Coming Out Christian in the Roman World by Douglas Ryan Boin

Author:Douglas Ryan Boin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

By A.D. 337, Constantine would be dead, interred alongside tombs for the holy apostles. As the roughly 90 percent of non-Christian Rome went about its usual routine—gods, temples, sacrifice—those who had been looking for guidance about being Christian would face a daunting task. They would have almost twenty-five years of the emperor’s public life, policy pronouncements, and personal experiences to pore over. It was a sizeable but confusing legacy. Less than a decade before his death, in A.D. 325, the emperor had given one of his final answers to the idea of what it meant to be a “Christian.” It was also one of the strangest.

This period marks a crucial time in Roman history. Only a year earlier, in A.D. 324, Constantine had raised an army against his co-ruler Licinius and summarily defeated him. For the first time in a generation, Rome was now reunited under one ruler.

Then, sometime after his defeat of Licinius, Constantine set to work planning a new palace for the empire’s second capital to be named after himself, Constantinople. The city’s formal dedication would not be celebrated until six years later—in A.D. 324, there was still much to be done to build it—but at least Constantine did not have to start from the ground up. A Roman settlement, replete with temples, a forum, even a racetrack, had been situated here, at the tip of the Golden Horn since the late second century a.d. By the time Constantine was finished investing in it, the city would have its own senate; and its residents would receive a free grain allowance, a quality-of-life perk that was held only by residents of Rome. The empire, in effect, would now have two capitals, not just one. There, amidst the temples, forum spaces, new churches, walls, fountains, houses, and harbors—all the things that distinguished a fourth century Roman city—Constantine would leave an important clue about his Christianity. It was displayed above the door of the imperial palace.29

Eusebius stood at the threshold of the palace and described what he saw. Above the door was the familiar logo of CHRIST, the chi-rho, placed like a talisman above Constantine’s head. Below it was Licinius. Licinius wasn’t shown as a flesh-and-blood Roman sporting a conservative toga or military cuirass, however. “The hated enemy and savage beast,” Eusebius says, the one who had “besieged the God’s Church through godless tyranny and brought it into the abyss [was depicted there] as a snake.” What was the reason for depicting a Roman emperor with such artistic license? Eusebius explained: “Passages in books that belong to God’s prophets have talked about this man [the enemy who would besiege God’s Church] as a dragon and a crooked snake.” Constantine himself would use the same imagery in a letter sent to bishops after A.D. 324. Licinius, he wrote to them, had been the embodiment of evil: the snake, the serpent.30

In Istanbul today, there is nothing left of Constantine’s palace—not even the door. Yet the image Eusebius saw, which Constantine references in his own correspondence, does survive.

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