Tertullian rightly said that the blood of the early martyrs became the seed of Christianity. Hardly anything can be so impressive to those outside the faith than to see how many Christians treasure their faith and how much they are willing to suffer for it. The Roman emperor Diocletian sowed many seeds of Christianity by ordering Christians to either worship false gods or die by horrible tortures. But he was the last of the emperors to do so. As the empire after him was divided among four would-be emperors, it became evident that only one man could truly rule, and that man was Constantine.
During a battle which would decide his fate as undisputed master of Rome, Constantine had a vision of a distant cross burning in the sky. He took this as a sign that the Christian soldiers in his army would bring him victory He ordered all his soldiers, even those who worshipped Mithras, the popular soldiers’ god, to put the symbol for Christ on their shields (Chi [Χ] and Rho [Ρ] superimposed on each other, which are the first two letters of “Christ” in Greek). A standard banner with the words “in hoc signo vinces” (“in this sign you will conquer”) was carried into battle. After winning the battle of the Milvian Bridge, in October, 312 A.D., Constantine became the new master of Rome.
Mindful of past injustices committed against Christians, not to mention the persistent growth of the faith despite persecution, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in February of 313, which allowed toleration for all religions. This had to be a serious blow to the pagan establishment, for the Edict took Christianity out of the shadows and put it front and center. Even Constantine’s mother, Helena, had become a Christian. Yet Constantine, always politically astute, granted concessions to the pagan deities and allowed their images engraved on Roman coins. This practice, however, gradually ended and Constantine increased his favors to the Christians, including the exemption of taxes for church properties and permission for bishops to act as judges in their dioceses.
Though Constantine read the Bible often, he was denied assistance at the Eucharistic services because he was not baptized. He encouraged Romans to become Christians by making sure that his sons received a proper Christian education. At least partly because of his favors, the Church drew many converts and Constantine saw it as a friendly ally by which he could secure and preserve his own power. After all, didn’t the Church preach against violent crimes and encourage obedience to the civil authority? But the peace of the empire would depend upon the unity of the Church, which by now was rife not only with heresies, but also with growing wealth and corruption.
During the thirty years of Constantine’s rule a remarkable change had overcome Rome. Christianity now flourished, but was itself much infected by the pagan cancers it had come to heal. At first holy hermits (such as today’s Saint Paul) fled into the solitude of desert caves to escape a clergy increasingly obsessed with ambition and avarice. But soon monastic orders emphasizing community would emerge in Egypt for the purpose of escaping worldly distractions and concentrating on prayer and penance. This religious movement, originally so pure and high-minded, had no way of knowing that by the high Middle Ages monks would be sorely tempted to indulge in the very ambition and avarice they had once sought to escape.
But by far the biggest problem both Constantine and the Church now had to confront was the rise of schisms and heresies on a massive scale. That phenomenon might be viewed as the first great wave of Protestantism to sweep through the Western World. Donatus, Bishop of Carthage, led a contingent of bishops who wished to punish those bishops who had cooperated with pagan authorities during the persecutions. The punishment was to consist of removing them from office and also declaring null and void all the sacraments distributed during their tenure. This retaliation was seen by most bishops as too extreme, especially because the few bishops under fire were to be removed and replaced by Donatist bishops. Constantine called a council of bishops at Arles and backed their decision to discipline the Donatists.
But the more dire threat to the unity of the Church, and therefore to the unity of the empire, was the heresy promulgated by the priest Arius in the diocese of Alexandria. His bishop, Alexander, tried to discipline Arius, but did not succeed. Before long the central heresy of Arius, namely that Christ was not equally divine with the Father (nor was the Holy Spirit), began to spread with alarming speed. The bishops of Egypt met and voted to defrock Arius, which only resulted in many clergy coming to his defense with renewed passion for his teachings. Constantine had no choice but to enter the fray and hope to suppress the heresy by calling a special council at Nicaea.
Attended by 318 bishops and a much greater number of priests, the council was not presided over by the ailing Pope Sylvester I, who chose to send representatives instead. The real presider was Constantine himself, still not a baptized Christian, who participated in the heated dialogue between Arius and Athanasius over the doctrine of the Trinity (later to be formalized by the Nicene Creed). At the council’s end, only two bishops refused to sign the Trinitarian document, including Arius, who was banished from the empire by Constantine and his writings ordered to be burned. Constantine also chastised the bishops for not being able to maintain order in their own house. For a time it appeared that Church unity had been restored, and with it the unity and peace of the empire.
Not long after the Nicene Council Constantine changed the capital of the empire from Rome to Nova Roma (later called, after him, Constantinople – today’s Istanbul). There he established what may be thought of as the start of the medieval schools by assembling professors throughout the provinces to teach medicine and law along with the arts, sciences, and languages. He did not forget to pay Rome her homage. There he built many churches, including a huge basilica that would be the prototype of St. Peter’s. He was perhaps the most famously documented of emperors through the biography of Eusebius, a Christian bishop (if a semi-Arian) who in his Life of Constantine told the story of the great emperor’s important contributions to the flourishing of Christianity and the triumph of Trinitarianism. If it were not for this biography, which is replete with references to writings long since lost, we would have much less history of Church and State relations during that era.
Constantine’s reign was unusual in that it lasted thirty years, long enough for an emperor to leave his indelible mark on history and earn the title of Great after his name. What seems peculiar is why he would do so much to pave the way in establishing Christianity as the state religion while refusing baptism for himself until his own approaching death. But he did finally submit, as his mother Helena had long prayed he would. Perhaps Constantine, like so many great and powerful men before him and since, had qualms of conscience for crimes that needed atonement. After all, he had ordered the execution of one of his wives and one of his sons. There is nothing like the approach of death to help one take the longest measure of one’s life and seek friendship with He who metes out final justice and mercy.