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

by Peter J. Leithart

  Yoder's summaries of Augustine's views on the church-world relation are worse, nothing short of bizarre. He claims that Augustine offers "a consensus kind of moral thought," a moral thought based on "what everybody thinks." He goes on: Augustine's ethics "does not radically ask, do you get that from the Bible? Can you get that from revelation? It does not ask, can you get that from Plato? It just asks, does that make sense to all of us? Is it part of our cultural agreement?" This does not count as a fair summary of Augustine by any standard. More obviously wrong is Yoder's claim that "Augustine's thought merges New Testament reconciliation language with classical peace language and Roman order language, as if they were all the same thing. Rome, nature, and providence are all seen as essentially the same. Religion celebrates the unity of everything and the way things are."" "Merging" the New Testament language of peace with "Roman order" is precisely what Augustine is not doing. His entire, very long, book aimed to distinguish the tranquilitas ordinis of the temporal city from the genuine shalom of the kingdom. To suggest that Augustine "celebrates" the way things are is equally baffling. Even an inattentive and hostile reader should notice that Augustine did have a word or two to say about the deep distortions of desire and order caused by sin. John Milbank is right to say that Augustine is involved in a profound deconstruction of Romanitas, picking at the knot of Roman virtue until it is shown to be libido dominandi. Yoder's Augustine is so far from the real Augustine that it is difficult to find a response beyond pointing to a copy of City of God with the exhortation Tolle lege.

  Facing a Vandal invasion of Romanized north Africa and responding to the fall of Rome to Alaric in 410, Augustine wanted to assure his readers that the city of God persists even beyond Rome. For Augustine, Constantine was not the hinge of the ages, and "the christianization of the Roman Empire is as accidental to the history of salvation as it is reversible."" Though his analysis was far more searching, Augustine assessed the empire in the same dual manner as Tertullian. On the one hand, the empire, like all things, comes from God and by his providence does limited good. It was not enough to prove that Rome did not fall because of Christians' abandonment of the gods; Augustine had to give some account of Rome's success. "I must," he wrote at the end of book one of City of God, "show what social well-being the true God, in whose hand are all kingdoms, vouchsafed to grant to them that their empire might increase."" At the same time, the empire grew because of its brutality and found that its anxiety and discord only increased as it grew. After Rome conquered Carthage, "concord was weakened, and destroyed by fierce and bloody seditions," and this was followed by civil war, massacres, bloodshed, lawless plundering, cruelties committed by one citizen against the other. "The lust of rule" brought no contentment, but "after it had taken possession of the more powerful few, subdued under its yoke the rest, worn and wearied."19

  Given that Augustine was the dominant theologian of the medieval West, it is hard to take seriously Yoder's claim that "Constantinian" merger remained the paradigm of church-world relations through a millennium and beyond. Prior to Constantine, Christians saw the empire as a providential setting for the life of Jesus and the spread of the gospel; during Constantine's life, Eusebius viewed the Christian empire as a fulfillment of prophecy and a renewed golden age that might last until the end of time. By the end of the fourth century, Eusebian optimism had cooled, and the difference between the empire and the city of God had become all too evident. If "Constantinian" is taken to mean a "merger" of church and empire in which Christians identify some nation or empire or ruler with the movement of God in history, there was a brief, ambiguous "Constantinian moment" in the early fourth century, and there have been many tragic "Constantinian moments" since.

  There was no permanent, epochal "Constantinian shift."

  WHOSE MISSION?

