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Category: Karlheinz Deschner

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Kriminalgeschichte, 32

Editor’s note: The author states below: ‘This provision [by Constantine] had serious consequences, as it was one of the first to deprive Jews, in practice, of owning farms’. This is how the first seeds were planted for the Jews to do what today is called ‘white collar’ jobs.
In the days of Ancient Rome the Jews still did not have an IQ superior to Whites. This policy of cornering Jews to work outside of what is now called ‘blue collar’ jobs continued until the French Revolution. Although the anti-Semitic seed of Constantine described below could be applauded by white nationalists, seeing it in perspective was a shot that backfired.
Parallel to allowing Jews in banking and usury, throughout the Middle Ages the best genes of White intellectuals ended, excuse me the crude expression, in the asses of the novices of the monasteries instead of in the fair sex. Unlike the Christians, medieval Jews never practised vows of celibacy. The artificial selection of genes that raised the IQ of the Jews at the expense of the lack of descendants of intelligent Whites (Aryan monks) was a courtesy of Christendom.
In previous chapters the author constantly used quotation marks around the word ‘pagans’. In this chapter he removed the quotation marks. Since ‘pagan’ was Christian newspeak of the 4th century, in some instances of this entry I’ll take the liberty to substitute the textual ‘pagan’ for something like ‘adepts of Greco-Roman culture’.
Below, abridged translation from the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity):
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Constantine against Jews, ‘heretics’ and pagans
The emperor was not very friendly with the Jews, surely he was greatly influenced by the permanent anti-Semitic attacks of the doctors of the Church, which we have seen in chapter 2, and the recent Synod of Elvira, which had sanctioned with very strong penances the relations between Christians and Jews, in particular the attendance to blessings of fields and banquets celebrated by Jews.
The Roman emperors were quite tolerant of Judaism; not even Diocletian tried to force them to comply with the pagan rites. But after the Council of Nicaea Constantine comes to the conclusion, reflected in an epistle to all the communities, that the Jews ‘tainted by delirium’, ‘wounded by the blindness of the spirit’, ‘deprived of the right judgment’, are ‘an odious nation’ and except for one day a year forbids them to set foot on the city of Jerusalem that he and his mother had filled with churches.
In addition, he forbade them to have slaves like Christians. This provision had serious consequences, as it was one of the first to deprive Jews, in practice, of owning farms. The Christian who Judaized was sentenced to death. In addition, Constantine renewed a law of Trajan, promulgated two hundred years before, according to which the pagan who was converted to Judaism was condemned to the stake.
Even harder was the policy against the ‘heretics’, and this already from the time of the regency, from the year 311, on the grounds that many of those who had abjured Christianity wanted to receive baptism again. This resulted in a schism with bloody repercussions that lasted for several centuries. It is at that time when the definition of ‘catholic’ as opposed to the figure of the ‘heretic’ appears for the first time in an imperial document.
The Donatists rejected the association with the State, the Constantinian alliance between the throne and the altar. They judged that they were the true Ecclesia sanctorum and that the Roman Church was the civitas diaboli. They appealed to the Christian’s beliefs by demanding greater austerity for the clergy. Constantine’s campaign against Licinius turned against the Donatists at the instigation of Bishop Caecilianus in a campaign that lasted several years, presided over by the decision to ‘not tolerate even the slightest hint of division or disunity, wherever it may be’. Moreover, in a letter from early 316 to Celsus, vicar of Africa, Constantine threatened: ‘I intend to destroy the errors and repress all the nonsense, in order and effect to offer to all the human race the only true religion, the only justice and unanimity in the worship of the almighty Lord’.
To the Donatists he took away their churches and their fortunes, exiled their chiefs and commanded troops who slaughtered men and women. The hecatomb of the adepts of Hellenism had not yet begun and Christians were already making martyrs of other Christians.
Constantine also fought against the Church of Marcion, an older church and at some point probably also more followed than the Catholic Church. Constantine prohibited the offices of the Church of Marcion even when they were held in private homes; had their images and properties confiscated, and ordered the destruction of their temples. His successors, most likely instigated by the bishops, stepped up the persecution of this Christian sect after having defamed it and by all means, including through falsifications during the 2nd and 3rd centuries. In 326, shortly after the Council of Nicaea, Constantine issued a scathing edict ‘against heretics of every kind’, in case it was authentic of course and not a figment of Eusebius.
Constantine’s actions against the ‘heretics’ set an example, but at least he respected life most of the time. After all, he did not care about religion as much as the unity of the Church on the basis of the Nicaea Council, and hence the unity of the empire. Undoubtedly, he had an exclusively political concept of religion, although religious problems always, and from the first moment, were presented in relation to social and political conflicts. In the interest of state power he promoted the unity of the Church. This, and not another, was the cause of his hatred of all kinds of discord. ‘I was sure that, if I could complete my purpose of uniting all the servants of God, I would reap abundant fruits in the public interest’, he wrote in a letter to Arius and Bishop Alexander.
In the year 330, Constantine sends a sentence against the Neo-Platonic school and even orders the execution of Sopater, who had been presiding over this school since the death of Iamblichus. The adepts of Hellenism become ‘fools’, ‘people without morals’ and their religion a ‘hotbed of discord’. Constantine’s true intention was that all humans ‘revered the one true God’ and that they forsake ‘the temples of the lie’.
While the adepts of Hellenism of the western provinces still enjoyed relative tranquillity, in the East the persecutions began after the definitive defeat of Licinius (324). Constantine forbade the erection of new statues to the gods, the worship of existing ones, and the consultation of oracles and all other forms of Greco-Roman worship.

