Constantine

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Alexandria and Rome
Presentation 14 of 14

Constantine
The End of the Age, Founding Byzantium, and the Synthesis of Alexandria and Rome
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 30, 1982

Transcript:

Tonight, we end the series. And we've taken ourselves from Alexander the Great and tonight, we'll end up with Constantine, who effectively closes out the ancient world. The tradition that had found its roots in the epics of Homer from the aristocratic salvaged wreck of the Mycenean world, whose visionary inheritors had built the foundations of those kingdoms that had come into play in Greece as early as the 9th or 10th century B.C. and had kept that vision intact for nearly 1300 years. Tonight, we see how their history comes to a close. Their vision becomes unraveled. And their capacity to conduct themselves as human beings parishes from the world. The last great coherent voice of that tradition was Plotinus. And with him passes the age.

So that from Homer to Plotinus is one consistent human vision of capacity developed and redeveloped transformed and reinvigorated, revitalized from time immemorial. It had seemed at that time. All of it was brought to a close. And it is as if they momentous decisions undertaken by Augustus and Virgil during the turn of the millennium, by trying to bring back into full expression again. That not only the great Homeric vision and the epic of The Aeneid of Virgil, but with Augustus himself bringing back the envisioning of man having a capacity to envision the entire world. A world wherein he may be free and mobile to act out the dramas of his choice. And all of the structures that had supported that vision and dream had become brittle and finally insoluble in the oceanic dilemmas of the 3rd century.

And we find actually the beginnings of the shift, the end, in the early part of the 3rd century, after the death of Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus came to the throne. A vicious, violent personality who styled the Roman empire [inaudible]. And he was finally murdered and replaced by a provincial emperor Septimius Severus, who was from North Africa. Severus is called the African emperor. He spoke Latin with a decided inflection and never much cared for Rome. Had never been a party to it. Never much cared for the great Greco Roman tradition, except as a convenient paved highway for his own personal dreams. It was a bell warning.

And in Gibbons Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire [The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] he singles out Septimius Severus who reigned in the early part of the 3rd century and died in 211, as the beginning of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. He says this man and his attitude is exactly where the challenge of antiquity faltered. Where the pace of continuity that had been sometimes set aside, but had never been lost, suddenly went out of kilter.

The Severn dynasty lasted until 235. Sons and inheritors came in. And then from 235 until the rise of Diocletian 50 years later, there were more than 20 legitimate emperors at the space of about two and a half years a piece. And dozens and dozens of pretenders. So that we have within a lifetime, a reasonable lifetime of a human being, complete and utter chaos. There was no place to stand. Except for the decade of the 260’s when the great wonderful combination of personalities of Plotinus and the emperor Gallienus and his wife and their circle made a ten-year respite in this nightmare. In this chaos. But with the death of Gallienus and the death of Plotinus soon the madness came back. And the Roman world sank deeper and deeper into what is seen now as a classic mental breakdown of an entire civilization.

All this while in the 3rd century making do when they had 200 persecutions. Flourishing when conditions let them. The Christian communities had spread throughout the entire empire and offered the only refuge of the day against the incredible besieging of the psyche by demonic speculations, millennial hallucinations, the endless retrogressive or progressive expectations of all the ancient religions that had suddenly descended upon the Roman empire and especially the city of Rome.

It was described, I think for us classically by a man named Franz Cumont about a 1911 Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. A paragraph from that to describe the state of affairs before the rise of Constantine. Cumont wrote,
Let us suppose that in modern Europe, the faithful had deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma. To follow the precepts of Confucius or Buddha. To adopt the maxims of the Shinto. Let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world, in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese [inaudible], Tibetan Lamas and Hindu [inaudible] would-be preaching fatalism and predestination, ancestor worship, and devotion to a deified sovereign pessimism and deliverance through annihilation. The confusion in which all those priests would erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rights. They're in such a dream, which the future may perhaps realize would offer a pretty accurate picture of the religious chaos in which the ancient world was struggling before the reign of Constantine.

So that the conditions that had developed had literally become intolerable for all concerned. In this chaos, and whenever there is this massive outcry there is always a response from the world. The universe is not dead. It is not mute. It does not ignore nor set aside, man and his requests. It is a time-honored tradition in all major religious visions, that there are answers to prayers.

And so, the beginning movement of an answer, of a solution to the situation, to dissolve the chaos appeared in the personality of a man known in history as Diocletian. Diocletian was from what we would today called Yugoslavia. The Southern part of it was a Roman province called Illyria. And as a matter of fact, it was the same province that Constantine was born in and his father and his grandfather. So that from Southern Yugoslavia, from the Roman province of Illyria came the individuals who were to piece together, some kind of a workable order, and finally a blossoming of a new world vision.
Diocletian famous for his reforms had been given the position of emperor by his troops, but by now they had seen so many emperors come and go that his contention was that it was too big a job for one man. So that what he would do, he would set up a four-part rulership known as the tetrarchy. Tetra for archy rule. Tetrarchy. So, that Diocletian took one of his old, trusted generals, a man named Maximilian, and he divided the empire into an East and West. And he said, I will take the East, and you will take the West. And we will also have under us two individuals, one each, which we will school to take our place when the time comes. But they will have responsibilities under our aegis, but nevertheless, they will have responsibilities. So that the four of us will be a stable form and structure of rule. And to make this workable solution, we will take all the provinces that had come down to us from antiquity and divide them up. So instead of having 12 or 14, we all have more than a hundred administrative areas. So that each of these administrative areas will be easier to control. Easier to see that revolts are coming up. Or that people are being fed. Or that a trade is coming along. Or that military commanders within them are not getting too big before we can see what they're doing.

