The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  This is a remarkable statement, unlike any seen before. In the words of Constantine scholar Harold Drake, it was “the first official government document in the Western world to recognize the principle of freedom of belief.”3 It is not that the Christians had now assumed control of the empire and were turning the tables on the pagans; it is simply that Christianity was being recognized as completely legitimate. So too were all the traditional religions of Rome. There was to be equality and toleration all around, a policy of complete noncoercion.

  Some modern Christian scholars have thought that if Constantine refused to compel his pagan subjects to convert to his new faith, he must not have been a “real” Christian, except on the surface. That is a wrong reading of the so-called Edict of Milan and of the rest of Constantine’s reign. Throughout history there have been millions and millions of sincere Christians who have adopted a live-and-let-live policy toward people of other faiths. Constantine was one of them, even if he did happen to be the most powerful figure in the early history of the religion.4

  It is also important to emphasize that when Constantine arrived at the conference in Milan in 313 he was a newly minted Christian. He had converted just months before. One cannot expect him to have had a full awareness of everything—or even anything—involved in his newly acquired faith. Learning an entirely new religion takes time. For Constantine it may have been a steep learning curve. But it did not take long for him to embark on his Christian education. He was forced to jump feetfirst into ecclesiastical life, almost immediately.

  CONSTANTINE’S INVOLVEMENT IN CHURCH AFFAIRS

  It may seem peculiar to modern minds that Constantine, a recent convert, should impose himself on affairs of the church right after he himself had joined its ranks. It is important to remember, however, that he, like most rulers before him, was deeply committed to religious ideology: social and political success—not just for him personally but for the entire empire—required divine support. And divinity required proper worship. Anything that affected divine worship was therefore important for the well-being of the state. Apart from the earlier Christian apologists, whom Constantine almost certainly had never read, no one was arguing for a separation of church and state.

  The Donatist Controversy

  Constantine himself certainly conceived of no separation of powers. In the very year he agreed on an empire-wide policy of toleration with Licinius, he became embroiled in a dispute threatening to tear the church apart, especially in the important region of North Africa. The Donatist controversy was Constantine’s first foray into ecclesiastical matters, and it is safe to say he had absolutely no idea what he was getting himself into. Unity of the empire was one of his chief ambitions, and a unified church could contribute to the cause. The church, however, was anything but unified. Constantine intervened in hopes of settling the controversy. As it happened, it would drag on for more than a century.5

  The first decree of Diocletian in 303 CE—just ten years earlier—had required Christian clergy to hand over copies of the Scriptures for destruction. Most Christians saw this not only as an awful policy of the persecutors but also as an act of sacrilege for anyone who complied. The clergy who had done so were labeled traditores (“those who handed over”) and were not just castigated verbally but were dismissed from office. Their dismissal raised a crucial question of polity: What does their unsuitability for sacred position say about the efficacy of their earlier official actions? In the church at the time, Christian leaders conducted numerous ritual activities: performing baptism, administering the Eucharist, ordaining new members of the clergy, and so on. These were not actions just any Christian could perform. There was a sanctity inherent in the clergy that conferred the divine power associated with these sacramental rites. But traditores had obviously rescinded their sanctified status. Were the rites they performed while still in office legitimate?

  The issue mattered a good deal. What if someone had been baptized by a traditor? Was the baptism still valid, or did it need to be performed a second time? What if a bishop had been ordained by the laying on of hands of a traditor? Was that person actually consecrated as a bishop?

  The largest church of North Africa, Carthage, debated the issue with particular vigor. Some leaders of the church insisted that the sacraments were valid no matter who had performed them, whether traditor or not. The efficacy of the sacraments came from the power of God, not the worthiness of the one who administered them. But there was virulent—even violent—opposition to this view. The most vocal opponent was a man named Donatus, who had a large number of followers. In particular, Donatus argued that the bishop of Carthage, Caecilian, had not received a valid ordination. He could not be regarded as a true bishop. The church needed a different leader.

  It is a long and complicated story that eventually involved such fifth-century stalwarts as the great Augustine. Constantine probably thought the solution was simple: he would have an established ecclesiastical authority judge the issue, he would sanction the answer, the church would accept it, and life would move on. But it was not to be.

  His involvement began with a request for assistance from the Donatists themselves. Constantine turned the case over to the bishop of Rome, who appointed a kind of ecclesiastical court to rule on the matter. The Donatists lost the case, and Caecilian was exonerated. But the Donatists refused to accept defeat and appealed a second time to the emperor, who decided to take matters more directly into his own hands. He called for an entire council of bishops to meet in the city of Arles in 314 CE. Quite obviously this was the first time an emperor had called a council of bishops, and it set a precedent for things to come.

  The bishops at the Council of Arles ruled decisively against the Donatists. Constantine himself had at first been somewhat inclined to their position, probably for practical reasons rather than because of any theological sophistication he could have brought to the table: he was certainly not well-read in the intricacies of sacramental theology. But when the Donatists refused the verdict of the council and appealed to him yet a third time, he saw them as obstructionists and set himself against them. Constantine was not particularly interested in the nuances of Christian theology or even of church polity. He was interested in unity. The Donatists were interfering with it. So he took the other side.

