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Labarum
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For the article about the "PX" symbol see Chi Rho
The Labarum was a typographic ligature formed from Chi (?) and Rho (?), which had particular symbolic significance to the Romans, Greeks, and to the Christians of Late Antiquity in general.
It originated as a marginal note added to oracular texts by Greek scribes, to mark a particularly valuable or relevant passage; the combined letters Chi and Rho standing for chreston, meaning good.
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For the article about the "PX" symbol see Chi Rho
The Labarum was a typographic ligature formed from Chi (?) and Rho (?), which had particular symbolic significance to the Romans, Greeks, and to the Christians of Late Antiquity in general.
It originated as a marginal note added to oracular texts by Greek scribes, to mark a particularly valuable or relevant passage; the combined letters Chi and Rho standing for chreston, meaning good. It was later used on the 3rd Century BC coinage of Ptolemy III Euergetes (between an eagle's feet), that of the 3rd century AD Roman Emporer Decius, and as a vexillum (military standard) by Constantine I and several subsequent emporers. Christians also used the symbol to represent the first two Greek letters of the word Christ (or ???st??).
Despite the Imperial use of the symbol by Decius, who heavily persecuted Christians, and earlier pre-Christian usages, later Christian writers argued that Constantine used the symbol to represent his Christian allegiance. Constantine's actual religious affiliation is disputed, and his reasons for using the symbol could equally be based on the scribal meaning of auspicious, or deliberately choosing a symbol with a meaning ambiguous between the two.
The etymology of the word labarum is unclear; it is perhaps to be derived from Latin /labare/ 'to totter, to waver' (in the sense of the "waving" of a flag in the breeze).
Christian accounts of Constantine's adoption of the Chi-Rho
According to Lactantius, a historian of North African origin saved from poverty under the patronage of Constantine ? as tutor to his son Crispus, who was writing in Latin, Constantine had dreamt of being ordered to put a "heavenly divine symbol" (Latin: coeleste signum dei) on the shield of his soldiers. The description of the actual symbol chosen by Costantine the next morning, as reported by Lactantius, is not very clear: it closely resembles a Chi Rho or a staurogram, a similar christian symbol. That very day Costantine army fought the forces of Maxentius and won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312), outside Rome.
Writing in Greek, Eusebius of Caesarea (died in 339), the bishop who wrote the first surviving general history of the early Christian churches, gave two different accounts of the events. In his church history, written shortly after the battle, when Eusebius didn't yet have any contact with Constantine, he doesn't mention any dream or vision, but compares the defeat of Maxentius (drowned in the Tiber) to that of the biblical pharaoh and credits Constantine victory to divine protection.
In a memoir of the emperor that Eusebius wrote after Constantine's death (On the Life of Constantine, ca 337-339), a miraculous appearance came in Gaul long before the Milvian Bridge battle. In this later version, the emperor had been pondering the misfortunes that befall commanders that invoke the help of many different gods, and decided to seek divine aid in the forthcoming battle from the One God. At noon Constantine saw a cross of light imposed over the sun. Attached to it, in Greek characters, was the saying "???t? ???a!" . Not only Constantine, but the whole army saw the miracle. That night Christ appeared to the emperor in a dream and told him to make a replica of the sign he had seen in the sky, which would be a sure defense in battle.
Eusebius wrote in the Vita that Constantine himself had told him this story "and confirmed it with oaths," late in life "when I was deemed worthy of his acquaintance and company." "Indeed," says Eusebius, "had anyone else told this story, it would not have been easy to accept it." As Constantine during his last few years enjoyed be considered in direct contact with God , it is likely that the story should be credited to Constantine, rather than to Eusebius.
Eusebius' description of the Labarum
"A Description of the Standard of the Cross, which the Romans now call the Labarum."
"Now it was made in the following manner. A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it. On the top of the whole was fixed a wreath of gold and precious stones; and within this, the symbol of the Saviour’s name, two letters indicating the name of Christ by means of its initial characters, the letter P being intersected by X in its centre: and these letters the emperor was in the habit of wearing on his helmet at a later period. From the cross-bar of the spear was suspended a cloth, a royal piece, covered with a profuse embroidery of most brilliant precious stones; and which, being also richly interlaced with gold, presented an indescribable degree of beauty to the beholder. This banner was of a square form, and the upright staff, whose lower section was of great length, of the pious emperor and his children on its upper part, beneath the trophy of the cross, and immediately above the embroidered banner."
"The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his armies."
Modern interpretations of Constantine's vision
Constantine's modern biographer, Ramsay MacMullen, is one who finds Constantine dream, as reported by Eusebius, not easy to accept: "If the sky writing was witnessed by 40,000 men, the true miracle lies in their unbroken silence about it".
There are numerous modern astronomical and astrological theories that defend Eusebius' account as possible. In 1948 Fritz Heiland, of the Zeiss planetarium at Jena, published his astronomical interpretation of Constantine's vision, that the fall of the year 312 was attended by an unusual spectacle: the syzygy or close alignment of three bright planets, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, in the evening sky above the southwest horizon, positioned along a line within about 20 degrees of each other on the border of Capricorn and Sagittarius. Heiland suggests that Constantine overcame the psychological impact on his army, of the ill pagan content of the astrological omen that associated syzygies with bad outcomes, by appropriating it to fashion a Christian token of victory in the form of the labarum.
