God Against the Gods (21 page)

A Death in the Latrine

Ultimately, the Council of Nicaea failed at every one of the principal tasks assigned to the bishops by Constantine. The Meletians, for example, refused to go along with the compromise that was adopted by the bishops, and the Church of the Martyrs continued to challenge the legitimacy of the orthodox church in Egypt. Indeed, the rivalry sputtered on for years, provoking riots, vandalism, book burnings and one notorious criminal case, in which Bishop Athanasius was charged with complicity in the murder and dismemberment of a Meletian bishop. Athanasius, it was alleged, used the severed hand of the dead bishop in a ritual of black magic. When the defendant was brought before a tribunal, a shriveled hand was offered in evidence against him—but the case ended in acquittal after the alleged victim showed up in court, alive and well and plainly in possession of both hands.

Even the dispute over something as simple and straightforward as the date of Easter was never fully resolved. The conflict, of course, had less to do with calendaring than with the ethnic and regional rivalries that already existed within a church that aspired to universal sovereignty over Christendom. Like so many other schisms and heresies, the Easter controversy cracked open along exactly the same linguistic and geopolitical fault lines that divided the Roman empire into eastern and western halves. Christianity, too, ultimately split into two separate spheres of influence, one Latin and the other Greek, one under the authority of the bishop of Rome and thus called the Roman Catholic Church, the other under the authority of the various churches that constitute Eastern Orthodoxy. And, to this day, Easter is observed on different days in eastern and western churches.

On the hottest point of all, the Arian heresy, the Council of Nicaea showed its greatest impotence. To be sure, the bishops were coerced into adopting a formal confession of faith, the so-called Nicene Creed, which declared God and Jesus to be
homoousion
rather than
homoiousion
—“of the
same
essence” rather than “of
similar
essence”—and thus repudiated the teachings of Arius. But many of the clerics, including one who served as a counselor to Constantine himself, soon renounced their vote and repudiated the Nicene Creed: “We committed an impious act, O Prince,” wrote Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia
^c
to Constantine, “by subscribing to a blasphemy from fear of you.”
¹³

The Arian controversy, in fact, only grew more rancorous as the moderate bishops who advocated a compromise were outshouted by the extremists on both sides of the question of whether God and Jesus were made of the same or different stuff. Constantine, whose court included both Arians and anti-Arians, was characteristically mercurial and temperamental, sometimes siding with Arius and sometimes with his principal adversary, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. Both men endured sporadic periods of exile when one or the other fell out of imperial favor, depending on who was whispering into Constantine’s ears at any particular moment.

Athanasius, for example, was favored by Hosius of Córdoba, the influential Spanish priest who had long served as Constantine’s principal adviser on Christian matters and, as John Holland Smith puts it, his “ecclesiastical intelligence officer.”
¹⁴
Arius, on the other hand, was favored by Constantia, the emperor’s half sister, who had taken up residence in the imperial palace after the murder of her husband, the pagan emperor Licinius. Constantine himself cared not at all about the theological niceties that moved other men and women to violent words and violent deeds—he sought only to suppress the whole rancorous debate. That is why, at the urging of his half sister, he invited Arius to the imperial capital and ordered the orthodox bishop to admit him to communion.

The bishop who was charged with welcoming Arius back into the orthodox church was deeply distressed at what Constantine wanted him to do, and he asked for a sign of divine will—or so the tale comes down to us. If the belief that Arius held was pleasing to God, he should be allowed to live, the bishop prayed, and if not, he should be made to die. On the day before the service at which he would be offered the Lord’s Supper, Arius was seized with a violent spasm of pain as he hastened down the streets of Nicomedia, and he stumbled into a public latrine near the forum to relieve himself. When he squatted down, his bowels literally dropped out of his body in a sudden and massive hemorrhage, and he died then and there. The pious chroniclers insist that the bishop’s prayer had been answered and Arius had met the fate that God willed for him. But there is another way to understand the ugly death of Arius.