  The other side could be seen as anti-rigorist. The Donatists took a hard line and were unforgiving of difference. That too did not sit well with Constantine. As Drake has observed, “Rigorists clearly were not the type of Christian he favored.”6 Moreover, this early dispute reveals that, all things being equal, in deciding a church issue Constantine preferred reasoned argument and considered opinion to the use of imperial force. Let the bishop of Rome make a sensible decision. If that does not work, have an entire council of bishops decide. Constantine was not interested in sending in the armies to bring the Donatists in line.

  This was a position he continued to take throughout his lengthy reign, even when it came to the much more weighty matter of whether to compel nonbelievers to adopt the Christian faith. A decade later, after he had established himself as sole ruler of the empire, he sent a letter to his subjects in the East in which he stated unequivocally, “It is one thing to take on willingly the contest for immortality, quite another to enforce it with sanctions.”7

  The Arian Controversy

  A year after Constantine wrote this letter in 324 CE, another ecclesiastical crisis came to a head. This one involved a dispute of theological importance. At least, it seemed important to the participants at the time, as it has to theologians in the centuries since. But to Constantine—and many others till today who have stood outside the ranks of the professional theologian—it seemed picayune and immaterial. This was the famous Arian controversy, a dispute that had arisen in Alexandria, Egypt, between a priest in the church named Arius and his bishop, Alexander.

  There had been heated debates for generations among Christian theologians over the true nature of Christ. From almost the beginning, Chr
istians had maintained that Christ was not just a human (even though, for most theologians, he was certainly that) but also the Son of God. In fact, already in our earliest Christian author, Paul, Christ was understood to be a divine being who existed in the heavenly realm prior to his birth (Philippians 2:6–8). In some sense he was God. But in what sense?

  This was an issue that had never been satisfactorily resolved, in no small part because most Christians had always wanted to affirm with vigor four different propositions that, at least on the surface, appear to create a contradiction: Christ is God. God the Father is God. Christ is not God the Father. And there is only one God. So if Christ is God and God is God, how is it that Christians can say there is only one God? In short, how can Christians be monotheists?

  It all hinges on what it means to say that there is only “one” God, and on how the Son of God is understood to relate to the Father. It is on these issues that Arius disagreed with his bishop, Alexander. Arius held a view in wide circulation among Christians for a long time, even if no one had articulated it with the same clarity and force. Christ, for him, was certainly a divine being, the Logos (the Greek word for “word”) of God, and he certainly existed before he came into the world as Jesus Christ. Moreover, he was the agent of all creation. As the Gospel of John affirms: it was through the Logos that God created the heavens and the earth (John 1:1–3). So he was divine, but he was separate from God. Then how do the two relate to each other?

  Arius maintained that Christ, the Logos, could not be equal with God the Father. The Father himself is almighty. There cannot be two beings who are both almighty, since then neither of them is “all” mighty. For Arius, only God the Father is almighty. Originally, in eternity past, God existed alone, by himself. He then, prior to the creation of the universe, begot a Son, a second divine being, who, since he was begotten of God, was secondary and subservient to him, as a son is to a father. This was the Logos, through whom the world was made and who much later took on human form and came into the world in order to bring salvation. The Logos, then, is a subordinate divinity who was brought into being at some point: he had not always existed. God the Father is superior to God the Son by an “infinity of glories.”

  Arius’s bishop, Alexander, could not disagree more. He took a hard line that Christ was not subservient to God the Father as a subordinate being. Christ himself had said, “I and the Father are One” and “If you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 10:30; 14:9). The two are equal. They are not identical, to be sure: the Son is a separate being from the Father. But they are equally omnipotent and have both existed forever. There never was a time that the Logos did not exist.

  Those taking Alexander’s side in the debate could point out that, by definition, if something is perfect it can never change. If something changes, necessarily it becomes either better or worse from the change. But if it becomes better, it was not perfect before; and if it becomes worse, it is not perfect after. Since God is perfect, he can never change. That means he could not become the Father by begetting a Son, since this would involve a change in his status from not-Father to Father. Necessarily, then, God had always been the Father. If he was always the Father, then the Son must always have existed.

  Thus, Alexander’s side of the debate maintained that the Son was coeternal with the Father and all-powerful along with him. He was not merely “like” the Father, of a “similar” kind of divine substance. He was “equal” with the Father, of the “same” substance. In the Greek terms used in these debates, the idea of being of the “same substance” is expressed by the word homoousias. By contrast, the word for “similar substance” is homoiousias. As you can see, they are very similar words, different only with the letter i, or in Greek, the iota, in the middle. Some observers have noted that the theological controversy threatening to fracture the church was a debate over an iota.

  That is certainly what Constantine personally thought. Because the dispute was causing such turbulence, he felt compelled to intervene, and did so first by writing the two principals a letter. In it he clearly states his ultimate concern, which had never been about theological niceties but about unity: “My first concern was that the attitude towards the Divinity of all the provinces should be united in one consistent view.”8 Constantine did not care which view emerged from the debate. He simply wanted one side to concede to the other and thereby effect unity. Personally, he indicated that he considered the matter “extremely trivial and quite unworthy of so much controversy.” For him, these were “small and utterly unimportant matters,” involving a “very silly question.” He urged Alexander and Arius to settle the matter between themselves.