  Perhaps we can grant that Christians after the fourth century did not kowtow to power, but according to Constantine's critics his conversion fundamentally altered Christianity's mission. According to Thomas Heilke, "The church under Constantine is `imperialized,' and made 'subservient' to the interests of the empire .1120 Heilke relies on Yoder to suggest that the church's mission was nullified by Constantinianism. After Chalcedon "relegated Nestorianism to Persia and Monophysitism to Abyssinia, thus identifying the concepts of `heretic' and `barbarian,' the church effectively turned over the expansion of Christianity for a millennium to the heterodox. 1121 Insofar as the Constantinian church had a mission at all, it was identified with the mission of imperial expansion.22 In the centuries after Constantine, Yoder claims, most mission work was carried out not by orthodox "Roman Christians" but by heretics .21

  Constantine himself had a deep sense of historical destiny, and as a result his foreign policy was guided in part by the desire to extend the church's reach. He envisioned a universal empire united in confession of the Nicene Creed, an empire that would have a symbolic center in the Church on Golgotha in Jerusalem and that would stretch to India and Ethiopia and someday include even Persia. But Constantine did not necessarily regard annexation into the Roman empire as an essential element of that vision. He seems instead to have envisioned a Christian commonwealth. Perhaps the empire would have remained dominant, but in Constantine's cosmopolitan mind it would not have been coextensive with "Christ's dominion."

  Though he probably did not impose Christianity on conquered Goths, his triumphs among the Goths assisted the spread of Christianity. After his victory in 332, Bishop Ulfila was consecrated and sent as a missionary in Gothic territory.24 Churches were also established in the "Mountain Arena," the Arab territories that served as a buffer between the empire and Persia. Eusebius mentions Arab Christian communities, and there was an Arab bishop at the council of Nicaea. Further east in Iberia (Georgia) there were Christians, and to the south Ethiopia (Aksum) also became Christian under Ezana.25 As already noted, Armenia became officially Christian shortly after Constantine defeated Maxentius. By the time he died, Constantine had left behind a "universal Christian commonwealth embracing Armenians, Iberians, Arabs, and Aksumites" that continued to take form under his Byzantine successors.26 This was not, it should be noted, an extension of Roman governance; it is rather that Roman imperial order had been reshaped, to some degree, by the demands of Christian mission.

  What of the church's mission activity? In the immediate aftermath of Constantine's conversion and reign, there is some truth to Yoder's and Heilke's arguments. There is little evidence of orthodox mission into barbarian territories. Even when Roman Christians found themselves captured and confined outside the empire, the church was slow to send pastoral assistance. Christianity was planted among the barbarians, but it was carried by captives and traders, or through barbarians who served in Constantine's Roman army, rather than through missionaries.21 Meanwhile, Arians did score some successes, converting a number of Germanic tribes prior to the collapse of the Western empire.

  Yet this needs to be qualified in two ways. Barbarians did convert, but they converted not because missionaries were sent to them but because they migrated into the empire. Late in the fourth century, a Christian visited the Marcomanni north of the Danube and spoke animatedly to Queen Fritigil about the great bishop Ambrose of Milan. The queen converted and wrote to Ambrose asking for more instruction in her faith. Ambrose wrote her a catechism of sorts and also urged the queen to prevail on her husband the king to make peace with the empire. She did, and the entire tribe migrated and settled in a Roman province as federates.28 That is one qualification: barbarians converted, readily and thoroughly, when they crossed into the empire. Moving from "the wilds of barbaria into the social relationships of Romania brought about a marked and comparatively sudden transformation in their religion."29 The other qualification is this: heretics-the great missionaries of Yoder and Heilke's narrative-typically converted barbarians in precisely the same way. Visigoths "converted to Arianism when settled as Federates in Moesia between 382 and 395," and the Burgundians likewise "converted when settled as Federates
in Germania Prima between 412 and 436." In 476, small Christian communities were scattered throughout northern and eastern Europe, but "none of the great Germanic peoples living outside the frontier was Christian."30 A Constantinian "merger" of faith and empire seems to have been a most effective evangelistic method during the fourth and fifth centuries.

  Yoder and Heilke, however, spread their net wider. Heretics were the great missionaries "for a millennium." A millennium is a long time. Add a millennium to the year of Constantine's death, and we come to 1337. In 1337 the Hundred Years' War was getting under way, and a decade later the Black Death would ravage Europe. The church had experienced the East-West schism, the Western church had endured the investiture struggle and the Aristotelian revival, English barons had forced the Magna Carta on the hapless King John, and Thomas Aquinas had lived and died. All that time, Yoder asserts, the orthodox so closely identified themselves with the Roman Empire that they did nothing in the way of missions.

