Res Publica Christiana
By Alan Fimister | 12 February 2025
“There is no justice save in that Republic whose founder and ruler is Christ” (St Augustine)
It is not often realised nowadays that the rulers of the Roman Empire held the title Emperor not because they were more than kings but because the title king was seen as too exalted for the leader of the Republic. Augustus, the first emperor, presented his foundation of the Empire as a restoration of the Republic thrown into chaos by the civil wars of the previous century, and not least by his adopted father Julius Caesar’s perceived interest in the title of king. In the second century, Marcus Aurelius spoke of the ideal of “a polity based on equality and freedom of speech for all, and a monarchy concerned primarily with preserving the freedom of the subject”.
Even less understood today is the role of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, in preserving this ideal. Though he probably had no notion that this would be the case, two key actions of Constantine the Great exercised a powerful preservative effect on the Republican tradition of ancient Rome.
Constantine’s predecessor as sole Emperor of the Roman world, Diocletian (284–305), had sought to eliminate the “fiction” that the Emperor was not a king but a magistrate of the Republic elected by, and ultimately answerable to, the people. Diocletian refused for twenty years to even visit the Eternal City because he did not wish to have his elevation to the purple confirmed by the Senate lest he be thought to need its recognition. When the emperor finally did visit Rome, twenty years after his accession, he immediately left again in a rage because the senators would not call him Lord or grovel before him.
Diocletian sought to construct a mechanism whereby his office would be shared with a co-emperor and two deputy emperors (“Caesars”) who would automatically succeed their seniors and then appoint deputies in their turn ensuring a smooth transition without any need for the involvement of the Senate and the People of Rome. Diocletian took the title Lord (Dominus or Kyrios) and wore a jewelled toga, demanding that other men prostrate themselves to him rather than merely salute him as a magistrate. He was the first emperor since Caligula and Domitian to receive this title and to be worshiped and addressed as a god.
Diocletian’s persecution of the Church — “the Great Persecution” — was not unrelated to this pagan ideology whereby he was to be adored as the earthly manifestation of Jupiter and colleague of Hercules. And certainly, there were men in the circle of Constantine who rejected this new system on the basis of the gospel. Lactantius, the tutor of Constantine’s son Crispus, accused those who submitted to the new ways of idolatry:
“For whosoever shall cast away the conduct becoming a man, and, following present things, shall prostrate himself upon the ground, will be punished as a deserter from his Lord, his commander, and his Father.”
The first act of Constantine which restored the ancient ideal of the Republic was his own acclamation as Emperor in York on 25 July 306. Constantine was acclaimed as Augustus (senior emperor) ignoring Diocletian’s tetrarchy and claiming the purple on the sole basis of the inalienable right of the Roman people to bestow upon whom they will the full extent of their own power and sovereignty.
The second great republican act of Constantine was his foundation in 330 AD of the City of New Rome. Constantinople was so brilliantly located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, poised between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, perfectly stationed for the frontiers on the Danube and the Euphrates and so utterly impregnable to besieging armies that it became impossible to marginalise the new capital, as Rome had been marginalised by the military emperors of the third century; impossible simply to claim the imperial dignity on a battlefield a thousand miles away from the City and then simply ignore it as Diocletian had done. One might be acclaimed on the frontiers, but unless one was able to secure the voluntary surrender of the Queen of Cities by its civilian population, one would not maintain the title for very long.
The perfect location of Byzantium as the capital of the world was perceived quasi-prophetically by none other than Aristotle half a millennium earlier:
“Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organisation, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best-governed of any nation, and, if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world.”
Latin westerners have been blinded to the massive significance of Constantine’s city and empire by a millennium of mindless prejudice. The very words “Byzantine” and “despot” — from the Greek for “master” or “ruler” — were transformed into insults. When Gaul, Britain and Iberia were dominated by pyramids of barbarian crime families exercising privatised justice for payment in kind, the Roman Republic on the Bosporus was a meritocratic objective state with an elected monarchy and equality before the law. It was in the Christian Roman empire of the sixth century that the idea of class distinction among citizens began to break down and the ancient pagan aristocracy disappear. The first emperor to prostrate himself before and be crowned by the pope was Justin I, in 523: a man who, as a child, was a peasant swineherd; whose wife was a former slave; whose nephew and successor married an ex-prostitute. Over the following centuries, the hereditary aristocracy essentially disappeared altogether, replaced by a military and bureaucratic meritocracy.
Observing the transformation of the Empire into a “Commonwealth” the pagan poet Claudian wrote at the end of the fourth century that she “took the conquered to her bosom, made mankind a single family, mother not mistress to the nations, conquering the world a second time by the bond of affection.”