Then Diocletian and Maximilian sent all of the armies of Rome out to the frontiers. And all along the frontiers built fortress towns. So that wherever the Roman empire had a frontier in the 280’s A.D. you found the Roman army spread out. And that left a bit of a power vacuum in the empire itself. So that the rulers with their guards and their trips and so forth could control the interior, the massive interior, of the empire. The choice for the term, the two seniors of the tetrarchy was to be the Augustus. So, one would be, Diocletian would be an Augustus and Maximilian would be in Augustus. Their juniors were called Caesars. So that you've had the Augusti and then you had the Cesarian.

Diocletian chose as his Caesar an ambitious young man named Galerius. And Maximilian chose as his Caesar a man named Constantius Chlorus who was the father of Constantine. So that in the East, Asia, Egypt, Illyria, Greece, you had a Diocletian and Galerius. And in the West, the rest of the empire, you had Maximilian and Constantius. Constantius a very excellent soldier loved to serve under Maximilian, who was also a very professional military man. Thoroughly trustworthy. Had been sent to Britain to handle a revolt situation on the British Isles.
Now Constantius had been quite an interesting character. He had fallen in love with a very common woman who was an innkeeper. Nevertheless, he loved her dearly. Her name was Helena, and she was the mother of Constantine. And he was born in Yugoslavia, Southern part. Classically the town's name is Niche. I think in Yugoslavia today it's called a Nisha or something on that order. So that Constantine himself physically was born at the union of this Roman military man, and this very gentle woman who was an innkeeper out in this frontier post of Yugoslavia. He had other children with her. Sons. It was not until 20 years later because of political reasons that Constantius was forced to annul the marriage and put aside Helena.

But all the while, while Constantine was growing up there was a legitimacy about his birth. And later on, we'll see that he makes a very great deal out of the fact that his ancestry comes through the line of Illyria. Because in Illyria his grandfather was an extraordinary individual who had in this great period of chaos been actually Roman emperor for two years. And had died as a fairly middle-aged man in his early fifties of the plague. In fact, he had been chosen personally as successor to Gallienus. Who had been the only respite of sanity for 50 years. So that in the back of his mind, while he was growing up constant time was not only the son of an important Caesar in the tetrarchy, but his grandfather had been the Roman emperor chosen by the last legitimate great Roman empire emperor Gallienus. So, he carried this within himself as a seed of a dream. And the beginnings of the whole Byzantine empire are there in that gorgeous vision of the legitimacy, which he had hidden within him.

It proved to be a very satisfactory situation, this tetrarchy. And it lasted. Diocletian's tax reforms. His land reforms. His insistence that the ancient traditions be refurbished, temples rebuilt, statutes refurbish seemed to go along. But Galerius who was Caesar in the East, kept whispering in his ear, say, you know the Christians are really a problem. There are more of them every generation. They have infiltrated. They have taken over many communities. And the structure of their church is the only real competitor that we have within the empire to our power. They are everywhere that we are. They are organized. They all speak the same languages. They have communication with each other. They are our competition.
And finally, this whispering in the ear got through to Diocletian and he considered that it was his right as the reinstater of the Roman empire to institute the curtailing the Christian Church, which meant of course the beginnings of persecution. And before he knew it, it had all gotten out of hand. And the persecution of Christians under Diocletian is probably the single thing that he is remembered for in history today. They were terrible. It was a horrendous descending all of a sudden upon the communities, which had become quite peaceful, quite large. And the word spread that times of great change of prophetic immutability had come to the world. That in fact, all of the prophecies of change had pointed obviously to this time. And that as the 3rd century phased out in the 4th century came in, it was expected that the 4th century was to be the century where the Christian Church would triumph and that the rule of the millennium would come in.

So, the young, Constantine who was holding within himself, this precious vision of legitimacy from the past himself, was extremely open to the situation that he found with the Christian communities. Constantine was not with his father as a teenager, but rather with Diocletian. He was in Egypt. Most specifically he was in Alexandria. And he was as a youngster assigned to mopping up operations. Very often the young Constantine was sent in to make what order he could after the persecution to the Christian communities. He was moved by these repeated exposures and episodes. Because he found great affinity with the secret beliefs that he harbored within himself and those expressed by the communities which had been subject to this persecution.

Fortunately, the persecutions did not last long. It was an extraordinary event. One almost unprecedented in the Roman empire. But Diocletian abdicated his throne. And the reason remains rather obscure except that we can piece together the following information. Diocletian was the Augustus of the East. He had taken a trip to Northern Italy. The weight of the persecutions against the church had begun to really burden his conscience. And he had decided that really Rome had become an evil place. Such that they true foundation of the Roman empire should be moved to another location. And in his quest for it, he decided to move it to a city in Asia minor named [inaudible] map here. This is where the Black Sea is. Turkey [inaudible]. And this is the Sea of Marmara. [inaudible] is down here on one of the long [inaudible]. And this is Greece. This is Italy.

