Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

by Peter J. Leithart

  While continuing to employ the terminology of the traditional imperial ideology, Lactantius revised the concept significantly, and Constantine followed suit in his imperial propaganda. Though still making play with the imperial ideology of the past, they redefined tyranny in terms of religious compulsion, thus branding Diocletian, Maxentius, Licinius, and the rest as enemies of Christian libertas, as sub-Roman tyrants. Perhaps inspired by the arguments of Lactantius, Constantine forged a religious policy that seamlessly knitted Christian and Roman themes together and set the ideological foundations for a Christian, but tolerant, Roman Empire. The theory was expressed in the inscription on the statue of Constantine in Rome. He holds the sign of Christ, and the inscription reads: "In this sign of salvation I have restored to Rome, her senate, and her people, their ancient liberty and glory, delivering them from the lawless yoke of the tyrant."36 The inscription could have adorned a statue of Octavian, who also claimed to fight for the libertas of the "Senate and the People of Rome" (long abbreviated as SPQR) and who claimed to bring "salvation" of the people. But the Christian symbol changes everything: Rome's libertas is now secure only in hoc signo-in this sign.

  What kind of Christian did Constantine become? He became a Lactantian Christian.

  Practically, that meant toleration of paganism. That was the policy established in 313, and it was the policy Constantine reiterated, more elaborately, after he defeated Licinius and assumed the sole imperium in 324. His edict to the Eastern Provinces attacked the irrationality of polytheism and defended monotheism. He recalled his father's kindness to the church with fondness and recounted the arrogance and stupidity of the persecuting emperors, "unsound in mind" and "more zealous of cruel than gentle measures." They turned a period of peace and prosperity into a virtual civil war and proved themselves more savage than the barbarians, among whom Christians found refuge. Like Lactantius, he rejoiced that the persecutors "have experienced a miserable end, and are consigned to unceasing punishment in the depths of the lower world." He insulted the Pythian oracle as "impious" and "delusive" and described Christianity as a "holy" religion.

  Having exposed the error, the savagery, and the political evils of paganism, and just as the reader is ready for the hammer to fall, Constantine revealed the thrust of the edict. Insisting that his desire was "for the common good of the world and the advantage of all mankind, that your people should enjoy a life of peace and undisturbed concord," he declared that "anyone who delight[s] in error, [should] be made welcome to the same degree of peace and tranquility which they have who believe." He did not want such persons to remain in their ignorance and error but hoped that "this restoration of equal privileges to all will prevail to lead them into the straight path." Perhaps addressing himself to militant Christians, Constantine declared that no one is to molest anyone else: "Let every one do as his soul desires." It is true that it is possible to live a life of "holiness and purity" only if one relies on the "holy laws" of "men of sound judgment." But Constantine was willing to permit "those who will hold themselves aloof from us" to keep their "temples of lies." He gave a Lactantian rationale for the policy: "The battle for deathlessness requires willing recruits. Coercion is of no avail." There is a vast difference between pursuing immortality "voluntarily" and compelling "others to do so from the fear of punishment." As it comes to a close, the edict modulates from imperial pronouncement to prayer: "We"-he meant "we Christians"-"have the glorious edifice of your truth, which you have given us as our native home. We pray, however, that they too may receive the same blessing, and thus experience that heartfelt joy which unity of sentiment inspires."37 Though framed as an official imperial document, from "Victor Constantinus, Maximus Augustus, to the people of the Eastern provinces," it is more a sermon than a law. Constantine is less a theocrat imposing Christianity than Billy Graham issuing an altar call.

  His concluding remarks suggest that Constantine issued the decree in part to cool down hot-headed Christians who might want to shut down all pagan shrines immediately, or even believed that paganism had suddenly died. He went on at length "because we were unwilling to dissemble or be false to the true faith; and the more so, since we understand there are some who say that the rites of the heathen temples, and the power of darkness, have been entirely removed." While he wished it were true, the emperor recognized that "the rebellious spirit of those wicked errors still continues obstinately fixed in the minds of some, so as to discourage the hope of any general restoration of mankind to the ways of truth." Instead of attacking pagans, Christians should be mixing with and evangelizing them. "Once more," he added, "let none use that to the detriment of another which he may himself have received on conviction of its truth; but let every one, if it be possible, apply what he has understood and known to the benefit of his neighbor; if otherwise, let him relinquish the attempt."38

