Christianity
Constantine and the Conversion of Europe
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 04, 1999
The Extent of Christianity before Constantine
The Emperors saw monotheism as a way of implementing their syncretist ideas. Different emperors favoured different gods. Augustus picked Apollo as Sol Indiges; Claudius preferred Cybele; Vespasian and Hadrian favoured Serapis; Domitian chose Isis. The Emperor Commodus (180-192 AD) was an initiate of Mithras, indeed he had the “Caesarian delusion” that he was Mithras incarnated. The Syrian priest, Elagabalus (218-222 AD), tried to introduce monotheism in the form of the Sun-God, Baal (Lord), but it did not catch on until Aurelian, toward the end of the third century AD, who incorporated all other gods as aspects of the universal god, a revived Sol Indiges under the new guise of Deus Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun God, encompassing Helios, Apollo, Mithras and Baal. The Sun-God was seen as the all powerful spirit pervading all the rest of the pantheon. Many of the gods had some solar aspect and could be absorbed fairly easily. In 303 AD an inscription of the Emperor Diocletian acclaims Mithras as “Sol Invictus, Protector of the Empire.”
Christianity did not defy this stage of syncretism. Indeed it adopted many of the features of its rival religions and even finally identified with Sol Invictus through the idea of Jesus being the Sun of Righteousness (Mal 4:2). Thus it was that Christianity was added to the syncretized sun religion and its bishops even placed in charge of it.
The conversion of Constantine is one of the unsolved problems of history. Thousands have written on this event, which changed the history of the world, yet do not agree. Years after his supposed conversion he continued to use Pagan language and he remained the head—Pontifex Maximus or Sovereign Pontiff—of the old Roman religion until he died. Some of his coins show him in the robe of the Pontifex Maximus and he appointed Pagan aristocrats to high offices in Rome. Pagan army officers and orators addressed him as if he were one of themselves, addressing him with the greeting, “May the immortal gods preserve you for us!” Then, in 321, Constantine made the day of Sol Invictus a holy day and a day of rest for the Christians—Sunday.
In 321 he ordered the auspices or religious diviners of the Pagan religion, against whom he had issued a severe decree, to make their exploration of the entrails of birds as usual if the palace were struck by lightning. In the following year he instituted the Sarmatian Games, with the usual Pagan religious accompaniments to the scandal of the Christians. In 330 he ordered the closing of two of the liveliest temples of Aphrodite in the east, and they were either not closed or were reopened at once. After his death, the Pagans made him, as was customary, a god. So no one knows his real beliefs but he adopted Christianity, and that was the beginning of its triumph. He deferred his baptism until the approach of death recommended to him this easy method of obliterating his crimes, baptism supposedly washing away all sin.
On the other hand, he established the principle of persecution of the old religion and his massive generosity to the Church lifted it in twenty years to a position of which it had never dreamed. Was he a Christian? Was he, as the Pagan historian, Zosimus, says an adherent of the old religion in his father’s way until the scorn of Rome for the murder of his wife and son drove him entirely into the arms of Christians? Or was it, until the end, merely a policy of creating a powerful organization, intensely attached to himself, out of the Christian body?
Christians like to believe that the natural superiority of their religion led to the total supplanting and eradication of the superstitious beliefs of Pagan peoples. Pagans like to believe that evil Christians forced their religion upon good, noble Pagans in the “baptise or die” fashion. Not that the latter did not happen, it certainly did, as in such accounts as Charlemagne’s conversion of the Saxons. But before Constantine emerged, at the beginning of the fourth century, all the blood of all the martyrs had converted only a small fraction of the Roman world.
The population of the Roman Empire was at the time about one hundred millions. Estimates of the number of Christians among them vary from 5 million by Gibbon to 50 million! In fact a careful study by a Christian scholar, based on the number of bishops, province by province, and a guess at the extent of each bishop’s flock yields not more than 4 million in total, though, being a Christian, he does not add up his separate estimates but instead gives a new one of 10 million.
The turbulent priest, Joseph McCabe, finds the figure much less. As late as the year 391 AD, when Christianity was established by law and all other religions bloodily suppressed, the bishop of Hippo had only one church, with a few hundred worshippers, in a town of thirty thousand inhabitants, and that Augustine, who succeeded him, had not a single priest under him. Yet two hundred bishops in Africa about the year 310, yields one hundred thousand Christians. There is no known ratio of bishops and the faithful.
In 251 AD, when the Church had enjoyed a long peace, Pope Cornelius reported that he had a staff of 154 ministers of various ranks, among them being 52 exorcists! He had forty-six priests, fourteen deacons and sub-deacons, and ninety-four lesser clerics. The Roman Christians also supported 1500 widows and destitutes. Gibbon deduced this stood for about 50,000 Christians in a population of about a million. Robin Lane Fox adds:
Inscriptions, Pagan histories, texts and papyri make next to no reference to Christians before 250 AD.
McCabe shows, from the official Calendar of the Popes, that until the year 220 the Roman Christians had not a single chapel of any sort, and to imagine that they had chapels for fifty thousand worshippers thirty years later is, in view of the stern law against them, absurd. It seems they had only two.
