The Arian Aftermath and the Deathbed Baptism

What Constantine did with the Church after Nicaea, and how he died. In the decade after 325 his policy swung toward the Arianizing party: Arius was recalled, and the champions of the Nicene faith — above all St. Athanasius — were driven into exile. And in May 337 Constantine was baptized on his deathbed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, a bishop of Arian sympathies. This file explains the era’s practice of deferred baptism, states the Arian association honestly, and reads the death as the tradition does.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Reversal After Nicaea

The strict settlement of 325 did not hold, and Constantine’s own vacillation is the clearest proof that the emperor was not the guarantor of the faith (see Constantine at Nicaea). Within a few years imperial favor shifted. The able and well-connected Eusebius of Nicomedia — an early protector of Arius, exiled after Nicaea for his sympathies — regained the emperor’s ear and was restored; Arius himself was recalled from exile after submitting a carefully worded, ambiguous confession that Constantine judged acceptable, and moves were made to readmit him to communion, forestalled (the tradition holds) only by his sudden death in Constantinople around 336 (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.25–38; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, chs. 12–14; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004). Meanwhile the strict Nicenes fell under imperial displeasure. St. Athanasius, who had become bishop of Alexandria in 328, was condemned at the Arianizing Synod of Tyre in 335 on trumped-up charges and exiled by Constantine to Trier in 336 — the first of the five exiles that would fill his life (Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, chs. 1–2; and see St. Athanasius). Constantine died with the great defender of Nicaea in exile and the Arianizing bishops in the ascendant.

This sequel is not concealed in the Orthodox reading; it is theologically important. It shows that the faith of Nicaea survived against the throne’s own drift, vindicated not by imperial constancy — there was none — but by the Church’s long struggle and the confessors’ endurance, until the Second Ecumenical Council of 381 secured it (see The Byzantine Church). The emperor who convened Nicaea could not, in the end, hold even himself to its line; the Church held the line for him.

The Deathbed Baptism (337)

Constantine fell ill in the spring of 337, after Pascha, while preparing a campaign against Persia. Feeling death near, he went to the suburbs of Nicomedia and there, at last, received baptism — deferred until his final days — from the local bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia. Eusebius, the emperor’s biographer and namesake’s contemporary (this is not Eusebius of Caesarea the historian), describes the scene at length: Constantine laid aside the imperial purple, was clothed in the white robe of the newly illumined, and would not put the purple on again, dying still in his baptismal white on 22 May 337 — Eusebius dates it to the noon of the feast of Pentecost — at a villa near Nicomedia (Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine 4.61–64; trans. Cameron and Hall, 1999; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 14). His body was carried to Constantinople and buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles he had built, among cenotaphs of the twelve — a placement that itself expresses the isapostolos claim the Church would later confirm (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.60, 4.70–71; and see Equals-to-the-Apostles).

Why Baptism on the Deathbed?

To modern readers the deferral can look like calculation or hypocrisy; in its own time it was a common and comprehensible choice, and the file states the practice plainly. In the fourth century, when the discipline of penance was severe and post-baptismal sin was regarded with great seriousness, deferred baptism was widespread among earnest Christians, including catechumens of high standing who lived for years as believers within the Church without yet receiving the sacrament (Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009, chs. on the fourth century and the practice of delay; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981). The logic was that baptism washed away all sin, and a life — especially a ruler’s life, of war, judgment, and the shedding of blood — could be brought to God cleansed at its end. The great fourth-century Fathers had to preach against the practice: St. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. Basil urged Christians not to gamble on a deathbed washing (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40, On Holy Baptism, arguing against delay; trans. NPNF II/7). Constantine’s deferral, then, places him with many devout contemporaries, not outside them: he had lived as a catechumen and patron of the Church for a quarter-century and received the sacrament when, by the reasoning of his age, it would seal a whole life at once. For a man with the deaths of Crispus and Fausta on his conscience (see Crispus and Fausta), the deathbed washing carried, in the tradition’s reading, exactly the weight of a final repentance.

The Arian Baptizer, Stated Honestly

The uncomfortable fact must be named: the bishop who baptized Constantine, Eusebius of Nicomedia, was a leader of the Arianizing party — the very party Nicaea had condemned and whose ascendancy had exiled Athanasius. [Disputed: the significance of Constantine's baptism by an Arian-leaning bishop. The fact is not in doubt — Eusebius of Nicomedia, an *homoiousian*/Arianizing prelate, performed the baptism (Eusebius of Caesarea, *Life of Constantine* 4.61–62; Jerome, *Chronicle*, s.a. 337, and Socrates, *Ecclesiastical History* 1.39, note the baptizer's party). Its meaning is read variously: (a) as evidence of Constantine's own drift toward the Arianizing court theology in his last years (Barnes, *Constantine and Eusebius*, 1981); (b) as a matter of mere circumstance — Eusebius was simply the bishop of the place where Constantine lay dying — carrying no doctrinal endorsement; (c) later Latin tradition was so troubled by it that it invented an alternative: the legend of baptism at Rome by Pope Sylvester (see [The Silvester Legend](../08-legends-and-forgeries/the-silvester-legend.md)), which is apocryphal and contradicted by the well-attested Nicomedia baptism.] The Orthodox tradition does not hide the Arian association, and it does not let it unmake the man’s veneration: the validity of baptism does not depend on the personal orthodoxy of the minister, and the Church honors Constantine for the whole orientation of his life and reign, not for the party of the bishop at his bedside. That the emperor who gave the Church Nicaea died at the hands of a Nicene opponent is one more instance of the irony that runs through his whole relation to the faith — he served the Church greatly and controlled its doctrine not at all.

The Death as the Tradition Reads It

The Church reads Constantine’s death charitably and hopefully, as the crown of the isapostolos‘s life: the emperor who ended the persecution and gathered the Fathers laid down the purple, was washed in Christ, and died in the white of the newly baptized on the feast of the Spirit’s descent. The historian’s caveats stand — the deferred baptism, the Arian baptizer, the exile of Athanasius still in force — and the Church does not need them denied. What she confesses is that a man who had done great things and terrible ones sought, at the end, the one thing the whole apparatus of empire could not give him and the Church exists to give: the forgiveness of sins and the washing of regeneration. On that reading his death is of a piece with his mother’s pilgrimage and his own church-building — the acts of a soul turning, over a long and bloody life, toward God (see Equals-to-the-Apostles).

References

Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine 4.60–71. Trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Ferguson, Everett. Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 40, On Holy Baptism. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
Jerome. Chronicle, s.a. 337. — Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 1.25–39. Trans. NPNF II/2.