  That Constantine was serious about giving freedom to pagans is evident from pagan reaction. For most, Constantine's conversion was a "bear able evil," and Constantine continued to have pagan philosophers in his court for years after his conversion.39 Pagans continued to serve in his administration and army; he gave pagans high positions; a pagan helped him gather materials from around the East to adorn his great "Christian" city of Constantinople. His policies toward the army were particularly significant. Diocletian, Galerius, and Licinius had expelled Christians from their army because their presence offended the gods and might lead to defeat. Theodosius II operated this principle when he reversed, or revived, Diocletian's policy and restricted the army to Christians. Wearing his chi-rho helmet and bearing his shield painted with a cross, Constantine kept pagan troops and led them in a monotheistic prayer that he knew would not violate their conscience.40

  John Howard Yoder to the contrary, Constantine did not decide that everyone in the empire had to be a Christian.41 Under the arrangements of Milan and the letter to the Eastern provinces, the Roman Empire appeared to offer all religions a level playing field.

  But is there any such thing?

  PUBLIC SPACE

  Drake argues that Constantine's goal "was to create a neutral public space" in which Christians and pagans could participate, a "peaceful coexistence."42 Above I have noted some of the grounds for that claim. Still, Drake's is a onesided conclusion. Though Constantine followed the principles and rhetoric of the Lactantian policy of religious freedom, he did not pretend to establish a neutral religious freedom. In the very same decree where he granted pagans freedom to maintain their temples, he condemned them for their persistent errors and prayed for their conversion. Everyone knew on which side of the pagan-Christian divide Constantine stood, and Constantine's preference for Christianity was more than verbal. It showed up in iconography, in privileges granted to the church and clergy, and in efforts to suppress some aspects of paganism. Pagans were tolerated, but they were tolerated within an empire that everyone could see was increasingly Christian.

  As we saw in the previous chapter, Constantine's iconography was initially ambiguous but became more explicitly Christian over time. He often had himself depicted with his eyes turned toward heaven, and the hand that remains from the monumental statue erected at Rome appears to be folded in a gesture of benediction. At Constantinople, the mint busied itself with producing a coin inscribed with the motto spespublica-the hope of the public-with an emblem of Christ piercing a dragon on the reverse side. To Eusebius, Constantine wrote after his victory over Licinius that the occasion was ripe for restoring churches "now that freedom is restored, and that dragon, through the providence of God, and by our instrumentality, thrust out from the government of the Empire" and thereby "the divine power has become known to all, and that those who hitherto, from fear or from incredulity or from depravity, have lived in error, will now, upon becoming acquainted with Him who truly is, be led into the true and correct manner of life.'3 By 320, images of the old gods completely disappeared from Constantine's coinage. Constantine is surrounded and adorned by traditional Roman battle gear-horse, shield
, helmet. But on the helmet is the chi-rho insignia.

  More than any other instrument of propaganda, architecture expressed the complexity of Constantine's religious policy. Architecture had a double significance for Roman emperors. Most obviously, it was a direct formation of public space. By laying out cities and building baths, public meeting halls, arches, temples, and governmental buildings, emperors literally shaped the pathways of civic life. An emperor's largess could turn a provincial backwater-like Byzantium-into the booming capital of a dreamempire that would last a thousand years. During the Tetrarchy, Augusti and Caesars had left their imprint on Trier, Serdica, Surmium and Nicomedia, and the one Rome-based figure, Maxentius, was involved in massive building in the venerable capital.

  Building was an act of euergetism, one of the main forms of gift-giving by which emperors established and nurtured alliances, enhanced their reputation for generosity and clemency, and offered conspicuous displays of wealth that increased their regal auctoritas. Augustus was patron of the city of Rome, and during the Principate only the emperor or Senate was permitted to build within the sacred walls of the urbs. His patronage extended throughout the empire; Augustus built the ramparts of Trieste, Fanum and Nimes and an aqueduct at Venafrum, as well as public buildings throughout Italy and the Roman provinces. Elsewhere, local and provincial officials imitated the emperors by building fortifications or buildings in their own territories.44 Constantine had the disposition, the resources and, just as important, the time to engage in massive and widespread building projects,45 and he used his time and resources to expand his popularity and promote his policies, particularly his religious policies.

