God and Constantine

God and Constantine February 17, 2015

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According to Augustine, all of Constantine’s achievements were gifts of God (City of God, 5.25): He “gave to the Emperor Constantine, who was not a worshipper of demons, but of the true God Himself, such fulness of earthly gifts as no one would even dare wish for. To him also He granted the honour of founding a city, a companion to the Roman empire, the daughter, as it were, of Rome itself, but without any temple or image of the demons. He reigned for a long period as sole emperor, and unaided held and defended the whole Roman world. In conducting and carrying on wars he was most victorious; in overthrowing tyrants he was most successful. He died at a great age, of sickness and old age, and left his sons to succeed him in the empire.”

But the lesson of Constantine isn’t that true piety necessarily leads to political success. Augustine’s argument in Book 5 is exactly the opposite, summed up in 5.26: “all other blessings and privileges of this life, as the world itself, light, air, earth, water, fruits, and the soul of man himself, his body, senses, mind, life, He lavishes on good and bad alike. And among these blessings is also to be reckoned the possession of an empire, whose extent He regulates according to the requirements of His providential government at various times.”

And God made this point in the immediate aftermath of Constantine. Jovian the Christian had an even shorter reign that Julian the Apostate, and God “permitted that Gratian should be slain by the sword of a tyrant” (5.25). In these events, God was reinforcing an anti-Constantinian point, warning that no “emperor should become a Christian in order to merit the happiness of Constantine, when every one should be a Christian for the sake of eternal life.”


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