FT275


Outside the south door of York Minster, there is a statue of a seated man. He looks pensively at the sword he holds, point down, in his left hand. The tip has broken off. The sword has become a cross. The man represented is Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, who was, on 25 July 306, declared Emperor of Rome within a few yards of his modern statue. He was the man who converted Rome to Christianity, the man who would be declared both a saint and a god after his death.

On the base of the statue are the words “Constantine. By this sign conquer”. This refers to one of the defining moments in the history of Western civilis­ation: the vision that led Constantine to victory at the battle of Saxa Rubra, when his forces defeated those of one of his rival emperors, Maxentius. This in turn led to Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity and his imposition of it on the whole Roman Empire.

This is such an important moment that it bears closer examination. There are two sources for the vision of Constantine. One is Lucius Cæcilius Firmianus Lactantius, the Christian tutor of Constantine’s eldest son, Crispus. The other is Eusebius Pamphilus of Cæsarea.

The most famous and dramatic account is that of Eusebius, who relates in his panegyric to the deceased Constantine, Vita Constantini, that the day before the battle of Saxa Rubra (27 October 312), Constantine was praying, and begging God to reveal Himself. As he prayed, at around midday, a “most marvellous sign” appeared in the sky. A cross of light appeared, above the Sun with the inscription In hoc signo vinces (By this sign, conquer). Constantine and his entire army of close to 100,000 men were amazed at the sight.[1]

That night, Eusebius reports, Constantine had a dream. In his dream, Christ appeared to him and ordered that Constantine make a “likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens” and use it as a protective in all his future battles.

So what was it that Constantine saw? Artists through the ages have attempted to depict the scene, but have done so in only the most fantastical way. The most obvious solution is that it was a particularly bright parhelion (a Sun dog or mock Sun). The specific assoc­iation that Eusebius makes with the Sun might support this. These images are caused by ice particles high in the atmosphere and are relatively common. Given clear skies, they can be seen on average about twice a week, if looked for carefully.[2] Very bright parhelia are rarer, yet should still have been known to Constantine, who would have spent far more time outdoors than we do today, and would consequently be more familiar with aerial phenomena.

Recently, the drama-documentary TV series Ancient Rome[3] espoused the theory that Constantine and his army witnessed a meteorite strike, the smoke from the blast curling into a slight (and unconvincing) Chi-Rho shape. Both armies would surely have witnessed either event – signs in the sky are not meant for one man, but for all.

There are two other versions of the events of that day, both written closer in time to the actual events, neither of which refer to a vision, and one of which was written by Eusebius himself. Eusebius’s first account appears in his Ecclesiastical History (c325). Here, the battle is described in somewhat myst­ical terms, the hand of God being more visible than the sword of Constantine. Maxentius is accused of sorcery, but there is no mention of a vision or a dream.[4]

The final account is that of Lactant­ius. In his book On the Death of the Persecutors, he writes: “Constantine was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle.”[5]

No mention of any vision. But note the use of the phrase “heavenly sign” – usually taken to mean the Chi-Rho monogram. Could Eusebius have interpreted this as a “sign” actually seen “in the heavens”? For despite his claiming that Constantine saw a vision, there is simply no mention of it anywhere else, not even in his own works. Only the Life, written some time after Constantine’s death, mentions it.

Interestingly, however, Constantine did once claim to have seen a vision. This was much earlier, before a battle in Gaul, and was of Sol Invictus, the martial emperors’ god of choice.[6] Here again we find a close association with the Sun.

The conclusion seems clear. Eusebius, living in a time when visions and miracles were an accepted part of everyday life, saw that Constantine’s momentous turn towards Christianity should have been accompanied by a suitably dramatic divine vision. It is a slight matter to transpose Constantine’s earlier vision of a false god to where it should have happened, and to modify it to a vision of the true God; and yet that association with Sol remains as a tantalising hint of the origins of the story. All the ingredients of the vision story preceded its first telling – it just took Eusebius to ‘correct’ history to suit the new Christian regime.




Notes
1 Eusebius: Life of Constantine, bk 1, ch 28. The dream reference is in ch 29.
2 Atmospheric Optics.
3 Ancient Rome – Constantine, BBC, 2006.
4 Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History, bk 9, ch 9.
5 Lactantius: On the Death of the Persecutors, ch 44.
6 John Julius Norwich: Byzantium: the Early Centuries, Penguin, 1990, p42.