Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 4

viewpoint diversity revisited

Jennifer M. Morton: 

Conservatives have criticized identity-based affirmative action because, they suggest, it imposes an expectation on students of color that they will represent what is presumed to be, say, the Black or Latino view on any given issue, which discourages freethinking. Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.

For professors hired for their political beliefs, the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater. If you had a tenure-track position, your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend on the inflexibility of your ideology. The smart thing to do in that situation would be to interact with other scholars who share your point of view and to read publications that reinforce what you already believe. Or you might simply engage with opposing ideas in bad faith, refusing even to consider their merits. This would create the sort of ideological echo chamber that proponents of viewpoint diversity have suggested, often with some justification, leads to closed-mindedness among left-leaning professors.

I think this argument is exactly correct: I have often said that if I were offered a job because I represent a certain position I would ask, “What happens if I change my mind?”

But the argument is also a useful strategy for ensuring that the academic humanities remain an ideological monoculture. Morton’s view is: It’s okay if all the professors are progressives as long as they assign some non-progressive books. And if you find that convincing, then turn it around: What if all the professors were rock-ribbed conservatives but told you that that’s fine, since they assign Marx and Fanon? 

So, acknowledging the validity of Morton’s warning, I still think that seeking more ideological diversity among faculty is less bad that her plan to keep things just as they are. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, every progressive becomes profoundly conservative once they’re in power. 

And while we’re on the subject, I like this from Justin Smith-Ruiu:

One great difference anyhow between the diversity statements of the past years and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era is that the McCarthyites were accommodating enough simply to force you to sign their oath; the DEI offices, by contrast, forced you to write your own, and then to sign it…. It is in some sense a shame that the diversity statements they were coercing out of us until recently met their demise at the moment fully functional LLMs hit the market — there was an instance, if there ever was one, where it really did make sense to outsource our writing tasks to the machines. I hope that if the Trumpists succeed in their efforts to impose viewpoint-based scrutiny of our job applications in the coming years, AI will likewise rise to the occasion and enable us to say whatever it is we are supposed to say, simply in order to be able to make a living, without having to waste any of our precious human cognitive energy on it.

the original of Wimsey

In 1935, when Dorothy L. Sayers was working wit her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne on the play Busman’s Honeymoon, she wrote from Oxford: 

I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything — and he is — THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL. What is the use of anything? … Such waste — why couldn’t he have been an actor? 

Though Sayers did not remember it, she had seen this man — whose name was Maurice Roy Ridley — many years before, and had swooned then also. In July 1913, at the end of her first year at Oxford, she reported to her friend Catherine Godfrey about what she saw at the Encaenia: 

But the Newdigate [i.e., the winner of the Newdigate Prize] was a darling. His poem was on ‘Oxford’, and he recited it so nicely. He had a very clear, pleasant voice, and spoke as if he meant it. He read from the rostrum close to us, so we saw and heard splendidly. His poem was not frightfully full of genius, and was very academic in tone and form (though it was in blank verse) but there was an appealing sort of youthfulness and pathos and Oxford feeling about it that made it quite charming.… He was very nervous, and he quivered all over all the time he was reciting. Charis and I fell head over heels in love with him on the spot. His name is Maurice Roy Ridley – isn’t it a killing name, like the hero of a six-penny novelette? He has just gone down from Balliol, so I shall see him no more – my loves are always unsatisfactory, as you know…. 

Surprisingly, this passionate love was altogether forgotten 22 years later. 

The news that he was “the perfect Peter Wimsey” reached Ridley, who subsequently acquired all of the Wimsey novels and placed them prominently on a shelf in his Balliol rooms. (Whether he read them is not known.) Vanity was certainly one of Ridley’s most prominent traits — one of his pupils reported that he had a bust of Dante on the mantel over his fireplace and would stand next to it, posing in such a way that the resemblance between him and the great Florentine poet was clear to all observers — and the Wimsey connection gave that vanity more fuel. For instance, he already had a monocle, and began wearing it more regularly. 

But Ridley was not content with mere appearance. In 1936 a Balliol student named Pat Moss died in a fire, in peculiar circumstances, and when the police arrived they found Ridley hopping around the scene of death with a magnifying glass. They ordered him to depart. Whether he continued to investigate crimes, or potential crimes, I do not know. 

But because Pat Moss was Canadian and naturally friendly with other Canadians at Oxford, one of them who had seen him earlier on the evening before his death — as it happens, a pupil of Ridley’s — was thoroughly questioned. His name? Robertson Davies. (I get this information from Judith Skelton Grant’s biography of Davies, from which I’ve also taken the photos below.) No arrests were ever made, and Moss’s death could have been accidental, but in later years Davies said he thought Moss had gotten involved with gamblers and had been killed by them. 

Another of Ridley’s pupils of the era said that he was not a good tutor, but was a great influence, and certainly he would have encouraged Davies — already quite inclined to flamboyance — to make a name for himself at Oxford. This Davies did largely through his participation in OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he served as sometime dramaturg, sometime stage manager, and sometime actor. 

Something else Davies learned from Ridley was the usefulness of a monocle: 

And a brief P.S.: Many of you will know that Sayers had a son out of wedlock, had him raised by her cousin, and only later told him that she was his mother. When John Anthony, after serving in the military during the Second World War, decided to attend university in 1946, what university did he choose? Oxford. And what was his college? Balliol. And who was his tutor? Why, Roy Ridley, of course. 

Constantine and Julian

I mentioned in an earlier post how Constantine’s murders of Crispus and Fausta set a kind of pattern — a pattern that would have certain surprising consequences. Here’s Gibbon:

Constantine himself derived from his royal father the hereditary honors which he transmitted to his children. The emperor had been twice married. Minervina, the obscure but lawful object of his youthful attachment, had left him only one son, who was called Crispus. By Fausta, the daughter of Maximian, he had three daughters, and three sons known by the kindred names of Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. The unambitious brothers of the great Constantine, Julius Constantius, Dalmatius, and Hannibalianus, were permitted to enjoy the most honorable rank, and the most affluent fortune, that could be consistent with a private station. The youngest of the three lived without a name, and died without posterity. His two elder brothers obtained in marriage the daughters of wealthy senators, and propagated new branches of the Imperial race. Gallus and Julian afterwards became the most illustrious of the children of Julius Constantius, the Patrician. The two sons of Dalmatius, who had been decorated with the vain title of Censor, were named Dalmatius and Hannibalianus. The two sisters of the great Constantine, Anastasia and Eutropia, were bestowed on Optatus and Nepotianus, two senators of noble birth and of consular dignity. His third sister, Constantia, was distinguished by her preëminence of greatness and of misery. She remained the widow of the vanquished Licinius; and it was by her entreaties, that an innocent boy, the offspring of their marriage, preserved, for some time, his life, the title of Caesar, and a precarious hope of the succession. Besides the females, and the allies of the Flavian house, ten or twelve males, to whom the language of modern courts would apply the title of princes of the blood, seemed, according to the order of their birth, to be destined either to inherit or to support the throne of Constantine. But in less than thirty years, this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.

