Chapter X: The Control of Christianity by the State Under Constantine

AND HIS SUCCESSORS.

A New Epoch in the Paganizing of Christianity--Paganism Seeking a New
God, Strong enough to Save the Empire--Constantine not a “Christian
Emperor,” but Superstitious, Time-Serving, and Ambitious--Murdering
his Kindred while Promoting Christianity as a rising Political
Influence--Seeking Christianity mainly for Ambitious Ends--Professing
Christianity only on his Death-Bed--Making the Most of Both
Worlds--Constantine Corrupted and Perverted Christianity More than he
Aided it.

The opening of the fourth century marks a new era in the process by which paganism poisoned Christianity, by applying to it the pagan theory set forth in the last chapter. Though sadly weakened and corrupted by these influences, Christianity was a growing power in the empire. On the other hand, paganism was declining, and the fortunes of the disintegrating empire seemed to be going down with the national religious cult. Pagan superstition looked upon all the fortunes of the empire as the direct work of the gods, and as misfortunes piled up around the empire, it was natural to think that the old gods were deserting it, and that new gods must be sought. When the empire became subdivided under different rulers, the rivalry between them, and the varying success which attended the efforts of each, naturally associated success and failure with the gods to whom each was devoted. The firmness of the Christians under persecution was looked upon by the pagans as evidence that the Christian’s God had great power to help those who worshipped him. In this way many were brought to consider the idea of adding this God to the catalogue of those whom they already worshipped.

The severe edicts of Diocletian against the Christians, issued in 303 A.D., spread desolation far and wide. In Gaul, Britain, and Spain, where Constantius Chlorus and Constantine his son reigned, the edict was tamely enforced, they preferring to favor the Christians. The bitterness of the persecutions in other parts of the empire inflamed the zeal of Christians, and martyrdom was sought by many, not so much from calm faith as from fanatical zeal.[184] This cruel persecution was the last direct effort of paganism to destroy Christianity by the sword. The fortunes which befell the leaders in the persecution increased superstitious regard for the God of the martyrs, who was thought to be like the gods of the pagans, only more powerful.

Galerius, who was the leader in the horrid work, being stricken by a terrible disease, was overcome with fear, and, in connection with Constantine and Licinius, ordered the persecutions to cease, by an edict in 311 A.D. This edict was to the effect that since punishment had not reclaimed the Christians, they might now hold their assemblies, providing they did not disturb the order of the state. The real animus of the edict is seen in its closing words, in which Galerius suggested that “after this manifestation of grace, Christians ought to pray to their God for the welfare of the Emperors and of the State.” Constantine attributed the military success which finally made him sole ruler in 323 A.D. to the help of the Christians’ God. All parties looked upon the issue as a political struggle between Jupiter and Jehovah, in which the latter was victorious.

BOISSIER, a late, learned French writer, says:

“Constantine recalled that of all the princes that he had known, the
only one who had lived prosperously, without eclipse, was his father
Constance, who had protected the Christians; while nearly all those
who had persecuted them had ended their lives miserably.”[185]

Character of Constantine.

Constantine has been called the “first Christian Emperor”; how unjustly will be seen in what follows. In a certain sense, Christianity ascended the throne of the Cæsars with Constantine. It was a political triumph, but a spiritual defeat. That we may the better understand the case, the reader needs to look carefully into the character of this first representative of the pagan state-church policy, and of the subordinating of Christianity to the political power. The reader will be permitted to make this survey mainly through the eyes of other writers, which I think will be more satisfactory than any picture that I might draw.

KILLEN thus summarizes the character of Constantine:

“The personal conduct of Constantine in advanced life did not exhibit
Christianity as a religion fitted to effect a marked improvement
in the spirit and character. In A.D. 326, he put to death his
son Crispus, a youth of the highest promise, who had in some way
disturbed his suspicious temper. His nephew Licinius and his own wife
Fausta shared the same fate. His growing passion for gaudy dress
betrayed pitiable vanity in an old man of sixty; and towards the end
of his reign, the general extravagance of his expenditure led to an
increase of taxation of which his subjects complained. He desired
to be a dictator of the Church, rather than a disciple; and with a
view to share its privileges without submitting to its discipline,
deferred his baptism until the near approach of death. He then
received the ordinance from the Arian bishop of Nicomedia.

