The colossus of Constantine – the same statue Joe and I saw in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museum – was constructed and housed in a basilica commissioned by Maxentius that Constantine took over and transformed into a monument to himself. The marble colossus was something not seen by Romans since Nero’s time; previous emperors had been content to have their likenesses represented by more-or-less life-sized statues. Constantine wanted himself re-created as a supernaturally large twelve-metre giant, seated on a marble throne; god-like, unknowable, seeing things beyond the mortal plane.* On the pedestal was an inscription that boasted of how he had saved Rome with the power of the chi-ro: Through this sign of salvation, which is the true symbol of goodness, I rescued your city and freed it from the tyrant’s yoke.
Constantine never did let go of his attachment to the cult of the sun god, but his gratitude to the God of the Christians was sincere: it does seem he genuinely came to believe that the Christian God had promised him an unlikely victory and then delivered it. The question was, how would he transform the philosophy of a man who preached poverty, forgiveness and non-violence into an ideology of power?
THE ARCH OF CONSTANTINE is shielding our eyes from the late afternoon sun. ‘Do you really think he had a vision?’ Joe asks sceptically.
‘Well, no I don’t. I think his attachment to Christianity was real, but it crept up on him slowly. I suspect the story of the vision was something he came up with years later to frame his change of heart in a dramatic way, and to make it look like he was God’s best friend.’
‘He was just a man,’ Joe replies.
‘He was just a man,’ I nod.
BY 313 CONSTANTINE had destroyed all his rivals in the west. Licinius, an old friend of the late Galerius, had likewise fought his way to become Augustus of the eastern empire. The two men forged a pact, dividing the Roman world between them.
Constantine named his son Crispus as a junior emperor, and entrusted him with command of Gaul. Crispus led his legions into victories against the Franks and the Alemanni. His affability and competence made him a popular figure, compared to his aloof and grandiose father. In 322 Crispus was summoned to accompany the imperial family on a visit to Rome, a city that Constantine had never very much liked. As the imperial family paraded through the streets of the ancient capital, the loudest, most enthusiastic cheers from the crowd were not for Constantine, but for Crispus.
IT’S DIFFICULT to imagine Constantine, a man given to commissioning gigantic statues of himself, settling for a half-share of the empire. And so, despite the vast distances between their courts in Trier and Nicomedia, Constantine and Licinius began to niggle at each other. Distrust festered into on-again, off-again civil war, and then into an all-out fight to the death.
In 324, Constantine marched his army into Thrace to confront Licinius under the standard of the Christian labarum, a military banner crowned by the chi-rho. Licinius retreated with his forces to the minor Greek city of Byzantium. Constantine camped with his army outside the city’s fortifications and waited for the arrival of his fleet, commanded now by Crispus. Perhaps at this time Constantine studied Byzantium’s impressive strategic position. Perhaps the stunning natural beauty of its location on the Bosphorus Strait also beguiled him.
Crispus’s fleet arrived a week later and smashed its way through Licinius’s paltry assortment of ships. Crispus’s decisive leadership was warmly praised on all sides; statues of the junior emperor were erected across the empire and his face was minted on imperial coins. Although Constantine had three younger sons from Fausta, Crispus was now the obvious heir apparent. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea sycophantically compared their relationship to that of ‘God the universal king, and the Son of God, the saviour of all men’.
Licinius fled the city and crossed the Bosphorus, but was caught at Chrysopolis. Constantine was at first inclined to be merciful, then thought better of it and discreetly had Licinius murdered.
The long era of civil war was over. All Constantine’s rivals were dead and the empire was at peace. He was now sole ruler of all the Roman lands, touching Scotland at one end and Mesopotamia on the other.
One emperor, one empire, under a Christian God.
Of the Same Substance
CONSTANTINE SET UP his court temporarily in Diocletian’s old capital of Nicomedia in Asia Minor. Having consolidated one-man rule, he now brought his immense authority to the difficult but necessary task of bringing the disparate factions of Christianity together under a single system of belief. But the faithful were in furious disagreement. The external pressure of persecution had concealed their divisions, but when Constantine invited them to the commanding heights of Roman power, underlying tensions broke out on the maddeningly complex issue of the nature of Christ.
The God of the Old Testament was singular and indivisible. What then did it mean for Christians to recognise Jesus as the ‘son’ of God? Was he descended from, or equal to, God the Father? The early church came up with an elegant paradox: the concept of the Holy Trinity, the idea that there is one God in three aspects: God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit, each one co-equal to the other two. But Christians couldn’t agree on what Jesus was made from. Was he different from God the Father, or was he simply another aspect of the same God-like substance?
Arius, a tall, thin priest from Alexandria, argued controversially that since Jesus was the son of God, he must therefore be subordinate to God, the father. Arius and his followers could not accept the concept of the Holy Trinity, because Jesus was, by definition, a created being, a man, quite unlike the God the Father, who is eternal and uncreated.
