PAUL FREEDMAN: Today,
we're going to talk
about what is arguably the most
important event of the
first part of our course, the
conversion of Constantine, the
Roman emperor, to
Christianity.
Important not because
of Constantine's
own particular opinions.
The fact that he embraced
Christianity is, as we'll see,
a little hard to explain on
purely strategic grounds.
But its importance is that it
represents a permanent change.
It represents the beginning of
the Christianization of the
Roman Empire, a very
unexpected result.
Because not only had
Christianity been illegal in
the prior history of the empire,
that is to say, for
over 250 years, but of course,
the god-man Jesus had been put
to death by the forces
of the Roman Empire.
And as we've discussed, Roman
religion, with its emphasis on
what we've called "civic
polytheism" or the performance
of ceremonies in public,
ceremonies that have to do
with local patriotism, emperor
worship, the tradition of the
Olympian gods, and, above all,
polytheism, was very foreign
to Christianity.
The Christian religion thus
seemed to be a kind of
annoying epiphenomenon of Roman
society when, in fact,
with this event, Constantine's
conversion, it becomes first a
tolerated religion, then a
favored religion, and very
quickly, within the course of
the fourth century AD, the
official and almost the only
religion of the Roman Empire.
How can this be?
We'll discuss both the specific
events today, and
their meaning, and how
they play out.
We recall then that what
is called "paganism," a
traditional religion of
the Roman Empire, was
polytheistic, was many gods,
ceremonial, had a lot of local
variation, and it
was eclectic--
eclectic meaning that you could
worship different gods
in different places, different
gods for different purposes,
different gods for different
times of your life.
There was a certain emotional
vacuum, or at least a
perceived vacuum, in this
religion because it seemed to
deny individual longing and
longing in general, that
longing, that sense internally
that there is more to life
than there appears to be.
So that many adherents of other
religions, including,
but not limited to, Christianity
believed that
some part of their body was
immortal, or the soul was
immortal, or that the immortal
soul had to be healed by
religion, and not that religion
should simply be a
pathway to good fortune or to
easing the anxieties of the
material world.
So Christianity, we've said, is
not so much otherworldly,
focused on heaven.
It is that.
But even more important perhaps
is its innerness, its
inner worldliness, the sense
that people have a interior
soul that yearns for something
eternal and more significant.
And then Christianity was
accompanied by other so-called
"mystery religions," religions
that also spoke to an
immaterial, heroic, non-civic,
non-urban type of piety,
Mithraism, for example,
the worship of the
mother goddess Cybele.
Christianity had certain
advantages in terms of
reaching a population, the
promise of an afterlife, the
commitment that it demanded
of people, a religion that
appealed both to the elite and
to the common people, and a
very strong local
organization.
But Christianity was alien
to the Roman Empire.
The Romans did not always
persecute Christianity, as
they did under Diocletian.
But they found Christianity
alien.
They didn't like the fact that
Christianity was intolerant.
Every other religion of the
Roman Empire, with one
exception, accepted
other gods.
If you worshipped Isis, you
had nothing against other
people worshipping Jupiter.
If you worshipped Cybele, you
had nothing against other
people worshipping Mithra.
But Christianity, of course,
ridiculed all of these gods.
The only other religion that
was like this was Judaism.
But Judaism made some
accommodations with the Roman
Empire, recognized the authority
of the Roman
emperor, and did not defy the
state in the way that
Christianity at least
appeared to.
And Christianity was not a Roman
religion in many of the
ways that it rejected
worldliness, rejected
engagement in or enjoyment of
the material world: the
pleasures of the theater, the
circus, the celebrations of
civic paganism, emperor
worship, law courts.
Well, law courts may
not be pleasurable.
But this sort of civic
involvement of the emperor and
the Empire are rejected
by Christianity.
Christianity, when you see what
Roman pagans write about
it, is a kind of killjoy
religion.
