The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Page 7

  Little of these splendid edifices remains today. Fires and earthquakes have taken their toll, and the passage of sixteen and a half centuries has done the rest. It must also be admitted that with only a limited quantity of first-class architects and craftsmen available at any given site, all too much of the imperial construction work was hasty and slipshod; walls were too thin, foundations too shallow. Yet the vision was there, and the energy, and the determination to preserve, perpetuate and adorn the great shrines of the Christian faith; and if few of these shrines nowadays possess a single stone recognizably dating from the time of Constantine,

  1 The Chape] of St Helena in the crypt of this church is - with the communicating Chapel of St Gregory - part of the ancient Palace. According to legend it was once the Empress's bedroom; it is now thought more probably to have served as her private chapel.

  there still remain a remarkable number whose very existence is due, in large measure, to him.

  And, of course, to his mother. By now an old woman, she had for years enjoyed immense popularity across the Empire; and her zeal for the religion that she had so enthusiastically embraced had in its turn been responsible for untold quantities of conversions. Her journey to the Holy Places caught the imagination of all Christendom; and even if we may question her finding of the True Cross, we can deny neither the number nor the generosity of her benefactions to churches and monasteries, hospitals and orphanages, wherever she went. We do not know the length of her stay in the Levant, nor the circumstances of her death; there is no certain evidence that she ever returned to Constantinople, and she does not seem to have been present at any of the dedication ceremonies. It may well be, therefore, that she died, as one suspects she would have wished to die, while still in the Holy Land - the first recorded Christian pilgrim, and the founder of the pilgrim tradition that has continued from her day to our own.

  Throughout the triumphal ceremonies by which Constantine inaugurated his new capital - and, as he believed, a new era for the Roman Empire - he was uncomfortably aware that, in one vital respect, he had failed. Despite the Council of Nicaea, despite all that he had done to bind together the Christian Church, it remained as divided as ever it had been. To some extent - though this he is unlikely to have admitted, even to himself - the fault was his own: personally uninterested in the nicer distinctions of theological doctrine and swayed above all by his determination to achieve unity within both Church and State, he vacillated constantly between opposing camps, allowing himself to be persuaded by whatever favourite happened to have his ear at any given moment. But the greater part of the blame lay with the Christian leaders themselves. Obviously, they believed that vital issues were at stake - issues for which, as many had already proved, they were ready to face exile and even martyrdom; none the less, by their eternal bickering and squabbling, by the hatred and bigotry, intolerance and malice that they showed to each other and by the readiness with which they stooped to every form of dishonesty to achieve their ends, they set a sad example to their flocks - an example which, moreover, countless generations of their successors have been all too ready to follow.

  Archbishop Alexander died in 328, and was succeeded in his Alexandrian see by his former chaplain, Athanasius. The two had been together at the Council of Nicaea, where Athanasius had proved even more skilled and quick-witted a dialectician than his master. In the years to come, he was to show himself to be something more: the leading churchman of his time, one of the towering figures in the whole history of the Christian Church, and a canonized saint. (He was long erroneously believed to have been the author of the Athanasian Creed, which still bears his name.) Arius and his adherents were to have no more redoubtable adversary.

  For the moment, however, their star was once again in the ascendant. Even after Nicaea, Arius had never lost the support of the Emperor's family - in particular that of his mother and his half-sister Constantia -while the Asian bishops (as opposed to those of Europe and North Africa) were also overwhelmingly pro-Arian in their sympathies and took full advantage of their proximity to the imperial court to further their cause. Already in 327 they had persuaded Constantine to recall Arius from exile and to receive him in audience; the Emperor, impressed as much by the brilliance and obvious sincerity of the man as by his assurance that he willingly accepted all the points of faith approved at Nicaea, had gone so far as to write at least two personal letters to Archbishop Alexander urging (though taking care not to command) that he should be allowed to return to Egypt. He seems to have been genuinely surprised when the archbishop proved reluctant to comply - and was probably still more so in the following year when Alexander's flock, by their election of the firebrand Athanasius, showed themselves equally obdurate.

  Not that Athanasius, even on home ground, was universally popular; firebrands seldom are. For internal political reasons unconnected with the Arian controversy, the local Meletian Church under its own Bishop John Arkaph was bent on his destruction, and over the next few years unleashed against him, in quick succession, accusations of fraud, bribery and even sacrilege. When all three charges failed to stick, they tried one of murder, claiming that a Meletian bishop had been flogged to death and dismembered at his instigation. According to one version of the story, Athanasius was actually able to produce the missing bishop, all in one piece, before the examining magistrate; in any event he had no difficulty in establishing that his alleged victim was alive and well, and the case collapsed. Arkaph and his followers now had one last try: rape. They found a young woman whom they managed to bribe or frighten into claiming that she had been violated by the archbishop - an experience which, she added, was made the more regrettable by the fact that she had vowed herself to perpetual virginity. Unfortunately, she failed to recognize her ravisher in court; and once again Athanasius was found to have no case to answer.