The Christian historian Optatus says that, in the year 310, they had only forty small chapels in Rome for the estimated 100,000 worshippers. At the outbreak of the Diocletian persecution, twenty thousand would be a better estimate, and the persecution scattered them like chaff, but they were disproportionately represented in the influential administrative class. Already it had become a religion of the wealthy.
In the Severan period, a funerary inscription declares that a Christian, Prosenes, was a “servant of the bedchamber,” a senior position in the royal household. Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, says that the emperor Valerian’s household was “full of the faithful.”
Nevertheless, the numerical strength of Christians was in the ignorant east, especially Asia Minor and Armenia, which alone had half of all the empire’s Christians. Antioch was the greatest city of the east and it had half a million inhabitants. Its famous bishop and orator, S John Chrysostom, says, about the year 385 AD, in a sermon in which he was boasting:
I believe we reach the number of a hundred thousand.
This was after seventy years of imperial favour, the support of the fanatically Christian Emperor Theodosius, and the greatest orator of the Christian world. Seventy years earlier, even at Antioch, the heart of eastern Christendom, there were not more than fifty thousand Christians.
Religious writers claim that Christianity was unique in welcoming the slave and the woman on equal terms. This was done by the Manichees, the Stoics and the religious Colleges. If the Christian body was attracted by Christian virtues, why were the sermons of the Fathers long indictments of its vices?
The old Roman, Greek and Asiatic religions were in decay, and many people were ready for alternatives. S Augustine says the Manichaeans were as numerous as the Christians. Mithraism was even more successful. Emperors adopted it before Christianity. When people get discontent with familiar ideas, novelties can spread alarmingly quickly. In the nineteenth century, Spiritualism won three million people out of forty millions in the United States in ten years. It took Christianity three centuries to reach that number. The spread of the Albigensian heresy in the Middle Ages was even more rapid and complete.
Most of the growth of Christianity was in the third century. Incessant war had impoverished the empire, and the Christians of the cities who tended to be the better off, made charity a important part of their work. The church at Rome supported fifteen hundred widows and indigents in the middle of the third century. The Church at Antioch maintained three thousand in the fourth century. The Romans appreciated this gospel of charity.
There was no growth that is historically unusual. Before Constantine, the Church won say a twentieth of the population. The question is: How was the five percent converted into one hundred percent?
The Legendary Triumph
In the year 312 AD, a fiery and unscrupulous but vigorous and ambitious man named Constantine was leading a great army across Italy to meet his rival for the emperorship of the world, Maxentius. Suddenly, just after noon, he saw, flaming on the heavens, the Greek monogram, the Labarum or Chi-Rho symbol of Christ, together with the words:
In this sign, conquer.
The sign cannot have been startling or obviously miraculous and Constantine did not fall on his knees. He merely wondered what the sign meant. No ecclesiastical historian today believes the vision as miraculous. The cross, if it ever existed at all, might have been the phenomenon of sun-dogs, caused by ice crystals in the stratosphere.
During the night, a second vision informed him that this monogram referred to the same Christ whose religion and followers he had been familiar with for ten years at least. After consultation with Christian clergy, he declared that the Sun-God had been created by the Christian God, removed the eagles from his standards and put in their place the Chi-Ro symbol of the failed Jewish Messiah. The following day, he marched on, crossed the Milvian bridge and did conquer. He won the battle of the Milvian Bridge and so supremacy over the whole Roman Empire. Later he converted, but a good many of his family and the Roman ruling class already had. With an emperor’s authority, Christianity was now secure.
“The father of ecclesiastical history,” as Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, is called, tells us of the miracle of Constantine and his sign of the Labarum in the sky, and he claims he had it from the Emperor’s own lips. He wrote his Ecclesiastical History some years before the death of Constantine. This miracle is not in it.
When the emperor died, the bishop wrote a false and eulogistic “Life of Constantine,” in which he tells of the Labarum. Eusebius had no shame in declaring his chief business was to “edify,” a way of admitting he was a pious liar. The other great Christian writer of the time, Lactantius, says that Constantine’s vision was a dream. The Labarum appears on coins soon after the conversion of Constantine, but no one pretends that it was a reality except Eusebius. Eusebius wrote that Constantine gave nations “rest and respite from their ancient miseries.” Democracy was “anarchy and dissension rather than a form of government… there is one God—not two or three or more.”
In 313 AD, he issued the Edict of Milan which gave toleration to all religions. Thus, the doctrines of Jesus, who had preached “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you,” achieved their triumph by his emblem being used as a battle mascot.
In return the Christian bishops announced that, though Constantine was not a god himself, he was in particularly close touch with God—he was a “Man of God”. Like many Christian converts, Constantine only espoused Christianity on his death bed in 337 AD when he finally accepted baptism, but by then he had united the worship of Sol Invictus and Christianity to strengthen his own hand. He had built churches but made Sunday, conforming to Sol Invictus with whom he obviously associated Jesus, a holiday. Christian iconography used the solar disc in the form of a halo to denote a holy person ever after.
