Justified True Belief

(●) The emperor who stopped the persecution, called the council that produced the Nicene Creed, and tied the church to the state for the next sixteen centuries. + In February 303 the emperor Diocletian ordered the churches of the empire pulled down and the Christian Scriptures burned. A young officer named Constantine was at that court, close enough to watch it happen. Twenty-two years later the same man, by then master of the Roman world, was paying the travel costs of bishops from Spain to Persia so that they could sit together in a lakeside town and settle what the church believed about Jesus Christ. Some of those bishops, the later church historians say, arrived with hands crippled and eyes put out by the persecution he had watched begin. That reversal is the reason he is on a Christian shelf. Nothing else in the history of the church happened so fast or changed so much. Within one lifetime the faith went from a capital offence to the religion the emperor professed, its clergy exempt from the civic burdens that a Roman town laid on its better-off men (the unpaid local offices, the bills for roads and public works), its buildings paid for out of the treasury, its Scriptures copied at state expense, and its Sunday written into Roman law as a day of rest. The trouble is that the same reversal is the reason he is argued about. Constantine had his eldest son executed and his wife died within months of it, and nobody has ever explained why. He put off his own baptism until he was dying. He exiled bishops when they would not sign, and he kept the pagan office of chief priest of Rome to the end of his life. Christians have been trying ever since to say what the church gained that day and what it lost, and no honest account of him can hand you only one of the two.

(●) c. 272 to 305 AD: Born to a rising officer and a woman of no family, he grew up at the court that ordered the Great Persecution. + Constantine was born at Naissus, a garrison town in the Balkans that is now Niš in Serbia, around 272. The year is an estimate; ancient writers disagree, and the range scholars will defend runs from about 272 into the 280s. His father, Constantius, was a career soldier climbing the ladder of a shaken empire. His mother, Helena, came from nowhere at all: the Christian writer Ambrose, preaching at Milan in 395, calls her a stabularia, a woman who worked at an inn or a posting station, and turns the word into a compliment by saying Christ raised her from the dung heap to a throne. Whether Constantius ever married her or simply lived with her was disputed even in antiquity, and around 289, when a better match was offered, he set her aside. The empire that this family was climbing in had nearly come apart, and Diocletian put it back together by dividing it. From 293 there were four rulers at once, two senior emperors called Augusti and two juniors called Caesars, an arrangement modern historians call the tetrarchy, the rule of four. Constantine’s father was one of the four, which is how the son came to be sent east, to the court at Nicomedia in what is now Turkey. He served there with distinction, and everyone at that court understood the other half of the arrangement perfectly well: a promising young man living under a rival ruler’s roof is also a guarantee of his father’s good behaviour. So he was there in February 303 when the order came down. Soldiers pulled down the church that stood in sight of the palace at Nicomedia and burned its books, and the edicts that followed stripped Christians of legal standing, arrested the clergy, and finally required every subject of the empire to sacrifice to the gods. Christians afterwards called it the Great Persecution, and the name is deserved: it was the longest and most systematic attempt the Roman state ever made to end the Christian faith, and it failed. Whatever Constantine came to believe later, he had seen at close range what force does to a conviction it cannot reach, and he had seen it not work.

(●) 306 AD: His father died at York, and the army proclaimed him emperor before the funeral was over. + In 305 Diocletian did something no Roman emperor had done: he retired, and made his colleague retire with him. The juniors moved up, and Constantius became one of the two senior emperors. Constantine got himself out of the eastern court and rode west to join his father, who was campaigning in Britain. Lactantius, writing within a few years, says he stripped the post stations of their horses as he went, the post stations being the government relay houses set along the great roads where a courier swapped a tired mount for a fresh one, so that nobody could follow him; a later account has him killing the animals outright. Constantius died at Eboracum, the legionary fortress that is now York, on 25 July 306. The army did not wait for the paperwork. It put the purple, the dyed cloak that in Rome only an emperor wore, on his son and hailed him Augustus on the spot, which was not how the tetrarchy was supposed to work at all. The senior emperor in the east, Galerius, was furious and offered a compromise: Constantine could be a Caesar, a junior. Constantine took the title and kept the army. He was about thirty-four, in command of Britain, Gaul and Spain, and the next six years went the way they went for any Roman emperor who intended to stay alive. He fought the Franks on the Rhine. He watched four rivals rise and fall, and in Italy one of them rose and stayed up: Maxentius, the son of the retired emperor Maximian, took Rome and held it.