“The defects in the religious character of Constantine greatly
impaired his moral influence. Though he did much to promote the
extension of the visible Church, his reign forms an era in the
history of ecclesiastical corruption. His own Christianity was so
loose and accommodating that it seemed to consist chiefly in the
admiration of a new ritual; and the courtiers who surrounded him and
who complimented him by the adoption of his creed, seldom seemed to
feel that it taught the necessity of personal reformation. All at
once, the profession of the Gospel became fashionable; crowds of
merely nominal converts presented themselves at the baptismal font;
and many even entered the clerical office who had no higher object
in view than an honorable or a lucrative position. Ecclesiastical
discipline was relaxed; and that the heathen might be induced to
conform to the religion of the emperor, many of their ceremonies
were introduced into the worship of the Church. The manner in which
Constantine intermeddled with ecclesiastical affairs was extremely
objectionable. He undertook not only to preach, but also to dictate
to aged and learned ministers. Had any other individual who had
never been baptized appeared in the Nicene synod, and ventured to
give counsel to the assembled fathers, he would have been speedily
rebuked for his presumption; but all were so delighted to see a
great prince among them, that there was a general unwillingness to
challenge his intrusion. He sometimes indeed declared, that he left
spiritual matters to Church courts; but his conduct demonstrated how
little he observed such an arrangement. He convened synods by his
own authority; took a personal share in their discussions; required
their members to appear before him, and submit their proceedings to
his review; and inflicted on them civil penalties when their official
acts did not meet his approval. Had Constantine given his sanction
and encouragement to the Church, and yet permitted her to pursue her
noble mission in the full enjoyment of the right of self government,
he might have contributed greatly to promote her safe and vigorous
development; but by usurping the place of her chief ruler, and
bearing down with the weight of the civil power on all who refused
to do his pleasure, he secularized her spirit, robbed her of her
freedom, and converted her divine framework into a piece of political
machinery.”[186]

Rev. E. EDWIN HALL, who was for many years chaplain of the American Legation at Rome, Italy, also chaplain of the American Church at Florence, made a careful study of the early history and of the modern characteristics of Roman Catholicism. In July, 1889, a paper from his pen was published in the _Outlook_, a Sabbath quarterly from which the following is taken:

“Soon after the so-called conversion of Constantine, when he became
sole emperor, the Church entered on its apostasy from the primitive
simplicity and purity which marked its earlier history. Pagans in
vast multitudes pressed into the Christian fold, bringing with them
old practices and customs, and filling the places of Christian
worship with the pageantry and the ornaments which characterized the
worship of the gods in heathen temples. These unconverted millions
became only nominally Christian, impressing their character together
with the doctrines, rites and forms of pagan religion upon the
Christian Church. Gibbon, speaking of these innovations, shows that:
‘Rites and ceremonies were introduced which seemed most powerfully
to affect the senses of the people. If in the beginning of the 5th
century Tertullian or Lactantius had been suddenly raised from the
dead, to assist at the festival of some popular saint or martyr, they
would have gazed with astonishment and indignation on the profane
spectacle which had succeeded the pure and spiritual worship of a
Christian congregation. As soon as the doors of the church were
thrown open, they must have been offended at the smoke of incense,
the perfume of flowers, the glare of lamps and tapers which diffused
at noonday, in their opinions, a gaudy, superfluous, and sacrilegious
light. They would see a prostrate crowd of worshipers devoutly
kissing the walls and pavement of the sacred edifice, their fervent
prayers directed to the bones, the blood, or ashes of the saints, the
walls covered with votive offerings, representing the favors received
from saints in answer to their prayers and illustrating the abuse
of indiscreet or idolatrous devotion, in recognition of the image,
the attributes, and the miracles of the tutelar saint, which had the
same value to their mind as a local divinity in the pagan religion.
The ministers of various names in the Catholic Church imitated the
profane model which they should have been impatient to destroy. So
the religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the
final conquest of the Roman Empire, but the victors themselves were
insensibly subdued by the acts of their vanquished rivals.’[187]

“From that time the worship of the Roman Catholic Church, in its
forms and ceremonies, has been more clearly identified with the
paganism of ancient Rome than with the religion of the New Testament.
The customs of pagan religion were only baptized with Christian
names. Gregory the Great in the latter part of the 6th century,
ignoring the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit and the power of the
Gospel, directed the Monk Augustine, whom he sent to convert the
idolaters of England, ‘not to suspend or abolish the pagan festivals,
nor the customs of their worship, but rather retain them, contenting
himself with substituting for the names of false gods, the names of
saints borne by their temples, and whose relics were deposited in
them.’”[188]

