Paganism Surviving in Christianity

by Abram Herbert Lewis

Alzog, a modern Roman Catholic Church historian, though laboring hard to set forth Constantine as the first Christian emperor, and a “saint” of the Roman Catholic Church, is forced to say:

“The law said to have been published by Constantine, A.D. 335, prohibiting all pagan sacrifices, is of doubtful authenticity, and, if authentic, is of very little importance, for like a great many others of a similar nature, it was never enforced. The execution of such laws met with a determined resistance in many places, and particularly at Rome. Constantine, although professing to be a Christian, lived pretty much the same sort of life he had lived while a pagan, and even stained his reputation by the commission of deeds of murder.

“Licinius was executed A.D. 324, and Licinianus, his son, who appears to have excited the fears of Constantine, shortly afterward met the fate of his father. Constantine also had Crispus, his son by his first wife, Minervina, apprehended in the midst of a solemn festival and exiled him to the shore of Istria, where he perished by an obscure death. Learning afterward, as it is supposed, that Fausta, his second wife, the daughter of Maximianus Herculeus, had been instrumental in causing the death of his brave and illustrious son Crispus, he had her strangled in a bath of warm water heated to an insupportable temperature. It may be that these murders, in which the designing policy of Fausta played so conspicuous a part, prompted Constantine to delay his entrance into the Church, and to put off his baptism till the hour of his death. He was, moreover, influenced by the prevailing prejudice relative to the sacrament of baptism, and also wished to be baptized in the river Jordan, which, however, ‘God did not permit.’”[192]

Dr. Schaff describes Constantine’s relation to Christianity as follows:

“Constantine adopted Christianity first as a superstition, and put it by the side of his heathen superstition, till finally, in his conviction, the Christian vanquished the pagan, though without itself developing into a pure and enlightened faith.

“At first Constantine, like his father, in the spirit of the Neo-Platonic syncretism of dying heathendom, reverenced all the Gods as mysterious powers; especially Apollo, the god of the sun, to whom in the year 308 he presented munificent gifts. Nay, so late as the year 321 he enjoined regular consultation of the soothsayers in public misfortunes, according to ancient heathen usage; even later, he placed his new residence, Byzantium, under the protection of the God of the Martyrs and the heathen goddess of Fortune; and down to the end of his life he retained the title and the dignity of a Pontifex Maximus, or high-priest of the heathen hierarchy. His coins bore on the one side the letters of the name of Christ, on the other the figure of the Sun-God, and the inscription ‘Sol invictus.’ Of course these inconsistencies may be referred also to policy and accommodation to the toleration edict in 313. Nor is it difficult to adduce parallels of persons who in passing from Judaism to Christianity, or from Romanism to Protestantism have so wavered between their old and their new position that they might be claimed by both. With his every victory over his pagan rivals, Galerius, Maxentius, and Licinius, his personal leaning to Christianity and his confidence in the magic power of the sign of the cross increased; yet he did not formally renounce heathenism and did not receive baptism until in 337 he was laid upon the bed of death....

“He was far from being so pure and so venerable as Eusebius, blinded by his favor to the Church, depicts him in his bombastic and almost dishonestly eulogistic biography, with the evident intention of setting him up as a model for all future Christian princes. It must, with all regret, be conceded that his progress in the knowledge of Christianity was not a progress in the practice of its virtues. His love of display and his prodigality, his suspiciousness and his despotism, increased with his power.

“The very brightest period of his reign is stained with gross crimes, which even the spirit of the age and the policy of an absolute monarch cannot excuse. After having reached upon the bloody path of war the goal of his ambition, the sole possession of the empire, yea, in the very year in which he summoned the great council Nicæa, he ordered the execution of his conquered rival and brother-in-law Licinius, in breach of a solemn promise of mercy (324). Not satisfied with this he caused soon afterwards, from political suspicion, the death of the young Licinius, his nephew, a boy of hardly eleven years. But the worst of all is the murder of his eldest son, Crispus, in 326, who had incurred suspicion of political conspiracy, and of adulterous and incestuous purposes towards his step-mother, Fausta, but is generally regarded as innocent....

“At all events, Christianity did not produce in Constantine a thorough moral transformation. He was concerned more to advance the outward social position of the Christian religion than to further its inward mission. He was praised and censured in turn by the Christians and pagans, the orthodox and the Arians, as they successively experienced his favor or dislike. He bears some resemblance to Peter the Great both in his public acts and his private character, by combining great virtues and merits with monstrous crimes, and he probably died with the same consolation as Peter, whose last words were: ‘I trust that in respect of the good I have striven to do my people (the Church), God will pardon my sins.’ It is quite characteristic of his piety that he turned the sacred nails of the Saviour’s cross, which Helena brought from Jerusalem, the one into the bit of his war horse, the other into an ornament of his helmet. Not a decided, pure, and consistent character, he stands on the line of transition between two ages and two religions; and his life bears plain marks of both. When at last on his deathbed he submitted to baptism with the remark: ‘Now let us cast away all duplicity,’ he honestly admitted the conflict of two antagonistic principles which swayed his private character and public life.”[193]

After such an array of testimony, which might be extended much farther if space would permit, it seems unnecessary to say more than this: the personal character and the political attitude of Constantine make it impossible to think of him as a “Christian Emperor.” He adopted and used the paganized Christianity of his time for personal ends, rather than because of true piety. The political aid which he gave it was overbalanced many times by the destruction of its best spiritual interests. Judged from the standpoint of the Bible and the facts of history, Constantine was the corrupter of Christianity, not its defender.