Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (30 page)

Judaism had found its own place in the empire, with concentrations of Jews to be found nearly everywhere. There were, by the beginning of the fourth century, something like a minimum of three million Jews, so their number, while probably less than that of the Christians, was still substantial. Two thirds of that figure lived east of the Balkan peninsula.
⁷
Jews lived in cities, especially Alexandria and Carthage, as well as Rome and the urban centers of Asia Minor. They also pursued agriculture in fertile areas like the river valleys of Mesopotamia and along the Nile. Many of these Jews were Hellenized, speaking the language of their neighbors and interacting with Christians and pagans. As we saw earlier, up until late antiquity, there was far more fluidity among these communities than is ordinarily imagined. We can presume that Hellenized Jewish communities were as intellectually and culturally vital as any. As in Christianity, the canonization of sacred texts had spawned among Jews a culture of text study and interpretation,
⁸
but it is a mystery that these Jews left almost no written records of their religious and cultural life. "After 100
C.E.,
" in the words of one historian of ancient Judaism, the Jews of the Hellenized Diaspora "appear to have become illiterate ... Greek-speaking Jews read the Bible in Greek ... but were not inspired thereby to write. Why, we do not know."
⁹

The story was very different in the communities of rabbinic Jews concentrated in what from Rome could seem the backwaters of Palestine, in what had been known as Judea and Galilee.
¹⁰
An emblem of Jewish survival was the story told about the Pharisaic leader Yochanan ben Zakkai, who had been spirited out of the besieged city of Jerusalem inside a coffin. He had set up his community at Yavneh, on the Mediterranean coast, and, as we saw earlier, a rabbinic academy had flourished there.
¹¹
By 300, the great literary tradition of Mishnah was well established. Throughout the preceding period of violence and dispersal, Jewish scholars and scribes, working quietly in schools under the leadership of a succession of prominent rabbis, based in Babylonia and Palestine, painstakingly recorded the oral traditions of commentary and law. The collected writings of the Mishnah were codified in the late fourth century, and they would spawn the further elaborations of Gemara, and the whole would ultimately be collected as the Talmud. In this way the spiritual legacy of Israel was not only preserved but built upon. Hebrew and Aramaic were the main languages used in these pursuits, but Greek, Latin, and Persian references in the ancient texts make it clear that translation was a central skill and that exchange with surrounding cultures was common. The rabbinic texts provide evidence of a rich, erudite communal life built around the study of Torah. As Christians revered their martyrs, rabbinic Jews revered their sages. Torah study, not open defiance of Roman religious cult, was what gave Judaism lasting strength. Indeed, Jews had less reason to resist than Christians. In addition to the exemptions from military service and pagan cult, Jews living in the communities of the rabbis exercised considerable autonomy, with a Roman-recognized Jewish patriarchate based in Palestine.

Thus, while both Christians and Jews consistently rejected all association with the pagan religions of Rome, Jews enjoyed a higher level of tolerance by the empire. Why is that? The answer involves a range of factors—for example, Judaism's status as an ancient religion set it apart from upstart cults—but perhaps one defining difference stands above others. Once the Church understood Jesus Christ as God-made-man, it seemed a corollary that all human beings were called to be united with him. Wasn't that why Jesus was remembered, in Matthew, as having commanded, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations"?
¹²
Christian theology evolved in such a way that primary emphasis was given to the Church as the community of the saved. The affirmation that all who were baptized in Christ had access to God came to be understood exclusively—that
only
those who were baptized could be saved. This notion underwrote Christianity's aggressive program of proselytizing, which led to the Church's steady growth, but it also was the source of offense taken by Roman pagans who regarded such a theology as an intolerable violation of a necessary religious tolerance.

