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

by Peter J. Leithart

  It is, again, rhetorically odd that Yoder insists on describing what he opposes as "Constantinian" when it comes to its most developed form after the Reformation. The oddity is especially startling in one passage where he moves from an observation about the "depth of the great reversal" that began in the second to fourth centuries to an assessment of the Renaissance and Reformation, thus leaving the whole of the Middle Ages hidden in the white space between two successive sentences. In part, he moves from the fourth to the sixteenth century because he is trying to show that the Constantinian consciousness remains in place "even as the situations which brought it forth no longer obtain."38 But that does not smooth out the bump or fill in the abyss of a millennium. In this passage he gives no examples of the Constantinian consciousness during the time when the "situations which brought it forth" did obtain. That is, from this section of Yoder's writing we have specific evidence of "Constantinianism" only after the circumstances that created it have disappeared. His relative endorsement of the medieval period makes it clear that he thinks the church in the Middle Ages fought off the worst effects of Constantinianism. One would think, though, that if the Constantinian consciousness is correlated to a particular social and political situation, namely, one in which Christians are in power and try to control history, then the Middle Ages would display a significant degree of corruption. Can he account for the "good" Middle Ages?

  Yoder might say that Constantinianism was slowly seeping into European Christianity throughout the medieval period and finally burst out in its more virulent forms when the Catholic Church fractured. That solution runs up against a basic historical objection. Despite the efforts of the Reformers to purify the corpus Christianorum, Reformation "Constantinianism" was not a development of the medieval system but a destruction of it. Nationalist Protestantism begins to rise, further, in the period when Lorenzo Valla was exposing the Donation of Constantine as a fraud, when Anabaptists were attacking Constantine as the betrayer of Christ, when even some Lutherans found something to hate in Constantine. Overt anti-Constantinianism begins to rise at the same time that Yoder says Constantinianism is entering its new modern phase.

  It is to his credit that Yoder acknowledges the achievements of the Middle Ages. Earlier Anabaptists rarely did but dismissed the whole period as corruption and apostasy. But Yoder has a problem: his thesis of the "fall of the church" cannot account for the period that immediately followed the shift itself. His historical paradigm breaks apart on the shoals of the medieval period.39

  Yoder's assault on "Constantinianism" is not merely about the theological meaning of the first Christian empire. Since he insists on wedding his prophetic critique of compromise and confusion with an Anabaptist "fall of the church" narrative, however, it is partly about the theological meaning of Constantine and his age. Since his thesis fails both historically and, as measured against his own account, methodologically, an alternative account is needed. That account must accomplish several things. To pass muster as a historical thesis, it must at least take seriously the major (if not exactly epochal) shift that took place when Constantine converted, it must be able to explain how the good Middle Ages arose from the rubble of a Christian empire, and it must provide an accurate account of what Constantine actually did. For my purposes, it will be serendipitous if it also provides some modest defense of Constantine's role in Western history. Below, I can only give the barest schematic outline of this alternative.

  ROME BAPTIZED

  When Yoder uses the word baptism in connection with Roman, Germanic or any other culture, he uses it derisively. The church "merely baptized" this or that cultural norm, institution, value.40 How, on Yoder's terms, could a culture or nation ever be baptized in anything but a superficial, and hence hypocritical, sense? By contrast, I mean the word seriously, though metaphorically. Not everyone in Rome was baptized in 312 or 324; Constantine himself was not baptized until he was on his deathbed. By using baptized to describe what happened, I want to capture, first, the fact that something happened, some border was crossed; second, that this something made the Roman Empire "Christian" in some important respects; and, third, that this something was, like every baptism, only a beginning. It was, like every baptism, an infant baptism.

  Let me begin where Yoder does, with eschatology. According to Galatians 4, when the Father sent his Son and Spirit into the world, they came to deliver the Jews ("we," v. 3) from childhood, which Paul characterizes as a state of slavery under the "elementary things of the world" (stoicheia tou kosmou). Identifying those "elementary principles" is difficult. Within the context of Galatians 4, bondage to the stoicheia is tied somehow to slavery to the "not-gods" (Galatians 4:8), and this and other considerations have led some to conclude that the stoicheia are identical with the powers and principalities that Paul elsewhere says governed human beings in their minori- ty.4' That may be; Israel too was governed by angels (cf. Galatians 3:19). But the similarity of Galatians 4:3 to Galatians 3:23 is more suggestive.42 Bondage under the stoicheia correlates to being under the custody of the schoolmaster Torah, and this linkage in Galatians seems to fit another New Testament use of stoicheia, Hebrews 6:1-2. Bondage under the stoicheia, I submit, refers to the life of Israel under the dietary, sacrificial and purity regulations imposed by Torah. That is the bondage from which Jews are delivered in the great exodus led by the Son and the Spirit-pillar; that is the highly regulated childhood that Israel outgrew in the fullness of time.

