Constantine the Great
Rome's first Christian Emperor
Murderer
Roman emperor Constantine — the first Christian emperor. After being converted to Christianity, Constantine put to death his wife, his son, a nephew and his wife, and had Licinius (his co-emperor) and his son strangled after promising them their lives.Link
Constantine the GreatLink, from Christian Heritage
First Christian Roman Emperor, 285 - 337.Constantine was the first Roman Emperor (306-337) to fight wars in the name of Christianity. Bishops soon accompanied his troops, and since 317 no battle was fought without the "Labarum," the ensign with the initial letters of Christ. Although Constantine himself was not baptized until on his deathbed, under Constantine the Christian religion had become legal (edict of tolerance 313). After defeating his opponent Maxentius (drowned in the river Tiber, Rome), breaking the alliance with his brother-in-law, the eastern emperor Licinius, Constantine started a war in the year 324 that was fought as a crusade from the beginning and was to annihilate the troops of Licinius. Although Constantine's sister pleaded for the life of her husband, who was exiled to Thessalonike, Constantine again broke his oath and had him murdered there. But Constantine also had another brother-in-law of his murdered, as well as the son of Licinius, his own illegitimate son Crispus, and even his allegedly adulterous wife Fausta (who was found to be innocent afterwards). [DA510]
[DA] Abermals krähte der Hahn, by Karlheinz Deschner.
Thus, according to Church Father Lactantius, Constantine was "a model of Christian virtue and holiness."
Constantine also intervened in the controversy between Arius, a well known scholar and minister of the Baukalis Church, Alexandria, and Church Father Athanasius, who declared Arius to be a heretic. Athanasius forged a letter in the name of Constantine, calling for the death penalty for all who kept any of Arius' writings. Constantine had him sent into exile, but immediately after his death Athanasius was pardoned by the emperor's son, Constantius II in 337. [DA375-401]
Emperor Maxentius, mentioned above, was yet another brother-in-law of Constantine, while Maximian, whom Constantine had strangled, was his father-in-law:
In 310 Constantine beat and strangled the old Emperor Maximian, whose daughter Fausta he had married; and in 312 (the labarum year) he set out for Rome to try his strength against his brother-in-law Maxentius.
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe
The reader is probably anxious to be informed of the details of these crimes. The father-in-law that Constantine strangled was the Emperor Maximian, whom, in February, AD 310, he defeated and captured at Marseilles. The brother-in-law whom he punished with the same fate was his rival Licinius, who fell into his hands after the siege of Byzantium, in AD 324, and who was secretly executed after being publicly pardoned. The deaths of these relatives may be explained by the rules of statecraft, but no such excuse can be offered with respect to the other victims of Constantine's cruelty. In July, AD 325, he publicly disgraced and privately murdered his eldest son Crispus, for no other crime than his virtues and his reputation. The Caesar Licinius, a nephew of Constantine, was involved in the ruin of Crispus and shared his fate, notwithstanding his youth and amiable manners, and the tears and entreaties of his mother. The first Christian emperor soon afterwards completed the list of his domestic murders by suffocating his wife Fausta in "the steam of a bath, which, for that purpose, had been heated to an extraordinary degree." This unfortunate lady was accused of adultery, and "her condemnation and punishment," says Gibbon, "were the instant consequences of the charge." After the commission of these atrocious crimes, it is no wonder that the people were discontented, and that satirical verses were affixed to Constantine's palace-gate, comparing him with the bloody and ferocious Nero.From: Christ to Constantine
-- Crimes of Christianity, by G W Foote and J M Wheeler (1887)
In later times, it was discovered that Constantine's illegitimate son Crispus was not innocent:
Constantine, in the next year, 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. Let me add here that three years later again, in 326, Constantine had his wife Fausta, his illegitimate son Crispus, and his nephew, murdered in his palace at Rome.
Clerical writers try in vain to shift from him the guilt of these new crimes. The evidence is overwhelming. It is clear that the illegitimate son of the illegitimate Constantine was guilty of some outrage in regard to his beautiful and refined step-mother, and in a blaze of temper Constantine ended their lives.
...
Fausta was a very beautiful and, as [the last pagan Emperor] Julian himself 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. It is clear from the historians that Helena, his Christian mother, stung him into committing the murder; and it is highly probable that Fausta had justly accused his son [Crispus] and so incurred the fierce anger of Helena.
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe
Besides murdering close family members and other relatives, Constantine was also intimately involved in the Church intrigues of his time. During the Council of Nicea which he convened, Arius was declared a heretic, as were his teachings. Eventually, the Christians following Arianism were declared heretics too and persecuted to death. See Council of Nicea and
Christ to Constantine
See more on Constantine's mother, St Helena
Adulterer
Constantine, who had his innocent wife accused of adultery and punished with death for the same, had a mistress of his own.
