This was not the end of the mischief, however. Constantine also stripped the doors and roofs off temples throughout the empire. He had other uses for the fine metal. So too with cult statues plated with gold. He sent several members of his inner circle on a destructive campaign “to every province” of his reign, to go “city by city, country by country” and order “the consecrated officials themselves to bring out their gods with much mockery and contempt from their dark recesses into daylight.” They then had the gold plate stripped off and melted down for other uses. After denuding the statues, they left the “superfluous and useless” remnants to “the superstitious to keep as a souvenir of their shame” (Life of Constantine 3.54).
How the tide had turned. Now it was not the Christians who were superstitious; it was the pagans. It was not the Christians who embraced a religion open to public mockery; it was the pagans. It was not the Christians who suffered from the imperially sponsored violence; it was the pagans. The tide would continue to turn against the pagans in years to come, and it would never turn back, except for one brief moment under the reign of the emperor Julian.
Constantine thus built his city and adorned it with the spoils of the pagan empire. It was a city built to last. It remained the capital of Christendom for over a millennium, until the assault of the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
CONSTANTINE AS AN ADVOCATE FOR THE FAITH
There should no longer be any doubt about the sincerity of Constantine’s devotion to the god of the Christians, despite the incredulity of some scholars over the years.11 Of course, it is technically possible that it was all a front. But his deep and personal commitment to Christian causes, if nothing else, should lay all suspicions to rest. As should his own words, found repeatedly throughout the sources, as in a letter he sent to those living in Palestine: “Indeed my whole soul and whatever breath I draw, and whatever goes on in the depths of the mind, that, I am firmly convinced, is owed by us wholly to the greatest God” (Life of Constantine 2.29).
Not only did Constantine take a vital interest in internal Christian affairs; he also took considerable steps to improve the lot of the church and the clergy who ran it. Most of the staffing and funding of ancient urban societies came from local aristocracies, not through high taxes but through enormous demands placed on their time, energy, and resources. Public office was an oft-noted burden for the wealthy, involving considerable outlays of cash—not just expected but demanded—for public buildings and public services. These official positions did provide real status for its occupants, but the large outlays of personal resources could obviously have been put to other, more personal uses.
Constantine issued legislation that absolved Christian clergy—who by this time tended to be among the local aristocracies—from having to serve in civic capacities, relieving them of such duties and financial obligations. Moreover, he provided them with extensive funds out of the imperial treasury for use in their congregations. Most famously, Constantine himself arranged for the building of major churches throughout his empire, including the Lateran in Rome.
In some instances he had these churches constructed on sites that had previously boasted famous and important pagan shrines. That required, of course, the destruction of temples. As Eusebius reports with approbation in his Life of Constantine, Constantine took shrines that pagan priests had “splendidly adorned” and stripped them bare, so that he “completely destroyed” temples that had been “most highly prized by the superstitious” (Life of Constantine 3.1).
It has sometimes been thought, based on this passage, that Constantine went on an empire-wide rampage, but Eusebius can specify only five sites that suffered this fate, three of them involving the worship of Aphrodite, one connected with the famous opponent of Jesus, Apollonius of Tyana, and another on the sacred site of Mamre, a place that was to be revered because it was connected with the Jewish patriarch Abraham in the Old Testament (see Genesis 18). One of the temples of Aphrodite was also located on holy ground: the place of Jesus’s passion. The temples of Aphrodite were suspected as places of sacred prostitution, providing Constantine all the excuse he needed to send in the wrecking crews. Thus, Constantine may have had good reasons for these particular destructions. They do not, however, indicate a trend. As one recent scholar has observed, “There is no reason to generalize from these cases to an empire-wide policy of temple destruction.”12 Still, once more we see a foreshadowing of things to come.
The religious zeal behind these demolition and building projects can be seen in Eusebius’s account of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. It is sometimes thought that Constantine’s mother, Helena, herself very Christian by this time, instigated the building of the church, but that is almost certainly not the case. Eusebius indicates that Constantine himself “decided that he ought to make universally famous and revered the most blessed site in Jerusalem of the Savior’s resurrection” (Life of Constantine 3.25). Unfortunately, there was already a shrine on the spot. And not just any shrine, but an unholy, vile, pagan shrine built by “wicked men” who had been driven by demons to cover over the place where Jesus had been buried. They had brought in dirt from elsewhere and “covered up the whole place, then levelled it, paved it, and so hid the divine cave somewhere down beneath a great quantity of soil.” Above it, they had built a terrible “tomb” of their own for “dead idols.” It was a “gloomy sanctuary to the impure demon of Aphrodite.” There they “offered foul sacrifices . . . upon defiled and polluted altars.” Constantine’s solution? A demolition and refurbishing of the site. The shrine was torn down and destroyed, the place dug up, and the cave where Jesus had been buried uncovered. On the spot Constantine had built a magnificent structure in honor of the savior, at the site still visited by millions of pilgrims and tourists to this day.
