Constantine the Great
Michael Grant
Number of quotes: 91
Book ID: 66 Page: 70
Section: 3C
Constantine’s bodyguard, too, was almost wholly ’barbarian’. This was a calvalry unit unit known as the scholae palatinae.
Quote ID: 1689
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 82
Section: 3C2
Constantine wore long, shoulder-length hair (recalling Alexander the Great) - some of it false. He also covered himself with bracelets and other jewelry, and put on elaborate jewelled robes with flowery designs. Eusebius, somewhat disingenuously, said he did this only because the people enjoyed it, like children ’wondering at a hobgoblin’, whereas Constantine’s attitude was merely one of detached amusement.
Quote ID: 1690
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 82
Section: 3C2
However, from c.315/16 a gemmed, high-crested helmet, foreshadowing the Byzantine crown, appeared his coins, replaced ten years later by a pearl decked diadem consisting that amounted, it might be said, to the deliberate elevation of the emperor far above other mortals (and even his sons began to wear diadems from c.325).
Quote ID: 1691
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 88
Section: 3C
Far more serious than the collatio gelbalis was the callatio lustralis, also known as chrysargyron, the gold and silver tax, because it could be paid in either metal. It was imposed on manufacturers and merchants, and apparently assessed on their own persons, and on the persons of their families and staff (including slaves and apprentices), and on their captial equipment: tools, implements, and milling requisites in the case of manufacturers, and ships, wagons, and draught animals in the case of merchants.Pastor John’s note: excessive taxation
Quote ID: 1692
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 98
Section: 3C,4B
By imperial oppression, then, or under the ineluctable circumstances which required such stringent measures, the Roman world had been transformed. Small farmers had ceased to exist, and in their place there was mass cultivation by slave or serf labour. Once again the rich - the large landowners - had prevailed, by mercilessly exploiting the poor, whom economic necessity had forced to flock on to their lands.And it was Constantine who played the chief part in completing and formalizing this situation.
Quote ID: 1693
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 99
Section: 3C,4B
The houses of the powerful were crammed full and their splendour enhanced to the destruction of the poor, the poorer classes of course being held down by force.
Quote ID: 1694
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 99
Section: 3C
Such was the general demoralization, but the trouble went further than social collapse: it amounted to a general unnerving of the will, a paralysis of character, a failure of strength.It was a hollow mockery, then, that each man was told he could do what his soul desired, and that Constantine and his friends repeatedly called him the ’restorer of freedom’.
What made matters even worse, a good deal worse, was the widespread corruption- ‘the universality of the employment of power, public and private alike, as a source of profit’.
This corruption was, of course, nothing new. It had been manifest enough in the third century, when inflation had reduced state salaries and wages to such an extent that criminal means had to be used to augment them. It was said that there had been insupportable unfairness under Diocletian, and bribery under Galerius. Maxentius had employed bribes to seduce Severus’ army. Decurions, under Licinius, had corruptly gained equestrian grades. But now, under Constantine, things were no better, and indeed were even worse.
Quote ID: 1695
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 99/100
Section: 3A1,4B
Everybody was out for what they could get. Officers treated their soldiers dishonestly, and pay was stolen. There were bribes at church councils Example: #06 pg. 237-238, and recurrent charges of handing over money in order to become a priest and gain high church office. Silvanus, the Donatist bishop of Constantina (Cirta), took bribes. Rich pagans claimed exemption from civic taxes and duties on the false ground that they were Christian priests.
Quote ID: 1696
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 109
Section: 3C
EUTROPIUS declared that Constantine was responsible for many murders of his ’friends’, and this was unmistakably true. There was a long list of victims. For Constantine’s behavior is inexcusable by any standards, and casts a blot on his reputation. Being an absolute autocrat, he believed that he could kill anyone.
Quote ID: 1697
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 110
Section: 3C
But something even worse, much worse, had happened five years earlier, or rather two things: Constantine’s execution of his eldest son Flavius Julius Crispus, followed by the execution of his second wife Flavia Maxima Fausta as well.
Quote ID: 1698
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 112
Section: 3C
Eutropius notes simply, ’being forced to it by necessity, he executed that exceptional man’, and Victor, ’of his children, he who was born the eldest was judicially executed by his father for an undisclosed reason’. Modern writers are equally puzzled. ’What precisely Crispus’s crime was has never been clearly established, and is probably now unascertainable.’
