it happened on the way to the forum: christogram or eastern-pivot

Born into the power-sharing arrangement that Diocletian established and the attendant civil wars that erupted across the Empire whenever one leader sought to recall the devolved governance, which even Diocletian witnessed in his retirement in Dalmatia—his careful planning collapsing despite his gracious bowing-out—though refusing entries to return and put an end to the in-fighting and poisonous ambition for more than a good regional share of the world, Constantine the Great, fore-father of the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires and revered as a saint in the Eastern tradition is a character of indubitable significance but forever escaping true comprehension.
Stripping away every other accomp- lishment and monument and joining him at the beginnings of his career, Constantine was a regional leader, an Augustus with his power-base centred in Trier. Dissatisfied only holding imperium over the Germania and Gaul, Constantine also tried to consolidate his holdings, launching offensives against his imperial colleagues. Whether his campaigns were carefully calculated in the name of self-interest or as a defender of the faith is a matter of much debate and ultimately the answer is something as private and inaccessible as belief and credulity. Perhaps recognising the political capital vested within the growing Christian population was more valuable that simply using these vaguely treasonous up-standing citizens as convenient scapegoats or perhaps out of genuine concern to stop the persecutions, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan that legitimised Christianity and banned their mistreatment—which effectively undid the terror visited on the community by Diocletian—the torture, the marginalising, the confiscation of property.
Constantine also famously raised campaigns against these pretenders but not exactly under the ægis of the Cross and rather by a vision communicated to him to him that his troops ought to bear the sign Chi-Rho (the Greek ligature of the letters Χ and Ρ, ☧, which appeared as marginalia short-hand and the equivalent of Latin NB, nota bene—good or important, long before it was understood as a monogram of Jesus), who were proponents for the return of Christian oppression. Whether their advocacy was rooted in slighted patrons, pagans that were remiss to have their abated riches taken back, or out of genuine devotion to the elder pantheon, Constantine's co-emperors were felled. Either out of a preponderance of caution or a demurring sense of being non-committal, however, the Triumphal Arch erected to immoralise his conquests bore no mention of the High God of the Christians and there was little talk of Christ and God, yet. Constantine’s sainted mother, Helen, was dispatched on a long good-will tour, making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a large entourage and collecting a lot of relics along the way. Mother and son commissioned the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the original St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, on the spot where the apostle was martyred. Despite his building initiatives which included many public facilities and infrastructure projects aside from the churches, Constantine remained rather silent on the matter of faith and proselytising but was always troubled by the squabbling within the hierarchy of the emerging Church.
Seemingly wanting to present a united front rather than risk a tradition that would plunge just as easily into sectarianism, Constantine began to directly engage doctrinal controversies. First, there was emergent issue of what to do about the Christians who had been pragmatic during the purges and obliged by making sacrifices to the pagan gods in order to escape punishment, and then there was the matter of the Arian schism (named for the priest, Arius of Alexandria) concerning the nature of Christ—whether He, as begotten, could still be considered divine or whether the Trinity was just different aspects of the self-same God. Constantine seemed to think that this was a rather petty question and certainly not worth excommunication and disunity. To let the opposing schools of thought finally hash out their differences, Constantine called together a meeting of the bishops and although the winning side and compromised reached was not exactly the outcome that the Emperor was backing—and Constantine could of course been more dictatorial as Pontifex Maximus had he wanted and just decided matters for himself—he respected the group’s decision. A bit naïve about Church politics and the volatility of opposing camps in matters of faith with the Arianists and non-Arianists certainty did not feeling that their squabble was trivial, Constantine was quite nonplussed that once debate was over, the two sides did not come together and all disagreements did not suddenly evaporate. So to try to settle matters once and for all, the Emperor called for a bigger council that represented a much broader swath of the faithful and convened the first Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, with bishops from all across the known world. Over the weeks, the nature of the Son of God was fixed—though as an even more confusing answer than the question posed, the calculus for determining the dates of moveable feasts like Eastertide, who was eligible for baptisms, and a host of other questions. With the matter appearing tidily resolved, Constantine could embark on other matters of state, including creating for himself a new capital. The City of Rome itself know abandoned as a sort centre emeritus, and all other metropolitan candidates, like Milan or Trier or Salona, fell short in one way or another. Constantine therefore decided to build up a fishing village on the Bosporus, styling it New Rome.
That name never caught on and the great capital was referred to as Constantinople (the city of Constantine) and ultimately İstanbul, derived from the accusative case of “the City.” Constantine did some momentous things during a career that spanned three decades and founding institutions that would go on shaping the world forever more, but the genuineness of his belief, and Whom exactly was his champion, remains mysterious. His ambitions and general deportment—including executing his wife and son for the sake of inheritance—was not very Christian, plus after all those efforts at reform and elevating the religion, Constantine himself was seemingly a death-bed convert, albeit that it was an efficient use of a baptismal since it is cumulative and the dying Emperor did not get the chance to commit any more egregious acts afterwards. Some blame the spread of Christianity for the downfall of the Empire and by extension, civilisation, and say the Church only saved the most Byzantine and corruptible elements of Roman bureaucracy. The great Emperor also had his failings, including monetary reform that pared away inflation but only benefited the wealthy and created class disparity with little mobility, poor succession-planning that led to the resumption of the civil wars that engulfed the Empire, a rift in the Church that only expanded in manifold ways, and a senseless war with Persia—ostensibly to protect the Christian population of Armenia, that benefited no one as one of his last official acts. Whatever the fundamental motivations—and this is an important question, the so-called Donation of Constantine is all around us to this day.