That Constantine was truly a Christian is doubtful, and the reasons and extent of his personal conversion are unclear. Many Pagans, used to a multitude of deities from whom favour might be sought, saw Christ as one more god to be entreated. Constantine was a supporter of the universal Sun-God, but wanted the help of the Christians. Supposedly his conversion was in response to a victory through assistance from the Christian God. Though he proclaimed Christianity as official policy, he did not accept baptism until his deathbed, according to Christian writers.
The Career of Constantine
In the complicated situation following the death of Diocletian, one of the imperial heirs, Constantine, was proclaimed Emperor in 312 AD by the legions at York in Britain. As S Ambrose relates it, Constantine was the illegitimate son of a Bithynian barmaid, Helena, and a Roman officer of distinction, Constantius, who placed his faith, according to Constantine himself, in “the One Supreme God,” Sol Invictus. In another account, his mother, Helena, was said to be the daughter of the British subordinate monarch, old King Cole of Colchester. Either way, as an illegitimate son of the Imperial family, he had to fight for power. He won the allegiance of the legions in Britain, then under the Christian emblem, he seized Rome, and, ultimately, he extended his authority to the Eastern empire. Constantine might have been born in Britain.
Constantine had a thick neck, a tremendous glare and the habit of tossing his head back like a lion. He lived well and dressed carefully, in later years becoming corpulent. He threw himself with fanatical single-mindedness into whatever happened to be important at the moment, mixing cunning with brutality. His voice could be gentle and cajoling, his actions very rough indeed—he executed his wife and one of his grandsons.
Educated Romans always hated and despised Constantine. Helena was fortunate to become the mistress of one who was destined for the purple and her generosity to the clergy earned her the halo of the saint. She deserved it because she “discovered” all the sites of the gospel stories that had mysteriously gone missing in the 300 years since the crucifixion!
When Diocletian had reorganized and pacified the empire he chose a colleague, Maximian Hercules, to assist him in ruling it and he raised to the rank of Caesars, princes with some hope of succession, Galerius and Constantius. Galerius was a somber and zealous adherent of the old religion, and he supposedly egged Diocletian on to persecution of the Christians.
Constantius, on the contrary, seems to have been an easy-going and more or less cultivated man. He believed, with the Greek and Roman philosophers, in one god whose reality was figured or caricatured in all the deities of the Roman religion, and he transmitted his mild philosophy to his son Constantine. Diocletian sent Constantius to rule Gaul and Britain and kept the son in the east.
When, in 303, Diocletian began to persecute, Constantius evaded the application of the decrees in his provinces. There were few Christians in them, and he could see no menace whatever in their peculiar beliefs and practices. His leniency became known throughout the Church, and the Emperor Galerius suspected that there was a political aim in his protection of the Christians. Diocletian and his colleague had abdicated in 304, and Galerius, now promoted to be emperor in the east, with Constantius as emperor in the west, prevented the young Constantine from obtaining the rank of Caesar.
The question of sparing or favoring the Christians of the empire now became a plank in the political platform. Christians were a small but influential minority and their support became crucial.
Constantine escaped and joined his father in Britain. Shortly afterwards the father died and his troops acclaimed Constantine emperor. Constantine probably engineered this coup, but Galerius refused to recognize the election and he made Constantine merely a Caesar. In a series of civil wars, in 310 Constantine beat and strangled the old Emperor Maximian, whose daughter Fausta he had married.
Constantine probably overestimated the number of Christians in Rome, Africa, and the east. He had lived six years in Britain and Gaul and he knew the extent of the sect only from the exaggerated language of the Pagans themselves—there were no statistics. In 312, the Labarum year, he set out for Rome to try his strength against his brother-in-law Maxentius.
Upon the scattered and dejected Christian world came the rapid items of news that Galerius had suppressed persecution and had died of cancer, that Constantine, whom rumour regarded as a patron and deliverer, was on his way to Rome to seize the throne, and that Maxentius, the actual ruler of Italy and Africa, had been accordingly forced to grant them full liberty. The Emperor Maxentius in Italy, against whom Constantine was advancing, thought it prudent to canvas the Christians who supported Constantine. Certificates of Pagan orthodoxy were cheerfully burned, and the faithful returned to the foot of the crucifix.
These were the circumstances when, in 312 AD, Constantine led his legions into Italy, Constantine was “converted” on the march and Maxentius was defeated at the Milvian Bridge. In 313, Constantine, now emperor, met his co-Emperor Licinius at Milan and together they issued a formal charter of liberty recognizing the freedom of the Christians. This famous Edict of Milan was not, as is commonly said, the first chapter of liberty. The Christians were already free, except that the Emperor Maximian still persecuted in the east, though he in turn was killed in 313. Constantine’s favouritism toward the Church was the real foundation of the triumph of Christianity.
In 323, Constantine attacked and beat Licinius, but he continued to share the empire with him for nine years, when, at the close of a fresh struggle, he had him treacherously murdered.
Then came the dreadful year 326, when Constantine had his wife Fausta, his illegitimate son Crishus and his nephew murdered in the heart of the empire, in his palace at Rome. Fausta was a beautiful and, as Julian tells us, most refined and virtuous lady, and she was only thirty-four or thirty-five years old at the time her husband murdered her.
