Constantine is usually accused of mixing church and state, as if the Roman world prior to him were a secular state. But Roman emperors before to Constantine claimed to be part of the Pantheon of gods to whom the Romans were to sacrifice.
When Constantine broke with the Roman sacrificial system, he sided with Christianity, but far from mixing church and state, he distinguished them for the first time. He did this by recognizing the church as a distinct polis with its own authority structure and by tolerating paganism. Constantine was only an interested observer at the council of Nicea and not the final judge, and he allowed pagans to continue to serve as government officials.
What Constantine actually did was allow the church to reform the state without making the church an arm of the state. The church introduced equal rights for all and charity toward the poor, but wasn't yet used to oppress pagans. Constantine recognized the need for church unity within the empire and called the council of Nicea, but his Christian successors thought the empire needed to be uniformly Christian and called for the removal of paganism. As a result, some began to condone force and the empire became less and less Christian.
2 comments:
Interesting argument. It has become standard historiography, however, to give Constantine a much more aggressive role in the first ecumenical council, and to accredit him with the genius of making Christianity the "glue" of the empire by making it the Empire's official religion. What are your sources for this alternative viewpoint? I'm open and interested.
See the not-so-standard Defending Constantine by Peter Leithart. I've reviewed it on this blog.
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