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

his ‘betrayal’ would have to be baptised again; the retort was that baptism as a
sacrament was valid in itself irrespective of the cleric who administered the rite.
The dispute became so intractable that it caused a schism in North Africa. The
hardliners, known as the Donatists, followed their charismatic bishop Donatus,
while the rival group elected one Caecilian as their bishop.
At first Constantine appears to have been happy to let the Church deal with
the problem, and he asked the Bishop of Rome, Miltiades, to preside over a
small gathering of bishops, mostly from Italy, to decide the issue. But after
appeals and counter-appeals from both parties - Constantine was always ready to
listen to petitioners, often giving them personal audiences - he gradually, over
three or four years, tended towards the Caecilianists. Donatus’ refusal to
compromise with the imperial authorities led to the isolation of himself and his
followers from state patronage, which was now channelled towards the
Caecilianists. It was a moment of immense symbolic importance, because
Constantine was in fact shaping the form and structure of what became the
Roman Catholic Church. By supporting those bishops who were prepared to
acquiesce in his rule, he created an alliance between Church and state that was to
persist, if often uneasily, in western Europe for centuries to come. The precedent
had now been set that the emperor might intervene not only to strengthen the
Church but to influence doctrine. (There does seem to have been some initial
state persecution of the Donatists, but in 321 Constantine ordered the vicarius of
Africa to relent, and despite their lack of patronage, the Donatists flourished and
became the largest Christian community in Africa.)
These pragmatic moves went hand in hand with Constantine’s rise to
domination over the empire. Licinius had eliminated his rival Maximinus in 313
and became Constantine’s sole rival for power. Over the coming years the
relationship corroded, and the records suggest that Constantine gradually took
more decisions without reference to Licinius. In 323 Constantine crossed into
Licinius’ half of the empire, establishing a cause for war that his rival could not
ignore. In two major battles in 324, one near the city of Adrianople, Licinius was
defeated. Constantine now ruled the entire Roman empire, east and west, and to
celebrate he set in hand a new imperial capital, strategically placed on the site of
ancient Byzantium between Europe and Asia. The ‘new Rome’, Constantinople,
was to be capital first of the eastern empire, and later of the Byzantine empire
until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
In the eastern empire Constantine encountered a Christian church that was
much more deeply rooted than anything he had found in the west. While only