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

by Peter J. Leithart

  Constantine did not try explicitly to Christianize the legal system, Roman society or Roman government. He appointed Christians to leading positions in his administration, and many men, often Christians, rose from lower ranks of society to positions of power. One law made explicit reference to Christian principles (the image of God in man), and some were inspired by Christianity. The most important of these were exemptions from taxes and other public obligations for clergy and the emperor's legislation against sacrifice, but his laws closing the gladiatorial shows and condemning exposure of children also drew on Christian teaching. Constantine's laws were both conservative and innovative-conservative in maintaining or hardening legally sanctioned social divisions, innovative in the ways he provided for the weaker and poorer citizens of the empire. Like pagan emperors before him, Constantine addressed the obstacles that excluded the poor and poorly connected to justice, but unlike his predecessors he found part of the solution in allowing appeals to episcopal courts.

  Constantine's laws were more often Christian in effect than in intent. Outlawing gladiatorial shows struck down one of the main institutions for the propagation of Roman values, culture and power and was more transformative than Constantine could have known. His support for the church made the church financially dependent on the empire to a large extent, but it also had the effect of enriching and empowering the bishops, who eventually provided a counterweight to imperial power. Whatever his intentions, over the long run Constantine's support of the church strengthened the church's status as an alternative society and polity within the Roman Empire. Already during Constantine's lifetime, and even more during the reigns of his sons, church leaders became more aggressively confrontational toward the empire, fighting to protect the church's independence from imperial intrusions.

  Constantine spent his life in the Roman military. He fought with Diocletian, and with his father, and when he became emperor he continued to fight, sometimes against barbarians threatening from the frontier, sometimes against other Romans, who were usually members of his extended family. By the time his life ended, he was (indirectly in every case, so far as we know) responsible for the deaths of his father-in-law Maximian, his brother-in-law Maxentius, another brother-in-law Licinius along with his son, his wife Fausta and his son Crispus, and a few other relatives. Some or all of these executions may have been just acts of punishing rivals and rebels. Some or all of them may have been acts of a paranoid emperor eager to maintain his hard-won power. We know too little to be sure. On the other hand, he never engaged in a purge. Maxentius's supporters were not slaughtered in Rome when Constantine took the capital; Licinius's son died with his father, and Constantine ordered the execution of one of Licinius's chief supporters, but no other members of Licinius's family or court were executed. Constantine believed his military expeditions were divinely commissioned, and he attributed his victories to God. During his long reign, the empire was comparatively peaceful.

  How did the church fare under Constantine? It is important to recall where our story began, with Diocletian's edict of persecution and the sacrificial slaughter of Christians. Toleration edicts had already been decreed in East and West before Constantine became the sole emperor, but he secured the church's freedom and made it permanent. Externally, the church flourished during the early fourth century. It had new, magnificent buildings and the prestige and power that partly arose from Constantine's conversion and his support for their mission. Church membership became legal, and attractive, and for reasons good (devotion to Jesus) and bad (tax exemptions, prestige) men sought church leadership. Constantine had considerable influence on the church but did not dominate it, dictate the election of bishops or make final decisions about doctrine. Councils met without his approval, and bishops were elected locally. He did not have "absolute authority" over the church, and there is no evidence that he wanted to get it. With power, money and prestige came the temptation to accommodate, a problem that nearly every church father after Constantine addressed repeatedly and explicitly. Christian missions did not cease after the fourth century. Barbarians who migrated into Constantine's empire frequently converted, and some missionaries crossed the frontier to shepherd Roman citizens living outside the empire or, in some cases, to evangelize barbarians. The conversion of many Romans bored holes in the fixed boundary between Roman and barbarian, and eventually dissolved the distinction entirely. Constantine's conversion was a crucial prelude to the decline of the empire and the rise of medieval Christendom's cultural cocktail of Romanitas, Germanitas and Christianitas.