Quote ID: 1699
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 113
Section: 3C
Whether that was the case or not, it was true that the emperor was liable to sudden changes of mind, and before very long he came to the conclusion that he had made a disastrous mistake, and that Crispus had not committed or planned an offence after all, so that by an appalling act of murder Constantine had deprived himself of his eldest son quite wrongly and unnecessarily: he said to have erected a golden statue ’to the son whom I unjustly condemned’.
Quote ID: 1700
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 114
Section: 3C
So Constantine murdered both his eldest son and his wife.
Quote ID: 1701
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 115
Section: 3C
As for Constantine himself, the deeds could well have helped to enhance in his personality the features of the savage, degenerate tyrant which he seemed to Julian the Apostate and Edward Gibbon, particularly in his somber last years.
Quote ID: 1702
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 116
Section: 3C
Constantine’s principal claims to fame, among subsequent generations, were two: his conversion of the empire to Christianity, and his creation of Constantinople (on the site of Byzantium), which was to become the capital of the eastern Roman empire and then, for many more centuries, the capital of the Byzantine empire that succeeded it.
Quote ID: 1703
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 127
Section: 2E6
Two events triggered the persecutions. First, the emperors’ ceremonies on behalf of the army were allegedly rendered null and void by Christians making the sign of the cross. This happened in Syria in 299, when Diocletian and Galerius were engaged in a military rite of sacrifice and divination. It was during this ceremonial that certain Christians of the imperial household made the sign of the cross, in order to keep demons away. Thereupon the official pagan diviners (haruspices) announced that they had failed to identify the necessary marks on the innards of the animals which had been sacrificed, so that the required and expected divination could not take place. The leader of the haruspices pointed to the cause of this failure: profane persons, notably Christians, were impeding the sacrifices. Diocletian and Galerius, sharing the universal contemporary belief in incantations and magic, were infuriated, and directed that every member of the imperial court should sacrifice to the pagan gods. And in addition they sent letters to every military commander, ordering that all soldiers under their commands should perform a similar sacrifice, or else leave the army.
Quote ID: 1706
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 66 Page: 129
Section: 2B2,4B
The opposite view, of course, was taken by Christian writers such as Lactantius, who sought to present his faith as compatible and harmonious with Romanitas, ....
Quote ID: 1707
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 66 Page: 130
Section: 3A3
For the Christians, despite their disunity due to ’heresies’, possessed effective cult-groups, artisan associations and what might be described as retirement and funeral insurance companies, which extended right down to the humblest social classes and caused all concerned to feel greater loyalty to their Christian providers than to the government.Pagan emperors might try to emulate these in-group organizations, but did not do so sufficiently well to enable them to be regarded as anything but rivals and menaces. Even Julian the Apostate (361-3) was impressed by the organized charity and social cohesiveness achieved by the Christians, which he tried to make the pagan civil and religious authorities imitate.
Quote ID: 1708
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 134/135
Section: 2B
Moreover, Apollo was equated or identified with the Sun-god, and the form of monotheism which particularly appealed to Constantine in his early years was the worship of the Sun. Anyway, it appealed to Constantine himself, who in 311 hailed the Sun as his tutelary god, and persistently portrayed the same deity on his coinage as his invincible companion (’SOLI INVICTO COMITI’). Coins attribute his victories to the Sun, and Julian the Apostate speaks of Constantine’s special links with the Sun-god.Sol, honoured at Rome by the city prefects Aradius Rufinus and Rufius Volusianus, remains on the coinage until 319/20, unlike the traditional pagan gods, who had vanished in 317. The Sun seems to be depicted in a brick pattern on the north wall of the church of St Gereon at Colonia Agrippinensis (Koln). Some of Constantine’s troops were called solenses, and the city of Termessus (Golluk) in Pisidia proclaimed him to be ’the Sun’. But he saw himself rather, not as the Sun, and not even as a fellow deity of the Sun, but as his ’companion’ (and, perhaps, his incarnation upon earth), since the Iranian concept of kingly power as trust from God or the gods had replaced the idea of actual identification with him or them.