Helena is not said to have had any hand in the affair. But she was active as a Christian ambassador in other ways. She is indeed most famous for her pious journey as a septuagenarian to the Holy Land, back in the days when it had never occurred to the faithful of Christendom to “walk where Jesus walked.” But she did so, and brought with her funding from the imperial treasury to recapture the place for Christ.13 It is not true that Helena claimed to have discovered the wood of the True Cross. That is the stuff of later legend. Eusebius, who discusses key events of her visit, says nothing of the sort. But Helena did choose two auspicious sites for special church buildings: one, the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, where Jesus was believed to have been born; the other, the Church of the Ascension, just outside Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, the site of his being taken up into heaven after his resurrection. In these projects, needless to say, Helena had the full backing of her avid Christian son.
In contrast to those scholars who have argued that if Constantine were a “real” Christian he would have been even more avid, some modern experts have argued that Constantine was so thoroughly committed to the Christian cause that his ultimate goal was to convert the entire empire.14 However, that is almost certainly not the case. Even if he himself was firmly committed to the Christian god, Constantine had imperial reasons for not forcing the issue or compelling his subjects. He had seen well enough what would come of coercion. He had lived through the Great Persecution, observing it up close as a member of the courts of both Diocletian and Galerius. It did not work. Constantine obviously was heavy-handed when he felt a need to be, as with the bishops at Nicaea. He was not, however, inclined to compel the religious preferences, or even practices, of his predominantly pagan empire.15
In the next chapter we will see that some of Constantine’s successors did not share his commitment to tolerance: by the end of the fourth century serious legislation issued from the imperial throne banning pagan practices altogether on pain of severe judicial penalty. One particularly thorny historical question involves Constantine’s tolerance of traditional cultic practices, or his lack of it. Did he try to shut down pagan religious activities by criminalizing animal sacrifice? There is no doubt about
his personal views. He despised animal sacrifice: the blood, the gore, the stench, and, in fact, the entire practice. He repeatedly said so. The historical issue is whether this is one instance in which he forced his views on all others by disallowing sacrifice throughout his empire.16
Some prominent experts have claimed he did, and in support they can cite some important evidence. For one thing, this is explicitly what his biographer Eusebius states. According to the Life of Constantine, after defeating Licinius in 324 CE, Constantine passed a law that “restricted the pollutions of idolatry which had for a long time been practiced in every city and country district, so that no one should presume to set up cult objects, or practice divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all” (Life of Constantine 2.45). Later Eusebius indicates again that by imperial injunction “for all those under Roman rule, both civilian and military, access was universally blocked to every form of idolatry, and every form of sacrifice banned.” Moreover, “in successive laws and ordinances he prohibited everyone from sacrificing to idols, from practicing divination, and from having cult-figures erected” (Life of Constantine 4.23, 25).
One cannot underestimate how significant such legislation would be. If the rates of growth and figures provided in chapter 6 are relatively correct, by 325 CE there would have been something like five million Christians in the empire. If there were also some four million Jews, we might round up and say that of the sixty million inhabitants of the empire, fifty million were still pagans practicing their traditional cults. Did Constantine bring the worship of five-sixths of his empire to a crashing halt? If so, would other sources have failed to mention some such little incident?
One other reference does seem to confirm the act. It comes in a law passed in 341 CE, four years after Constantine’s death, by his emperor son Constantius, who clearly did indeed attempt to abolish pagan sacrificial practices. Here is what the law said, according to the later compilation of legal injunctions made early in the fifth century known as the Theodosian Code:
Superstition shall cease; the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished. For if anyone in violation of the law of the sainted Emperor, Our Father, and in violation of this command of Our Clemency, should dare to perform sacrifices, he shall suffer the infliction of a suitable punishment and the effect of an immediate sentence. (Theodosian Code 16.10.2)17
We have already seen that it was far easier in the Roman Empire to issue legislation than to enforce it, and the enforcement even of this explicit condemnation of pagan sacrifice appears to have been lax indeed—virtually nonexistent. It was another fifty years—and millions more Christian conversions later—before anti-pagan legislation took any serious hold. But for our purposes, the important point is that Constantius II in 341 CE indicates that his father had already ordered a cessation of sacrifice. That coincides with what Eusebius claimed just two years earlier in the publication of his Life of Constantine. Are these two Christian sources, one an imperial biographer and the other an actual emperor, to be trusted?
It has proved to be one of the most hotly debated issues of Constantine’s religious activities. On one hand this is because there is no hard evidence of any such law. Eusebius, who claims it existed, never cites it, either in his Life of Constantine or in his Church History, in both of which he was more than a little eager to celebrate the triumph of the church over the evils of paganism, and especially to trumpet the victories of the faith over the powers of darkness achieved by the emperor Constantine. Why would he not cite the actual law if he had something to cite?
