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 OF GOD

During the three following centuries the history of the developing Papacy is bound up with the life of the Empire as a whole. Political priority was now established in the East and Rome became estranged from its imperial master. Migrating Germanic tribes erected new states inside the Empire, which waged wars on each other and on the Empire as a whole, with the result that the kingdom of the Franks was firmly established. The political movements of the time are interwoven with spiritual and religious upheavals, for example, the ferment which arose out of efforts to assimilate ancient heathen ele- ments into the new Christian system. The struggle for priority be- tween East and West went on side by side with philosophical, dog- matic debates concerning the unity of teaching in the West Roman, East Roman and Germanic sections of Christianity.

In the year 330 Constantine dedicated his Roma Nova on the soil of ancient Byzantium. The chariot of the sun-god rolled into the market square, beside him stood the reigning Tychon with the Cross on his head, and a choir chanted the Kyrie eleison. Thus, with blended Christian and heathen tradition, this third city of destiny proceeded arm in arm with Rome and Jerusalem into what was to be the history of a realm lasting a thousand years. All the world was to see in this newly-founded Empire a sign that times had changed. But not everything had been renewed. In a city freshly adorned with gold and marble, the Cassars besought the Galilean to be their God as Jupiter and the unconquerable Sun had been the deities of their fathers. Constantine placed religion in the service of the state in the same spirit that had actuated Diocletian and all ancient emperors, though his was a different creed. The Church he confronted was so much like a state and so firmly established that the idea of welding it to the Empire was eminently natural. There could be no objection to the union in so far as the Church was of the nature of the ancient Politeia. But this Church was conscious of being something more, something greater: a communion founded in the beginning of time, transcending states and centuries in its devotion to the purposes of the eternal realm which had called it into being. Therefore a state

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