So, Diocletian was on his way to the new Rome to begin it when he had a complete nervous breakdown. Absolutely incapacitated to rule. Still able to carry himself in a crippled stance as a man. But on the 1st of May in 305, he abdicated. This is raised of course, his Caesar to a supreme position so that Galerius became the new Augustus. And Diocletian talked to his old general confrere Maximilian into also abdicating. So that Constantine's father became also an Augustus. So, there was a second tetrarchy with Constantius, the father Constantine and Galerius, the one who did all the whispering.

Now Galerius very shrewdly made sure that the young Constantine was not made a Caesar. He saw that this young man had always drawn attention to himself. Had in fact, a magnetic charismatic personality and always seemed to be in the center of a situation. Because Constantine was quite an extraordinary individual. So that Galerius got two friends of his appointed as Caesars. One was named Severus, who was not a very nice man and didn't last very long. And the other was a man named Maximinus Daia. D-a-i-a. These two gentlemen of course were ignored by Constantine. He was not the sort of individual to accept somebody else's chalk lines on the playground. He had his own ideas. His own vision. And it seemed that everyone he ever talked to agreed with him that he made sense.

But Constantine was also extraordinarily capable of waiting. And so patiently, even though his troops wanted him to become a Caesar. He kept quiet. But his father died just six months later in 306. And so, the troops this time said, you're not just a Caesar. You are an Augustus. You are on a level of Galerius, and we will fight with you.

Well, Constantine took stock of his situation. He had Britain. He had Gaul. He had Spain. He had the support of many German Kings. Chief among them, a man named Crocus Alemanni, they called them in Latin. But Constantine realized that the situation had been chaotic before was falling back into the chaos. And what he needed was a consistency of vision that this was the key. And again and again, as he meditated upon his situation, a very curious deja vu symbol occurred to Constantine. It was the, of suspended in space or in the sky or in a mental receptivity of a cross. A cross which was red. A fiery cross. A red cross. And he kept this visionary capacity well within discretion. But again and again, Constantine went to his inner self. And in that quietude and that sense of presence he waited. He kept his troops in top shape by having them fight incursions. Drilled them and brought them like the old Scipio Africanus ha into the peak of working perfection.

All this time, of course, they new Caesars being roughnecks really couldn't stand the fact that they had just a little power. They want all the power. And so there was elbowing in a Rome again. And this time Severus was knocked out of the picture. In fact, he was knocked out of the picture by a new pretender to the thrones, a man named Maxentius, who was the son of Maximilian. Maximilian of course, seemed not to care too much for his own son. He had brought him up it's true and had arranged for his military education and career, but didn't like the result as he saw it.

So Maxentius the first chance he got in history tore into Severus and had him disposed of. Maximilian realizing that he technically was retired. Diocletian had retired to Salonica the modern Thessaloniki in Northern Greece up in this area to grow vegetables. That's what happens. But Maximilian was in great shape. True, he was about 60, but he was in tremendous physical shape. He was in great mental acumen. And he couldn't stand to see this son of his elbowing his way in. And then he remembered that when they had set up the tetrarchy, the call for its legitimacy had gone back to a mythological stratagem. That Diocletian had claimed that he was an embodiment of Jupiter. And that Maximilian was an embodiment of Hercules. That they were physical reincarnations of the power mythically described and generated by Jupiter and Hercules. And that each of them was then an incarnate expression of the Jupiterian dynasty and the Herculaneum dynasty. This was to legitimize the notion that there was a divine right for kingship. So that Diocletian is the first person in history to actually bring into a political theological statement that the leader, the ruler, the King, the emperor, is so not by the acclimation of the troops or by the declaration of votes of the people, but by divine right. He expresses the will have divinity on Earth by his office and therefore should be worshiped. At that the sanctity of that connection could not be abrogated by man only by God, by withdrawing his support.

So, Maximilian of course, saying that Diocletian had, had his support withdrawn by the Gods, but not his. So, taking stock of who was capable, Maximilian fled North to Constantine and said, you're my boy. You are my boy. And together we'll take care of this entire crowd. But Constantine seeing Maximilian just as he was admiring the man. Loving the fact that he had been one of the original tetrarchy. He'd been a friend of his father. But refused to get into the complication and kept on with his expeditions with his troops training them. Maximilian couldn't stand this. And so, he began fomenting revolt in the head camp of Constantine. And finally due to his eloquence and his old military command, his sense of seniority he did gather some troops and Constantine had to come back and crushed the revolt and Maximilian was forced to commit suicide.

This situation of course, was mirrored in the complications with Galerius and the rest of the persons. They were always hedging against each other and new pretenders would come along. But finally, it was a situation where in 307 Galerius attempting to come into Rome faced the embarrassment of his own troops revolting against him at the gates of Rome. And this situation was like a cue to the visionary religious mind of Constantine. That the troops of the competition at the gates of Rome had refused to administer the legitimate divine right, which everyone expected by now should have been there. And so, Constantine marked in himself that there was a portal of a prophetic destiny at the gates of Rome awaiting for that individual who was truly chosen by God to be his manifestation to rule man on Earth at that time. And of course, his entire background, it showed that he himself was carrying this message, this golden egg of promise.

And so, Constantine began to marshal his troops for a march on Rome. This chaos in the East had produced yet another pretender to come up a man named Licinius. And Licinius a very powerful individual realized that Licinius who was the son of Maximilian and Maximinus Daia who was still floating around with troops had joined together. And that maybe he'd better get behind Constantine. So that one couldn't read the program card. There were so many Maxis floating around. You would simply get confused looking at it.

