Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (17 page)

On the positive side, Constantine filled the city with Christian symbols: "one might see the fountains in the midst of the market place graced with figures representing the good Shepherd, well known to those who study the sacred oracles, and that of Daniel also with the lions, forged in brass, and resplendent with plates of gold. Indeed, so large a measure of Divine love possessed the emperor's soul." Eusebius was most impressed with a "vast tablet displayed in the center of its gold-covered paneled ceil
ing" in the palace, where Constantine ordered "the symbol of our Saviour's Passion to be fixed, composed of a variety of precious stones richly inwrought with gold." For Eusebius, "this symbol he seemed to have intended to be as it were the safeguard of the empire itself. "66

From what we can tell at this distance,67
Constantinople's break with the pagan past was not so self-evident.61
Constantine included no coliseum but built a hippodrome for racing that mimicked the Circus Maximus at Rome. Notable churches dotted the city, including the first form of the Church of Holy Wisdom and the Church of the Apostles, where for a time the emperor was buried.69
Christian imagery was evident throughout. Yet he also treated the city as a project continuous with the Roman past. As a celebration of his victory over the tyrant, Constantinople was the city of Rome's victory, not merely of Constantine's personal triumph.70
Further, he erected a statue to Tyche, the goddess of good fortune
7' and at the top of a porphyry column that still stands in the center of the old square of Constantinople, he placed a golden statue of Apollo looking toward the rising sun, whose face was remade into the face of Constantine, with an inscription that "intended to signify that instead of being a sungod Constantine gave his allegiance to the God who made the sun."72
He moved so much existing art into his new city that Jerome complained that all the cities of the East had been stripped bare.73
Constantinople was newly founded, but it deliberately evoked the Roman past as well, religiously as well as politically.

HOUSES OF THE LORD

In the main, Constantine's buildings in Rome and elsewhere left no room
for ambiguity. He was a great builder of churches, Christian churches. He studded Rome with churches and baptisteries74
and erected church buildings throughout the empire, including several in Palestine, where his mother Helena traveled. He built other buildings and monuments, but church building was his main architectural preoccupation. Not only did this preoccupation demonstrate Constantine's official approval of the church, but erecting churches took the place of the temple building sponsored by earlier emperors. The location of his buildings in the capital was significant. Now the site of a bustling urban center, St. Peter's was originally built on the margins of the city, a sign of Constantine's departure from the earlier imperial focus on the Forum
.71

Constantine's church building often embodied his self-image as a victor over paganism.76
In his construction projects Constantine was once again Moses, plundering Egypt for materials with which to erect the house of God. None so thoroughly expressed this victory over paganism as the church erected at Mamre. Sacred to Jews, Arabs and even Greeks, Mamre, a place Abram visited during his sojourns in Canaan, had become a hotspot of pagan revelry and idolatry. When Constantine heard, he was incensed. According to Sozomen, he "rebuked the bishops of Palestine in no measured terms, because they had neglected their duty, and had permitted a holy place to be defiled by impure libations and sacrifices." In a letter to Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, and other Palestinian bishops, he commanded that "these bishops ... hold a conference on this subject with the Phcenician bishops, and issue directions for the demolition, from the foundations, of the altar formerly erected there, the destruction of the carved images by fire, and the erection of a church worthy of so ancient and so holy a place." Prohibiting sacrifice, he demanded that Mamre "should be exclusively devoted to the worship of God according to the law of the Church." In the event that "any attempt should be made to restore the former rites, the bishops were to inform against the delinquent, in order
that he might be subjected to the greatest punishment."77
At Mamre, at least, Constantine intended to bring an end to sacrifice.

The very form of Christian church buildings communicated the triumph of Christianity in the Roman world and Christ's victory over the Roman gods. The choice of the basilica form for church buildings was virtually forced on Constantine and other church builders. Domestic spaces could no longer house the crowds that now crammed into meeting places for worship, and ancient temples were designed to house an image of the god, not to accommodate mobs of worshipers. In the Roman world, only one style met all the needs of the church-the basilica.
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Today a "basilica" is a church basilica, but in the Roman world basilicas were used for many purposes. Whenever there was a need for a large assembly-for political gatherings, markets, court sessions, military drills, adjacent to temples-basilicas were serviceable. Basilica plans were no more uniform than their uses. There were "single-naved halls with or without apses; halls with two naves; halls composed of a nave and aisles, the latter parallel to or enveloping the nave on four sides; broad and short, or very long structures." Entryways were variable as well. They could be "placed on one of the long sides, thus intimating a transversal or central reading of the plan; or they are placed on one short side, on the longitudinal axis, or indeed, on both one long and one short side." In public basilicas, "the tribunal for the presiding magistrate may project into the nave or an aisle; or apses sheltering tribunals may extend outward from one, two or three flanks of the building. Nave and aisles may be of one height; or the nave may be higher and provided with clerestory windows, small or large. Also, the aisles may or may not be surmounted by galleries."79
In the early fourth century, the only common elements of the basilica form were a timber roof and the presence of at least one raised platform or tribunal in the apse or standing free in the nave. By the early part of Constantine's reign, the single-nave basilica, whether or not flanked by aisles, had become the predominant form.80

Basilicas already carried a religious charge. They "shared the architectural vocabulary of the temples," such as "colonnaded orders, entablatures, stone masonry ... vaulting or coffered ceilings." By the beginning of the fourth century, these associations were overlaid with allusions to the imperial cult: "the presence of the emperor, in effigy or in the flesh, had become increasingly the predominant element in any basilica." Any boundary between secular and civic disappeared, and "any basilica was, or carried the connotations of, a sanctuary of the god on earth.""

