Commitment to Christianity of Constantine I

Shortly after the defeat of Maxentius, Constantine met Licinius at Mediolanum (modern Milan) to confirm a number of political and dynastic arrangements. A product of this meeting has become known as the Edict of Milan, which extended toleration to the Christians and restored any personal and corporate property that had been confiscated during the persecution. The extant copies of this decree are actually those posted by Licinius in the eastern parts of the empire. But Constantine went far beyond the joint policy agreed upon at Mediolanum. By 313 he had already donated to the bishop of Rome the imperial property of the Lateran, where a new cathedral, the Basilica Constantiniana (now San Giovanni in Laterano), soon rose. The church of St. Sebastian was also probably begun at this time, and it was in these early years of his reign that Constantine began issuing laws conveying upon the church and its clergy fiscal and legal privileges and immunities from civic burdens. As he said in a letter of 313 to the proconsul of Africa, the Christian clergy should not be distracted by secular offices from their religious duties “…for when they are free to render supreme service to the Divinity, it is evident that they confer great benefit upon the affairs of state.” In another such letter, directed to the bishop of Carthage, Constantine mentioned the Spanish bishop Hosius, who was important later in the reign as his adviser and possibly—since he may well have been with Constantine in Gaul before the campaign against Maxentius—instrumental in the conversion of the emperor.

Constantine’s personal “theology” emerges with particular clarity from a remarkable series of letters, extending from 313 to the early 320s, concerning the Donatist schism in North Africa. The Donatists maintained that those priests and bishops who had once lapsed from the Christian faith could not be readmitted to the church. Constantine’s chief concern was that a divided church would offend the Christian God and so bring divine vengeance upon the Roman Empire and Constantine himself. Schism, in Constantine’s view, was inspired by Satan. Its partisans were acting in defiance of the clemency of Christ, for which they might expect eternal damnation at the Last Judgment. Meanwhile, it was for the righteous members of the Christian community to show patience and long-suffering. In so doing they would be imitating Christ, and their patience would be rewarded in lieu of martyrdom—for actual martyrdom was no longer open to Christians in a time of peace for the church. Throughout, Constantine had no doubt that to remove error and to propagate the true religion were both his personal duty and a proper use of the imperial position. His claim to be “bishop of those outside the church” may be construed in this light. Other such pronouncements, expressed in letters to imperial officials and to Christian clergy, demonstrate that Constantine’s commitment to Christianity was firmer and less ambiguous than some have suggested. Eusebius confirmed what Constantine himself believed: that he had a special and personal relationship with the Christian God.

Constantine’s second involvement in an ecclesiastical issue followed the defeat of Licinius, but the controversy over Arianism, with its intricate explorations of the precise nature of the Trinity that were couched in difficult Greek, was as remote from Constantine’s educational background as it was from his impatient, urgent temperament. The Council of Nicaea, which opened in the early summer of 325 with an address by the emperor, had already been preceded by a letter to the chief protagonist, Arius of Alexandria, in which Constantine stated his opinion that the dispute was fostered only by excessive leisure and academic contention, that the point at issue was trivial and could be resolved without difficulty. His optimism was not justified: neither this letter nor the Council of Nicaea itself nor the second letter, in which Constantine urged acceptance of its conclusions, was adequate to solve a dispute in which the participants were as intransigent as the theological issues were subtle. Indeed, for more than 40 years after the death of Constantine, Arianism was actually the official orthodoxy of the Eastern Empire.

The Council of Nicaea coincided almost exactly with the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the reign of Constantine, at which, returning the compliment paid by the emperor’s attendance at their council, the bishops were honoured participants. But Constantine’s visit to the West in 326, to repeat the celebrations at Rome, brought the greatest political crisis of the reign. During his absence from the East, and for reasons that remain obscure, Constantine had his eldest son, the deputy emperor Crispus, and his own wife Fausta, Crispus’s stepmother, slain. Nor was the visit to Rome a success. Constantine’s refusal to take part in a pagan procession offended the Romans, and, when he left after a short visit, it was never to return.

Final years

These events set the course of the last phase of the reign of Constantine. After his defeat of Licinius he had renamed Byzantium as Constantinople, and immediately upon his return from the West he began to rebuild the city on a greatly enlarged pattern as his permanent capital and the “second Rome.” The dedication of Constantinople (May 330) confirmed the divorce, which had been in the making for more than a century, between the emperors and Rome. Rome had long been unsuited to the strategic needs of the empire. It was now to be left in splendid isolation, as an enormously wealthy and prestigious city—still the emotional focus of the empire—but of limited political importance.

It was perhaps in some sense to atone for the family catastrophe of 326 that Constantine’s mother, Helena, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Her journey was attended by almsgiving and pious works and was distinguished by her church foundations at Jerusalem and at Bethlehem. By the initiative of Eutropia, Constantine’s mother-in-law, a church was also built at Mamre, where, according to an interpretation of the Book of Genesis shared by Constantine and Eusebius, Christ had first shown himself to humanity in God’s appearance to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, but the most famous of these foundations followed the sensational discovery of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. The discovery was taken up with enthusiasm by Constantine, who instigated the building of a great new basilica at the spot, offering unlimited help with labour and materials and suggestions as to design and decoration.

Constantine’s interest in church building was expressed also at Constantinople, particularly in churches of the Holy Wisdom (the original Hagia Sophia) and of the Apostles. At Rome, the great church of St. Peter was begun in the later 320s and lavishly endowed by Constantine with plate and property. Meanwhile, churches at Trier, Aquileia, Cirta in Numidia, Nicomedia, Antioch, Gaza, Alexandria, and elsewhere owed their development, directly or indirectly, to Constantine’s interest.

The emperor was an earnest student of his religion. Even before the defeat of Licinius, he had summoned to Trier the theologian and polemicist Lactantius to be the tutor of Crispus. In later years he commissioned new copies of the Bible for the growing congregations at Constantinople. He composed a special prayer for his troops and went on campaigns with a mobile chapel in a tent. He issued numerous laws relating to Christian practice and susceptibilities: for instance, abolishing the penalty of crucifixion and the practice of branding certain criminals; enjoining the observance of Sunday and saints’ days; and extending privileges to the clergy while suppressing at least some offensive pagan practices.

Constantine had hoped to be baptized in the Jordan River, but perhaps because of the lack of opportunity to do so—together possibly with the reflection that his office necessarily involved responsibility for actions hardly compatible with the baptized state—he delayed the ceremony until the end of his life. It was while preparing for a campaign against Persia that he fell ill at Helenopolis. When treatment failed, he made to return to Constantinople but was forced to take to his bed near Nicomedia. There, Constantine received baptism, putting off the imperial purple for the white robes of a neophyte; and he died in 337. He was buried at Constantinople in his church of the Apostles, whose memorials, six on each side, flanked his tomb. Yet this was less an expression of religious megalomania than of Constantine’s literal conviction that he was the successor of the evangelists, having devoted his life and office to the spreading of Christianity.