This tremendous vision was repackaged in the eighteenth century as a classical pagan ideal when it is nothing of the sort. As Jacques Maritain observed:
“[I]t is the urge of a love infinitely stronger than the philanthropy commended by the philosophers which causes human devotion to surmount the closed borders of the natural social groups — family group and national group — and extend it to the entire human race, because this love is the life in us of the very love which has created being and because it truly makes of each human being our neighbour. Without breaking the links of flesh and blood, of self-interest, tradition and pride which are needed by the body politic, and without destroying the rigorous laws of existence and conservation of this body politic, such a love extended to all men transcends, and at the same time transforms from within, the very life of the group and tends to integrate all of humanity into a community of nations and peoples in which men will be reconciled. For the kingdom of God is not miserly, the communion which is its supernatural privilege is not jealously guarded; it wants to spread and refract this communion outside its own limits, in the imperfect shapes and in the universe of conflicts, malice and bitter toil which make up the temporal realm. That is the deepest principle of the democratic ideal, which is the secular name for the ideal of Christendom.”
St Augustine praised the pagan Romans for admitting all to the rights and duties of Roman Citizenship (even though the emperor who did it did so to broaden the tax base).
“Did the Romans at all harm those nations, on whom, when subjugated, they imposed their laws, except in as far as that was accomplished with great slaughter in war? Now, had it been done with consent of the nations, it would have been done with greater success, but there would have been no glory of conquest, for neither did the Romans themselves live exempt from those laws which they imposed on others. Had this been done without Mars and Bellona, so that there should have been no place for victory, no one conquering where no one had fought, would not the condition of the Romans and of the other nations have been one and the same, especially if that had been done at once which afterwards was done most humanely and most acceptably, namely, the admission of all to the rights of Roman citizens who belonged to the Roman empire, and if that had been made the privilege of all which was formerly the privilege of a few, with this one condition, that the humbler class who had no lands of their own should live at the public expense — an alimentary impost, which would have been paid with a much better grace by them into the hands of good administrators of the republic, of which they were members, by their own hearty consent, than it would have been paid with had it to be extorted from them as conquered men?”
The creation by the secular left of a caste system of races, their dehumanisation of the unborn and renormalisation of suicide for the weak and the old, their construction of slave economies from distant sweatshops and imported multitudes of migrant serfs is the rebirth of a despair, cruelty and oppression that always distinguished pagan society and was only banished by the empire of Christ.
“His empire extends not only over Catholic nations and those who, having been duly washed in the waters of holy baptism, belong of right to the Church, although erroneous opinions keep them astray, or dissent from her teaching cuts them off from her care; it comprises also all those who are deprived of the Christian faith, so that the whole human race is most truly under the power of Jesus Christ. For He who is the Only-begotten Son of God the Father, having the same substance with Him and being the brightness of His glory and the figure of His substance (Hebrews 1:3) necessarily has everything in common with the Father, and therefore sovereign power over all things.” (Leo XIII, Anum Sacrum)
Freed by baptism from the libido dominandi — “the lust to enslave” — which built the pagan empires, the Christian has no need or desire to barter the Supreme, in the words of St John Henry Newman, “for the spice of the desert or the gold of the stream”. He has no desire as St Augustine observes to be always “anxious with fears, pining with discontent, burning with covetousness, never secure, always uneasy, panting from the perpetual strife of his enemies, adding to his patrimony indeed by these miseries to an immense degree, and by these additions also heaping up most bitter cares.” But rather is he “contented with a small and compact estate, most dear to his own family, enjoying the sweetest peace with his kindred neighbours and friends, in piety religious, benignant in mind, healthy in body, in life frugal, in manners chaste, in conscience secure”.
As Pius XI observed:
“There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ.” (Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei).
The faithful must resist the lawless egotism of nationalist self-assertion and the secular globalism of the “enlightenment”.
Augustine perceived that, had it been done with their consent, the application of Roman jurisprudence to the nations would have done no harm, and in the end that was precisely what happened in the era of Christendom. As St Bede observed, as soon as our own St Ethelbert was baptised (a moment depicted over the throne of the sovereign in the House of Lords), he began to “make laws in the Roman fashion”. St John Henry Newman saw more than a thousand years later that “the present framework of society and government, as far as it is the representative of Roman powers, is that which withholdeth, and Antichrist is that which will rise when this restraint fails.”
Today we are faced with that lawless spirit in two seemingly opposed forms: the angry collectivised selfishness, which takes the corruption of so-called “international institutions” as an excuse to revive the most shameless imperialism of the nineteenth century, and the pseudo-humanitarianism of anti-human secular internationalism. For two thousand years, the faithful have been on guard for the coming of the beast and the false prophet. Who could have anticipated that they would lure men into their embrace by masquerading as enemies?