  STUDIED AMBIGUITY

  No one questions the scale of Constantine's artistic and architectural achievement. Many have contested its quality, and more broadly the quality of the culture in the age of Constantine. Charles Freeman traces the "closing of the Western mind" to the triumph of Christianity in the time of Con- stantine.46 The squat, expressionless figures on the frieze of the Arch of Constantine have come in for particular scorn, symbolic markers of the end of ancient artistry and the beginning of medieval incompetence. In a famous report on the art of Rome prepared for Pope Leo X, Raphael found the arch architecturally "beautiful and well conceived" but the sculptures "very tasteless."47 Bernard Berenson complained that "individual figures suggest nothing so much as an assemblage of rudely carved chessmen.... We find huge heads out of all proportion to their bodies." The "stunted bodies," he observed, "are swathed in heavy blankets or covered with scanty shifts, both with the folds of the draperies as unfunctional, as helplessly chiseled as ever European art sank to in the darkest ages."48

  Burckhardt's criticism of Constantinian art was more wide ranging. Everywhere he looked he saw signs of degeneration and aesthetic corruption. Because of the penetration of Goths and Franks and their incorporation into the empire, arts and customs took on a disturbingly un-Roman character, evidence of a widespread "barbarization." Mosaics splashed upward from floors to walls, and finally to ceilings, and "with the introduction of Christianity, mosaic became the principal decoration, wherever means sufficed, for all walls and ceilings in churches." The speeches of rhetors were filled with bombast and poets undertook strained efforts to represent Christian truth symbolically.

  Part of the reason, Burckhardt explained in his Teutonic nineteenthcentury way, was that people themselves were getting uglier. Most of the blame, though, went to the church. Once victorious, the church felt compelled to announce its victory, resulting in a "tendency toward heightened magnificence" in architecture; the aim was to "make the entire structure and every stone in it a symbol of its power and its victory." Christians were so insistent on their message that form mattered little, and in arches, sarcophagi and other places "representation grew altogether impoverished and childish." Burckhardt's charge is that Christianity introduced a cor- ruption-"domination of subject over form."49

  Judgments about the value of Roman art in Constantine's age turn on questions of preference-"whether one prefers the classical naturalism of the bulk of Graeco-Roman art to the more abstract schematism of medieval art, of which the arts under Constantine were a harbinger"-and questions about Constantine's religion: "whether the Christianization inaugurated by Constantine was more or less of a good thing."50 Burckhardt's commitment to classicism blinds him here. Deviation from classical forms, genres and styles is necessarily a decline from a great height.

  Burckhardt, further, was less informed about the interests and aims of classical Roman art than he realized. Subject matter had long shaped style. In depicting battle scenes, artists strove to capture the passion, chaotic motion and tragedy of war. When Augustus wanted to be represented as the embodiment of Roman dignitas, maiestas, pondus and auctoritas, how ever, he distanced himself from the "Asiatic" Anthony by having himself portrayed according to "an ideal of calm serenity and cheerfulness." Battle scenes, in short, demanded "Hellenistic" treatment, but portraiture demanded "Hellenic, classical" treatment. Linkages of subject matter and form were not mechanical. Bacchus could be depicted in the nude as a soft, feminine youth, his posture sensuous and his hand resting languidly on his head. But he could also be depicted as an old man, fully clothed, with archaic stylized beard and hair. Though the connections were not rigid, subject matter shaped style; different depictions of Bacchus intended to bring out different aspects of his complex character. As Tonio Holscher puts it, "State ceremonies were shown as being conducted with religious or official dignity, battles portrayed in terms of pathos, emotion and straining effort. The choice of the form was thus based on the content."51