(●) 312 AD: He marched on Rome under a sign he said had been given him, and won at the Milvian Bridge. + In the autumn of 312 Constantine crossed the Alps with an army that every professional judged too small and moved down the peninsula toward Rome. On 28 October the two armies met at the Milvian Bridge, the crossing of the Tiber just north of the city. Maxentius had broken the bridge and thrown a boat bridge beside it; when his line gave way, the improvised crossing collapsed under the retreat and he drowned in the river with a good part of his army. What everyone remembers is what happened before the battle, and two accounts of it survive that do not match. Lactantius, a Christian scholar writing within two or three years, says simply that Constantine was warned in a dream to mark the heavenly sign of God on his soldiers’ shields, and did. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing after the emperor’s death more than twenty years later, gives the version everyone quotes: that Constantine told him under oath that he and his whole army had seen a cross of light above the sun in the early afternoon sky, carrying the words Conquer by this, and that Christ appeared to him in a dream that night to explain it. Which leaves two witnesses to weigh against each other, and they are not the same kind of witness. Lactantius is early, brief, and mentions no vision in the sky at all. Eusebius is late and elaborate, and he says he had the story from Constantine himself, under oath. What the two do agree on is that a sign was involved and that it was Christian. Whatever a reader concludes about the sky, the change in behaviour is not in question: from that campaign onward the emperor’s public reasoning is Christian, and the arch the Senate voted him three years later, which still stands beside the Colosseum, credits the victory not to Jupiter but to "the prompting of the divinity," in a phrase carefully vague enough for pagan senators to read their own way.

(●) 313 AD: At Milan he and his eastern colleague made worship free for every subject of the empire. + In February 313 Constantine met Licinius, who ruled the Balkans, at Milan. Licinius married Constantine’s half-sister, and the two men agreed a religious policy that Licinius published as a letter to his governors that summer. It is conventionally called the Edict of Milan, though strictly it was neither an edict nor issued at Milan; what survives are the letters that carried it, one copied out by Lactantius in Latin and one by Eusebius in Greek. Two years earlier the dying Galerius, the emperor who had pressed the persecution hardest, had already called it off, admitting in a bitter document that the Christians had simply refused to be broken and might as well pray for the state. Milan went much further. It granted free choice of religion to Christians and to everyone else alike, and then it did the expensive thing: it ordered the confiscated property returned, the meeting places and the holdings that congregations had owned as bodies rather than as individuals, at once and without charge to the churches, with compensation from the treasury for whoever had bought them in good faith. That second half is what makes it a hinge rather than a gesture. Toleration can be revoked with a sentence. Handing back the deeds is a different order of thing, because it means the state has recognised the church as a body that can own property, go to court, and be left alone, and within a decade, when Licinius turned on the Christians in his own half of the empire, Constantine had both a grievance and a cause.