It's a religion of people who
seem to have their eyes
focused on anything but the
actual process of getting
ahead in Roman society.
All of this notwithstanding, it
should be emphasized that
Christianity was not persecuted
constantly nor was
the persecution very intense.
We have Nero in the late 60s AD,
the Decian persecution of
the mid-third century, and of
course, the great persecution
under Diocletian.
Christianity received just
enough persecution, one might
say, to fortify its spirit, to
give it some backbone, but not
enough to break it.
Constantine emerged from the
chaos following Diocletian's
abdication.
Diocletian, and as you'll
recall, had created this four
man rule, the Tetrarchy, in
order to divide what was
perceived as an excessively
large empire with an
excessively large administrative
structure.
The Tetrarchy was, at least we
can say with hindsight, doomed
to failure.
These four emperors would
not cooperate.
They would tend to be rivals.
Constantine was the son of one
of the caesars, one of the
subordinates.
Remember there were two
augusti, two caesars.
His father was Constantius
Chlorus who was appointed when
the Tetrarchy began in
the West in 293.
So there was an Augustus of the
West and a Caesar of the
West. The Caesar of the West
was Constantius Chlorus.
The young Constantine was sent
east to serve the eastern
Augustus, who succeeded
Diocletian, Galerius.
Constantine was left out
of the succession
when Diocletian abdicated.
Galerius appointed
somebody else,
and Constantine rebelled.
Constantine, in 306, raised an
army in faraway Britain,
marched on Gaul, and eventually
was grudgingly
recognized by Galerius
as caesar.
At the same time, another
disinherited son of an
augustus, a man named Maxentius,
rebelled in Rome.
And I will not burden you with
the whole working out of these
intrigues, of the fightings of
armies, of the quarrels of
augusti and caesars.
But basically, in 311, Galerius,
who had been ill
with cancer, died.
And Galerius was succeeded
by an emperor in
the East named Licinius.
And Licinius allowed Constantine
to deal with the
usurper Maxentius in the West.
So we have Licinius in the
east in 311, and then in the
West, Constantine and
Maxentius fighting it out.
Galerius has died.
Constantine defeated Maxentius
at a battle not far from Rome,
the Battle of the
Milvian Bridge.
The Battle of the Milvian
Bridge in 312.
And Constantine was now
Augustus in the West,
Licinius, Augustus in the
East. The Battle of the
Milvian Bridge is the context
for whatever had happened that
changed Constantine's mind
about his religious
orientation.
Just before the Battle
of the Milvian
Bridge, something happened.
There are two stories that
purport to explain the event.
One is that Constantine
had a dream.
And in this dream, an angel
spoke to him and ordered him
to paint a symbol combining the
Greek letter chi and the
Greek letter rho on his
soldiers' shields.
The rho, the R in Greek, and the
chi written as an X. The
two letters symbolize, or at
least were taken later to
symbolize, Christ, the first
letter being a chi,
the second a rho.
The second version, which is
later, that is, later in
circulation as a story, but
seems perhaps to have been
attested by the emperor
himself to
his biographer, Eusebius.
According to Eusebius,
Constantine was marching with
his army before the battle.
And he, along with the army,
saw a cross in the sky.
And superimposed on the sun,
against which background the
cross appeared, were the words,
"In this sign, you will
conquer." Hard to say which
version, if either, is what
Constantine thought
happened to him.
The argument for the second
one is partly Eusebius's
description, partly the fact
that angels in a dream are a
standard kind of story.
On the other hand, the Chi Rho
symbol is not previously a
sign of Christianity.
So the very fact that there
isn't a background to that,
that this is something that we
hear of now for the first
time, might indicate that
that's the true story.
But more important than what
actually happened is that
there's no reason to doubt
Constantine's sincerity.
There is no reason to believe
that this was a calculating,
cynical, or politically
astute move.
This is not because Constantine
wasn't devious.
He was.
But because it's hard to imagine
any emperor thinking
that Christianity
was a good idea.
