The Oration to the Saints is thus a product of political circumstances which were never to be repeated; but this is not to say that it has no model as a Christian manifesto. The eloquence of the persecuted faith had reached its apogee in Lactantius, who resided in Bithynia during Constantine’s seclusion there, but fled before the tide of persecution. He was sure enough of Constantine to celebrate his alliance with Licinius in his treatise On the Deaths of the Persecutors, and to insert a dedication in the book of his masterpiece, the Institutes. Both these works instructed the imperial neophyte in the arts of rhetoric; the more distant predecessors whom he names as persecutors are the ones whose deaths Lactantius also treats as a manifestation of God’s wrath:
I ask you now Decius . . . you hater of the Church, you who exacted retribution from those who lived in holiness, how do you fare after life? . . . Falling on the Scythian plains with all your force, you made the famous name and power of Rome contemptible to the Getae. But as for you Valerian . . . taken prisoner and led in chains with your very purple and all your royal attire, and finally, having been flayed and hung on the orders of the Persian king Sapor, you presented an eternal spectacle of your own misfortune. And you Aurelian, fire of all iniquities, how conspicuously, cut down in the midst of your mad career through Thrace, you filled the furrows of the road with your impious blood. (Oration, 24)
Lactantius’ Institutes are a compendium of arguments which are rarely unprecedented, yet had not been used together or with such elaboration. Heikel’s annotations show how much the great commander has in common with his satellite. Both observe that beings who suffer mortal pangs can neither be immortals nor produce them; both calculate that if the gods could reproduce, they would by now have overrun the universe; both maintain that gods are either deified men or demons, and extend ironic credence to the poets’ tales of folly in the latter. Both, as we have seen, adopt the Sibyl as a pedagogue and Virgil as a prophet; both proceed from the virgin birth to the doctrine of a double generation. The similarities cannot be accounted for by chasing every point to a separate origin; the two men share a faith, a sense of history, and a reservoir of proof. We should not conclude, however, that the eloquence of Constantine is in every case an echo of his protege’s. We have seen that he turns the Sibylline acrostic to his own purposes; and he differs from Lactantius in equating its composer with the Sibyl who inspired the song of Virgil. Lactantius is more accurate, but Constantine the more astute; the scholar wrote to edify the nations, while the politician spoke to flatter Rome.
In flattering Rome, he hoped, as we have seen, to confirm himself, and perhaps this can be seen in his cosmology. No one, East or West, had added such persuasive colours as Lactantius to the platitudes that nature requires a demiurge, that the conflict of the elements admits no peaceful outcome, and that all would turn to chaos were it not for the arm of providence and the wisdom of an omnipresent mind. Those Greeks who held that God controlled the universe through daemons drew analogies with the government of Persia; Celsus, as a Roman, brought the likeness home to the Antonines; Christian monotheism would entail a different Emperor, as it supposed a different God. Even if the modern application escaped Lactantius, it would hardly have been obscure to Constantine:
There is one set over all existent things, and everything is subjected to his sole rulership ... If there were not one but many authorities over these innumerable things . . . what pity would there be, what providential oversight of God with regard to humanity. Unless indeed the one who was more humanely disposed to the one who had no relation to him prevailed by violence. (Oration, 3)
The hypothesis that the Oration was composed around 314 explains why Constantine says nothing of Galerius, whom Eusebius and Lactantius both agree to have been the cause of Diocletian’s persecution in 303. His silence may be intended to flatter Licinius, who wished to be perceived as the legal ruler of the East. Since he was not merely the successor but the creature of Galerius, who had made him the Western emperor, Licinius would have resented any allusions to the crimes of his precursor, most of all by the colleague forced upon him from the West. Lactantius’ secret history of the persecution might have been encouraged in the Latin-speaking provinces, but Constantine had to reckon on translation into Greek.