(●) 324 AD: He destroyed his last rival and became sole ruler of the Roman world. + The alliance with Licinius lasted about as long as such alliances did. There was an inconclusive war in 316, an uneasy decade, and then a final campaign in 324: a hard-fought battle at Adrianople in July, a naval action in the Dardanelles, and a last defeat at Chrysopolis, across the water from the city Constantine would soon build. Licinius surrendered on terms. Constantia, his wife and Constantine’s half-sister, begged for his life and got it. The following year her husband was charged with plotting and executed anyway, and Licinius’ young son was killed soon after. For the first time in forty years one man ruled from Britain to the Euphrates, and that man was a professed Christian. What he found when he looked at the eastern provinces was not one church but several churches at war. In North Africa a rigorist party called the Donatists, named for their bishop Donatus, had split from the rest of the church. Rigorists are Christians who will not soften a standard, and the standard at issue was purity in the clergy: the split was over whether clergy who had handed the Scriptures over to be burned during the persecution could ever be trusted with the things of God again. They had refused every settlement Constantine offered them for a decade. In Egypt the quarrel was about the faith itself. A presbyter of Alexandria named Arius, a presbyter being an elder who ranked under a bishop and had the care of a congregation of his own, was teaching that the Son of God, though before all worlds, was a creature the Father had made, and half the eastern bishops were taking sides. Constantine sent his most trusted churchman, the Spanish bishop Hosius of Cordoba, to Alexandria with a letter telling both parties to stop. Hosius came back and told him the quarrel was not going to stop.

(●) 325 AD: He summoned the bishops to Nicaea, paid their way, and would not let them go home divided. + The invitation went out under the imperial post, the same chain of roads and relay houses that carried government despatches, which meant in plain terms that the state paid the fare and the lodging for every man who came. Bishops came from Egypt, Syria, Asia, Greece, the Balkans, one from Persia beyond the frontier, a handful from the Latin West, and two presbyters sent by the bishop of Rome. Eusebius, who was there, says more than two hundred and fifty; the number the church has remembered ever since is three hundred and eighteen. They met at Nicaea in Bithynia, a short ride from the imperial residence, from 20 May 325, the emperor arriving some weeks later to open the council in person. Eusebius describes the emperor coming in like a figure out of a vision, glittering, and waiting to be asked before he sat down. What Constantine wanted was agreement, and he was prepared to be useful to get it. Then the assembly deadlocked, and it deadlocked for a reason that shaped everything after it. Every phrase the majority proposed came straight out of Scripture, and every one of them Arius’ supporters could sign with a straight face and go home reading it their own way. So a word from outside Scripture was put into the creed instead, one nobody could sign and still mean what Arius meant: homoousios, "of one substance," meaning that whatever the Father is, the Son is, not a lesser thing made at the beginning. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing home to explain his own signature, reports that the emperor himself pressed for the word. Nearly everyone signed. Arius and two Libyan bishops would not, and were exiled. What was settled and what was not are two different things, though, and the difference matters. The creed of 325 said the thing that had to be said, and the church has been saying it ever since; but the fight over it ran on for another fifty-six years, through exiles and reversals on both sides, and Constantine himself would recall Arius from banishment and send the creed’s fiercest defender, Athanasius, into exile before he died.

(●) 326 AD: He had his eldest son put to death, and his wife died within months. + Crispus was Constantine’s son by his first partner, Minervina, a young man in his twenties who had commanded the fleet in the war against Licinius and had coins struck in his honour. In 326, while the court was travelling to Rome for the twentieth anniversary of his father’s reign, Crispus was arrested and executed at Pola in Istria. Within a few months Fausta, Constantine’s wife of nearly twenty years and the mother of his three younger sons, was dead too; the ancient reports say she was killed, one of them describing a bath heated until it suffocated her. Their names were struck from public inscriptions. Why he did it, nobody knows, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The pagan historian Zosimus, writing nearly two centuries later and hostile throughout, says Crispus died on a suspicion of adultery with his stepmother, and that Constantine, pressed by his mother’s grief, then had Fausta shut in the bath. The familiar version, in which Fausta laid a false charge against Crispus and was killed once her husband saw through it, comes from Byzantine writers later still. Others in antiquity guessed at a conspiracy, or at a pregnancy. Eusebius, who wrote a whole book in praise of the man and had every reason to keep quiet, keeps quiet: Crispus simply disappears from his pages. What we have are the executions themselves and a silence around them. The chronology matters for a different reason. Both deaths fall in the year after Nicaea, in the middle of the reign that Christians would later hold up as the model of a godly one, and eleven years before his baptism. Whatever else the church took from Constantine, it never got a saint’s life out of him without leaving this out.

