Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
Page 44
25Harris, "Child-Exposure," p. 19: "There was a powerful inhibition in the way of selling a child of citizen parents. That was precisely what could not be allowed to happen to a member of the citizen community. At least some Greeks felt that the selling of children was more abhorrent than exposing them."
26Harris, "Child-Exposure," p. 21.
27This is often described as a reversal of long-standing Roman law, but W. W. Buckland (The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908], p. 421) points out that Constantine himself claimed that it was permitted by earlier emperors (CTh 5.10.1). According to Buckland, Constantine's "contribution to the matter seems to have been to regulate it by laying down several rules to which such sales must conform."
28And, as everywhere, there is controversy about Constantine's interest in and attention to slaves. Jones (Constantine and the Conversion ofEurope, p. 189) claims that he showed little interest in the problem, while Dorries (Constantine the Great, pp. 92-103) argues that his legislation was revolutionary. For details of particular legislation, see Corcoran, Empire of the Tetrarchs, pp. 108, 113, 167. See E. J. Jonkers, "De l'influence du Christianisme sur la legislation relative a l'esclavage dans 1'antiquite," Mnemosyne, 3rd ser. 1 (1933-1934): 265-80.
29Buckland, Roman Law of Slavery, pp. 3-5.
30Lactantius Divine Institutes 5.15.3.
31For details of these, see Buckland, Roman Law of Slavery, pp. 77, 86, 269, 402, 420-22, 606.
33CTh 9.12.1; Grubbs, Law and Family, p. 26.
32CTh 2.25.1; CJ 5.37.22.2-4; Judith Evans Grubbs, Law andFamily in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine's Marriage Legislation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 25-26.
34Dorries, Constantine the Great, pp. 95, 99.
"Christopher Kelly, "Bureaucracy and Government," in The Cambridge Companion to theAge of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 195-97.
36A. H. M. Jones, "The Social Background of the Struggle Between Paganism and Christianity," in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) pp. 26-27; David S. Potter, The Roman Empire atBay, AD 180-395, Routledge History of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 387-88.
17 On Diocletian's and Constantine's administrative reforms generally, see Charles Matson Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 229-30; Dorries, Constantine the Great, chap. 8; MacMullen, Constantine, chap. 10; Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 340-41; Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 9-10; Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, pp. 367-77; Kelly, "Bureaucracy and Government," pp. 183-204.
38Kelly, "Bureaucracy and Government," pp. 183-89; Jones, Later Roman Empire, 1:101.
39Peter Brown ("Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy," Journal of Roman Studies 51 [1961]: 1-11) argues for a "drift into a respectable Christianity" in the two decades following Constantine's death, and Michele Renee Salzman (The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002]) argues for an even later development, in the 360s. Timothy D. Barnes ("Statistics and the Conversion of the Roman Aristocracy," Journal ofRoman Studies 85 [1995]: 135-47) vindicates Eusebius, concluding that both Constantine and Constantius "preferred Christians when they appointed men to high office" (p. 144).
40Jones, "Social Background," pp. 28-30; cf. Andreas Alfoldi, The Conversion of Constantine and Pagan Rome, trans. Harold Mattingly (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948).
41Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, pp. 388-89.
42Jones, Later Roman Empire, 2:901.
43Eusebius Life 4.31.
44Ibid., 2.13.
45Zosimus is mistaken. Fausta was Crispus's stepmother.
"Quoted in David Woods, "On the Death of the Empress Fausta," Greece and Rome, 2nd ser. 45 (1998): 71-72.
41Ibid., p. 72.
48Burckhardt, Age of Constantine, pp. 283, 339.
49Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), p. 96.
"Woods, "On the Death of the Empress." My point is not primarily to endorse Woods's reconstruction. It maybe wrong, and scholars who claim that a dynastic struggle lay behind the executions maybe closer to the truth. I focus on Woods to show just how little we know about the incident and to defuse the frequent charge that Constantine "murdered" his son. He may have, but we simply lack the evidence to make a confident judgment.
"The only stronger case is that Constantine is to be commended for applying the law without partiality, even when it meant punishing his own son and wife.
12 Harold Berman, Law andRevolution: The Formation ofthe Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
"Harold Berman, Faith and Order: The Reconciliation ofLaw and Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerd- mans, 1993), p. 44.
14 Thanks to my former student Davey Henreckson for several conversations about this concept.
'Quoted in Hermann Dorries, Constantine the Great, trans. Roland Bainton (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 209.
'I am following the story as told in Dio Cassius Roman History 68.8-14. Additional details from
'Tenney Frank, Roman Imperialism (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 355.
4Susan P. Mattern, Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 164, 198-99.
'Frank, Roman Imperialism, p. 355.
'Frank, Roman Imperialism, p. 355; see also Dio Cassius Roman History 67.6-10.
7TacitusAgricola 39.
'This is the thesis of Frank, Roman Imperialism, recently popularized, with application to American expansion, by Thomas F. Madden, Empires of Trust: How Rome Built-andAmerica Is Building-a New World (New York: Dutton, 2008).