Quote ID: 1709
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 66 Page: 135
Section: 2E4
And indeed he was not, and had not been, the only man to take this view, which, with the assistance of Neoplatonism, allotted the solar religion a sort of middle ground between paganism and Christianity. Old Testament prophecy was interpreted as identifying the ’Sun of Righteousness’ with Jesus Christ, who was often called Sol Justitiae and depicted by statues resembling the young Apollo or Sol. Clement of Alexandria writes of Christ driving his chariot across the heavens like the Sun-god, and a tomb mosaic found beneath St Peter’s at Rome, probably made early in the fourth century, displays him in this chariot, mounting the sky in the guise of Sol. Moreover, Sol remained a Christian symbol, and on a coin of Betranio (c.350), with a Christian inscription, Sol Invictus crowns the Christian standard, the labarum. The Christian Sunday was manifestly named after the Sun, and Tertullian remarks that many pagans believed that the Christians worshipped the Sun, because it was on Sundays that they met, and prayed to the east, in which the Sun rose. Moreover, in the fourth century, in the western part of the empire at least (the date in its eastern regions is uncertain), there began the commemoration of 24 December, the Sun-god’s birthday at the winter solstice, as the date for the birth of Christ.
Quote ID: 1710
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 66 Page: 136
Section: 2B
This was all too clear to Pope Leo I the Great (440-61), who - aware, perhaps, that people at Contantinople had sacrificed to the statue of Constantine as if it stood for Sol - reprimanded his congregation for performing devotions to the Sun on the steps of St Peter’s before turning their backs to it and entering the Basilica to perform Christian worship there. Nearly a century earlier, as he no doubt also knew, when Julian the Apostate had reverted to the pagan religion, this sort of feeling made it easy for many to abandon Christianity in favour of solar monotheism. The bishop of Troy was an interesting case in point. He found it possible at that time, with a clear conscience, to switch from Christian to pagan belief because, even while holding episcopal office, he had secretly continued to pray to the Sun.
Quote ID: 1711
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 66 Page: 138
Section: 3C2
Indeed, it is possible that he had had this experience: or, rather, that he had seen a cross in the sky, where the sun occasionally presents such an image, known as the ’halo phenomenon’.Inscriptions in the sky are not very plausible, and it is possible to look behind the polite words of Eusebius (written down only after Constantine’s death) and to detect that even he, strong supporter of Constantine that he was, believed that the emperor, consciously or unconsciously, was not altogether telling the truth about his vision - which was, in fact, fictitious: or rather, the inscription and its visibility to the army were fictitious, although Constantine may perhaps have seen some natural phenomenon in the sky which he later looked back on as a heaven-sent Christian symbol.
For Constantine was extremely disposed to see visions, which was why, earlier, a pagan vision had been attributed to him.
Quote ID: 1712
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 141
Section: 3C2
According to Eusebius, it was now that he began to devise his special standard, the labarum, which displayed the Christogram (Chi-Rho: the initial letters of Christos) at the summit of the cross, and which became a magical, miraculous amulet, almost the equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant.
Quote ID: 1713
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 142
Section: 3C2
The labarum took the form, Eusebius tell us, of a long spear, covered with gold, and joined by a transverse bar which gave it the shape of the cross. At the summit of the standard was a wreath made of gold and precious stones: and it was within this wreath that the Chi-Rho sign was inserted. The labarum, then, was an amalgamation of religious banner and military vexillum (emblem of power), analogous to a standard earlier employed by the Mithraists.
Quote ID: 1714
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 143
Section: 3C2
The symbol also bore some resemblance to the mystic Egyptian ankh, and others might have noted or assumed a connection with the worship of the Sun or Apollo or Mithras (though the theory of the development of the Christogram Chi-Rho from a pagan star does not seem admissable), or it might just have been regarded as a good-luck sign. Subsequently, of course, it became a Christian symbol, but how and when this transfer or transformation occurred is a matter for conjecture.In other words, the Chi-Rho had a double meaning, one for pagans and one for Christians. Double meanings were nothing new for Constantine, who had been brought up (at Diocletian’s court) in an atmosphere that required dissimulation. The Chi-Rho may have appeared again in his statue at Constantinople, which was not only adapted from a representation of Apollo but possessed the radiate crown of the Sun-god (so familiar from the imperial coinage) and faced the Rising Sun. That is to say, the Christogram could be reverenced by both pagans and Christians: an illustration of Constantine’s desire to play to both audiences. Indeed, that may have partly been the reason why he welcomed both the Chi-Rho and the labarum - because of their ambiguity, which was convenient for his purposes.
Quote ID: 1715
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 146
Section: 3C2
One school of thought maintains that he had undergone this conversion a good deal earlier than the Battle of Milvian Bridge, which only confirmed his decision; after all, he already had Christian bishops in his entourage as he marched on Rome.
Quote ID: 1716
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 147
Section: 3C,2E5
For it was by God’s grace, and by this alone, that Constantine believed he had won the victory over Maxentius: the ubiquitous, winged figure of Victoria became God’s angel.