In 326 Constantine came to order the destruction of all the images, while in the East he began the confiscation of temple properties and the plundering of valuable works of art. In his new capital, blessed on May 11, 330 after six years of work funded in part through the treasures confiscated from the temples, Constantine banned the worship and the festivals of the adepts of Hellenism and rents were no longer paid to the temples of Helios, Artemis Selene and Aphrodite.
Constantine, described as a ‘renegade’ and ‘innovator and destroyer of ancient and venerable constitutions’ by Emperor Julian, but praised by many modern historians, soon prohibited the repair of Greco-Roman temples and ordered numerous closures and destructions ‘directed precisely against those who had been most revered by the idolaters’ (Eusebius). He arranged the closing of the Serapis of Alexandria, the temple to the Sun-God in Heliopolis, the demolition of the altar of Mamre (because the Lord himself had appeared there to Father Abraham, in the company of two angels), and that of the temple of Aesculapius in Aegae, the latter being fulfilled with such diligence ‘that not even the foundations of the ancient ravings remained’ (Eusebius).
Constantine also ordered the destruction of the temple of Aphrodite on Golgotha, for the ‘great scandal’ that it represented for the believers; it was also the turn of Aphaea in Lebanon from whose sanctuary came ‘a dangerous web to hunt souls’ and which, according to the emperor, ‘does not deserve the sun to shine’. There was no stone left upon a stone; and the very famous Heliopolis was burned down and reduced to rubble by a military command.
Constantine burned Porphyry’s controversial writings. From the year 330, when Neo-Platonism was forbidden, Christians abounded in looting of temples and breaking images, as all Christian chroniclers celebrated and despite such activities having been implicitly prohibited by the Council of Elvira.
Contrary to what Christian historians would like us to believe, the emperor, naturally, was not interested in fighting face to face with the Greco-Roman culture that still held the majority in much of the empire and retained part of its strength, which of course does not mean that there were not well received ‘the small material expropriations’ (Voelkl): the stones, the doors, the bronze figures, the vessels of gold and silver, the reliefs, ‘the valuable and artistic ivory votive offerings confiscated in all the provinces’, as Eusebius highlights.
‘Everywhere they went stealing, looting and confiscating the images of gold and silver and the bronze statues’ (Tinnefeid). Constantine did not even respect the famous tripods of the fortune-teller of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. The historian Kornemann notes ‘a theft of works of art as has never been seen in all of Greece’.
Even St. Jerome criticized that the city of Constantinople had been built with the booty of almost all other cities. ‘In the blink of an eye, whole temples would disappear’, rejoices Eusebius. The entire Olympus was gathered in the ‘new Rome’, where the emperor, even without daring to tear down the temples, had all the statues removed from them. The most venerated gods were installed in bath-houses, basilicas and public squares. The deified Apollo, which had been the most venerable monument in the Hellenic world, was converted into a Constantine the Great. ‘Immense riches disappeared from the coins or went to fill the empty coffers of the Church’, Voelkl reminds us.
Eusebius tells us that… the temples and sanctuaries, once so proud, were destroyed without anyone ordering it, and churches were built in their place and the old delirium was forgotten.
However, at the Easter of 337 the sovereign fell ill. First he sought remedy in the hot baths of Constantinople, and then in the relics of Lucian, protective patron of Arianism and disciple of Arius himself. Finally he received on his farm, Achyronas of Nicomedia, the waters of baptism despite his desire to take them on the banks of the Jordan in imitation of Our Lord. At that time (and until about 400) it was customary to postpone baptism until the last minute, especially among princes responsible for a thousand battles and death sentences. As Voltaire suggests, ‘they believed they had found the formula to live as criminals and die as saints’. After the baptism, which was administered by another colleague of Lucian named Eusebius, Constantine died on May 22 of the year 337.
While the Christians have almost dispensed with their common sense for praising Constantine, obviously there are very few testimonies of his critics that have reached us, among them those of the Emperor Julian and the historian Zosimus.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Slavery