Rabbinic Judaism had no notion of God-made-man. "In Jewish thought, God stayed strictly separate from man," Alan Segal wrote, "just as the Jews stayed strictly separate from Gentiles. For the Jews, purity categories could remain strong without sacrificing universality because, when Jews distinguished between themselves and the Gentiles, they were not distinguishing between the saved and the damned."
¹³
Roman pagans could accept the walls Jews erected between themselves and "impure" cults, strict Jewish marriage laws, and even prohibitions against taking meals with non-Jews, because such boundaries did not imply an assumption that pagans were damned. Jews engaged in proselytizing in the ancient world, but not for the reasons that Christians did. Soon enough, Jewish proselytizing would become illegal, Jewish distinctiveness would offend, and Jewish autonomy would be abolished.

In 305, Diocletian, sixty years old, abdicated the imperial throne—probably a signal of his serious purpose as a reforming ruler. He imposed the same decision on Maximian, his counterpart in the West. Constantius and Galerius became Augusti. To tie himself to the emperor's court in Milan, Constantius had divorced Helena, of whom we have already taken note, and married Maximian's daughter Theodora. Yet Constantius was still more the rough soldier than the courtly emperor; soon after his ascension to the rank of Augustus, he led his legions into Britain to maintain control over the island's perennially unruly natives. While there, in 306, Constantius was taken ill. He died at York. At his side was his son Constantine, who is commonly said to have been about eighteen years old. He was described by contemporaries as a large, impressive-looking man, and he certainly had impressed his father's troops. They spontaneously hailed him as the successor to Constantius, the Augustus of the Western empire. But in Rome, Maximian disavowed his forced abdication to reassert his claim to the position.

Constantine would have none of that. He ensconced himself in Trier, quickly consolidated his control over the northern legions, and ordered construction of a palace fit for a Roman emperor—the
Konstantin-basilika
referred to earlier. And he laid plans to take on Maximian.

Thus begins the remarkable story of the reign of the man who transformed the Roman Empire, the Church, and the place of Jews. As usually told, the story is quickly summarized.
¹⁴
A threatened Maximian sued for peace, displaying a surprising deference by coming to Trier to confer with Constantine. In 307, the wily Constantine recognized Maximian as senior Augustus, and sealed the arrangement by marrying another of Maximian's daughters, Fausta. He was prepared to wait to assume full control in the West. But the next year, Maximian's son Maxentius, seeing himself shunted aside, staked his own claim to be emperor of the West. Maximian, understandably, faltered in his deal with Constantine, who was quick to take offense. Their armies met in battle at Marseilles in 310. Constantine was victorious. He killed Maximian. In 312, Constantine stormed Italy, moving against Maxentius's army, fortified in Rome. The story is that Constantine's legions were spent by now, demoralized, and uncertain so far from home. In the coming battle against Maxentius, who would be fighting on his home ground, they would be the decided underdog. But the night before the battle at the Milvian Bridge, on the Tiber, Constantine saw a cross in the sky, above the legend
In Hoc Signo Vinces
("In This Sign, Conquer"). With the news of this vision, a signal of favor from the Christian God, Constantine's troops rallied, went firmly into battle the next day, and won. Constantine himself threw Maxentius off the bridge into the Tiber, where he drowned. On the strength of that vision, and its fulfillment, the emperor became a Christian, so did his army, and, ultimately, so did the empire.

In a way, this is the second-greatest story ever told, at least concerning what we think of as Western civilization. After the death and Resurrection of Jesus, the conversion of Constantine may have been the most implication-laden event in Western history. If we rarely think so, that is because we take utterly for granted the structures of culture, mind, politics, spirituality, and even calendar (Sunday as holiday) to which it led. None of those structures was foreordained, and indeed, to grasp the epoch-shaping significance of Constantine's embrace of Jesus, his sponsorship of Jesus' cause, imagine how the history we trace in this book would have unfolded had the young emperor been converted to Judaism instead. It is a nearly unthinkable turn in the story, imagined in retrospect, but in prospect such a conversion would have been no more unlikely than what happened, and to entertain the idea is to wonder how Judaism, instead of Catholicism, would have fared as the locus of political and religious dominance. When the power of the empire became joined to the ideology of the Church, the empire was immediately recast and reenergized, and the Church became an entity so different from what had preceded it as to be almost unrecognizable. It goes without saying that the conversion of Constantine, for Church and empire both, led to consequences better and worse—although not for Jews, for whom, from this, nothing good would come.