Quote ID: 1717
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 148
Section: 3C
Constantine’s court reflected the heavenly court (a Hellenistic idea), and disobedience to the emperor was a sacrilege, because he ruled by the Grace of God, of whom he was an imitation (mimesis) upon earth.
Quote ID: 1718
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 148/149
Section: 3C
Such were the attributes of the Christian God whom Constantine venerated, and in the fetching stories about Jesus that one finds, for example, in the Gospel according to St Luke he took no interest at all. Indeed, Jesus’ doings did not seem to him of any importance: nor, even, did the person of Jesus himself, since, although Constantine felt able to quote, or rather misquote, Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue as forecasting the Incarnation (in his Oration to the Assembly of the Saints, and a Nicaea) he also rebuked his half-sister Constantia for excessively revering what was believed to be a likeness of Jesus, whose actual existence on earth as a human being did not seem to him a matter worth dwelling upon at all.Nor would he have been able to see the point of Jesus’s Crucifixion, at least without some mental acrobatics. It was embarassing, to say the least, that God’s own son had been subjected to this humiliating end, and contemporary Christian art avoids the whole question, because it seemed to involve such ignominy; and for this reason Constantine abolished crucifixion as a punishment.
And he encouraged his mother Helena to obtain alleged pieces of the True Cross in the Holy Land.
Quote ID: 1719
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 150
Section: 3C
Constantine and his contemporaries frequently refer to the Devil, and he was portrayed on the entrance gable of his palace at Constantinople.
Quote ID: 1720
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 150
Section: 3C
For the emperor, in addition to seeing the Christian faith as God’s will, also realized that it was useful. Mention has already been made of the Christians’ admirable social cohesion: theirs was the only organized force in the empire, aside from the army. And its enemies had come to bad ends. Edward Gibbon saw that Constantine realized the utility of Christianity, but believed that this realization was derived from his avarice and ambition. Anyway, the emperor saw that it could, and would, be useful. For he liked the idea of backing Christianity because he wanted to have its effective organization on his side.
Quote ID: 1721
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 151
Section: 3C
Indeed, that was his dominant aim, to achieve, through the adherents of this religion, unity in the Roman empire-although the ’heresies’ disappointed this aim.
Quote ID: 1722
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 151
Section: 3C
Such people are dangerous, and impossible to argue with. If they want to do something, they know it is with God’s support. That is what Disraeli complained about Gladstone, that ’he had God up his sleeve’.
Quote ID: 1723
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 151
Section: 3C
Yet this conclusion was unjustifiable, since Constantine genuinely felt that he was in continuous touch with God. When he was tracing the boundaries of the new Constantinople, and someone told him he had gone far enough, he answered, ’I shall go on until He who is walking ahead of me stops.’
Quote ID: 1724
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 151
Section: 3C
flatterers even ventured to say that he was a new Jesus. Bishops dining with him felt they were like the Apostles at Jesus’ table.
Quote ID: 1725
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 151/152
Section: 3C
Yet Eusebius, in his Praise of Constantine, almost raised him to this level. and even if that seemed excessive he had no objection, as the situation developed, to being ranked with Christ’s Apostles, as isapotolos. Indeed, he arranged to be buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople, with monuments and relics of the Twelve Apostles around him. This made it seem that he was greater than they had been; or, at the very least, that he saw himself as the Thirteenth of them. It was therefore permissible to see a resemblance between Constantine and Peter; and Christian hymn-writers likened him to Paul.
Quote ID: 1726
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 155
Section: 3C
The Cross first appears, modestly, on rare coins of 314.
Quote ID: 1727
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 156
Section: 3C
In 313 CONSTANTINE and Licinius, jointly, issued the so-called Edict of Toleration but going a good deal further by granting positive advantages and privileges (including the recovery of losses, and recognition of legal rights) to the Christian community.
Quote ID: 1728
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 157
Section: 3C
....among the other things which we saw would benefit the majority of men we were convinced that first of all those conditions by which reverence for the Divinity is secured should be put in order by us to the end that we might give to the Christians and to all men the right to follow freely whatever religion each had wished, so that thereby whatever of Divinity there be in the heavenly seat quicquid divinitatis in sede caelest may be favorable and propitious to us and to all those who are placed under our authority.
