Saturday, February 19, 2022

Negative Assessment of Constantine and Charge of Image-Worship Against Christians in the Works of Philostorgius (368-439)

 Recording the words of Julian:

 

Constantine, as you yourself know, was the most gullible of men, stupid and senseless, and so made innovations in the cult, annulled the Roman customs, and turned away to Christianity; it was because he was afraid of his unholy acts and because the gods led him astray as one accursed and unworthy in their cult, drenched as he was with his own relatives’ blood. For he killed his brothers, who had done nothing wrong, along with his wife Fausta and his son Priscus, that good and worthy man. Abhorring these impious deeds, the gods led him astray and made him wander far indeed from their sacred and all-holy cult, and wiped out his accursed and abominable seed and his whole family from the human race. ((Philostorgius, Church History [trans. Philip R. Amidon; Writings From the Greco-Roman World 23; Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007], Book 2, 4b [p. 19])

 

Elsewhere, we read of the charge of image-worshipping against Christians:

 

Our enemy of God accuses the Christians of worshipping with sacrifices the images of Constantine set up upon the porphyry column, of paying homage to it with lamp-lighting and incense or praying to it as to a god, and of offering it supplications to avert calamites. (Book 2, 17 [p. 35])

 

Having now a firm expectation of victory, he at once made an image of the cross that had appeared. What he did was to show a model of the sign of triumph to a goldsmith and thus raise up in the camp a trophy of purest gold and of stones most precious, since victory was quite certain. Fifth of the strongest men in the army were charged with taking it in turn to carry it in the line of battle, and it was the greatest display of faith amid such an overwhelming prevalence of the polytheism and worship of demons of most people: some of the units bore the very names of the demons, such as those called the Ioviani and Herculiani, which in Greek would be Diasioi and Herakleioi (among the Italians Zeus is “love” and Heracles is “Hercules”), while all of them carried idols on their standards, which the Romans call signa, different ones with different idols. And amid all of this, Constantine placed his hopes for victory on the sign of the cross and the symbol of suffering. (Supplement New Fragments of Philostorgius On the Life of Constantine, IV, 3 [pp. 246-47])