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The history of Christianity is so fascinating — a struggle between the ambitions of humans and what we believe to be the guidance of the Divine. In this second and final part of Tom Lee's Chapter 18 we look further into the legacy of Constantine. It recounts the final severing of our links with our Jewish spiritual ancestors and Jerusalem. From now on the Jews would be excoriated in Christianity and we're still sorting that out in our own day.

Consolidation of Church and State – Part 18.2
by Tom Lee

The power play between Constantine and Licinius...

For the next three years Constantine was busy fortifying the frontier cities along the Rhine to keep out would be immigrants, and Licinius continued as emperor in the East, but in 316 Constantine claimed that Licinius was implicated in a plot against his life. It is impossible now to know if a real plot existed or whether it was an excuse concocted so Constantine could act against his only remaining rival.

Licinius moved troops to the frontier between their sectors of the empire, declared that Constantine had been deposed, and appointed his own frontier commander Valens as Augustus in his place. Constantine attacked and won the first battle and Licinius retreated. Constantine pursued and a second indecisive battle was fought. Licinius slipped away northward, giving Constantine an almost unopposed southeastern march to the small but strategically valuable city of Byzantium, which he quickly captured.

Outmaneuvered, Licinius sued for peace, acknowledged Constantine as senior emperor, and deposed and executed Valens, his hapless pawn. By a territorial adjustment most of the Balkan Peninsula was ceded to Constantine. An uneasy accord of friendship was celebrated in 317 by the declaration that the sons of the two emperors were Caesars.

Licinius two-year-old son was the progeny of his Syrian concubine. Constantine's sons were Crispus, whose mother was Minervina, a concubine, and the newborn Constantine junior, born to his wife Fausta. She would provide two more sons and three daughters. The Christian apologist Lactantius was called to Trier by Constantine to be tutor to Crispus. The cleric had granted the pagan Sibyls a Christian respectability by declaring that their prophecies foretold the Virgin Birth, the Passion of Christ, and the Last Judgment.

About the same time Constantine moved his capital eastwards from Sirmium, from whence he had been governing the empire, to Serdica, which was well placed for the surveillance of Licinius' last surviving European outpost in Thrace. Both knew that sooner or later war was inevitable.

Despite his constant military preparedness, his building projects and frequent edicts on civil and religious matters, Constantine kept up a steady stream of letters to North Africa trying to resolve the Donatist's schism. For a time he authorized harassment and attempts at bribery. He finally washed his hands of the matter in 321, making it clear that he did not regard the Donatists as being any longer a part of the Catholic Church.

The birth of Monasticism and Nunneries...

Orthodox icon of St Pachomius the Great — founder of cenobitic monasticism

Meanwhile in central Egypt, Pachomius, known as the father of true monasticism, placed himself, with a few other monks, under the spiritual direction of an anchorite named Palemon at Tabennisi, on the Nile. Pachomius is said to have been a soldier in the imperial army who on being released from service became a Christian. As the community grew, his knowledge of military organization came to the fore. He marshaled the group into a workable system of communal living.

As adherents flocked in, fleeing the doctrinal battles disrupting the cities, a second monastery was established at Pabau and nine more followed, two of them for women, the first nunneries in Egypt. The nuns soon far outnumbered the monks. Both St. Basil the Great and St. Benedict were influenced by Pachomias' written Life and the regulations that he drew up, but the original text of his rule has been lost.

The last known meeting between the original family of Jesus and the Imperial leaders...

A curious sidelight in the year 318 was a visit to Rome by the remaining Jewish-Christian leaders of the family of Jesus from Palestine. The emperor provided sea transport for the eight humble men to the port of Ostia. From there they rode on donkeys into Rome and to the Lateran palace for talks with Pope Sylvester. Unable to understand their Aramaic, and they unable to comprehend his Latin, Sylvester conversed with them in Greek. No record of their talks remains, but one subject would probably have been the fact that they, as Jews, were still forbidden to enter Jerusalem. Emperor Hadrian's ban had never been lifted. A Greek bishop presided there. They might have asked for a lifting of the ban, or even that the Greek bishop be removed and one of their number be elevated. Possibly they asked for financial help. Nothing came of it. It was the last known meeting between the descendants of the original Nazoreans and the imperially approved proto-dictator of the Western Church.

An attempt at this time by some Jews to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem was brutally terminated. Some of the Jewish-Christian priests and bishops survived until the early decades of the fifth century, then one by one they disappeared.

The beginning of the persecution of the Jews under the new order...

Constantine's attitude was uncompromising, and he probably reflected the prevailing mood in the church: "It is unbecoming beyond measure that on the holiest festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people..." From a "distinguished religion" or a "permissible creed" as it had been under the early empire, Judaism now became a "sacrilegious gathering" or a "nefarious sect". It was forbidden to build any new synagogues, referred to in the emperor's edict as "brothels". It became a capital offense to draw outsiders into the Jewish fold, or to restrain Jews tempted to become Christians.

