Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="Heliodromus, post: 8056630, member: 120820"]I'm not so sure! It seems that Constantine's real claim to fame is in being the first Christian emperor, or more specifically the first to support Christianity, and his epithet of "the Great", not to mention sainthood, follow directly from that, thanks to the church. Other than this, he was obviously a successful emperor, and a capable general, but hardly a legendary one. Most definitely not a saint either, by any normal definition of the word! In his most famous victory, at the Milvan bridge, Constantine's opponent Maxentius made a suicidically bad decision by choosing to fight with his back to the wall and then deliberately cutting off his own means of retreat! The senate nonetheless awarded Constantine the title of "MAXIMVS" for this, seemingly as an act of self-serving politics. In any case, the legendary name "Constantine the Great" seems unrelated to this title. To me the most interesting question is whether Constantine's actions actually changed the course of Christianity in any way, and my opinion is that they really did not. It seems much more a case of being "in the right place at the right time", with the church then happy to promote him as a founding figure, perhaps as a role-model they hoped subsequent emperors would also follow. In order to come to this conclusion, you have to look at the growth of Christianty from its' origins to Constantine and beyond, a good starting point of which are the books by Rodney Stark ("The Rise of Christianity") and Ramsey Macmullen ("Christianizing the Roman Empire", "Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries"). It might be tempting to think of the rise of Christianity as the result of mass conversions, perhaps based on miraculous beliefs, but the evidence seems to suggest it was much less dramatic... All social phenomena, including religion, naturally grow (while supporting conditions persist) at an exponential rate, which is to say that the speed of growth is a function of the number of current adherents (since the more adherents you have, the more outsiders they can then influence). Accordingly we can (and Stark does) use the formula for exponential growth to figure the growth rate for given endpoints. We don't know the exact numbers, but if you do the calculations it really doesn't make that much difference. The number of Christians goes from perhaps a few dozen/hundreds at time of Christ to maybe 10% of the roman population of ~50 million by the time of Constantine, which interestingly gives us a growth rate almost identical to the birthrate! The conclusion then is that most new Christians were just the children of Christian parents (the same as people behave today). The interesting question then becomes how were Christians nonetheless able to grow as a percentage of the population, which it seems may have been mostly due to keeping their own members alive one way or another (not exposing unwanted babies, caring for their own during the great pandemics of the first few centuries AD). Of course there is more to it than this - the effect of the diaspora, and the failure of the traditional Religio Romana to protect the empire from strife - but it helps to understand the big picture of what was going on. So, we have a slow but relentless growth of the Christian population resulting in it having grown to a point (~10% of population) where it could no longer be ignored by the time of Diocletian and Constantine. This was occurring regardless of whether the religion was officially supported or opposed, even by persecution, and would continue to do so. Perhaps an emperor different from Constantine might not have embraced Christianity, but as it continued to grow as a percentage of the population at some point it had to be accepted, so if not by him then someone else within the same rough time period. Outside of religion, Constantine's other claim to fame might be his moving of the capital east to Constantinople, which might, in retrospect, be considered as key to the longevity of the "romano-byzantine" empire. How might things be different if instead the capital was Rome and the fall of the western roman empire had become the fall of rome itself ? However, this was hardly something that Constantine had forseen ... a whole series of eastern soldier-emperors had chosen the east as their base, and it seems Constantine was initially just doing the same (as soon as sole rule gave him the opportunity to do so).[/QUOTE]

Log in or Sign up

Reply to Thread

Useful Searches