I personally am a fan of Constantine
Since he is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Catholic Churches, he is a Saint in the Catholic Church and therefore is 100% in heaven. So I think that we should start with that premise, since we are Catholics, and then work backwards.
As an Anglican priest recently said, “Experts in the field of early Christianity now believe that Constantine was a genuine Christian who earnestly tried to apply his faith to his role as Emperor”.
The view of Constantine in academia has recently, but slowly, been shifting from bias against him to a position favourable of him.
The Fausta incident has been resolved in the most recent historical writings on Constantine, I think. All of the recent writings show the complexity of the situation, and how Constantine’s involvement was either non-existent or partial. It is now largely thought that Fausta was trying to have an abortion, for example, since in Ancient Rome they believed that hot baths would kill babies in the womb. Her and Crispus definetly had a sexual affair in my opinion, either he raped her as she claimed or it was a genuine affair, since all the ancient sources seem to agree on this point.
So we can conclude that his wife and son betrayed him, had an affair. He exiled his son and his wife, in regret, tried to have an abortion which went horribly wrong as often happened before the advancves of medicine…As for Crispus his circumstances of death are really odd…There is no known punishment for use of poison as execution. The most likely situation was that Crispus, in his exile, committed suicide since that was considered the “noble thing” to do in Roman times. No one really knows about him though.
One historically possible scenario delineated now goes as follows…
David Woods:
“Crispus and Fausta had sex, whether consensual or rape (it is impossible to know). Fausta became pregnant. Constantine could hardly have ignored such a flagrant violation of family and political order. What was his response?..If they were both guilty, the death penalty for adultery was on the books, and Constantine was within his legal rights to condemn them…Yet there is no other evidence that Constantine applied the death penalty for adultery, and the manner of Crispus’ death is unusual. He died by poison on the out-of-the-way island of Pola. Had he been executed, he would have been beheaded rather than poisoned. And the location is unusual too. Shortly before this incident Constantine had exiled a senator because of adultery, and it is possible that Crispus too was exiled. The exiled Crispus was possibly given the chance that many Romans before had been given, to bury his shame in suicide. Fausta’s manner of death is even more unusual…Ancient medical treatises sometimes recommended hot-baths to induce abortion, and Fausta, pregnant by her stepson, may have died in a botched abortion attempt…In short…Constantine wanted neither Fausta nor Crispus dead…he setenced his son to exile and…his wife [had] an abortion which, like many ancient abortions, went wrong”
Constantine also spent the rest of his life in grief and atonement for the loss of his wife and son…that’s why he spent so much time building churches and praying…So who are we to judge him?
I’m not suggesting he was a flawless angel. No human being - even saints. He was an Emperor who lived in one of the most barbarous periods of history when common citizens of Rome actually enjoyed watching innocent men and women hacking each other apart and getting eaten by lions in the colesseum. For his time and taking into account the fact that he’d been brought up a warrior in a bloody time of civil war, the worst period of Roman history, I think he was very advanced for his era. He brought in full religious liberty, for the first time in history, ended the Roman Gladiatorial Games, banned crucifixtion and other cruel forms of torture and increased the social welfare of citizens of the Empire.
We don’t know what really happened to Crispus and Fausta. Historians seem to agree that:
- Fausta and Crispus seem to have been in some kind of sexual relationship
- Fausta claimed that Crispus had raped her
- For this Constantine exiled his son to a faraway island, as he usually did for adulterers whereas most previous Emperors and indeed Roman Law stipulated execution in such cases
- Crispus, Constantine’s beloved son (and I mean he REALLY appears to have doted upon him from the sources, since he groomed him to be the next Caesar) was then found dead with poison. He should have been hanged, if he was executed, which tells us that he must have taken his own life
- His mother Helena was saddened and agrieved by her beloved grandson’s death that she told Constantine that Fausta had lied. Crispus hadn’t raped her, rather they’d been having an illicit relationship.
- Fausta appears to - or at least might - have become pregnant and gone into a hot bath to try and induce an abortion (it was believed in Roman times that piping hot baths would induce abortion, but as with Fausta, such practices often ended badly)
(continued…)