(●) 330 to 337 AD: He dedicated a Christian capital, was baptized as he lay dying, and was buried among the apostles. + On 11 May 330 he dedicated the old Greek town of Byzantium, rebuilt on a scale to rival Rome, as his new capital. It kept a few pagan monuments, hauled in from across the empire to furnish it, but it was founded with churches rather than a temple at its heart, and it would be the seat of Christian emperors for eleven hundred years. His mother Helena, by then in her seventies and a Christian, made a journey through Palestine in these years, and churches rose over the cave at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives at her son’s expense. The great basilica over the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, ordered around 326, was dedicated in 335; a basilica was simply the long pillared hall a Roman city used for its law courts and its business, and the church borrowed the shape because it was the one building Romans already had that held a crowd. The story that Helena discovered the cross itself is told by nobody until Ambrose preached it at Milan in 395, sixty years after that dedication, and Eusebius, who described the excavation of the tomb in detail, never mentions it. In the spring of 337, preparing a Persian campaign, Constantine fell ill at a spa near Nicomedia. He had put off baptism for twenty-five years, a common enough choice at the time among people who thought of it as the washing that dealt with a lifetime’s sins and wanted it as late as possible. He said he had hoped to be baptized in the Jordan, and would settle for this. The bishop who baptized him was Eusebius of Nicomedia, a friend of Arius and no friend of the creed of 325, which is one of the small ironies history declines to tidy up. He laid aside the purple, wore white, and died on 22 May 337, at about sixty-five. They carried him to Constantinople and buried him in the Church of the Holy Apostles, in a tomb he had prepared for himself among twelve memorials to the twelve apostles. It was a startling place for an emperor to ask to lie, and a fair summary of the ambition of the whole reign.

What He Taught

(T1) One supreme God rules over all, and the safety of the state hangs on standing right with him. + Every Roman before Constantine took for granted that religion was a public utility. The gods kept the harvests coming and the frontiers quiet, and the rites were maintained the way a city maintains its aqueducts: not as a private taste but as infrastructure everyone depends on. That is why persecution made sense to the men who ordered it. A group that would not sacrifice was not exercising a preference, it was sabotaging the water supply. Constantine never abandoned that framework. He inverted it. There is one God above all, he reasoned, the one the Christians worship, and the empire’s peace depends on his favour rather than on the old rites. Everything else follows from that one move: the money for churches, the exemptions for clergy, the anxiety about a divided church, the sense that a doctrinal quarrel in Alexandria was an imperial emergency. When he explains himself in his own letters he is perfectly consistent about it, and he explains his own success the same way, as a debt owed to a God who backed him. For Christians this is the most double-edged thing he believed. He was right that there is one God over all and that nations answer to him. But a God who is valued for what he does for the state is being fitted into a slot the old gods used to fill, and the prophets of Israel spent centuries telling kings that this is not what the Lord is for.

(Q) "To grant both to the Christians and to all men freedom to follow the religion which they choose, that whatever heavenly divinity exists may be propitious to us and to all that live under our government." + Source: the Milan agreement of 313, as preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History X.5.4 (McGiffert translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series). This clause is the reason the document gives for granting religious freedom to everyone. The wording is studiously open: not Christ by name, but whatever divine power there is, whose goodwill the state cannot afford to lose. Constantine is arguing for toleration on grounds a pagan governor could accept and act on (T1). The Latin copy that Lactantius kept says the same thing a shade more plainly, asking "that that God, who is seated in heaven, might be benign and propitious to us."