Philostorgius, besides declaring Fausta to be innocent, also wrote how Constantine's mistress had given him the three sons who succeeded him: Constantine the younger, Constantius II, and Constans. Philostorgius refers to her as an adulteress. She too was murdered:
There is further evidence of a respectable kind that Fausta was barren, that the three sons of Constantine were born of his mistress Minervina, and that she also was murdered at some time.
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe
Constantine's son: Constantius II
Christian Roman Emperor 337 - 361 CE:...had both of his uncles and seven cousins murdered to rise to power. Only two other cousins, twelve year old Gallus, and seven year old Julian, who was to become the last pagan emperor, survived this butchery in the first Christian dynasty. [DA401]Link, from Christian Heritage
[DA] Abermals krähte der Hahn, by Karlheinz Deschner.
See also: Athanasius to Hypatia from Crimes of Christianity by G W Foote and J M Wheeler, which has more on how the Arian heresy was dealt with during the reign of Constantius II.
The conversion of Constantine
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 fable, but it embodies a fact. Rome, which was still overwhelmingly pagan, drove out the emperor with its scorn and indignation. He was a barbarian. Christianity received him, at least more intimately than before.Christian apologists like to point out how Constantine was only ever baptised on his deathbed, and therefore his conversion was incomplete until that time. Yet we have already seen how the 4th century Lactantius, considered a great Christian writer by the Church, declared Constantine "a model of Christian virtue and holiness."
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe
Others of the time were also certain that Constantine had converted during his life. The refusal of the priests of the deity Jupiter to perform purification rites on Constantine might be a fable, but Emperor Julian tells of how the land really lay:
[Emperor] Galerius was followed by Constantine (Constantinius), another Mithraist, who nonetheless ended the proscription and declared Christianity legal. Some years later Constantine himself became a Christian, for reasons explained by his nephew Julian: Constantine at various times murdered his son, his second wife, and several other close relatives. Refused purification by the Mithraic Holy Father, who informed him that such crimes were unforgivable, Constantine turned to the Christians. He was told that all sins could be washed away by the Christian immersion initiation and, since Jesus differed from Mithra only in name, he promptly converted.Finally, in his day, Constantine was considered a Christian, and this continued to be so after his death: the Greek Church canonised him, making him a much-adored Saint.
He did not, however, accept immediate immersion. Since the rite could be performed once only, and no alternative method of sin-removal yet existed, Constantine kept a priest at his side for the remainder of his life with instructions to immerse him the moment it became evident that he was about to die. He was thus enabled to sin with impunity for many more years, knowing that he could still obtain a no-questions-asked ticket to the pie in the sky when he died. Much later, when the Christian hierarchy recognised that the one-forgiveness-only rule was keeping people from being immersed until they were near death, the alternative ritual of forgiveness-through-confession was added to their mythology's mythology.
-- Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus, by William Harwood
But even Constantine was not as bad as the Christian Emperors who succeeded him and who ruthlessly persecuted the old Greco-Roman religion out of existence. The ancient Roman empire was converted through the sword.
Constantine's supposed vision: the labarum
It was the year 312. All the blood of all the martyrs had converted only a small fraction of the Roman world, and a recent persecution had made apostates of ninety-nine in a hundred of those.At that moment a fiery and unscrupulous, but very vigorous and ambitious man named Constantine, son of a rural barmaid who had dallied with a Roman officer, was leading a great army across Italy to meet his rival for the sovereignty of the world. Suddenly he saw, flaming on the heavens, the Greek monogram (the labarum) of Christ, and, as if to prevent any nonsense about an ocular illusion, the words: "In this sign thou shalt conquer."
As is common in the case of these stupendous and unmistakable miracles, Constantine did not fall on his knees, but merely wondered. A second vision, during the night, informed him that this monogram referred to Christ; with whose religion and followers he had been familiar for ten years at least. After these two miracles he opined that Christianity was worth inquiring into. He inquired, was converted; and the real Christian Era opened. At Christ in a manger Greeks and Romans had mocked. By an emperor in the purple, with the police and soldiers behind him, their eyes were opened.
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by historian and former Catholic priest Joseph McCabe
Let us for a moment consider the dear old labarum: one of the most profitable miracles that the hand of God, or of his earthly representative, ever achieved.It is Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, who tells us of the miracle in his "Life of Constantine"; and you ought not to doubt it for a moment, because he says that he heard it from the Emperor's own lips! We will not, however, waste time in psychoanalytic research. I do not think that any ecclesiastical historian today believes in the vision, or even suggests an ocular illusion. All other historians smile at it. The labarum is as discredited as Catherine's wheel.