“Those who press the literal narrative of the death of Arius,” Gibbon observes, “must make their opinion between
poison
and
miracle
.”
¹⁵

“A Picture of Christ’s Kingship”

Arius, as it turned out, won a posthumous victory. His teachings were embraced by Christians across the Roman empire for centuries after his death. Still, even if the Council of Nicaea failed to end the debate over Arianism, it marks a crucial event in the history of monotheism. When the bishops marched into the imperial palace, Christianity could still be seen as a radical and subversive movement that set itself against the power and the glory of Rome. When they marched out again, however, the bishops had “sealed an alliance of throne and altar”
¹⁶
and the church could be regarded as “a branch of the Imperial civil service.”
¹⁷

The Christian church now functioned as “the Christian ‘state-within a state,’ ”
¹⁸
a kind of shadow government that styled itself after the imperial administration that had once sought to persecute Christianity. The word “vicar,” for example, is derived from
vicarius
, a title that was first used by the arch-persecutor Diocletian to identify the deputies whom he placed in charge of various provinces, and “diocese” is derived from the term that described the area under their administration. “Basilica” originally described a public building that housed the royal courts and other government offices—the word comes from “
basileus
,” the Greek word for “king”—but, significantly, it came to be associated with church architecture after Constantine deeded a basilica to the bishop of Rome for use as a church.

Christians had once been taught to believe that they would witness the end of the world—the final destruction of Rome, the “Whore of Babylon,” and the elevation of the faithful to a heavenly kingdom—but now the church was allied with and dependent on the all-powerful Roman emperor who continued to rule here on earth. “The selfsame imperial government which used to make a bonfire of Christian sacred books had them adorned sumptuously with gold and precious stones,” writes Jerome in frank amazement, “and, instead of razing church buildings to the ground, pays for the construction of magnificent basilicas with gilded ceilings and marble-encrusted walls.”
¹⁹

So the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation were now replaced by
realpolitik
. When the high clergy of the Christian church beheld Constantine wearing the diadem that had once crowned their persecutors, they no longer saw an agent of Satan but rather “the Lord’s angel,” and they regarded the sight of the Augustus on the imperial throne as “a picture of Christ’s kingship.”
²⁰

A Death in the Palace

One measure of Constantine’s piety—or, perhaps more to the point, his lack of it—is found in the short, unhappy life of his firstborn son, Crispus. Like Constantine himself, Crispus was the offspring of his father’s first consort, a woman who may have been his concubine rather than his wife. Crispus’s mother, Minervina, was dismissed when his father married the daughter of the emperor Maximian, but Constantine kept Crispus in his own household, encouraged him to acquire the skills of a soldier and ultimately raised him to the rank of Caesar. Still, Constantine turned out to be not the champion of his eldest son but his betrayer.

Crispus distinguished himself as his father’s second in command in the war against Licinius. Indeed, the young war hero won the adulation of the Roman citizenry for his courage and daring in battle, but Crispus may have been doomed by his own celebrity: “This dangerous popularity,” writes Gibbon, “soon excited the attention of Constantine, who, both as a father and as a king, was impatient of an equal.”
²¹
Then, too, Crispus may have fallen afoul of the imperial secret police whom Constantine charged with detecting and destroying all potential rivals, real or imagined. Some nameless informer may have whispered the name Crispus to one of the
agentes in rebus
who were charged with rooting out conspiracies against the crown, and the accusation of treason, whether true or false, was carried back to Constantine.

The most lurid tales that reach us from antiquity accuse Crispus of a sexual rather than a political offense: he is charged with conducting a love affair with his stepmother. Variants of the same story hold that Fausta tried to seduce her handsome stepson, and when he dutifully rebuffed her advance, she revenged herself by falsely accusing him of either a failed seduction or a successful rape. Yet another tale accuses Fausta of dynastic intrigue—perhaps she falsely accused Constantine’s firstborn son of political or sexual treachery in order to secure his death and thus clear the way for one of her own three sons to mount the throne on the death of the Augustus.

