The Christian and the Pagan
The day upon which I’m writing this missive now before you, 21 May, marks for Eastern Christians the commemoration of the Roman Emperor Constantine, hailed as “Saint,” “the Great,” and “Equal to the Apostles.” Others have not been quite so generous with their praise.
For centuries, the Roman Empire persecuted Christianity. Cast out from synagogues after a tragic parting of the ways, Christians had no resort to the legal protections offered by the Senate to ancient religions such as Judaism. Worship in urban centers literally went underground, as house churches became catacomb churches, celebrating the Eucharist atop the martyrs’ tombs.
Recent scholarship has sought to downplay the severity of Roman persecution, in part due to the exaggerations of medieval hagiography [defn: the writing of the lives of saints], and in part as a reaction against American Christianity’s recent history of claiming victimhood whilst nakedly pursuing political power. Yet for generations, prominent churchmen were brutally executed by the Empire for no other reason than their faith in Jesus Christ. This scarred the community, and prompted deep theological reflection.
But then, all of a sudden, mirabile dictu [defn: wonderful to relate], the persecutions ceased. Constantine, proclaimed Augustus by his father’s soldiers in York, had a vision of a Christian symbol in the heavens—either the Cross or the Chi-Rho 
Almost overnight, Christianity rose from the grave to the heights of imperial favor and power. For those living at the time, it seemed nothing short of a miracle, the deliverance of God. The same Empire which had crucified Christ was now led by a Christian imperial family—even if Constantine did not seek Baptism until his deathbed, to wash away his many and severe sins.
This alliance of church and state, of empire and episcopacy [defn: government of a Church by bishops], produced a mixed legacy to say the least. No longer on the outskirts of society, consisting largely of women and slaves and the poor, the Church now grew to enjoy wealth and power and privilege, even to embrace the same violence once inflicted upon the martyrs. For many, the imperial church was corrupted from the start, along with all of those denominations descended from it—darn near all of us.
Yet the exchange went both ways. How many of us would be Christian today, were it not for Constantine’s embrace of the faith? The values of pagan Rome are not our own. Christianity introduced the “slave morality” that uplifted and cared for the poor, valued women, protected children, insisted upon works of charity and mercy, and led at last to abolition. Human rights have far more to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ than with Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
Constantine’s family were murderers through and through. There’s no sugarcoating it. If he had a genuine spiritual experience, a true religious conversion, as appears to have been the case, he still had a long way to go to love his neighbor as himself. Constantine was an Emperor. And as with most Emperors, he and his relations took turns stabbing each other in the back, until but one was left: a nephew named Julian.
Julian the Apostate, Rome’s last pagan Emperor, has been variously remembered as a medieval villain, an Enlightenment hero, and the final member of the imperial family who brought Christianity up from the catacombs into the halls of worldly wealth and power. Bookish and spiritual, Julian was raised in the favored faith of Constantine, but he held little love for the hypocrisy of uncles who slew his father and brother. He preferred the Classical philosophy and cultured civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.
Upon taking the throne, he patronized pagan temples as his forebears had churches. He reinstated public sacrifices, and encouraged schismatics to stir up internecine squabbles amongst the Christians. He imagined a temperate, intellectual, quasi-monastic, and organizationally unified pagan religion, worshipping one God in many forms, of course with himself as the head. Alas, such a paganism never before existed, and loath as he would be to admit it, Julian's monotheism sounds downright churchy. He was more Christian than he knew.
Alas, his exasperation at those, pagan and Christian alike, who failed to see the elegance of his vision, led him to grow increasingly harsh and fanatical. When Julian died on campaign against the Persians, all manner of Romans danced in the streets of cosmopolitan Antioch. Despite his flaws and the cruelty that ever seems to come with the crown, Julian’s erudition, earnestness, and devout piety still elicit sympathy and respect. One can hardly blame him for reacting against his murderous Christian relatives.
Having seen the writing on the wall, he fought for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as he understood the divine, ultimately paying for his callousness and hubris with his life. In the final accounting, our true division may not lie so much between the Christian and the pagan as between the fanatic and the mystic. In this age when Christianity appears ever on the back foot, it’s hard for bookish clerics not to see something familiar and even noble in our erstwhile enemy.
One wonders, then, which was the good Emperor and which the bad: St Constantine, who uplifted Christianity whilst boiling his wife alive; or Julian, who rejected the Church only to construct a pagan mirror-image of it? I see ourselves in both. Ours is a messy, broken, sinful world, and we are sinners in it. We are all of us Christian pagans and pagan Christians. This then must be why we cling to the Cross: for we need an almighty mercy exceeding even reason.
In Jesus. Amen.
By: Reverend Sir Knight Ryan Stout
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