From Christ to Constantine . . .

“Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He began asking His disciples, saying, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”

And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Simon Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

And Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.

“And I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church: and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it.

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”’ (Matthew 16: 13-19)

Known officially as Pontifex Maximus, the current pope, Benedict XVI, bears the title of the high priest of pagan Rome of which Julius Caesar served a term, as did Nero after the Roman republic became a monarchical system and the office was inherited by its emperors. The Vatican’s College of Cardinals is organized upon the lines of the pagan Roman priesthood, the purple sashes on their cassocks referencing the trim on the togas of the senators of ancient Rome. The baroque extravaganza of St. Peter’s basilica provides the apex of the architectonic tradition of Roman antiquity; and, until 1963, Latin was the official language of the Mass. The sacrificial quality of that mass performed on an altar by a priest before a congregation is also ceremonially akin to pagan Rome, when religious rites were turned outward and the interior of temples closed.

Indeed, it is the continuity which fascinates, the ‘Tradition’ upon which the Council of Trent placed equal emphasis with Scripture in the face of Luther’s Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church is an extremely capable political organization so founded upon its pagan predecessor that it could be argued that the Roman Empire never truly fell, but rather contracted in size from the largest empire in the world of its time, to the smallest country in the world of our time – Vatican City – where not only its administrative and artistic, but even its religious heritage is still alive. And still structuring a billion of the world’s lives.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

In the unusually hot July of 64 A.D. – in the under-the-stands world of snake dancers, astrologers, fortune-tellers and Aramaic courtesans with whom the writer Lucan recorded that Nero enjoyed mingling – a fire started in the Circus Maximus. A fire which spread to rage for nine days throughout the city, leveling three of the capital’s fourteen districts and severely damaging seven others. It was during this conflagration that Nero supposedly fiddled while Rome burned, throwing parties on the vast, rose-marbled hemicyclical terrace of the Palatine palace where he strummed the lyre and had plays put on depicting the fall of Troy to the surrounding backdrop of a burning Rome.

The historian Tacitus called the fire the greatest disaster to ever befall mankind; and, for the Roman people – still the product of a belief in oft-angered gods requiring propitiatory sacrifice – a disaster of this magnitude indicated something rotten in the Empire. In fact, the fire was probably an accident, yet Nero – who possibly had it started in the hope of clearing space for a new palace and unaware that it would spread so far – suddenly found himself needing a scapegoat to divert the blame from his own head. Thus, the growingly unpopular twenty-three year old panicked, assembled his advisers, and immediately settled upon Rome’s small but stubborn Christian community. With an inexplicable ideology which was considered both low-brow and subversive to the system, they seemed ideal.

By 64 A.D., the city had been exposed to them for twenty years. Still turned a rolled – but no longer a blind – eye to, they had proven more than just another faddish idea, philosophy, craze or movement. Their ideological inexplicability – their refutation of all other gods in favor of a convicted criminal – moreover, their ‘Jewishness,’ made them not only low-brow and ridiculous, but subversive to the System. Needless to say, the Roman common man, trying to live out his daily life, was not amused by rock fights in the streets between orthodox Jews and members of the Christian sect, regardless of who threw the first stone. It bears keeping in mind that, five years later, an estimated one million Jews were killed in the campaigns of Titus and Vespasian against the revolt in Judea. Jerusalem was sacked, Solomon’s temple burned; all in an attempt to remove this thorn in the side of Western Culture.

Thus, Nero instituted one of the first genocides in history. Homes were raided, tables of the agape overturned, and men, women and children rounded up for public torture. In the circuses, Christians were clothed in the skins of wild animals and torn apart by others; or crucified around the perimeter walls, doused in pitch and set on fire. Paul, a Roman citizen with a right to a merciful execution, was taken out the eastern city gate and beheaded. Peter, not a citizen, was crucified upside-down in the Circus of Caligula.

As Peter is nailed down in the Circus of Caligula at the base of the Vatican hill, over the insane roar of the crowd perhaps he could hear the words Jesus spoke to him forty years before recur in his head: “when you were younger, you used to gird yourself, and walk wherever you wished; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will gird you, and bring you where you do not wish to go.” (John 21:18) His wife was mauled by lions and his daughter Petronilla stripped naked in a Roman brothel. Paul was led out the Salarian Gate, bloodied by beatings, and forced to his knees. One can imagine him looking up into the cold blue arc of infinity as the axe fell, wondering if it had all been worth it.

S.P.Q.R.

For the next two hundred and fifty years, Christianity was more or less steadily persecuted by the Roman state. Yet its initial pull upon the lower classes grew with the widening of those classes to encompass millions of freedmen, tradesmen, bondsmen and slaves. The more Christianity was persecuted, the more it grew; until, under the emperor Diocletian in the 280s A.D., an estimated 144,000 Christians were executed in the city of Alexandria alone.