Kriminalgeschichte, 31

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

 
Christian family life and rigours of criminal practices
The first Christian emperor, in addition to revealing himself as a great military leader, was consistent in the application of capital punishment, also emulated in this by Catholic theologians of all times, not excepting ours. In the year 310, the son of St. Helena [Constantine], is still assured by Christian historians of the second half of the 20th century that ‘few of his successors reached his political and human greatness’ (Baus) and that ‘in his private life he did no secret of his Christian convictions, leading an exemplary Christian family life’ (Franzen).
He had his father-in-law, Emperor Maximian, hanged in Massilia (Marseille) after which all the statues and images that represented him were destroyed.
He ordered to strangle his brothers-in-law Licinius and Basian, husbands of his sisters Constantia and Anastasia; in 336, he enslaved Prince Licianus, son of Licinius, who was then flogged and murdered at Carthage in 326.
He made Crispus, his son (from his spouse Minervina shortly before marrying Fausta) be poisoned along with ‘numerous friends of his’ (Eutropius); incidentally, a few months after the Council of Nicaea in which the symbol of faith was promulgated.
And finally, this paragon of human greatness accused of adultery with Crispus his own wife Fausta, mother of three children and two daughters, who was shortly before recognised on coins as ‘spes reipublicae’ (hope of the State); although nothing was demonstrated. She was drowned in a bath and all her properties of the old Lateran district adjudged definitively to the Pope.
‘Exemplary Christian life’, indeed (Franzen above)!
The Byzantine historian Zosimus, a diehard pagan whose well-documented history of the emperors is, together with Rerum gestarum libri XXXI of Ammianus, our main source of information on the events of the 4th century, claims that after the liquidation of his son and his wife the unpopularity of Constantine in Rome had become so great, that he preferred to change residence.
The decline of the Law became more acute during these 4th and 5th centuries of our era. The classical mentality of the pagan era was displaced by the vulgar right of the late Roman era and the legislation fell ‘to a level of unscientific primitivism’ (Kaser), which justifies the assertion of Jerome, doctor of the Church, ‘aliae sunt leges Caesaru Christi…’
During the republican period, the death penalty, although not formally abolished, was severely limited in its application. Under the Caesars, the tolerance was even greater. The emperor sanctioned, with the death penalty instead of the traditional exile, the publication of anonymous libels, and ordered that the tongue be ripped off from the slanderers, ‘the greatest plague of human life’ before executing them.
Constantine criminalised the kidnapping, until then a private crime. So that he not only condemned to death the abductor, and in a horrible way, but also the bride if she had consented; and also those who had acted as mediators, casting molten lead in the mouths of the slave owners and burning the slaves alive.

A modern depiction of Constantine

Shelley wrote: ‘The punishments promulgated by that monster, the first Christian emperor, against the pleasures of forbidden love were so unutterably grave that no modern legislator would even consider them against the worst crimes’. Constantine also authorised the interrogation through torture during the trials, ‘the methods envisaged were of extraordinary cruelty’ (Grant).
And if Diocletian forbade parents to sell their children as slaves, Constantine allowed it in cases of grave necessity and provided that it was made under a repurchase agreement. If a slave took liberty on his own and took refuge among the barbarians, once captured, they cut off his foot and sent him to forced labour in the mines, which almost always amounted to a death penalty.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantine Evil Goths Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Theology

Kriminalgeschichte, 30

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

Editor’s note: Constantine did not only wage war on the adepts of Hellenic culture but on the Aryans themselves, the blond Goths: he perpetrated massacres even against blond women and children. In this entry the behaviour of the Judaized Christians he empowered reminds me the saying, ‘The Jew is always either at your throat or at your feet’.
 