Because Christianity was
subversive of Roman values.
And it was particularly
subversive of the values of
the Roman army, whose crucial
aid Constantine depended on
and of which Constantine had to
be the leader not only in
order to defeat Maxentius, but
simply to survive in power.
Christianity was pacifist. At
this time, it took more
literally than it would later
the admonitions of Christ in
the Gospels not to fight, not
to hit back, not to engage
oneself in the pursuit
of worldly
gain by means of violence.
So it's hard to imagine anything
more unlikely than an
emperor becoming Christian
and gaining the
support of his followers.
Now that doesn't mean that
Constantine became some sort
of monk, interpreted the Gospels
literally, told his
soldiers to put down
their weapons.
It's clear that Constantine
regarded the Christian god
much as other emperors had
regarded, say, the Invincible
Sun, or the genius of the divine
emperor, or any other
pagan deity that brought
victory in war.
Constantine, like all emperors,
saw himself as a
child a fortune, as someone who
was favored by fortune,
depended on fortune, and who
needed to placate, to mollify,
to please whatever god it was
that controlled fortune.
What's unusual is that he would
deem the Christian god
to be this sort of god, a leader
of war, a giver of
victory in battle, a companion
to the emperor.
None of this would seem, at
first glance, to be likely in
Christianity.
The fact that not only does it
work, but that it would work
for centuries later is just part
of the cataclysmic nature
of this event, or if not
cataclysmic, at least
unexpected.
Constantine was not ignorant.
He's someone who had studied
philosophy, who was quite
literate, knew Greek pretty
well, familiar with Latin
literature.
But nevertheless, he was
obviously a man of affairs.
He's not an intellectual,
contemplative person, poring
over philosophy books.
He's a man of power,
decisiveness, strategy, and
not a little cruelty
and brutality.
And we can see that after his
conversion experience--
and indeed, I should point out
he did beat Maxentius--he
accepted the Christian god,
he went to battle with the
usurper, and he defeated him.
But even after his victory, he
doesn't become, in every
respect, a totally committed
Christian at least in terms of
the symbols of power
of his office.
His coins, for example, which
are a very good mark of
propaganda and self-regard, his
coins kept the imagery of
the earlier pagan deity
associated with the emperor,
the Invincible Sun.
After a little while, you start
to see the Invincible
Sun on one side of the coin and
the cross on the other.
And only later in his reign
do we have just the cross.
Constantine's first substantive
act as a Christian
or as someone who favored the
Christian church was the Edict
of Tolerance.
The Edict of Tolerance or Edict
of Toleration issued at
Milan in 313 was jointly the
product of Constantine and
Libanius, now the two
last guys standing.
The Augustus of the East,
Libanius, and Constantine, the
Augustus of the West.
Libanius was a pagan.
He did not share Constantine's
bizarre
enthusiasm, but all right.
If he wanted to tolerate
Christianity, this was fine.
This was part of their--
I'm sorry.
It's not Libanius.
Libanius is a philosopher.
Licinius.
Licinius.
Constantine and Licinius.
Licinius was a pagan, but he was
willing to go along with
toleration.
At this point, Christianity
was legalized.
But in the west, Constantine
came to favor the Church and
do more than merely accept
it as legal.
For example, he returned
property confiscated in the
Diocletianic persecutions.
He exempted the Church from
state taxation, an incredible
gift, and allowed church
officials, bishops and others,
to use the imperial
communications system, the
so-called post system whereby
they could get fresh horses to
go from one place to another,
greatly speeding up their
journeys and making the
journeys, in effect,
chargeable to the state.
Constantine left the pagan and
ceremonial center of Rome
alone, for the time being at
least, and built two great
basilicas on its outskirts.
One, Saint Peter's.
The St. Peter's that stands
today is, of course, a product
of the Renaissance
and the Baroque.
But the old church that was
destroyed in the sixteenth
century was that
of Constantine.
And he also built the
Lateran Basilica.