F. W. MAURICE aptly describes the Christianity of Constantine’s time as follows:

“And to the gloss of civilisation had been added the gloss of
Christianity. The Emperor had believed, when other help was failing,
that in the might of the Cross he might still conquer. The sign
was indeed there, but it was marked upon the standard, not written
upon the hearts, of those rulers of the world. They saw not what it
meant; how it interpreted and crowned all that had been great in
their history hitherto; how it separated the real great from the real
little; how it sanctified all those feelings of obedience, duty,
reverence for unseen law, self-devotion, by which the city had risen
from nothing; how it poured contempt upon dominion, except as an
instrument by which the highest might serve the lowest, upon glory,
except as it grew out of humiliation, and was the exaltation of man
above himself. The civilised Christian Roman had lost the heart, the
reverence, the faith which belonged to his rude Pagan ancestors; that
Christianity and civilisation might be victorious, the miserable
patrons of both were swept away.”[189]

Speaking of the effect of Constantine’s attitude in favoring Christianity as a rising influence in the nation, MERIVALE says:

“We may suppose, indeed, that the favor thus unexpectedly showered
on the new faith by the Imperial government would tend inevitably to
reverse the proportions of the two persuasions, or rather of the two
parties, which now divided the Roman world. Powerful as the example
of rulers has always been in such matters, it would never, perhaps,
be more so than at the moment when paganism, corrupt and effete,
had lost all the spirit of a real faith, and when, as we shall see,
Christianity was only too ready to accept overtures to the easy
compromise which its rivals soon began to offer it. Nevertheless, the
progress of the Church of Christ was really slower and less complete
than might have been expected. Some allowance, as we have seen, must
be made for the spirit of pique and the wounded pride of a class so
deeply prejudiced on all matters of sentiment as the magnates of
Roman society. But paganism, it must be added, developed at her last
gasp a new principle of vitality, and nerved herself for a desperate
conflict along her whole line.”[190]

Concerning the overthrow of paganism, as late as the time of Gratian, 375-383 A.D., Merivale says:

“It seems clear that, as might indeed be expected, the earliest
edicts for the confiscation of the temple-endowments under Gratian,
big and stern as they look in the codes or statute-book, were
practically of little effect. If many temples were really closed,
as we may readily believe, though certainly by no means all or the
greater number of them, we must suppose that the lordly holders of
their property contrived to retain the enjoyment of the funds, while
they, not unwillingly perhaps, relieved themselves from the services
for which these funds had been originally given. Theodosius found the
pagan priesthood despoiled of their wealth in name only, and however
earnest he might be in his Christian profession, he long abstained,
both in policy and mercy, from asserting the full authority of
previous enactments.”[191]

Alzog, a modern Roman Catholic Church historian, though laboring hard to set forth Constantine as the first Christian emperor, and a “saint” of the Roman Catholic Church, is forced to say:

“The law said to have been published by Constantine, A.D. 335,
prohibiting all pagan sacrifices, is of doubtful authenticity, and,
if authentic, is of very little importance, for like a great many
others of a similar nature, it was never enforced. The execution
of such laws met with a determined resistance in many places, and
particularly at Rome. Constantine, although professing to be a
Christian, lived pretty much the same sort of life he had lived while
a pagan, and even stained his reputation by the commission of deeds
of murder.

“Licinius was executed A.D. 324, and Licinianus, his son, who
appears to have excited the fears of Constantine, shortly afterward
met the fate of his father. Constantine also had Crispus, his son
by his first wife, Minervina, apprehended in the midst of a solemn
festival and exiled him to the shore of Istria, where he perished
by an obscure death. Learning afterward, as it is supposed, that
Fausta, his second wife, the daughter of Maximianus Herculeus, had
been instrumental in causing the death of his brave and illustrious
son Crispus, he had her strangled in a bath of warm water heated to
an insupportable temperature. It may be that these murders, in which
the designing policy of Fausta played so conspicuous a part, prompted
Constantine to delay his entrance into the Church, and to put off his
baptism till the hour of his death. He was, moreover, influenced by
the prevailing prejudice relative to the sacrament of baptism, and
also wished to be baptized in the river Jordan, which, however, ‘God
did not permit.’”[192]

Dr. SCHAFF describes Constantine’s relation to Christianity as follows:

“Constantine adopted Christianity first as a superstition, and put
it by the side of his heathen superstition, till finally, in his
conviction, the Christian vanquished the pagan, though without itself
developing into a pure and enlightened faith.

