Constantine the Winner

 

Italian Version

Driven by my passion for the history of late roman empire and the love I have always had for the author, I just finished reading Alessandro Barbero's “Costantine the Winner” (Costantino Il Vincitore). 

Disclaimer The review is long, but I assure you the book is longer!

 Alessandro Barbero is a famous historian in Italy. He started with a five minutes break about various historical facts in a famous science tv show, and from there he became a small television star.

 He is a fantastic speaker (if you have the opportunity and you speak italian, go to his conferences or look for one on youtube) but he is also an excellent writer of history essay and even historical novels.

 The beautiful thing about Barbero’s works compared to many other historical essays is his continuous use of primary sources. This gives a sense of vitality and an exceptional concreteness to his books (and make you regret bitterly of having practically forgotten all that Latin studied in high school).

When a history book deals with the original voices it is always fun and very educational: Constantine's legislation on tax evasion or on bribery of public officials seen with the eyes of 21st century teaches a lot, especially that in 2,000 years the world has not changed (apart from the penalties a less bloody than the stake or the crucifixion).

So having read with pleasure other books from him, I boldly faced "Constantine the Winner".

It's an eight hundred pages book.

Eight hundred pages that start from the primary sources.

If you lack the strength to deal with the textual analysis of the works of Eusebius of Caesarea, Lattantius or Zosimos, this is not the book for you. And this is the light part: there are entire chapters dedicated to the epigraphs of the road milestones or on how the legislative activity of Constantine can be reconstructed based on the materials of the later Codex Teodosianum or Justinianum.

Did I scare you? Well, I don't want anyone to venture without being aware of what they find.

In short, it is not an easy book and it is not the right book if you have not already read something about Constantine, but having said that, the final judgment is that it is a very interesting, revolutionary book, that can teach you something new.

Barbero's book is a counter-current book, it tries to reconstruct the figure of Constantine from primary sources and in doing so it cannot help but criticize and falsify much of traditional historiography.

There are two great strands of historical thought on Constantine.

Constantine is the first Christian Emperor, he converted having the famous vision of the cross and the inscription In Hoc Signo Vinces before the battle of Ponte Milvio against the pagan persecutor Maxentius, after which to thank God for the victory he founded numerous Basilicas (in Rome San Peter and St. John) and he promulgated the edict of Milan which gave freedom of worship to Christians, and he convened the Council of Nicea to affirm orthodoxy and fight the Arian heresy.

Or maybe you read the opposite: Constantine was a crafty cynic who did not believe in anything and who chose a new religion to unify a shaky Empire, and perhaps modeled Christianity from above by defining dogmas and sacred books (betraying its original spirit).

Over time, the two currents have alternated in popularity, sometimes falling into the more ridiculous  hagiography, others leading to the popularization of pseudo conspiracy fiction.

Barbero analyzing the single sources step by step shows how both representations are profoundly wrong, and in many details simply false.

The Constantine we know from the history books is largely invented and the author does not spare the salacious jokes about the many historians (ancient and modern) who, in order to remain faithful to the mythical figure of the Christian hero Constantine (or his opposite) had to bend facts to opinions, ignoring them, modifying them, interpreting them or perhaps directly inventing them and giving certain weak hypotheses as facts.

We have many sources on Constantine but very few historical certainties, we know that the stories of the panegyrists of his time, on which we rely (especially the Christian ones: Eusebius of Caesarea and Lactantius) do not correspond with many of the known facts, and this does not wonder: all these authors have the explicit goal of praising the Emperor and attributing anything good and positive to him and downloading anything evil onto others (think about a well paid politically bended journalist, but with a much greater style and literary ability).

 Barbero, source after source, destroys the figure of the saint carved in marble, but two-dimensional, and, refraining from drawing explicit conclusions himself, lets his work speaks and from the analysis of the documents another figure emerges this time three-dimensional, of lights and shadows, a gigantic and often contradictory character.

 Drawing my conclusions at the end of the reading, the thought that struck me most was that although Constantine is mainly remembered for his religious politics, I really don't think he considered it an important part of his politics, or even imagined that he would be remembered for his "private" sympathy for the Christian God (By private we must obviously mean how much "private" the attitude of an Absolute Monarch can be).

 What are the main "myths" that we can dispel about Constantine?

 The Milan Edict of Tolerance was revolutionary. No, it wasn’t.