From the pacifist Church to the Church of the pater castrense
That prince, buried among the funeral steles of the apostles and sanctified by the Eastern Church—although among western heroes there is not lacking of the same genre: Charlemagne for example, was called a Saxon butcher—, that saint Constantine who never lost a battle, ‘man of war’ (Prete), the ‘personification of the perfect soldier’ (Seeck), fought countless wars and great campaigns, most of them ‘with a terrible hardness’ (Kornemann).
In summer or autumn of 306 he waged war against the Bructeri, first in Roman territory and then invading them. In 310, again against the Bructeri, Constantine burns the villages and orders the dismemberment of the ringleaders. In 311, against the Franks; the chiefs of the tribes pay with life. In 314, against the Sarmatians, already vanquished by himself in the time of Galen, now deserving the title of ‘great slayer of the Sarmatians’ (sarmaticus maximus). In 315, against the Goths (gothicus maximus).
In 320, his son Crispus defeated the Alamanni; in 332, it is he himself who again defeats the Sarmatians. All this is worth a rich booty and thousands of prisoners deported to Roman lands as slaves. In 323, he defeats the Goths and orders to burn all their allies alive. The survivors are also thrown into slavery; new title: ‘gothorum victor triumphator’. New foundation: the games ‘ludi gothici’, which are held every year from 4 to 9 February (after having founded the ‘frank games’).
During the last decades of his life, Constantine fought often in the Danubian regions, trying to make ‘land of a mission’ of them (Kraft), and inflicts on the Germans defeats that influenced even their religious history (Doerries). In 328, he subdues the Goths in Banat. In 329, Constantine II almost exterminated an army of Alamanni. In 332, father and son again crush the Goths in Marcianopolis; the number of deaths, including hunger and freezing (‘fame et frigore’, as the Anonymous Valesian says), was calculated in hundreds of thousands, not excepting women and children victims of the ‘Great Diaspora of the Goths’.
In the year 313, Constantine and Licinius enact their Edict of Tolerance; Christianity, once forbidden, becomes a licit religion (which from that moment hastens to declare all other religions unlawful), and from overnight comes the amazing metamorphosis of the pacifists into regimental chaplains! If before they faced everything, even martyrdom, as long as they did not provide the pagan service, now the need to kill seems obvious to them. The Church became the party of the predators from that moment on, it shared the direct and indirect responsibility of a millennium and a half of massacres.
Lactantius ‘was one of the first to enjoy, as favourite of the emperor, the new regime of alliance between the sword and the cross’ (Von Campenhausen); in other words, one of the first to change colours. In 314 he wrote a summary or epitome where he crossed out all the pacifist passages. The grateful writer corrects the dedication of his main work and begins to praise the war and legislative activity of the sovereign. It is then when Christianity happens to become a ‘bloody struggle between good and evil’ (Prete).
Thus Lactantius betrayed his own convictions, denying almost three centuries of pacifist tradition—and with him, in the background, the whole Church, obedient to the will of the emperor who had recognized and made her rich and influential, but who had no job for a pacifist and passive clergy, but for those who agreed to bless their weapons. And they have not stopped blessing them since then, or as Heine has written: ‘It was not only the clergy of Rome, but also the English, the Prussian; in a word, always the privileged priesthood associated with the caesars and their ilk, in the repression of the peoples’.
Modern theologians, who do not dare to deny in their entirety that bankruptcy of the doctrine of Jesus, speak of an ‘original sin’ of Christianity. With this they try to play down the importance of the event, as if remembering the story of the snake and the apple, as if the whole question were nothing more than ‘a small Edenic slip’. As if we did not speak of massacres perpetrated for millennia, now committed in the name of ‘the good news’, of the ‘religion of love’; massacres that now turn out to be fair, necessary and even excellent.
Thus a new theology is born, although wrapped in the terminological garb of the old woman to disguise it. And the new theology is not only political but also militaristic: now they speak of Ecclesia triumphans, of Ecclesia militans, of the theology of the emperor… or of all the emperors, at least of the Romans of Antiquity who brought their line back to Caesar, but much further on in reality.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantine Eastern Orthodox Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 29

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

A gold multiple of ‘Unconquered Constantine’
with Sol Invictus, struck in 313 AD.

 
Constantine as saviour, deliverer and vicar of God
Rudolf Hernegger says he does not know any other historical personage ‘whose influence has remained so unchanged for seventeen centuries’ and underlines, to our understanding, that ‘for the past 1,700 years the Church has deserved the epithet of ‘Constantinian’.
The predecessors of Constantine feared the Christians and some of them fought them. Instead, he favoured them and thus won them for his cause, to the point that he called himself ‘bishop for foreign affairs’ (episkopos ton ektós) of the Church, or as Grégoire ironized, ‘the gendarme of the Church’. In effect, Constantine placed the clergy at his service and imposed his will on it.
‘He soon dominated the episcopate as he dominated his official and demanded unconditional obedience to public decrees, even when they intervened in the internal affairs of the Church’ (Franzen, Roman Catholic). The Church gained influence but lost independence, and some people, already during the 4th century, began to see it. The Church became part of the Empire, instead of the Empire being a part of the Church. The bishops owed gratitude to the emperor, their protector, who had favoured them so much.
And they obeyed Constantine: He was the master, he convened the councils and even decided on questions of faith, however confused his own Christology was (but… which Christology is not?). Constantine imposed theological formulas which he and his successors commanded to respect. He and they made the Church of the State, ‘where the word of the emperor, without becoming the highest commandment, nevertheless had a decisive weight and not only in matters of external order but also in matters of doctrine’ (Aland).
Although Constantine, during misfortunes, continued to consult the signs of the sky and the viscera of the animals, he made all his family Christian and ended up receiving also the baptism, calling himself a saviour appointed by God, sent by the Lord and a man from God. He declared that he owed everything he had to ‘the greatest God’; ordered that honours be performed as ‘representative of Christ’ (vicarios Christi) and that he be buried as the ‘thirteenth Apostle’. Pagans and Christians were to greet him with genuflection, of which perhaps only the bishops were dispensed. And anything he had touched was also sacred. (Sanctus and sanctitas, well-known notions of paganism, were preached about imperial dignity.)
The central point of the new capital of Constantine, which was named after him, was the court: of exaggerated luxury, in the Oriental manner, built ‘iubente Deo’, that is, by divine order, on a land four times more extensive than the old Byzantium, and with the help of forty thousand Goth operatives.
With the founding of this ‘new Rome’, the former capital of the empire was definitively relegated to a second place; the influence of the Hellenic East was reinforced and the conflicts between the Eastern and Western Church became more acute. Constantine, on the other hand, surpassed the old emperors when he named his palace, a prototype of the primitive basilica and ‘house of the king’ not ‘encampment’ (castra) like the former houses, but temple (domus divina) in the image and likeness of the celestial throne room. The throne room was shaped like a basilica, as if it were a sanctuary, and a ceremonial of strong ecclesiastical flavour was created, which later the Byzantine emperors intensified, if possible.
The Eastern Church has Constantine as the ‘thirteenth apostle’. He and his mother are considered among the saints, and many Greek churches have his image and celebrate with great pomp his festival on May 21.