"The father of ecclesiastical history," as Eusebius of Caesarea is unhappily called, wrote his famous Ecclesiastical History some years before the death of Constantine; and it does not contain this very important miracle. When the emperor died, however, the bishop wrote a most untruthful and eulogistic "Life of Constantine," and in this he tells the story of the labarum. He tells us also that his chief business as a writer is to "edify"; which means, to advertise the Church. So modern historians are discreetly reticent about the zealous and courtly bishop. I will, as usual, supply the word which they leave unspoken. Eusebius was a liar. The other great Christian writer of the time, Lactantius, is by no means a model of veracity. But he merely says that Constantine saw the vision in a dream. The labarum appears on coins soon after the conversion of Constantine, but no one pretends that it was a reality except Eusebius.
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by historian and former Catholic priest Joseph McCabe
The Christian population in the empire before Constantine
First of all let us make quite sure that the triumph had not been substantially won, as ordinary believers think, and religious writers encourage them to think, before the conversion of Constantine. How many Christians were there in the Roman Empire in the first decade of the fourth century? That means, remember, nearly three hundred years after the death of Jesus, two hundred and fifty years after the supposed "immense multitude" of Christians (fertilized by the blood of martyrs) at Rome, and two centuries after Pliny is believed to have said that the temples were deserted in Bithynia.
This point is of very great importance and interest, and we are going to study it for ourselves. One reason is that the estimate is difficult, and the figures vary from five millions to fifty millions! It is generally agreed that the population of the Roman Empire was at the time about one hundred millions, and I will set out here the estimates of the number of Christians among them that have been published by different historians who have made any sort of calculation:
Gibbon ................... 5,000,000It must be difficult, mustn't it? As a matter of fact, it is not difficult to show that the larger estimates in this list, which are old and superficial guesses, are ludicrous, and even that the figure of five millions is too large.
Friedlander ............. 5,000,000
Richter .................... 6,000,000
Zockler ................... 7,000,000
La Bastie ................. 8,000,000
Chastel .................... 8,000,000
Scbultze ................. 10,000,000
Keim ..................... 16,000,000
Matter ................... 20,000,000
Staudlin ................. 50,000,000Professor Bury, the most distinguished Roman historian in England and the very able editor of Gibbon's great work, generally agrees with Gibbon, but would put the figure higher at one time. As, however, he has made no personal study of the matter, I turn rather to the most recent and most scientific (or least unscientific) of all the estimates, that given by Professor V. Schultze, a Protestant scholar, in his "Geschichte des Untergangs des griechisch-romischen Heidentums" (2 vols., 1892).
Schultze makes a lengthy and detailed estimate of the number of Christians in each province of the Roman Empire; and, if you will take the trouble to tabulate the results (as he fails to do) and add them together, you will find a curious and significant thing. Apart from a few provinces where it is impossible to estimate the number of Christians, but where he admits that they were very few, his figures amount to three million six hundred and fifty thousand. He would not ask us to add more than one hundred thousand for all the rest of the Roman world. Yet he concludes that there were "at least" ten million Christians in the Empire at the beginning of the fourth century, and he further says that Keim's figure, sixteen million, is not too high! That is a nice sample of "religious statistics"; and Schultze was a distinguished professor and an expert.
But even the figure of three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand is too high. Having myself made a thorough study of the fourth century (see my "St. Augustine and His Age," "Crises in the History of the Papacy," "Empresses of Rome," etc.), I can check Professor Schultze's deductions, and we shall find that he is too optimistic, even in his lower figure.
For most provinces of the Roman Empire he finds the number of bishops, and from this he estimates the number of the faithful. It is a delicate and treacherous method unless you know well the conditions of church-life in the fourth century. In my "St. Augustine" (pp. 195-7) I have shown that as late as the year 391, when Christianity was established by law and all other religions bloodily suppressed, the bishop of Hippo had only one church, with a few hundred worshipers, in a town of thirty thousand inhabitants, and that Augustine, who succeeded him, had not a single priest under him; yet because Schultze finds two hundred bishops in Africa about the year 310, he roundly estimates that there must have been one hundred thousand Christians. There is no known ratio of bishops and the faithful.
Now let us take Rome, where Schultze again finds one hundred thousand Christians (in a city of one million). We know that about the year 250, when the Church had enjoyed a long peace, Pope Cornelius had forty-six priests, fourteen deacons and sub-deacons, ninety-four lesser clerics, and fifteen hundred widows and poor to support. From this Schultze and most other clerical writers (except Harnack) argue that there were fifty thousand Christians in Rome in 250.