9See especially Mattern, Rome and the Enemy, chap. 5. For a discussion of the dynamics of honor in the internal politics of the empire, see J. E. Lendon, Empire ofHonor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). These should be balanced and nuanced by the profound meditations of Carlin A. Barton ("Savage Miracles: The Redemption of Lost Honor in Roman Society and the Sacrament of the Gladiator and the Martyr," Representations 45 [1994]: 41-71), who emphasizes the "less sanguine and sober strains" in the late republican and early imperial culture, the sense that all of Rome's victories were hollow, and the fascination with heroic death.
11Mattern, Rome and the Enemy, p. 215.
12Ibid., p. 175, notes that superbia is "a vice characteristic of people of high status," the "opposite of deference and therefore exactly what one wished to avoid in one's enemies."
13I have in mind especially the deaths of Maximian and Licinius, both of whom died after Constantine defeated them, and both of whom were charged with conspiring against Constantine. Possibly they really did plot; we can see from other incidents that Maximian was not eager to give up power. But we cannot know for sure, and it is likely that they were executed on Constantine's orders and for the protection of his own power. On Crispus and Fausta, see chapter 10.
10Dio Cassius Roman History 67.4.6.
14A point stressed by Raymond Van Dam, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
"Augustine City of God 5.25.
16Van Dam, Roman Revolution, p. 91.
19Ramsey MacMullen, Constantine (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 14-16.
"Ibid., pp. 94-95.
181bid., p. 88.
200n the relation of emperor to panegyrist, see C. E. V. Nixon, "Constantinus Oriens Imperator: Propaganda and Panegyric; On Reading Panegyric 7 (307)," Historia 42 (1993): 229-46.
21I am drawing on the summary provided by C. E.
V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, eds., In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 23-24.
24Panegyric 6.9.4-5, in ibid., p. 232.
"Panegyric 6.1.5, in ibid., p. 218.
"Panegyric 6.8.3, in ibid., p. 230.
uPanegyric 6.12.1-3, in ibid., pp. 234-35.
"Panegyric 6.17.2, in ibid., p. 243, with n. 79 identifying the references.
27Panegyric 12.23.2-3, in ibid., p. 329.
28Eusebius Life 1.8. The poet Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius, known as the "Ovid of the Constantinian Age," thought the same. He described the homage paid by Indians, Arabs, Ethiopians and Armenians to Constantine (Elizabeth Key Fowden, "Constantine and the Peoples of the Eastern Frontier," in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], pp. 377-98, 389). In the fourteenth of his Carmena he, like Eusebius, described Constantine's progress toward the east as the spread of light into the world's darkness:
29Letter to the Provincials of Palestine, quoted in Eusebius Life 2.28. Though his movement is from east to west, the roundel on the east side of the arch of Constantine shows Sol rising on his quadriga.
'Hugh Elson, "Warfare and the Military," in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 339; Michael Ku- likowski, "Constantine and the Northern Barbarians," in Cambridge Companion, p. 358.
31Kulikowski, "Northern Barbarians," p. 358.
32Ibid. See also Fowden, "Peoples of the Eastern Frontier," p. 378.
33TUlian Caesares.
34Zosimus New History 2.
"For an excellent brief summary of the pre-Constantinian relations with Persia, see Fowden, "Peoples of the Eastern Frontier," p. 382-84.
36Timothy D. Barnes, "Constantine and the Christians of Persia," journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985): 135-36, analyzes an early-fourth-century text known as the Itinerarium Alexandri that links Alexander and Trajan and hints that Constantine's son Constantius was getting ready to invade Persia. The text, Barnes argues, illustrates "the hopes which Constantine aroused."
37Fowden, "Peoples of the Eastern Frontier," p. 390-91; see also Barnes, "Constantine and the Christians," pp. 126-36; Garth Fowden, "The Last Days of Constantine: Oppositional Version and Their Influence," journal of Roman Studies 84 (1994): 146-53.
38Eusebius Life 4.56.
39Fowden, "Peoples of the Eastern Frontier," p. 393.
40Barnes, "Constantine and the Christians," p. 131.
41Eusebius Life 4.9-13, along with notes in Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), pp. 313-15.
42Barnes, "Constantine and the Christians," p. 132.
45Dorries (Constantine the Great, pp. 128-29) gets the tone right in describing it as "evangelistic" and an offer of "brotherhood."
46Hermann Dorries, Constantine and Religious Liberty, trans. Roland Bainton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960).
43Fowden, "Peoples of the Eastern Frontier," pp. 391-92.
"Barnes, "Constantine and the Christians," p. 136.
47Panegyric 6.7.3, in In Praise of Later Roman Emperors, ed. and trans. Nixon and Rodgers, p. 351. Nazarius refers to God as summa ilia maiestas (16.1) and benigna maiestas (19.2).
50Ibid., 2.
51Ibid., 3.
52Ibid., 5.
"Panegyric 4.18.1, in ibid., p. 363.
49Oration S.
53John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 82-83, 145.
'John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution, ed. Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), p. 58. This is true in the trivial sense that the gospel contains no "mirror for magistrates."
57Ibid., 4.16, 21.
581bid., 4.5-7; see Cameron and Hall's edition, pp. 311-13, for the background.