The family tree is pretty complicated — you can take a look at it here. And what makes it more complicated is Constantine’s decision, just before his death in 337, to divide the empire among his three surviving sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius, with a few other relatives having a share as well. (The family naming conventions don’t help.) The person most offended by this spread-the-wealth strategy was Constantine II, who fiercely believed in primogeniture and tried to assert it. He was killed in 340 by soldiers under the command of his brother Constans, who immediately took over Constantine’s lands.

So now we had, roughly speaking, Constans the Caesar ruling the Western half of the empire and Constantius the Caesar ruling the Eastern half. By this point Caesar was a title that meant, or was thought by the Constantines to mean, something like “ruler of a large chunk of the Empire but subservient to the One Emperor, the Augustus.” For the Constantines there might not be at any given moment an Augustus, but there should be, and it should be one of them.

Constans lived until 350, when he was killed by a general named Magnentius, who then (a) proclaimed himself the Caesar of the West and (b) tried to conquer the rest of the Empire. But his campaign against Constantius went badly from the beginning, and when his forces were crushed at the Battle of Mons Seleucus in 353, he took his own life.

Now Constantius was sole Emperor, which was what he had wanted all along — and indeed when he first came to power, in 337, he had systematically slaughtered everyone in his family who might make a claim against him, leaving only two young children, the half-brothers Gallus and Julian. Eventually he made both of them Caesars — but when Gallus began taking on airs (i.e., acting like an Augustus) Constantius had him killed … and that’s how we ended up with the situation Gibbon describes: “this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities, such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.”

But was Julian content to be a mere Caesar and leave the stature of Augustus to Constantius? Of course not. In 360 he rebelled, and wrote in self-justification, “Six of my cousins — his cousins too! — he killed without mercy, along with my father, who was his own uncle, and another uncle of us both on my father’s side, then later my elder brother. He had them all put to death not even bothering with a trial.” Which was true.

That self-justification came in a letter to the people of Athens — an odd choice of recipient, for Athens was, and had been for centuries, a mere backwater of the Empire. But Julian had received an excellent education in classical thought — even though he had also been raised a Christian — and had a special reverence for Athens’s philosophical and literary history. That a Christian family should give their sons a classical education should not be surprising, for it was common. If you want to know the reasons, try reading Basil of Caesarea’s “Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.”

For Julian, the classical education took; the Christian formation did not. Until he became Augustus, on the sudden and unexpected death of Constantius in 361, he maintained the façade of Christian belief, but then he threw it off and announced himself the defender and celebrant of the ancient Roman gods and the enemy of the “Galileans,” as he derisively called Christians. We do not know when he ceased to believe in the Christian religion, or even if he ever believed in it; but almost everyone who has studied the matter believes that his long and close observation of the world-class hypocrisy of the Constantines, who professed a devout faith in the Prince of Peace and yet ruthlessly slaughtered anyone who threatened their grip on power, played a major role in his hatred of the religion.

Julian is fascinating because he’s genuinely determined to see Christianity eradicated in the empire, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a persecutor. So he pronounces a an edict of universal toleration of all religions, and he often writes that he doesn’t want to see the Christians injured in any way. For instance, he writes to one of his provincial governors, “I swear by the gods I do not want the Galileans killed or unjustly beaten or treated badly in any way. What I desire most insistently is to show preference to those who fear the gods.”

But he does three things that are worth noting here. Philip Freeman, from his excellent brief biography of Julian:

Scarcely a month after Julian had taken the throne and made his rejection of Christianity known, the Alexandrians murdered Bishop George, the leader of the Christian church in one of the most important towns in the Roman world. That he was an Arian and not orthodox meant little to the pagan mob. He was a Christian, and that was enough. George had been an important figure in young Julian’s life during his education in Cappadocia, and his excellent library, made freely available to the prince, had given Julian a matchless window into the rich intellectual tradition of Greek philosophy and literature. The new emperor’s response was not one of outrage at the murder of a prominent Roman citizen but only a mild rebuke to the crowd for taking the law into their own hands. In a letter to the Alexandrians he shamelessly pandered to the pagans of the city by casting George as an enemy to the gods who got what was coming to him: “You say that perhaps George deserved to be treated in such a fashion? I’ll grant that and admit that he deserved even worse and more cruel treatment.”

At this moment Julian’s concern is to preserve the pagan books in George’s library, the library he had delighted in as an adolescent, thanks to George’s generosity. Now he writes about the Christian books in the library, “I wish them to be utterly destroyed. But make sure you do so with the greatest care lest any useful works be destroyed by mistake. Have George’s secretary help you. Let him know that if he is faithful in the task he will get his freedom as a reward. But if he is in any way dishonest in sorting things out, he shall be put to torture.”

So that’s one thing: his complicated disingenuousness about his attitude towards Christians.

The second thing, from Freeman again:

His declaration of religious tolerance also included an amnesty and right of return for all orthodox Christian leaders who had been exiled and marginalized under Constantius, who had favored Arian Christians. This was a clever move on Julian’s part. As the pagan historian Ammianus would say disparagingly a few decades later, the Christians were like wild beasts who fought more viciously with each other than they ever did with pagans. Rather than launch a persecution against Christians as a whole, Julian was deliberately fueling a civil war within the church to encourage the orthodox and the Arians to attack and weaken one another, leaving his own hands clean. Most notable of these pardoned orthodox exiles was Athanasius, the former bishop of Alexandria, who had been replaced by an Arian Christian leader in the city. Julian was eager to see what trouble he would stir up when Athanasius arrived back in Egypt.

