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

by Peter J. Leithart

  Along with this new ecclesiology come a new eschatology and a new view of providence. For Yoder, eschatology is central to the problem of Constantianism. Constantinianism is, he says in various places, an eschatological heresy. In the early church, eschatology focused on Christ's victory over the world, and especially over the powers and principalities that structure the world. In The Politics ofJesus, Yoder explains that the powers are good and necessary for human life, yet fallen. Because they are fallen, these structures (political and social institutions, traditions, mammon, power, etc.) are, or can be, demonic. God does overrule and orchestrate the powers so that they promote human flourishing. Tyranny is better than chaos, and tradition better than aimless innovation. But the powers are largely inimical to human existence. Jesus, however, has triumphed over the powers, and the very existence of the church is a declaration that the powers are not-gods whose authority is limited. In the church, and in the church only, is a people that refuses to bow the knee to the idols. The church's refusal to conform to fashion, to traditionalism, to violence is a continuous evangelical announcement: The gods are dethroned. By his triumph, Jesus liberates Christians. This liberation is not complete, but it has begun, and it is a sign of the inbreaking of the eschatological kingdom and an announcement that the powers are doomed. The church's efforts are poured into resisting the seductions of the powers .14

  Constantinianism changes this. Principalities and powers, though they are not subdued and do not acknowledge Jesus, "could not escape from His hidden control or from the promise of His ultimate victory." Jesus denied them free rein, using even their evil designs for his purposes. This hidden control suddenly became visible in Constantine: "after Constantine, one had to believe without seeing that there was a community of believers, within the larger nominally Christian mass, but one knew for a fact that God was in control of history." Why is this a problem? Mainly, Yoder says, because this paradigm identifies the providence of God, the purposes of God, with the good of the empire or, later, the nation. Mission is thus redefined: "beyond the limits of empire it had become identical with the expansion of Rome's sway." 15 The empire becomes identified with Christianity, but there is no deep conversion or change. Constantinianism misidentifies the locus of meaning in history, displacing it from the church to the empire or nation, and thus misreads history itself. Ethically, this leads to a universalizability principle. The church no longer asks, Is this what Jesus demands? but rather, because it has identified itself with power, Can you ask this behavior of everyone?

  Constantinian Christianity succumbs to the original temptation of Satan, to seize godlikeness and try to wrest control of history from God. Because providence is now visible in the emperor, or the nation, or the class, directing that institution gives leverage for moving history in the direction we want it to go. Because Constantinian Christianity wants to direct history, it wants to know what works. In place of obedience to Jesus' counterintuitive commands, the church lives by the standard of efficiency: Will this action have the result I'm looking for? Will it give me control over the direction of history? Anti-Constantinian faith is, by contrast, a joyful "not being in charge," manifest in a politics of patience. AntiConstantinian Christians obey Jesus, come what may.

  More subtly and perhaps long-lastingly, Constantinianism brings a new metaphysics and a new epistemology. The metaphysics is dualistic. Augustinian Neoplatonism is the intellectual form, but the success of his meta physics is its "usefulness" in legitimizing "the new social arrangement and resolve the problems it raised. The church we see is not the believing community; the visible/invisible duality names, and thereby justifies, the tension. The dominant ethic is different from the New Testament in content (Lordship is glorified rather than servanthood) as in source (reason and the `orders of creation' are normative, rather than the particularity of Jesus' and the apostles' guidance) .1116

  The epistemological consequences go in the opposite direction. Constantinianism is the first form of a Western universalism that comes to secular expression in the Enlightenment. If you do not have to rule or convince everyone, you can root your epistemological and ethical claims on your own local, tribal traditions. Once Christians rule non-Christians, decisions have to be justified on a universal base that makes sense to unbelievers. The result is what Chris Huebner calls a "methodological Constantinianism" similar to what recent thinkers have dubbed "foundationalism." This is characterized by "appeals to the universal, natural law, common sense, a system, or a set of universally acknowledged axioms," and its goal is to "justify the social order as it exists."17

