The Life
Constantine was born around 272 in Naissus (modern Niš, Serbia) to Constantius Chlorus and Saint Helena. He was proclaimed emperor at York in 306 on his father’s death. In 312, before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he saw a vision of the Cross with the words “In this sign, conquer.” Christ appeared to him in a dream the next night. He placed the Christian symbol on his troops’ shields and won the battle, entering Rome in triumph. In 313 he issued the Edict of Milan with Licinius, ending the imperial persecution of Christians. He defeated Licinius in 324 to become sole emperor. He convened the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 against Arianism. He founded Constantinople in 330 as the new Christian capital. His mother Saint Helena discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem and built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Constantine was baptized on his deathbed and reposed at Pentecost on May 22, 337.
Saint Constantine was born around 272 in the Roman city of Naissus (modern Niš in Serbia) in the imperial province of Moesia Superior. His father Constantius Chlorus was a senior Roman military officer who would later rise to become Caesar and then Augustus of the Western Roman Empire under the Tetrarchic system. His mother was Saint Helena, a woman of humble birth who had been the wife or concubine of Constantius before his imperial career required him to set her aside for a dynastic marriage. Saint Constantine was close to his mother throughout her life. His mother had become a Christian (the precise date of her conversion is debated but appears to have been early in her life), and her influence on her son was and lasting. He grew up at the imperial court, receiving the classical Roman education suitable to a senior officer’s son.
Saint Constantine spent the next six years (306–312) consolidating his position in the Western Empire and preparing for the inevitable confrontation with his rival Maxentius, who had seized the imperial throne at Rome and was oppressing the Christian community of Italy. The providential moment came in the autumn of 312 as he was moving with his troops toward Rome. According to the contemporary accounts of Eusebius of Caesarea (who claimed to have heard the account directly from Saint Constantine himself) and Lactantius, he saw in the sky a sign of the Cross or the Labarum (the Chi-Rho monogram of Christ, formed from the first two Greek letters of “Christ”) with the words “In this sign, conquer” (“In hoc signo vinces” in Latin). The following night Christ himself appeared to him in a dream, confirming the vision and bestowing on him the power of the Cross.
In February 313, Saint Constantine met the Eastern Roman emperor Licinius at Milan. The two emperors jointly issued the famous Edict of Milan, which granted full religious toleration to the Christian Church across the entire Roman Empire and ordered the restoration of all property that had been confiscated from the Christians during the persecutions. The Edict of Milan ended the era of imperial persecution of Christianity that had begun under Nero in 64 and had continued in waves for the next two and a half centuries. The Christian Faith was now legal across the entire Roman world. The Christian Church could emerge from the catacombs and house churches into the public sphere. The imperial sponsorship that would later make the Christian Faith the state religion of the empire had begun.
Saint Constantine’s deepest theological achievement was the convening of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in May–June 325. The Christian Church was divided at this time over the Arian heresy, which taught that the Son of God was a created being subordinate to the Father rather than the eternal Son of one essence with the Father. Saint Constantine, deeply concerned for the theological and ecclesial unity of the Christian Church he had now legalized, convened an ecumenical assembly of bishops from across the entire Christian world at Nicaea in northwestern Asia Minor. About 318 bishops attended (the traditional number; some accounts say 250 or 300). The Council condemned the Arian heresy and formulated the Nicene Creed, which has remained the foundational confession of Christian Faith for the entire Christian world for seventeen centuries. Saint Constantine himself attended the Council’s sessions and contributed to the discussions, though the theological work was done by the assembled bishops.
Saint Constantine’s mother Saint Helena (despite her advanced age — she was already in her late seventies) made her famous pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in 326–328. She oversaw the excavation of the traditional site of the Lord’s Crucifixion and the Holy Sepulchre, the removal of the pagan Temple of Venus that the Emperor Hadrian had built over the site in the second century, and the founding of the great Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the recovered holy ground. According to the tradition, she also discovered the True Cross of Christ during the excavations — the precious wood of the Lord’s Crucifixion that had been buried under the rubble of the destroyed pagan temple. The relic of the True Cross has been one of the most precious treasures of the entire Christian Church ever since. The churches Saint Helena founded in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and on the Mount of Olives became the foundational pilgrimage centers of the entire Holy Land.
In the year 330 Saint Constantine founded the new imperial capital of Constantinople (originally called “New Rome”) on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium at the crossing point between Europe and Asia. The new capital was designed from its foundation as a Christian city, with Christian churches at its heart, Christian symbols on its buildings and coins, and the relics of the Christian saints distributed across its churches. The founding of Constantinople was the symbolic moment when the Christianization of the Roman Empire became visible at the center of the imperial state. The new capital would become the heart of Eastern Christian civilization for the next eleven centuries (until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453) and would shape the entire history of the Eastern Christian Church.
The biblical foundation of Saint Constantine’s imperial conversion is the Lord’s Great Commission to the apostles. The Lord had commanded his apostles to teach all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The providential significance of Saint Constantine’s imperial conversion was that it made possible the fulfillment of the Great Commission across the entire Roman world. The Christian Faith that had been the persecuted minority religion of the Roman Empire became the dominant religion through Saint Constantine’s imperial sponsorship; the apostolic Faith spread to all the nations of the Roman Empire through the institutional and political support that his imperial conversion made possible. The Eastern tradition has rightly given Saint Constantine the title “Equal-to-the-Apostles” for his providential role in the apostolic mission of the Christian Church.
Saint Constantine fell ill in the spring of 337. He had been preparing for a military campaign against the Persian Empire when he became sick at Helenopolis in northwestern Asia Minor (a city named after his mother). He recognized the approach of his death and finally received the baptism he had long deferred. He was baptized by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and immediately put on the white baptismal garment that he wore for the remaining days of his life. He reposed in peace at Nicomedia on May 22, 337, the day of Pentecost. He was about sixty-five years old. He had ruled the Western Roman Empire for thirty-one years and the united Roman Empire for thirteen years. His body was returned to Constantinople and was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles that he had built as his imperial mausoleum.
Constantine gives the Christian Church a particular gift: the early Eastern dramatization that the providence of God can use even imperfect instruments of secular political authority to advance the work of the Christian Church. He saw the vision of the Cross at the Milvian Bridge and converted to Christianity. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313, ending the imperial persecution. He convened the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 against Arianism. He founded Constantinople in 330 as the new Christian capital. His mother Saint Helena founded the great churches of the Holy Land and discovered the True Cross. He was baptized on his deathbed and reposed at Pentecost on May 22, 337. We may not be emperors. But we are all called to recognize the providential dimension of the ordinary historical processes through which the providence of God works.