Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 The Christian Empire: The image of God upon earth
- 2 The Viceroy of God: The plenitude of Imperial power
- 3 The battle over images: The challenge of popular belief
- 4 The working compromise: The limits of Imperial control
- 5 The monks and the people: The opposition to the palace and the hierarchy
- 6 Decline and fall: The end of the Kingdom of God on earth
- Notes
- Index
1 - The Christian Empire: The image of God upon earth
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 The Christian Empire: The image of God upon earth
- 2 The Viceroy of God: The plenitude of Imperial power
- 3 The battle over images: The challenge of popular belief
- 4 The working compromise: The limits of Imperial control
- 5 The monks and the people: The opposition to the palace and the hierarchy
- 6 Decline and fall: The end of the Kingdom of God on earth
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Whether or not it was granted to the Emperor Constantine to experience a vision which turned him to support the Christian Faith is a question about which historians will always argue according to their tastes. His biographer Eusebius relates that the Emperor many years later told him, rather shyly, that on his way to invade Italy in A.D. 312 he had a sudden vision of a cross shining against the midday sun, and below it the words: ‘In this, conquer.’ That night Christ came to him in a dream and bade him place upon the shields of his troops the labarum, the Christian monogram XP. Rationalist historians dismiss the tale as being the invention of Constantine himself, or, more probably, of Eusebius, whom they dismiss as an unreliable sycophant. Pious Christians see in it a miracle. Others believe that Constantine saw a rare but not unique natural phenomenon which he exaggerated in his imagination. That his soldiers wore the monogram at the battle of the Milvian Bridge a few weeks later is testified by the historian Lactantius, who, however, says that Constantine's inspiration was given to him on the eve of the battle. The stories are not necessarily contradictory. Constantine was talking to Eusebius twenty-six years after the event, and he may genuinely have forgotten the time-lag between his two visionary experiences. It is well attested that when he entered Rome as a victor at the end of October 312, his troops had a Christian symbol as their standard; and they carried the standard with them on the campaigns in the East that made Constantine the master of the world.
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- The Byzantine TheocracyThe Weil Lectures, Cincinatti, pp. 5 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977