God and Constantine: Divine Sanction for Imperial Rule in the First Christian Emperor's Early Letters and Art

The Catholic Historical Review VOL. LXXXI JULY, 1995 No. 3 GOD AND CONSTANTINE: DIVINE SANCTION FOR IMPERIAL RULE IN THE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR'S EARLY LETTERS AND ART BY Charles Odahl* During his arduous military campaign to wrest control of Rome from the usurper Maxentius in A.D. 312, Constantine the Great felt the need for supernatural assistance against the substantial armed forces and the superstitious religious rites supporting his enemy. Noting that the previous generation of emperors who had followed the traditional pagan cults and persecuted the Christian Church had come to unhappy ends, he invoked the "Highest God" of the universe in prayer for aid and power in his time of trial. Believing that he received an answer to this appeal through revelatory experiences from the God of the Christians, he decided to employ the caelestia signa of Christ as talismanic emblems on the arms of his troops. The emperor's climactic victory over the forces ofMaxentius at the Battle ofthe Mulvian Bridge on October 28, 312, convinced him that he had made the right choice for a divine patron and that he should direct his religious loyalty to this Divinity in the future (Illustration I).1 *Dr. Odahl is professor of ancient and medieval history and classical languages at Boise State University in Idaho. This illustrated article was first delivered before a joint session of the American Catholic Historical Association and the American Society of Church History in January of 1994 in San Francisco.¦Contemporary Christian sources explicitly recording Constantine's conversion ex327 328 GOD AND CONSTANTINE 111. 1: Constantine's conversion commemorated on a coin motif of his son: the emperor is depicted being crowned by a victory-angel and gazing at the Christ monogram on his war standard while the Hoc Signo VictorEris inscription records the celestial message of his vision experience. (Bronze, Siscia mint, 350-351, British Museum ) After his triumphal adventus into Rome in the autumn of 312, Constantine made a most public profession of his new religious orientation in the very center of the capital city. While in Rome for the next few months, he ordered the completion of a grandiose Basilica Nova that Maxentius had begun at the northeast end of the Roman Forum. It was one of the largest structures in the heart of the city, and is still impressive in ruins with a longitudinal axis of over ninety meters in length andwith barrel vaults ofnearly thirty meters in height. In the western apse of this building Constantine placed a colossal statue of himself holding a war standard shaped in the form of a Christian cross and marked with the monogram of Christ. At its base he set up an inscription proclaiming that it was "by virtue of this salutary sign . . . that I have saved and liberated your city from the yoke of tyranny." Portions of this statue with its six-foot-high head have been relocated to the atrium of the Conservators' Museum on the perience are Lactantius, Oe Mortibus Persecutorum 44, ed. S. Brandt and G. Laubmann in the CSEL, Vol. XXVII, Fas. II (Vienna, 1897); Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica IX. 9, ed. and trans. J. Oulton and H. Lawlor in the LCL (Cambridge, 1932), and Vita Constantin ! I. 26-40, ed. F. Winkelmann in the GCS, Eusebius Werke, Bd. I (Berlin, 1975). Contemporary pagan sources implicitly recognizing it are the anonymous Trier Panegyricus LX, and Nazarius' Roman Panegyricus X, ed. E. Galletier in Panégyriques Latins, Tome II (Paris, 1952). For modern assessments of Constantine's conversion, see Etienne Delaruelle, "La conversion de Constantin: état de la question," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique, LIV ( 1953), 37-54 and 84-100; John W. Eadie, The Conversion ofConstantine (New York, 1971); Charles Odahl, "Constantine's Conversion to Christianity," in Problems in European History (Durham, 1979), pp. 1-18, and "Christian Symbols in Military Motifs on Constantine's Coinage," SAN:Journal oftheSocietyforAncientNumismatics, XIII (1983), 64-72; Timothy D. Barnes, "The Conversion of Constantine," Classical Views, XXIX, n.s. (1985), 371-391—reprinted in the Variorum "Collected Studies Series" in From Eusebius to Augustine (Brookfield, Vermont, 1994), Chap. Ill; and Charles Odahl, "A Pagan's Reaction to Constantine's Conversion—Religious...