Categories
Ancient Rome Catholic Church Christendom Constantine Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 28

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

 
The Catholic clergy, increasingly favoured
Obviously, an earthly paradise was inaugurated at least for the Constantinian ‘court bishops’, and for the Catholic hierarchy whose servility before the emperor assumed, like Eusebius in his writings, ‘the psalmist’s tone when he speaks of the Lord’ (Kühner). Others sang in chorus, like the Fathers of the Church: Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria. And they did not lack motives. The Christian religion, once persecuted, became recognized and official. Moreover, the Catholic Church and its prelates enjoyed growing privileges that were worthy of power and wealth.

The emperor made donations to the clergy of large estates in Syria, in Egypt, as well as in Tarsus, Antioch, Alexandria and other great cities. We must bear in mind that Oriental donations meant, in addition to income, import operations especially in the market of spices and essences of the East, much appreciated by the Romans. In a word, the famous Patrimonium Petri began to accumulate, of which we will have occasion to occupy ourselves very often later on.
In Constantine’s time begins the metonymy (both in Latin and in Greek) of the word ‘church’ to mean both the community of believers and the building, formerly also called templum, aedes and other names. Constantine continued to erect churches in Ostia, Alba, Naples, and also in Asia Minor and Palestine. As he himself wrote to Eusebius, ‘all of them must be worthy of our love for the splendour’ and monuments to their victories.
Now, all these churches—the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, inaugurated by the emperor in person (335), whose pomp should be superior to that of all others, that of the Nativity in Bethlehem, that of the Apostles and that of Peace (Irene) in Constantinople, the great basilica of Antioch, those of Tire and Nicomedia, endowed with ‘truly imperial’ splendour, ‘decorated with many and rich votive offerings of gold, silver and precious stones’—they consumed immense sums. All the more so because the construction mania of the emperor was emulated by other members of the imperial family, and especially by his mother, Helena. Eusebius, as chronicler of the court, never tires of praising ‘the inexhaustible generosity of imperial donations’.
The clergy, in particular, received from Constantine ‘the greatest honours and distinctions, as men consecrated to the service of the Lord’. Again and again Eusebius reiterates that ‘they were honoured and envied in the eyes of all’, ‘he increased their prestige through laws and decrees’, ‘the imperial generosity opened wide the coffers of the treasure and distributed its riches with a generous hand’. And there were many bishops who were able to emulate the grandeur and splendour of the imperial court itself. They received special titles and incense cleansings; honours were given to them on their knees, they were seated on thrones conceived in the image and likeness of the throne of God.
Others recommend humility in their sermons!
So many and such were the signs of Constantine’s favours that the influence and economic power of the bishops increased rapidly. They participated in the free distribution of wheat. In their favour only for them, the emperor annulled the laws that disadvantaged the single people or without children. He equated them with the highest officials, those who were not obliged to genuflect in the presence of the sovereign.
In 321, the churches were authorized to receive inheritances, a right that pagan temples had never enjoyed, except in very special cases. On the other hand, for the Church this privilege was so lucrative that only two generations later the State was forced to issue a decree ‘against the plundering of the most gullible devotees, especially women’ (Caspar). This was not an obstacle to the fact that, only a century later, the ecclesiastical patrimony had reached gigantic proportions, as there were more and more Christians who ‘for the salvation of their souls’ made donations to the Church, or left whole fortunes. That custom became a kind of epidemic during the Middle Ages, seizing the Church a third of the extension of all Europe.
Constantine trusted so much the prelates that he even delegated to them part of the powers of the State.
In the trials, the testimony of a bishop had more strength than that of the ‘distinguished citizens’ (honoratiores) and was unassailable. But there was more, the bishoprics acquired their own jurisdiction in civil cases (audientia episcopalis). That is, anyone who had litigation could go to the bishopric, whose sentence would be ‘holy and venerable’, as decreed by Constantine. The bishop was authorized to sentence even against the express wish of one of the parties, and in addition the ruling was unappealable; the State being limited to the execution of the sentence with the power of the secular arm.
‘Soon the Church became a State within the State’ (Kornemann).