  This is false, and betrays either dishonesty or a quite breathtaking ignorance of medieval history. By 1337 Patrick had begotten a crusading army of Irish monks that begat Columba that begat Columbanus that begat missionary monasteries throughout Europe; Pope Gregory had sent Augustine to evangelize the Britons (who turned out to already have been evangelized); Boniface had wowed the Saxons by cutting down a holy tree; the Franks had established a formally Christian empire; sent by the caesaro- papists in Byzantium, Cyril and Methodius had evangelized the Slavs; in Kiev, St. Vladimir had chosen Byzantine rather than Catholic Christianity for the Rus; to the far north, the peoples of Scandinavia turned to Christianity in droves just before the turn of the first millennium. Missionaries of course bore the gospel in a cultural form, but in many cases they were careful to impose as little of that cultural form on their converts as prudent.31 That Cyril and Methodius did not identify Byzantine culture with Christianity is evident from the fact that they did not force Greek on the Slavs but invented an alphabet so they could give them Christianity and the Bible in their own language.32 Yoder would remind us that this was a "Constantinian" mission effort; nearly everywhere missionaries evangelized kings, who changed their tribal religion en masse, becoming "New Constantines."33 True enough; still it belies Yoder's astonishing charge that the church gave up on missions for a millennium.

  UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

  In chapter ten I examined some of the consequences of Constantine's legislation and policies, suggesting that whatever his intentions, his reign had a revolutionary impact on the empire, an impact that, if it did not quite rise to the level of thorough "Christianization," began that process and prepared the way for it to continue. Similar observations may be made about Constantine's imperial agenda. He no doubt wished to maintain the borders of the empire, keep the barbarians at bay, invade Persia, extend the empire, protect and enrich the church. Perhaps he believed that it would all last forever.

  Whatever Constantine's intentions, however, the empire's devotion to the church was one of the causes for its eventual decline. Geza Alfoldy concludes his Social History ofRome with the suggestive observation that

  the role of Christianity in the collapse of the Roman system of power resulted from the fact that it was taken over by the Germans and carried on. Throughout previous Roman history, the value system of Roman society had been the mos maiorum, which set up an insurmountable barrier between Romans and non-Romans. But Christian Romans were linked to the Christian barbarians by their common religion and morality: in the words of Orosius, a Christian Roman was "interRomanosRomanus, inter Christia- nos Christianus, inter homines homo" [among Romans a Roman, among Christians a Christian, among men a man] ...: for such men Christian barbarians were not longer hostes [enemies] but fraters [brothers].... From Orosius' standpoint even Alaric's capture of Rome in AD 410 did not seem a really bad thing for, after all, the Western Goths were also Christians. For Salvian, the Germans embodied the Christian virtues very much more than the Romans. Orosius had a vision that Romans and Germans should live together in a Christian Romania .14

  Arnaldo Momigliano likewise points out that the church had ways of dealing with the barbarian threat that were not available to pagans: "The educated pagan was by definition afraid of barbarians. There was no bridge between the aristocratic ideals of a pagan and the primitive violence of the German invader." At best, a few barbarians might be educated and become Roman, but "the ordinary barbarian as such was nothing more than a night mare to educated pagans." Christians, on the other hand, "could convert the barbarians and make them members of the Church. They had discovered a bridge between barbarism and civilization." In the East, though, the church supported the Byzantine emperors in their persistent struggle against the barbarians, and there "the defence of the empire could be presented as the defence of the Church." Thus, "in the West the Church gradually replaced the dying State in dealing with the barbarians," while in the East "the Church realized that the Roman state was much more vital and supported it in its fight against the barbarians." On both sides of Europe, ordinary people needed leaders and largely found them in their bishops. More, Roman civilization had no way of accommodating barbarians. There was no basis for a common civilization. After converting to Christianity, though, the "Germans were, at least to a certain extent, Romanized and made capable of living together with the citizens of the Roman empire."35

  In short, the conversion of the empire did not bond empire and church inseparably together. It had, as we would expect and Yoder would want, the opposite effect. It loosened the bonds that many Romans felt to the empire, even as it strengthened their bonds to another city, another kingdom, one that spilled far over the limits of the empire. Baptized Rome found that it could join with baptized barbaria, since Jesus had broken down the dividing wall.