Both of these outside
the walls of Rome.
As we'll discuss, he also
attempted to mediate in
disputes involving the church.
He never, however, completely
marginalized the old religions.
He emphasized the diversity
of religious practice.
He didn't require a single
form of worship.
But by the time he died in 337,
the pace of conversions
was such that perhaps as much
as half of the Empire had
embraced Christianity.
And this brings us to a crucial
question, of course,
that we'll be discussing
really throughout the
semester, and that is what was
the effect of Constantine's
conversion on the Church?
Or beyond the mere event of 312,
what did it mean for the
Church to go from persecuted
minority
to established majority?
What explains Constantine's
ability not only to change the
course of the Roman religious
practice and tendencies, but
to do so permanently?
For the Church, was this
turnaround a providential sign
or a kind of Trojan horse gift
in which the Church would now
be so tied to the official
culture that it would never be
able to shake off Rome,
administration, and
bureaucracy to get back to its
original, charismatic,
individual, powerful
foundations?
The era of Constantine
establishes the problem of the
Church in the world for
the Middle Ages
and, indeed, beyond.
This problem is is the church a
collection of special people
who have their eyes fixed on
heaven or, is it a kind of
universal society that is hard
to distinguish from just
worldliness and engagement with
the world of business,
life, death, and other
banalities?
It is Saint Augustine who is
going to deal with this most
forcibly in terms of theory, but
that's a century later or
so, well, 75 years later.
Externally, the Church adapted
very quickly to success.
We can see this in terms
of the pace of
conversion, as I said.
Not only were 50% of the people,
perhaps, Christian by
337 when Constantine died, but
by 390, the time of the
Emperor Theodosius and his
death, 395, probably 90% of
the population was at least
nominally Christian.
The reasons for this success.
In other words, how could
Constantine's particular
gesture have such a
decisive impact?
Some of this has to do with
Christianity's willingness to
adopt to the customs
of the Empire.
Some of it may have to do with
the weakness of the official
religion of Rome and of the
urban elites who were its
chief support.
Those who held out against
Christianity were, on the one
hand, people in the rural areas,
so peasants, whose
fundamental beliefs tended to
be directed to agriculture,
local deities, deities that
controlled the weather, and
water, and things like that.
The army, for reasons I've
just said, that is,
Christianity is not, at first
glance, congenial to people
who fight for a living.
And then the third group
that held out were the
intelligentsia, particularly
of Roman and Athens, the
people who had a substantial
cultural investment in Greek
and Roman philosophy,
the intellectual
side of the old elite.
Well, Constantine fell
out with Licinius.
And after some small skirmishes,
Constantine
managed to defeat him
at a place called
Chrysopolis in 324.
Licinius fled from the
battlefield, Constantine's
forces caught up with him, and
Licinius was executed.
This event, this Battle
of Chrysopolis,
important in itself--
P-O-L-I-S--
important in itself was even
more important because it
showed Constantine the
importance of the small
fortress city of Byzantium,
not far away.
Byzantium who is the ancestor
of the city that Constantine
would found there,
Constantinople.
And of course, modern
Istanbul in its
twenty-first century
incarnation.
Byzantium commanded a strategic
point of access
east-west and north-south.
It was the point of access
between the Black Sea and the
Mediterranean.
The Bosphorus is a narrow
strait that
separates Europe from Asia.
Byzantium, Constantinople,
Istanbul stands on the west
bank, the European side, but it
commands and controls the
channel by which anyone would
go from the Mediterranean to
the Black Sea.
And since the Black Sea is the
gateway to central Asia, it,
in effect, controls
communications between two
commercial, strategic,
and military zones.
It also controls the route from
the Balkans, southeastern
Europe, into Asia, into,
specifically in this case,
Asia Minor or the Asian part
of what's now Turkey.
Byzantium is, therefore,
strategically located in terms
of communication and, at the
same time, located so that an
army can get to two of the most
dangerous frontiers of
the Roman empire in a reasonable
amount of time
without having to commit
itself to one
or the other totally.
