Chrysopolis
By Alan Fimister | 4 September 2024
18 September this year will be the 1,700th anniversary of the Battle of Chrysopolis in 324. The battle was in some ways the climax of the reign of Constantine the Great. As a result of the encounter, he defeated his last remaining imperial rival Licinius and became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. It was because of the Battle of Chrysopolis that Constantine was able to summon the Council of Nicaea in 325, gathering bishops from across the entire Roman Empire and beyond. The campaign leading up to Chrysopolis, during which Licinius retreated into the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, alerted the first Christian emperor to the many strategic advantages of its location and led to its refoundation as Constantinople, the Queen of Cities.
The life of Constantine is not taken from the sacred narrative of scripture, but it still has lessons for us. Our Lord admonishes us to “seek first the kingdom of God and His justice and these other things will be added unto you”. Whether this was the path Constantine trod we shall have to wait until the general judgment to see, but he does have a liturgical cult in the Byzantine liturgy. St Augustine tells us that, lest Christians imagine earthly glory can be attained only by the worshipers of demons, “God gave to the Emperor Constantine, who was not a worshipper of demons, but of the true God Himself, such fullness of earthly gifts as no one would even dare wish for.”
From 325, however, the trajectory was downward, and this decline also holds lessons for us. Constantine executed the eleven-year-old son of his defeated rival in 326 and was manipulated by his second wife Fausta into executing his own eldest son (from his first marriage) Crispus. When he realised what had happened, he killed Fausta as well. After these catastrophes, Constantine came increasingly under the influence of Eusebius of Nicomedia, the leader of the pro-Arian party. Although he always remained loyal to the Council of Nicaea, the Emperor was increasingly poisoned against St Athanasius. Constantine planned to end his reign by triumphing over Persia, the ancient enemy of the Romans; just as soon as he had finally received his long-delayed baptism in the Jordan, he would lead a vast host across the Euphrates and surpass the glories of Trajan. It was not to be. In the end he fell ill before the campaign could be initiated and never reached the Holy Land. He was baptised by Eusebius of Nicomedia on his deathbed while still in Bithynia. September 324 to August 325 (when Nicaea ended) may therefore be considered the apogee of Constantine’s career.
Twelve years earlier, when he conquered the southern provinces of the Western Roman Empire at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine constructed a new standard for his armies which replaced the eagle of Jupiter with the “heavenly sign” of the Cross.
The historian Eusebius of Caesarea tells that at the Battle of Chrysopolis this new standard, the Labarum, instilled a special terror in his foes:
“Having now learned by experience the Divine and mysterious power which resided in the salutary trophy, by means of which Constantine’s army had become habituated to victory, [Licinius] admonished his soldiers never to direct their attack against this standard, nor even incautiously to allow their eyes to rest upon it; assuring them that it possessed a terrible power, and was especially hostile to him; so that they would do well carefully to avoid any collision with it. And now, having given these directions, he prepared for a decisive conflict with him whose humanity prompted him still to hesitate, and to postpone the fate which he foresaw awaited his adversary. The enemy, however, confident in the aid of a multitude of gods, advanced to the attack with a powerful array of military force, preceded by certain images of the dead, and lifeless statues, as their defence. On the other side, the emperor, secure in the armour of godliness, opposed to the numbers of the enemy the salutary and life-giving sign, as at once a terror to the foe, and a protection from every harm.”
This striking moment is a reminder of the true source of our every victorious endeavour: the holy and life-giving Cross. As the ancient text proclaims, “God reigns from the tree.” The anointed one teaches, sanctifies and governs from His throne and altar upon Mount Calvary. And the Cross is always near us, we have but to reach out and grasp our standard to bear it to victory.