But the situation was very clear to Constantine. And he began to prepare a select number of troops, very small for an army of that day. Less than 20,000 thousand armed men. And he proceeded to cross the Alps about 311. And just as he did, of course, Galerius died almost like a bell of recognition to Constantine. And as he came into Italy over there, the troops of the pretenders, Maxentius and Maximinus Daia, met them at Turin and were defeated. Met them at Verona and were defeated. So, they fell all the way back to Rome to the great walls of Rome, which are pierced by those fateful gates.

And Constantine now knowing his vision to be true marched in an incredible move and appeared at the gates of Rome in 312 A.D. And the troops massed against him were some 250,000 men under Maxentius. And Constantine had hardly a 10th of that, but he had his vision. And so, he had all of his soldiers’ paint on their shields this red cross and they came streaming across the hills into vision. And Maxentius with his men and you have to understand that there's all this psychological morass underneath the toughness of the soldiers and the troops. They had all been used to all kinds of appeals to their life and to their imagination, their possibility. Looking out from the gates of Rome and seeing this chairman mass of men carrying some mystic symbol in unity on their shields that had never been stopped since they had started in Northern Germany coming upon them. There was a quaver of fear, and these massive troops were unable to get themselves organized into battle array and on King Constantine. And there was a famous gate at the Milvian bridge, which went over the Tiber River. And Constantine himself holding aloft a banner of this red cross led his troops in a fantastic sudden charge across the Milvian bridge. Maxentius himself trying to rally this immense army that he had, unable to finally falling off the Milvian bridge to his death in the water.

And Constantine had taken Rome, not with troops, but with a vision. With a sword that had pierced through all these veils. And upon entering Rome Constantine, immediately seeking to establish an equanimity throughout the empire made peace with Licinius. And they met on a neutral ground in the North of Italy, in Milan. Milano. And they issued an edict from Milan. It's known as the Edict of Milan and it for the very first time and forever after gave freedom of religious worship throughout the empire, specifically to the Christian churches. That they would never again be persecuted. That in fact God had spoken and the code of the divine right of Kings had manifested God's true empire on the Earth. And that his people would thereafter have freedom of worship. And the Edict of Milan in 313 is one of the great documents in world history.

Constantine, then making peace with Licinius. But Licinius not really making peace with Constantine, kept his eye on Constantine. And the first situation that came up tried to make sure that there was some kind of a confrontation militarily just to test strength. And Constantine of course, was able to carry the day and two or three more episodes. And finally, Licinius seeded to Constantine all the land up to [inaudible], which meant all the way up to the ancient city of Byzantium.

So that Constantine had his moving edge of empire held for about five or six years at Byzantium so that the city was on his mind. The location was on his mind. And it was very close to what Diocletian had chosen as the new Rome, Nicomedia some 50 or 60 miles away. So that with this visionary mind Constantine his capacity to not only carry the vision but to feed into it make a fabric of reality out of happenings in his life began to consider that the moving of Rome was the right thing to do. And when in 323 A.D. his two sons Crispus and Constantine II were able to defeat on the Sea of Marmara. The fleet of the Licinius finally giving up completely and exile. He was not killed, but he was exiled.

Constantine had the entire Roman empire in his hands. And at that point as soon as he had the entire empire under his sole discretion, he began designing the new Rome and to change the name of the city of Byzantium to Constantinople. Constantine city. [inaudible]. And it took six years from 324 to 330 A.D. Constantine to redesign the new Rome. Byzantium had been there for centuries. It had been a formative place, but had had never had the attention which Constantine gave to it. There is a peculiarity involved in that the, the decision to make this new city the new Rome, the new focus of the empire, was delayed until May the 1st 330 A.D. So that there was a reverberation back to the application of Diocletian. But the man who had begun the move, who had proved to be inappropriate, because God had withdrawn his confidence in him because of the persecutions against his church, had on that day restored to the right man the divine right to make the city of God on Earth and institute a new kind of empire. Instead of being a Roman empire, based on the old pagan traditions, this would be the new Holy Roman empire based on the Christian traditions. And this vision, of course, Constantine brought to bear.

The position of Constantinople, militarily and economically, was probably the most blessed in history. The city itself sticks out rather than like a raised thumb. And there is here on this side a body of water known as the Golden Horn. And then there is the [inaudible], which is very narrow [inaudible] and then there is the Black Sea. And then there is the Sea of Marmara. Over here is Asia. And here's the old Greek community of [inaudible]. And the Sea of Marmara goes all the way down about a hundred or 200 miles down this way.

Constantine put the walls of the city four miles out. So that he enclosed within enormous walls a lot of open ground and [inaudible] space. It looked sort of like a Los Angeles in the late 1920’s where city limits was way, way out and there's nothing but sagebrush. But before one more generation that entire city land area was filled. And before another couple of generations, they had to the walls even further out under Theodosius and Justinian. And the walls were extended way out. And the suburbs of Constantinople went some 10 to 15 miles beyond those second walls. So that very, very quickly Constantinople not only filled up, but it became the center, the great rich city for the next thousand years of history. And in fact, was the walls were not breached until 1453. So, they held up until modern European times began.