  That, I think, is a fair historical portrait of the man, his career, his times and his effect on the church. In my judgment, it is a history that John Howard Yoder and other theological and historical critics get wrong on many particulars and in the general outline. Yoder cannot know as much as he claims about the pacifist consensus of the early church, badly misreads major figures like Eusebius and especially Augustine, oversimplifies the history of "mainstream Christianity" to the point of caricature, and tries to convince us that the orthodox church handed missionary activity to heretics for a millennium after Constantine. His rhetoric of antiConstantinianism discourages Christians from a serious and sympathetic engagement with more than a millennium of Christian theological, and political theological, reflection. Using Yoder's definition of "Constantinian," I think it is more accurate to describe the early fourth century as a "Constantinian moment" than as an epoch-making "Constantinian shift"; further, the worst abuses that Yoder identifies arose after Constantine, sometimes long after. As I argue below, I think there was a "Constantinian shift," but it is one that Yoder quite misses.

  This book, however, is not intended to be a Big Book of Quibbles. That would be too easy and also would set me up as a target for similar treatment, as readers (if any there be) sift through this book and (inevitably) discover my own historical errors, big and small. My main interest in this project has been theological. Theology and history, as Yoder is the first to remind us, are not ultimately divisible. My historical portrait has implied a political theology. But it is time to make that political theology more overt, to explain where I think Yoder goes wrong and to offer an alternative account of the theological meaning of Constantine.

  ANTI-CONSTANTINIANISM

  Anti-Constantinianism has a long history. Early on, most of the opposition came from pagans like Julian and Zosimus, and in the modern era Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Gibbon and Burckhardt assaulted the first Christian emperor as a usurper, a murderer, a tyrant whose only redeeming quality was his impatience with theological dispute. That pagans and rationalists would dislike Constantine is unsurprising, but there has also been a strong anti-Constantinian tradition within the church that is more interesting because it is more unexpected.

  Francis of Assisi already traced the corruption and degeneration of the church to the Constantinian period, and in the fourteenth century "protoReformers" like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus took up the theme. Often medieval critics of the Constantinian settlement focused their attacks on the Donation of Constantine, mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, Constantine's legendary gift of Rome, Italy and episcopal supremacy to the bishop of Rome. Anti-Constantinianism was thus entwined with antipapalism, leading Wycliffe, for instance, to repudiate "the entire papal system on the grounds of having been founded by Constantine and not Christ."2 Papal supporters like Bernard of Clairvaux also condemned the Donation, because it corrupted the church with a grant of worldly power and property.' Dante's allegorical vision of church history at the end of Purgatorio gave this view its classic poetic expression, as the golden wings of the Roman eagle drop into and damage the chariot of the church, just before the fox of heresy slips in.

  Radical Reformation attacks on the Constantinian church made the same linkage with papal power. Radical Reformers aimed, they said, to reach back beyond the Constantinian corruption to a primitive church that was spiritually alive, simple, nonsacramental. For Melchior H
offmann, the church of Constantine corresponded to the church of Perga- mon in the book of Revelation, a church "where divine truth became polluted by human wisdom and moral compromise was generally accepted." This was the period when "the pope and antichrist were very pleased to accept the same power, authority and strength of worldly rule." Pietist Lutheran Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714) reinterpreted the whole of church history along anti-Constantinian lines, brandishing an early "pure church" as a measuring rod to show how far the mainstream church fell into "the poisonous embrace of Constantine." In Arnold's story, the true church "had been preserved over the centuries, not by powerful prelates and conciliar decrees, but by the despised dissenters, sometimes labeled as the heretics of the age."5 During the nineteenth century Ludwig Keller developed a similar account of the church's history, tracing a persistent altevan- gelische Briidergemeinden from the apostles through the Waldensians to the Reformation Anabaptists, a paradigm that, in turn, inspired the work of Ernst Troeltsch.6