  Whether Constantine was, as he maintained, genuinely troubled by these continuing accusations - groundless as they invariably proved to be - or whether he was simply falling ever more under the influence of the pro-Arians around him, he seems gradually to have come to the conclusion that Athanasius, rather than Arius, was now the chief impediment to that Church unity for which he strove. By this time, too, he was making plans for celebrating, in 335, the thirtieth year of his reign by the formal consecration of the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Here he proposed to summon a vast convocation of bishops, drawn from every corner of the Empire; and he was determined that doctrinal harmony should prevail among them. He accordingly gave orders that the bishops on their way to Jerusalem should hold a synod at Tyre, in the presence of a high imperial official, in order - as he rather disarmingly put it - 'to free the Church from blasphemy and to lighten my cares'.

  The synod was called for July. It was, as soon became clear, to be attended almost exclusively by bishops of the Arian persuasion, and consequently to be less a gathering of distinguished churchmen than a trial of Athanasius; and the archbishop seems to have realized as much. In the previous year, when a similar exercise had been proposed at Caesarea, he had categorically refused to attend and the idea had been abandoned; on this occasion, however, he resolved to face his enemies and duly presented himself before the tribunal. He was soon to regret his decision. All the old charges were now revived, and new ones introduced; hosts of new witnesses were called, each one apparently prepared to swear black and blue that the archbishop had broken every commandment and committed every crime in the statute book. He himself fought back with characteristic vigour, not hesitating to meet his accusers with their own weapons; and the synod soon degenerated into a general uproar of lie and counter-lie, of calumny and curse, insult and invective. Finally a commission of inquiry was appointed, consisting of six of Athanasius's most implacable opponents, with orders to proceed forthwith to Egypt, there to gather further evidence. At this point the archbishop, believing - probably rightly - that his life was in danger, slipped away to Constantinople. He was deposed in his absence, after which the synod broke u
p and its members continued their journey to Jerusalem.

  Once arrived in the capital, Athanasius went straight to the Palace, but was refused an audience; and we have it on Constantine's own authority that, one day when he was riding into the city, the archbishop suddenly appeared in his path and flung himself in front of his horse. 'He and his companions looked so weighed down by their troubles,' wrote the Emperor, 'that I felt an ineffable pity as I realized that this was Athanasius, the holy sight of whom had once been enough to draw the Gentiles themselves to the worship of the God of All.' The whole episode, we can assume, had been expertly stage-managed by Athanasius; but despite its promising beginning it did not succeed. Six bishops, including the two Eusebii, hastened to Constantinople at the Emperor's bidding, with a new and dangerously damaging allegation: that the archbishop was even now planning to call all the workers at the port of Alexandria out on strike. If he were not immediately reinstated, they would refuse to load the transports with the grain on which Constantinople depended for its survival, and the capital would be starved into submission. In vain did Athanasius deny the charges; where his beloved city was concerned, Constantine was deaf to the voice of reason. In a rage, he banished the still protesting archbishop to Augusta Treverorum - the modern Trier - and then turned back to the interrupted task of getting Arius reaccepted in Alexandria.

  Now, however, it was the Emperor's turn to fail. Every attempt by Arius to return brought new outbreaks of rioting in the city - led by the great St Anthony himself, aged eighty-six, who had left his desert hermitage to champion the cause of orthodoxy and who now wrote several personal letters to the Emperor on behalf of Athanasius. Although these were written in Coptic - Anthony spoke no Greek - they seem to have had some effect, inducing Constantine, probably some time in 336, to summon Arius back to Constantinople for a further investigation of his beliefs. It was during this last inquiry - so Athanasius later wrote, with considerable Schadenfreude, to his Egyptian flock - and while the pro-Arian bishops were trying to persuade the Patriarch of Constantinople to allow him to attend Mass on the following day (a Sunday), that

  Arius, made bold by the protection of his followers, engaged in light-hearted and foolish conversation, until he was suddenly compelled by a call of nature to retire; and immediately, as it is written, 'falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst and gave up the ghost' . . .

  This story, to be sure, comes from the pen of Arius's arch-enemy; but 1 Acts. I. 18. although there are - predictably - several different versions of exactly what occurred,1 the unattractive circumstances of his demise are too well attested by contemporary writers to be open to serious question. Inevitably, it was interpreted by those who hated him as divine retribution: the archbishop's biblical reference is to the somewhat similar fate which befell Judas Iscariot. It did not, however, put an end to the controversy - nor even to the exile of Athanasius, which lasted until after Constantine's own death in 337. Only on 23 November of that year did he finally return to Alexandria, starting up as he did so yet another period of factional strife in that unhappy diocese. Constantine's dream of spiritual harmony throughout Christendom was not to be achieved in his lifetime; indeed, we are still awaiting it today.

  One would like to hear more about the tricennalia celebrations in Jerusalem. Eusebius writes with wonderment of the numbers of the assembled bishops, and of the distant lands from which they had come: they even included, he tells us, 'a holy prelate from Persia, deeply versed in the sacred oracles'. All, he goes on, were received by the Imperial Notary and entertained with feasts and banquets, while there were also lavish distributions of food, clothing and money to the poor of the city. Most of his account, however, is devoted to the endless series of sermons and dissertations that were pronounced, and in particular to an interminable one of his own which he was to repeat, in the presence of the Emperor, on his return to Constantinople. Of the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself he tells us nothing at all.