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Civil war Constantine Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 27

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

Partial bust of Licinius


War against Licinius
Two emperors had disappeared; ‘Two men beloved of God’, according to Eusebius, remained. It must have been around 316 (and not 314 as it is said) when Constantine broke hostilities against Licinius in the Balkans, since the highest divinity, according to himself, ‘in his heavenly designs’ had entrusted him ‘the direction of all earthly affairs’.
The battle took place on October 8 next to Cibalae, on the banks of the Save, where Constantine, ‘a luminous beacon of Christianity’ (writes the Catholic Stockmeier) annihilated more than twenty thousand of his enemies.
This was followed, in Philippolis, of one of the most frightful massacres of the time, which did not decide the final result, but in any case Constantine had managed to snatch from his brother-in-law almost all European provinces (the current Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Dalmatia, Macedonia and Greece). Then he made peace with him, although Licinius was no longer a ‘beloved man of God’ but a ‘treacherous enemy’ (according to Eusebius).
Constantine dedicated ten years to rearmament and propaganda in favour of Christianity as in the East, for example in Asia Minor, half of the population was already Christian in some areas. After those ten years he rose again in search of the ‘final solution’.
The ‘saviour and benefactor’ had prepared the decisive battle through a series of political-religious measures; the Christians worked for Constantine and discredited Licinius as an ‘enemy of the civilised world’. In addition, Constantine encircled Licinius with a pact with the Armenians, by then already converted to Christianity (see the next chapter), and prepared the future war as a crusade and ‘war of religion’ (as the Catholic Franzen has said) with its regimental chaplains, its banners with the initials of Jesus Christ as an emblem of the imperial guard, and with a campaign of ‘holy enthusiasm’.
On the other side, Licinius revitalised paganism and persecuted the Church by forbidding synods, dismissing Christians from the army and the civil service, putting obstacles to the public celebration of the cult and promulgating various punishments and destructions. At the same time, Licinius celebrated other cults and oracles and put on his banners the images of various gods ‘against the false foreign god’ and ‘his dishonourable flag’. In reality, what mattered to one and the other was the exclusive power of universal monarchy.
In the summer of 324 two armies of enormous size for the time faced each other: 130,000 men, allegedly, with 200 warships and more than two thousand transport ships by Constantine, and 165,000 men (including a strong Gothic contingent) with 350 warships on the part of Licinius: figures that imply the most ruinous looting of all the resources of the empire.
On July 3, Licinius’ army was defeated on land, and so was his fleet in the Hellespont; On September 18 he lost the last and definitive battle of Chrysopolis (the current Skutari), in front of the Golden Horn, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus.
After the defeat of Chrysopolis, Licinius retained about thirty thousand followers. At the request of Constantia, Constantine swore to respect his life, but a year later and while Licinius was in Thessalonica, where he was conspiring with the Goths according to accounts, he was strangled along with his top general.
In all the cities of the East began the extermination of the most notable supporters of Licinius, with or without judgment. So after ten years of civil war and constant campaigns of aggression on the part of Constantine, this ‘victorious general of all nations’ and ‘leader of the whole world’, a titular he made of himself, remained—and with him, Christianity—as the definitive winner and owner of the Roman Empire.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantine Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 26

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

Bust of Maximinus Daia

 
War against Maximinus II
Maximinus Daia was not a bad ruler. He knew how to manage and protect literature and science, despite being himself of humble origin and scarce culture. His persecutions against Christians, between 311 and 312, were quite moderate.
In February of 313 Constantine renewed in Milan the pact with Licinius, whom he married with his sister Constantia to endorse the agreement. In a constitution, the so-called Edict of Milan, both emperors granted legal status to Christianity, and with special reference to it they proclaimed freedom of worship throughout the empire.
If Maximinus were overthrown tolerance would extend to the eastern part, but all religions were already equated from the legal point of view. Maximinus, who built temples in all the cities and ordered the reconstruction of the ancient temples, and who protected the most notable pagan priests, guessed without difficulty what was coming. During the harsh winter of 312 to 313 he took advantage of an absence of Licinius to invade Syria. After conquering Byzantium and Heraclea, on April 30, 313 he confronted in the place called ‘Campus Serenus’ near Tzirallum an enemy that already had Christian symbols on its flags.
According to Father Lactantius, this already was a true war of religion, a judgement with which Johannes Geffcken coincides when he calls it ‘the first true war of religion in the world’. Licinius, to whom ‘an angel of the Lord’ had appeared in the eve of the day of the battle, made the soldiers take off their helmets to pray; his butchers ‘raised their hands to heaven’, invoked the name of God three times and then, ‘with hearts full of courage, they put on their helmets again and raised their shields’.
It was then that a miracle occurred, when ‘those few forces made a great slaughter’. The religion of love put to paint war stories! Maximinus was able to escape disguised as a slave in the direction of Nicomedia and then continued with his followers to Cilicia, passing the mountains of Taurus. The same year he died in Tarsus, suicidal or sick, while the troops of Licinius were advancing on the city by land and by sea.
The ‘good news’ had triumphed for the first time in all the Roman Empire and the other ‘enemies of God’, according to Eusebius, that is to say, the supporters of Maximinus Daia ‘were exterminated after long torments’, ‘especially those who, to flatter the sovereign, had persecuted our religion blinded by their arrogance’, the holy bishop congratulates himself.
Licinius, as Eduard Schwarz says, ‘documented his sympathy for the Church mainly through a tremendous blood bath, welcomed by Christians with great shouting of joy.’ There the women and children who had survived the performance of other emperors or caesars perished. Among the assassinated were Severianus, son of the emperor Severe (in turn, assassinated in 307), Candidianus, son of the emperor Galerius (that had been entrusted by the dying father to the trusteeship of Licinius); Prisca and Valeria were also murdered, and in the most brutal way, the wife and daughter of Diocletian along with Valeria’s children despite the supplications of the old emperor, who had already abdicated and who died that same year.
The wife of Maximinus Daia was also killed; an eight-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter, Candidianus’ fiancée. And ‘also those who were proud of their kinship with the tyrant suffered the same fate, after great humiliations’, that is, entire families were exterminated and ‘the wicked were wiped from the face of the earth’ (Eusebius). Lactantius also comments that ‘the wicked received truly and justly, with God’s judgment, the payment of their actions’ and the whole world could see their fall and extermination, ‘until there was no trunk or roots left’.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantine Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 25