Clever! First of all, the rival Christians will kill each other. And in so doing, they will discredit the Gospel. (Tertullian, 150 years earlier: “But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred. See, they say about us, how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves would sooner kill.” Julian: ) Julian knows that he doesn’t have to persecute Christians: the different Christian factions will persecute each other.

The third point about Julian: his own paganism is complicated. There are two distinct elements to it. One of them is completely ignored by Charles Norris Cochrane in his otherwise excellent treatment of Julian, because Cochrane is a historian of ideas, and he wants to talk about their effect: his focus is on Julian as a neo-Platonic philosophical theologian, and that’s not wholly wrong, as we’ll see in a moment. But what Cochrane ignores Gibbon emphasizes: Julian’s love of blood sacrifice and his belief in divination and magical power. The Emperor actually becomes a haruspex:

On solemn festivals, he regularly visited the temple of the god or goddess to whom the day was peculiarly consecrated, and endeavored to excite the religion of the magistrates and people by the example of his own zeal. Instead of maintaining the lofty state of a monarch, distinguished by the splendor of his purple, and encompassed by the golden shields of his guards, Julian solicited, with respectful eagerness, the meanest offices which contributed to the worship of the gods. Amidst the sacred but licentious crowd of priests, of inferior ministers, and of female dancers, who were dedicated to the service of the temple, it was the business of the emperor to bring the wood, to blow the fire, to handle the knife, to slaughter the victim, and, thrusting his bloody hands into the bowels of the expiring animal, to draw forth the heart or liver, and to read, with the consummate skill of an haruspex, imaginary signs of future events. The wisest of the Pagans censured this extravagant superstition, which affected to despise the restraints of prudence and decency. Under the reign of a prince, who practised the rigid maxims of economy, the expense of religious worship consumed a very large portion of the revenue; a constant supply of the scarcest and most beautiful birds was transported from distant climates, to bleed on the altars of the gods; a hundred oxen were frequently sacrificed by Julian on one and the same day; and it soon became a popular jest, that if he should return with conquest from the Persian war, the breed of horned cattle must infallibly be extinguished.

That’s one side of Julian’s paganism. But in theory, as Cochrane shows, he is effectively a monotheist — someone who sees all of the gods as a manifestation of the One God. For him the ideal way to worship as a pagan is to worship the Sun. “From my childhood an extraordinary longing for the shining rays of the god pierced deep into my soul. From my earliest years my mind was so completely overcome by the light that rules the sky that not only did I desire to gaze at the brightness of the sun, but also whenever I walked on a clear and cloudless night I abandoned all else and gave myself up to the beauty of the heavens.” Soon after he became emperor he wrote a hymn to the Sun that he hoped would be the model for his people’s religion.

He didn’t get the chance to pursue this ideal programmatically — he died in battle in his early thirties — but he very much reminds me of Akhenaten, who wanted to replace the variegated polytheism of Egypt with a highly impersonal cult of the sun. Akhenaten and Julian alike were frustrated that they had so little success in weaning their people from a miscellaneous polytheism.

The other figure Julian reminds me of is, paradoxically enough, Constantine. Constantine was happy for pagans to be confused and rivalrous as long as Christians — on whose strength and integrity he staked his empire — were unified. Julian, his mirror-image, sowed chaos among the Christians while fruitlessly pursuing unity among his fellow pagans. Freeman once more:

Julian also believed the best way to defeat the church was to end division among the pagans, much as his uncle Constantine had tried to banish disunity among Christians. The followers of traditional religions had to work together in the true spirit of worshipping and honoring the gods, not squabbling with each other while the Christians happily looked on. The problem was that, like most crusaders throughout history, Julian was convinced that only his own particular religious beliefs were the right ones. But his austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed. The fact that other pagans could not see the world in the same way he did baffled and frustrated him no end.

The Bible tells us, “Put not your trust in princes.” But maybe what princes need to learn is to put not their trust in the peaceable unity of any religious party.

oh the irony

Americans are reading less. Is that poisoning our politics? | Vox: 

As America’s test scores fall and its screen time rises, narratives of cultural decline become hard to dismiss outright.

Yet it’s worth remembering the perennial appeal of such pessimism. More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates decried the novel media technology of his day — the written word — in much the same terms that many condemn social media and AI in 2025. Addressing himself to the inventor of writing, the Greek philosopher declared, “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.”

Lovely! Here’s an essay about the decline of reading that features either a misreading or non-reading of a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus. Remember, Plato wrote dialogues, and in this one Socrates is on a walk with Phaedrus, having a discussion about the written and spoken word. Thus: 

Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. 

So, no: Socrates does not speak to the inventor of writing: he tells a story in which a divine Egyptian king speaks to the inventor of writing. And this isn’t hard to discover, nor is the passage hard to understand. 

Bless me, what do they teach journalists these days? It’s all in Plato — all in Plato! 

And if you keep reading the dialogue it gets more curious. Phaedrus says that he agrees with Thamus, but Socrates does not, not exactly. He too has concerns about writing, but they are rather different than Thamus’s. For Sccrates, writing shares a problem with several other modes of expression: 

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. 

Socrates believes that writing, painting, and declamatory rhetoric all have the same problem: they are non-dialectical. This is also, Socrates shows in other dialogues, the problem with many versions of what people call “philosophy.” Genuine philosophy, Socrates believes, is dialectical, that is, it proceeds when people physically present to one another put one another to the question in a strenuous encounter that elicits anamnesis — recollection (literally unforgetting) of the knowledge that one’s spirit had before being tossed into this world of flux. Nothing else counts as philosophy; nothing else — not painting; not poetry or speeches, whether in spoken or written form — is productive of genuine knowledge. The critique of Socrates is far more unbendingly radical than that of Thamus. 