  As noted above, Constantinianism does not refer to a particular churchstate settlement. During the course of Western history, the relation of the church to the world has undergone several transformations. "Neo- Constantinianism" is the small-potatoes Constantinianism of identifying the meaning of history with the fortunes of an individual nation-state, or a class, or a future people, rather than with the fortunes of a universal empire. Disestablished churches can be as Constantinian as established ones, insofar as the church considers its duty to be supporting the "good guys," that is, us Americans or us South Africans. With each new phase of Constantinianism, something is lost. Fourth-century Constantinianism welded the church onto an empire, and medieval Christians retained some sense that the church had an independent base of power and a catholic reach that went beyond Europe. After the Reformation, each new phase of Constantinianism has set its sights more narrowly and has progressively lost a sense of catholicity. In each manifestation the Constantinian church misconstrues the locus of meaning in history, shifting it from the church to some other institution.

  Charles Mayo Collier has emphasized that Yoder's entire theological program is animated by a "Christological historicism."" Yoder's deepest complaint against Constantinianism is a christological one, the pretense that one can go beyond the unsurpassable Christ. There can be nothing new after Christ, because Christ brings in the end of the ages, the fullness of the times. We may ask, which Christ is unsurpassable? Or, better, at which stage of Christ's work does he become unsurpassable? For Yoder, the answer is that the crucified Christ, Christ in his suffering, defeat and weakness, is the unsurpassable Christ. If one says that Christ is now resurrected and vindicated, exalted to the throne at the Father's right hand, Yoder would reply that this exaltation is the exaltation of the crucified Lord; the Lamb, the slain Lamb, sits on the throne. Jesus never reverses his kenotic act, because kenosis is the very form of his lordship. At times Yoder claims that what is unsurpassable is not only Jesus himself but the "community he creates."" My question is the same, which community? Clearly, for Collier and Yoder, the community that is foundational is the community that remains in the way of Jesus, that renounces the sword and embraces the cross.20

  Yoder's critique is powerful because it offers a comparatively simple paradigm that proliferates new insights and seems to explain a great deal about the history of the church and the West. It is powerful too because it exposes the bonds between foundational theological grids (nature-grace, for instance), conceptions of church-state relations, theological method and the social location of the church. It is also powerful because so much of what Yoder attacks is so familiar, and so wrong. And it is powerful because it gives blunt names-heresy and apostasy-to habits of thought and Christian practice that can and have become instinctive.

  Where he fails, however, is in showing that this heresy actually deserves the name Constantinian, and therefore that this heresy has characterized the mainstream church for the better part of its history. Yoder is trying to wed two things that do not go together: a capitulation of the church to the world on the one hand, and an Anabaptist narrative of the Constantinian "fall of the church" on the other.21 I agree with a great deal of Yoder's critique of "Constantinianism"-I abhor nature-grace schemes, I repudiate any effort to get to some deeper foundation for Christian life and practice than Jesus and his Word (though I differ with Yoder about what that Word teaches us),
I renounce epistemological dualism with all its pomp and show, and so on. But these renunciations do not compel me to believe that the "church" "fell" in the fourth, or the sixth, or the sixteenth, or the twentieth century.22 I do not believe that this is true, and it seems true only if one accepts Yoder's account of the early church, which I have argued is erroneous.

  I want to break asunder what Yoder has put together. Of the two partners, I want to focus on the "fall of the church." Can we send that packing? Yes, and I believe Yoder has provided much of the evidence to justify the divorce.

  THE CONSTANTINIANISM OF ANTI-CONSTANTINIANISM

  Yoder assumes his inherited Anabaptist narrative of the fall of the church, and this shapes his treatment not only of the fourth century but of the whole of church history. But this narrative is, ironically, a "Constantinian" construct (using the term in Yoder's sense). That is true in two main senses.

