Did the Emperor Constantine Found the Catholic Church?
Old myths die hard. The legend that Constantine established the Catholic Church persists, despite the facts to the contrary. The story goes that after a superficial conversion to Christianity in 312 AD, still half-pagan, he took over the Christian Church, made it a department of State and re-fashioned Christianity into an instrument of control. His power grab culminated by him calling the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, and imposing the paganized doctrine of the Trinity. This is said to be the birth of the Catholic Church.
The legend rests on the idea that Constantine was not truly a Christian. It is admitted by the majority of historians today that Constantine's conversion was sincere. Skeptics underscore the fact that in he continued to use pagan symbolism, such as the Sol Invictus symbol on his coins. They assume that when a person converts to a new religion, he is perfectly orthodox, or else his ignorance is a sign that he is not truly committed. Constantine's behaviour says otherwise. If Constantine had been insincere, his private words and actions would have contradicted his public acts. An example of a truly insincere Christian is Hitler. In fact, he was no Christian at all, but a complete hypocrite. In public, he would invoke the name of Jesus and twist Christianity to his own ends. In private, as we can read in his famous Table Talk, he utterly denounced it, not to mention the fact that he did not live by any of its tenets. Constantine lived the life of a Christian in his court. He liked to talk about theological issues. He held Christian ceremonies in his court and his correspondence shows a preoccupation with giving true worship of God. His insincerity cannot be ascribed to his ignorance or lack of orthodoxy on certain issues. The only way that such a hypothesis can be maintained is by maliciously reading into the evidence, not by contrasting his thought with his belief. Being so devoted to his faith, it is natural that Constantine took an interest in the affairs of the Church. Anti-Catholics interpret his intervention in religious matters as an attempt to control the church. They confuse his intervention with the attempt to appropriate the Church as a department of State. In the Donatist affair, which began over a dispute over an election of the bishop of Carthage in 311 AD, Constantine forced the handover of church property from Donatists to Catholics. Since the election was the cause of social disruption, the Emperor had every reason to intervene to make sure that the electoral process was respected. Constantine also operated on the belief that the well-being of the empire rested on concordia, or harmony. When there was civil strife, the people turned their attention away from the worship of God, whose blessing Constantine believed was necessary for the welfare of the Empire. In order to ensure the temporal welfare of the Empire, he had to make sure that Church matters were carried out in an orderly manner.
Constantine's intervention was limited to co-operating with the Church. He never attempted to manipulate Christian belief. In fact it was against his policy to impose any belief on anyone. In 313 AD he emitted the famous Edict of Milan, which many people think was an attempt to impose Christianity on the Empire. In fact, it said that all religions were tolerated. In the following year, Constantine wrote to the bishops at the Council of Arles: "What each man, out of conviction, undertakes himself, he shall not try to force on another. What a man sees and realizes for himself, let him serve his neighbor therewith, if he may; but if he avails not to do so, let him leave it alone. "
When the Arian crisis erupted, initially, he would not take sides. In 323 AD, he sent his spiritual advisor, Bishop Hosius of Cordoba to the main rivals, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and the priest Arius. He blamed both sides for fomenting the dispute because of their love of argument. To Constantine, the question of the relationship of the Father and the Son was a hairsplitting argument, and he blew it off, saying that there should be a charitable difference of opinion.
But the feud persisted, and it caused much disorder. It is for this reason that Constantine called the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. The popular interpretation of this act is that he called it in order to impose his own pagan views. Constantine did not even have a vote at the Council. He was the president of the assembly, the one who kept order during the discussion. He participated in the discussions, even proposing the word "consubstantial" at the suggestion of Bishop Hosius. In the end, it was the bishops who voted and agreed with the term, purely on their own terms.
The Church had, after all, a tradition behind it. The Church had already affirmed her belief that there are three persons in one God when Pope Dionysius condemned Sabellianism at a Council in Rome in 262 AD. Sabellianism taught that there existed no real distinction between the persons, so that one could argue that God the Father died on the cross. It was in the preceding century that the word "Trinity" was coined by St. Hippolytus. Other pre-Nicene Fathers, such as Tertullian and St. Gregory the Wonderworker also spoke of the Triune God.
But even if Constantine had intended to impose a pagan formula on the Church, it would have been completely illogical for the Church to bow down to him. A number of the bishops present at the Council of Nicea had suffered during the persecutions of Diocletian in 303 and under Licinius in 321. Their faith had already been tested: they were ready to suffer and die before they would bow down to idols. If the Trinity truly had been pagan in content, and not of their own devising, they would have sooner died than accepted it. Constantine himself kissed their scars of the bishops who had undergone physical mutilation for the faith, out of respect for their suffering. Unless one wants to maliciously read into it an act of hypocrisy, Constantine obviously respected how they stood up to paganism and did not give in to it.
The myth of Constantine's attempted paganization of Christianity through the Council of Nicea rests on a few truths either taken in isolation from the wider context, mixed in with historical distortions. In order for the myth to stand, Constantine's imperfect faith must be construed as insincerity; his convoking the Council of Nicea must be seen as an attempt to strongarm Christians to embrace his allegedly pagan belief system; the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity itself is seen in isolation from the preceding centuries. When all the pertinent historical facts are strung together, the real picture one gets is of an organic development of the faith as it had been preached for three centuries. All these inconvenient facts must be overlooked in order to sustain the belief that Constantine founded the Catholic Church, not Jesus Christ, and that Catholicism is a pagan hybrid of Christianity.