Defending CONSTANTINE: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

Amazon ^ | Sep 2010 | Peter Leithart

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There have been of late a splurge of populist history books damning Constantine the Great as the villain of the piece. Almost without exception they have drawn their picture of this most complex and complicated of late-antique Roman emperors from secondhand, clichéd and hackneyed books of an older generation, adding their own clichés in the process. Constantine has been sketched luridly, as the man who corrupted Christianity either by financial or military means. At long last we have here, in Peter Leithart, a writer who knows how to tell a lively story but is also no mean shakes as a scholarly historian.

This intelligent and sensitive treatment of one of the great military emperors of Rome is a trustworthy entrée into Roman history that loses none of the romance and rambunctiousness of the events of the era of the civil war, but which also explains why Constantine matters: why he was important to the ancient world, why he matters to the development of Christianity (a catalyst in its movement from small sect to world-embracing cultural force). It does not whitewash or damn on the basis of a preset ideology, but it certainly does explain why Constantine gained from the Christians the epithet 'The Great.' For setting the record straight, and for providing a sense of the complicated lay of the land, this book comes most highly recommended. (John A. McGuckin, Columbia University)

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I always considered ‘My God, My God .... why hast thou forsaken me’ .... to be Christ as “The Son” who had never been separated from God “the Father”, taking on all the sins of the world, and experiencing for the first time the bar that sin places between one and God - for the first time in eternity (is that even a cogent phrase?) He tasted sin and lost contact with God the Father...