Homosexuality outlawed as well...

Love between men had been a significant element of Greek and Roman civilization — in civic and military life, in education, art and literature. From this time on, Christianity, which first dominated and then suppressed paganism, asserted its anti-homosexual bias through imperial laws and in time reshaped popular morality. Male love was defined as something diabolical and forbidden.

Border tension between the two halves of the empire had been building for seven years before Constantine felt that he had a genuine excuse to attack his adversary. Licinius, still a worshipper of Jupiter, and fearful that his Christian subjects were more loyal to Constantine than himself, began to impose restrictions upon them, encouraged by those resilient and resistant pagans opposed to forcible reorientation. When Constantine forged an alliance with the newly Christianized Armenians, thus encircling Licinius' eastern frontier, Licinius began to move his troops into defensive positions.

Constantine, in 323, moved his armies into Licinius' territory, legitimately to repel a Visigoth incursion on the Danube frontier. For the Eastern emperor, it was the last straw. But Constantine, fighting on a three hundred mile front, against the marauders who had crossed the frozen river, was successful, for the time being. Ultimately it would be seen as a draw. Constantine had threatened that anyone who collaborated with the Germanic invaders would be burnt alive.

Tapestry of the Sea Battle at Hellespont wong by Constantine's son, Crispus.

On July 3, 324 the two emperor's armies clashed outside Hadrianopolis, in one of the biggest battles of the fourth century. Constantine won. Licinius lost 34,000 dead, and many of the survivors deserted. From now on, for Constantine, there followed a series of mopping-up operations. Constantine's son Crispus as an admiral of the fleet, aided by a massive storm, destroyed or captured most of the enemy vessels near the Hellespont.

Licinius was defeated, but would not lie down. In mid September he lost another 30,000 men in battle, with further massive desertions. He fell back to his capital Nicomedia. There, his wife Constantia, the half-sister of Constantine, persuaded him to surrender with the promise of a pardon. Licinius was stripped of all offices and his acts were annulled. In the spring of 325 he was accused of resuming his intrigues. With blood-curdling panache Constantine had Licinius and his ten-year-old son garroted. Ossius of Cordova quietly returned home.

The victory of Constantine's heroic son Crispus at the Hellespont was celebrated on coins and memorials on which he was described as INVICTVS, Unconquered. Crispus' wife Helena had made Constantine a grandfather by giving birth to a son in 322. And yet, a year after Crispus' victory, Constantine, apparently acting on his wife Fausta's allegations of a plot, had his twenty-one year old son arrested, tried and executed.

Fausta was no doubt protecting the future of her own three sons from a strong potential rival. Crispus' name was erased from inscriptions. The facts, if any, behind the charges brought against him, are now beyond recovery. The Christian historians, anxious to extol the emperor who elevated the Church, left an embarrassing blank.

Within a year, a guilty conscience beset the emperor, played on by his Christian advisers. Constantine came to the belief that he had made a disastrous mistake and is said to have erected a golden statue "to the son whom I unjustly condemned".

His vengeance fell on Fausta who had remained a pagan. She was executed either by being immersed in a scalding bath, or suffocated in a deliberately over­heated steam room, in the Constantinian Baths at Trier. The story that she had denounced Crispus because he had rejected her sexual overtures was circulated; and it was claimed, alternatively, that she had committed adultery with a slave in the imperial stables.

Constantine gets sexually righteous...

Perhaps as a result of his personal dramas; about this time Constantine began to issue edicts and directives regarding sexual morality, making it a criminal offense for a married man to take a concubine, for a slave to cohabit with a master or mistress, and severe penalties were enacted against adultery.

The emperor also dispatched his mother Helena on a penitential journey to the Holy Land where she is reputed to have recovered the remains of the True Cross of Jesus. She claimed to have identified most of the major sites associated with the life of Jesus following ecstatic visions. Bear in mind that this was the city built by Hadrian, not the city Jesus had known.

The credulous or perhaps just dutiful son, ordered magnificent churches to be built to house each of the holy places, including one at Bethlehem on the site of Jesus' supposed birthplace. The focal point was the rock­cut grotto where pagan women had come for centuries on a fixed day every year to mourn for the death of Adonis. Regardless of the authenticity or not of Helena's discoveries, the story of her pilgrimage led to a flood of pilgrims from all over the Christian world, eager to view where Jesus had delivered his message. Their influx began to enrich the Church there.

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IMAGE CREDITS: The image of St Anthony the Great used in the footer quote, part of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch was sourced from Wikipedia. The headline image was sourced from a wonderful website of mosaics: www.classicalmosaics.com/ Clicking on the images in the body of the article will take you to the original source.

Tom Lee is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

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©2009 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409

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