  Still less do we know how the tricennalia were marked in Rome. The Christians, we read, celebrated them by transferring the presumed remains of St Peter and St Paul from the catacombs of St Sebastian to the two splendid new basilicas that Constantine had built near the sites of their respective martyrdoms. But those who had remained faithful to the old religion, who despised the Emperor as an apostate and his new city as an upstart, who believed Rome to be the eternal capital of the Empire and the world, unchallengeable and unchangeable - in what way did they observe Constantine's anniversary? Did they invite him to par-

  1 Socrates Scholasticus, for example, records that Arius was taken short while 'parading proudly through the midst of the city, attracting the notice of all the people', just as he was passing through the Forum of Constantine. Socrates is admittedly writing in the first half of the following century, but he inspires confidence when he writes that 'the scene of the catastrophe is still shown at Constantinople ... behind the shambles in the colonnade: and, in the way that people still point to it as they pass by, the memory of this extraordinary way of death is perpetually preserved.'

  ticipate, as they had ten years before? Were they offended, or relieved, by his non-appearance? We cannot tell. As for the Emperor himself, it is doubtful whether he spared the matter a moment's thought.

  His place at such a time was his new capital, where the celebrations -in contrast to those that had marked the city's consecration and dedication - were exclusively Christian. (Between 331 and 334 he had issued a series of decrees effectively closing down all pagan temples in the Empire.) In the course of these festivities, however, he took the opportunity of announcing the promotion of his two nephews - the sons of his half-brother Delmatius - to key positions in the State. The elder of the boys, named after his father, was proclaimed Caesar; the younger, Hannibalianus, was appointed King of Pontus and given the hand of his first cousin, the Emperor's daughter Constantina, in marriage. With the additional title of King of Kings - shamelessly appropriated from the Persians - he was then sent off with his bride to rule in Pontus, that wild, mountainous region that extends back from the rainswept southern shore of the Black Sea.

  The elevation of these two youths brought the number of reigning Caesars effectively to five, Constantine's three sons by Fausta having already been raised to similar rank - the youngest, Constans, only two years previously, at the age of ten. It has been suggested that by multiplying their number the Emperor was deliberately attempting to reduce the Caesars' prestige: with advancing age he was becoming ever more convinced of a special divine dispensation that singled him out from his fellow-men, even those of his own family. The Caesars enjoyed viceregal powers in the various provinces of the Empire to which he had appointed them, but such glory as might attach to their station must be seen, he was determined, only as a reflection of his own. Never at any time in his life did he consider appointing a second Augustus, as Diocletian had intended.

  But his very reluctance to delegate authority in the capital imposed on Constantine a workload of almost Herculean proportions; and early in 337 he seems to have suspected that he was ill. He had spent the winter in Asia Minor mobilizing his army - for the young King Shapur II of Persia was making no secret of his territorial ambitions and it was now plain to everyone that war could not be long in coming - during which he had shown all the energy, stamina and endurance that had long made him a legend among his men. Then, shortly before Easter, he returned to Constantinople - there to put the finishing touches to the great Church of the Holy Apostles which he had begun a few years before on the high spur of land which forms the city's fourth hill.1 Perhaps he already suspected that he had been stricken, for it was at this time that he gave orders for his tomb to be prepared in the church; but only after Easter was past did his health begin seriously - and obviously - to fail. The baths of the capital having proved useless, he moved on to those at Helenopolis, the city that he had rebuilt in honour of his mother; and it was there, so Eusebius tells us, that, 'kneeling on the pavement
of the church itself, he for the first time received the imposition of hands in prayer'2 - becoming, in short, a catechumen. Then he started back to the capital, but when he reached the suburbs of Nicomedia found that he could go no further; nor could the momentous step that he had so long considered be any further delayed. Summoning the local bishops, he addressed them:

  The long-awaited time has finally come, when I have hoped and prayed to obtain the salvation of God ... Now I too may have the blessing of that seal which confers immortality, the seal of salvation itself. I had thought to receive it in the waters of the Jordan . . . but it pleases God, who knows what is best for us, that I should receive it here. So be it, then, and without delay; and should it be the will of Him who is Lord of life and death that my existence here should be prolonged ... I shall prescribe for myself henceforth a way of life that befits his service.

  And so at last Constantine the Great, for years a self-styled bishop of the Christian Church, was baptised by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia; and when it was done, 'he arrayed himself in imperial vestments white and radiant as light, and lay himself down on a couch of the purest white, refusing ever to clothe himself in purple again'.

  Why - the question has been asked all through history - why did Constantine delay his baptism until he was on his deathbed? The most obvious answer - and the most likely - is Gibbon's:

  The sacrament of baptism was supposed to contain a full and absolute expiation of sin; and the soul was instantly restored to its original purity, and entitled to the promise of eternal salvation. Among the proselytes of Christianity, there were many who judged it imprudent to precipitate a salutary rite, which could not be repeated; to throw away an inestimable privilege, which could never be recovered.