Clerical writers try in vain to shift from him the guilt of these new crimes. The evidence is overwhelming. The illegitimate son of the illegitimate Constantine was guilty of some outrage in regard to his beautiful and refined stepmother, and in a blaze of temper Constantine ended their lives. Helena, his Christian mother, stung Constantine into committing the murder and it is highly probable that Fausta had justly accused his son and so incurred the fierce anger of Helena.
Joseph McCabe examined all the original authorities in regard to the character of Helena, the illegitimacy of Constantine (which Gibbon denied) and these murders. Constantius could not validly marry Helena in Roman law. As to the murders of a son, wife and a young nephew, the evidence is so clear that no one but Christian historians now doubt it. It seems Fausta was barren, that the three sons of Constantine were born of his mistress Minervina and that she also was murdered. The Pagan empresses, up to the end of the fourth century, were as a rule reputable women but, with the conversion of imperial ladies to the new religion, we enter upon a story of intrigue, passion and vindictiveness which is far more picaresque.
Helena, evidently a more enthusiastic Christian than her son. Helena is a Christian saint! She went to Jerusalem, and found what she claimed to be the cross and nails with which Jesus had been crucified. Constantine used one nail as the bit for his horse’s mouth and put another in his war helmet. Visit the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, see the Mount of Calvary, the site of the Crucifixion, and you will be shocked to find that it is a rock wrapped in an ugly nineteenth-century church and displayed to the faithful who view it from a raised gantry. This and the other sites associated with the death of Christ were invented by this self same Empress S Helena, mother of Constantine, in 327 AD in her fervour for Christianity. As the first Christians pilgrim, or tourist as we would say today, she could not find the places mentioned in her brochures—called the gospels—and so she “found” them herself, as she could—she was the empress and the mother of a tyrant. These places have been accepted as genuine ever since by the Christianity industry, and its wealthy chief executives have convinced the ignorant consumers of the truth of it.
The Greek historian, Zosimus, tells us that after the murders at Rome the emperor applied for purification in the temple of Jupiter, and the Pagan priests sternly refusing, he turned to the Christian priests who consented. This is untrue but it embodies a truth. Rome, which was still overwhelmingly Pagan, scorned the emperor with its indignation and rejected him. He was a barbarian. Christianity received him, at least more intimately than before.
He went to Asia Minor, and there he made the old town of Byzantium into a new capital of the empire, Constantinople. The plan had been decided—because of the scornful opposition of Italy to his religious designs, and his determination to create a new and wholly Christian Empire—and the work begun, before 326, but the plan was brought forward when Constantine found pasted on the gate of his Roman palace the inscription:
Say ye the Golden Age of Saturn dawns again?
Of Nero’s bloody hue these jewels are, be fled.
Constantine Favours Christianity
There is a popular belief that from the moment of Emperor Constantine’s conversion, Christianity swept through Europe, replacing the old ways. There is some truth in it but it was mainly through wealth and priviledge not moral authority that it was true. What is not appreciated is that the Christian Church was just as converted to the emperor as he was to the Church. Constantine was a follower of the Pagan “monotheism” centered on the sun as Apollo, Mithras or Sol Invictus, and he saw the Christian god as the same. When he saw the Chi-Rho symbol in the sun, he swapped sun gods without changing his fundamental Pagan ideas and he effectively gave authority over solar religions to the Christian bishops. He seemed particularly to hate the old Roman religion.
Constantine lavished patronage to the Church from 312 AD and his own pronouncements seem unequivocal that he was committed to Christianity from 312 AD. Constantine immediately went beyond the declaration of religious neutrality of the Edict of Milan and evinced an attitude of what is euphemistically called benevolent neutrality—favouritism.
Constantine travelled to battle with the Persians with a large tent stitched in the shape of a church. In it, he prayed with his bishops to God, the Giver of Victory, and worshipped Him before battle. Eusebius in his hagiography of Constantine, wrote:
After he had prayed ernestly to God, he always received some revelation of God’s presence, and then, as if divinely inspired, he would leap up from his tent. At once, he would set his troops in motion and exhort them not to delay, but at that very hour to take up their swords. In a pack, they would fall on their foe and hack them down, beginning with their young men…
This, from the pen of the church’s greatest early historian, is the nature of Christianity when it was adopted as the Roman state religion. Yehouah was a god of war and savage militaristic brutality, just as He had been in the Jewish scriptures. Where is the love here? Why do Christians think He is now a God of love? Did He change at some time? Surely God is unchanging. When did He change?
Constantine’s god was also the god of civil graft and privilege, with quite a different persona from that offered by the poor Galilean. The state religion had to be well endowed to get the right type of men running it. Constantine exempted the clergy from civic duties and built them magnificent churches. The bishops were given magisterial powers and there was no appeal from their judgements. The church was allowed funds for poor widows and orphans, a centralization in the church of earlier Roman schemes aimed at providing a source of soldiers and some security for their widows and children, especially keeping their children from falling into a life of crime. There was no reference to Christian charity in the legal changes made to accommodate these welfare provisions. Indeed, Constantine introduced laws at the same time against offending slaves that were harsher than they had ever been.
