ABSTRACT

Light bends. Rays ignited in a sun spill from their course. They fall on objects, bounce, diffuse, and concentrate, until finally the lens of an eye collects them into focus and they are seen. When crystalline ice is suspended in air light strikes obliquely, it may cross the sky with a halo. Many cultures would identify a miracle: too splendid for human sentiment to want to assign to happenstance, too vast to corral within workaday sequences of causation. Even if the physics is understood, why should conditions align so perfectly? Weiss has made a persuasive case, confirming the suggestion more arbitrarily advanced before by Gwatkin and Jones, that just such a sight arrested Constantine once in the earlier years of his reign.1 The habit of taking divine messages from meteorology readily made it seem portentous. Constantine and his contemporaries read significances they were able to deem appropriate. Disparate perspectives focused their views of the heavens and of contemporary politics. Refractions converged. They generated Constantine’s charisma in no less multiply contingent and, in its way, miraculous a fashion than the physics of the celestial blazon itself.