Peter Brown Considers Constantine, Eusebius, etc.

[Peter Kirby]

http://www.aarome.org/news/features/pet ... ristianity

... Speaking on “Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea and the Future of Christianity,” Professor Brown attempted to add a new dimension to discussions of the early 4th century by asking how early Christians may have envisioned the future.

Professor Brown argued that an eerie grandeur has come to surround Constantine as the figure around whom Christianity solidified its dominance, yet this retrospective view often obscures the more cautious expectations that Christians themselves then had for the future of their creed. Over the course of his discussion Professor Brown painted a picture of the Christian worldview between 312 and 337 as one that envisioned a “thin universalism,” but could not yet imagine itself in a “majoritarian” position. “The insistent Christian,” Professor Brown explained, “is an anachronism,” for men like Eusebius and Constantine shared perspectives that had been shaped in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries and had no sense of the universalism to come. Their relative tolerance suggested the confidence of those who believed that God’s acts had succeeded and the Christian revolution had already taken place.

Historians often imagine it being but a short step from Constantine I to Theodosius I, but Professor Brown insists that these leaders were separated by a decade of intense change and that it was only in the maelstrom of a long 4th century that Christianity truly came of age. In attempting to reconstruct a vision of the future as seen by those in the past, Professor Brown engages in the most difficult kind of history, which acknowledges the innately subjective character of a discipline that can only be projected backwards and filtered through the eyes of the present.

[Roger Pearse]

I saw this material, and they seemed like wise words to me. It's worth remembering that emperors had introduced strange cults to Rome before. None lasted long. Constantine did less in this regard than Heliogabalus did. Probably nobody expected it to last. But somehow it became fashionable sometime during Constantine's reign, and took such a hold on the general populace that Julian the Apostate was mocked for trying to roll it back.

Why that was might be debated, of course.