In 313, he exempted the Christian clergy from municipal offices. In the Roman administration these local functions, so far from being paid, were extremely costly and onerous to the citizens who were compelled to discharge them, and there was a general attempt to evade them. Exemption was regarded as so valuable a privilege that the Christian clergy now discovered a remarkable number of “vocations” to their body, and great disorder ensued in the municipal administration:
The effect of this measure was soon felt. On all sides one saw crowds of people make for the churches who were moved not so much by conviction as by the hope of reward; and this first favour granted to Christianity admitted to its bosom guilty passions which had hitherto been foreign to it, passions which had speedy and pernicious consequences. The complaints of the municipal bodies and the disorder that followed in the administration of the provinces soon compelled Constantine to modify the privilege.
The anger of his solidly Pagan empire compelled him to withdraw it. In 319 be issued a savage decree that any auspex who entered the house of a citizen should be burned alive, though the auspices might continue to function in the temples. It is said that the aim of the decree was to prevent the fraudulent exploitation of the citizens by private fortune-telling for money, but the real aim was a deadly blow at the old religion by making impossible the assumption of its offices. Two years later Constantine was forced to modify, or virtually repeal, his law, and it was probably never applied.
In the same year, he tried to impose the Christian Sunday as a day of rest on his Empire. How stupid or ignorant is the idea that the Christian Church brought a great boon to the Roman worker with its one day’s rest out of seven. The Romans rested on the Thursday (Thor’s or Jupiter’s Day—Dies Jovis), and they had more than a hundred holidays in addition in the year. Constantine’s aim was, as in his previous measures, to enforce Christianity. Again, however, he failed, and he had to modify his own decree.
The Trinity
With acceptance and prosperity, the Christians began feuding over what appeaed to be a fiddling detail of doctrine, adding to Constantine’s bewilderment over his new institution. The trouble arose over Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria. A tall, thin man with staring eyes and long hair, Arius writhed and twisted as he talked. His enemies compared him to a snake. He was, however, an eloquent preacher and a powerful influence upon the women of Alexandria. Arius propounded the notion that the Son was younger than the Father and that, therefore, aeons ago, there had been a time when the Son was not. To the orthodox who believed and still believe that Father and Son are co-eternal, this lessened the dignity bf Jesus.
Christians have always found supernatural details crucially important in their religion even though they had no way of settling such matters of fantasy and empty opinion. Soon dissension, sometimes accompanied by violence, spread through the churches. Constantine hit upon the idea of summoning all the bishops in the world to a council to settle the matter.
It was a unique occasion. There had been local councils and synods before but never one covering the whole Church. The council met at Nicaea, now Iznik, in Turkey, in May 325 AD. For weeks, the bishops travelled there, mostly from the east but a few from the west—there were no British representatives. The Bishop of Rome, Sylvester, was too old to travel but he sent two representatives. Most had never set eyes on one another. They were a crowd of weird eccentrics, yet they had been granted religious power in the Roman Empire.
There was a blond Goth from Germany and a dark Persian from India. There were bishops in the wild dress of hermits, including the goatskinned Jacob of Nisbis who could raise hordes of gnats against his enemies! Some of the older ones had been physically broken. They limped painfully along, gruesome scars where their right eyes had been. Eusebius, a scholar deep in Constantine’s confidence, was there but unable to influence a democratic council like this because his opponents would discredit him by reminding him that he had sacrificed to an idol rather than be mutilated like some of the others present.
Nicolas of Myra was there, a jolly, plump man with a white beard, the original of Santa Claus. He so lost patience with Arius that he crossed the council chamber and smacked him on his ear. Alexander, the aged Pope of Alexandria where all the trouble had started, was also there with his 25-year-old archdeacon and successor, Athanasius, the most eloquent anti-Arian of all. Constantine wore his imperial purple and a foppish wig.
Eusebius had expected that Arius would carry the council, but Arius and his supporters were arrogant and dogmatic. Arius went so far as to start to sing songs he had written to popularise his doctrine among the masses. As he jigged up and down intoning “God was not always Father. Once he was not Father. Afterwards he became Father” the simpler bishops raised their hands in horror. Perhaps that is when Santa Claus got so irate.
By an overwhelming majority, the bishops accepted a creed which repudiated Arius’s doctrines. The Council of Nicaea established the Christian Church as the State Church of the Roman Empire.
This was the greatest and most tragic event in history. Instead of the world being guided by the thoughts of the great philosophers of Greece and Rome, its inhabitants fell under the domination of the hierarchy of ignorant priests… The Greek and Roman educational system was replaced by theology, and ignorance took the place of the pursuit of knowledge.Arthur Findlay, The Curse of Ignorance (1947)
The victorious episcopal hierarchy had to stop the people learning anything that contradicted it. It was the first creed ever intended to be binding upon an the churches and, with adaptations accepted at the Council of Chalcedon a century later, the Nicene creed is still the standard statement of orthodox Christianity. Thereafter the Church set about destroying any knowledge and views that revealed its own stupidity, leading ultimately to the Dark Ages.
With it, the Christian Trinity had arrived. The Pagan gods of Old Egypt had asserted their influence. At the Council of Nicaea, the Church decided that the Trinity, which included Jesus, was present at the creation. Jesus will also be present at the Judgement Day. The Council of Constantinople of 381 AD added a full description of the Holy Ghost. The new idea had been created of making religions by decisions of a committee!