Quote ID: 1729
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 157
Section: 3C
....namely our view should be that to no one whatsoever should we deny liberty to follow either the religion of the Christians or any other cult which of his own free choice he has thought to be best adapted for himself, in order that the supreme Divinity Summa Divinitas, to whose service we render our free obedience, may bestow upon us in all things his wanted favour and benevolence.
Quote ID: 1730
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 158
Section: 3C
....every man to worship as he will. This has been done by us so that we should not seem to have done dishonour to any religion.
Quote ID: 1731
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 159
Section: 3C
It must have been a striking experience for the clergy to become the recipients of this unlimited generosity from Constantine, and to find a much wider and richer social life at their disposal than had been available before.True, the emperor completely controlled the bishops himself. His dominance over them, embodied in the statement ’my will must be considered binding’ - which some earlier Christians would never have accepted - was a prime example of that monarchical control of the church described as Caesaropapism.
Quote ID: 1733
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 159
Section: 2C,3C
And it was he himself who chose every bishop when a vacancy arose.
Quote ID: 1734
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 160
Section: 2C,3C
The top clerics, the bishops, received special attention, and were employed to pronounce on religious issues rather as earlier emperors had used pontifices and augurs; and they obtained judicial powers as well. Indeed, they found themselves among the emperor’s principal advisers; and, although he himself had appointed them, he treated them with respect, even asserting the ’God has given you power to judge us also’.
Quote ID: 1735
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 160
Section: 3C
Those at court dined with Constantine - like Apostles surrounding Christ in paradise, said Eusebius - and some were haughty and avaricious intriguers. As the ecclesiastics took over the interests and values of the governmental hierarchy, and churches became endowed with great wealth, Christian art and architecture increasingly borrowed the grandeur of imperial ceremonial.
Quote ID: 1736
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 161
Section: 3C
Even if Constantine approved of the preaching of hermits such as St Anthony (c.251-356) against the Arian ’heresy’, he cannot really have applauded eremitic and monastic asceticism, which operated against his ideal of unity based on the control of the church by the state.
Quote ID: 1737
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 161
Section: 3C
For, apart from his deep emotional involvement, the main reason why he had favoured Christianity, as we have seen, was because he believed that it would encourage unity in the empire.
Quote ID: 1738
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 161
Section: 3C
Constantine deplored this ridiculous proliferation of dissension, believing that imperial unity required unity of creeds.
Quote ID: 1739
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 163
Section: 3C
For the history of the Christians under the later Roman empire was gravely damaged by the savage warfare which raged with their own ranks, deserved the censure of Julian, and has been described as one of the most intolerable spectacles in all history. ’Such events seem to many of us to cast thorough discredit upon the claim of Christianity to constitute a divine revelation.’ This conclusion, used by Voltaire and Gibbon to explain the fall of the western empire, can scarcely be contested except by blaming what happened upon the activities of the Devil, or by arguing - as Christians, on all sides, did in antiquity, and still disastrously do - that there was, and is, only one authentic Christian church, and that those self-styled Christians who failed to adhere to it cannot be regarded as true Christians at all.
Quote ID: 1740
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 165
Section: 3C
The subsequent history of the affair is tortuous. But two epoch-making events stand out. One was the fact that, at quite an early stage (311-13), the Donatists themselves appealed to Constantine:
Quote ID: 1741
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 167
Section: 3A2A,3C
A second historic aspect of the Donatist schism lay in the fact that, when Constantine saw he could not get rid of it, he had employed forcible coercion (316): for he felt, at the time, that this decision was amply justified:
Quote ID: 1743
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 167
Section: 3A2A,3C
Nevertheless, he had used force: and this did immeasurable harm, and set a bleak precedent for every century to come.
Quote ID: 1744
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 167/168
Section: 3C1
The second ’heresy’ which put an end to his dream of imperial Christian unity was Arianism. Its founder, Arius, probably a Libyan by birth, possessed a genius for propaganda, became a prebyter at Alexandria, and in c.319-22 started to propagate his views.
Quote ID: 1745
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 168
Section: 3C1
But what caused all the controversy was that Arius seemed to be making the terrible observation that Jesus had not got quite the same qualifications as his divine Father. For what Arius maintained was that the Son, although created before time and superior to other creatures, was like them changeable - the Gospels represent him as subject to growth and change - and consequently different in Essence from the Father. For ’there was a time when Jesus was not’: so that he cannot, therefore, himself be God, to whom he is in a sense posterior. That is what caused the storm, the most passionate storm that ever convulsed the Christian world, since it seemed to reduce the Son to a status that was less than divine.