Sayers and Constantine: 6

Our attempts to understand the character of Constantine are befuddled by two mysteries, the first of which is: Constantine had his (second) wife Fausta and his (eldest) son Crispus executed, and we don’t know why. Some have speculated that he caught the two of them having an affair; Gibbon, more plausibly and with more deference to rumors current at the time, believes that Fausta falsely implicated Crispus in a plot against his father in order to clear the way for her own sons — Crispus being the son of Constantine’s first marriage — to inherit the throne. Gibbon:

The innocence of Crispus was so universally acknowledged, that the modern [by which Gibbon usually means “medieval”] Greeks, who adore the memory of their founder, are reduced to palliate the guilt of a parricide, which the common feelings of human nature forbade them to justify. They pretend, that as soon as the afflicted father discovered the falsehood of the accusation by which his credulity had been so fatally misled, he published to the world his repentance and remorse; that he mourned forty days, during which he abstained from the use of the bath, and all the ordinary comforts of life; and that, for the lasting instruction of posterity, he erected a golden statue of Crispus, with this memorable inscription: To my son, whom I unjustly condemned. A tale so moral and so interesting would deserve to be supported by less exceptionable authority; but if we consult the more ancient and authentic writers, they will inform us, that the repentance of Constantine was manifested only in acts of blood and revenge; and that he atoned for the murder of an innocent son, by the execution, perhaps, of a guilty wife. They ascribe the misfortunes of Crispus to the arts of his step-mother Fausta, whose implacable hatred, or whose disappointed love, renewed in the palace of Constantine the ancient tragedy of Hippolytus and of Phaedra.

Sayers in The Emperor Constantine more-or-less endorses this interpretation, though she differs from Gibbon in another respect: Sayers has Constantine executing Crispus in a blind rage, whereas Gibbon says that his murder was carefully planned well in advance. It was a settled decision, not a moment of wrath. (As we shall see in a future post, this sets a pattern for his family.) Sayers is not excusing him, but I think she does make him a more impetuous and less coldly calculating figure than the real Constantine was — though Sayers’s Constantine does inform Fausta that he will have her executed, but only after she accompanies him as his consort in a grand public ceremony. Which is pretty cold: The imperial show must go on. (And Fausta calmly plays her part.)

The second puzzle about Constantine: Why did he delay his baptism until he was on his death-bed? One possible answer: it was not uncommon in that era for converts to delay baptism until near death, because they believed that if they died immediately after baptism — without the opportunity to commit more sins — that would allow them to go straight to Heaven. Sayers hints that Constantine may have been aware of this: in the scene in which he orders the death of his son Crispus and others he believes to have been conspiring against him — about which more in a moment — he says, “How fortunate that I was never baptised! I can damn myself with a clear conscience.” As though to say: I am not officially a Christian and so do not betray my Lord by this sin — though I can make amends later.

(FYI: You may now choose to read an exemplary tale, taken from an American novel published in 1964, that illustrates in a distinctive way the theological and moral implications of the once-common theology of baptism that I have just described. Or you may simply continue.)

However we might read Constantine’s murderous gratitude that he is unbaptized, something becomes quite clear in the play’s last scene, when the people whom Constantine has had murdered appear before him as spectral images, horrifying him. It is then that, for the first time in his life, he confronts the true depth and extent of his sins: 

Sin is more terrible than you think. It is not lying and cruelty and murder — it is a corruption of life at the source. I and mine are so knit together in evil that no one can tell where the guilt begins or ends. And I who called myself God’s emperor — I find now that all my justice is sin and all my mercy bloodshed…..

How can he be forgiven? How can he not pay the price for his wickedness?

It is Helena, his mother — yes, in fact she predeceased him, but shut up about that — who tells him the terrible and wonderful truth:

HELENA: The price is always paid, but not always by the guilty.

CONSTANTINE: By whom, then?

HELENA: By the blood of the innocent.

CONSTANTINE: Oh no!

HELENA: By nothing else, my child. Every man’s innocence belongs to Christ, and Christ’s to him. And innocence alone can pardon without injustice, because it has paid the price.

CONSTANTINE: That is intolerable.

HELENA: It is the hardest thing in the world — to receive salvation at the hand of those we have injured. But if they do not plead for us there is nobody else who can. That is why there is no redemption except in the cross of Christ. For He alone is true God and true Man, wholly innocent and wholly wronged, and we shed His blood every day.

What Constantine must understand, here at the end of his life, as the waters of Holy Baptism are prepared for him, is that the formulation he himself oversaw at Nicaea — that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, is also “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father” — is not just a theologically accurate statement, but the only hope of the dying. Constantine must throw himself upon the mercy of the Crucified One — the one whom he himself, in his sins, helped to crucify. As John the apostle put it: “He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

And this is where the two helices of the story of this flawed but remarkable play meet and merge. It is when we grasp for ourselves the truth of what was articulated at Nicaea that the dogma indeed becomes the drama. 

Sayers and Constantine: 5

I have said that one helix of The Emperor Constantine is the clarification of Christian doctrine at Nicaea, and the other is the personal theological development of Constantine. When we first see him in the play, he demonstrates a religious sensibility — but one totally subordinated to the needs of the Empire. He asks his mother whether Christ is a “strong god,” because “The Empire needs pulling together — a new focus of faith and energy.” As the Emperor Julian — subject of a future post — will later think, Constantine for a time believes that Sol Invictus is the ideal “focus of faith and energy.” But when he starts winning victories under the sign of the Labarum he starts to suspect that his mother may be right when she says that Christ “is the one true God.”

At one point his Christian servant Togi — accompanied by the bishop Hosius — sees an opportunity to put his master to the test:

CONSTANTINE: Here, Togi, is there a table in this blasted barracks?

[TOGI looks at CONSTANTINE, as if wondering how far he dare go with him. Then —

TOGI: Here you are, Augustus! (He sweeps the offerings from the table dedicated to the Lares.)

CONSTANTINE (leaping to catch them): Here, damn it! what are you doing? That’s sacrilege, you little swine! You’ve offended all the household gods. What the devil’s come over you? By Jupiter I’ll — (He checks the blow in mid-air, and looks from the table to the Chi-Ro and back again, while a ludicrous succession of emotions — rage, alarm, shame, irritation, superstitious awe, schoolboy mischief and defiance chase one another across his face. Then he grins, and the tension is relaxed.) Toleration, I said — not religious intolerance. Is that what happens when we stop persecuting you? Must you persecute others and break down their altars? Does your Christ want all the sky to Himself, and all the offerings too? (He laughs a little uneasily, and looks sideways at Hosius. His tone changes.) By the gods, I believe that’s what you do want.

HOSIUS (steadily) There is only one true God, my son, and He cannot be served with half-measures.