To Constantine, this all looked like theological hair-splitting. The emperor expressed his exasperation in a letter to the Bishop of Alexandria:
I had proposed to lead back to a single form the ideas which all people conceive of the Deity; for I feel strongly that if I could induce men to unite on that subject, the conduct of public affairs would be considerably eased. But alas . . . The cause seems to be quite trifling and unworthy of such fierce contests . . . these are silly actions worthy of inexperienced children, and not of priests and reasonable men.
Constantine took steps to resolve the dispute, and forge an outcome that would suit him. He announced a conference of every leading figure in the Christian church and let it be known that attendance was mandatory. And so, in the late spring of 325, more than three hundred bishops from across the empire travelled by land and sea to the town of Nicaea in Asia Minor.
IT SEEMS EXTRAORDINARY today that a Roman emperor should devote so much time and energy to fine points of religious doctrine, but Constantine’s interest wasn’t driven by theology as much as it was by a need to find a political solution to a problem he’d inherited from Diocletian. The cult of the God-Emperor was finished; not even Diocletian could be bothered keeping up the pretence that he was the incarnation of Jupiter. It invited ridicule when emperors retired to grow cabbages.
The death of the cult of the semi-divine emperor had left the empire without the fuel to drive it forward. It was a similar predicament faced by the Chinese Communist Party after Mao: having lost its faith in communism, the cadres had to cast about for a new governing ideology to justify their monopoly of political power settling on an appeal to crude nationalism and the pleasures of consumerism.
If Christianity was to form a new moral basis for the Roman empire, then Constantine would need to find a formula that would make his religion work as a governing ideology – a set of values and ideas that could persuasively explain why he, Constantine, deserved to rule, that would give his empire energy, cohesiveness and direction.
A Christian ruler couldn’t be a god, but he could present himself as a ruler chosen by God, as Christ’s regent on Earth, the favourite of heaven. Constantine and the emperors who followed him would place themselves in this exalted position, at the nexus of heaven and Earth, as a vessel that collects divine energy as it trickles down from heaven, and disperses it into the mortal worl
d.
There was a divine symmetry at work. The emperor rules in Constantinople, attended by his advisors, bishops and generals, just as Jesus reigns in heaven, surrounded by angels and saints. This is why Roman mosaics of Jesus would come to portray him not as a broken pauper on a cross, but as a triumphant king on a throne. It was self-evidently the natural order of things. And to question the emperor’s authority would be to question the moral order of the universe.
ON 20 MAY 325, CONSTANTINE opened the first ecumenical council in the history of the church.* The Council was charged with examining Arius’s ideas before drafting a basic statement of belief that would be binding for all churches across the empire. Constantine presided but did not direct proceedings, letting the debate run its course as Arius made his case. The heretical priest was received coldly and subject to a hostile cross-examination.
When the conference ended, Constantine came down against the Arian position, putting forward a resolution declaring that the Father and Son were ‘of the same substance’, which was passed overwhelmingly. Arius and the two dissenters were banished, and Arianism was officially denounced as heresy.
The assembled clergy then sat down to hammer out a creed that would bind them all together. The Nicene Creed would be refined and altered over time, but the first version reads today like a careful statement of faith, blended into a combative political tract, which is exactly what it was:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
The only-begotten of his Father, of the substance of the Father,
God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God,
Begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.
This early version of the Creed concluded with a very pointed reference to the Arians:†
And whosoever shall say that there was a time when the Son of God was not,
Or that before he was begotten he was not,
Or that he was made of things that were not,
Or that he is of a different substance or essence or that he is a creature,
Or subject to change or conversion – all that so say, the Catholic and
Apostolic Church condemns them.
In exile, Arius contracted dysentery and died in poverty, but his expulsion failed to prevent further controversies on the nature of Christ. It was a mind-bending conundrum: every answer that was arrived at prompted more imponderable questions. How was it that God, who transcended space and time, could manifest himself in a human form? How did the human and divine elements co-exist within Jesus? Were those two natures intermingled or separate? Was he truly flesh and blood, or more like a three-dimensional spiritual hologram?
These fierce disputes over abstract and unknowable points of theology are baffling to modern eyes. Why not humbly accept the paradox and meditate on it? But for the early Christians, so much was at stake. If Jesus is fully human, then you could ask, what makes him special? But if he’s fully divine, how did he die on the cross? They needed Jesus to be a manifestation of heavenly power, but also someone they could relate to as a human being, a man who endures suffering and poverty. Finding that sweet spot between the human and divine would wrack Christian thought for centuries.
Nicholas the Wonderworker
EMOTIONS HAD RUN HIGH at Nicaea. Arius’s testimony to the assembly had so incensed one bishop that he had walked across the conference floor and slapped the heretic in the face. The bishop’s name was Nicholas of Myra, and those who knew him were shocked, for he was a kindly man, much loved by his people.
Nicholas had grown up an orphan, his parents dying in a plague epidemic when he was eight. The boy received a sizeable inheritance, but chose to give most of it away to the poor and the sick. For this and other kindnesses he was appointed Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor.
