Emperor Saint Constantine the Great, Equal-to-the-Apostles
The ever-excellent Mystagogy blog has, currently, a wonderful and heartfelt tribute to one of the best, most honourable and most humble emperors of Rome! Please do give it a read. S. Constantine sadly gets a really bad rep in the West, probably for any among a number of reasons. But it cannot be denied that Christianity as we know it would not have existed if it hadn’t been for him!
Interestingly enough, the same might be said about the welfare state! Emperor Saint Constantine was apparently quite aggressive in embarking on his reforms granting a state-funded safety net to widows and orphans, as well as introducing a progressive taxation schema to help fund it! A good and honourable and humble emperor, to be sure, and clearly holding a few economic priorities which would make him unpopular amongst too many American Orthodox (and Catholics, and Anglicans) these days...
The Constantinian Age of the church was a disaster for both church and state; state and church should be separate.
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