Constantine the Great

So if you insist on there being fakes, they are going to have to be very old fakes.

Must they be fakes? The story is that they were found by Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Helena herself has become as encrusted with legends as an icon is with jewels, but that is no reason for the story not to be true.

Christianity, after three hundred years of having to hide, was out in the open and certain to stay there.

Augustus was crowned Imperator at Rome.

Constantine became the first Christian emperor at Byzantium.

The hordes of the barbarians bore down upon the wide-reaching provinces of the Caesars, and still the Arabs remained undisturbed, unexplored, and unsubdued.

Their frontier cities might pay homage to Khosros or Caesar, the legions of Rome might once and again flash across their highland waste, but such impress was faint and transitory, and left the Arabs unmoved.

They were Christians and, in their way, very earnest Christians.

Spain was but nominally converted at the time of their arrival.

Constantine had indeed promulgated Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, but it had taken very little root in the western provinces.

The advent of ignorant but devout race like the Goths might probably arouse a more honest faith in the new religion amid the worn-out paganism of the kingdom, and the Catholic priests were full of hope for the future of their church.

We permit them, therefore, freely to profess their private opinions, and to assemble in their conventicles without fear or molestation, provided always that they preserve a due respect to the established laws and government.

The second, of which Constantine was the author, known as the Edict of Milan, was to a similar effect, and based toleration on the emperor's care for the peace and happiness of his subjects, and on the hope of appeasing the deity whose seat is in heaven.

The relations between the Roman government and the Christians raised the general question of persecution and freedom of conscience.

A state with an official religion, but perfectly tolerant of all creeds and cults, finds that a society had arisen in its midst, which is uncompromisingly hostile to all creeds but its own, and which, if it had the power, would suppress all but its own.

Reason in Prison.

The Middle Ages.

About ten years after the Edict of Toleration, Constantine the Great adopted Christianity.

This momentous decision inaugurated a millennium in which reason was enchained, thought was enslaved, and knowledge made no progress.

Most Americans think like that, and all of them, I fancy, feel like it.

Just in that spirit a later Empire Roman might have written of, propose the gigantic new basilica of Constantine the Great—who was also, one recalls, a record-breaker in shipbuilding—and have compared it with the straitened proportions of Caesar's Forum and the meager relics of Republican Rome.

So, too, obside omen, he might have swelled into prophecy and sounded the true modern note.

One hears that modern note everywhere nowadays where print spreads, but from America with fewer undertones than anywhere.

But you know what? He had to continue fighting, you know, because the emperors kept on.

Well, even Constantine himself waffled a bit on what to do with Arius and what to do with his doctrine.

And so Athanasius was repeatedly attacked.

exiled from his own sea and he had to go live in the icy lands of the north, far away from Egypt.

We did mention Perpetua, Cyprian, and Augustine, but there's Pope Victor I, one of the early writing popes, those teaching popes who really had things to say.

There's Carthage, Arnobius, who was a rhetorician who taught rhetoric, and also who was the first to articulate what we now call Pascal's wager, right, for the existence of God and for faith in God.

And then his student, Lactantius, who became the chair in Latin rhetoric for the for the emperor himself and became the great tutor of Constantine.

And I think the reason why Constantine's main issue on taking the imperial throne was religious freedom, religious liberty.

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In the year 407, the Emperor Constantine III led the last few Roman troops from these islands.

The empire that had constructed this remarkable wall had crumbled in Britain.

Now, history books tell us that when the Romans pulled out, they took with them all vestiges of civilization.

But when I first saw it, I was crammed at the bottom of a Roman well and the tank lay there like a crumpled milk carton.

I remember thinking, why on earth didn't they melt it down and reuse this valuable lead? Why dispose of it in this deliberate fashion? What was so special about this tank? The tank is decorated with a symbol which combines the Greek letters chi and rho, which is a sign of very early Christian worship.

This is Constantine the Great.

Near this spot in July 306, he was made emperor of Rome.

During the first three centuries, the struggle of the Church was mainly one for existence, first with Judaism or an insidious mixture of Judaism and Oriental philosophy, and secondly with the iron despotism of a pagan empire endeavoring to crush a religion which would admit no rival and recognize a higher law than the edicts of emperors.

After the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, the struggle was for the truth, for the preservation of the faith from manifold and subtle forms of error, for the protection of Christian morals from the baleful influence of heathen practices, ideas, and sentiments with which society in an age of decadent civilization was deeply infected.

The third great contest was with the strong, rough races which from the end of the fourth century steadily forced their way into the old Roman Empire and gradually broke it up.

Amidst the general wreck the Church stood the shock of invasion and tamed and educated the conquerors.

At his word, one king had been put down, another set up.

It was only natural that the new dynasty should become the protector of the papacy, which had called it into existence.

The real donation also of Pippin was soon followed by the appearance of what purported to be a far more ancient grant, the forged donation of Constantine, and thus fact and fiction combined to swell the papal power to lay the groundwork for vast pretensions and all the mighty struggles which were to grow out of them.

But events still more momentous were to seal the alliance between the papacy and the Franks.

Today, part one is going to be roughly from 193 to 284 CE, the Severan dynasty, the collapse of the silver coinage, and the payment crisis, the disappearance of Roman banking, and one of the most severe monetary breakdowns in recorded history.

Next episode, part two, Diocletian's attempt to put it all back together, Constantine's gold, and the long slide to 476 CE.

Fair warning though, this is the episode where the numbers get ugly.

And let's start with the thing that broke.