The situation militarily was that as long as there was a wall across that peninsula, and as long as there was a strong fleet in the Sea of Marmara Byzantium was literally unsalable. And they were able to stretch a chain across the Golden Horn so that they could literally lock up the ships in that harbor, that great natural harbor. And all along the coast of Byzantium they built large harbors where ships could come in behind walls and large gates could be closed so that everything was under military control. And because of his position being at the crossroads of Asia and Europe and Africa, it was the city where all trades seem to flow through. And as the benefits of the Romanizing of Europe became apparent there was no longer just one province above Byzantium that of [inaudible] but the spreading of civilization went far to the North past what we now know as Yugoslavia. Past Romania. Up into Russia. Up into Germany, up into East Europe. So that Byzantium became really the center of the new world that came into being in the 4th century A.D.

On the end of Constantinople were the Royal palace features and Constantine styling at the new Rome decided that he would try to mirror as best he could the situation that had made Rome such a mythologically successful architecture. Instead of the Palatine Hill, he chose one of the hills in Constantinople. He managed to get the wall, so they included seven hills just as the seven hills in Rome. And on the first hill, he built a palace complex, which when it burnt down and was rebuilt about a century later was the site of the greatest cathedral in Christendom, the Hagia Sophia, which was a monument beyond compare for more than a thousand years. Next to that palace hill complex mirroring the Palatine Hill in Rome, he built the chariot track, the Hippodrome. Much like the Circus Maximus in Rome is adjacent to the Palatine Hill complex. Now that Hippodrome had been laid out initially by none other than Septimius Severus some hundred years before, but it was inadequate for the new Rome. So, Constantine wanted it expanded, but there wasn't really enough round area there in Constantinople, level ground area. So that he had part of the hill carved out so that one part of the Hippodrome could fit in there. And then he had the rest of the Hippodrome built over massive, arches stone masonry arches. So that actually it was an enormous construction. So that the racetrack instead of just being on flat dirt, actually swooped up over the countryside. So that if one were coming into Constantinople from the ocean and the Sea of Marmara one would see the Royal palace complex standing up in this great massive dome light shape. Mirrored later by the Hagia Sophia’s great dome. And this wonderful, sweeping prow of the Hippodrome. An architectural piece. And on one end near the palace construct Constantine built a small palace where he could oversee the chariot races and the various other games.

This was an importance not only for sporting events, but it was a social focus. It was also the place where citizens would gather to make themselves known. There were, there were many instances in later Byzantine history of revolts being staged in the Hippodrome and the empire being settled by battles there. It was the meeting place.

The second church that was built by Constantine and later rebuilt further and almost by his gate, the church of the Holy Apostles, which was rebuilt many times. And the church of Saint Mark's in Venice is a copy of the church of the Holy Apostles. It's a massing of several domes together and an interior space that has that echoing cacophony capacity. All these were instituted by Constantine.

And to link up the wonderful idea of the gate as having been the threshold of the vision coming into focus, he made a beautiful golden gate in the wall. Which was later when they moved the walls further out reinstated again. And it was built of a honey-colored marble inset with bronze plaques to show and frieze relief the achievements in vision and military prowess and political acumen and social stability that had led up to man's capacity to erect the golden gate. And through the golden gate went the triumphal way, the way of the emperor, the Royal way again. And it went through and met the middle [inaudible] linked the two main churches together. The middle road. So that the basic structure of Constantine’s city was one of Royal decree from the beginning.

And this a tremendous achievement of his same to be mirrored and his social and religious program. As soon as work began on Constantinople in 324, he convened a Christian council. The following year in 325 at Nicaea, very close by, in which he brought together all of the bickering factions of the Christian Church. And had them all sit down together for months on end to iron out all the differences that they had. And to come to an ecumenical decision on basic creeds that they could all share. On a vision, which they could impart forever after. And that all of the various heresies of the day could be aired and unanimously be seen to either be worked in or thrown out.
The man who was in charge of this council of Nicaea was the great church historian Eusebius. And Eusebius who had been born about 10 years before Constantine had actually grown up in the area, still in Turkey. It was called in those days [inaudible] in Cappadocia. Turkey is it's a country that has an enormous plateau area and it's, it's high up. [inaudible] is up on the plateau. There are only a few passes that go up into this plateau region. And very often the mountain plateau goes all the way down to the sea coast, especially in the South. So that it's very difficult for people to travel. And in antiquity there were, it was just if you remember Alexander the Great was considered very fortunate, because he was able to bring his armies along this coast of Turkey. The sea actually moved back with the tidal actions to allow the God to pass by. That was the phrase.

This Southern part of Turkey, wherever there were plains on the plateau held very strange geological structures. Hills of soft rock that were infusions sticking up into the alluvial sediment, which through the geologic ages, as it washed away, left these odd shape rocks. Sticking up, sort of conical. And these [inaudible] carved in these rocks. So that the early Christian communities of monks in the deserts of Asia minor were there on Cappadocia. And so [inaudible] was like Alexandria, in a way. It was continuous as a metropolitan learning center in area to an area filled with monastic communities of those religious individuals who were seeking to find the true vision and bringing it into expression in their own lives.