It is not far from the Danube
frontier, which was, as we
said, one of the points at
which the empire met the
Barbarian tribes and which the
empire had sort of decided on
as its natural frontier.
And Constantinople was also not
that far from the eastern
frontier of the Roman Empire,
the frontier with Persia,
which ran along what's now
eastern Turkey, Armenia,
western Iran, and Iraq.
It was the city, also,
within the
richest part of the empire.
As we said, one of the problems
of the Empire in its
later years, its later centuries
was that the east
was becoming richer, more
urban, more commercial.
The west was lagging behind,
more rural, less successful in
its commerce.
Constantine wanted an eastern
capital for both strategic and
for economic reasons.
For strategic reasons having to
do with the movement of the
armies and the protection
of the frontier.
For economic reasons having
to do with taxation and
administration.
The city of Rome itself was
somewhat isolated, strangely
enough since, of course, the
whole empire had grown up
around Rome.
But Rome was the historical
origin of the Empire, but not,
in the fourth century AD, its
actual living capital.
It would be too much to compare
it, say, to the
relationship between Portugal
and Brazil.
It's not quite that lopsided.
But Brazil is a former
colony of Portugal.
They speak the language
of Portugal.
Yet on the world stage, Brazil
is larger than Portugal, more
important than Portugal, richer
now than Portugal.
So whatever preeminence Portugal
or its capital,
Lisbon, has within the world of
culture, no Brazilian would
take Lisbon to be the be all and
end all of the Portuguese
cultural world.
So similarly, by this time, Rome
has become less important
even within the western
empire.
And this relocation of the
capital to Constantinople, the
relocation of the capital to
the east is significant
because it shows us
the permanent
result of the Tetrarchy.
As we've said, Diocletian's
experiment was a failure in
the sense that the emperors and
caesars would not cooperate.
And such a scheme was
never tried again.
But the division of the Empire
between east and west would be
something that would eventually
become permanent.
Its first traces are with
Diocletian, and that's one
reason why we begin the
course with him.
It is also something that
continues under Constantine
without the addition
of the caesars.
Constantine ruled over
the whole empire.
He did not divide it himself,
but he facilitated its
conceptual, and eventually real,
political division by
creating a new Rome, a new
capital in the former fortress
of Byzantium, a town that he
modestly named after himself.
Constantinople, as this town was
called, was planned to be
a new Rome.
Like Rome, it would have a
forum; it would have civic
spaces; it would have races
and sporting events.
It would have imperial palaces
and gardens; it would have
victory columns, triumphal
arches, aqueducts, the whole
panoply of classical
civilization.
It wouldn't have a whole
lot of temples.
Churches would be more important
than temples, not
that Constantine totally
banned temples from
Constantinople.
But these were not the
highlights of the city.
It is an ideological statement
like other planned, great,
imperial sites.
So we could compare it to, in
the modern world, Saint
Petersburg, created by the czars
as a certain kind of
statement, with a certain kind
of plan, and a certain kind of
look evoking western Europe
in particular.
Or Versailles, not a town at
all, but rather a kind of
palace city fit for the
king of France.
At this point, Constantine
becomes considerably more
devout and somewhat
more intolerant.
We start to see him interact
with the Christian Church in
its most intimate way, that
is to say, doctrine.
Constantine is appealed to by
the Donatists, schismatics--
well, we're calling
them schismatics--
or heretics, as they
were decided to
be, from North Africa.
The Donatists taught that the
priests who had given over the
scriptures under persecution at
the time of Diocletian were
not legitimate priests.
And we'll talk later about
the implications of this.
The implications, briefly, are
that the Church cannot cover
for priests, that the office is
not greater than the man.
If the man has committed a sin,
such as what was called
treason, the handing over
of the scriptures to the
persecutors, he no longer can
baptize validly, he no longer
can perform the sacraments
with validity.
