Today, 21st May is the feast of St Constantine and his mother St Helen.  Both Christians made a huge impact on Christian history; and we can learn from their witness in the light of new enemies of Christ today.  I will only have time today, however, to consider St Constantine and his role in ending 300 years of persecution of the Christian Church by the Roman Empire.  Today is about Church history, so sit back and enjoy the ride!

Constantine was born between 271 and 273 AD near the River Danube with a Christian mother, (St Helen, of course), and a pagan Father, Constantius - his father being appointed by the persecuting Emperor Diocletian to a subordinate role in the governance of the vast Roman Empire.  It was under Diocletian in the early 300’s that Constantine witnessed the most severe and comprehensive persecution of Christians the world had ever seen, until for us perhaps, with the sufferings of the Russian Church under the Soviet Yoke.  In the light of subsequent events, we might speculate that this unremitting violence against the Church at the turn of the fourth century had a profound effect on Constantine, not least on account of his mother, St Helen’s faith, and because the Orthodox did not buckle under pressure.

After Emperor Diocletian’s death and then that of Constantine’s father, a power struggle ensued between Constantine, who was declared Emperor in York by a western faction of the army, and Maxentius who eventually challenged him.  The two came to battle at the Milvian bridge over the River Tiber in 312 AD, and Constantine prevailed, establishing his position as an Emperor unchallenged.  He was probably not a Christian at the time, although his much-loved mother, St Helen, was obviously putting him on the right track!  Constantine attributed his victory to a vision of the Holy Cross that he was granted to him in the heavens with the words: “in this sign you shall conquer.”

In thanksgiving to the God of the Christians for his victory, Constantine promptly set about bringing peace to the Church, a process he began at the Edict of Milan in 313 AD.  He stopped the persecutions, freed the prisoners and legalised the Church …. something he actually did for all those other religions in the Empire which had fallen out of favour with the Roman Imperium, a fact often deliberately forgotten and ignored by some today, (more of that later).  He restored church properties, built new churches, (in this aided by his mother), and he also granted tax breaks to the clergy and the Church generally. As the historian Eusebius has written, Constantine sought to be a Christian emperor who “by bringing those whom he rules on earth to the only begotten and saving Word, renders them fit subjects for his Kingdom.”  Constantine also built a new Eastern capital on the ancient Roman site of Byzantium, and this was designed to be the great Christian, cosmopolitan and commercial hub of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, the “city of Constantine.”  We can forgive him his pride!

In the same year as the Edict of Milan, Arius was ordained priest in the city of Alexandria.  His doctrine concerning Christ as not being God—not being one with the Father and the Spirit—was soon condemned by the Church, but his heresy still spread like wildfire across the Empire.  It was the Emperor Constantine the Great who helped stem this tide by convening the first Ecumenical Council of bishops, at Nicaea in 325 AD, in response to a request from Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, to help resolve the Arian controversy.  The bishops agreed what was to become the first edition of the Creed that we still use today—a creed finally refined and revised at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381 AD at Constantinople some 44 years after Constantine’s death in 337.  It was Constantine’s initiative in convening the first Council that enabled the outstanding Orthodox Christian theologians of the next generation to continue the godly fight of rolling back this Arian heresy for good.

That’s the good news about Constantine and why the Orthodox Christian East has always honoured him as a saint.  The Christian West, however, called and continues to call him only “the Great” and not a saint.  Perhaps this is because he deferred baptism until his death bed (as was the unfortunate and misguided practice at the time).  Moreover, the baptism, strangely, was performed by an Arian bishop!  Maybe the West has also denied him sainthood because he had both his wife and his son murdered.  Indeed, Constantine’s behaviour—whatever the reason for the murders—does remind us that standards of behaviour then, in some areas of life at least, are not what they are now!

OK, that’s enough history!  What about St Constantine’s legacy and reputation, among both his admirers and detractors alike?  He still excites debate and disagreement today, not, of course, among the Orthodox, but between the Orthodox and a rag bag group of others—most Protestants, secularists (both religious and agnostic) and, of course, atheists.  For these, Constantine, in his Christian phase at least, is a rogue, a villain - the brutal architect of both a vicious, persecuting Catholicism and a repressive Christian State. 