The establishment and preservation of a Christian social order is not the final objective of the Church’s labours. In itself, it is a mere side-effect. The purpose of her activity is the salvation of the individual souls of each man and woman, but man is a social and political animal and if we do not preach to him as to the member of a family and a commonwealth, we do not truly preach to him as an individual either. The conversion of whole societies to the true religion and the one church of Christ is a worthy proximate goal and partial measure of the zeal of the faithful in any given historical era. Surprisingly, for all the desperate appearance of our present predicament, this task of social conversion is not as impossible as it may seem. Nothing, after all, is impossible for God. As St John Henry Newman assures us, “Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God”.
Each of the aspects of the emperor’s decline in later years came from a failure to observe this simple precept, from the neglect of one or another aspect of the Christian’s vocation as an alter Christus. For the sake of compromise and consensus, he weakened his defence of the dogma settled at Nicaea; to avoid the demands of the narrow way, he delayed his descent into the waters of Holy Baptism, and for the sake of political expediency, he stained his catechumenate with the blood of his nephew.
We have no need to trust in ambiguity, to retreat from or desecrate the sacraments or to fear aught that the world, the flesh and the devil may cast against us, because God is with us. “Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom.” (Lk 12:32)
The faith itself is the source of superhuman confidence. As the Beloved Disciple tells us, “you have the unction from the Holy One, and know all things” (1 Jn 2:20). English Catholics are familiar with St Edmund Campion’s boast that “no one Protestant, nor all the Protestants living … can maintain their doctrine in disputation [and] I am to sue most humbly and instantly for combat with all and every of them”. Campion was, of course, a man a great learning, but commenting on the Apostles Creed, St Thomas Aquinas remarks that “no one of the philosophers before the coming of Christ could, through his own powers, know God and the means necessary for salvation as well as any old woman since Christ’s coming knows Him through faith.”
The concrete actions by which we habitually express this confidence in the saving death of Our Blessed Lord are the recourse to the sacraments which define and nourish the life of the Catholic. As St Paul exclaims, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:4–5). Baptism is the gate by which we re-enter paradise and partake of the Tree of Life. As Tolkien told his son, “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”
The war between the Christian and the world, the flesh and the devil is an inevitable consequence of the reconquest of his soul by Christ. For, as St John warns us, “we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one” (1 Jn 5:19) and so, as the liberating army of grace advances, the evil one bitterly contests every inch of the formerly occupied territory that is our flesh and our society. And yet, all we need in order to prevail is to grasp the Cross. “These things I have spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
What then are Licinius’s legions to do if there is no hope of victory against the shining standard of the Cross? Then as now, their tactic, their only possible means of delaying the ultimate victory of the Church is “never to direct their attack against this standard, nor even incautiously to allow their eyes to rest upon it”. Our strategy must therefore always be to confront the world with the Cross, to accentuate the conflict, to make no compromise, to preach above all “those principal truths which are directly opposed to the errors of this day” with the high praise of God always in our mouths and the two-edged sword of God’s word in our hands. The signal for the beginning of the final persecution of the Antichrist, we are told by the Prophet Daniel, is the taking away of the perpetual sacrifice (Dn 12:11). The degradation of the liturgy and the proliferation of sacrilegious communions is the harbinger of that dark hour. Every good confession and pious communion forestalls it and arms us against it. The defence of the natural law against unnatural vice and the innocent blood that desecrates almost every land may seem a lost cause, but it is not. Every time a voice is raised in the wilderness, the eyes of the enslaved rest, however fleetingly, upon the Cross, and the legions of darkness are weakened and forced into direct confrontation with it, a confrontation in which they cannot prevail. All the idiotic slogans about “the right to chose” and “reproductive rights” and “all are welcome” and “love is love” are designed to steer Licinius’s armies away from the Labarum. We must not be driven into euphemisms; “homosexuality” is sodomy; “reproductive rights” is child murder; “trans awareness” is castrating children. Reason is not secular, reason demands that all men and all communities of men worship God in the manner he has established, and this is what we must demand to. To stand on any other ground is to guarantee defeat before a single weapon is unsheathed. Every time we choose some other ground and trust in eloquent words of worldly wisdom instead of the Cross, we empty the Cross of its power, and we lose.