[JMJ333]

[Romulus]

Constantine's priority was the guarantee of religious freedom, which became known as the Edict of Milan. It is the first legal affirmation of religious liberty, issued more than 1,400 years before a similar idea would be promulgated in America. But what is equally interesting about the Edict of Milan is that it mentions only one specific religion--Christianity--and it mentions it repeatedly...

The Edict of Milan, issued by two professing pagans, was the first royal proclamation in a series that would establish Catholic Christianity as the religion of empire,...

The Edict of Milan is ante-dated by the Edict of Toleration of the pagan Augustus Galerius, issued as a last-ditch political maneuver in 309-310. Here's the text in its entirety:

Among other arrangements which we are always accustomed to make for the prosperity and welfare of the republic, we had desired formerly to bring all things into harmony with the ancient laws and public order of the Romans, and to provide that even the Christians who had left the religion of their fathers should come back to reason ; since, indeed, the Christians themselves, for some reason, had followed such a caprice and had fallen into such a folly that they would not obey the institutes of antiquity, which perchance their own ancestors had first established; but at their own will and pleasure, they would thus make laws unto themselves which they should observe and would collect various peoples in diverse places in congregations. Finally when our law had been promulgated to the effect that they should conform to the institutes of antiquity, many were subdued by the fear of danger, many even suffered death. And yet since most of them persevered in their determination, and we saw that they neither paid the reverence and awe due to the gods nor worshipped the God of the Christians, in view of our most mild clemency and the constant habit by which we are accustomed to grant indulgence to all, we thought that we ought to grant our most prompt indulgence also to these, so that they may again be Christians and may hold their conventicles, provided they do nothing contrary to good order. But we shall tell the magistrates in another letter what they ought to do.

Wherefore, for this our indulgence, they ought to pray to their God for our safety, for that of the republic, and for their own, that the republic may continue uninjured on every side, and that they may be able to live securely in their homes.

This edict is published at Nicomedia on the day before the Kalends of May, in our eighth consulship and the second of Maximinus.

from Lactantius, De Mort. Pers. ch. 34, 35. Opera, ed. O. F. Fritzsche, II, P. 273. (Bibl. Patt. Ecc. Lat. XI, Leipzig, 1844.)

[Commander8]

The truth is that his vision is really the figment of some Medieval poet's imagination. Constantine basically had what amounted to a temporary fox hole conversion. After the battle he went back to worshipping his pagan son god. When he merged the Church of Rome with the Roman Empire, it kicked off the Dark Ages which gave us the Inquisition, the Borgias, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Gun Powder Plot and a millennium of corruption and bloodshed that lasted until the rise of republics and democracies which followed the fall of the feudal kingdoms.

[american colleen]

Thank you for a great historical post. Many non-Catholics malign Constantine and try to promulgate the theory that the early Christian Church went "corrupt" around 320ish because of him (and the "real" Christian Church went underground from then until the Reformation), but I've never seen anyone address how the "corrupt" Catholic Church of 367AD was able to determine which books of the hundreds of forgeries floating around were Inspired and belonged in the Bible that they (non-Catholics) accept as God's Word.

The first list of the books that should belong to the Bible was put together in the 39th Pastoral Letter of Saint Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, in 367AD. The said list was then confirmed by the Council of Hippo in 393AD, Council of Carthage in the year 397, Pope Innocent I in 405AD, and finally, by the Council of Trent in 1546.

God works in mysterious ways. Look how he used Constantine.

[Antoninus]

From an Orthodox web site:

Troparion Tone 8

O Lord, thy disciple Emperor Constantine, who saw in the sky the Sign of Thy Cross, / Accepted the call that came straight from Thee, as it happened to Paul, and not from any man. / He built his capital and entrusted it to Thy care. / Preserve our country in everlasting peace, through the intercession of the Mother of God, / for Thou art the Lover of mankind.

Amen!