The First Missionary War, Chapter 2
by Michael Routery
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Constantine
One of the great fallacies that the Church has so energetically propagated over the centuries is that of the persecution of the Christians themselves in their early days; a claim that is terribly exaggerated. The Catholic Church has made a small industry out of manufacturing tales and lurid illustrations of dubious saints and martyrs undergoing the most delirious of tortures and degradations. The only persecutions against Christians in general occurred during the third century starting in 250 under the emperors Decius, Valerian and Diocletian.3 At a time of crisis a law was passed requiring all inhabitants of the Empire to sacrifice to the Gods, pour libations and eat of the sacrifice. Many Christians left the church to escape the death penalty, leading to the term lapsi, the lapsed. Some rejoined synagogues. The Christian church was the only religion which required an all or none allegiance at the time. The State was persecuting the Christians for political reasons, because they refused to acknowledge the state cult and thereby asserting that they were outside its laws.
Diocletian continued the attempt to control the growth of the Church and consulted the oracle of Apollo at Didyma about what to do. He probably saw them as a dangerous threat to classical Mediterranean values. Six years later, on Feb. 23, 303, he issued his first decree against the Christians, provoked by the discovery of covert Christians in the innermost circle of his administration, ordering the destruction of churches and burning of bibles. In a decaying empire the hyper-organized church, was quite reasonably, felt to be taking over. In areas under control of Christian officials such as Antioch, influential pagans were executed in revenge. However Diocletian's successors issued edicts of tolerance. In general much of the population resented the Christians who were thought of as an unfriendly and elitist group; in some place mobs turned them in. Its important to remember that the people actually persecuted and certainly those killed were of a very small number.
Within a few years, the climate shifted dramatically and with most fateful consequences for the history of the world, with the rise of Constantine to the Imperial throne. In 306 he proclaimed himself Caesar. At the time he followed the Sun God (Sol Invictus) who had once appeared to him in a vision promising a long reign, but in his campaigns against his rivals he had courted the support of the Christians. Early on, bishops, who were admitted into his court, perceived his potential for the Church and called him the "Lords angel" and stated that his throne was a "picture of Christ's kingship". It seems that the church hierarchy had their designs on him from early on; they would mutually use each other to great effect.
On October 28, 311, Constantine's army with the help of the Christians defeated his rival, Maxentius, and killed him at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge at the city gates of Rome. Constantine claimed that at the outset of the battle that the god of the Christians sent him a sign of favor. Two different historical accounts from the time have survived about this history-shifting event: the Christian historian Lactantius , who personally knew Constantine, an imperial favorite and a tutor to Constantine's eldest son, said the sign was given in a dream the night before the battle, in which the emperor was instructed to place the monogram of Christ on the shields of his soldiers.
A second historian, Eusebius, who, also, had met the emperor and claimed to be relating personal confidences wrote that while journeying to the battle the emperor had seen a glowing cross in the sky with the words 'conquer with this' rendered in Greek. The next night in his dream he was told to use the sign for protection.4 The protection of the Sun god seems to have been combined with that of the Christ, in the memory of the emperor long after he had renounced his devotion to Sol. At any rate, symbolically the historical wheel was turned.... The now half-Christian emperor issued an edict, enacted at Milan, in Feb. 313, in which freedom was allowed for all religious paths, but gave the Christians a privileged place.
It's relevant that from an early date Constantine combines the Christian symbol with his personal image as a conquering general; the cross as a symbol of victory over 'darkness' imposed with imperial fervor. His coins reveal a picture of him in the conqueror's pose and armor next to a cross topped by a globe, while his helmet bears the name of Christ. The emperor stands in for the departed Christ, yet, for many years he used Apollonian imagery as well. A pragmatist, the image of Christ seemed to blur in his mind with that of the Sun god. He was aware that the majority of the inhabitants of the Empire were still pagans and so he smartly incorporated some pagan imagery into his personality cult. He was sophisticated in what would now be called public relations. So he exploited the use of ancient statues when he claimed Byzantium, an ancient Greek city, for his new capital (330) renaming it after himself -- Constantinople. Nevertheless, according to the historian Zosimus, he alienated the citizens of Rome by refusing to do the ancient sacrifices to Jupiter in the Capitol. But Byzantium had a higher concentration of Christians than any other part of the empire; churches already outnumbered temples there, so it was a strategic location for the newly Christian direction the empire was taking.
While Constantine was happy to use certain symbols of paganism to support his rule, he was deeply misogynist and 'transphobic' and suppressed, decidedly, non-patriarchal pagan centers. The state cult was one thing, ritual transvestism was another. And so he attacked the Temple of Aphrodite/Astarte in Aphaca, now Efqa, Lebanon. This Goddess temple was the home of ritual prostitutes, females and androgynous males who served in an ancient practice of bringing worshipers close to the divine through sexual communion. Constantine was determined to destroy this popular temple and had the temple razed to the ground; but was unable to destroy the sanctity of the site in the eyes of the populace. According to his fawning chronicler, Eusebius, in this "hidden snare of souls ... men undeserving of the name forgot the dignity of their sex ... and propitiate the demon [meaning the Goddess Astarte] by their effeminate conduct. "The priests were murdered, in Eusebius' words -- 'the hand of military force was made instrumental in purging the impurities of the place".5 An apologetics for atrocity that would course down the Christian centuries.
