If Constantine wanted to dominate the church, the obvious thing for him to do would be to try to widen the divisions in the church and keep them competing with each other.
That’s not what he did. Instead of “divide and conquer,” he did his best to unite the church, often against the inclinations of the bishops. Drake points ou that by devoting “considerable personal resources to achieving Christian consensus,” Constantine “weakened considerably his own capacity for independent action – his own, and that of his successors.”
Ultimately, his policy (conscious or no) was not “divide and conquer” but “unite and submit.”
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Restoring Man at Notre Dame
It is fascinating to be an outsider on the inside of an institution going through times of…
Deliver Us from Evil
In a recent New York Times article entitled “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery…
Natural Law Needs Revelation
Natural law theory teaches that God embedded a teleological moral order in the world, such that things…