Despite the manifestly Pagan origins of the Trinity, a Christian’s salvation was made to depend upon belief in it on pain of everlasting death. The Church persecuted heretics, who denied the divinity of Jesus, into extinction.
Even in the epistles of Paul a clear distinction is maintained between Jesus and God. No Jew could accept more than one god and Paul said he was a Jew. Jews could accept a Son of God but could not make the identity of the Son with God. In Revelation, chronologically the earliest book of the New Testament other than the epistles of Paul, Jesus is still not god, nor in Acts. In the synoptics the same and indeed he is depicted as refuting the idea as in Matthew 19:17 and 20:23, as well as the cry from the cross. John shows some development in calling Jesus the Word (“and the Word was God”), allowing Thomas to say “My Lord and my God,” though elsewhere more conservative phraseology is used.
In the fourth century BC, Aristotle had pronounced “all things are three, and thrice is all.” The ancient Egyptians arranged their gods in trinities, Osiris, Isis and Horus, for example. The Hindu Trinity of Brahman, Siva and Vishnu is another example. Jesus never mentioned the Trinity. He could not because a Jew can recognise no god other than God. Nowhere in the Bible does the word Trinity appear. It was adopted by the Church 300 years after the death of Barabbas and its origins are Pagan. Before that, Christians had a God and his son, who was partly divine, and the Holy Spirit, an emanation of god known to the Jews, but all three had to become equal to form the Trinity. The Hebrew word for the Holy Spirit meant wind or breath and in Genesis this spirit moved upon the face of the waters and was the breath of life of Adam—an idea stemming from the Egypt of the time of Akhenaton in 1370 BC. Thus The Holy Spirit existed at the Creation. The Logos, the Word, discussed by Philo, a Hellenised Jew of Egypt, was Pagan but it had entered Judaic thought as the means by which God revealed himself. It was therefore also co-eternal with God and, as used by John in the introduction to his gospel, helped Christianity toward the deification of Jesus.
Paul speaks of “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghos”t thus expressing the Christian Trinity at an early date (2 Cor 13:14) without explicitly making Jesus a god. Early Christian baptisms seem to have been done in the name of the Trinity though the Apostles Creed makes no mention of it nor does it state that Jesus is god. The Nicene Creed does.
After the Council, Constantine founded Constantinople as the new Christian Rome, gathering the relics of the apostles to lie in the principal church. When in 337 AD, as he was dying, he asked for Church membership, his attendants removed his purple robe and clad him in white. Eusebius baptised him. Constantine bade his courtiers rejoice because he was going to heaven. On Whit Sunday, he died and the Christians carried him in a golden coffin to be buried in his Church of the Apostles.
In such a man, it is difficult to disentangle true belief from political tactic. Christianity was a convenience. He enlisted it and used it to bolster his power. He saw it as one of the solar religions of the empire, but studied it a lot in the last ten years of his life and even preached sermons. He built Byzantium named after himself as Constantinople, as the new Rome, using funds he had robbed from the Pagan temples he closed. This was to be a common method of fundraising for Christian emperors up to Justinian.
Back in the old Rome, the Pagan priests enrolled Constantine with the other Caesars among the gods and offered incense to his statue. But Constantine had devised his own title for after death—not “divine” but “equal with the apostles” was inscribed by his command upon his tomb.
The Consequences
From the first Constantine had, apart from his unsuccessful decrees, showered wealth and privileges upon the Church. A stream of gold flowed from the palace and new churches of a more attractive nature began to rise. At court and in the army the best way, if not the only way, to secure promotion was to become convinced by the brilliant evidence of the religion. Even ordinary citizens were rewarded with a baptismal robe and a piece of gold. Villages were raised to the rank of cities if all their inhabitants exchanged Jupiter for Christ. In ten years, imperial gold had done more than the blood of all the martyrs, the miracles of all the saints, and the arguments of all the apologists.
Except that wealth continued to reach the Roman clergy, the progress of the Church in the west was suspended with the move to Constantinople. The city was dedicated in 330 and the world had a Christian metropolis—a superb city. More than three fourths of the Christians were in the east, and they were now encouraged to attack Pagan temples and openly ventilate their scorn. Few Pagans could get advancement in the east. Constantine had lost all his vigour and clear wit. Dressed in effeminate robes, laden with jewels, crowned by a mass of false hair, he sat amongst the women and priests who now “converted” the world by means of his money and favours. Only now and again did the old anger burst, when the quarrels which rent the Church, from Africa to Mesopotamia, showed him how futile was his dream of a spiritual empire. He was baptized, and died, in 337 AD.
Delayed baptism till the brink of death was a popular practical measure for converts. Baptism was held to wash away all preceding sins, and so sinning after baptism was tainting baptism’s perfection. Constantine killed his wife and eldest son, serious crimes even for an emperor and ones he would rather were washed away in baptism before death, rather than soiling his soul for eternity. Baptism also gave the clergy authority over your soul, so practical people left the final act of conversion, baptism, as the final act of their lives to keep out of their clutches.