In Egypt transgendered priests, who ritually castrated themselves, served in the temples of the Nile (Hapy) and participated in the rites that encouraged the fertilizing flooding of the river. Constantine, expressly forbade their participation, although festivals encouraging the flooding of the river were allowed to continue. Hapy, known as Nilus to Latin speakers was an androgynous god depicted with a beard and women's breasts. The Greeks and Romans associated him with the astrological sign Aquarius and with Ganymede, reinforcing associations with homosexuality. He was served by transgendered priest/esses. Hapy's temples and worship was ordered abolished by the emperor and the priest/esses were slaughtered.6 The attacks on the Goddess Isis and her followers also began at this time. Served by, androgynous males, as well as traditional males and female priestesses, Constantine demanded that these gender-variant males stop their ceremonies. When they refused he ordered them killed. Later he had many of the priestesses murdered as well and temples were looted and desecrated. Here he mirrored a very old Roman patriarchal abhorrence of such customs of 'sex surgery'; amplified by the biases of the new Christian faith, the results were murderous. As so often, the laws were for the subjects not the ruled; in hypocrisy the emperors of the late empire continued to happily employ eunuchs in their palaces and used some of them for sexual purposes, but it was Constantine's son, Constans, who would wage war against homosexuality -- except his own -- making it against the law and a capital offense.7
Following a Christian agenda, Constantine also ordered the destruction of the Temple of Asclepius at Aigeai in Cilicia, now in Turkey. This was an important sanctuary of the Greek healer god, a lover of humanity whom the Christians considered a competitor of their Christ. Apparently the bishop of the city was responsible, probably acting with the emperor's tacit approval. Eusebius, the Christian historian, put Constantine, his hero, in the starring role. The bishop in an architectural performance designed to show the triumph of the church over Paganism stripped the temple of its exterior colonnade and reused it to build his church.
The most important legacy of Constantine was the marriage between the Church and the imperial state. Church clerics were given the status of imperial administrators, they became essentially government bureaucrats and secular and ecclesiastical law became one and the same. 'Ecclesia', the church community, became the body of the state. Under Constantine's successors this unity would become so seamless that paganism or heresy became, thought of, as, a form of treason; thoughts and practices not simply considered spiritually wrong but acts against the state. In an ominous development for the future the Roman imperial inquisitorial process became part of the Church legal process which from its earliest days had demonstrated a tremendous need for purity, marking off the boundaries between the faithful and those contaminated with heresy -- (hairesis, 'to choose', in Greek).8 Constantine took great interest in disciplining the unity of the Church and called for Church councils including the Council of Nicea in 325 which shaped the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and defined the Church against the heretics. He also established the present week, with the worship of Jesus to be performed on the day of the Christ symbolizing sun. Before the 'schismatics' (factions) fought among themselves, often with bloodshed, now the dominant faction had the state apparatus to enforce its will against other non-compliant Christians. By the Middle Ages, the Church had turned Constantine into a mythic figure. The Papacy, in fact, laid claim to its secular rulership and ownership of central Italy upon a document forged in the 8th century called the Donation of Constantine. The forgery, alleged to have been written by the emperor, gave the church vast lands and secular authority over them, lands the Popes would rule until the late 19th century and of which the Vatican City State is the surviving tiny, yet, extremely rich, remnant.9
Much worse was to come after Constantine but a precedence had been set. In an era of a declining economy, the late emperors passed harsher and harsher laws -- and viewed the solid organizational structure of the church as a wonderful support for the political regime. The tenacity and durability of the Christians monotheism, the extremely detailed dogmas, the definitive answers as to what happened after death, the cut and dried qualities, that made it distinct from the pagan traditions, lent itself to a peculiar merging and fusion with the needs of the imperial state. The Christian emperors symbolically stood in for the departed Christ, enacting God's will on earth, they carried much of the role that the popes would later carry alone. The laws of the Emperor were equated with the Word of Christ.10 In terms of structure the Church was like a steel bunker while the Mysteries were like beautiful colored tents, delightful and enchanting, but easily pulled down or torched. In the Mysteries people had to use their imaginations, in the Church they had to submit to rules that made life easy for those who wanted an answer for everything handed to them. It was a time of closing intellectual horizons. People traveled less. Many destitute people became bandits who haunted roads that had once seen the safe passage of people and goods. The church grew hand in hand with tyranny and as life grew more harsh the anti-worldly attitudes of Christ's religion probably came to make more and more sense to people; life was becoming a 'vale of suffering' (that beloved phrase of the Catholic Church and generations of preachers, designed for inducing passivity). An ascetic trend that had been growing for centuries in the Mediterranean world rose, a knife, which the church fathers, honed to a sharp sheen.
Notes to this chapter
3. Persecutions that occurred under some early emperors like Nero, were specifically of a political nature, they refused to acknowledge the government and it came after them for that reason, it was a strictly secular police action.
4. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, p.25
5. Ibid. p.32
6. ibid.; Conner, Sparks and Sparks, Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit
7. Chuvin, p.33
8. From the beginning the early Christians were obsessed with purity, who was 'in' with God and who was 'out'.
9. Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, p. 41
10. Turcan, Cults of the Roman Empire, calls this development ceasaropapism.
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