Quote ID: 1746
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 168
Section: 3C1
But Arius’ exact views, and teachings, have been the subject of extensive debate. This was how Socrates Scholasticus described his opinions:On one occasion at a gathering of his presbyters and the rest of the clergy, he [bishop Alexander of Alexandria] essayed a rather ambitious theological discussion on the Holy Trinity. But one of the presbyters, Arius by name, a man not lacking in dialectic, thinking that the bishop was expounding the doctrine of Sabellius the Libyan, from love of controversy espoused a view diametrically opposed to the teaching of the Libyan, attacked the statements of the bishop with energy. ’If, said he, ’the Father begot the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: hence it is clear that there was when the Son was not’.
Quote ID: 1747
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 169
Section: 3C1
But Arius’ enemies maintained that such opinions undermined the entire basis of Christianity, founded on the divinity of Jesus.
Quote ID: 1748
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 169
Section: 3C1
The most abstruse theological controversies excited ferocious passions. Gregory of Nyssa remarked that one could not talk to a shopkeeper in the market place, or to an attendant in the public baths, without getting involved in a theological discussion, and very often the discussion was about the matter mentioned above, the relationship of the Son to the Father.
Quote ID: 1749
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 170
Section: 3C
And so after his victory in 324 he produced a flurry of six public statements to explain his Christian purpose. For it was his belief that Christianity was the one force which could effectively bring the jarring elements together. But it must be his own brand of Christianity, for, as we have seen, he issued laws warning against ’heresies’, seeing it as his duty to banish error in religion.
Quote ID: 1751
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 171
Section: 3C1
And Arius ought to have kept quiet. Questions and answers alike, Constantine went on, were the products of a quarrelsome state of mind created by not having enough to do.
Quote ID: 1752
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 171
Section: 3C1
For such investigations, which no legal necessity imposes, but the frivolity of an idle hour provokes, we should, even if they are made for the sake of a philosophic exercise, lock up within our hearts and not bring forward into public gathering or entrust imprudently to the ears of the people.....
Quote ID: 1753
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 172
Section: 3C1
Excommunicated in 323 (by initiative of his infuriated bishop Alexander), Arius was condemned by the Synod of Antioch (late 324), presided over by Ossius. And it was with the intention of following up this initiative that, in the following year, Constantine convoked the Christian bishops to the First Council of Nicaea, the first ’ecumenical’ Council, transferred from Ancyra (Ankara), which was less conveniently situated (and too far from the possible plotting by the defeated Licinius which Constantine may at first have feared).
Quote ID: 1754
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 173
Section: 3C1
On somebody’s advice - probably that of Ossius once again - Constantine decided to pronounce that Jesus was homoousios with God, ’of one substance’.
Quote ID: 1755
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 173
Section: 3C1
So this was the Nicene Creed that eventually emerged, after redrafting to include the term homoousios:
Quote ID: 1756
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 174
Section: 3A2A,3C1
And after the Council of Nicaea the official church took over the church of St. George (S. Giorgio Maggiore) at Mediolanum (Milan) from the Arians who had constructed it.Despite widespread doubts among those present at Nicaea, only two of them failed to accept this definition, whereupon, like Arius himself, they were condemned to excommunication -although three others, too, wrote in, shortly afterwards, to say that they wished to repudiate the acceptance of the term that they had offered at the time.
Quote ID: 1757
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 174
Section: 3C1
Nevertheless, the emperor felt able to declare that the decisions at Nicaea were divinely inspired, and that they mirrored the judgment of God.
Quote ID: 1758
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 176
Section: 3C,3C1
A decisive point in Athanasius’ fight against the Arians occurred in the same year, when Arius died in a lavatory at Constantinople: which his enemies, such as Athanasius, proclaimed as a sign of God’s anger. But Arius’ death did not end his influence; and indeed Arianism had destroyed imperial unity as completely as Donatism had done, though for different reasons. Constantine’s idea that the adoption of Christianity would unify the empire had proved totally mistaken. And indeed Arianism itself had a significant future, being embraced by the emperor’s own son Constantius II as the best means of accommodating the church to the imperial state:....
Quote ID: 1759
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 177/178
Section: 2B2,3C,4A
...Constantine used to hold a regular ’salon’, a sort of religious-philosophical debating society (the members of which, in so far as they were pagans, must have found his interest in Christianity ridiculous and perhaps humiliating). His encouragement of higher education also implied a continued toleration of paganism. He called his friend Strategius ’Musonianus’, after the Muses. He even gave his churches at Constantinople the names of Greek personifications, such as Eirene (Peace) and Sophia (Wisdom), and the town itself was sometimes called ’Platonopolis’, owing to his admiration of Plato. Constantine also at times described the Christian clergy and monks as ’philosophers’.