18. The Cross and the Religious Imagination

C
HRISTIANITY
and Judaism are religions of revelation. But how, exactly, is the content of our beliefs revealed? It is a long time since we took for granted the idea of theophany, a sudden and dramatic unveiling of mystery—an experience like that of Moses before the burning bush, or Moses coming down from the mountaintop with the tablets of the Law. One of the assumptions I make in a work like this, however, is that the truth of our beliefs is revealed in history, within the contours of the mundane, and not through cosmic interruptions in the flow of time. Revelation comes to us gradually, according to the methods of human knowing. And so revelation comes to us ambiguously. Certitude and clarity are achieved only in hindsight, and even then provisionally. That is the work of memory, which is the arrangement of incident and experience into a meaningful narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The theophany of Moses is less a matter of what happened to him on Mount Sinai than it is of the story told by those who came after him.

The great question for Christians is, How is Jesus God? It can come as no surprise to one for whom revelation is a profoundly human, and therefore timebound, way of knowing to realize that the Jesus movement only gradually came to ask that question. It applied categories of divinity to him through the turmoil of argument, guesswork, estimation, imprecise language, and error far more than through sudden inspiration from above. For religious inspiration, like all things in history, evolves over time.

However gradually it takes shape, the painstaking construction of a commonly held narrative involves an ultimate recognition, which can indeed seem to be a sudden lifting of fog—Joyce's epiphany again—before a new kind of knowing. Such a recognition of the basic content of belief in Jesus occurred in the fourth century when, at last, a formerly divided, contentious, widely dispersed Christianity achieved agreement on an answer to the question How is this man God? That breakthrough in theology, honored in a creed that is still recited around the globe in every hour of every day, was accompanied by, enabled by, a breakthrough in the social organization of a formerly divided, contentious, widely dispersed Roman Empire. For political as well as religious reasons, the revelation came decisively to the pagan population too. Jesus is God in the way Emperor Constantine says he is.

Constantine wanted to unify the empire in every way. When he declared a freeze on wages and prices to control inflation, a chaotic system of competing local economies began to operate as one. When he ordered workers to remain in their fathers' occupations as a way of assuring basic services, from the bakery to the blacksmith shop, the social order coalesced. In a similar way, Constantine was the instrument of a revolution in the religious imagination of the Mediterranean world, and eventually of Europe. His political impact on Christianity is widely recognized, but his role as a shaper of its central religious idea is insufficiently appreciated. Latin Christians, anachronistically, have preferred to keep him, as a ruler, on the secular side of the sacred-profane divide, as if he were an early Charlemagne. In the Eastern Church, he is honored as a saint, but even there his role in shaping a new religious consciousness is downplayed. But at the time, Constantine was a kind of, well, Moses—an image I would not presume to apply to him. It originates with Eusebius of Caesarea, his biographer.
¹

Eusebius (c. 260-c. 339), the bishop of Caesarea, was born before Constantine and died after him. He is sometimes called the father of Church history. The author of several important works, especially
History,
the earliest telling of the ascendancy of the Church, he is usually a reliable recorder in the mode of Josephus.
²
But his
Life of Constantine
is a celebration of the divinely ordained union of the Church and the empire—Constantine as Moses—and not in any way an objective work of biography. Thus, for example, Eusebius emphasizes Constantine's youth when he takes his father's place at the head of the rough northern legion, as if he were aged eighteen or so, barely a man, and that is the age I cited in my summary of the story of Constantine. Some sources say he was about twenty-five. He was probably nearer thirty,
³
but the challenges he faced would have been daunting no matter how old he was. His ultimate achievement suggests that even Eusebius's obsequious praise may not have exaggerated his strengths—saying nothing here about his virtues.