So, Eusebius growing up in this area and being in fact elected as the bishop of [inaudible] was very familiar with all the aspects of religious life. From the Markish mendicant living in a cave in one of these rocks in Cappadocia to being at home and the grand library of his teacher Pamphilus. And in fact, in antiquity, he was called Eusebius Pamphilus, a play on the term son of Pamphilus. And Pamphilus had accrued a fantastic library for himself, which Eusebius was completely at home in. And he was probably the most learned man of his day. Eusebius was to the 4th century what Plutarch was to a previous time. He was the man in charge of the council of Nicaea. And his participation in this council was that he sat on the right-hand side of Constantine. So that there was the emperor and there was Eusebius and there was the great round table with all of the delegates from all the empire.

Well, I think we should take a little break here. I feel my voice needing some tea. I'm sure you do too. Let's have that and then we'll come back.

The classic assessment of this period and its direction is by Edward Gibbon. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire [The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] has since its inception several centuries ago then the real bell for just about anyone trying to understand what happened. And I thought I would give you just a little bit of Gibbon, an excerpt because it's good information. By now, after the first part of this should you’ll be able to place it in perspective. But as great as Gibbon was, he was a historian, but he did not have the real visionary capacities to see into the shifting frames of reference that we're actually obtaining.

And I think if you'd like to establish for yourself very quickly, a visual rule of thumb of the change that had taken place in the spirit of these people, you can inspect Roman painting of the 3rd century A.D. and then inspect Byzantine mosaics a hundred years later. And it’ll tell the whole story. The [inaudible] volumes of Roman mural painting, even with the garish colors, which were new once, are two dimensional slices. They're just images. But in the Byzantine mosaics somehow not only the line, but the volumetric sense of spatiality has become vibrant. And in that vibrancy, the color spectrum radiates like flames of visionary capacity. And the Byzantine, especially the early Byzantine mosaic art before it became awesome, impressive and grand, is spiritually exuberant. What has the feeling that is one that you were looking at a Chagall painting. Or at the fantastic light in a Rembrandt. That only comes from those artists and artisans who are free in their spirit. Who are able to take the medium and address themselves to the expressive moment. And saying, I make in that the spirit come alive. And you can see these Byzantine mosaics from the 5th-6th centuries, just unbelievable.

The figure of Moses here among many colored hills. And later on, when we have the detail in here, you can see gorgeous animals of colored [inaudible]. Man come alive. His capacity to express is free. There's no longer the need to look over every shoulder to see if one of these stick demons of negation is reaching out to cashew in some art unguarded moment. There's just the exuberance of the color and the moment in the medium coming together.

But other than that, we have to piece together, laboriously as it is, by reading. And very often I come across books in this era of human history. Old books, whose pages are uncut very, very frequently. They've been in libraries for 60, 70, 80, 90 years. No one's ever read them. No one has ever looked at them. You don't see it too much concerning Plato or Alexander. Or even into earlier Roman history. Once you get to this era, the courses in the university, somehow end and somehow one never gets around to it. And it all passes by the wayside.

Gibbon on Constantine. He wrote,
The character of the prince who removed the seat of empire and introduced such important changes into the civil and religious constitution of his country has fixed the attention and divided the opinions of mankind.
Beautiful, balanced sentences of Gibbon. Only Mr. Hall and Bertrand Russell seem to exist in this verified climate.

He goes on,
The person, as well as the mind of Constantine has been enriched by nature with her choices endowments. His nature was lofty. His countenance majestic. His deportment graceful. His strength and activity were displayed in every manly exercise. And from his earliest youth to a very advanced season of his life, he preserved the vigor of his constitution by a strict adherence to the domestic virtues of chastity and temperance. He delighted in the social intercourse of familiar conversation.
And he goes on to give us a list of wonderful attributes admired by Gibbon himself in his day.



And later on, he writes,
The public establishment of Christianity may be considered as one of those important and domestic revolutions, which excite the most lively curiosity and afford the most valuable instruction. The victories and the civil policies of Constantine no longer now influence the stage of Europe, but a considerable portion of the globe still retains the impression which it receives from the conversion of that monarch.

And he goes on to say,
The Christianity of Constantine must be allowed in a much more vague and qualified sense. And the nicest accuracy as required in tracing the slow and almost imperceptible gradations by which the monarch declared himself the protector and at length, the proselytizer of the church. It was an arduous tasks to eradicate the habits and the prejudices of his education to acknowledge the divine power of Christ. And to understand that the truth of his revelation was incompatible with the worship of the Gods,
meaning the old Gods. It took a long time, almost to the end for Constantine to finally come to peace with this for himself.

Gibbon writes,
The obstacles which he had probably experienced in his own mind, instructed him to proceed with caution in the momentous change of a national religion. And he insensibly discovered his new opinions as far as he could enforce them with safety and with effect. During the whole course of his reign the stream of Christianity flowed with a gentle though accelerated motion. But its general direction was sometimes checked and sometimes diverted by the accidental circumstances of the times and by the prudence or possibly by the caprice of the monarch.


And he goes on later on to show that,
The enthusiasm which inspired the troops and perhaps the emperor himself had sharpened their swords while it satisfied their conscience. They marched to battle with the full assurance that the same God who had formerly opened a passage to the Israelites through the waters of,
he says Jordan here, “and had thrown down the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpets of Joshua would display his visible majesty and power in the victory of Constantine.”