  From at least the seventeenth century, criticism of Constantine has taken the form of a critique of "caesaro-papism." In early usage, as in the work of the Protestant jurist lustus Henning Bohmer, the term referred equally to systems in which popes take worldly power and to systems in which laymen assume the responsibilities of bishops. Eventually "only the second caught on," and the term was used less as an analytic concept than as a Western club specially designed to beat Byzantine Christianity. Johann Christian Hesse made caesaro-papism the hinge of his account of Western political Christianity: "Constantine was now the villain of the piece; he had opted for Christianity for political reasons and had made religion serve what he perceived as his own interests." Taking up this tradition, Jacob Burckhardt found analogies between Byzantine and Islamic political order, and thereby discarded Byzantium as "un-European."7

  Much of this critique, especially in the modern period, is fairly easy to dispose of. Burckhardt's hostility to what he thought of as caesaro-papism is based on the conviction that religion and power can never mix; politics is the arena of amoral combat, religion of contemplation, prayer, soft pieties. The charge of caesaro-papism deconstructs into an unlikely alliance of "Roman [Catholic] fundamentalism" and Protestant pietism, and relies on "the radical distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, which was intended to separate religion from politics" and has the ironic consequence of endorsing clerical power and reproaching "the founder of the Christian empire ... for having lacked an ideal of laicity."8 In short, critiques of Constantinianism, especially in the modern period, have lacked an ecclesiology and have operated with what John Milbank describes as the "liberal Protestant metanarrative," according to which the church gradually sheds its external political encrustrations and is revealed as what in essence it always has been, something "purely religious." On those premises, the critique of Constantinianism is preloaded; no matter how faithfully the church gives cultural form to its gospel, it is abandoning the "spiritual" message of Jesus.

  For all its celebration of the martyrs, furthermore, Christian antiConstantinianism does little justice to the martyrs' hopes. Martyrs endured flame and sword because in that anguish they shared in the sufferings of Christ. But they also knew that the sufferings of Christ were not perpetual. Jesus suffered, died, was buried and then rose again, vindicated by his Father over against all the condemnations of the world and the devil. Mar tyrs went to their deaths expecting vindication, and expecting that vindication not only in heaven and at the last day but on earth and in time. That is what Lactantius's treatise on the death of persecutors is all about. "Behold," he writes to one Donatus, "all the adversaries are destroyed, and tranquillity having been re-established throughout the Roman empire, the late oppressed Church arises again, and the temple of God, overthrown by the hands of the wicked, is built with more glory than before." Just like Jesus.

  The political reversal accomplished by Constantine is testimony to God's mercy:

  For God has raised up princes to rescind the impious and sanguinary edicts of the tyrants and provide for the welfare of mankind; so that now the cloud of past times is dispelled, and peace and serenity gladden all hearts. And after the furious whirlwind and black tempest, the heavens are now become calm, and the wished-for light has shone forth; and now God, the hearer of prayer, by His divine aid has lifted His prostrate and afflicted servants from the ground, has brought to an end the united devices of the wicked, and wiped off the tears from the faces of those who mourned. They who insulted over the Divinity, lie low; they who cast down the holy temple, are fallen with more tremendous ruin; and the tormentors of just men have poured out their guilty souls amidst plagues inflicted by heaven, and amidst deserved tortures. For God delayed to punish them, that, by great and marvelous examples, He might teach posterity that He alone is God, and that with fit vengeance He executes judgment on the proud, the impious, and the persecutors.

  God's vengeance against his persecutors comforts the mourners, vindicates the dead, and, more important, vindicates God himself, teaching that "He alone is God."

  This form of anti-Constantinianism is theologically erroneous and historically hopeless. Fortunately, that is, by and large, not Yoder's brand of anti-Constantinianism.

  YODER'S ANTI-CONSTANTINIANISM

  Yoder's opposition to Constantine suffers from the same oversight as ear her forms of anti-Constantinianism with regard to martyrs.10 He longs for the hardy faithfulness of the martyr church but does not recognize that the martyrs were motivated by something very different from antiConstantinianism. They died, one might almost say, in hope that the Lord would raise up an emperor very like Constantine, through whom the Lord would show that their blood had not seeped silent into the earth.