It would not be a monumental triumph, but, in point of fact, I have shown 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 worshipers thirty years later is, in view of the stern law against them, absurd. As far as I can discover, they had only two.
Further, we learn from the Christian historian Optatus that in the year 310, when Schultze estimates their number at one hundred thousand, they had only forty small -- very small -- chapels. It would thus be more reasonable to suppose that at the outbreak of the Diocletian persecution they numbered about twenty thousand, and the persecution scattered them like chaff. Schultze's estimate of one hundred thousand Christians for the rest of Italy is even wilder. In the central and best educated part of the Roman Empire, Italy, which had a population of about ten million, the Christians numbered certainly not more than six hundred thousand and probably much less. Schultze admits that in the next best educated provinces -- Greece, Spain, and southern Gaul -- they were very few in number.
The Christians were mainly in the ignorant east, especially Asia Minor (which had a larger population then than now) and Armenia. Antioch was the greatest city of the east, and it had half a million inhabitants. Its famous bishop and orator, St. John Chrysostom, tells us that he had in it one hundred thousand followers about the year 385. This was after seventy years of imperial favor, under the fanatically Christian Emperor Theodosius and the greatest orator of the Christian world. I would add that the figure is (as religious writers forget to say) a mere guess. What John really says, in a sermon in which he has every reason to exaggerate, is: "I believe we reach the number of a hundred thousand." In any case, we can safely assume that seventy years earlier even at Antioch, the heart of eastern Christendom, there were not more than fifty thousand Christians.
In short, it is liberal to grant, in the year 310, three million nominal Christians amongst the hundred millions of the Roman Empire; and the persecution had driven most of these back to the temples. Moreover, the vast majority were in rural Armenia (to which Schultze assigns no less than two million out of his three million seven hundred and fifty thousand), Syria, and Asia Minor. The gospel, after nearly three centuries of propaganda, was a failure.
Hence we will not linger over the many pretty and ingenious theories of "the spiritual triumph" of Christianity, but the reader will expect a word about the five causes assigned by Gibbon in the famous fifteenth chapter of his "Decline and Fall":
- The inflexible zeal of the Christians.
- The definite Christian doctrine of a future life.
- The miracles claimed by the Church.
- The pure and austere morals of the faithful.
- The unity and discipline of the Christian Republic.
The reader may understand at once that Gibbon's speculations are due entirely to the imperfect condition of scholarship in his time. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is not only the most elegantly written historical work that ever appeared, but it is for its age a model of conscientious industry and critical insight. Parsons who now jibe at its "errors" would do well to compare it with clerical works of the eighteenth century.
But our knowledge of the ancient world was at the time a mere legacy from the Middle Ages. Even Egyptologists had not begun their revelations; and Babylon -- nay, even ancient Rome itself -- still lay under the rubbish which a thousand years of semi-barbarism had heaped upon them. Nothing was known about "the pure and austere morals" of half a dozen sects besides the Christian, or about the equally sure and certain hope of immortality which they offered to the pagan world. The vast library of lies and forgeries about the martyrs had as yet admitted only a few tremulous rays of truth; and Gibbon, in admiring the "inflexible zeal" of the Christians, was quite unaware that for every genuine martyr, voluntary or involuntary, a thousand Christians had offered incense to Zeus or bribed officials to certify that they had done so. The "miracles" were, we now see, not even known to the Christians themselves of the first three centuries. They are almost entirely the work of unscrupulous later ages.
This disposes of four of the five causes; and the fifth cannot have been taken seriously by the historian himself. He would, of course, not know that there was just as much "discipline" amongst the Mithraists and Manichaeans, the worshipers of Isis, and the devotees of the Greek mysteries. But he did know that instead of being "one," the Church was bloodily rent by schisms and heresies; that, instead of being a republic, its constitution was intensely autocratic by the third century; and that what it had of unity and discipline was precisely what annoyed the Romans and moved good emperors to persecute it.
We understand Gibbon, but we can make only the excuse of culpable ignorance for religious writers who in our time find "causes" of the miraculous spread of Christianity. One of the most popular and most mendacious of these is the claim that it was unique in welcoming the slave and the woman on equal terms. This was done by the Mithraists, the Manichees, the Stoics, and the religious trade-organizations (or Colleges). And it is equally untrue that the Christian body attracted by its virtues -- the sermons of the Fathers are one long indictment of its vices -- or would be likely to attract the ignorant masses of the Roman world, who formed the great bulk of its adherents, by such an expensive advertisement.
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by historian and former Catholic priest Joseph McCabe