  First, methodologically: J. Alexander Sider has argued that Yoder's account of the patristic period relies on historical work that is "not very good" and badly outdated.23 That is a flaw, but not an uncommon one. More seriously, Yoder makes no effort to penetrate the biases and politics that animate the historical work he uses. Again, not an uncommon flaw, but for Yoder it is a serious oversight, given his insistence that historical work is always done from a particular location for a particular purpose. He knows quite well that he is socially located, and he knows that his location is politically charged. Yet he naively accepts other historians' accounts as if they were not. Of course they are. Burckhardt's attack on Constantine is bound up with Protestant-Catholic polemics and opposition to the Reichs- kirche of Kaiser Wilhelm 11.24 Scholarship on Eusebius has been distorted by scholars who think they find echoes in Eusebius of the German church's endorsement of the Third Reich'25 and Yoder's own training in postwar Europe moved him in similar directions.26 Some of Constantine's and Eusebius's fiercest critics seem to have conflated Constantine with modern tyrannies and totalitarianisms.

  In Yoder's work, "Constantinianism" functions not as a detailed historical hypothesis but in a "legendary" or mythical fashion, as a "narrative trope," or even in a "transcendental" way." All historians work with types and tropes and fill historical figures and movements with conceptual significance that goes beyond anything the historical figures themselves could have known or done. I have offered my own story line for the period, and it does not include everything; certain events contextualize other events, and I have developed the threads of the story that I think are most revealing and representative. Plus, I have written the history of Constantine with polemical intention, in order to redress an imbalanced popular portrait of the first Christian emperor. I could have told the story of Constantine with the death of Crispus at the center, and the results would have been very different.

  The problem is not types and tropes but the fact that Yoder's use of the "Constantinian" trope and the historical scholarship on which it is based are "monologic."28 He knows that history is always full of mess and misjudgment, and that all historical work is full of difficulty and equivocation-is this source reliable? what is his or her agenda? who has been silenced? what has been left out? Yoder knows that there are always multiple voices. He is quite good in bringing out suppressed voices. But not with Constantinianism; Constantinianism changes and morphs, but in its basic outlines remains a monolith. Why so?

  But his methodological problem is actually more serious: Yoder charges that any effort to mold history into smooth contours betrays a "Constantinian" effort at conceptual mastery, a heretical attempt to "seize godlikeness" by taking control of history and historical narrative, a Constantinian epistemology and method. That, however, is precisely what he has done. Further, he insists that history is done well only when the historian makes the imaginative effort to get into the "psychic skin" of his or her subjects in order to capture the openness of the choices before them. Historical actors do not know ahead of time how it will all turn out, and we ought not project our knowledge of the outcome back on the actors. This again would be a Constantinian move, a "closure" imposed on a history that for the participants is still very open.29 Yoder knows that the world is a complicated place, and he claims to honor the passage of time and the liquid configurations of social and political life. When it comes to the fourth century, though, he seems to forget everything he has warned us about. He does not attempt to get into the skin of the participants but keeps them very much at arm's length. He does not allow the story to remain open. Yoder's "Constantinianism" is plausible only because he follows what he condemns as a "Constantinian" methodology.

  Again, why? I believe Yoder has worked with a "prior narrative" of the church's fall. He starts with a closed narrative, the one he inherited from sixteenth-century Anabaptists. Everything else remains open, everything else discussable; that narrative remains fixed and foundational.