CONSTANTINE So! … Well, that’s logical enough, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. … That’s His strength, of course, He knows the secret of rule. One God… one Emperor. (It is the birth of a new idea; he ponders it.) One. (He goes and stares at the Chi-Ro.) You won our battle for us…. One, true, and mighty…. Give us Your favour and protection — and ten more years of life — (He turns away, discovers that he is clutching an apple in his hand, gazes at it in astonishment and takes a large bite out of it.) All right, Togi. But do remember that, Christ or no Christ, I’m still Pontifex Maximus.

Nope his epithets: “By Jupiter,” “By the gods.” Gradually, though, Constantine becomes more and more committed to the belief that the Christian faith is the One True Faith. But even then he is a kind of theological minimalist: when he learns about the Arian controversies, he says,

CONSTANTINE: It really is heart-breaking — after all I’ve done for them — not to speak of what God has done! For two pins I’d knock their reverend pates together! … All this hair-splitting about texts! Why can’t they agree to differ, like sensible people?

HOSIUS (cautiously): Why indeed, Augustus? Unless the difference of opinion is really so fundamental that —

CONSTANTINE: It isn’t. It’s only some obscure metaphysical point — nothing but sophistry. All anybody wants is faith in God and Christ and the simple Gospel message. These theologians are getting swelled heads, that’s what it is. They feel safe, they enjoy the Imperial favour, they’re exempt from taxation, and instead of looking after the poor and converting the heathen, they start heresy-hunting and playing a sort of intellectual catch-as-catch-can to jockey one another out of benefices. I won’t have it. It’s got to stop.

But, again gradually, he comes to realize that there may be more at stake in these debates than he had suspected. And his experience at the Council — long hours listening to to the Arians and the Athanasians going at each other — ultimately confirms the point. So when the Council is struggling to come up with a formal dogmatic statement, he finally intervenes. (Note: Eusebius of Nicomedia is one of the leading Arians, not to be confused with the more famous Eusebius of Caesarea, who throughout this debate sits on the fence.)

CONSTANTINE: Will you give me leave to speak?

EUSTATHIUS: But of course, sir. Pray do.

CONSTANTINE: There was a phrase mentioned earlier in the proceedings which struck me very forcibly. It was, if I remember it rightly, “of one substance with the Father.”

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: Oh lord!

That Constantine was the person to introduce this word is not Sayers’s invention: when Eusebius of Caesarea wrote a letter about the Council to his own church, he described what the council articulated as “our faith” — in essence what is now called the Nicene Creed — and then added,

When we presented this faith … our emperor, most beloved of God, himself first of all witnessed that this was most orthodox. He agreed that even he himself thought thus, and he ordered all to assent to subscribe to the teachings and to be in harmony with them, although only one word, homoousios, was added, which he himself interpreted, saying that the Son might not be said to be homoousios according to the affections of bodies, … for the immaterial, intellectual, and incorporeal nature is unable to subsist in some corporeal affection, but it is befitting to think of such things in a divine and ineffable manner. And our emperor, most wise and pious, thought philosophically in this manner.

The other Eusebius, of Nicomedia, cries out when he hears the word homoousios because he knows that it is irreconcilable with the views that he and Arius hold. But those who agree with Athanasius are delighted:

HOSIUS: Why, yes, sir — “consubstantial” — quite a familiar term in the West. The Greek, I believe, is “homosoious”. (He pronounces it to rhyme with “joyous”.)

CONSTANTINE (deprecatingly) “Homo-ousios”, I think.

HOSIUS I told you my Greek was bad. Your Majesty is of course quite right.

[The word has taken everybody rather aback — but since it is the Emperor’s suggestion nobody likes to speak first. Murmurs.

CONSTANTINE (insinuatingly): It seems to me a very definite and unambiguous sort of word.

ARIUS (to ARIANS): And I took that man for a simpleton!

CONSTANTINE: As the Apostle says, I speak as a fool — there may be objections to it.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA (to ARIANS): They’ve put him up to it. (Aloud) There is every objection to it.

This is a bold move, but Constantine through his ostentatious humility has invited it — or so Eusebius of Nicomedia hopes. Interestingly, the next person to speak is the other Eusebius, who, as I have said, is fence-sitting. He does not explicitly agree that the term is “objectionable,” but he points out that “It is not scriptural.” Here we might remember that Arius constantly emphasizes that his own views are derived directly from Scripture — and indeed he takes this opportunity to pounce:

ARIUS (with satisfaction): Ah! … Do you think you know better than the Holy Ghost? Which will you have? The Word of God or the word of Constantine?

[Everybody is shocked, except CONSTANTINE.

CONSTANTINE (mildly) Nobody, I hope, would hesitate. But I did not invent the word…. What does Athanasius say?

A shrewd move by the Augustus! He could make the case himself, but why not turn that job over to one who has already shown himself a master of disputation?

ATHANASIUS: Surely it is not a question of substituting our words for those of the Holy Spirit, but only of defining with exactness our understanding of what the Spirit says in symbols and mysteries. And Our Lord Himself set us the example when He interpreted to His disciples the parables which He had taught them.

JAMES: Do not we all do as He did? When I preach to my simple desert folk, I tell them a story, or read them a psalm, and then I say, “this is how we must understand it”.

SEVERAL VOICES: Quite right.

ATHANASIUS: I should … greatly prefer a scriptural word. But our urgent need just now is of a word that nobody can possibly misinterpret — not even Arius.

And if we look at the text of the Nicene Creed that Christians still affirm, we can see how devoted it is to eliminating Arian wiggle-room: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God” — so far Arius would perhaps agree, but then: “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light” — did you hear that about his actually being God? In case you didn’t, let’s say it again: “true God from true God.” Did you hear that about his being begotten? Let’s say that again: “begotten, not made, of one Being [ousios] with the Father….” The repetitions are not accidental.

Yet Athanasius is perhaps too hopeful. A little later the Arians whisper among themselves:

THEOGNIS: We can always say that we understood “homoöusios” in the sense “homoiousios”.

EUSEBIUS OF NICOMEDIA: True — between “of one substance” and “of like substance” there is the difference only of an iota.

This anticipates Gibbon’s famous jibe:

The Greek word, which was chosen to express this mysterious resemblance, bears so close an affinity to the orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians. As it frequently happens, that the sounds and characters which approach the nearest to each other accidentally represent the most opposite ideas, the observation would be itself ridiculous, if it were possible to mark any real and sensible distinction between the doctrine of the Semi-Arians, as they were improperly styled, and that of the Catholics themselves.

