The Arian Controversy and the Council of Nicea

[Theodosius the Great]

The heretical Arians lost, and the bishop whose name was given to the heresy was exiled to Illyria by the still pagan Emperor Constantine.

Ughhh....He renounced paganism after his victory at the Milvian bridge and was an unbaptized Christian at the time the council took place. That term may sound like an oxymoron to us moderns, but most Christians were unbaptized until they neared the end of their lives. If Constantine was a crypto-pagan he sure hid it well with his anti-pagan legislation. Plus, he made sure his sons had a Christian upbringing.

I just finished reading a book on him by Michael Grant (shudder) and even he -an atheist- believes Constantine was a sincere "convert." He also believes Constantine was an incrementalist when it came to Christianizing the empire : forbidding pagan sacrifices, withdrawing state funds from the temples, but never outright outlawing paganism. Pagan images were slowly phased out on the coinage but not completely in his lifetime. All the while he built Churches all over the empire on a massive scale - most of which were uncompleted in his own lifetime.

I never thought of the process that way before, but it sounds plausible to me.

But Grant believes that Christian disunity destabilized the empire and so Constantine, he says, contributed to the empire's fall. I don't agree with him on that because the disunity never led to civil war. Also, the, now Christian, citizens were more cohesive than they had been before. In other words, they started to "feel" like "Romans" for the very first time. The state was no longer seen as a distant oppressive alien power that ruled over their lives.

However, I do agree with Grant when he places blame on Constantine for leaving a dynastic mess by bequeathing the Empire to five men - his three sons and nephews. The same thing happened with Charlemagne after his death. Yet, Medieval kings always looked back to these two men as model Christian rulers even though they brought disaster to their empires by their dynastic arrangements.

In Grant's view, another contribution to the fall of the western empire was Constantine's military reforms. This view, the last time I checked, is not mainstream among scholars and this is where I'm dubious about analyses by popularizers like Grant who tend to oversimplify matters and are not military men. He doesn't give an alternative answer which leaves me to think that he believes that the old system based on the classical legions was what needed to be reconstructed. This view seems to ignore the new realities that Rome faced on its borders with new confederations and peoples upping the pressure against the empire. The old system wasn't designed to counteract these new forces, to my understanding. I read a book on this called "The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire" by Edward N. Luttwak.

Theo