Hunkered Between Santorum and Paul Lies Peace Through Total War
OK Sam lets check and see what you’ve left on the editing room floor.
You respond to me and wrote: “Tolerance became official in 313.
The first Christian Emperor seized the throne in 323.
The Western Empire officially ended in 476.
That’s over a century of Christian “moral debasement” to handwave away so casually.”
Likewise the Empire expanded rather significantly after Nero, making blaming him for the start of any sort of decay highly questionable at the least.
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Constantine the Great, also known as Constantine I, was Roman Emperor from 306 to 337. At Constantine’s initiative, Constantine and co-Emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313, which proclaimed religious tolerance of all religions throughout the empire.
Constantine reunified Imperial rule in 323 after centuries of destructive and exhausting dynastic struggle between emperors, co-emperors and junior emperors at the frontiers.
In the early 4th Century Christians comprised around 1/3 of the population in the Eastern Empire but 10% or less in the West. The suggestion that “Christian moral debasement” caused the fall of the Western Empire is shear nonsense.
Constantine was not only able to unify the Empire which had experienced instability and loss of control of major portions on the Western Empire, such as the The Gallic Empire in the 3rd century, but Constantine was able to to expand the Empire. Mind you the Eastern more Christian portion of the Empire succumbed to jihad during the reign of Greek Catholic Emperor Constantine XI in the 15th century AD. You would do do well to throw your copy of Edward Gibbon’s polemic in the trash if you want to understand the Fall of Rome.
Moreover I didn’t blame Nero, instead I wrote “The Roman Empire began to come apart during reign of Emperor Nero in the 7th decade of the 1st Century AD before much of the New Testament was even written.” The pagan Roman Empire more or less stopped expanding after the The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the 1st decade of the 1st century AD. The Empire barely survived internal existential threats begin during Nero’s reign but also in the 2nd and 4th decades of the 2nd century AD and thereafter.