But Gibbon is imperceptive here, as Constantine was at first when he derided the controversy as “hair-splitting” and “sophistry.” For, as Athanasius explains, if Christ is not God but only in some sense like God, then he cannot redeem us, and we are still dead in our sins. Or else God the Father (whoever He is) redeems us (by some means or another) and the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are irrelevant to this redemption. In either case nothing remains of Christianity.

Constantine now grasps this point — to some degree. But there is one more stage in his development still to come.

Sayers and Constantine: 4

In my previous post I referred to the bihelical structure of The Emperor Constantine; today I’m going to discuss one of those helices.

Since the Council of Nicaea was called to deal with the views of Arius and his followers, Sayers — who is drawing throughout on the many surviving records of the Council — rightly gives him a lengthy speech to introduce the debate:

Certainly, I say that the Son is “theos”, that is to say, “divine”, but not that He is “ho Theos”, that is to say, God himself. Our Latin friends who have no definite article in their woolly language may be excused for woolly thinking; but for those who speak Greek there is no excuse. For it is written: “The Lord your God is one God — there is none beside Him: He is God alone.” Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen? The Father alone is eternal, underived Being, that which is — as He Himself said to Moses, “ I AM THAT I AM”. And in His eternity, before all time, He begat the Son, whom St. Paul also calls, “the first-born of every creature” — not a part of Himself, since God cannot be divided, but called forth by Him out of nothing, as the Book of the Proverbs says: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way; when there were no depths, I was brought forth.” And this is His Logos, that is to say, His Wisdom or Word, by whose means He afterward made all things, and without whom, as St. John writes, “nothing was made that has been made”. And this Logos, being in the fullness of time joined to the body of a man, was — in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews — “faithful to Him that made Him” — so that, as it is written of Him in the Acts of the Apostles, “God hath made Jesus both Lord and Christ”.

We may pause here to note that Arius’s views are thoroughly grounded in Scripture, and that he does not deny, and does not mean to diminish, the Lordship of Christ — though he is making a distinction between Lord (which Christ, he thinks, is) and God (which Christ, he thinks, is not). And if Christ is not God, then he might be venerated but cannot be worshipped: “Are we heathens and polytheists, to worship two gods, or three, or a dozen?” That woolly language Latin allows a distinction between latria (which we owe to God) and dulia (which we owe to the saints); Arius effectively makes the same distinction, but between the Father and the Christ. It is not clear that he understands the full implications of his argument. 

(N.B.: If I were to go into all the ways that the verses Arius cites might be differently interpreted — for instance, I could point out that it’s not the Son who speaks in Proverbs 8, it’s Wisdom — we’d be here all day. I’m focusing on the main points of disagreement. By the way, Sayers typically renders the biblical quotations of all parties in the Authorized Version, so if you want to know where a passage comes from, just copy it and paste it into a search engine.)

Arius continues:

This doctrine I received, and the Bishop of Nicomedia also, from the venerable Lucian our teacher, and from the tradition of the Saints: One God and Father of all, and of Him One Son or Word, sole-begotten before all worlds. But that the Son had no beginning, or that He is equal and co-eternal with the Father, this we deny: for it is the nature of a son to be subsequent to his father, and of that which is derived to be inferior to that from which it derives. This stands to reason, and for this cause the Word when He was made flesh said plainly: “My Father is greater than I.”

That is the truth of Scripture, which every sincere mind must acknowledge.

That last note is an important one: Arius believes himself — certainly he wishes to be — faithful to the plain teaching of Scripture; and indeed, he finds his view so amply and obviously attested by Scripture that it’s impossible for him to believe that any “sincere mind” could see things otherwise. Therefore he treats his opponents as either mindless — he seems to think all Latin-speakers dim-witted — or insincere: he singles out for particular scorn his own bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, whom he suggests is trimming his sails to meet the prevailing political winds.

Alexander is rendered speechless by this personal attack, and allows his deacon, a young man named Athanasius, to respond to Arius. Athanasius is so superior to his bishop as a theologian and a debater than one suspects that Alexander would in any circumstances have found a way to be prostrated. Let’s pick up partway through Athanasius’s speech:

… the Son is God out of God, from the very substance and Being of God; therefore the blessed Apostle, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, calls Him: “the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person, upholding all things by the word of His power.” And the Apostle John, in the beginning of his Gospel which lies here open before you, declares very well both the distinct Person of the Son and His equal Godhead with the Father, saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

ARIUS: Why, then, does the Apostle call Him “the first-born of every creature“?

Notice that Arius is ignoring the passages from Hebrews and John’s Gospel that Athanasius has just cited.

ATHANASIUS: Because so He is. For when He became Man, He made Himself as one of the creatures; and therefore He said of himself when He was in the body, “My Father is greater than I”, because He had assumed our nature, being made a little lower than the angels. As it is written, “The first man was of the earth, earthy: the second Man is the Lord from Heaven”. Yet He Himself created the nature that He put on; and this was ordained by Him from eternity when time was not, so that He that is second on earth is first in Heaven. Who also went up thither, the first-born from the dead of all that He had created. Him likewise did John behold in his Apocalypse, in form like unto the Son of Man, and saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty”.

ARIUS: Spoken like a giant, little mannikin. You are so learned in the Scripture you know more about it than Christ Himself, who said to the rich young ruler: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

ATHANASIUS: So he did — and the fool stood gaping. But what if he had answered, like Peter: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God“?

Athanasius’s point is that Jesus did not say, “Why do you call me good, since I am not God?” Arius thinks that’s what Jesus means, but, as Athanasius suggests, instead Jesus is suggesting that he should be called good only if he is God — which he may be. He is pressing his interlocutor to make a decision on that point. But Arius doesn’t get the point: he reads as a denial what is in fact a genuine question.  

ARIUS: He would have earned a blessing — and perhaps have been commended for knowing better than to confuse the Son with the Father.

ATHANASIUS: Was Thomas, then, rebuked when, looking upon the wounds of the Redeemer, he cried: “My Lord and my God!“? Rebuked he was, not for belief, but because he was so slow in believing…. And do not forget to remind your Latin friends, with your customary politeness, that he said, not “theos” but “ho theos mou“ — ” the Lord of me and the God of me” — with the definite article, Arius.

