It has often been observed that Constantine’s faith was never an obstacle to his ambition, and that in his political acts he treated pagans with a moderation bordering on indulgence. Hence it has been surmised that he was dishonest in his profession of Christianity, or that he failed to grasp what his new religion demanded of him. Historians wrestle with discordant accounts of his conversion, which agree in ascribing one decisive experience to him, but cannot agree with regard to its date, its location or its content. In modern times they have contested not only the date but the reality of the conversion, maintaining that while the emperor was a Christian when he spoke to the church he addressed the pagan world in a different character; others, though they argue that he was privately and publically a Christian, opine that he was not orthodox, or rather that in the murky altercations between Eusebians, Marcellans, Homoousians, and Arians he did not know his right from his left.
The first Christian to ascribe a portentous vision to Constantine is his contemporary Lactantius, who does not name his informant, and does not say that the experience was followed by an immediate conversion. Since the basic figure was an X, the result would be an approximation to å, the first letter in the Greek spelling of the name Christ.
Real events, when they move us, are unconsciously augmented in each retelling, and this later account is surely, as E. R Dodds surmised, a ‘secondary elaboration’ of the original narrative (Dodds 1965). It is hard to understand why Constantine should have failed to point out the celestial anomaly to anyone else at the time of its occurrence; one might ask how a banner large enough to be legible to one observer could have eluded other eyes. Eusebius must have been forgetful or inattentive if he failed to grasp that the promise of victory was vouchsafed on the eve of a battle; although he records that the cross was inscribed on the shield of the emperor’s troops, this episode is separated by many chapters from his account of the vision. In both redactions we are left to wonder why either God or the emperor’s own subconscious should have elected to communicate with him by the medium of the Greek alphabet; the symbol XP, commonly called the labarum, does not appear as a military ensign before 317, although some scholars have maintained its pagan origin (Drake 1976, 73–4; Bruun 1966, 61; Grégoire 1927–28; Frakes 2006, 104–5).
Leave a Reply