Constantine and His Favors to Christians
By Editor
MOSHEIM was not wont to speak harshly of Constantine, yet he speaks as follows of his favors to the Christians for which a few have been willing to think that he was a true believer in their religion:— “Constantine, therefore, in obedience to the commands of his father, as he himself admits, in his edict, preserved by Eusebius, wished to be accounted a worshiper of the one God. And yet, when occasion seemed to require it, and lest he should alienate the minds of the people and soldiers from him, he supplicated the gods, gave thanks to them, and offered them sacrifices and gifts. . . . Such being the character of Constantine, before his conversion to Christianity, I fully believe that the favors he conferred on the Christians, from the very commencement of his reign, did not proceed either from his humanity and justice, or from any love for the Christian religion, but were owing solely to his desire to establish his own authority in the empire.”—His. Com., p. 450. Stanley, in harmony with his quotation from Niebuhr, makes this excuse, that Constantine’s life “describes the religion of many in that time;” yet this affords no great relief to the dark picture which his life presents, for it was his patronage of the church, his secularization of Christianity, hiding its inherent simplicity under the pomp of his court, and enforcing conformity with all the weight of imperial power, which led to the very things to be condemned in the bishops as well as in himself. For it cannot be shown that this was the state of the church before he made Christianity subservient to his own ambition. And Stanley himself proves all this, as the following shows:— “His leading idea was to restore peace to the church, as he had restored it to the empire. [His object was to preserve the peace of the empire.] In the execution of this idea two courses of action presented themselves to him, as they have to all ecclesiastical statesmen ever since. . . . In him both the latitudinarian and the persecutor may find their earliest precedents. . . . No scheme of comprehension has been broader, on the one hand, than that put forward in his letter of advice to Alexander and Arius; and on the other, when this failed, he still pursued the same end, with the same tenacity, by the directly opposite means of enforcing uniformity, to us long familiar, but first introduced by him into the church, the hitherto unknown practice of subscription to the articles of a written creed, and the infliction of civil penalties on those who refused to conform.”—Stanley, pp. 294, 295. This testimony makes Constantine the instigator of the Nicene creed, and goes to show that the Inquisition was built upon the foundation laid by him. Certainly the legacy which he left to the church does not entitle him to the reverence of those who love Christianity in its purity, and we are led to marvel at the credulity of those who style him “the first Christian Emperor.” Had his life been marked with the practice of Christian morals, we could give him credit for sincerity of heart even in introducing such roots of evil into the church. Marsh speaks as follows:— “The sincerity of the man, who in a short period effected such amazing changes in the religious world, is best known to him who searches the heart. Certain it is that his subsequent life furnished no evidence of conversion to God. He waded without remorse through seas of blood, and was a most tyrannical prince.”—Marsh’s Eccl. Hist., period 3, chap. 5. It will not be considered out of place to give the testimony of Gibbon, who speaks only in harmony with that of so many reliable Christian authors:— “Crispus, the eldest son of Constantine, and the presumptive heir of the empire, is represented, by impartial historians, as an amiable and accomplished youth. . . . He deserved the esteem, and he engaged the affections of the court, the army, and the people. “This dangerous popularity soon excited the attention of Constantine, who, both as a father and as a king, was impatient of an equal. Instead of attempting to secure the allegiance of his son by the generous ties of confidence and gratitude, he resolved to prevent the mischiefs which might be apprehended from dissatisfied ambition. . . . By all the allurements of honors and rewards, he invites informers of every degree to accuse without exception his magistrates or ministers, his friends or his most intimate favorites, protesting with a solemn assertion, that he himself will listen to the charge, that he himself will revenge his injuries. “The informers, who complied with so liberal an invitation, were sufficiently versed in the arts of courts to select the friends and adherents of Crispus as the guilty persons; nor is there any reason to distrust the veracity of the emperor, who had promised an ample measure of revenge and punishment. The policy of Constantine maintained, however, the same appearance of regard and confidence toward a son, whom he began to consider as his most irreconcilable enemy. . . . The time was now arrived for celebrating the august ceremony of the twentieth year of the reign of Constantine; and the emperor, for that purpose, removed his court from Nicomedia to Rome, where the most splendid