A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

Hill. These buildings were plain on the exterior (presumably so as not to offend
pagans) but glittering with gold and mosaic inside. In this way a pagan custom,
the worship of gods through impressive buildings, was transferred successfully
into Christianity. Such display was completely alien to the Christian tradition,
and the ascetic scholar Jerome must have spoken for many traditionalists when
he complained that ‘parchments are dyed purple, gold is melted into lettering,
manuscripts are dressed up in jewels, while Christ lies at the door naked and
dying’. Now opulence became central to Christianity’s public identity. It was one
of the most important architectural and economic revolutions in European
history. Walk through any city with a medieval past and note the extensive space
and resources given to churches. In the early fourteenth century the poet Dante
himself lamented:
Ah, Constantine, that was indeed a curse,
not thy conversion, but thy dower which
first filled the Holy Father’s purse! 12
These developments were extraordinary in themselves but masked something
just as fundamental. When Christianity became Constantine’s religion as the
result of the apparent support shown for him by the Christian God at the Milvian
Bridge, it meant accepting that God willed the rise to power of the emperor by
means of bloody warfare. Constantine’s biographer, Eusebius of Caesarea, had
no difficulty in finding relevant texts from the Old Testament to explain the
victory. Exodus 15:4, ‘Pharaoh’s chariots and his force he [God] cast into the
sea, and picked rider-captains he overwhelmed in the Red Sea’, clearly referred
to the similar fate suffered by Maxentius and his men in the waters of the Tiber.
According to Eusebius, Psalm 7:15-16, ‘he dug a hole and excavated it, and will
fall into the pit he made’, certainly told of the consequences for Maxentius of
having broken down the original Milvian Bridge! 13 Thus the Hebrew scriptures,
which had been adopted by Christians as foretelling the coming of Christ, were
now used to foretell the victory of a Roman emperor over his adversaries. But
not everyone felt so comfortable about this use of the Old Testament. When the
Christian missionary Ulfilas, working among the Goths, translated the Bible into
Gothic, he deliberately left out the two books of Kings on the grounds that the
Goths were warlike enough already and did not need any further encouragement.
On the other hand, as we will see, bishops such as the formidable Ambrose of
Milan followed Constantine’s precedent by equating God’s support with the
coming of imperial victory. The consequences of this relationship between