And you have to envision now at this massive, enormous glacial displacing of the ancient world by Christianity meant that you no longer thought about Plato. You no longer thought about Aristotle. You no longer thought about Virgil. But you were thinking about what happened to Moses. What happened to Job. What had become of Jesus. So that these images, these concerns, were displacing massively the old concerns. This was all happening in the time and in the mind of Constantine. And he's a case in point, whenever an individual is raised to a public apex, wherein history may be written in living manifestation usually and generally, at that apex, they're all the inks that are flowing in the time will be there present. And you'll be able to see the stain at the time.

Gibbon goes on,
The evidence of ecclesiastical history is prepared to affirm that their expectations were justified by the conspicuous miracle, to which the conversion of the first Christian emperor has been almost unanimously ascribed. The real or imaginary cause of so important an event deserves and demands the attention of posterity. And I shall endeavor to form a just estimate of the famous vision of Constantine by a distinct consideration of the standard, the dream and the celestial sign.
The standard, the dream and the celestial sign. Three elements that came together.

Incidentally to give just a little bit of rootedness in this vision of the cross in the sky. The red cross in the space of presence within the spirit was first noted by the founder of Christian Monasticism a man named Pachomius, Saint Pachomius, who opened up Monastic communities along the Nile River, across from the [inaudible]. That wonderful [inaudible] that comes out from the Nile and floods and makes it beautiful fertile valley area. It was Saint Pachomius who had first seen this visionary sign and it was Constantine who picked up that sign and that vision from him.

I have to skip over to this. The cross as an ancient world emblem was an insignia of torture. The cross was a disgrace. So that the transposition, the displacing of the psychic energy of an instrument of torture to an instrument of sacrifice and exaltation on the celestial scale was a monumental changing. Gibbon wonderfully writes,
An instrument of the tortures, which were inflicted only on slaves and strangers became an object of horror in the eyes of Roman citizens. And the ideas of guilt, of pain, of ignominy, were closely united with the idea of the cross. The piety rather than the humanity of Constantine soon abolished in his dominions the punishment which the savior of mankind had condescended to suffer. But the emperor had already learned to despise the prejudices of his education and of his people before he could erect in the midst of Rome, his own statute.

And in fact, in Constantinople, in the center of the hippodrome racetrack, there were three columns. And one of those columns was a column of a triple snake wound and braided together. Three heads came up and held a tray, a bowl, a dish. It was a sacred emblem of the ancient world. And the next monument was a very large column, an obelisk from Thutmose III which was brought there. And the third was a column that mysteriously held only bronze plaquing all the way up and down itself. And this of course was thrown over in the time of the destruction of Constantinople but had in Christian times held images of the sacred relics of Christianity. They were defaced by the conqueror Muhammad the Conqueror, Muhammad II, the man who sacked Constantinople.

Incidentally maybe some time we will show there's a wonderful hour film made by John Julian Norwich in England about 10 years ago or so on the, the fall of Constantinople. Excellent film. Used to show it.

Gibbon goes on to say, and he's speaking about the displacement of the cross as a symbol of ignominy thrust upon strangers and slaves to a celebratory symbol capable of sustaining even the emperor of the world to the manifestation of his God's true empire. It is a momentous change.
The same symbol sanctified the arms of the soldiers of Constantine. The cross glittered on their helmets was engraved on their shields, was interwoven into their banners. And the consecrated emblems, which adorn the person at the emperor himself were distinguished only by richer materials and extraordinary workmanship.

And in fact, the whole notion of symbolic tapestry, making a symbolic clothing making, came into being in the West in Constantinople. Within the Royal palace complex were places where the imported silks and fabrics could be brought in and woven in very special designs. So that the sacred and the secret emblematic expressions of mystical understanding could be put into the very fabric of the structure and worn by the persons themselves. And this was one of the glories of Byzantium to be presented a bolt of this incredible material was one of the greatest treasures of the medieval period.

All of this because of the incredible release of spiritual freedom by transposing what had been anathema into the gate of paradise itself. In other words, when there is a chaos, when there is a confusion on a massive scale like this, sometimes taking the hourglass of time and turning it over starts anew a whole new process. That act and not the throwing of more grains of sand into the hopper to extend it and go beyond and go beyond. Take command and turn it over and start it fresh.

“But the principle standard,” writes Gibbon, “which displayed the triumph of the cross was styled the labarun.” L-a-b-a-r-u-n. The labarun. Very mystical expression of the cross, the labarun. The Chi-Rho which symbolizes the crest is a form, mystical form, of the cross and radial motion creating time and space from a point of eternity. And it's called the labarun and it's an extremely mystical sign.

The best expression of it we'll see at the end of the next lecture series, when the old Celtic monks in Ireland at the end of that age, made one of the pages of The Book of Kells, the Chi-Rho, the labarun, and we'll see slides of it. And then you can see the grandeur have a real spiritual vision. That symbols are not just wonderful complex objects, which we manipulate but that they are in affable focuses of eternal events, which may include our entire aspiration capacity. If we could only understand it. Such as the Chi-Rho. Such as the labarun.

Gibbon writes,
But the principle standard, which displayed the triumph of the cross was styled the labarun. An obscure though celebrated name, which has been vainly derived from almost all the languages of the world. It is described as a long pike intersected by a transpersonal beam. The silken veil which hung down from the beam was curiously in rot with the images of the reigning monarch and his children.
And then there's a crown of gold.