preparations had been made for his reception. Every eye, and every tongue, affected to express their sense of the general happiness, and the veil of ceremony and dissimulation was drawn for a while over the darkest designs of revenge and murder. In the midst of the festival, the unfortunate Crispus was apprehended by order of the emperor, who laid aside the tenderness of a father, without assuming the equity of a judge. The examination was short and private; and it was thought decent to conceal the fate of the young prince from the eyes of the Roman people; he was sent under a strong guard to Pola, in Istra, where soon afterward he was put to death, either by the hand of the executioner, or by the more gentle operation of poison. The Cæsar Licinius, a youth of amiable manners, was involved in the ruin of Crispus; and the stern jealousy of Constantine was unmoved by the prayers and tears of his favorite sister, pleading for the life of a son whose rank was his only crime, and whose loss she did not long survive. The story of these unhappy princes, the nature and evidences of their guilt, the forms of their trial, and the circumstances of their death, were buried in mysterious obscurity; and the courtly bishop, who has celebrated in an elaborate work the virtues and piety of his hero, observes a prudent silence on the subject of these tragic events.”—Pp. 158–161, chap. 18. The following remark of Gibbon is neither harsh nor uncharitable considering the occasion of it:— “According to the strictness of ecclesiastical language, the first of the Christian emperors was unworthy of that name.”—P. 249. Neander, the justly celebrated church historian, is not a whit behind Gibbon in his condemnation of the life of Constantine. He does not hesitate to ascribe his acts in favor of Christianity to deception and a lust for power. He says:— “Constantine must indeed have been conscious that he was striving, not so much for the cause of God, as for the gratification of his own ambition and love of power; and that such acts of perfidy, mean revenge, or despotic jealousy, as occurred in his political course, did not well befit an instrument and servant of God, such as he claimed to be considered; but there was here the same lamentable self-deception, the same imposition upon one’s own conscience, which is so often to be seen in the mighty of the earth who wear religion as their motto, and which, in their case, so easily insinuates itself and gains the mastery, because it is so difficult for truth to find its way through the trappings of pomp which surround them; because they are approached by so many who, blinded themselves, dazzled by this splendor, blind them still more in return; and because no one has ever got access to them who had the impartiality or the courage to discover to them the cheat, and teach them how to distinguish between outward show and truth. Thus was it with Constantine. And what wonder that he should proceed under such a delusion, when even Eusebius, one of the best among the bishops at his court, is so dazzled by what the emperor had achieved for the outward extension and splendor of the church, as to be capable of tracing to the purest motives of a servant of God, all the acts which a love of power that would not brook a rival, had, at the expense of truth and humanity, put into the heart of the emperor in the war against Licinius; and of even going so far as to represent him as giving out the orders of battle by a special divine inspiration, bestowed in answer to his prayers, in a war that beyond all question had been undertaken on no other grounds than those of a selfish policy.”—Pp. 22, 23, vol. 2. The testimonies thus far presented speak of his life in such general terms as to cover the periods both before and after his reputed conversion. We now offer a few which speak more particularly of the latter part of his life, after his profession of faith in Christianity. Neander relates as a fact, to which many have referred, that he embraced the faith of the Christians because the bishops offered him that consolation which the pagan priests, on account of the enormity of his crimes, refused to give him. These are the words of Neander:— “When at length he began to feel the reproaches of conscience, he inquired of the Platonic philosopher, Sopatros, or, according to others, of heathen priests, what he could do to atone for his crimes. It was replied to him that there was no lustration for such atrocious conduct. At that time an Egyptian bishop from Spain became known at the palace, through the ladies of the court. He said to the emperor that in the Christian faith he could find a remedy for every sin; and this promise, which soothed the conscience of Constantine, first led him to declare decidedly in favor of Christianity.” With these facts before us, we do not wonder at the estimate put upon his Christianity by Neander in the following words:— “It is most probable that, carrying his heathen superstition into Christianity, he looked upon baptism as a sort of rite for the magical removal of sin, and so delayed it, in the confidence that although he had not lived an exemplary life, he might yet in the end be enabled to enter into bliss, purified from all his sins.”—Church History, p. 29.