I hope you can all see that none of these charges actually stick!  The Edict of Milan legalised ALL religions in the Empire.  It was the bishops at Nicaea who upheld the Orthodox Christian faith, not the Emperor!  St Constantine was not glorified as a saint by us because of theological prowess (to say the least!), but rather because he utterly transformed the condition of the Church.  No longer would parents need to prepare their children in infancy for the possibility of martyrdom.  No longer would the shadows of Nero and Diocletian stalk the Church.  Instead, the Church could expand and grow in peace.  “Pax Romana”–the Peace of Rome–then actually began to mean something for Christians.

However, if you read the novels of Dan Brown, (a former Episcopalian, now atheist), with his fantasy paranoias of Rome and its post-Constantinian state then you get an entirely unhistorical and false presentation of St Constantine’s legacy.  The ‘Da Vinci Code’ and ‘Angels and Demons’ make for good box office, but Brown deceptively weaves fact in with fiction, and alluringly and engagingly rides the wave of post-Protestant secularism with its haunting portrayal of naughty Rome and all her misdeeds–thanks, of course, in part to “the evil Constantine.”  According to these propagandists, if a meaningful Christianity existed at all after Constantine it was in bondage and only became visible again after the Protestant Reformation, when “the shackles of Rome” were finally broken.

Likewise, if you pick up the works of many Protestant Church historians or Protestant patristic scholars of the 4th century, there he is again, Constantine, the “not-Great,” cynically portrayed as the power-mad, manipulative tyrant who corrupted the Church as his plaything and possession, laying the pattern down for subsequent centuries in a Rome that had fatally poisoned Christianity.  This is sheer, utter nonsense, propaganda of the worst sort, yet many people fall for it, because it is what they already incoherently believe.  Therefore, it is necessary for the Orthodox in the West to challenge these bad cultural memes about St Constantine and his legacy if we are to recover the vision of a truly Christian society and culture which is both tolerant and inclusive while at the same time being firm about Orthodoxy and heresy.

We cannot allow Western secularism to continue to secularise Christianity, banishing it from the public square and resisting its public endorsement.  Some, Rod Dreyer, for example would have us hunker down (as described in his book,The Benedict Option) to ride out the storm in order to come back later and pick up the pieces, but I am not impressed by that argument.  We have not, as Orthodox Christians, even begun to make our presence felt.  This week, I was sent a questionnaire by a UK University asking me to describe what the Orthodox Church is doing to make its views known to the Government about issues of concern.  I made as good a showing responding to the questions as I could, but the honest answer would be: “not much!” That’s a terrible self-inflicted limitation and indictment laid upon us, and it has to be addressed and changed.  Rather than hunker down, how about making our voice heard for change?!

There is one other connected issue at stake here, and to this, finally, I must now turn.  St Constantine created a religiously tolerant State and Empire, yet one that was eventually to become thoroughly Christian, even when the Empire itself finally fell in the West in the 5th century.  In the east, where the Roman Empire survived the barbarian hordes for a thousand years before the Ottomans seized Constantinople in 1453, the Constantinopolitan ideal of a Christian State, which was tolerant of other religions, survived as the Emperor’s sturdy legacy.  Yet in the West this harmony between Church and State started a long process of decline which began with the development of a centralised and powerful papacy under the 11th century pope Gregory VIIth (Hildebrand) and arguably ended with the American and French revolutions.  In the West today, people, even some Orthodox Christians, can hardly conceive of a State that is both simultaneously tolerant and Christian.  Perhaps if they could deal with their own prejudicial reading of history, these souls might discover through disinterested research a very different Orthodox Christian St Constantine, a sinner for sure, but a man to whom God gave a vision for triumph—not just a cross in the sky but also a cross in his heart, a vision for a truly Christian society.  It is not too late for the West to recover that vision and purpose.