leaps and bounds

Æon Magazine shares an interesting thought on robotics and mobility, pondering whether advances in controlling servos and springs might not lead to changes in human travel, making wheels and roadways obsolete. I personally would very much to don some exoskeleton that would enable me to run and work—or just be seated while a carriage-and-four negotiates the traffic and natural landscape while the roads are reclaimed by Nature. What do you think? Will it be a shock to future generations that humans were allowed to pilot wheeled-vehicles on endless stretches of highways?

urban-outline or shadowboxing

In a piece entitled The Civic Minimum BLDGBlog features the photographic safari of Chris Clarke through a haunting nook of a suburb on the edges of London.

This bleak, mock landscape was commissioned by the Ministry of Defense for paramilitary and police training for urban warfare—and stands strangely deserted outside of exercises. The course, which contains all of the idylls that idealistic city-planners can summon up—with all the traditional necessities and a small town, Main Street/High Street look that is increasingly crowded out by property-management agents—makes me think of those exterior-shots for a sitcom household or the flats of Wild West towns built up by Hollywood, but I cannot image that peopled this training-ground would lose its eerie aura. How effective are such scenarios when zoning and economics no longer favour such models?

two-bit, four-bit

The winning design team for the upcoming series of Norway's paper currency features pixelated reflections on the observe of the natural wonders that appear on the face of kroner. It strikes me that the Nordic countries have gone mostly cashless—including a mechanism to donate electronically to the basket as it is passed down the pews at church—and successfully branding each bill with a bar-code (to prevent counterfeiting and to usher in a form of electronic transaction) accessible to any retailer and financial institution without the associated fear of knowing the chain of possession. I do rather like the designs and have no issue with reducing lag-time, however, being old-fashioned, I like to sequester my allowance and have a few coins left over to plonk into savings myself.

i'm fantastic, made of plastic

Over death threats against the artist, an exhibit entitled Barbie: Plastic Religion to be held in Buenas Ares was called-off. The packaged dolls do not come across to me as a lampoon or necessarily sacrilegious and rather than being aimed as what we hold sacred but rather offers a much more uncomfortable critique of the worshipful, whom can be selective about what their icons, avatars stand for and can pick and choose from their several virtues. The majority of the figures have a Catholic theme, with Joan of Arc and quite a few Marian apparitions—however there is also Buddha Ken and Staci as Kali the Destroyer.

czy wiesz?

Later this month, a monument (EN/DE) will be dedicated in Poland to the collaborative philosophy behind the online lexicon Wikipedia. The sculpture will be unveiled in Słubice on a university campus, and was commissioned after a suggestion by one of the professors. It is fitting that the first tribute to the pervasive and unfettered resource be raised up here, as the city borders Germany, just across the Oder River from Frankfurt, and these two populations are among the most avid and active contributors to Wikipedia in Europe.

b is for bruxelles—that's good enough for me

Philosopher Philippe van Parijs presents a rather brilliant lesson in the post-war history and civics that led—indecisively, to Brussels (Brussel, Bruxelles) becoming if not the de facto but customary capital of the European Union. Though the Belgian capital city had the support of the Western European powers, the nation was itself unwilling to accept that yoke, rallying for its own domestic seat of industry, the ancient town of Liège, as the union was constituted back in 1952 was focused on the efficient use of Europe's raw materials and iron and coal resources for rebuilding and remediation.
After much consternation, the political organs of the West became the journeyman body-politic that has endured to the present day, the court migrating from Strasbourg (with sufficient office space) to Luxembourg (an alternative to Paris, which only the French viewed as a natural consequence and the obvious choice), and ultimately to Belgium, too, and points further depending on its charge. It is strange how natural endowments became the stuff of toy kingdoms and the restoration of old boundaries. Liège never stood as a candidate as the Walloon population rejected the return of their exiled monarch, while the rest of Belgium was for it. Support evaporated as violence arose in Belgium, in response to the restoration of the king. In the turmoil, however, when no decision could reached, Belgium due to alphabetical order, gained order of precedence: Aachen was disqualified out of hand as German, as was Amsterdam as too much of a logistically accomodating challenge, as were others in the founding coalition of six. Brussels, realising that this indecision was likely to continue as commission powers expanded, acquired more and more viable space for the functionaries to meet, ultimately becoming the winter-quarters of this traveling greatest show on Earth, though the placement remains unofficial.