“At first Constantine, like his father, in the spirit of the
Neo-Platonic syncretism of dying heathendom, reverenced all the
Gods as mysterious powers; especially Apollo, the god of the sun,
to whom in the year 308 he presented munificent gifts. Nay, so late
as the year 321 he enjoined regular consultation of the soothsayers
in public misfortunes, according to ancient heathen usage; even
later, he placed his new residence, Byzantium, under the protection
of the God of the Martyrs and the heathen goddess of Fortune; and
down to the end of his life he retained the title and the dignity
of a _Pontifex Maximus_, or high-priest of the heathen hierarchy.
His coins bore on the one side the letters of the name of Christ,
on the other the figure of the Sun-God, and the inscription ‘_Sol
invictus_.’ Of course these inconsistencies may be referred also to
policy and accommodation to the toleration edict in 313. Nor is it
difficult to adduce parallels of persons who in passing from Judaism
to Christianity, or from Romanism to Protestantism have so wavered
between their old and their new position that they might be claimed
by both. With his every victory over his pagan rivals, Galerius,
Maxentius, and Licinius, his personal leaning to Christianity and his
confidence in the magic power of the sign of the cross increased; yet
he did not formally renounce heathenism and did not receive baptism
until in 337 he was laid upon the bed of death....

“He was far from being so pure and so venerable as Eusebius, blinded
by his favor to the Church, depicts him in his bombastic and almost
dishonestly eulogistic biography, with the evident intention of
setting him up as a model for all future Christian princes. It must,
with all regret, be conceded that his progress in the knowledge of
Christianity was not a progress in the practice of its virtues. His
love of display and his prodigality, his suspiciousness and his
despotism, increased with his power.

“The very brightest period of his reign is stained with gross crimes,
which even the spirit of the age and the policy of an absolute
monarch cannot excuse. After having reached upon the bloody path of
war the goal of his ambition, the sole possession of the empire,
yea, in the very year in which he summoned the great council Nicæa,
he ordered the execution of his conquered rival and brother-in-law
Licinius, in breach of a solemn promise of mercy (324). Not satisfied
with this he caused soon afterwards, from political suspicion, the
death of the young Licinius, his nephew, a boy of hardly eleven
years. But the worst of all is the murder of his eldest son, Crispus,
in 326, who had incurred suspicion of political conspiracy, and of
adulterous and incestuous purposes towards his step-mother, Fausta,
but is generally regarded as innocent....

“At all events, Christianity did not produce in Constantine a
thorough moral transformation. He was concerned more to advance the
outward social position of the Christian religion than to further its
inward mission. He was praised and censured in turn by the Christians
and pagans, the orthodox and the Arians, as they successively
experienced his favor or dislike. He bears some resemblance to
Peter the Great both in his public acts and his private character,
by combining great virtues and merits with monstrous crimes, and
he probably died with the same consolation as Peter, whose last
words were: ‘I trust that in respect of the good I have striven to
do my people (the Church), God will pardon my sins.’ It is quite
characteristic of his piety that he turned the sacred nails of the
Saviour’s cross, which Helena brought from Jerusalem, the one into
the bit of his war horse, the other into an ornament of his helmet.
Not a decided, pure, and consistent character, he stands on the line
of transition between two ages and two religions; and his life bears
plain marks of both. When at last on his deathbed he submitted to
baptism with the remark: ‘Now let us cast away all _duplicity_,’ he
honestly admitted the conflict of two antagonistic principles which
swayed his private character and public life.”[193]

After such an array of testimony, which might be extended much farther if space would permit, it seems unnecessary to say more than this: the personal character and the political attitude of Constantine make it impossible to think of him as a “Christian Emperor.” He adopted and used the paganized Christianity of his time for personal ends, rather than because of true piety. The political aid which he gave it was overbalanced many times by the destruction of its best spiritual interests. Judged from the standpoint of the Bible and the facts of history, Constantine was the corrupter of Christianity, not its defender.

FOOTNOTES:

[184] See Schaff, vol. ii., chap. 64 _ff_.

[185] _La Fin du Paganisme_: Étude sur les Dernières Luttes Religieuses en Occident, au Quatrième Siècle. Par Gaston Boissier, de l’Académie Française, et de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. Tome premier, p. 28, Paris 1891.

[186] _The Old Catholic Church_, etc., by W. D. Killen, D.D., pp. 70-72, Edinburgh, 1871.

[187] _Decline_, etc., c. xxviii.

[188] _Beda_, lib. i., c. xxx.

[189] _The Religions of the World_, by F. W. Maurice, p. 185, London, 1886.

[190] _Four Lectures on Early Church History_, by Charles Merivale, D.D., pp. 13, 14, New York.

[191] _Ibid._, p. 45.

[192] _Universal Church History_, by Rev. Dr. John Alzog, vol. i., p. 471, Cincinnati, 1874.

[193] _Church History_, vol. iii., pp. 14-18.