Donatism, then, implies that
the Church itself is really
just as good as the character
of its officials.
The Donatists were strong in
North Africa, and they appeal
to Constantine against decisions
that had been made
against them within
the Church.
The fact that Christians are
appealing to the emperor
already, as early as 317, shows
the acceptance of the
emperor as a Christian
arbiter.
But it also shows a kind of,
in retrospect, dangerous
intermingling of what
we would consider to
be church and state.
Similarly, Constantine would get
involved in controversies
over the relationship between
God, the Father,
and Christ, the Son.
This, too, we'll go into in more
detail, but this is the
Arian heresy--
Arian with an "i,"
not with a "y"--
named after a priest named Arius
who taught that while
Christ is God, he is,
in some sense,
subordinate to God the Father.
This is a controversy over the
nature of the Trinity in which
Christ is seen as coming from
God, as emanating from God.
And as I think I warned at the
beginning of the course, if
you don't like doctrinal and
theological controversy, I'll
try to spare you all its ins and
outs, but you can't teach
this course without it.
Again, what we're talking about
now is not the content
of Arianism, who embraced it,
why, but the fact that the
Emperor gets involved in
these controversies.
On the one hand, this shows the
quick adaptation of the
Church to imperial rule.
On the other hand, because
Constantine was able to solve
neither the Donatist nor the
Arian division, at least not
definitively, and at least not
yet, it shows how difficult it
was for an emperor who could
conquer all of his secular
rivals, who could control this
vast realm from Gibraltar to
the Tigris and Euphrates, but
couldn't get a bunch of North
African peasants to obey his
orders about how to worship or
Egyptian priests either.
Constantine, we can see,
is frustrated by this.
You can see in the reading from
Jones, his difficulties
in dealing with this
in the usual way.
The usual way being the emperor
is petitioned by
people, he appoints some
arbiters or judges, the judges
make a decision, and then the
emperor announces to these
people that that's what
it's going to be.
The problem is that, of course,
people like the
Donatists were already
used to martyrdom.
Threatening them with
imprisonment, threatening them
with torture, denouncing them,
trying to use the awesome,
awe-inspiring power of the
emperor against them was not
going to be sufficient.
Nevertheless, Constantine, far
from abandoning Christianity
in frustration, becomes more and
more engaged in trying to,
if not officially Christianize
the Empire, at least legislate
as a Christian emperor.
By 330, he has come to see
himself not merely as an
emperor who has a kind of
peculiar favor or a peculiar
god that is following him, but
as the implementer of the
mission of the Church.
So for example, he starts
promulgating laws against
married men having
concubines--
ineffective--
or the seduction of wards by
their guardians, or punishing
rape by burning, all orientation
towards sexual
crimes that shows a more
Christian horror of them than
the more easygoing
Roman attitude.
Constantine favors the church,
enacts legislation recommended
by the church, favors the
bishops, and even in the 320s,
presides over the first
ecumenical council of bishops
of the Church called at Nicaea
across the Bosporus from
Constantinople, the Ecumenical
Council of Nicaea called to
deal with the Arian
controversy.
And here, we see Constantine as
something different from an
emperor merely the companion of
Christ or the companion of
God, but the emperor
as, in some
sense, head of the Church.
Constantine appears at the
council, he is deferred to by
the bishops.
Nevertheless, he is not
himself a bishop.
He is not himself, however
imperial the Church may look,
able to legislate by himself
for the church.
Because unlike many
other religions--
and certainly when
we come to Islam,
you'll see the contrast--
the political leader of the
Roman Empire is not the
designated leader of the
religious practice of the
Church because he is not a
priest. Now who is the
designated leader of the church
is not clear yet.
Certainly, it's not yet
the pope in the 320s.
It is the collectivity of
bishops, but in that case,
then some bishops have more
power than others.