  Paul is not talking only about Jews, however. "We" were in bondage until the One who came born under the Torah; but "you" (vv. 6, 8) who did not know God have also been liberated by receiving the Son and Spirit. Paul radically flattens out the difference between Jew and Gentile. Unlike in Romans, here he does not say that all are under "sin" but rather that all are in bondage to the stoicheia. For Gentiles as much as Jews, this bondage meant adherence to animal sacrifice, the keeping of days, the avoidance of contamination. 43

  Yoder insists, rightly, that the victory over the powers was won on A.D. 29/30, not in 312.44 Incarnation and Pentecost are Paul's coordinates in Galatians 4. Yet though Jesus defeated the powers on the cross and liberated "us" and "you" from the stoicheia through the Spirit, something happens when that victory is proclaimed and accepted by people who are still in their childhood. Church history is not an empty parenthesis between the cross and the eschaton. The proclamation of repentance to all nations is part of the promised fulfillment, part of the evangel itself (Luke 24). Jesus won on the cross and in the resurrection, but the reality of that victory breaks through when the Spirit comes in the preaching of the gospel and the response of faith (e.g., Acts 2 and 10-11). The victory over the powers and the liberation from the stoicheia happened once for all in the first century, but Constantine learned of it in the fourth. For him as an individual, liberation from the stoicheia did not happen until three centuries after the cross. That was when the news of Jesus' triumph came to him, and when it came to him, he was swept up in it.

  What happens when one is liberated from bondage to the stoicheia? If I am right about the stoicheia themselves, freedom from their bondage would mean liberation from structures organized by distinctions of holy-profane and clean-unclean, from worries about unclean foods, from distinctions between impure Gentiles and pure Jews, from the fear of contagion. Above all, liberation from the stoicheia will be evident in the end of sacrifice. The great sign of Constantine's personal deliverance from stoicheia was his abandonment of childish things, that is, his renunciation of sacrifice.

  CITY OF SACRIFICE

  According to R. A. Markus45 and others, Augustine offered an "eschatological" defense of the secular, and especially of secular politics. By insisting that the perfected city is the city of the future and that the perfect peace is the peace of the kingdom, Augustine relativized the proximate peace and justice of the earthly city. Earthly republics were no longer of ultimate concern and could no longer demand ultimate sacrifice. That may have something to it as a theoretical model
, and I will return to Augustine in a moment. But I am more interested in how that Augustinian insight works out in the cultural and political world that Constantine bequeathed to the West.

  What Constantine established was surely not secular polity, if secular is used in the modern sense of an autonomous sphere of social life, impervious to God's action, free from religious guidance, vigorously protected from divine interventions of any and all sorts. His policies did not secularize Rome in that sense. He adopted religious policies, favored the church and gave the church a significant role in the "secular" life of the empire. Bishops dispensed justice, mediated disputes, built hospitals and hostels, fed the hungry. On modern (at least modern American) grounds, Constantine regularly disdained the boundary between sacred and secular.

  When he died, Constantine did not leave behind a "secular" Roman political order, but he did leave behind something other than he inherited. He left behind a political order that had been "desacrificed." The end of sacrifice announced by the gospel was effected in the actual history of Rome, during the reign of Constantine Augustus. Just as that was the moment of his personal liberation from the stoicheia, so it was the deliverance of Rome from its childhood.

  This is the "baptism" that I refer to, a moment in history, or a period of history, when a people, nation or empire receives the gospel of the victory of Jesus and is blown by the Spirit from the world of sacrifice, purity, temples, and sacred space and is transferred into a new religio-socio-polit- ical world. It is a baptism out of the world of the stoicheia, which, at least for Gentiles, involved the worship of "not-gods," into a world without sacrifice, a world after the end of sacrifice.46 Before the fourth century, the world had already seen such a baptism: "it was the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem ... that activated the slow-overly slow-transformation of religion to which we owe, among other things, European culture." With the fall of the temple, the Jews "offered the example of a society that had succeeded in conserving its ethnic and religious identity, even after the destruction of the only temple where daily sacrifices could be offered." Such a "sudden disappearance of sacrifices in a community represents a deep transformation of the very structures of its religious life."47 The waves from that baptism in Jerusalem eventually reached the Roman Empire. After the fourth century, many other civilizations were baptized in the same way, until by the high Middle Ages the European continent was baptized to the four points of the compass. Baptisms have continued since and will continue until the nations are made disciples. That, after all, is Jesus' commission to his church (Matthew 28:18-20).

  Constantine began to eliminate sacrifice from Roman life, and this was no mean achievement. Roman sacrifice was at the center of Roman civilization. It was the chief religious act by which Romans communicated and communed with the gods, keeping the gods happy so Romans could be happy. Sacrifice disclosed the secrets of the future, as the haruspex read the entrails of a slaughtered animal. Sacrifice was essential to Roman politics. Senatorial decisions were sealed with sacrifice, and so too imperial decrees. Soldiers sacrificed to the gods to win their favor before they went to slaughtering enemies in battle in order to restore the offended honor of the Roman imperium. It was not only good politics; it was also cathartic. Roman citizens, at least during times of persecution, were required to manifest their submission and devotion to gods, to the emperor and to Rome by acts of sacrifice. By sacrificing for or to the emperor, they acknowledged him as Lord, Savior, Deliverer, even, at times, as God. Christians refused because they knew there was another King, another world Emperor, who filled that role, and Romans tried to suppress this Christian rebellion by sacrificing Christians. Sacrifice was essential to Roman society, as humiliores were devoted to the comfort of honestiores. Sacrificial slaughter in the arena was one of the empire's chief entertainments.48