The two men differ also in their manner of reciting history. Lactantius, where his narrative is not confirmed by others, is accredited by his own vivacity. No biographer fails to tell of Constantine’s nocturnal flight from the intrigues of Galerius, Maximian’s vain attempt to strip the purple from Maxentius, or the victory of Licinius over forces twice as numerous as his own. Many prefer his story of the vision at the Milvian Bridge to the emperor’s own account, professed on oath to Eusebius. The historian certainly has more to learn from him than from Constantine’s Oration, even when it purports to be giving personal testimony:
What good did it do this man [Diocletian] to have waged war against our God? I suppose that of passing the rest of his life in fear of the thunderbolt, Nicomedia tells it, and the witnesses are not silent, of whom I happen to be one. . . . His palace and house were destroyed by the visitation and the dispensation of fire from heaven. And the outcome of these things was indeed foretold by people of intelligence . . . and openly they spoke with freedom to one another: ‘What is this madness? . . . For the divine is justly indignant with the wicked’. (Oration, 25)
Any discourse attributed to a multitude is fantasy. Constantine has availed himself of the ancient writer’s privilege of casting his own appraisal of events into direct speech. Here the anonymity of the speakers makes them capable of anachronistic clarity; equally false to history is Constantine’s remark that Diocletian lost his house to ‘fire from heaven’. This is not, as some modern readers hold, an attempt to put the blame on lightning for the fire which Diocletian and Galerius had imputed to the disaffected Christians; we see a forerunner of this conflagration in an equally anomalous allusion to the fall of Babylon: ‘And Daniel, after the dissolution of the Assyrian state, when it was destroyed by the launching of thunderbolts, crossed over to Cambyses, the King of the Persians, by the providence of God’ (ibid. 17).
Constantine’s strange history of the Mesopotamian kingdoms is derived from the Book of Judith, from ecclesiastical chronicles, and from biblical typology. The thunderbolts, however, are not apocryphal, but borrowed from a different part of Scripture, being the remnants of the artillery that put an end to Sodom and Gomorrah. For Constantine, the turning-points of history are not discrete occurrences, but one divine catastrophe repeated many times. While Lactantius cultivates the Roman taste for unique, vivid anecdote, Constantine is the harbinger of a paradigmatic method which was to throw up new examples in the course of a generation. In his letter to Serapion, the Alexandrian Patriarch Athanasius (298—373) likens the death of the heretic Arius to that of Judas Iscariot, while in the Life of Constantine Eusebius has little more to tell of his hero’s wars than that Maxentius fell like Pharaoh, and that the same unavailing mercy was extended to Licinius that David showed to Saul.
To make one man the inventor of a genre would be rash; but it would not be absurd to think that the exceptional career of Constantine supplied new themes, new modes of speech, and new incentives to historical and apologetic writing. His reasoning in the Oration, that the universe could not come into being by chance collisions, and that the elements need a single mind to rule them, may seem trite enough to us; but the earliest of the other Greek apologies which use it in extenso are Athanasius’ Against the Nations and Eusebius’ Tricennial Oration, both published in the reign of Constantine. As we have seen, the arguments on behalf of a cosmic monarchy may have been advanced by Constantine as a tacit commendation of his own desire to assume the sole hegemony of the empire. Once he had achieved this, his encomiasts could say openly that he exercised the delegated sovereignty of God:
My present speech wishes to make known the facts and causes of your godly works, praying to expound your mind and be a mouthpiece of your godly soul, and teaching everything that is right and proper for the instruction of everyone who wishes to have an account of the God who is our Saviour. (Tricennial Oration, II)
As its name implies, the Tricennial Oration was delivered in 336, one year before the emperor’s death, and thus cannot be earlier than the Oration to the Saints. Any agreements, therefore, either in substance or in idiom, which were not yet commonplaces in the literature of the Church, would seem to put Eusebius in the debt of his royal friend. Every Christian writer was obliged to hold that God is the cause of everything, that Christ is his Word and Wisdom in creation, and that man is their magnum opus; and so, predictably, say both Eusebius and Constantine. Not every Christian writer, on the other hand, had affirmed that God directs the course of nature as a driver steers his chariot, instanced the procession of days and nights as a signal proof of his solicitude, or reserved a special mockery for the notion that the world rose automatically from uncreated elements; yet so do both Eusebius and Constantine. For Eusebius it is not only God, but Constantine, who guides the turbulent chariot of the world; and whereas Christ is said by Constantine to have resumed his hearth, or hestia, with the Father, Eusebius notes that Constantine restored the sacred hestia of Jerusalem. Constantine had attributed the extremes of philanthropia and megalopsuchia to the Saviour; Eusebius writes of Constantine as one who steers the car of earth as God steers that of heaven, and edifies the nations by his philanthropic laws. Constantine says twice that Christianity is the one straight road to heaven; Eusebius, discerning both the proverb and its context, says that Constantine himself has pointed out the ‘royal road’.
