Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition by Eamon Duffy Read Free Book Online Page B

freedom ‘to Christians and all others’ (the order of the words here was crucial). Confiscated Church property was returned (without compensation to the purchasers), Christian clergy were exempted from the responsibilities of public office, and public funds were allocated for the work of the Church.
    For the church in Rome, it was a bonanza beyond their wildest imaginings. The meagre early entries of the official papal chronicle, the Liber Pontificalis , based on scraps of half-remembered information or simply invented, suddenly explode into lavish detail in the entry for Pope Sylvester (314–35). Page after page lovingly enumerates Constantine’s benefactions, above all, the great basilican churches he would build in and around the city: a cathedral, baptistry and residence for the Pope at the Lateran, raised partly in the palace of his wife Fausta and partly on the ruins of the barracks of the imperial horseguards, who, unluckily for them, had fought for Maxentius; the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in the old Sessorian Palace; the great cemetery churches on the Vatican over the shrine of Peter, and at the third-century site of the joint cult of Peter and Paul, San Sebastiano. But the buildings were only the tip of the iceberg. To maintain them, massive grants of land and property were made – estates in Numidia, Egypt, in the Adriatic islands, on Gozo, farms in Tyre, Tarsus, Antioch, gardens, houses, bakeries, and baths in Rome itself. And then there was the avalanche of precious metals: for the Lateran, seven silver altars, weighing 200 pounds apiece, over a hundred silver chalices, a life-sized silver statue of Christ enthroned, surrounded by the twelve Apostles and four angels with spears and jewelled eyes, a chandelier of gold hung with fifty dolphins; in the baptistry, a golden lamb and seven silver stags from which water poured into a porphyry font. 13
    These benefactions were intended to establish the worship of Christ on a properly imperial footing. The Lateran basilica was immense, bigger than any of the secular basilicas in the Forum, capable of accommodating crowds of up to 10,000. But Constantine drew back from the symbolic imposition of Christianity in the historic heart of Rome. His two main city churches, at the Lateran and at Santa Croce, were on the fringes, near the walls, not at the centre, and, like St Peter’s, they were built on imperial private property, not on public land. Rome remained pagan still, and Constantine’s departure in 324 for his new capital, Constantinople, at Byzantium on theBosphorous and closer to the heartlands of empire in the Eastern and Danube provinces, left the city to the domination of conservative senatorial families. Their hereditary paganism was as precious to them as Protestantism would be to the Cabots and Lowells in nineteenth-century Boston, a mark of true Romanitas and of old money, and a witness against the vulgarity and populism of the Emperor’s unpleasant new religion.
    For Constantine, Christianity meant concord, unity in the truth. God had raised him up, he believed, to give peace to the whole civilised world, the oecumene , by the triumph of the Church. As he rapidly discovered, however, the Church itself was profoundly divided. The providential instrument of human harmony which God had placed in his hand turned out to be itself out of tune. Undaunted, he set himself to restore the unity of Christians, confident that for this, too, God had given him the empire. It was an aim and a confidence which his successors would share, and the imposition of unity on the churches at all costs became an imperial priority: ironically, it was a priority which set them on a collision course with the popes.
    Constantine’s first encounter with Christian division was not long in coming. In North Africa a new bishop of Carthage, Caecilian, had been consecrated in AD 311, and one of the officiating bishops was suspected of having handed over copies of the Scriptures