59See also ibid., 2.28, where Constantine tells the people of Palestine that he "banished and utterly removed every form of evil." This sounds like hubris, but he claims to be nothing more than God's instrument who, by "the aid of divine power," recalls all nations to "the holy laws of God."
55Eusebius Life 1.46; see comments in Eusebius, Life, ed. and trans. Cameron and Hall, p. 222.
56Eusebius Life 2.12; 4.19-20.
60Thomas Heilke, "Yoder's Idea of Constantinianism: An Analytical Framework Toward Conversation," in AMind Patient and Untamed: Assessing John Howard Yoder's Contributions to Theology, Ethics and Peacemaking, ed. Ben C. Ollenburger and Gayle Gerber Koontz (Telford, Penn.: Cascadia, 2004), pp. 89-125. According to Yoder, the early Christians believed that "creation" and its institutions, including the state, were subordinate to the order of redemption, but after Constantine this was reversed-Christian life became a matter of submitting to the standards internal to created institutions. Heilke's criticism reverses Yoder's standard criticism; his complaint is that post-Constantine Christian writers subordinated the order of creation to the order of redemption.
61This, once again, is one of Yoder's formulations of the "heresy of Constantinianism." He says that for the Bible "the meaning of history had been carried by the people of God as people, as community" (Priestly Kingdom, p. 138). While true in a sense, this concept neglects the central role of representation in Scripture; the history of the Davidic kingship is the history of the people because the Davidic king personally embodies Yahweh's son, Israel (cf. Exodus 4:23; Peter J. Leithart, A Son to Me: An Exposition of 1 and 2 Samuel [Moscow, Ida.: Canon, 2003]). Besides, while Scripture includes accounts of patriarchs and Moabite widows, it also includes 1-2 Kings and 1-2 Chronicles, telling the story of the monarchy twice! There is no 1-2 Peasants.
62Robert L. Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), pp. 57-59.
63 Quoted in Marc Mastrangelo, The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudenti us and the Poetics of the Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 56.
"Quoted in ibid., p. 54.
611bid., p. 116.
"Augustine City of God 5.24.
67Thousands of books have been published on empire, many in recent years. Theologians and biblical scholars have entered the fray. See, for example, Wes Avram, ed., Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004); Richard A. Horsley, ed., Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1997), Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), and In the Shadow ofEmpire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History ofFaithful Resistance (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2008); Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel, eds., Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008); John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (San Francisco: Harper, 2007). In the wider debate, the works of Noam Chomsky have a large place; see also various works by Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich. Yale Ferguson, "Along the Imperial Continuum: Varieties of Empire," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2007, available at
68John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 1971, 2003), p. 68.
69Yoder wrote his books before the current obsession with empire, and he rarely deals with the subject directly.
70Tertullian On Idolatry 19. The Latin reads "non potest una anima duobus deberi, deo et Cae- sari."
'Ibid., pp. 53-54.
"Yoder, Christian Attitudes, p. 49.
"Ibid., p
p. 49-51.
74I examine some of these theological and ethical concerns in the final chapter, though even there it will be impossible for me to deal fully with Yoder's concerns, especially the issue of pacifism.
'Though Yoder asserts more than he can prove on the historical question, his careful and probing ethical treatments of the subject are very challenging for just war thinkers. See especially John Howard Yoder, When War Is Unjust: Being Honest in JustWar Thinking (1996; reprint, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2001).
4Yoder argues in many places that the basic problem of Constantinianism is its ecclesiology and eschatology. Yet pacifism looms very large in his analysis of church history, and hence of Constantinianism. Without pacifist assumptions, much of Yoder's edifice crumbles. Yoder describes Constantinianism as, in part, the belief that "the Roman emperor and their God were allies" (John Howard Yoder, The War ofthe Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking, ed. Glen Stassen et. al. [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009], p. 45). But how can Yoder know that this is not the case? The apparent presumption that it is impossible for a political ruler to be an "ally" of God rests on his pacifist ethic. Perhaps it is best to say that the church's supposedly shifting views on war and peace are, for Yoder, the leading symptom of the church's apostasy.
2justin Dialogue with Trypho 110.
'Justin First Apology 39.
'Ibid., p. 204, n. 10.
'John Helgeland, "Christians and the Roman Army from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine," ANRW2.23.1 (1979): 764-65.
7Yoder, War ofthe Lamb, p. 45.
'Again, assumptions about pacifism shape the answer. If one takes the Sermon on the Mount as a pacifist manifesto, then of course Ambrose and Augustine and others who formulated Christian "just war" theory abandoned the Sermon on the Mount. But if the Sermon on the Mount does not entail pacifism, the assessment of post-Constantinian theologians will be very different.
9James Jordan regularly makes this point in many different contexts.
10See the summary of research in David G. Hunter, "A Decade of Research on Early Christian Military Service," Religious Studies Review 18, no. 2 (1992): 87-94. On page 93 he concludes that the recent research has shown that "the efforts of Christians to justify participation in warfare for a `just' cause ... stand in fundamental continuity with at least one strand of preConstantinian tradition."