  They were unable to do so. It was not simply that they were at odds with each other. Both sides had numerous supporters who engaged in vitriolic attacks on the theological ignorance of the other. The debate was racking the church. Constantine decided to intervene in a major way by calling for the first worldwide, or ecumenical, council of bishops to meet and resolve the issue. This was the famous Council of Nicaea of 325 CE, named after the city in Asia Minor where the meeting was held. Later records indicate that some 318 bishops from around the world came to participate, most of them from the eastern provinces. (As we have seen, the church was not nearly as well established in the West9).

  Constantine himself attended the meeting. He gave the opening address and participated in the discussions. At the end the bishops took a vote. Arius lost. The council devised a creed, a statement of faith that expressed its understanding of the nature of both the Father and the Son and related important theological matters. Included in the creed were a number of “anathemas,” or “curses,” on anyone who took a contrary position. That creed ultimately came to form the basis of the Nicene Creed, still recited in many churches today. At the council, only twenty participants ended up on the Arian side. Constantine pressured the naysayers to concede the case and convinced nearly all of them to do so. The only two recalcitrant bishops—along with Arius himself—were sent into exile.

  As was true of the Donatist controversy, the council called by Constantine did not finally resolve the matter. Arians continued to press their case and made converts to their cause. Emperors after Constantine—including his own offspring—adopted the Arian view and exercised their authority to cement its stature in the church, even though, as we will see, it eventually lost. Our concern here, however, is with Constantine himself and his relation to the Christian faith. By 325 CE he had learned more about the intricacies of Christian theological discourse than he ever expected. He wanted unity, but he was not willing to impose it by sending troops to de-convert the Arians by the sword. When it came to matters of the church, he believed in persuasion.

  In terms of civil governance, on the other hand, he remained very much a military man, quite willing to lead the armed and dangerous forces himself when it was to his political advantage.

  CONSTANTINE’S MILITARY AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES

  By 313 CE, Constantine and Licinius had reached a temporarily amicable decision to co-rule the empire. Diocletian’s brainchild, the Tetrarchy, was a thing of the past. One might think the two-emperor solution imposed by the resolution of the civil wars would prove practicable. Constantine could rule the West and Licinius the East. It was not to work out that way in the long run, however, in no small measure because Constantine was a man never satisfied. He knew how to wait for what he wanted, but ultimately he was driven by massive ambition. From early he had set his sights on being the sole ruler, the first since the early days of Diocletian’s reign some four decades earlier.

  The next decade saw the rise of antagonism with Licinius and occasional military flare-ups as relations frayed. According to Eusebius, the final straw came in 324 CE with Licinius’s decision to renew the persecution of Christians in the East. This was all the excuse Constantine needed—in fact, some modern scholars think it is an excuse he himself manufactured for the occasion. Constantine chose to move against his co-emperor and “res
cue” his co-religionists. He defeated Licinius in a major battle, sent him to retirement in Thessalonica, and eventually ordered his death. Constantine was now in complete control.

  Not everyone was joyful at the prospect. When Constantine traveled to Rome to celebrate his twentieth anniversary as emperor in 326 CE, he chose not to follow the centuries-old custom of making a token sacrifice to Jupiter upon entering the city as conqueror. That decision has always made perfect sense to Christian commentators, but it proved disastrous for imperial public relations, incensing pagan members of the Roman senate. Constantine’s ties with the ruling elite soured. He had already by this time begun building a new capital city for the empire, a kind of “New Rome” that he named after himself, “Constantinople”—that is, “Constantine’s City”—now modern Istanbul. He was to spend much of his final years in residence there, never again even visiting Rome.

  For the new capital he chose a strategically important location, something that Rome itself, obviously, never had: the city of Byzantium on the Bosphorus strait. From there it would be much easier to oversee troop movements both east and west, and the site itself was relatively easy to defend and difficult to assault. Constantine had Byzantium destroyed and then he carried out a carefully conceived architectural plan for its replacement.

  He built his capital as an explicitly Christian city.10 There were to be no temples to pagan divinities and no sacred idols, with one exception: in order to adorn his city with statuary, a typical feature of the ancient urban environment, Constantine had sacred sites from around his empire pillaged, with bronze statues brought back and installed in public spaces throughout the city. This decision had a triple function: it deprived pagan religions of their revered cult images, it desacralized the statues and made them “secular” objects of art, and it raised the aesthetic appeal of his new capital. In the process, it gave the opportunity for Christians, whether resident or visiting, to mock the religious views of pagans. In Eusebius’s Life of Constantine we are told that the emperor “used these very toys”—that is, the pagan playthings, their idols—“for the laughter and amusement of the spectators” (Life of Constantine 3.54). If Eusebius is right, we can assume the despoiled pagans were not amused. Acts such as this, and the attendant mockery, foreshadowed much worse things yet in store for devotees of traditional pagan religions.