This is the text of a talk I've given on many occasions, sometimes (despite their awareness of my atheism) even in front of church groups. The full title is...
The 13th Apostle: Constantine the Great and the Marriage of Church and State
With Constantine victorious, so was Christianity. His famous, though possibly mythical Edict of Milan, declared the “spiritual freedom” of all religions but it was clearly something else in practice. It freed Christians from interference by the state, but as they won power, other religions lost it. Constantine did not suppress many pagan temples but he looted them thoroughly. Commissioners were appointed to tour the provinces and confiscate their gold. This filled the dual purpose of removing the support structure of paganism as well as replenishing the imperial treasury at the same time. Just how quickly and thoroughly paganism was undermined by this is illustrated by the fact that when, 50 years later, the Emperor Julian the Apostate tried to revive the non-Christian beliefs, he found the pagan temples in disrepair and largely deserted. It was impossible to undo the damage in his brief reign of 18 months and after his death, the attempt was abandoned.
At the same time that the pagan temples were being looted, Constantine was glorifying the new religion. He was lavish in his favors to Christian communities, spending public money to refurbish old churches and build magnificent new ones. He sent his mother, Helena, soon to be Saint Helena, to Jerusalem to discover the site of Calvary where Jesus had been crucified. Aided by the usual dream, she not only found it but, with a speed and sureness that archeologists can only envy, she also dug up the True Cross, the Lance that pierced His side, the Sponge that wetted His lips and even the Crown of Thorns that had lain against His brow! Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to mark the spot where his mother had single-handedly founded two new industries: pilgrimage and holy relic hunting. Just to give you an idea to what extremes these two concepts were carried, well in 1204 AD, when the 4th Crusade, on its way to liberate the pilgrimage sites of the Holy Land, paused to sack the Christian city of Constantinople, amongst the booty carried off were enough pieces of the True Cross to build a house and not one, but two heads of John the Baptist.
Now none of this aided the spiritual cause of Christianity much but some of Constantine’s other measures hurt it even worse. He promoted the material wealth and political power of the clergy. A bishopric became a ticket to a princely life style and, when Constantine exempted clergy from many of their tax obligations, so many people swarmed into holy orders it became necessary to apply restrictions to the number of the ordained. There were other consequences of this emphasis of the material over the spiritual but we’re mainly interested in just one: what happens when a religion that claims spiritual authority over the entire human race gets the temporal power to do something about it?
Now Constantine the Great may have seen in Christianity a force that could unify the Empire but, at the time of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, they represented perhaps 10% of the Roman population. It was a very committed 10% though, tried in the fire of persecution and still growing. There was no comparable group anywhere in the Empire, but if the goal was a unifying principle, Constantine was to be sadly disappointed. Within a year of his declaration of universal tolerance, the bishops confronted him with a controversy concerning the Donatists. The Donatists were a group of zealots within the church who insisted that sacraments could be administered only by spiritual leaders who were, in fact, superior to their flock. It was a lofty principle but one that was fatal to the authority of the bishops since it subjected them to the judgment of their parishioners and made conditional the value of the sacrament.At the request of the bishops, Constantine called for a council to debate the matter and personally presided over it. Constantine ruled against the Donatists and, when they continued to defy his decrees, ordered the shutting down of their churches and the imprisonment of their leaders. Thus began the first persecution of Christians by a Christian state. Constantine soon wearied of it but, under the goading of high churchmen, both he and his successors grew accustomed to it. By the end of the century, Theodosius the Great (AD 379-395), the last emperor to rule over a politically united empire, deprived heretics of civil rights. For the first time in history, literal orthodoxy became a requirement of citizenship.
Next: Unholy wedlock!
Photo Credits:
1) Saint Augustine refuting a heretic
2) The two heads of John the Baptist (with apologies to Caravaggio!)
3) Constantine presents the work of the Council of Nicaea to Jesus
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Comments
Interesting history lesson...however, the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD had NOTHING to do with Donatism but instead confronted the heresy of Arianism. If you are going to talk in front of a church, do it in front of ignorant Protestant churches (I know, I used to be one.) Eastern Orthodox Christians (hopefully) know the history, especially the Seven Ecumenical Councils.
Hello William. You're right, of course. The Council of Nicaea dealt with the Arians, not the Donatists. You have confused the illustration, which was of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), with my text, which was about the Council of Arles though. It's an easy enough mistake to make since I didn't actually mention the name of the council but, if you'll note, I was talking about a council that occured a year after Constantine's declaration of universal tolerance (AD 313) and the Council of Arles, where Donatism was condemned, was in AD 314.
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