Constantine by Paul Stephenson

Author:Paul Stephenson [STEPHENSON, PAUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, HIS002020, HIS002000, BIO000000, BIO006000, BIO018000, BIO010000, REL015000
ISBN: 9781468303001
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

A common vision?

It is clear from the passage quoted in full above (p. 183) that Eusebius (VC I.28), and following him the fifth-century Christian historians Sozomen (I.3) and Socrates Scholasticus (I.2), wished that Constantine’s soldiers had shared his midday vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, if not his subsequent nocturnal visit from Christ. Although no contemporary source suggests this, later representations of the vision, perhaps most famously Raphael’s Vatican fresco, show emperor and troops gazing heavenwards, observing the sign of divine favour. Constantine’s vision may very well have been a pious fiction, devised to demonstrate his suitability to rule alone and to authenticate his novel claims of descent. However, Peter Weiss has advanced a striking hypothesis, only hinted at by earlier commentators, that Constantine’s vision was real, however it was interpreted and later reinterpreted. Weiss has argued that Constantine and his troops all witnessed a solar halo, on a spring afternoon in 310. ‘Solar halos,’ he notes, ‘are created by sunlight refracted through ice crystals in the high levels of the atmosphere.’ The less common variant of the solar halo (the 46° halo) manifests itself as two concentric circles of light around the sun. The outer circle is faint, but within the inner circle one sees three points of intensive light, one to each side and one above the sun. These, one might argue, could have been seen as the numerals XXX within a circle. But the halo also gives the impression of a single ‘light cross’, formed by a horizontal axis passing through a ‘sun pillar’. The effect appears suddenly and lasts for up to two hours, before disappearing just as suddenly. It occurs mostly on afternoons in late winter and spring. According to Weiss, this vision was first interpreted as vota, prayers for a thirty-year reign, in a laurel wreath, but later a dream allowed Constantine to recall it as a ‘cross formed of light’. This reinterpretation has misled many into believing the vision took place in 312 on the eve of Constantine’s victory at Rome’s Milvian Bridge. They trust later Christian commentators who attributed these successes to their god, and it is clear that Constantine himself came to see things their way.

If we are to follow Weiss’s explanation, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that in 310 the whole army witnessed the ‘cross of light’ formed by a solar halo, and subsequently all were willing to embrace the explanation offered by their victorious imperator. But we need not follow Weiss to find a reason. Moreover, the Roman army comprised more than those troops who had accompanied Constantine in 310-12, and its transformation into a Christian force required more than a willingness to march beneath a new symbol, the labarum. The wielding of the labarum and the rhetoric employed by Eusebius have led many to call Constantine’s struggle with Licinius a ‘holy war’. Some have even referred to it as a ‘crusade’. The latter definition is especially inaccurate, in a literal sense, as Constantine’s troops fought

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.