 In the public sphere, Maxentius and Licinius and (more reluctantly) Galerius had already reached the conclusion that persecuting Christians was at least useless. Our fixation on an alleged turning point is precisely due to the distortion of contemporary sources, which, by definition, cannot attribute these merits on defeated rivals, but must necessarily celebrate only the emperor in office.

 Moreover, if we really say the whole truth about Constantine's Edict of Milan we must say that it is not an Edict, it was not issued in Milan, it is not by Constantine and it does not even concern Christians.

 What we have is not actually an edict but a rescritum (i.e. not a real law, but it is something more like an interpretative ministerial circular), that was issued to Nicomedia by Licinius, and it gives freedom of worship not only to Christians, but to all the other religions persecuted in the past (another myth is that the persecutions were only against Christians, for example even the Manichaeans were persecuted by Diocletian).

 So why are we talking about Constantine? Well the document bears, as per Tetrarchical practice, also the name of Constantine (in second position after Licinius), after the final victory of Constantine, how could it be admitted that the tolerance of Christians had been proclaimed by a defeated tyrant defined as a persecutor, and there was no trace of a similar act of the beloved and meritorious reigning Emperor? The simple solution was to assume that the edict / non-edict had been decided in Milan where Licinius and Constantine met in 313, or even more that obviously it was the good Constantine who convinced the evil Licinius.

 In two thousand years of repetition, the hypothesis without any confirmation has become an indubitable fact and so a circular from Licinius issued to Nicomedia has become in everyone's mind an Edict of Constantine promulgated in Milan.

 Fake news is not a modern invention.

 We can also dwell on the affirmation that Constantine converted before the battle of Ponte Milvio following the famous vision of a fiery Cross. No source report this fact.

 The hagiographic sources tell two separate stories: a celestial vision in which Constantine and the army in Gaul see an XP (the Christogram, not the cross) in the sky and a dream before the Milvian Bridge in which he dreams the Christogram and the inscription:. in Hoc Signo Vices (or better en toútōi níka, the words were in greek).

 The union of the two facts is an early medieval reworking. Which after centuries of repetition has become official history

 Moreover, we must remember that every self-respecting Roman general before a battle had (or at least declared that he had) visions of victory, dreams and omens and Constantine was certainly no less.

 Again, in the profusion of sources made available by Barbero of Constantinian visions we find plenty of them. Athena and Apollo were at home in his tent when he was in the field.

 To make people understand what is really found in the official texts on which our historical knowledge is based, my favorite story is the following: before a battle on the Rhine against barbarian marauders, a god appears to Constantine and the army, but not any god, it’s his deceased father to appear, the Divo Costantius Clorus and not alone! He appears accompanied by a whole army of souls of his old legionaries, who take up the front line alongside the living and with the mighty terror of their presence defeat the barbarians (in short, a battle of the fields of Pelennor antelitteram, if you have read Tolkien)!

 Barbero ironically enjoys citing so many respectable historians who are quick to discount (obviously) pagan apparitions as mere exaggerations or legends, but who employ pages and pages of twisted reasoning and risky interpretations of exotic atmospheric and astronomical phenomena to try to save the historicity of only two christian apparitions.

 In the same way we can also exclude some of the most deeply rooted myths that depict Constantine as the cynical autocrat who consciously modeled and distorted Christianity to make it the glue of the new imperial structure (if that were true it was a disastrous mistake, just remember the tumultuous struggles between Nestorians, Monophysites, Arians!).

 Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea (and he also paid the bill and expenses) it was his role as both patron of Christianity and as Pontiff Maximus who governed the whole religious life of the Empire, but if we read the texts (not apocryphal) we have a surprise: in his letters the thing that pleased him most is the definition of a unique method for all the churches of the empire to calculate the date of Easter!

 And the Aryan dispute? the Creed? Homousia and omoiusia? All those fine arguments that fill the church history books? Here, too, we have his own words in a letter to the Council Fathers: “they are philosophical subtleties to break the hair in four, which make normal faithful headache just thinking about them, and on which moreover we could never know the truth. Bishops should refrain from arguing over unnecessary similar elaborations that confuse the flock of the faithful and get along in peace without causing discord and scandal.”

 So wasn't Constantine who chose the dogmas of the church? It is enough to look at the facts to understand his sympathies: after the council of Nicaea, Constantine recalled the condemned heretic Arius and convened a new council in Tire which thought well to please the emperor rehabilitating him and sending St. Athanasius of Alexandria (doctor of the church and supporter of the dogma of the consubstantiality of the Father with the Son) into exile in Trier. Add to this the fact that he had Eusebius of Nicomedia (right arm of Arius) as a counselor at court and that on his deathbed he was baptized by him and the answer is quite clear: Constantine was a supporter of Arius certainly not of Orthodoxy which made history.