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

Bust of Maxentius

 
War against Maxentius
To secure the flank, Constantine allied himself first with Licinius, one of the eastern Caesars. He waited for the death of Emperor Galerius and then fell by surprise—against the opinion of his advisers. Naturally, there are many historians who want to apologise to Constantine at this point, as do so with many others.
After arming himself to the teeth, Constantine unleashed a veritable deluge of propaganda against the ‘tyranny’ of the Roman emperor. The Church did not take long to set the tone and to paint Maxentius with all the colours of hell. Actually, Maxentius (emperor from 306 to 312) had suspended the persecutions against Christians, endorsed the edict of Galerius by which he had granted, in 311, the freedom of Christians under some conditions; and made it comply scrupulously by going, in Rome and in Africa, even beyond what the edict strictly required.
It would not be historic, then, to present the campaign of Constantine against Maxentius as a crusade, undertaken to rid the Church of the yoke of a fanatical tyrant. And although not even Constantine could claim that his rival had discriminated against Christians, and although Christian sources testify to the tolerance of Maxentius, the clergy soon turned that aggression into a kind of war of religion and Maxentius into a real monster.
The first to manipulate the story was Eusebius, who fails to specify his accusations about ‘the crimes that this man used to subdue his vassals of Rome through the rule of violence’. This fictitious image of an ‘impious tyrant’ was spread by the Christians as soon as the emperor fell, whose biography they falsified entirely. The sources do not cite a single concrete example of the cruelty that has been imputed to him.
However, the popularity that Maxentius justifiably enjoyed among the Roman people, vanished when food was lacking as Africa was lost and shortly after Spain. On the contrary, in the Constantinian aggression, Christians wanted to see the action of ‘God’ and even that of the ‘celestial hosts’.
On October 28 Constantine appeared at Ponte Milvio, today called Ponte Molle. Maxentius, and this is a subject that has been much discussed among historians, abandoned the protection of the walls and fought in the open field with the Tiber behind him. In addition, the bulk of his army fought with little ardour, except for the Praetorians, who did fight without giving ground until the last man fell. Maxentius was drowned in the river along with a good number of his soldiers, ‘fulfilling thus the divine prophecy’ (Eusebius). Or as Lactantius says: ‘The hand of God weighed on the battlefield.’
To this victory of Constantine, celebrated by all historians of the Church as the birth of the Christian empire, the Germanic troops contributed, especially the so-called auxilium (a contingent of mercenaries) of the cornuti (because they wore helmets with horns, whose symbol introduced the emperor, as a sign of gratitude, on the shield of the Roman armies).
In Rome, they took Maxentius out of the mud, cut off his head, which was stoned and covered with excrement during the triumphal walk and then taken to Africa. Finally, the son of the vanquished and all his political supporters were slain, and the whole family of Maxentius exterminated.
On October 29, the winner got by without the pagan sacrifice in honour of the Capitoline Jupiter and the Christian clergy was favoured immediately after the battle. In fact, there were more Christians in Italy and in Africa than in Gaul. In Rome, the Senate would build, in honour of Constantine, the triumphal arch that we can still see next to the Colosseum.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantine Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Revilo Oliver

Kriminalgeschichte, 24

Editor’s note: According to Ramzpaul’s most recent video, about 70-80 percent of white nationalists are Christians. If true that explains why my donations have dramatically dropped in the last months. But even as an alienated priest of the 14 words I’ll continue to translate passages from Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.
Why I do this? Just pay extra attention to the quoted words of Revilo Oliver in my recent ‘Darwin’s exterminationism’: ‘how suddenly the terminal symptoms of Christianity appeared, like the symptoms of the tertiary stage of syphilis, and destroyed our race’s mentality and vital instincts…’ (for due context, see also ‘The Red Giant’).
In previous instalments of Deschner’s first volume the subject was the ethos of the Christians before they reached control of the Roman Empire. Let’s now see how they behaved after controlling it. White nationalists may know the tamed form of Christianity that founded the US but ignore that, in Old World history, in any country over which Christianity held sway it murdered and tortured to the exact extent of its power.
 