  Through Constantine, Rome was baptized, and sacrifice in all these senses either came to an end or began to. Constantine stopped the slaughter of Christians. He refused to sacrifice at the Capitol during his triumph in 312. He ended sacrifice for officers of his empire, thus opening imperial administration to Christians, and eventually outlawed sacrifice entirely. He closed a few temples where sacrifices were being offered, though he permitted various forms of divination to continue. He stopped the gladiatorial combats and gave legal support to humiliores who wanted access to the judicial system so that they would not be chewed up by the system. Torture continued, and despite Constantine's decree, sacrifice persisted throughout the empire. Constantine himself fought imperial wars, but his savagery was not celebrated as the honor-wars of previous emperors had been. With Constantine, the Roman Empire became officially a desacrificial polity. If he did not entirely expunge sacrifice, Constantine displaced sacrifice from the center of Roman life, pushed it to the margins and into dark corners. Constantine's reign marked the beginning of the end of sacrifice. He took away the smoky food of the not-gods (Galatians 4:8), and the demons began to atrophy.

  To this extent, Constantine's polity has remained in place until the present. A desacrificed civilization has become so commonplace that we think it is the natural order of things. We are horrified when we hear that some bizarre Wiccan cult has performed a sacrifice in a wood nearby; we sense that this portends ghoulish assaults on our ordered world. If a session of the Senate or Supreme Court opened with sacrifice, talk radio would be abuzz for months and we might have marches in the streets. Historically speaking, though, we are the aberrations. For millennia every empire, every city, every nation and tribe was organized around sacrifice. Every polity has been a sacrificial polity. We are not, and we have Constantine to thank for that.

  THERE WILL BE BLOOD

  That is only one side of the story, however; because there will be blood. Every ancient city was a sacrificial center, ever since Cain slaughtered his brother before setting up the walls of Enoch, the city named for his son. Rome, in mythology if not in fact, was built over the blood of Remus, the blood of Dido and Turnus, the blood of the many thousands trampled beneath the lusty domination of Rome. Negatively, Constantine created and left a desacrificed city. Positively, he recognized and welcomed the church into his realm, to the center of the Roman Empire. There was blood there too, but it was the blood of Jesus that announced the end of bloodshed. The church too was a sacrificial city, the true city of sacrifice, the city of final sacrifice, which in its Eucharistic liturgy of sacrifice announced the end of animal sacrifice and the initiation of a new sacrificial order.

  Even before we reflect on this theologically, we should make some effort to grasp the earth-quaking significance of Constantine's decision. Every city is sacrificial, but Constantine eliminated sacrifice in his own city and welcomed a different sacrificial city into Rome. For a fourthcentury Roman, eliminating sacrifice from the city was as much as to say, "My city is no longer a city." For a fourth-century Roman, acknowledging the church's bloodless sacrifice as the sacrifice was as much as to say, "The church is the true city here." When Constantine began to end sacrifice, he began to end Rome as he knew it, for he initiated the end of Rome's sacrificial lifeblood and established that Rome's life now depended on its adherence to another civic center, the church.

  For Augustine, the Eucharist not only announces the end of sacrifice but also ritually embodies a sacrificial movement that encompasses the entire life of the church. The church is a priesthood not only at the table on the Lord's Day but in its life together. Sacrifice, Augustine said, is any work by which we seek to adhere to God in holy society with him.49 What God above all desires is mercy, and so the highest sacrifice is the work of compassion done in order to adhere to God. When a group lives out this sacrifice, it is not only continuously joined to the society of the transcendently sociable triune God but also united together in that union with God. The whole city becomes a universale sacrificium through Christ, the priest who offers himself, and offers us in him:

  Since, therefore, true sacrifices are works of mercy to ourselves or others, done with a re
ference to God, and since works of mercy have no other object than the relief of distress or the conferring of happiness, and since there is no happiness apart from that good of which it is said, It is good for me to be very near to God, it follows that the whole redeemed city, that is to say, the congregation or community of the saints, is offered to God as our sacrifice through the great High Priest, who offered Himself to God in His passion for us, that we might be members of this glorious head, according to the form of a servant.50

  Christ's is the founding sacrifice of the new city, the eschatological city. But that sacrifice is perpetuated by the body in mutual love and service. Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum: multi unum corpus in Christo-this is the sacrifice of Christians, we who are many are one body in Christ.51

  By virtue of this sacrifice, the church does justice.52 The just city, Augustine famously argued, is the city that does justice to all, above all to God. Only the city that renders God his due, which is the true sacrifice of the one body united in peace and love, only that city is truly just. When the Roman world passed through its "baptism" from bondage to the stoicheia, Constantine eliminated sacrifices to the gods in the earthly city and thereby renounced any claim that the Roman city was a just city. A city without justice, Augustine insisted, is no city at all, so by eliminating sacrifice Constantine was admitting that Rome had become decivilized.