Too large and diverse to be administered from a single capital by a single ruler, Diocletian devised a scheme to split the Roman Empire into a ‘tetrarchy,’ or rule of four. Thus it was officially divided into a Western and an Eastern half, with one emperor presiding over each. Diocletian installed his comrade Maximian as emperor in Rome, while taking responsibility for the East. They each in turn adopted junior emperors to be their designated successors – Galerius in the East, Constantius in the West – who in turn chose two further juniors.

The nature of power what it is, this system did not succeed. After Diocletian abdicated in 305, and forced Maximian to do the same, the Empire passed to Galerius and Constantius. Constantius died the year after and his junior was challenged and defeated by Maximian’s son, Maxentius, who seized control of Rome. When Galerius died in 312, Constantius’ son, Constantine, invaded Italy. Routing Maxentius’ northern army at Turin and Verona, on October 28 of the same year, what started as a cavalry skirmish between forward scouts of both armies outside of the capital, continued downhill to the Tiber and across the Milvian Bridge ending in the conquest of the Roman Empire.

Having spread like wildfire throughout the lower classes over the preceding two and a half centuries, by 312, as much as a third of the population of the Rome facing Constantine may have belonged to the Christian ‘church,’ or at least had sympathies with it. Nor could he have been ignorant of this fact. Like their counterparts in cities throughout the Empire, they had found a sense of belonging to something besides birth; and the sources say that Constantine’s own mother was even a Christian convert. Whatever the case, before the ‘Battle of the Milvian Bridge,’ he claimed to have seen a vision of the cross in the sky and heard a voice say, ‘In this sign you shall conquer.’

Timing is everything to the success or failure of socio-political movements. And timing was on Constantine’s side. Where religious flexibility had once been more conducive to the cultural assimilation of an expanding empire, by the fourth century what reigned was simply confusion. The old gods failed to satisfy, and the new ones, though very different, were all trying to say the same thing. What was needed was their consolidation and assimilation into one ‘God’ – not simply to facilitate peace and commerce, but to facilitate control.

This idea of oneness was a Roman obsession personified in men like Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Trajan – the idea of one Empire, of one world. Those throughout History who have attempted its execution, however, have often faltered over the stumbling block of Religion. For Religion – as the one great civilizing, or civilization-defining agent – is Culture. And, whether or not Constantine had a vision of Christ’s cross in the sky, he did have a vision to remove that stumbling block – a vision to employ Faith in the execution of Oneness.

In better times, the divine institution of the Imperial ‘Genius’ had been that faith – the concept of Roman stability and peace as personified by its Emperor. But by 312 A.D., this concept was too outworn, had been outworn by too many of his lesser predecessors, for it to be revived.

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Surviving evidence shows that Constantine initially gave credit for his victory at the Milvian Bridge to Sol Invictus, the ‘Invincible Sun,’ deity of an Eastern mystery cult which, along with the Greek Helios and the Syrian Elagabal, was associated with the Roman Jupiter. This would have been conservative enough to satisfy the upper classes, and in keeping with ‘Classical’ tradition. Yet, given its mass appeal and its lack of association with the old gods in the face of the religious confusion of the age, Constantine most probably realized that Christianity was an ideal political platform for change. And though it is difficult to resist seeing something of his mother in this – the indomitable Empress Helena, who with her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and supposed return with the ‘True Cross’ upon which Christ was crucified, is largely responsible for the iconography of the Roman Catholic Church – still, what better mass-ethic for a politician to base his rule upon than the doctrine that ‘he who is least among you will be greatest,’ ‘blessed are the meek,’ and ‘take the lowest place at table.’

Constantine did not immediately declare Christianity the state religion, and it was left to his son who succeeded him to finally outlaw the ‘pagan’ traditions. But, in the aftermath of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he and his mother began to dedicate shrines over the graves of significant martyrs – graves which, in many cases, had been secretly maintained and revered for two and a half centuries by Rome’s resistant Christian community.

Thus the original persecutions under Nero, and especially the martyrdom of Peter – considered the first ‘pope’ by the Catholic Church – began a process of veneration amongst an underground, illegal cult that enabled a pagan emperor with a vision for change to found an organization that a third of the world’s population belongs to today. An organization that has its own currency, its own banking system, untold billions in wealth and revenue; and that has perhaps wielded more power in the seventeen hundred years of its history than all other political systems combined.

Moreover, a century after the last remnants of its temporal power were removed (by force) in 1870, the Roman Catholic Church could still wield enough of a ‘sword’ in the form of a Polish pope to be a major player in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. A political role that was based firmly on the social, moral stance. Yet a role that still avenged the final desecration of its progenitor, the pagan Roman Empire, which took place at the hands of the very same barbarian tribes – the Vandal, the Alani, the Mongol and Hun – represented racially by the peoples of the ex-Soviet Union.

Quite a pedigree. But is it Christ’s? Or is it Constantine’s?

Booking information Back to main page