The oration given by Eusebius to Constantine in 336 AD reveals the relation between Church and state that Constantine had sought from the Christians as the condition for his acceptance of Christianity as the controlling religion in the empire. He was happy to accept that there was one ruler in heaven, God, and one divine law, the Christian law. In return, the Christian leaders accepted the absolute rule on earth of the Roman Emperor, acknowledged as God’s viceregent on earth, and there was one secular law, the law of Rome. Eusebius declared that Constantine was the earthly reflexion of the Logos or Word of God—the principle by which God gave order to the world. He was, in fact, recognized as Christ reincarnate! The Jewish Ebionite leader who despised wealth became a potentate in heaven and a real potenate on earth as the Roman Emperor. Christ as Emperor was the concept of Christ for the next millennium, and the bishops were happy to be seen as baby Christs in their dioceses.
The key factor was the organisational strength given to the Church by Constantine who provided the Church with the legal privileges that allowed it to accummulate the power and wealth to dominate Europe a few centuries later. With power behind them, the bishops immediately stopped Christians from choosing their own bishop. Bishops were to be made bishops by other bishops, so they became a self electing body independent of their sheep and totally able to do and to decide whatever they liked. Constantine did as the bishops asked him in the treatment of certain crimes. First, he ended crucifixion as a form of execution, not because it was so terrible but because it was so holy. Instead new punishments were introduced—people were to have their eyes gouged out or their legs maimed, but branding of slaves on their face was to end. Instead under a new law, their master could beat them to death and they were not allowed to seek sactuary in a Christian church. The bishops saw they were returned to their owners. As you might expect, the severest laws were to be for sexual crimes—adultery and prostitution.
But conversion was a very slow and uneven process with many local variations. Emperors varied in how they handled Christian and Pagan practices after Constantine, with Julian the Apostate breaking with the Christianity. Could he have reversed the tide? Perhaps so, if he’d reigned for twenty years rather than less than two.
Christian Barbarism
The period after Constantine’s death was confusing, as the Empire fractured and emperors changed frequently, especially in the West. Constantine’s son, Constantius (337-361 AD), made the Pagans’ ritual sacrifices a capital offense. In an edict of 341 AD, he ordered all “superstitions” to cease and sacrifices to be abolished. A later edict of this same Arian Christian emperor commanded the closing of all Pagan temples, and people guilty of offering sacrifices were to be killed. Mobs of zealous Christians took it as carte blanche to invade Pagan temples and overturn alters. These oppressive laws aroused the anger of the Pagans of the empire. Pagans retaliated with riots and similar actions against Christian churches.
Anyone worshipping the Old Gods was a witch, so they must have been casting spells on people. Casting spells on people merited the death penalty in the Roman Empire as did many other crimes. The Pagan Romans did not like witches but they were never thought of as anything other than individual sorcerers. With the triumph of Christianity witchcraft became a mass conspiracy of Satan to be expunged en mass.
Christians were told witchcraft could only be effective by invoking demons since the Absolute God would not be used in this way. And there were a lot of powerful demons about—they were the Pagan gods the Christians had banned! Christian horror of the power of witchcraft really depended on the Church’s success in painting the Old Religions as the work of the devil. People had, until Theodosius, believed in the effectiveness of the gods of the mystery religions as strongly as the Christians believed in their god. Pagan parents had told their children about their faith in their god but the Christian deacons then told the children that they were devils. So the idea of black magic as being the powerful enemy of the Good God became firmly fixed in people’s minds.
Yet before triumphant Christianity had banned other religions, many Christians tolerated other gods to the extent of being willing to attend their temples, just as Romans did generally. They might have sought some favour that was a speciality of the Pagan god, or wanted to worship in a family group though different members of the family favoured different gods.
Christianity also fractured, with the schism between Catholic and Orthodox, the stresses of different approaches to divinity, eucharist and celebration, and eventually to that of iconoclasm. The Roman Church sought to bring local churches, often with regional or political variations, into line with official church dogma. All this internal strife curtailed the war against the heathen.
In 361 AD, the legions of Gaul rebelled and acclaimed as emperor Julian, a cousin of Constantius and an apostate from Christianity. Constantius died on the way to suppress the usurper, and for the first time since Licinius the empire was governed by a Pagan. Julian however only ruled for two years.
During the reign of Gratian (378-383 AD), despite the opposition of Symmachus and other Pagan senators, Gratian, influenced by S Ambrose, bishop of Milan, renounced the title of Pontifex Maximus, and had the Altar of Victory removed from the Roman senate. He also withdrew from Pagan priests privileges they had previously had.
Still, Paganism was not officially proscribed until 392 AD, when the Spanish emperor Theodosius (379-395 AD) again forbade the offering of sacrifices, and also the Pagan religious rites of the lar, the genius, and the penates. A person guilty of sacrificing was to be put to death, while anyone who practiced other Pagan rites had their property confiscated, a common way that Christians robbed Pagans. The laws against all forms of Paganism were continued by the successors of Theodosius. In the last quarter of the fourth century, non-Christians, who had until then been called “gentiles,” began to be more commonly called by the word used ever since, “pagani.” Plainly, Paganism was being recognized as confined to the people of the countryside so the urban centres were solidly Christian.