(T2) Faith cannot be forced, because a man has to walk toward immortality on his own feet. + Here is the part of Constantine that gets left out of both the hero version and the villain version. Having won the whole empire in the name of Christ, he did not make anyone else a Christian. He wrote to the eastern provinces, freshly taken from a persecutor, telling the pagans among them to keep their temples if they wished and asking only that nobody be harassed either way. Sacrifice was discouraged at court and eventually restricted, temple treasures were stripped for his building projects, and he was rude about the old religion in public; but the empire he left in 337 was still mostly pagan, and it was legally free to be. The reason he gives is worth hearing, because it is a theological reason and not a political one. Salvation is a contest a person enters willingly. Frighten someone into the ring and you have not gained a believer, you have gained a frightened man, and the God who is worth worshipping is not served by that. It is the same insight the persecuted Christians of the previous century had been shouting from the dock: Tertullian had written in Africa a century earlier that it is no part of religion to compel religion. Two honest qualifications belong beside that. The first is that he did not extend the freedom to Christians he thought had left the road: he closed the meeting houses of groups he judged heretical, meaning bodies whose teaching the wider church had ruled to be outside the faith rather than merely a difference of custom, he confiscated their books, and he exiled bishops who would not sign at Nicaea. The second is that the exemption ran out under his sons, who banned pagan sacrifice outright. The principle he stated is better than the practice he kept, which is a thing that can be said about most people and is worth saying plainly about him.

(Q) "For it is one thing voluntarily to undertake the conflict for immortality, another to compel others to do so from the fear of punishment." + Source: Constantine, letter to the eastern provincials, in Eusebius, Life of Constantine II.60 (Richardson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series). Written in 324, just after the defeat of Licinius, to provinces that had been under a persecutor weeks before. In the same letter he tells the pagans that those who hold back may keep their shrines if they insist, and asks that no one molest his neighbour over it (T2).

(T3) A church divided against itself must settle the matter in council, and the emperor’s task is to get the bishops into one room. + Christians had held councils before, local gatherings of neighbouring bishops going back to the second century, and they had settled a good deal that way. What no one had been able to do was gather the whole church at once, because the whole church lived in a state that would have arrested it for trying. Constantine could do it, and his instinct every time a quarrel reached him was to do it: a council at Rome in 313 for the African dispute, a larger one at Arles in 314, and then Nicaea. His own reading of the Arian controversy was that it was a squabble over a technical point that never should have been raised in public and could be dropped by two reasonable men. He was wrong about that, and the next century proved it; the question of whether Jesus Christ is God or the highest of God’s creatures is not a technicality, and the bishops who fought over it knew what was at stake better than he did. But being wrong about the size of the question did not stop him being right about the remedy. Get them together, at state expense, and make them face each other until they produce a common answer. The habit outlasted him by far. Six more councils would be recognised across the ancient church as speaking for it, every one of them summoned by an emperor, and the creed that comes out of the first two is still recited on Sunday mornings by Christians who could not name a single emperor of Rome.

(Q) "Having made a careful enquiry into the origin and foundation of these differences, I find the cause to be of a truly insignificant character, and quite unworthy of such fierce contention." + Source: Constantine, letter to Alexander of Alexandria and Arius, in Eusebius, Life of Constantine II.68 (Richardson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series). Carried to Egypt by Hosius of Cordoba in 324, before the council. The emperor tells the bishop and the presbyter that they have quarrelled over a question that should never have been asked aloud, and asks them to forgive each other and get on with it. It did not work, and Nicaea followed within the year (T3).

(T4) The emperor is a bishop too, appointed by God over everyone the church cannot reach. + A bishop, in the Greek of the New Testament, is an episkopos, an overseer: the man responsible for watching over a flock. Entertaining bishops at his own table one evening, Constantine told them that he was one as well, with a different congregation. They oversaw the people inside the church. He had been given charge of everybody else. Read one way this is modest, and it may be how he meant it. He is not claiming to consecrate anyone, to set a man apart for the ministry by the laying on of hands, and he is not claiming to define doctrine. He is saying that a Christian ruler is answerable to God for the pagans, the soldiers, the tax collectors and the slaves of an empire that has never heard a sermon, and that this is a pastoral job and not merely an administrative one. Some of his laws read exactly like that: a man could free his slaves in church before the congregation with the same legal force as a magistrate’s ceremony, the branding of criminals on the face was forbidden because the face carries the likeness of God, and the courts of the bishops were given standing in civil disputes. Read another way it is the whole problem in a sentence. Once the emperor is a bishop of any kind, the distance between the throne and the altar is a matter of his goodwill. His sons and successors would summon councils, depose bishops and enforce creeds as a matter of course, and the church would spend the next thousand years working out what to do when the man with the army has views about the Trinity.

