Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

Constantine saw there the blazing of a cross, visible to his whole army, and inscribed with the words, ‘By this sign, conquer.’ That night, in his tent, he was visited by Christ Himself. Again came the instruction: ‘By this sign, conquer.’ Constantine, waking at dawn, obeyed. He gave orders for the ‘heavenly sign of God’ to be inscribed upon his soldiers’ shields. When battle was finally joined outside Rome, Constantine was victorious. Entering the capital, he did not forget to whom he had owed his triumph. Turning his back on a whole millennium of tradition, he offered up no sacrifices to those demons whom the Caesars, in their folly and their blindness, had always worshipped as gods. Instead, the dominion of the Roman people was set upon a radically new path, one which God had clearly long been planning for it, to serve Him as the tool and agent of His grace, as an imperium christianum — a Christian empire.

‘And because Constantine made no supplications to evil spirits, but worshipped only the one true God, he enjoyed a life more favoured by marks of worldly prosperity than anyone would have dared imagine was possible.’ Certainly, it was hard for anyone to dispute that his reign had indeed been divinely blessed. In all, Constantine ruled for thirty-one years: only a decade less than the man who had first established his fiat over Rome and her empire, Caesar Augustus. It was during the reign of Augustus that Jesus had been born into the world; and now, under Constantine, so it seemed to his Christian subjects, the times were renewing themselves again. In Jerusalem, earth and rubbish were cleared from the tomb in which Christ had been laid. A Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ‘surpassing all the churches of the world in beauty’, was raised above it, and over Golgotha, the hill of the crucifixion. Simultaneously, on the shores of the Bosphorus, what had formerly been the pagan city of Byzantium was redeveloped to serve the empire as a Christian capital. Constantine himself, it was said,

The Roman Empire in ad 395

marking out the street plan of his foundation with a spear, had been guided by the figure of Christ walking before him. Never again would pagan temples be built on Byzantine soil. No palls of smoke greasy with sacrifice would ever drift above the spreading streets. Graced with the splendid title of ‘the New Rome’, the capital would provide the first Christian emperor with the most enduring of all his memorials. Ever after, the Romans would know it as ‘the City of Constantine’ – Constantinople.

A seat of empire, to be sure—but hardly a monument to Christian humility. The leaders of the Church were unperturbed. Scarcely able as they were to credit the miracle that had transformed them so unexpectedly from a persecuted minority into an imperial elite, they raised few eyebrows at the spectacle of their emperor’s magnificence. Since, as St John had seen in his vision, the New Jerusalem would not be descending to earth until the very end of days, it struck most of them as a waste of time to preach revolution. Far more meritorious, the world’s fallen state being what it was, to labour at the task of redeeming it from chaos. It was order, not egalitarianism, that the mirror of heaven showed back to earth.

What were the saints, the angels and the archangels if not the very model of a court, ranked in an exquisite hierarchy amid the pomp of the World Beyond, with Christ Himself, victorious in His great battle over death and darkness, presiding over them, and over the monarchy of the universe, in a blaze of celestial light? A Christian emperor, ruling as the sponsor and protector of the Church, could serve not merely as Christ’s ally in the great war against evil, but as His representative on earth, ‘directing, in imitation of God Himself, the administration of this world’s affairs’. In the bejewelled and perfumed splendours of Constantinople might be glimpsed a reflection of the beauties of paradise; in the armies that marched to war against the foes of the Christian order an image of the angelic hosts. What had once been the very proofs of the empire’s depravity – its wealth, its splendour, its terrifying military might – now seemed to mark it out as a replica of heaven.

Naturally, the Christ to whom Constantine and his successors compared themselves bore little resemblance to the Jesus who had died in excruciating and blood-streaked agony upon a rough-hewn cross. Indeed, whether in the meditations of theologians or in the mosaics of artisans, He began to resemble nothing so much as a Roman emperor. Whereas the faithful had once looked to their Messiah to sit in awful judgement over Rome, now bishops publicly implored Him to turn His ‘heavenly weapons’ against the enemies of the empire, ‘so that the peace of the Church might be untroubled by storms of war’. By the fifth Christian century, prayers such as these were turning shrill and desperate – for increasingly, the storms of war appeared to be darkening all the world. Savages from the barbarous wilds beyond the Christian order, no longer content to respect the frontiers that had for so long been circumscribed by Roman might, were starting to sweep across the empire, threatening to despoil it of its fairest territories, and to dismember a dominion only lately consecrated to the service of God. Was this the end of days come at last? Christians might have been forgiven for thinking so. In ad 410, Rome herself was sacked, and men cried out, just as St John had foreseen that they would, ‘“Alas, alas for the great city!”’ Still waves of migrants continued to flood through the breached frontiers, into Gaul and Britain, Spain and Africa, the Balkans and Italy; and this too, it struck many, St John had prophesied. For the end time, he had written, would see Satan gather to himself nations from