Callinicum on the Euphrates a crowd, said to have been stirred up by its bishop, burned a synagogue; Theodosius ordered the bishop to rebuild it, but Ambrose, bishop of Milan, pressed the emperor until he withdrew the order. Around 385 Priscillian, a Spanish bishop accused of heresy, was put to death by the imperial court at Trier on the charges of other bishops. Martin, bishop of Tours, tried to prevent it, and Ambrose broke communion with the bishops who had sought his death.

On the Day of Pardon in March 2000 Pope John Paul II confessed the violence the church's sons and daughters had used in the name of defending the truth, and asked forgiveness Memory and Reconciliation. The road of defending truth by the sword went deeper in the Middle Ages (see The Inquisition and heresy), and Protestants later walked it too.

Two memories, and the church today

The Eastern Orthodox honour Constantine every year on 21 May, with his mother Helena, as ‘equal to the apostles’: the emperor who ended the persecution and gathered the first ecumenical council, used by God for his church. Catholics in the West have generally not honoured him as a saint, but remember him as the emperor who gave the church its freedom.

The Anabaptists of the sixteenth century confessed that Christians do not take up the sword Schleitheim Confession, Article 6, and several Anabaptist writers saw in the fourth century, when the church was joined to the emperor's sword, the time it lost its way (see The Anabaptists and the Radical Reformation). The Lutherans' Augsburg Confession says that "many have incommodiously mingled together the Ecclesiastical power and the power of the sword" (incommodiously: unfittingly), and sets the two apart Augsburg Confession, Article 28. Yet the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican churches kept for centuries a state church under the protection of the prince. Christians of many traditions now look back together on that long age of church and state as one, weighing its light and its shadow.

It is cause for thanks that the martyrs' children could worship freely, build churches and rest on the Lord's day. But the emperor's favour taught the church to lean on his power, and the freedom given to all in 313 was taken from others within a century. Jesus told Pilate:

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, My servants would fight to prevent My arrest by the Jews. But now My kingdom is not of this realm.”

John 18:36

Augustine, while saying that this kingdom is here until the end of the world, adds: "But yet it is not from here, since it is a stranger in the world" Augustine. Even under the protection of power the church lives as a stranger, and asks for its neighbours the freedom it enjoys. The next lesson, The desert and the monastery, follows those who went into the desert and the monastery as the church grew comfortable.

Practice