Olympiodorus tells the story that when the Christians started to purge the Pagan religions, the people of Thrace decided to take a prophylactic measure. They had three solid silver statues of figures with long hair in elaborate robes and with hands bound symbolically behind their backs. They had been consecrated in Pagan fashion and set up at a strategic pass facing north to ward off barbarians. To keep their salvific effect but yet save them from Christian barbarians, the local people buried them in situ, still facing towards the north to ward off the invaders. In 421 AD, the Christian emperor, heard of the three cult statues and ordered them to be dug up and removed. No sooner was this done than three separate barbarian tribes converged on the valley from the north, plundering the land. For the Thracians the removal of their three protective gods meant the downfall of the empire, and in another half century it had fallen.
After the edict of Theodosius banning Paganism in 392 AD the Old Religions unquestionably continued either underground or tolerated in some regions by the local authorities for another 200 years at least. Their fate was sealed, though. The Christians had all the power of the state behind them and determined to destroy all unofficial religions. Most Pagan shrines and temples were destroyed. Our lack of knowledge of Pagan ceremonial and ritual is partly, if not largely, because Christians destroyed Pagan records of their liturgies and hymns when they prohibited heathen religions. Meanwhile Christians pinched the charismatic practices and festivals of the old religions to help those reluctant to convert to the new order.
Syncretism Rules OK
Christianity began with three elements, the figure of their god dying for the redemption of mankind, the Essene code of brotherly love taught by Jesus and recorded in the gospels, and the God of the Jews with its long history of trying to achieve an objective on earth through a Chosen People—no longer the Jews, but the community of Christians. With the fall of the Nazarene Church and the destruction of the Essenes, they had no ritual other than possibly baptism, some prayers and the messianic meal. To become a religion to rival those of Imperial Rome they had to take their ritual entirely from other sources, all Pagan.
The sayings of Jesus purveyed simple truths appropriate to the apocalyptic circumstances he saw. In none of them does Jesus speak of a Queen of Heaven, advocate endlessly complex ritual or grand clothes, nor does he claim to be founding a church, the statement to Peter being obviously interpolated. Yet within a few decades of his death his church had been founded and its theology and ceremonial were developing apace. Pagan religions gave to Christianity the form of their churches, their use of candles, incense, alters, liturgies and hymns, vestments, choral music and sermons.
Mary by the fifth century had become the Queen of Heaven replacing Isis in that role and by the seventh century the Moslems thought the Christians worshipped a goddess and two gods. Between the sixth and ninth centuries the originally simple clothes of the clergy got grander and grander. Dressing up for divine worship goes back to the stone age but does not seem to fit in with the teachings of humility attributed to Jesus nor the simple white vestments of the Essenes.
Yet, in many places in the Dark Ages Christianisation was barely skin deep. Legal records late into the Middle Ages forbid practices such as dedicating temples or performing sacrifices. The need for the statute means the acts were being committed. Christianity gained hold in the cities and in the royal courts. Often a country was called Christian because the ruler converted. When he did, the Church had his permission to send missionaries to convert the people, but they often could not—the people continuing their traditional, Pagan, festivals.
Under Pope Gregory “the Great,” the church took the tack of adopting many of these festivals and practices to make popular custom Christian by fiat. Local cults became the cults of saints, Pagan festivals became Christian holy days and Pagan temples became Christian churches. These were the real ways that Christianity took over Europe. There were enforced conversions but there were fewer instances than this cleverer way.
From Pagan mythology Christianity adapted many useful ideas: from Adonis worship the tale of the star in the East, building upon the Star prophecy of Judaism; from Osiris and Dionysus worship the tale of turning water into wine; from Mithraism the birth in the cave, the adoration of the shepherds, the idea of being washed in the blood of the lamb and the expression ”born again” (common in Pagan religions), the use of bell, candle and Holy Water, the use of catacombs for worship, the Vatican Hill as a holy site; the ceremonious court paid to God. For Romans gods were potentates and required their acolytes to behave like a commoner in the court of an unpredictable king, with flattery and blandishments. Today any intelligent man will see that the supreme God must be far above such nonsense.
Heathen gods were admitted to the church as saints: Castor and Pollux as St Cosmo and St Damien; Dionysus as St Denis of Paris; Diana Illythia as St Illis of Dole, etc. Places sacred to the old gods became Christian churches and chapels; the holy springs and wells of the heathen became the holy wells of the church; the statues of Jupiter and Apollo became statues of St Peter and St Paul; shrines to nymphs and goddesses became chapels to the Madonna and figures of Isis and Cybele became figures of the Madonna—Madonna lilies are the sacred lotus flowers of Isis and Astarte.
Some heterodoxy remained throughout Europe until the rise of Protestantism and the threats it brought. It was the religious upheaval of the early modern era (14th-17th centuries) that saw the fuelling of the inquisition and the witchcraft hysteria. In this period one’s personal beliefs and practices were a matter of scrutiny and at times, a badge indicating associations.
In some of the centuries before this, except in the matters of scholarly or theological debate, individual belief was often not a big issue, the big exception being the Cathars. Common people were seen as a sheep to be led through life, rude, remote from God. Thus overlooked, they continued to practice the old formulae of their ancestors, often believing them to be as Christian as the eucharist itself.
