Quotes About Constantine

As Eusebius recounted the story, Constantine seemed to believe there was a basic incompatibility between being an emperor and being a Christian, between court and church, warfare and prayer, the purple and the white. It would be an ironic conclusion: Constantine, the first anti-Constantinian. Constantine the Yoderian

In 1880 at the Military Hospital at Constantine, I discovered, on the edges of the pigmented spherical bodies in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria, filiform elements resembling flagellae which were moving very rapidly, displacing the neighbouring red cells.

Batman and Superman are probably my favorite superheroes - apart from Constantine.

may say to thee as Constantine did to Acetius the Novatian, 'Set then up thy ladder, and go to heaven by thyself, for never any went this way thither;' and dost thou think to be the only man that shall appear in heaven purchaser of his own happiness?

Christianity, the humblest of all faiths, degenerated into the most power-hungry and hierarchical religion on the face of the earth. After the emperor Constantine elevated Christianity to the status of a state religion in A.D. 312, the once-persecuted faith became a fierce persecutor of all its opposition.

I love the entire 'Constantine' mythology, the 'Dead Man' mythology, the Alex Holland 'Swamp Thing' mythology.

Fifteen hundred years ago, Constantine, who murdered his own wife and children, started the Christian religion.

After the cave was authenticated as the place of Christ's birth, Helena's son, Emperor Constantine, issued a decree for the first church building to be constructed on that site in the year 326 AD.9 That earliest church in Bethlehem was built directly on the land above the cave where Christ was born, and in 339 AD, the Church of the Nativity of Christ was dedicated.10

The guys on 'Game of Thrones' trust me implicitly to take care of the action stuff. I don't mess with their drama, but they allow me to come up with ideas like 'Hey, what if the giant had a bow? And what if he shot some guy off the wall?' With 'Constantine,' too, they really trust me to scare the audience.

What Constantine ordered, however, was not a cross-shaped object but rather a long, gilded spear, bisected by a horizontal bar, topped with a golden and gemmed wreath that surrounded two letters, chi and rho: the first two letters of Christos. Like Lactantius, Eusebius explains that this looked like the intersection of the Latin letters X and P. In addition, a banner hung from the bar, embroidered with portraits of the emperor with his two sons.

However one evaluates the character of Constantine's conversion, he clearly believed that the Christian God was his ally. Thus the cross, or its counterpart, the christogram, became a trophy of victory, not only over demonic foes but also over ordinary human ones.

Nevertheless, some surviving evidence indicates that Constantine himself was originally devoted to Apollo, supported by the fact that the god Sol Invictus continued to show up on the reverse types of Constantinian coinage until the mid-320s

Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one's name was Constantine. We'd met before.

Indeed, as some of the Protestant traditions recognize, the symbol of a cross per se can all too readily become a mere token or amulet leading to superstition and magical thinking. Even worse, when detached from its significance, it can and often has become a sign denoting allegiance to a cause that mocks the very One who died in that way — the cross of Constantine, the Crusaders, and the Ku Klux Klan.

At the time of Constantine's deathbed baptism in 337, the overwhelming majority of his subjects were still pagans.

Still, as one ponders that progress from open commensality with Jesus to episcopal banquet with Constantine, is it unfair to regret a progress that happened so fast and moved so swiftly, that was accepted so readily and criticized so lightly? Is

But Louis XV, in arguably the biggest single blunder of his reign, capitulated to clerical pressure and to specious arguments such as the 'donation of Constantine', whereby the first Christian emperor had given land to the church unencumbered and in perpetuity. The problem did not go away: clerical resistance to taxation was to defeat Louis XVI's major reforming initiative too.

Ever since the emperor Constantine had invested dominion over the Church in the bishop of Rome,‡ successive popes had borrowed his Neoplatonist vocabulary of imperial authority to describe their own. The Catholic Church saw itself as a Platonic copy of the true Universal Church, the Body of Christ. And just as the Body of Christ has only one head, went the argument, so also must Christian society. God

When the emperor Diocletian retired in 305, however, Constantine son of Constantius Chlorus rushed his legions down from Britain to join in the struggle for power. He also displayed a ruthless cunning in working to secure his title. He married the daughter of Diocletian's co-emperor, Maximian, then in 310 had his father-in-law arrested and strangled.

When the emperor Diocletian retired in 305, however, Constantine son of Constantius Chlorus rushed his legions down from Britain to join in the struggle for power. He also displayed a ruthless cunning in working to secure his title. He married the daughter of Diocletian's co-emperor, Maximian, then in 310 had his father-in-law arrested and strangled. The next year he allied himself with one rival, Licinius, in order to declare war on the other, Maximian's son, Maxientius.

It was time for Constantine to make a decisive intervention of his own. He cast aside his invincible sun god without a second thought. From this point on, he would consider himself a Christian in belief and deed. A month or two later, he issued his imperial Edict of Milan, which brought religious toleration to everyone in the empire, including Christians.

A]s the sun, when he rises upon the earth, liberally imparts his rays of light to all, so did Constantine, proceeding at early dawn from the imperial palace, and rising as it were with the heavenly luminary, impart the rays of his own beneficence to all who came into his presence.

That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separated out the two holidays and made sure that should they fall on the same day it would be the Jews who moved their Passover, that combative dialogue continued.

In 312, Manichaeanism and Mithraism were no less popular than Christianity. Constantine could just as easily have chosen one of these - and Europe might today be Mithraistic or Manichaean.