EN TOUTOI NIKA

There are two faces to Emperor Constantine: a sadistic murderous thug and a hallowed Christian saint. No paradox here, though. Christianity, too, has two faces: the victim and the perpetrator, the peacemaker and the warmonger. So does life itself: it gives birth, and it kills; life and death are the two faces of existence.

As a “secular” person, Constantine comes across as a reprehensible man, but no more and no less than an average run-of-the-mill Caesar. Every educated child’s cultural guru Hendrik Van Loon is particularly negative toward Constantine, in sharp contrast to, say, the glowing panegyric to him by Herbert G. Wells, who has been notorious, however, for quite a few egregious historical misjudgments. But, once again, so what if Constantine had his apparently innocent son Crispus cruelly executed for treason? Not even to mention his wife Fausta who falsely testified against her stepson and thus deserved her own sordid fate at her husband’s bloody hand. Constantine was an exceptional personality, a ruler of genius, and thus was entitled to cruelty and mayhem as much as he was entitled to deeds of historic greatness. Russia’s Ivan Grozny and Peter the Great each killed a son of their own, being none the worse for it in the historical memory of mankind!
Emperor Constantine I of the Roman Empire has been called the Great for a number of reasons, the biggest of them being his personal conversion to Christianity, and the legitimization of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.
According to the famous Church historian Eusebius, Emperor Constantine, once marching with his army to a decisive battle, saw the Greek letter X in the sky, together with the words “en toutoi nika” better known in their Latin translation as “in hoc signo vinces.” This vision was allegedly interpreted to him the same night in a dream by Jesus Christ Himself as the sign of the Cross and at the same time, the first letter of the Greek word Χριστός. Let us not argue about the historical veracity of this legend, as it belongs to a separate realm of religion, and we have enough purely historical realities to argue about without starting mixing apples and oranges.
There can be no question about his ulterior motives in his adoption of Christianity. He may have been quite sincere (in fact his Serbian-born mother Helena [Saint Helena of Constantinople, to be exact] was allegedly a Christian herself, and she may indeed have had a certain influence on her son’s mind in this matter), but, mind you, such sincerity in a great emperor never precludes a clearly defined set of ulterior motives, and it certainly makes no sense to frame an argument over this as “either…or.” I will go even farther, to suggest that, had Constantine not seen his Christian conversion as an excellent political move, his mother’s religion would have had little impact on him, except, at best, to make him a closet Christian.
As it happened, though, there was an extraordinary alignment of the political and religious “planets” at that particular time, and Constantine did not have to be a cynical manipulator to acknowledge this fact and to be sincerely, and even religiously, inspired by this realization.
…This is by no means a biography of either Constantinus Maximus Augustus, or Isapostolos Konstantinos, and I have no intention of going beyond making a few points of particular interest to me in this entry. Aside from his role in the Christianization of Rome, Constantine’s remarkable statesmanship and prodigious military talents are naturally an integral part of his historical legacy, but, in my judgment, these hold a relatively small place, and I would never have considered him for this section on their account. After all, his vigorous and occasionally successful efforts to revitalize and strengthen the declining Roman Empire were doomed by history herself, whereas the triumphant power of the Christian religion over the ages was to serve as the defining monument to his greatness, just as he had been trying to use it during his own time, to achieve specific political objectives.
By the same token, Constantine’s seminal role in the history of Christianity can hardly be overstated, even though he never attempted to impose the new religion on the Roman Empire, opting instead for “freedom” of religious worship. I see this “irresolution” on his part not as some manifestation of his religious freedom-loving disposition, but as a prudent temporary measure, a first step in his gradual Christianization program, designed to avoid the otherwise inevitable clash of religions, competing in such a case not for a supremacy, but for sheer survival, thus making the odds of a decisive victory somewhat smaller for Christianity, in this scenario, whereas patience and gradual advancement were indeed the key to its eventual triumph.
Among other things, it is worth noting that the celebrated Christianization of Rome was originated in Greek rather than in Latin; that Emperor Constantine went on to choose the Greek city of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, as the New Rome of his Roman Empire. Coupled with the fact that the Christian New Testament was written primarily in Greek (with just a few words and sentences in Aramaic), this fact, normally downplayed, although by no means doctored in the Roman Catholic West, well underscores the Eastern Orthodox Church’s claim to a religious supremacy, culminating in the Russian historic Doctrine of the Third Rome developed in the aftermath of Constantinople’s fall to the Turks, during the reign of Ivan III the Great, naming Moscow as the Third, and Last Rome. (I have several entries about this throughout my book. See, for instance, Russia’s Three Romes in my composite entry The Russian National Idea, posted on 1/22/2011.)
One must not overlook the irony of the fact that the city of Rome should forever become the centerpiece of Roman Catholic Christianity, being associated with Constantine’s famous “Greek” conversion, whereas in reality Rome had been the hands-down champion of Christian persecution, yet played a second fiddle to the true citadel of the ultimate Christian victory, the Greek city of Constantinople.
As for Emperor Constantine presiding over the momentous Council of Nicaea (again, a Greek, rather than a Latin event!), his placement of himself as Caesar over the Christian priesthood there, is more indicative of the earlier Eastern brand of Christianity, than the later Roman-Catholic brand, with its supremacy of the Pontiff over Europe’s earthly rulers. I guess, the secular father of Roman Catholicism was not Constantine at all, but the glorious German regenerator of Rome Charlemagne…

 ...“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7)
Most things, persons, and events, with very few pathological exceptions, have two faces: good and bad. When only one of them is highlighted by historians with regard to the past, and by the mass media with regard to the current events, humanity is ill served. On the contrary, the public ought to be allowed to see both faces of each, in order to make their own judgment whether the good one may possess a sufficient redeeming value to overcome the negative effects of the bad one.
Alas, there are too many unequivocal judgments made today on the basis of selective evidence. Whatever is selected to look good, is represented as something blameless; and vice versa, whatever such judges choose to condemn, is deliberately stripped of any redeeming value.
Looking with horror at what is going on in the world of the twenty-first century, drowning in vice, violence, shameless hypocrisy and crooked propaganda, I keep wondering whether there is any redeeming value left in it at all.
What we need the most today is a “G 20” of strong-willed “Constantines,” doing more good than evil for our clueless and leaderless world simply by doing something, and perhaps also a sign of purpose and meaning, up there in the sky, with the three words in it: En Toutoi Nika!