Churches built, not burned
Constantine's building program begins
In the decade following the Edict of Milan, Constantine does something no emperor has ever done: he builds churches.
Not converts' houses or catacomb chapels or the modest meeting rooms Christians had used for three centuries. He builds basilicas — the great rectangular halls that were the standard form for Roman public buildings, law courts, and administrative centers. He takes the architecture of empire and gives it to the church.
In Rome: the Lateran Basilica, still the official cathedral of Rome today, built on land confiscated from the imperial cavalry. The basilica over the tomb of Peter. The basilica over the tomb of Paul on the Ostian Way.
In Jerusalem: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the site identified as Golgotha and the empty tomb. His mother Helena goes to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and oversees the project. She also, according to tradition, discovers what she believes to be the True Cross.
In Bethlehem: the Church of the Nativity, built over the cave identified with Jesus's birth.
In Constantinople — the new city he is building on the Bosporus to be the Christian capital of the empire — he builds the Church of the Holy Apostles, with symbolic sarcophagi for each of the twelve surrounding the place prepared for his own burial.
The church that had met in homes and catacombs and borrowed spaces for three hundred years now has buildings that will outlast empires.
Some of them are still standing.
“I have resolved to devote my life to the restoration of your most holy dwelling place.”
— Constantine, letter to Macarius of Jerusalem, c. 325 AD
“But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens can't contain you; how much less this house that I have built!”
The buildings Constantine built are still standing. The Lateran Basilica, the Church of the Nativity, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — all of them have been rebuilt and modified over seventeen centuries, but all of them stand on the foundations he laid.
Buildings matter. They are a form of commitment — a way of saying: we expect to be here for a long time. The community that meets in borrowed spaces is a different community from the one that plants itself in stone.
And yet Solomon's wisdom echoes forward: heaven itself cannot contain God, how much less a building? The buildings are not the faith. They are the faith's address.
What is your community committing to that will still be standing when you are gone?