The Swedish geologist Jens Ormo and co-authors suggest that the account may have had its origins in Constantine's witnessing the daylight effects of a meteorite's descent through earth's atmosphere, of which the impact he believes resulted in the Sirente crater situated in Sirente-Velino Regional Park, Abruzzo, Italy
Celestial chi
Though modern representations of the chi-rho sign represent the two lines crossing at ninety degree angles, the early examples of the Chi-Rho cross at an angle that is more vividly representative of the chi formed by the solar ecliptic path and the celestial equator. This image is most familiar in Plato's Timaeus, where it is explained that the two bands which form the world soul (anima mundi) cross each other like the letter chi. Not only did the two legs of the chi remind early Christians of the Cross, "it reminded them of the mystery of the pre-existent Christ, the Logos Theou, the Word of God, who extended himself through all things in order to establish peace and harmony in the universe," in Robert Grigg's words. Hugo Rahner summarized the significance:
- "The two great circles of the heavens, the equator and the ecliptic, which, by intersecting each other form a sort of recumbent chi and about which the whole dome of the starry heavens swings in a wondrous rhythm, became for the Christian eye a heavenly cross." Of Plato's image in Timaeus, Justin Martyr, the Christian apologist writing in the second century, found a prefiguration of the Cross, and an early testimony may be the phrase in Didache, "sign of extension in heaven" (semeion ekpetaseosen ourano).
Iconographic career under Constantine
Among a number of standards depicted on the Arch of Constantine, which was erected, largely with fragments from older monuments, just three years after the battle, the labarum does not appear. A grand opportunity for just the kind of political propaganda that the Arch otherwise was expressly built to present, was missed, if Eusebius' oath-confirmed account can be trusted, although it can be argued that, in the early years after the battle, the emperor still had not decided to give clear public support to Christianity, whether for lack of personal faith or in fear of religious friction. The arches' inscription does say that the Emperor had saved the res publica INSTINCTV DIVINITATIS MENTIS MAGNITVDINE ("by greatness of mind and by instinct [or impulse] of divinity"). As with his predecessors, the sun symbol - interpreted as Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun) or also as Apollo or Mithras — is inscribed on his coinage, but in 325 and thereafter the coinage ceases to be explicitly pagan, and Sol Invictus disappears. In his Historia Ecclesiae Eusebius further reports that, after his victorious entry into Rome, Constantine had a statue of himself erected, "holding the sign of the Savior [the cross] in his right hand." There are no other reports to confirm such a monument.
Whether Constantine I was the first Christian emperor supporting during his rule a peaceful transition to Christianity or an undecided pagan believer until middle age, strongly influenced in his political-religious decisions by his Christian mother St. Helena is still in dispute among historians.
As for the Labarum itself, there is little evidence for its use before 317. In the course of Constantine's second war against Licinius, in 324, the latter developed a superstitious dread of Constantine's standard. During the attack of Constantine's troops at the Battle of Adrianople the guard of the Labarum standard were directed to move it to any part of the field where his soldiers seemed to be faltering. The appearance of this talismanic object appeared to embolden Constantine's troops and dismay those of Licinius. At the final battle of the war, the Battle of Chrysopolis, Licinius, though prominently displaying the images of Rome's pagan pantheon on his own battle line, forbade his troops from actively attacking the Labarum, or even looking at it directly.
The usurper Magnentius appears to have been the first to use the Chi-Rho monogram flanked by Alpha and Omega, on the reverse of some coins minted in 353. In Roman Britannia, a tesselated mosaic pavement was uncovered at Hinton St Mary, Dorset, in 1963:. On stylistic grounds it is dated to the fourth century; its central roundel represents a beardless male head and bust draped in a pallium in front of the Chi-Rho symbol, flanked by pomegranates, symbols of eternal life.
"Labarum" is also used for any ecclesiastical banner, such as those carried around in processions as well as under the name "the holy lavaro" for the set of early national Greek flags, blessed by the Greek Orthodox Church, under which the Greeks united, from the commencement and throughout the Greek Revolution (1821) against the Ottoman Empire, which was occupying Greece at the time.
It also gives the name (Labaro) to a suburb of Rome adjacent to Prima Porta, one of the sites where the appearance of this symbol is placed.
See also
Further reading
- Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins ((Princeton University Press) 1968:165ff
- Grant, Michael (1993), The Emperor Constantine, London. ISBN 0-75380-5286
- R. Grosse, "Labarum", Realencyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft vol. 12, pt 1(Stuttgart) 1924:240-42.
- H. Grégoire, "L'étymologie de 'Labarum'" Byzantion 4 (1929:477-82).
- A. Lipinsky, "Labarum" Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie 3 (Rome:1970)
- Odahl, C.M., (2004) Constantine and the Christian Empire, Routledge 2004. ISBN 0415174856
- Smith, J.H., (1971) Constantine the Great, Hamilton, ISBN 0684123916
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