A hit, a palpable hit! That young Alexandrian deacon is pretty skilled in disputation.  

He is also following one of the cardinal principles of biblical interpretation: passages that are unclear or ambiguous must be interpreted in light of those that are clear and unambiguous. Arius, by contrast, because he assumes that Christian monotheism is a simple thing, has simply ignored the passages (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3) that in their (terrifying!) straightforwardness complicate what Arius would prefer to keep simple.

And now, by citing the words of Thomas (John 20:28), Athanasius has exploded the distinction that is most essential to Arius’s theology: that between God the Father and Jesus the Lord. Thomas confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, and this, Athanasius reminds us, is indeed the confession of the Church — however distressing that confession might be for the familiar theological categories. 

Later in the debate they raise an issue that does not get fully resolved for another 125 years, at the Council of Chalcedon, but the passage points to the incoherence of Arius’s position: 

ATHANASIUS: You say that Christ had no human soul?

ARIUS: In Christ, the Logos took the place of the human soul.

ATHANASIUS: Then was He not true man, for man’s nature consists in a fleshly body and a rational soul. There are heretics who deny Christ’s Godhead and others who deny His Manhood — it was left for Arius to deny both at once…. Tell me, how did this compound of half-man and demi-god do the will of the Father? Freely, or of necessity?

ARIUS (hesitating — he sees the trap but cannot avoid it): Freely.

ATHANASIUS: That which is created free to stand is created free to fall. Was the Son, then, made fallible by nature, needing God’s grace to keep Him from sin? If so, the second Adam is no more than the first. Christ is but man or at most an angel — and to worship Him is idolatry. 

(The language Sayers gives Athanasius here echoes that of Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, Book 3: “I made [Adam] just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”) As noted above, I am not certain that Arius has fully grasped that, if the Son is not God, then the Son cannot be worshipped — it would indeed be idolatry to do so. But Christians do worship the Son along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God. This is why Athanasius says, near the beginning of his first Oration Against the Arians, “Those who consider the Arians Christians are in great error.” 

But — you may well be asking — where in all this is Constantine, the Emperor who called this Council? We’ll get to him in the next post. 

two quotations on giving up and giving in

Nobody cares, the title says. Nobody. 

As I drove and the music played, I felt nothing — but I felt that nothing with increasing acuteness. I was neither moved nor sad nor pensive, just aware of the fact that my body and mind exist in a tenuous zizz somewhere between life, death, and computers. This is second-order music listening, in which you experience the idea of listening to music. What better band to provide that service than one that doesn’t even exist?

But looking toward the blushing sky ahead of me, I realized that I didn’t even want this music to be art, or to feel that I was communing with its makers. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America. This music — perhaps most music now — is not for dancing or even for airports; it’s for the void. I pressed play and gripped the wheel and accelerated back onto the tollway, as the machines lulled me into oblivion. 

Second quotation: 

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. 

Sayers and Constantine: 3

The Emperor Constantine is not a great play, largely because Sayers, who had done a tremendous amount of reading in preparing to write it, seems to be under sme compulsion to share as much of it as possible. So we get a lot of backstory and political context hammered into the dialogue in classic “As you know, my Lady” style.

FLAVIUS [Constantinus Chlorus]: Yes. The old man sent me west and kept the boy at court — as a hostage for my loyalty, I suppose. He trusts no one. But when Diocletian retired, I sent to Galerius — who has succeeded him, you know, as Augustus of the East —

HELENA: Yes, yes, I know.

It’s painful, and even more painful when Sayers uses The Common Folk to mediate it:

So old Maximian starts cussin’ and swearin’ and tries to ‘ave the purple off ‘im, see? But the troops only laughs at ‘im, and the old boy runs off to Constantine, ‘owling blue murder. And Constantine treats ‘im very kind, but ‘e don’t give ‘im no power, see? because of upsettin’ Maxentius. Besides, the old boy was past it. But any’ow, Maxentius ‘ad is ‘ands full, because Africa goes and ‘as a rebellion and sets up a new Augustus on its own.

Stop. Please, make it stop. In his columns in the Irish Times Myles na gCopaleen would often introduce the thoughts of The Plain People of Ireland. Sayers seems to have had a similar idea of The Plain People of England and makes frequent use of them — even when she has to disguise them as Romans — from the East End of Rome, no doubt. Fossato di Riva. Or Cappella Bianca. (That was a joke for Londoners.) In general, though, while Sayers knows the shortcomings of the P. P. of E., she has more affection for them than Myles had for the P. P. of I., whom he called an “ignorant self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained ham-faced mealy-mouthed streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws.”

But I digress. Back to the play.

There’s another bizarre moment when Sayers is describing the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and she gives us this:

OFFICER: We left the city by the Milvian Bridge, and when we got to the fork —

MAJOR DOMO: Where the Cassia turns into the Via Flaminia?

OFFICER: That’s it — we took the Flaminian Way. About a mile out, you come to a narrow defile between the hills and the river —

CRASSUS: I know it. The Red Rocks.

The Turn-by-Turn Navigation Is Definitely Not the Drama. This could not possibly be less relevant to the essential concerns of the play, and, alas, there’s more like it.

But the story has a strong spine, and if you strip away the irrelevancies, you can see its shape. I’m borrowing the “spine” metaphor from Peter Jackson, who said that when he and Fran Walsh and Philippa Bowens were writing The Lord of the Rings they knew they couldn’t tell the whole story, so they had to find a spine, a firm but flexible narrative line which would hold the movie together. The Emperor Constantine has such a spine, though it’s less like a straight rod than a double helix. It looks something like this:

The complex process by which Constantine moves from a vaguely pious religiosity to belief in the defense of what we could now call Nicene orthodoxy — and, ultimately, achieves a complete existential reliance on the Triune God celebrated at Nicaea.The complex process by which the Catholic Church came to realize that the account given by Arius and his followers of who Christ is could not be tolerated as a viable option — even if the refusal of the Arian position brought, for a time, increased division in an already-divided Church.

And so the Council of Nicaea itself, presided over by Constantine, becomes the point at which the two helices meet.

The (even more complex) sequence of events and achievements by which Constantine became first a Caesar and then, eventually, the sole Emperor of Rome, however intrinsically interesting it might be, has nothing to do with double-helical spine of this story, and it’s a shame that Sayers did not recognize that. If she had recognized it, this might not be a forgotten play. I wish I had the time to make a reduced and clarified version of this play — an Imperial Edit, as it were, by analogy to the Phantom Edit.

