“The giving of divine honours to tombs and pestiferous ashes.”99 So one Christian contemptuously dismissed the practice. Here, amplified across the centuries, was an authentic echo of the primal and magnificent scorn of Paul. As in the earliest days of the Church, so now, in the hour of its great triumph, it never crossed the minds of most Christians that those who clung to the love of gods other than Christ might conceivably have reasons for doing so aside from mere malignancy or backwardness. No other interpretation was necessary. Two centuries on from the reign of Decius, and the attitude felt by Christians towards their one-time persecutors was no longer one of dread, but rather of haughty and splendid disdain. The word they increasingly used to describe those who spurned baptism was pagani—“civilians.”e This, of course, was to cast the Church itself as a heroic band of warriors, soldiers of Christ engaged in a mighty battle against the demons of hell; but it also served, very effectively, to imply that “pagans,” no matter the fabulous range and variety of their cults, their observances, and their gods, were all, in the sordid depths of their souls, essentially the same. The notion that there existed such a thing as “paganism” gave to Christians what any great army of conquest marching into enemy territory, trusting to its size and its superior fire-power, will always looks to find: a single body of adversaries that could be pinned down, brought to battle, and given a decisive knock-out blow.
A strategy which, as it so happened, had always been the hall-mark of the Roman way of making war. Shortly after news of the miracle of the seven sleepers had arrived in Constantinople, the emperor himself—the “imperator”—is said to have travelled to their cave, where they gave him his blessing, then piously expired. Theodosius II, the fortunate recipient of the sleepers’ benedictions, might initially have seemed an improbable heir to the grand traditions of Roman martial prowess. For all that his grandfather and namesake had been very much a warrior emperor of the old school, the younger Theodosius rarely left the gilded confines of his capital. His most tangible contribution to military policy had been purely defensive: girding the land flank of Constantinople, just over half a mile beyond Constantine’s original wall, with a truly massive line of fortifications. This did not mean, however, that Theodosius gave no thought to the prosecution of war against the enemies of the Roman people. On the contrary: he devoted himself to it daily. The true battles were to be won, not from the saddle of a war-horse, but in churches and chapels. As Theodosius himself put it in a solemn decree, “We are aware that Our State is sustained more by proper worship than by official duties, and physical toil and sweat.”100 The literal truth of this pronouncement had been vividly demonstrated during the reign of his father, when a fiery and sulphurous cloud, self-evidently of divine origin, had descended upon Constantinople. Only the prayers of the emperor himself had succeeded in dispersing it, and thereby preserving the capital from the wrath of God. Understandably, given the evidence of such miracles, Theodosius had grown up quite exceptionally devout. He fasted, he sang psalms, he averted his eyes from all temptations. His prayers, in consequence, had come to attain a rare and much valued potency. Four long decades he had reigned—and throughout that time, even as barbarian depredations had shaken the western half of the empire to the point of ruin, the provinces ruled from Constantinople, despite the odd alarm, had stood firm. Proof, if any were needed, of just what might be achieved by an emperor, if only the heavens could be won to his side.
Plus ça change indeed. For all the revolution that Constantine had initiated in the affairs of the empire, the instincts of the imperial elite, amid all the toppling of the ancient gods from their thrones, had altered, in truth, barely at all. Glory, eternal glory, remained what it had ever been: the due of the Roman people. Idols might have been smashed, and temples gutted—but not that basic, guiding presumption. What, after all, when Christ first spoke to Constantine, had He promised the emperor, if not victory, plain and simple? Constantine himself, later in life, would recall the experience of his conversion as a single moment of transcendent and soul-wrenching rapture; and yet, in truth, his spiritual journey had been altogether more protracted, perhaps, than such a memory allowed. Long before his vision of Christ, before he was even emperor, Constantine had been casting around for a divinity sufficiently powerful to sustain the formidable scope of his ambitions. It had been necessary for such a god, his own quite stunning lack of modesty being what it was, to be one of such might, potency, and magnificence as to reign, in effect, alone. At various stages in his career, Constantine had imagined that this supreme god might be Apollo—the twin brother of Artemis—or perhaps the Sun. In the end, however, it was Christ who had passed the audition. Constantine had called on the One God “with earnest prayer and supplications that He would reveal to him who He was”101—and a cross of light had duly appeared in the sky. From that moment on, the emperor had not fought a single battle without first retiring to his tent to pray—“and always, after a short while, he was honoured with a manifestation of the Divine Presence.”102 Nobody, given the startling scale of Constantine’s achievements, could possibly doubt the truth of this. Who were his heirs to forget it? To rule in the great city founded by Constantine was to appreciate just what was owed by the Roman people to the favour of Christ. It was to know that they were protected by a guardian of literally incomparable power. It was to rejoice in the certainty that the empire, even amid all the convulsions and upheavals of the age, rested upon foundations of a truly adamantine solidity: those same foundations that were the proper knowledge of God.
Except that here was begged an obvious question: what precisely was the proper knowledge of God? The answer to this was not, of course, remotely as self-evident as Christians had always yearned for it to be. Back in the first century of the Church, Ignatius, the great Bishop of Antioch, had coined a most suggestive word, expressive of his desperate longing for there to exist a coherent and universally accepted framework of Christian belief: Christianismos.103 Two centuries on, however, and although there certainly existed an immense array of Christians, what did not exist was any consensus among them as to what Christianismos—“Christianity”—might actually be. The concept had proved a chimera. When Constantine, fresh from communing with the Almighty, had turned for assistance with his great labours to the supposedly “catholic” Church, he had found to his consternation that he was dealing, not with a single, monolithic organisation, but rather with an uneasy coalition of often bitterly antagonistic constituencies. To be sure, many of the tensions afflicting the various churches of his empire reflected jockeying for worldly position among ambitious bishops—but not all of them, by any means. The great kaleidoscope of Christian faith, formed as it had ever been of a bewildering array of beliefs and practices, was still in its customary state of flux. Not even the miraculous conversion of an emperor had served to distract Christian intellectuals from their favourite pastime: obsessing over the nature of God.