 Following orthodox authors are so embarrassed by facts so obvious, and that cannot be erased, that they have to put together twisted explanations on how the good Emperor had, as his only fault, an excessive goodness and tolerance and that he could not bear the idea of punishing anybody, not even the evil heretics (forgetting Constantine killed his own wife and firstborn son ...).

 Constantine was certainly a Christian, but he didn't become one immediately, he certainly did not convert suddenly on the eve of Ponte Milvio, his was a long path that led him in the last years of his life to be "in a certain sense" a Christian. Christian yes, but in a very different way from how we now define being a Christian.

 This is not only due to the historical difference (often underestimated) between our Christianity and the one existing prior the great ecumenical councils, that is, before the dogmas that a modern Christian takes for granted were defined (or even thought of), but also for the simple fact that Constantine was no ordinary human being. He was the Emperor, the Autokrator. We think that to convert means to accept something superior and external, to change oneself (the word itself means it). I don't think Constantine changed himself, he didn't accept something external, Christianity did not bring value to HIM, HE brought value to Christianity.

 Constantine was a Roman polytheist, used to seek protection from the gods and dealing and bargaining with them. I believe that he certainly felt favored by the Christian God, but I do not think he was "monotheistic" like a modern man, indeed very personally I think that his vision, for most of his life, had remained more enotheistic than anything else.

 He publicly favored Christians with donations and a favorable tax system, took bishops to court (Arians such as Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea), built churches (the Holy Sepulcher and the Nativity for example, while we have no evidence instead he actually built he the Roman basilicas, probably St John in Lateran was founded by Massentius, while St Peter is from his successor Constantius), made being a Christian not only convenient, but also very trendy and these demonstrations of favor seem to gradually strengthen over the years.

But on the other hand we cannot ignore that it also financed the construction of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter in Constantinople, and that the Constantinian coinage is devoid of Christian symbols (even if pagan ones also disappear as well), in the same way in its arch of triumph in Rome there is not a single sign that remotely refers to Christianity (despite herculean interpretative efforts of historians who in both cases try to sell off the slightest isolated scratch as a cross or Christogram).

 To give an example of how the situation his shaded: in Constantinople, his new capital, a triumphal column (which still stands) was erected in the center of the forum that bore his name, In the basement, to protect the city, the legend says that fragments of the true cross were hidden ... and the Palladio (the sacred statue of Athena that Aeneas saved from the destruction of Troy and brought to Lazio) and at the top of the column a statue of the Emperor watched his city represented in the guise of…. Apollo Helios. Historians can try to deny that Constantine ever conducted a syncretic policy, but I don't know how to define it otherwise.

 You will question me, but how this position of the Emperor was reconciled with the faith of the Christians with which he surrounded himself? Isn't this an open contradiction? Yes, of course it is, there are no doubts, but I really don't think anyone dared to go and point this out to "Imperator Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus Pius Felix Victor Maximus". No, you were not going to discuss with someone who has killed his wife and firstborn son without too many problems.

 In the following centuries, Constantine was gradually transformed into a two-dimensional icon, the contradictions smoothed out under a thick coat of plaster, or at least into an instrument of destiny. Both descriptions inadequate to grasp the depth of the character.

 To understand the size of the character two quick anecdotes:

 Constantine is the only human being who is both a Christian Saint (at least for the Orthodox Church) and a full-fledged Pagan Deity (last among the Roman emperors, the Senate decreed his Apotheosis).

 Constantine also has another paradoxical record: he is the man who in who caused the death of more Roman emperors: Maximian (his father-in-law), Maxentius (his brother-in-law), Bassiano, Valente, Martiniano, Licinius (also brother-in-law, husband of his sister) and Liciniano (nephew, son of his sister), not to mention his own firstborn son, Crispus, who was appointed Caesar and associated with the throne. Here you can see a common tract in Constantine family… I mean, killing large quantities of relatives.

 Such a character was not a saint, in fact he was probably a megalomaniac and I would not have liked to frequent him (look at the severe and inspired features of his colossal head in Palazzo dei Conservatori), he was perhaps not even a cynic as others claim (perhaps not even the stupid fool his nephew Giuliano describes). He was a complicated person who made history.

 This book helps us to recover and understand it better.

 
Read it if you can, I repeat it is a book that you can learn from, and this is a rare commodity.