(Q) "You are bishops whose jurisdiction is within the Church: I also am a bishop, ordained by God to overlook whatever is external to the Church." + Source: Constantine, reported in Eusebius, Life of Constantine IV.24 (Richardson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series). Eusebius sets the remark at a dinner the emperor gave for bishops, and reports it as something he said in their hearing rather than a written decree. It is among the most quoted sentences Constantine ever spoke, and historians still argue about how much weight it will bear (T4).

(Q) "I have thought it expedient to instruct your Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures, the provision and use of which you know to be most needful for the instruction of the Church, to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers thoroughly practised in their art." + Source: Constantine, letter to Eusebius of Caesarea, in Eusebius, Life of Constantine IV.36 (Richardson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series). Fifty complete Bibles for the churches of his new capital, on the best parchment, made by the best copyists, at government expense, with carriages provided to deliver them. Twenty-five years earlier the same state had been feeding Christian books into fires. Whether any of the fifty survives is one of the standing questions of manuscript scholarship, and the two oldest Greek Bibles left to us, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, have been proposed as candidates without anything like proof.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Eusebius drew him as the pattern of a Christian ruler, and the East kept that portrait for a thousand years. + The man who had watched the persecution at close range, and whose own teacher Pamphilus was beheaded for the faith in 310, lived to give the thirtieth-anniversary speech for the emperor who ended it, and he did not hold back. In the Life of Constantine, written just after his death, Eusebius presents him as a second Moses, raised in the tyrant’s own household and sent to lead God’s people out; the reign becomes a chapter of sacred history and the empire becomes the peace that lets the gospel travel. That portrait shaped the eastern half of Christendom permanently. The Byzantine emperors who followed him were crowned into a role he had defined, and the Greek, Slavic and other Eastern churches honour Constantine and his mother Helena together to this day with the title isapostolos, "equal to the apostles," the rank reserved for those who brought whole nations to the faith. A caution belongs with the compliment, and Eusebius half admits it himself: he says openly that he will pass over what does not edify. A biography written by a grateful beneficiary, published after the subject is safely dead, is a source to be read with the eyes open. Almost everything warm in the ancient portrait comes from him, and almost everything ugly comes from writers who hated Constantine for other reasons.

(†) The council he called gave the church a creed it still says out loud. + Whatever a Christian thinks of Constantine, this much is his doing in the plain sense that it would not have happened without him. Nicaea was possible because one man could pay for it and compel attendance, and what came out of it has outlasted every institution in the room. Revised and expanded at Constantinople in 381, the creed of Nicaea is recited every Sunday by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans and a good many others, and it is one of the few sentences the divided churches of the world still say in unison. It also fixed a method. The church had always argued from Scripture and from what it had been taught; from 325 it had a way of putting a disputed question to representatives of the whole church and treating the answer as binding. Six further councils would be received across the ancient church on that pattern, running down to 787, and every branch of Christendom that traces its theology through them is standing on a floor Constantine laid. He is not the author of the doctrine, and the popular story in which an emperor sat down and invented the deity of Christ at Nicaea has the thing backwards. The bishops at Nicaea were arguing about texts that were nearly three hundred years old, and men had already died over the answer. What Constantine supplied was the room, the road money, and the refusal to let them leave without one.