Quote ID: 1760
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 178
Section: 2B2,3C
Thus we see him accepting Roman consulships, in the old traditional style, in 307 (in the west), and 312 and 313 and 315, and his Arch shows him sacrificing to the gods. Moreover, he even retained the office of pontifex maximus, a traditional and very pagan part of the imperial titulature.
Quote ID: 1761
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 178
Section: 3C
...(which reminds us that Christians were censured for offering sacrifice to images of Constantine).
Quote ID: 1762
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 178/179
Section: 2B2,3C
The graduality of the removal of paganism from the coinage, or, to speak more exactly, the gradual conversion of pagan concepts into neutral, ambivalent coin-types and inscriptions, demonstrates the care with which Constantine proceeded.
Quote ID: 1763
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 179
Section: 3A2,3C
Let those who are in error be free to enjoy the same peace and quietude as those who believe. Let no one molest another. Let each hold to that which his soul desires, and let him use this to the full.
Quote ID: 1764
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 181
Section: 3C
....(and sometimes resorted to entrail divination himself).
Quote ID: 1765
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 181
Section: 3C
Subversion was also suspected to be a possible outcome of astrology (about which Firmicus Maternus had a lot to say). But Constantine, being highly superstitious, did not actually proceed against the art, and duly consulted astrologers himself (for example, in 326-8).
Quote ID: 1766
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 181
Section: 3C
Constantine may have shared the almost universal belief in magic and wizardry and incantations, but did not like their pagan manifestations: there are no less than eleven fourth-century regulations (constitutiones) condemning the practitioners of occult sciences.
Quote ID: 1767
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 182
Section: 3C
And after the defeat of Licinius in 324 he began - at first in the newly acquired lands of Asia Minor and the east, and then elsewhere as well - to make decisive changes which gradually established the Christian faith as something like the official religion of the Roman empire: which is certainly how his sons and successors interpreted his actions.
Quote ID: 1768
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 182
Section: 3C
’You are bishops within the church. But I have been appointed by God as bishop of what lies outside the church“
Quote ID: 1769
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 183
Section: 3A2,3C
As regards the former of these groups, when he made conquests of German and Sarmatian territory, the treaty agreements that ensued regularly stipulated conversion to Christianity.
Quote ID: 1770
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 184
Section: 2B2,3C
Christianity, too, was apparently behind the elevation of Sunday as a public holiday and day of rest, despite a manifest solar background. ’All magistrates, city-dwellers and artisans’, decreed Constantine in 321, ’are to rest on the venerable day of the Sun, though country-dwellers may without hindrance apply themselves to agriculture...The day celebrated by the veneration of the Sun should not be devoted to the swearing and counter-swearing of litigants, and their ceaseless brawling.
Quote ID: 1771
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 189
Section: 2E3
However, his most conspicuous achievement was the creation of Christian churches.
Quote ID: 1772
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 192
Section: 2E3,3C
.....It was usual, moreover, for a Constantinian basilica to be entered from the west, so that the rising sun poured its rays of light upon the celebrating priest as he stood in front of the altar facing the worshippers.
Quote ID: 1773
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 194
Section: 2A3,3C
Constantine covered it with great and wealthy churches, although he did locate most of them outside Rome walls, often near the graves of martyrs, to whose cults he was so especially devoted - ........
Quote ID: 1776
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 203
Section: 2E1,3C
While in Palestine, Helena committed her son, who encouraged and prompted her, to the payment of enormous sums for building churches. And when she left the country, she took with her some pieces of wood which, she was told and believed, had formed the True Cross - a fortunate, though dubious, discovery. In order to find them, she had made enquiries among the local people, who advised her to proceed to a place where ’ancient persecutors’ had built a shrine of the pagan goddess Aphrodite.Stimulated by visions, she ordered that the site should be excavated, whereupon, according to St. Ambrose’s work On the Death of Theodosius (De Obitu Theodosii, 395), three crosses were according to the New Testament, had set up, on the occasion of the Crucifixion of Jesus, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. It next remained to discover which of the three crosses was the one on which Jesus had died. Here Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem came to Helena’s help, by undertaking, with a prayer for God’s help, to place a sick woman on each of the crosses in turn, so that is could then be seen what happened to her on each of the three occasions. When she was placed on the first two crosses, nothing happened. Next, however, she was made to lie on the third cross, whereupon she was healed. That, it was concluded, must have been the True Cross on which Jesus had met his death.