Nevertheless, this is the
beginning of an era in which
we have a blending, but not a
total equivalency of secular
rule, imperial rule, on the
one hand, and spiritual or
church rule on the other.
And that's one of the things
that, of course, characterizes
our image of the Middle Ages,
a period in which the church
and the state were overlapping
if not actually fused.
Constantine in relation to
Diocletian, to conclude.
Differences and similarities.
Obviously, their similarities
are great.
Both Diocletian and Constantine
remade the Roman
Empire as a much more tightly
administered state, a more
bureaucratically complicated
state, and a
more militarized state.
Constantine continued
Diocletian's military and
administrative structure.
Like Diocletian, in order to
do this, he had to rely on
very heavy taxation.
If anything, his taxation had
to be greater because he had
exempted the Church and its
clergy, and someone was going
to have to make up
the difference.
But Diocletian had persecuted
the Catholic church, whereas
Constantine would favor it.
And that is, of course,
a crucial difference.
On the other hand, even here
there are some connections.
Under Diocletian, the
emperor was a god.
The emperor was a distantly
glimpsed figure.
He was no longer, even in
pretense, first citizen, guy
just like you and me,
hand-shaker, baby-kisser,
anything like that.
But this was also true
with Constantine.
Constantine, too, had a
ceremonial, distant, and--
because of his association
with the Church--
semi-sacred status.
He couldn't be worshipped as a
god, to be sure, but he was
something a bit more than
merely a follower of
Christianity.
Constantine ended the Tetrarchy,
but he really set
the seal on the division of the
Empire east and west, as
we've just said, by the
establishment of
Constantinople.
And finally, Constantine was
a little more successful
economically.
Diocletian did not have the
means available to Constantine
who had a certain amount from
the old pagan temple treasures
that he was able
to confiscate.
And also, by virtue of his
victory over Licinius, he was
able to rule pretty tightly
over the Empire.
The fourth century often is seen
as a period of decline
because we're focused--
we-- historians are focused on
the collapse of the Roman
Empire in the late
fifth century.
But obviously, people in 337,
the year that Constantine
died, did not know that
in 476 the Western
Empire would collapse.
They did not know that in 410
Visigoths would invade and
plunder the city of Rome, no
more than we have the faintest
idea of what's going to happen
75 or 100 years from now.
From their point of view, the
Empire had been restored.
The Empire, which had been
endangered in the third
century by invasions, inflation,
armed forces out of
control, chaotic imperial
succession, was now stable.
It was clear who the
emperor was.
The barbarians had been pushed
back behind the frontiers.
Trade, culture, civilization
seemingly flourished.
And if we trust the impressions
we have of
contemporaries, both formal,
written work and informal,
things like the slogans that
people put in their dining
room mosaics, for example, good
times had been restored.
This seems to be the
constant theme.
And I emphasize this because,
again, it's a lesson in how
history cannot be seen from
the front backwards.
You can't use hindsight
to tell what
people should have felt.
People in the fourth century
at the time of Constantine
were optimistic.
No more so those people who had
embraced Christianity as
the coming thing, as the
religion of not only truth,
but of success.
What is odd is, of course, that
thus far, Christianity
would have seemed
to be unlikely.
Christianity would have seemed
to be alien from the Empire.
And even if some emperor
embraced it for weird reasons
of its own, his own, it wouldn't
have seemed to have
been the most favorable context
for the preservation
of the Empire.
And indeed, of course, the
Empire would fail in the west
within a century and a half
or so of the embrace of
Christianity.
And it's no surprise, then, that
the English historian of
the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon,
whose Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire sort of sets
the agenda for any course
like this one.
It's no accident that Gibbon
blamed Christianity for the
fall of the Empire.
But indeed, in the fourth
century, it seemed that
Christianity was one
of the forces that
had saved the Empire.
And not only that, as we will
see as this course unfolds,
much of what was preserved from
the debacle of 476 and
successive problems of the
preservation of civilization
would be preserved through
the action of the Church.
Thanks very much.