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Chapter 5 – St. Constantine: The First Christian Emperor, ‘Symbol of Seventeen Centuries of Ecclesiastical History’

‘In all the wars he undertook and captained he achieved brilliant victories’. —St. Augustine, Father of the Church
‘Of all the Roman emperors, he alone honoured God, the Most High, with extraordinary devotion; he alone boldly announced the doctrine of Christ; he alone exalted his Church like no other since there is human memory; he alone put an end to the errors of polytheism and abolished all kinds of worship of idols’. —Eusebius of Caesarea, Bishop
‘Constantine was a Christian. He who works this way, and above all in a world that was still largely pagan, must be a Christian at heart and not only according to external demonstrations’. —Kurt Aland, theologian
‘Christendom always had before its eyes, as a luminous example, the figure of Constantine the Great’. —Peter Stockmeier, theologian
‘His spiritual postures were also those of a true believer’. —Karl Baus, theologian
‘That monster Constantine… This hypocritical and cold executioner who slaughtered his son, strangled his wife, murdered his father and his brother-in-law, and kept in his court a bunch of bloodthirsty and untamed priests…’ —Percy Bysshe Shelley

 
The terror of the Rhine
On July 25, 306, when Constantius I Chlorus died in Eboracum, present-day York (England) after a victory over the Picts, the troops appointed the young Constantine without delay. But Galerius, who tactically and formally remained as the first Augustus within the system of the Tetrarchy, only wanted to recognise Constantine as caesar.[1] That proclamation [Augustus status] had been an illegal act that broke the order of the second Tetrarchy.
The restoration of the holy religion was the first of his decrees. Once he became the owner of Britain and Gaul, in 310 he undertook the sacking of Spain, presumably to deprive Rome from the supply of Iberian cereals, and to expose Maxentius to a hungry population. But what Constantine most cultivated were the border wars, which made him the terror of all the Rhine.
His foreign policy ‘was characterized from the outset by its aggressiveness, as he lead his campaigns in counter-attacks and deep penetrations in enemy territory’ (Stallknecht). In 306 and 310 he decimated the Bructeri, stole their cattle, burned their villages and threw the prisoners into the circus to be pasture for wild beasts.
‘Of the prisoners, those who were not worth soldiers for not being reliable, nor for slaves for being too fierce, he threw all to the circus and were so many, that fatigued even the wild beasts’. The young emperor drowned in blood any attempt of rebellion; in 311 and 313 he crushed the Alemanni who had been greatly punished by his father, as well as the Franks, whose kings Ascaric and Merogaisus were destroyed by hungry bears, for general edification. The idolatrous Franks respected the life of the prisoners of war. But Constantine, after casting his victims (of the 71 well-known amphitheatres of antiquity, the Trier was tenth in importance, with 20,000 seats) and seeing the acceptance of the spectacle, decided to make it a permanent institution.
While the young ruler thus made life easier for the inhabitants of Trier, there were in the Roman Empire three other emperors: Maxentius in the West, who had authority over Italy and Africa; Maximinus Daia in the East, whose territory included the non-European part of the empire (all the provinces south of the Taurus mountain range and also Egypt), as well as Licinius, owner of the Danubian regions.
The fact that there were so many emperors seemed intolerable to Constantine, and he proposed to dismantle the system of the Tetrarchy instituted by Diocletian to consolidate that gigantic empire. So it began the destruction of the established ‘order’ by one warlike campaign after another, successively eliminating his rivals and establishing an ever-stronger bond between the empire and the Christian Church. Such a Constantinian ‘revolution’ was certainly a turning point in the history of Christianity, and it also brought about the rise of a new ruling class, the Christian clergy, while maintaining the old relations based on war and exploitation. It has been called ‘the beginning of the world metaphysical age’ (Thiess).
 
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[1] Note of the Ed.: I am writing ‘caesar’ with small c to differentiate the title from ‘Augustus’. The difference between the caesars and the all-powerful Augustus will be explained in future instalments of the novel Julian.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Christendom Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Warm from the press

The late Karlheinz Deschner was the mature scholar. He spent decades of his life preparing his ambitious Criminal History of Christianity, published in ten volumes beginning in 1986, with the final volume appearing in 2013. He started to write Criminal History at 62 and finished it at 89.
He who doesn’t want to approach the subject in German can order a copy of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, a book by Catherine Nixey recently released by Macmillan.
In his book review of The Darkening Age Peter Thonemann writes: ‘Statues were smashed, temples toppled and manuscripts burnt, as the early Christians tried to wipe out all traces of classical civilisation…’

What happened in the century we were born—the perpetration of the Hellstorm Holocaust on Germans and then the (((chutzpah))) of blaming the victims for the perpetration of an holocaust!—has a long history. A new constellation of authors are providing a powerful corrective to our view of early Christians persecuted by evil pagans, showing that in fact it triumphed through wholesale barbarity.