A crucial role is assigned by some of the ancient sources to Constantine’s mother, Helena. She had been “put away” by Constantine’s father, as we have seen, when he was first raised to the rank of Caesar some thirty years earlier. Now she carried the title of empress and was an influential figure in her son’s court. Helena is said to have denounced her daughter-in-law, perhaps because she knew of Fausta’s sexual misdeeds with Crispus, or perhaps because she had invented them, and she supposedly demanded that Constantine punish his faithless wife by putting her to death.

Whatever the real reason for the suspicions that now afflicted Constantine—and we do not know which of them, if any, were grounded in fact—he resolved to do something about them while the imperial entourage was en route from Nicaea to Rome in 326 for the formal celebration of his
vicennalia
. At a stopping place along the way, Crispus was arrested, shackled and charged with some unspecified crime. Constantine himself sat in judgment of his son and pronounced him guilty as charged; Crispus was stripped of the badges of rank that he wore as Caesar and put to death as a common criminal.

Fausta’s life ended shortly afterward. One chronicler credits her with taking her own life in order to avoid the indignity of death at the hands of the public executioner. Others insist that she was murdered in the baths of the imperial palace—by drowning, by scalding or by asphyxiation, according to the various tellers of tales—and one especially gruesome version depicts the beautiful young woman dispatched like a stewed lobster after the doors to the baths were barred and the fires stoked to bring her bathwater to the boiling point. No matter how Fausta died, however, the consensus of the ancient sources is that Constantine was complicit in her death.

The death of a third victim of Constantine’s purge is devoid of gruesome details but it allows us to see the likeliest reason for all of the carnage. Living under Constantine’s protection in the imperial court was his nephew, Licinianus, the son of Licinius. Both Crispus and Licinianus had been granted the rank of Caesar in the happier days when their fathers served as coemperors. Now both of them were dispatched, along with their companions and comrades, on Constantine’s orders. Sexual scandal and family politics aside, the simplest explanation is that Constantine was acting with typical ruthlessness to preclude any challenge to his reign.

The sons whom Constantine left alive did not yet pose a threat. The point is made in Constantine’s selection of a replacement for Crispus as commander of the Roman garrison in Gaul. The troops who had served under Crispus were charged with pacifying the barbarian tribes along the northern frontier, but surely Constantine recalled how his own troops had once raised him to the purple in defiance of the lawful emperor. When he finally dispatched a new officer to replace the murdered Crispus, he chose one of his and Fausta’s three sons: the boy, who already held the title of Caesar and now assumed the command of the praetorian guard at Augusta Trevorum, was eleven years old.

The City of Constantine

Constantine and his court, now much reduced in size by the murders of his various relations, did not linger at the old imperial capital. Helena promptly set off on a pilgrimage to Palestine, perhaps as an act of contrition for her role in the deaths of Fausta and Crispus, and she embarked on a new career as the world’s first and most successful biblical archaeologist. According to pious Christian tradition, she sought and found the sites where Jesus was crucified and entombed, and she is even credited with bringing back the True Cross. Constantine, too, undertook an ambitious new enterprise—he resolved to establish a glorious new capital for the empire that he ruled as the sole and supreme Augustus.

Constantine’s city is conventionally depicted as a purely Christian enterprise. Like Akhenaton, we are invited to believe, he set out to build a pristine new capital on virgin soil. Just as the young pharaoh sought to distance himself from the old gods and goddesses of Egypt, the emperor aspired to create a place that would be wholly free of pagan shrines and statuary that adorned the streets of Rome. And so, on November 4, 328, Constantine put his hands on the handles of a plow and cut a furrow in the empty plain that marked the outermost boundaries of the city that he proposed to build, the city he called Constantinople. Another version of the same event depicts him using an implement with which he was surely more familiar—the point of a lance. Either way, Constantinople was the creation of the willful emperor who ultimately named the city after himself.