Constantine continued to build monumental civic buildings in basilica form, the most prominent of which is at Trier. It is a long-nave basilica, without aisles, one hundred by two hundred Roman feet (95 by 190 English feet), and a hundred Roman feet high. The nave has two rows of windows on each side, nine windows per row, and the curved apse has two rows of smaller windows, five in each row.82
Today the exterior is simple brick, and the building sticks out awkwardly like a prematurely tall teen, but it was once covered by pink stucco and nestled among other buildings that have since collapsed. When Constantine first built it, the interior was lavishly decorated: "the walls carried a marble revetment of many colors rising in successive tiers to the upper row of windows and articulated, it seems, by inlaid pilasters, panels, and friezes; above, there followed a zone of painted stucco or possibly mosaic; five niches in the apse wall bore ornamental glass mosaic; on the floor, pavement slabs of white and dark marble formed a geometric pattern."83

A few of Constantine's basilica churches were on the same scale.84
Begun shortly after his victory over Maxentius, the Lateran basilica in Rome was a long-nave structure flanked by side aisles. It was over three hundred feet long, and its ceiling rose to one hundred feet.85
If the Liber Pontificalis is to be believed (it probably is not), the ornamentation of the Lateran basilica was as luxurious as any pagan temple, with "a hammered silver fastigium," on the front of which was "the Saviour seated in a chair, 5 ft in size,
weighing 120 lb, and 12 apostles each 5 ft and weighing 90 lb with crowns of the finest silver." Another image of Christ was visible to someone looking down the nave from the apse: "the Saviour sitting on a throne, 5 ft in size, of finest silver weighing 140 lb, and 4 spear-carrying silver angels, each 5 ft and weighing 105 lb, with jewels of Alabanda in their eyes
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Constantine's original church of St. Pietro at the Vatican was the largest of all Christian churches of the time. The nave alone was 295 feet long, and the entire interior 390 feet long and 210 feet wide. Distinctively, however, it had a transept as tall as the nave itself that separated the nave from the large apse. Before the apse was the tomb of Peter, marking the transept as the martyrium proper.17
After St. Pietro, the cruciform shape made from the long-nave basilica with transept became a standard cathedral form. Constantine's conversion was a response to the sign of the victorious cross, and the cross had been painted on military gear and impressed on coins. Fittingly, the cross also became the shape of sacred space.

The sheer fact of church buildings gave the church a fixed physical presence that it had never had before. Church buildings had existed, but their existence was precarious, dependent on the unreliable favor of the emperor. Constantine secured the church's legal status and in building churches gave that establishment physical form. After Constantine, church building became the most characteristic of the emperor's building projects, a signal of the changed status of the Christian religion.ss
The size of Constantine's churches, especially the Lateran cathedral, spoke of the new prominence of Christianity in Constantine's world. The Christian God had proved himself the most powerful of all deities, and this had to be expressed in the design and scale of his houses of worship.

The basilica form was fitting, since Constantine had drawn the church into the imperial orbit and delegated to bishops some of the functions of the state. As we shall see in a later chapter, Constantine broke the logjam of legal appeals by allowing complainants to take their case to episcopal courts, and bishops were increasingly responsible for social welfare in the cities. Given the bishops' expanded public role, the basilica was the most natural architectural form to use. Since the basilica had been a form as
sociated with the imperial cult, the churches also suggested a union of civic and religious life on a different level. The Lateran was "the throne hall of Christ Basileus and of the bishop, His representative, just as the basilica at Trier was the seat of the Emperor's Divine Majesty, or, in his absence, the seat of his local representative."89

Some of the vocabulary of pagan temples carried over into the Christian basilicas, but the distinction between church and temple was equally important. On the one hand, churches "were meeting halls for the congregations (basilicae ecclesiae) or meeting halls for burial and funeral rites (basilica quae sunt cemeteria)," but "they were also audience halls of the Lord." According to the Pilgrim of Bordeaux, the church built on Golgotha (wrongly described as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher) is "basilica, idest dominicum," and Eusebius uses terms such as basileios neos or basileios oikos instead of basilike. Such language "establishes the church as the throne room of the Emperor of Heaven, comparable to the sanctuary where the living god-emperor received the obeisance of his subjects."90

This might be evidence that Constantine was trying to rope Christ into service to the imperial cult, but it seems more likely that it was a confession of his subordination to the greater Lord. He had baptized public space. Paganism still had its place, but temples were increasingly overshadowed by large, and numerous, churches.