Constantine and the Christian Empire

In less than a century, the Church passed from hiding into the open, then to the first rank of the Roman Empire. Long hunted, she became free, then public, then recognized as the religion of the State. This reversal, bound to the name of the emperor Constantine, transformed everything: the place of the Church in the world, her relations with power, and even the perils that threatened her.

Constantine’s Turn

In 312, on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge, at the gates of Rome, where he faced his rival Maxentius for the throne, Constantine had, according to the ancient account, the vision of a sign of light bearing these words: by this sign you will conquer. He then had the chi-rho traced on his soldiers’ shields, the monogram formed of the first two Greek letters of the name of Christ; he conquered, and attributed his victory to the God of the Christians. The following year, by the Edict of Milan, he granted everyone freedom of worship and ended the persecutions, restoring to the Christians their places of prayer and their confiscated goods. He then heaped favors on the Church: he had great basilicas built, exempted the clergy from certain burdens, gave Sunday a public rest. When Arianism divided the Church, it was he who summoned the council of Nicaea to restore unity. Following a widespread custom of his time, he put off baptism until his deathbed. He founded at last, in the East, a new and Christian capital that bore his name, Constantinople.

A Religion Become Public

Freedom changed the face of the Church. Worship, long hidden in houses, unfolded in vast churches raised at Rome, at Jerusalem, at Bethlehem, over the tombs of the apostles and the martyrs. Pilgrimages opened toward the holy places. The Church could organize in the open, often modeling her districts on those of the Empire, the dioceses. What the faith had said in secret, it could now say before all, and begin to mark the laws and manners of the city.

The Christian Empire

The movement was completed under Theodosius who, in 380, made the faith of Nicaea the official religion of the Empire; the pagan cults receded and were then forbidden. So was born what is called Christendom: a society where faith and public life are henceforth interwoven, where one is born a Christian as one is born a subject of the Empire, where Church and State sustain each other. For centuries, the West will live within this frame.

The Peril of an Enslaved Church

This alliance had its dark side. In protecting the Church, power was tempted to govern her. Several emperors meddled in doctrine, and many supported Arianism, deposing and exiling the bishops faithful to Nicaea. The most unshakeable of these defenders, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, was driven from his see five times by emperors won over to the heresy, so that his constancy passed into a proverb: Athanasius against the whole world. They readily treated the Church as a department of the State. This claim of the prince to rule the faith, strong above all in the East, will later be called Caesaropapism. The danger was real: a Church subject to the throne would have ceased to be free to proclaim the truth, even against the prince.

The most powerful of these emperors was Constantius II, son of Constantine himself: master of the whole Empire, he governed the Church for a quarter of a century, gathered and directed councils to have Arian formulas signed there, and sent into exile the bishops who held for Nicaea. He could say, it is reported, that his will stood in place of the Church’s law.

Ambrose and the Emperor

Against this peril rose Ambrose, bishop of Milan. When the emperor Theodosius, in 390, after a riot that had killed the garrison commander, had about seven thousand inhabitants of Thessalonica summoned to the circus and slaughtered without trial, Ambrose barred him from the church and from communion until he should do public penance for his crime. The emperor bowed and asked pardon. The scene fixed a principle that will run through the whole of Christian history: the emperor himself is under God and under the moral law, and the Church is not the servant of the State. The freedom of the Church before power had found its symbol.

An Ambiguous Legacy

Constantine’s turn was at once a deliverance and a trial. It gave the faith freedom, peace, and soon a whole civilization shaped by the Gospel. But it also bound her to earthly power in a way that would bring, by turns, greatness and compromise. The Church learned little by little to live within the Empire without belonging to it, to receive its support without letting herself be governed by it. And when the prince forgot this, there remained the memory of the martyrs, who had preferred to die rather than obey the emperor against God: the measure of every faithful Christendom.

The peril was not only political. When it became advantageous to be a Christian, the faith drew crowds who lacked the fervor of the times of persecution, and the life of the Church risked dissolving into that of the world. It was in reaction that men and women set out to seek God alone in the desert: monasticism was born to keep, within a wholly baptized society, the radical demand of the Gospel.