  Yet Yoder's anti-Constantinianism is more challenging precisely because he does not sacrifice ecclesiology but highlights it. His is an ecclesiological and eschatological critique of Constantinianism. As noted a number of times before, Yoder does not identify "Constantinianism" with the achievements or policies of Constantine or any of his successors. Constantinianism is a set of mental, spiritual, and institutional habits that get into the blood of careless Christians. Yoder's is in part a historical thesis; he does believe that "Constantinianism" took its first form in the period between the mid-second century and the fifth, or, more narrowly, between the "Edict" of Milan and the City of God. Yet he discerns forms of Constantinianism in pre-Christian Judaism and even charges that ethnically restricted Anabaptist groups might become "Constantinian."

  Constantinianism is not dependent on Constantine. What exactly is it? In his most systematic account, Yoder begins with the obvious: After Constantine, Christianity was no longer a minority religion, beleaguered and persecuted, but instead became the favored religion of the empire, in time the majority religion, eventually the established religion. This created a crisis of Christian identity and forced a shift in the meaning of Christian. Prior to Constantine, it took some chutzpah to be a Christian; after, it took chutzpah not to be one. In short, "after Constantine the church was everybody.""

  What interests Yoder here is the fact that this new social status brought with it a new ecclesiology. Prior to Constantine, the church could be identified concretely, visibly, by the lifestyle and practices of the Christian community, particularly the Christian renunciation of violence. If someone was baptized, gathered for Eucharist on Sunday and refused to pick up a sword or retaliate against enemies, he or she was a Christian. After Constantine, the visible markers of baptism, the Lord's Supper and church membership no longer identified the community of sincere believers, since everyone was in the church. A baptized person could be a rank pagan at heart, baptized only to secure a promotion in the provincial administration or to qualify for service in the army; or he could be a sincere, peaceable disciple of Jesus. Baptism told you nothing.

  As a result, some new mark of Christian identity had to be found, and it could not be an external mark. It had to be an internal mark, the invisible mark of faith, or of rege
neration or of some other spiritual reality. Because of Constantine, Christians developed a "doctrine of the invisibility of the true church" and the distinction between an inner ring of true (elect, believing) Christians, which remains a tiny minority within the visible community, and the vast majority of baptized tagalongs. Augustine's formulation of the idea of an ecclesia invisibilis is the dogmatic systematization of the identity crisis that followed Constantine's conversion and promotion of Christianity. 12 Among other things, this is politically problematic. An invisible church has no distinctive way of life that can critique, call, challenge or model an alternative to the wider society. Constantinianism is a historical irony: just when the church believes it has reached the pinnacle of influence and power, its political and social witness gets neutered.

  A double church brings a double ethic. Because Christian changes meaning to include everyone, the church redefines discipleship on two levels. Not everyone is expected to obey the Sermon on the Mount, only the special and spiritual believers, monks and ascetics. Everyone else pretty much goes about business as usual.13 In the world, Christians no longer operate by the example and teachings of Jesus but by an ethic of "vocation" that depends on a theory of natural law or "creation ordinances." There is a natural, created order to the family, for example. Being a father does not mean I bear the cross and imitate Jesus in my family. It means rather that I live by natural standards internal to the institution as created. This problem becomes especially acute, for Yoder, for Christians in politics. For someone of a Constantinian mindset, the state, with its violence and war, is a natural institution with its own rules of operation. When Christians assume office in that institution, they are "called" to function according to the demands of that calling. They punish others and fight wars, just like their pagan counterparts, and ignore Jesus' commands to do otherwise (Yoder thinks). A public-private dualism also results. What Christians would not, could not do in personal life (shoot an enemy) they can do if they have a public vocation in the natural institution of the state.