  Second, substantively: what deepens the irony is that the specific myth Yoder depends on is itself-in both the literal sense and in Yoder's sensea Constantinian myth. Literally: it was Eusebius who first taught Christians to think that the past was pristine, and the Eusebian story line was part of the post-Constantinian effort to stave off mediocrity and compro- mise.30 It was a way of saying, "Look how far we have fallen! Get back to the fathers!" I have raised questions throughout this book about the accuracy of Yoder's portrayal of the church between the apostles and the sec and century, and have argued that, at best, Yoder claims to know more about that period than any of the evidence allows, and, at worst, his portrayal is a misreading of what little evidence there is. I am left, like Nigel Wright, wondering whether the church Yoder wants has ever existed.31 Actually, I do not wonder; I am convinced that it never did, at least in the first three centuries.32 But the crucial point is more subtle. Yoder claims to be able to lead Christians out of the Egypt of Constantinian captivity, but he remains in that captivity himself. Yoder might well embrace this irony; he may recognize the irony that the conditions of possibility of his own opposition arise from the thing opposed. But for him to make his antiConstantinian case, he has to be able to get outside those conditions. He has to be able to break the distorting lenses of Constantinianism and see the early church with the naked eye. He often writes as if he has done that, but in fact he is still looking through the same lenses-to repeat, the same Eusebian lenses-though perhaps he has turned them upside down.

  In Yoder's sense, too, the myth of the fall of the church is a Constantinian myth. One of the crucial errors of Constantinianism, Yoder argues, is the misplacement of God's action in history. For Scripture, that action centers on the community of the church, but for the Constantinian it centers on rulers, wars, powerful figures, "real" powers to which the church must attach itself to get things done. Has Yoder done that when he identifies the crucial shift of all church history as a "Constantinian shift"? Yoder cleverly minimizes the role of Constantine as a man and emphasizes that the crucial shift was the church's own "apostasy." Yet he explains much of church history in reference to the great "epochal" change by using the name of the emperor. At least rhetorically, Yoder makes an odd move here, and one that raises questions about the coherence of his rhetoric with his substance: Does his anti-Constantinian rhetoric undermine his protest against misidentifying the meaning of history? Who is putting too much weight on princes Yoder, who wrote constantly about Constantine, or Augustine, who dispatches Constantine in a brief chapter in City of God so that he can rush ahead to relate the history of God's city?

  To put the question the other way round: Why does Yoder not identify the heresy as "Eusebian"? That would be more accurate, though, as I have argued, not entirely fair to the maligned bishop of Caesarea. "Eusebian," though, is too specific; Eusebius's views were too obviously eccentric, too quickly corrected (by Augustine especially). Eusebius is too obscure. One cannot construct grand schemes of history on the foundation of Eusebius. Ultimately, I again suspect that Yoder employs the rhetoric he does because he is reading church history throu
gh the framework provided by Anabaptist protest since the sixteenth century.

  In sum: Yoder's narrative of the church's fall comes under his own judgment as "Constantinian." We should abandon it, if for nothing else than for Yoderian reasons.

  THE GOOD MIDDLE AGES

  His narrative of the "fall of the church" fails for a second major reason, again one internal to Yoder's own work. Though at times Yoder seems to claim that, apart from a few pockets of radical faithfulness, the church has been in a state of "apostasy" since the fourth century,33 he generously acknowledges in several places that the medieval synthesis was superior at least to later nationalist Protestantism. He warns that "the risk of caricature is great" when discussing the Middle Ages and observes that "significant elements of the otherness [of the church] in structure as in piety" remained during those centuries. The church's consciousness of being distinct from the world was "more than vestigial," manifested in "the higher level of morality asked of the clergy, the international character of the hierarchy, the visibility of the hierarchy in opposition to the princes, the gradual moral education of the barbarians into monogamy and legality, foreign missions, apocalypticism and mysticism," which "preserved an awareness, however distorted and polluted, of the strangeness of God's people in a rebellious world."34 The medieval church's "hierarchy had a power base and a self-definition" that, importantly, gave the church enough distance to criticize rulers, call them to repentance, demand justice and place limits like "the rules of chivalry, the Peace of God" on the lusts and ambitions of princes.31 Over the centuries, the scope of the church's "chaplaincy" steadily reduced, and as a result the church's commitment to catholicity steadily evaporated.36 Throughout the Middle Ages, however, the original conviction that the church is the center of history remained "half alive."37 In the atrophied Constantinianism of American civil religion, by contrast, the nation is so closely identified with God's purposes that the church is reduced to being a cheerleader for the world's last superpower.