More in the next post about this double helix.

Sayers and Constantine: 2

First post in this series. 

In her Preface to The Emperor Constantine, Sayers explains why its subject is important:

The reign of Constantine the Great is a turning-point in the history of Christendom. Those thirty years, from A.D. 306, when he was proclaimed Augustus by the Army of Britain at York, to A.D. 337, when, sole Emperor of the civilized world, he died at Nicomedia in Asia Minor, exchanging the Imperial purple for the white robe of his baptism, saw the emergence of the Christian ecclesia from the status of a persecuted sect to power and responsibility as the State Church of the Roman Empire. More important still, and made possible by that change of status, was the event of A.D. 325: the Council of Nicaea. At that first Great Synod of East and West, the Church declared her mind as to the Nature of Him whom she worshipped. By the insertion of a single word in the baptismal symbol of her faith, she affirmed that That which had been Incarnate at Bethlehem in the reign of Augustus Casar, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and risen from death in the last days of Tiberius, was neither deified man, nor angel, nor demi-god, nor any created being however exalted, but Very God of Very God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father.

The first Christian Emperor was thus, in the economy of Providence, the instrument whereby Christendom was brought face to face with two problems which have not yet found their full resolution: the exterior relations between Church and State; the interior relation between orthodox and heretic within the Church.

We shall return to all this, but at the moment I want to deal with another matter: Why tell this story at the Festival of Colchester?

It turns out that, if certain traditions are to be believed, Constantine has an intimate connection with Colchester, a connection which begins with the simple fact that Camulodunum, as the Romans called it, was the capital of the province of Britannia. More formally it was known as Colonia Claudia Victricensis — colonia, not municipia, which marked it as a kind of extension of the city of Rome itself rather than a mere town in the provinces. The residents of a colonia had the honor of Roman citizenship. (Similarly, Tarsus was the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, which is how the apostle Paul, native of that city, gained the Roman citizenship that in a difficult situation he made good use of.)

It is said by some that the name Colchester means “fortress of Coel,” Coel being a king in semi-Romanized Britain. (Probably not the “merry old soul” of song, but who knows for sure?) This is the story that Geoffrey of Monmouth tells about Coel and Constantius, AKA Constantius Chlorus:

At that time Duke of Kaelcolim, that is to say Colchester, started a rebellion against King Asclepiodotus. He killed the King in a pitched battle and took for himself the distinction of the royal crown. When this was made known to them, the Senate rejoiced at the death of a King who had caused trouble to the power of Rome in all that he did. Mindful as they were of the setback which they had suffered when they had lost the kingdom, they sent as legate the Senator Constantius, a wise and courageous man, who had forced Spain to submit to Roman domination and who had laboured more than anyone else to increase the power of the State of Rome.

When Coel, King of the Britons, heard of the coming of Constantius, he was afraid to meet him in battle, for the Roman’s reputation was such that no king could resist him. The moment Constantius landed in the island, Coel sent his envoys to him to sue for peace and to promise submission, on the understanding that he should retain the kingship of Britain and contribute nothing more to Roman sovereignty than the customary tribute. Constantius agreed to this proposal when it reached him. Coel gave him hostages and the two signed a treaty of peace. Just one month later Coel developed a most serious illness which killed him within eight days.

After Coel’s death Constantius himself seized the royal crown and married Coel’s daughter. Her name was Helen and her beauty was greater than that of any other young woman in the kingdom. For that matter, no more lovely girl could be discovered anywhere. Her father had no other child to inherit the throne, and he had therefore done all in his power to give Helen the kind of training which would enable her to rule the country more efficiently after his death. After her marriage with Constantius she had by him a son called Constantine.

And now we know why the Festival of Colchester might well feature a play about Constantine. Indeed, the first scene of Sayers’s play is set in Colchester, with Helena as the point of focus. While modern historians believe that Helena was a native of Bithynia — as did Procopius — Sayers treats that as a mere legend: “It was said by some, both then and now, that she was [Constantius Chlorus’s] concubine, a woman of humble origin — a barmaid, indeed, from Bithynia. But an ancient and respectable tradition affirms, on the other hand, that she was his lawful wife, a princess of Britain.” And if Helena were from Camulodunum, it would be no surprise if she were also a Christian, since in her time Camulodunum not only had churches but sported its own bishop.

Whether historically accurate or not, a belief in her British birth makes for a better story — especially in Colchester. We’ll just set aside the inconvenient fact that in 330, just after her death, her son renamed the Bithynian town Drepanon as Helenopolis. Move along, nothing to see here.

So here, in Sayers’s play, we have Helena, whose husband Constantius Chlorus had divorced her for political reasons, though we are reminded that in the eyes of God they remain married. She lives with her aged, exhausted, and mentally incapacitated father Coel, and in this first scene will see her (former?) husband for the first time in a decade — and her son Constantine, now 21. The surprise of this scene is old King Coel emerging from his slumbers to utter a prophecy:

Coel the son of Coel the son of Coel the heaven-born;
I have harped in the Twelve Houses; I have prophesied among the Dancers;
Coel, father of the Light, who bears the Sun in her bosom.

Three times have I seen the Cross:
Air and fire in Gaul, under the earth in Jerusalem,
Written upon water in the place of the victories.

Three times have I heard the Word:
The word in a dream, and the word in council,
The word of the Word within the courts of the Trinity.

Three Crowns: laurel among the trumpets,
A diadem of stars with fillets of purple,
Thorns and gold for the Bride of the Trinity.

I have seen Constantine in the air as a flying eagle,
I have seen Constantine in the earth as a raging lion,
I have seen Constantine in the water as a swimming fish.

Earth and water and air — but the beginning and the ending is fire,
Light in the first day, fire in the last day, at the coming of the Word,
And Our Lord the Spirit descending in light and in fire.

Then he collapses back into sleep. The prophecy is incomprehensible to all, especially to the young pagan warrior Constantine. But the pattern of the story is now established.

P.S. Just a random note, but the Penguin Classics edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth that I quoted is edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, the husband of Sayers’s great friend, collaborator, biographer, and goddaughter Barbara Reynolds — though he did this several years after Sayers’s death. Small world.