God Against The Gods by KIRSCH JONATHAN

Author:KIRSCH, JONATHAN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group

God the Highest

Constantine had favored the Christians within his realm ever since the victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, of course, but even after the defeat of Licinius, the fate of Christianity in pagan Rome was not yet clear. After all, the vast majority of the Roman population, including all but a few members of the imperial household and the ruling class, were still pagans. Would Christianity merely continue to enjoy the generous gifts and personal protection of the man who happened to be the reigning emperor, or would it replace the old imperial cult as the state religion of the empire?

Constantine had put an end to the Great Persecution and secured for Christians the same freedom of religion that the various pagan cults had always enjoyed, but he still served as the Pontifex Maximus of the priestly colleges that preserved and practiced the worship of the old pantheon. He had granted Christian clergy the same rights and privileges as those enjoyed by priests of the various pagan cults, but the official coinage of his realm continued to feature the images of Jupiter and Mars, Hercules and Sol Invictus, all of them condemned by the Christians not merely as false gods but as devils and demons. At the celebration of his decennalia, the tenth anniversary of his reign, he had declined to participate in the customary blood sacrifices, but he had permitted the uttering of prayers of thanksgiving to the pagan deities. Above all, while his official pronouncements had always invoked a supreme deity in words and phrases that seemed to refer to the Christian god—“God the Highest,” for example, or “The Supreme God”—he had not yet submitted to the fundamental Christian rite of baptism and, for that reason, was not yet a formal convert to Christianity.

With the victory over the last pagan emperor of the old Tetrarchy, however, Constantine was poised to make a decision for Christ that would have world-changing and history-making consequences. Now that he was the one and only emperor of the Roman empire, it was up to Constantine to determine exactly what measure of power and privilege would be bestowed upon the community of Christians whom the emperors who reigned before him had persecuted so cruelly. It was also within his power to decide which of the many contending factions within Christianity was entitled to hold itself out as what we are accustomed to call “the Church.” For exactly that reason, as we shall see, the bitter struggle within early Christianity over the name and nature of the Only True God turned out to be a battle for the heart and mind of one man—the emperor Constantine.

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