  Constantine's conversion subverted the empire in another way as well. As we have seen, Constantine saw the unity of the church as essential to the unity and health of the empire. He normally described that in terms of maintaining the favor of God, but his religious policies make it clear that he also wished to unify the empire theologically and ecclesiastically. When the bishops at Nicaea had determined the relationship of the Son to the Father, that became the creed of the churches of the Roman empire. Arius was exiled and kept at arm's length until he could come up with a convincing confession of Nicaea. This creedally based empire had one great advantage for Constantine: it gave Rome a universal cultural and religious mission that it had never had, and made it a rival of the more ideologically focused Persian empire.

  Assume the worst: Constantine was a cynical hypocrite, using the church as a means to achieve his own imperial ambitions. Suppose that he did not believe a word of the Nicene Creed but only hoped to force the whole world into a mold more Roman than Christian. Assume the worst, yet his program was doomed to crash, precisely on the shoals of heresy. Once the empire was a creedal empire, heresy could not be seen as a tolerable difference of opinion; it was subversive, an attack on the vitals of the imperial body, and had to be expelled. Inevitably, then, the empire founded on a monotheistic creed fractured and eventually yielded to a commonwealth of Christian peoples, the Byzantine "empire."36

  It was not long after Constantine, as Alasdair Maclntyre points out, that people of goodwill decided that maintaining justice, peace and civilized life did not require the maintenance of the Roman empire. Some left for monasteries, while others continued in the empire but not of it. Whatever Constantinian moment there had been was over, ironically assisted by Constantine himself, who not only failed to prevent the empire's inevitable collapse but probably helped to hasten it.

  JEREMIAN ECCLESIOLOGY

  In both the last chapter and this one, I have argued that to sustain his thesis of a "Constantinian shift," Yoder must discover a moment in the church's history in which the church was universally opposed to violence and war, universally hostile to empire and universally committed to a particular interpretation of Jesus' injunctions in the Sermon on the Mount.
I have argued too that Yoder never did find such a starting point, and that he did not because he cannot, and he cannot because no such moment ever existed.

  Yoder would respond by saying that the fixed starting point-the height from which the church fell-lies in the teaching and example of Jesus, as seen in the context of the "Jeremian" paradigm of the Jewish diaspora. Historians and exegetes have, he says, missed the point by quibbling "about this or that legalistic reading of a few words of Jesus" while "ignoring both the sociological and theological contexts within which first-century believers sustained their view of history under God." According to this "Jew ish quietism," God is in charge, not humans, and accordingly the faithful renounce Maccabean or Zealot efforts to "take charge" of history through nationalism or violence. Jesus drew on and deepened that tradition.37

  For Yoder, the Jeremian model of Jewish life and identity does more than simply provide a way of making sense of Jesus' teaching in the Gospels. It provides a model for the church in its relation to worldly powers.31 Jeremiah ranks with Constantine as symbol and legend, a marker of an epochal shift in the life of the people of God. Yoder's Jeremiah instructed the people to settle into the galuth, exile, not as a temporary "hiatus" before a new kingship and temple were established, nor simply as a punishment for their sins. Jews were to "seek the salvation of the culture" of Babylon by accepting their dispersion as a call to mission. They were to retain their separate identity by adherence to a peripatetic moral and liturgical lifethey defined themselves by a "text which can be copied and read anywhere," centered their worship on "reading and singing the texts," established places of worship without priesthoods wherever ten households gathered, maintained their international unity by "intervisitation, by intermarriage, by commerce, and by rabbinic consultation," found the "ground floor of identity" in "the common life, the walk, halakah," and confounded kings and emperors "with the superior wisdom and power of the one authentic God."39 There was no "Jewish emperor," and they were not to hope for one; their leaders might be in king's palaces, but it would be as "intermediaries" between "the community and the Gentiles."4°