  Even those stumpy figures on the frieze of the arch have precedents in Greek art. Constantine's battle scenes "are reminiscent of the work of another group of sculptors, from the finest period of Greek art in Greece and Asia Minor, who undertook to carve battle scenes, including a siege, on the basement of the tomb known as the Nereid Monument at Xanthos." Though completed in the heyday of classicism, around 400 B.C., the figures "show the same tendencies toward distortion of the human figure (venturing toward dwarfism) and the same rendering of fortifications in a Lilliputian fashion that we see on the Arch of Constantine." The issue is not artistic skill but "the result of the problems of achieving wide perspective on a narrow frieze without making it look gigantic and without allowing the figures to all but disappear if they are to be kept in proportion to the buildings." Similarly, on Constantine's arch "the dwarfish figure with head too large for his body and the stunted building [were] part of an effort to keep the action from being lost and to keep the setting subordinate to the figures involved."52

  Artistic values were indeed changing during the Tetrarchy and into Constantine's time. Depictions of the Tetrachs suggest that the change was partly forced by political considerations.53 Not all artistic shifts were politically motivated, however. Fourth-century artists had a taste for pattern, geometry and flat surfaces without perspective or clear spatial distribution. Mosaic was ideal for such a sensibility, and mosaic reached a pinnacle in the fourth century, in the peacocks and fruit that adorn the Santa Costanza in Rome, the hunting scenes in a villa at Hippo Regius, the hunting scene and "bikini girls" on the walls in a villa at Piazza Armerina, Sicily.54 It is impossible to tell in the last of these how the animals in the hunt scene are spatially related. In another mosaic, a charioteer, hand raised in triumph, faces the viewer. His two horses turn impossibly in opposite directions so that the artist could depict them at three-quarter view, while his chariot wheels twist at a right angle to the chariot itself. It is difficult to prove that these shifts are the product of a decline in talent; it is just as plausible to account for them as a change rather than as a collapse of taste. Burckhardt's animus toward Constantinian art simply states a preference and a prejudice: he prefers classical to medieval and pagan to Christian, and so pre- to post-Constantinian art.

  The Arch of Constantine has, moreover, a more unified design than often credited to it.55 One
of the complaints against the art of late antiquity and after was its extensive use of spolia. Sculptors recut the faces of statues to resemble the latest patron, architects reused columns, builders moved figures and designs from their original location to a new location. Though spolia in fact had long been used in Roman art,56 it reached a "veritable flood" in the fourth century and into the medieval period.57 But this "recycling" was not necessarily driven (merely) by lack of materials or talent. It could also be motivated by a "positive choice aimed at identifying Rome's new ruler with the `good' emperors of the past, particularly Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius."58 On Constantine's arch, the spolia was not an act of damnatio, literally effacing images of earlier emperors. Spolia rather was an architectural typology, associating the vetera or old things (Trajan) with the fulfillment in the nova or new things (Constantine). 59

  Its religious message was also one of continuity and change. Eight tondo relief carvings were taken over from Hadrian's arch, with the imperial faces recut to resemble Constantine. These too show a unity of design. They move from a hunt-traditional artistic symbol of the taming of chaos-through various acts of government and end with sacrifices to Apollo, Diana and Hercules.60 Yet the figures who perform the sacrifice are not cut to resemble the new emperor. Earlier emperors engaged in animal sacrifice, and Constantine's arch pays due homage to that traditional mode of worship. But Constantine himself has left that form of worship behind, and with it the gods of the Roman past.61

  Earlier triumphal arches declared the victory of the princeps and the favor of his gods, and Constantine's did the same. The way it makes the point is, however, significant. Its famously inscrutable inscription attributes his victory over Maxentius to the inspiration of an unidentified deity. The fact that it was not attributed to Jupiter or Mars is itself a sign that the Senate that awarded the arch to Constantine in 315 recognized that its new emperor served a different deity.62 The arch's inscription places Constantine in continuity with his predecessors, while it hints silently that a new God has taken residence in Rome. The same subtle neutrality is evident in its placement and in the reliefs that adorn its various levels. Constantine's arch imitates that of Septimus Severus in many particulars, establishing continuity with the previous imperial dynasty and with the most impressive arch in the Forum. Constantine's arch is set at the entry to the Forum, thus claiming it for Constantine and his followers, and the arch was designed to line up with a statue of Sol, Constantine's pagan patron and, at least for the later Constantine, a symbol of the Christian Sun of Righteousness.63