If Constantine wanted to dominate the church, the obvious thing for him to do would be to try to widen the divisions in the church and keep them competing with each other. That’s not what he did. Instead of “divide and conquer,” he did his best to unite the church, often against the inclinations of the bishops. Drake points ou that by devoting “considerable personal resources to achieving Christian consensus,” Constantine “weakened considerably his own capacity for independent action –... Read more

Was Constantine converted? Really, truly, deeply, irreversibly converted ? Not just converted, but converted converted? It depends on what “conversion” means. Arthur Darby Nock recognized that conversion has preconditions, but describes the actual event as a “chemical process” that involves the “addition of a catalytic agent” to produce a “sense of perceiving truths not known before, a sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without and an ecstasy of happiness.” This is the kind of jolt and bolt that... Read more

William Appleman Williams’s Empire As A Way of Life is a far from perfect book, but one of the striking things is the surprisingly open way America’s founders spoke of the US as an empire. “No constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.” Not what you expect from Jefferson. Madison claimed that extensive territory was not a threat to Constitutional freedoms but the guarantee of them. Extending US territory was of a piece... Read more

Drake’s title – Constantine and the Bishops – says a lot. Instead of the usual “Constantine and the Church” or “Constantine and Christianity,” Drake’s title implies that Constantine had to deal with real actors with their own motivations, agendas, passions, some of whom are as imperious as the emperor, some of whom are as good at politics as he and enjoy a rough battle as much as the lifelong military man. If anything, Constantine’s letters show that he is shocked... Read more

H.A. Drake’s Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Ancient Society and History) is a remarkable piece of work. One of his opening moves is to show how, despite clear and overt differences, both Burckhardt’s pure-political Constantine and Baynes’s sincere-Christian Constantine share common assumptions about politics and religion. He charges that Burckhardt is guilty of a “conceptual anachronism” when he projects the category of “purely political” motivation back onto the fourth century. Otto Seeck puts it wittily: “Show me... Read more