Bishop Nicholas was suspected of being the secret benefactor of many people in Myra. One man in the town despaired because he had no money to provide dowries for his three daughters. Without such dowries to attract husbands, he feared he would be forced to sell his daughters into slavery. But on three different nights a purse of gold was tossed through an open window and landed in a shoe that was drying by the fire. The man concluded the mysterious benefactor must be the bishop. Who else could be so kind?
People also told stories of miraculous deeds performed by Nicholas. It was said that during a terrible famine, three children were lured into the house of an evil butcher, who killed them and placed their remains in a barrel to cure their flesh, which he planned to sell to starving people as ham. On the day that Bishop Nicholas came into town, the butcher’s crime was exposed to him in a vision. He located the barrels and resurrected the three children.
For this, and for other miraculous feats, the bishop achieved great renown as ‘Nicholas the Wonderworker’. He died in 343 in Myra and was buried in his local cathedral. Nicholas was recognised as a saint by the church, his spirit credited with creating miracles long after his death. In time his reputation as a gift-giver and a protector of children blended together and it became customary to give gifts to children on his feast day of 6 December.
Different European nations came to celebrate the feast of St Nicholas in their own way. Dutch migrants to the United States transmuted the name of St Nicholas into ‘Sinterklass’, which became ‘Santa Claus’, and the gift-giving tradition shifted to Christmas Day, although gifts are still exchanged in many European countries on 6 December.
The legend of the coins in the shoe evolved into the tradition of hanging stockings by the fire on Christmas Eve. Icons of St Nicholas depict him as a thin man in the brocaded robes of a bishop, not as a large man in a red suit. Santa doesn’t come from the Arctic Circle – he comes from Asia Minor.
Today Nicholas is venerated by the Orthodox church as the patron saint of children, barrel makers, sailors, merchants, the falsely accused, repentant thieves, brewers, pharmacists, archers, pawnbrokers and (mercifully) broadcasters.
The Immovable Ladder
AS CONSTANTINE was attempting to shepherd the church towards a basic statement of belief, his seventy-eight-year-old mother embarked on a mission to the Holy Land. No longer the discarded consort, Helena was now the honoured mother of the supreme Augustus. Constantine brought her out from the shadows and placed her at his side, awarding her the title of Augusta Imperatrix, and he gave her a luxurious palace in Rome.
During her time in the wilderness, Helena had become intensely Christianised. It’s possible she had a hand in Constantine’s decision to adopt the faith himself. Helena now became an immensely powerful and popular figure, with unlimited funds to search for holy relics. For Helena, such artefacts were more than mere souvenirs; they were holy objects, crackling with the residue of divine energy.
And so in 326, the Augusta embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to walk in the city where Jesus once preached and died in agony. As she travelled through Palestine she showered gifts on the poor, freed slaves from their servitude in the mines, and commissioned the building of churches in significant places.
Entering the holy city of Jerusalem, Helena asked to be taken to the site of the crucifixion, identified in the scriptures as Golgotha, ‘the Place of the Skull’. When she arrived she saw to her horror that a temple to Venus had been built on the site. The temple was demolished, and a team of workers began excavating the ground underneath. The traditional account records that Helena sat on a chair and supervised the digging. Soon the workmen dug their way down to a chamber carved out of the rock. When they entered this sepulchre they found three crosses. Helena concluded that these must indeed be the same crosses that Jesus and the two thieves alongside him were crucified upon.
But which was the cross of Christ? A test was called for. The Bishop of Jerusalem brought a deathly ill woman to the cavern. Timber from each of the three crosses was placed in turn upon her. At the touch of the third cross, which wa
s stained with blood, sweat and tears, the woman instantly recovered, a sure sign that this was the True Cross of Christ.
Also found within the sepulchre, according to the legend, were the iron nails that were hammered into the hands and feet of Jesus by Roman soldiers three hundred years earlier.
Helena brought the Holy Nails and a piece of the True Cross back home with her. The rest of the cross was encased in a frame of silver and placed in the care of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Constantine ordered that a great church be built on the site: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which stands there today.
A VISIT TO THE Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City is an overwhelming experience. It still serves as the headquarters of the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, and is shared between no fewer than six Christian denominations, bound by intense mutual loathing.*
When I visited the church in the early 1990s, I expected some kind of hushed and hallowed cathedral, but no: at the entrance I heard a din of clashing music and voices from rival liturgies, each trying to drown out the other. It was like a rehearsal space shared between six bands. There was no single, open cavernous space, but a warren of thirty different chapels. The gloomy chambers, the clouds of incense, the clashing hymns and fervent worshippers produced a strange, electrifying atmosphere, like an unusually intense rock concert.
The six denominations share rights to the tomb itself, which is housed in a chapel known as the Aedicule. As I came out of the tomb, a very tall, bearded priest with burning black eyes confronted me.
‘ONLY THE HEAD,’ he boomed, glaring at me.
‘I’m sorry?’ I stuttered.
‘ONLY THE HEAD OF JESUS IS BURIED HERE.’ He gestured for me to enter a small side chapel to the main sepulchre, controlled by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The chapel was too small for them to lay claim to the whole body of Jesus, so instead they claimed dominion over the portion of the tomb where they believe Christ’s head had once lain.
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