Moreover, there is no such law in the Theodosian Code. This was a collection of legislation made by legal scholars under the reign of Theodosius II, published in 438 CE. It is a very large book containing laws passed by emperors starting with Constantine himself in 313 CE and continuing for the next 125 years. The laws are arranged topically and represent, to be sure, only a selection of legislation: the compilers had to choose what to include and what not to. But the final book of the code is devoted to important laws connected with religion—almost exclusively related in one way or another to Christianity, of course—and there is a section of the book that focuses on legislation against pagan practices. No law of Constantine is cited forbidding sacrifice.
The case against such legislation is even stronger than that: we have the direct testimony of the famous Roman rhetorician Libanius, a major figure in Roman imperial life toward the end of the fourth century. Libanius was an avid pagan and advocate of traditional religions. Living during the reign of the über-Christian Theodosius I, he felt the pressure from the empire on his personal commitments and issued a plea for religious tolerance in the face of imperial legislation against pagan practices. In the course of his eloquent oration, Libanius urges the precedent of Constantine himself for toleration, reminding the emperor that Constantine “made absolutely no alteration in the traditional forms of worship” (Oration 30.6).18
That would have been a very foolish argument to make if there was any solid evidence that in fact Constantine had shut down, or tried to shut down, the entire apparatus of pagan worship. How, then, can we explain all the evidence, some that says he did (or attempted to) outlaw sacrifice, and other that indicates he did not?
Numerous solutions have been proposed over the years, including attempts to reconcile the statements in various sources, so that both Eusebius is right that Constantine passed such a law and Libanius is right that he did not.19 Most of these reconciliations are a bit forced, however, and possibly it is best to adjudicate the matter by considering what Constantine himself says about it in a letter that he directed to inhabitants of the eastern provinces in 324 CE. Here Constantine states directly that the “doctrines of the divine word”—that is, the tenets of the Christian faith—are held firmly by “those who think aright and who are concerned with genuine merit.” It simply cannot be helped, he indicates, if non-Christians refuse to come to the truth for salvation: “If any prevents himself from being cured, let him not blame it on someone else, for the healing power of medicines is set out, spread openly to all.”
Here Constantine intimates a doctrine of tolerance for those foolish enough to refuse the healing salve provided by Christ. But he goes on to insist explicitly on toleration for those who choose to continue practicing pagan cults:
Let no one use what he has received by inner conviction as a means to harm his neighbor. What each has seen and understood, he must use, if possible, to help the other; but if that is impossible, the matter should be dropped. It is one thing to take on willingly the contest for immortality, quite another to enforce it with sanctions. (Life of Constantine 2.6)
Constantine clearly and directly opposes the use of sanctions to enforce religious practices on those who are unwilling, or to disallow practices. His own comments show that Harold Drake, a leading expert on the reign of Constantine, is probably right: Constantine opted for persuasion, not coercion.
CONSTANTINE THE IMPERIOUS EMPEROR
That should not be taken to mean that Constantine was soft in his rule of the empire. Roman social historian Ramsay MacMullen has raised the question of what practical difference it made to the empire that the emperor became Christian.20 Working through the legislation found in the Theodosian Code, one finds penalties enacted by Constantine that reveal clearly his “judicial savagery.” It is true that most of these laws were meant to promote social decency and to advance basic principles of morality. But the punishments! Imperial bureaucrats who accepted bribes were to have their hands cut off (Theodosian Code 1.16.7); ineffective guardians of girls who had been seduced were to have molten lead poured down their throats (Theodosian Code 9.24.1); tax collectors who treated women tax delinquents rudely were to “be done to death with exquisite tortures”; anyone who served as an informer was to be strangled and “the tongue of envy cut off from its roots and plucked out” (Theodosian Code 10.10.2); slaves who informed on their masters were to be crucified (Theodosian Code 9.5.1.1); anyone guilty of parricide �
�shall not be subjected to the sword or to fire or to any other customary penalty, but he shall be sewed in a leather sack, and, confined within its deadly closeness, he shall share the companionship of serpents” and then thrown into a river or ocean “so that while still alive he may begin to lose the enjoyment of all the elements” (Theodosian Code 9.15.1).
How is one to account for such judicial cruelty from a Christian emperor? MacMullen suggests that by the fourth century Christianity was revealing an increasingly cruel streak. He notes in particular the heightened popularity of the Christian literature we previously considered that delights in recounting in graphic detail the torments of hell for those who refuse to do God’s will.21 Possibly what applied to heaven applied to earth: If this is how God handles sin, then who are we to act differently? As MacMullen puts it: “Religious beliefs may have made judicial punishment specially aggressive, harsh, and ruthless.”22
The Triumph of Christianity Page 26