Eusebius knew well enough that in many cases he was giving back to Constantine the Hellenistic epithets which the emperor had been discreet enough to apply to God. A great theme of this eulogy is that everything depends on the nod, orneuma, of the deity through that of his royal delegate. The senatorial formula, that Maxentius was overthrown with divine assent (divinitatis nutu), was translated by Eusebius in his Life of Constantine; a Latin panegyric of 307 assures the emperor Maximian, then the associate of Constantine, that his nutus rules the elements of nature. In the Tricennial Oration the word neuma is used most frequently of God, and more obliquely of his ambassador, so the flattery of the one will be compatible with piety as regards the other.
Eusebius is often called an Arian, because he holds that the Logos is inferior to the Father as the statue of an emperor is inferior to the man. The principle which lurks in this analogy, or rather this conflation of analogies, is that the emperor is to the human world what the Father is in heaven. When panegyrists told a pagan monarch that the elements obeyed him, they flattered him with power, but could not tell him how to use it. This was possible only for a theology that regarded man as the image of his maker. Constantine, when he vows himself to the service of the Deity at the end of his speech, implicitly compares himself with the second god, the Logos, who is perfectly obedient to his Father. As we have seen, Eusebius, being both courtier and dogmatic theologian, drew this moral openly in his Tricennial Oration. The emperor is a peer of Christ, since one is the Father’s pre-existent image, while the other is his image in the cosmos. Not only God’s transcendence, but his character, is therefore manifested in the ruler; but, since it is God’s will, and not man’s nature, that imparts the image, rulership is a special dispensation, not a goal that others could pursue.
The analogy would be harder to sustain if it were thought that the glorious image had been lost or defaced in man through the fall of Adam. In 313 a pagan orator had alluded to the corruption of the arts by quoting Virgil. The Georgics spoke of men in their iniquity beating ploughshares into swords; Constantine, when he exercised his clemency in the taking of a multitude of prisoners, had ingeniously commanded that their weapons be converted into fetters. When Constantine delivered the Oration to the Saints, he gave an account of human progress which omitted any notion of a corporate delinquency; in the Tricennial Oration, Eusebius admits the deterioration of the species, but attributes it to repeated acts of sin without alluding to the primordial transgression of an Adam or an Eve.
Eusebius merits more consideration than we are able to bestow upon him here. Biographers of Constantine have found him a reluctant friend, since, though his Life and his Ecclesiastical History abound in documents, their narratives are in many places incoherent, lacunose, or wantonly obscure. The reason is that, being a pioneer in four domains of literature—the history, the biography, the political encomium, and the chronicle—he entered each with the instruments and instincts of an advocate, whose clients were the Christian faith, the Church, the emperor Constantine, and finally—as the prize of notoriety—himself. If we ask what made him so prolific, we can say that, first of all, he matched extraordinary gifts with the resources of the Caesarean library. Secondly, all Christian essays using a new technique— including those of commentary, chronology, and dogmatic exposition—might be called apologetic in so far as they purported to be written against some enemy of truth. Thirdly—and we should not lose sight of this—he had assisted Constantine in a revolution which could not have failed to animate both new and old experiments in writing. The composition of triumphant histories was now a Christian duty, and to praise the God of heaven was to justify the king. This was to be expected, but it was less to be expected that the king himself would have done so much to guide apologetic into the service of the throne.
Since his own days, Constantine has been unjustly flattered and uncritically dispraised. Few deny his competence as an autocrat, yet many have refused to be convinced of his religion. Our study shows at least that his Christianity was more than a veneer. The Oration to the Saints reveals an emperor who was able to give more substance to his faith than many clerics, and an apologist whose breadth of view and fertile innovations make it possible to rank him with the more eminent theologians of his age.