In consequence, Helena built a church on the spot, and lodged parts of the Cross there in silver caskets. The remaining parts she sent to Constantine, together with nails from the same Cross, which was incorporated in the bit of his war-horse.
Quote ID: 1780
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 206
Section: 2B2,3C
.....which was supposed to be the birthplace of Jesus (and pagan women had come there on a fixed date every year to mourn for the death of Adonis).
Quote ID: 1781
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 211
Section: 2A1,3C
Ever since New Testament times baptism had occupied a position of great importance in the Christian community and was regarded as essential to the new birth and to membership of the Heavenly Kingdom.
Quote ID: 1782
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 211
Section: 2A1
The questionaire employed at baptism in c.ad 200, if not earlier, ran as follows: ’Do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was born by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and died, and rose again on the third day living from the dead, and ascended to the heavens, and sat down at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit in the Holy Church?PJ Note: If God is the baptizer, He does;t need to ask such questions because he knows.
Quote ID: 1783
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 66 Page: 212
Section: 3C
Surprise has often been expressed, however, that Constantine, who had displayed his adherence to Christianity so much earlier, postponed his baptism until what was virtually his death-bed. Some members of the church deplored the lateness of this decision. But in fact late, last-minute baptism - like adult baptism in general - was not an infrequent phenomenon, because it was strongly felt that after baptism one ought not to commit a sin, and the only way to ensure this was to become baptized when one was not going to live for very much longer. In the words of Edward Gibbon:The sacrament of baptism was supposed to contain a full and absolute expiation of sin; and the soul was instantly restored to its original purity, and entitled to the promise of eternal salvation.
Among the proselytes of Christianity, there were many who judged it imprudent to precipitate a salutary rite, which could not be repeated: to throw away an inestimable privilege, which could never be recovered.
Quote ID: 1784
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 212
Section: 3C
The truth was different. He delayed his baptism through fear of God. Believing, as he did, in divine anger, he (in common with others, as we have seen, who likewise delayed their baptisms) was terrified about the future of his soul, which would be imperilled if, after baptism, he did anything wrong.
Quote ID: 1785
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 213
Section: 2A1,3C
And so Constantine took off the purple robe of imperial power, was baptized naked (as was the custom) by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, and put on the white vestment which Christian converts wore for a week after their baptism. Catholics became uncomfortable about baptism at the hands of Eusebius of Nicomedia - who was practically an Arian - and invented a story that he was instead baptized by Pope Silvester I of Rome, which is repeated on the inscription upon the Egyptian obelisk in the Piazza di San Laterano. That this is entirely fictitious is one of the certainties in the long but obscure papacy of Silvester (314 - 35).......at the time of the emperor’s baptism Silvester had already been dead for two years.
Quote ID: 1786
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 215
Section: 2B2,3C
Then Constantine was deified (made divus), as his coinage records: a curious indication that his adoption of the Christian faith did not prevent this pagan custom from being retained. The coins celebrating his deification show him, veiled, in a quadriga (reminiscent of the ascent of Elijah - but the chariot was also an attribute of Apollo and the Sun). A hand descends from heaven. Eusebius records the issue of these coins.
Quote ID: 1787
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 66 Page: 223
Section: 3C
One question, however, which cannot fail to disconcert Christians today is his ability to reconcile his new faith with appalling murders, including those of his own kin.Another question which arises is whether, although Constantine regarded himself as the linear descendant of earlier emperors, Edward Gibbon was right to suppose that his conversion of himself and his subjects to Christianity was one of the principal causes of the fall of the western Roman empire, which ceased to exist 139 years after his death. It was Constantine, according to this view, who made this shipwreck inevitable, or, to change the metaphor, opened all the gates to destructive forces.
Quote ID: 1789
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 66 Page: 226
Section: 3C
It is a mocking travesty of justice to call such a murderer Constantine the Great. Or, perhaps not: for what does Greatness mean? Constantine was, as we have seen, a superlative military commander, and a first-rate organizer. He was also an utterly ruthless man, whose ruthlessness extended to the execution of his nearest kin, and who believed that he had God behind him in everything he did. That, surely, it must be repeated, is the stuff of which the most successful leaders are made.
Quote ID: 1790
Time Periods: ?
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