(†) Augustine took the obvious lesson away from him, and Christians have argued about the settlement ever since. + By the time Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God, a century after the Milvian Bridge, Rome had been sacked and pagans were saying it happened because the old gods had been dropped. Augustine had a delicate job: he wanted to praise Constantine without conceding the premise that God pays his friends in victories. So he grants the whole list of Constantine’s earthly blessings, a long reign, a peaceful death, sons to succeed him, and then turns the list around on the reader. God gave those gifts, he says, so that nobody could suppose a man had to worship demons in order to get them. And then, so that no emperor would turn Christian merely to obtain the happiness of Constantine, God let the Christian emperor Jovian rule only a few months and let the Christian emperor Gratian be murdered. Eternal life is what the faith is for. Everything else is on loan. Christians have been divided about the settlement itself ever since, and the division is not between the faithful and the faithless. On one side is the plain gain: the killing stopped, the Scriptures were copied instead of burned, the poor were fed out of church funds on a scale nobody had managed before, and the gospel could be preached without a death sentence attached. On the other is a real cost: a church that could call on the magistrate soon did, membership became respectable and then compulsory in practice, and bishops learned to lobby. The monastic movement that filled the Egyptian desert in these same decades, ordinary Christians walking out of the towns to live alone or in small communities under vows of poverty and prayer, is often read as the first Christian answer to it, made by people who thought a comfortable church needed somebody keeping the harder promise. Neither side of that ledger is fanciful, and the New Testament supplies the tension rather than resolving it. Paul tells Christians to pray for kings and calls the magistrate God’s servant for good (1 Timothy 2:1-2; Romans 13:1-4). Jesus tells his followers that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over their subjects and that it shall not be so among them, and tells Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world (Matthew 20:25-28; John 18:36). Both are Scripture, and a church living inside a Christian empire had to hold them at the same time.

(†) Where his own record will not bear defending: the killings, the exiles, and a baptism kept back to the end. + Four things the primary sources lay at Constantine’s own door. They are his doing, not what later ages did in his name. - Blood. He executed Licinius after his own half-sister had obtained a promise of the man’s life, and executed Licinius’ boy soon after. He executed his eldest son Crispus, and his wife Fausta died in the same season under circumstances his own admirers would not describe. No account of these that survives is flattering, and no explanation of them is known. A man may rule an empire under Roman rules of political survival, or he may hold that all who take the sword will perish by the sword (Matthew 26:52), and Constantine did not choose. - Force in matters of belief. He wrote the best sentence of his reign about not compelling faith (T2), and then closed the assemblies of Christians he judged heretical, seized their books and buildings, and exiled bishops who would not sign a creed. The exile is the precedent that mattered most, because his successors used it constantly and in every direction, against the Nicene party as readily as against the Arian one. - Unity valued above the question. He treated the Arian dispute as a quarrel to be composed rather than a question to be answered (T3), and his later conduct followed from that: Arius was recalled from banishment within three years of the council and restored to communion, received back into the fellowship of the church and its table, by a synod at Jerusalem in 335, a synod being a meeting of the bishops of a region rather than of the whole church; and Athanasius, who had defended the creed hardest, was sent away to Trier in the November of that year. A ruler who wants agreement above all will, sooner or later, side with whoever will agree. - A faith held at arm’s length. He kept the ancient pagan office of chief priest of the Roman state, the post whose holder had charge of the old public rites and the calendar of sacrifices, and he kept the sun god on his coinage for years after the Milvian Bridge, and he put off baptism until he was dying. Delayed baptism was common in that century and was not thought cynical at the time; even so, twenty-five years of professing a faith while declining the water it starts with is a fact about him, and it belongs in the ledger next to the churches he built. None of this cancels the reversal of 313 or the room at Nicaea. It does mean that the church which called him great has never quite been able to call him good, and that Christians who want a model of a ruler under God would do better with Josiah, the king of Judah who heard the book of the law read out and tore his clothes at what he heard (2 Kings 22:11), than with Constantine.