And then the writing here,
Constantine displayed in all their military expeditions the standard at the cross. When the degenerate successors of Theodosius had ceased to appear in person at the head of their armies the labarun was deposited as a venerable but useless Relic in the palace of Constantinople. There were a memorable words inscribed.
And it was from the vision, in this sign thou shall conquer. in this sign thou shall conquer. And this was the famous phrase.
In making this displacement, in making this transition from a classic vision which had obtained from Homer through Plotinus, this mountainous tradition, which was all they had known into something new, which they had never known. They had to be convinced that they had known it long before the classic world had even begun. That it was not just a new temporality coming into vogue, but it was eternity re-expressing itself all over again. And that persons were able to understand it and to accept it because the old world and had been but a moment in time. And this was a reinstatement of eternity. And therefore clues, prophetic clues, in the ancient world, in the Greco-Roman world, where sought. There must be clues for this. There must be in chink the armor. And of course, all of the heresies that came up at the time were manifestations of these chinks in the armor.

But one of the favorite prophetic indications that was chosen by Constantine, by the council of Nicaea was the famous Fourth Eclogue Virgil, The Messianic Eclogue. And they reinterpreted what Virgil had written of the coming of Augustus to read that Virgil had as the great prophetic seer seen the coming of the Messiah and that he had written it in The Fourth Eclogue. So that along with some of the more esoteric sibling versus The Fourth Eclogue of Virgil became the lynch pin for the transition from the ancient world to the world after 325 A.D. when Christianity finally obtains.

Gibbon writes,
Forty years before the birth of Christ, the [inaudible] as if inspired by the celestial muse of Isaiah had celebrated with all the pomp of Oriental metaphor the return of the Virgin. The fall of the serpent. The approaching birth of a God-like child. The great offspring of great Jupiter, who should expiate the guilt of humankind and govern the peaceful universe with the virtues of his father, the rise of the appearance of a heavenly race, a primitive nation throughout the world, and the gradual restoration of the innocence and felicity of the golden age. The poet was perhaps unconscious of the secret sense and object of these sublime predictions, which have been so worthily, unworthily applied to the infant sign of a council or a triumpher.

In other words, Virgil thought he was writing it of Augustus, but his real eternal self was writing out the Messiah. And know we see that.

So, Gibbon writes,
But if a more splendid and indeed spacious interpretation of The Fourth Eclogue contributed to the conversion of the first Christian emperor Virgil may deserve to be ranked among the most successful missionaries of the gospel.
And of course, probably nearing the end of his life, having enjoyed all of this success through the contact with the religion Constantine finally began to ascend to his own inclusion.

I have left out some of the gory details. There were many people murdered by Constantine. The list is long. His wife had a complication with one of his sons. The son was put to death and wife was found to be lying. She was put to death. This is after the council of Nicaea. This is well Constantinople was being enjoy it and all of its grandeur and glory.

So, there were hard times in the man's life, but I wanted to bring the impression to you of some one individual who was handling all the frayed ends of an unwound circuit. And instead of being electrocuted by it was able somehow through his skill, patience and everything, to braid it back together and make a line of transmission to the future. For whatever faults he had. For whatever visions Constantine had. In actual practice by founding Constantinople, by literally picking up the roots of the past and refashioning them into a new form for the future, he preserved a bridge to our time. Because within several generations Rome and the West sacked again and again. Trade beyond compare. Began to sink into what was style for a very, very long time as the dark ages. But there was always this hidden Hermetic beacon of Constantinople. Shiny, bright, brilliant. It was said of it in Middle Ages that everyone there talked about whether Christ was going to appear the next year or whether all these theological arguments that they would go through were actually the case that the man in the street was living the life of the other world in his life here. And it was this focus that saved them from the great debacle of the crash.

The rise of Islam finally truncated the Byzantine empire. And sometime we'll do a course here on it. And it shrank. But actually, the greatest age of Constantinople was from about 850 to about 1100-1200 when it enjoyed three and a half centuries of absolute great splendor. And of course, at that time, it was a focus for all the pilgrims from Europe who were going to the Holy land. They would all pass-through Constantinople. And so, the religious awe of a sacred city of Christ in the East was constantly one of these images that reoccurred and gave hope to millions during those centuries of the so-called dark ages.

And it wasn't until actually the 13th century that the empire of Constantinople shrank to a size where almost just the city itself was left. And actually, many of the treasures were taken by Western Christian nations. The great four horses that are in Venice in St Mark's square. Those were taken by Venetians from Constantinople. And at the final siege of Constantinople after having held out for several years, just on their own recognizance, they were finally taken over the walls were finally breached by Mehmed the Conqueror.

But we can see that at that time, when the transition of civilization flowed back to the West again it was Byzantine scholars who began to appear in Northern Italy, in Florence, in Sienna, bearing their long, complicated scrolls wrapped in these wonderful tapestries that brought the light of the ancient world back. Because the only additions that we have of almost all of these authors come from Byzantine people, holding them in trust for 12 or 1300 years, and then bringing back when they could no longer safely guard them.

So, I think the achievement of Constantine is at least as important as that of Alexander the Great. The idea that a man might express that a human being in their own individual and individuality might express a cosmic view for all to enjoy. And for it to become incarnate upon the world of time space is truly a remarkable achievement.

Well, the next series will start next week. And I think that it should be of interest to those of you who have suffered through this long course. And I hope to see some of you at that time.

Thank you.

END OF RECORDING