Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (32 page)

It is impossible to stand under the magnificent coffered ceiling and not see a throng of togas, great ladies in diadems lining the heated walls, bowing at his arrival. Below them, in subterranean caverns, slaves would have labored at boilers to heat the mosaic tiles on which he walked, creating an artificial climate intended to make chilly Trier feel like Rome. Every effort would have gone to enhance the impression made by this one man, and from what followed, we know that it all succeeded. "And now, all rising at the signal which indicated the emperor's entrance"—this is Eusebius describing an arrival that he witnessed—"at last he himself proceeded through the midst of the assembly, like some heavenly messenger of God, clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glowing radiance of a purple robe, and adorned with the brilliant splendor of gold and precious stones. Such was the external appearance of his person; and with regard to his mind, it was evident he was distinguished by piety and godly fear. This was indicated by his downcast eyes, the blush on his countenance, and his gait. For the rest of his personal excellencies, he surpassed all present in height of stature and beauty of form, as well as in majestic dignity of mien, and invincible strength and vigor."
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To a world threatened by dissolution, the unifying impulse can only seem virtuous, yet the perennial human problem is how to keep the ideal of unity free of the burden of tyranny, and that problem reached a point of crisis in the Age of Constantine. For him, unification was by definition a matter of domination. And that played itself out in the wars he waged against his rivals. But military domination was only part of his agenda. At a deeper level, he wanted a spiritual domination too, and a fuller sense of that background can help us see his conversion to Christianity in 312 in a clearer light.

After he defeated his wife's father, Maximian, at Marseilles in 310, Constantine's fortunes were already being raised to the divine. On the way back to Trier from Marseilles, he stopped at the pagan temple in Autun a moment, before the oracle that Eusebius enshrines: "O Constantine, you saw, I believe, your protector Apollo, in company with Victory, offering you laurel crowns ... You really saw the god, and recognized yourself in the appearance of one to whom the prophecies of poets have declared that the rule of the whole world should belong."
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News of this vision, with its implication of heavenly anointing by Apollo, who was identified with the sun god,
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would have been spread far and wide by Constantine's panegyrist. As the historian of antiquity Averil Cameron points out, such claiming favor of the pagan gods offers the context in which to see the story of his subsequent vision at Milvian Bridge. Caesars had habitually declared special sponsorship by gods, but in this era, the meaning of such piety was changing. The coming to the fore of Christian ideas was only part of a larger religious revolution, which our own simplistic notions of paganism fall short of explaining. For example, it is significant that Constantine's coins stated his devotion to the Unconquered Sun. Sol Invictus had already come to be understood, in a proclamation by the emperor Aurelian in 274, as "the one universal Godhead," as the historian J.N.D. Kelly summarized it, "which, recognized under a thousand names, revealed Itself most fully and splendidly in the heavens."
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The Roman cult of the sun god, as the supreme being, already manifested a movement toward monotheism, and it means everything that Constantine's own instinctive piety, both as a pagan and as a converted Christian, should have had as its constant vision the bright light in the sky. Monotheism is regarded as having strictly herded pagans to one side and Christians and Jews to the other, but definitions at the time were anything but strict.
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What never varied in Constantine's otherwise fluid religious self-understanding, something that carried over from Apollo to Christ, was that it was divinely commissioned "that the rule of the whole world should belong" to him.
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Of course others felt the same way—for example, Maxentius, the son of Maximian who, after Marseilles, took his father's place at war with Constantine. Like his father before him, Maxentius affiliated himself with the demigod Hercules.
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Constantine's putative association with the superior Sol was another kind of usurpation: The contest between the human rivals was also now a contest between their sponsoring deities—just like the contest between Moses and Pharaoh with which the saga of the One God began. Maxentius controlled Rome, and that was what Constantine wanted next. The legend of Milvian Bridge says that Constantine was moving against an overwhelmingly superior force, that when his vision of the cross promised victory, such an outcome was unlikely. The legendary vision thus made the contest one between the Christian God and the Roman gods.

"The gods of Rome, then, had declared for Maxentius; whence in this crisis should Constantine seek aid?" This account of the legend, written in 1931 by N. H. Baynes, breathlessly renders the tale on which I was raised, and which we saw in summary in the previous chapter. "Against the advice of his generals, against the counsel of the augurs, with amazing daring Constantine invaded Italy."
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He knew from his vision that he had more than a chance; he had a mandate. But it depended on his putting his faith, at last, in Jesus Christ. That is why he raised the cross on a spear. Commenting on Baynes's version of the traditional account, T. D. Barnes dismisses it as "a boy's adventure story."

An alternative narration, preferred by Barnes and most scholars now, debunks key elements of the legend and the uses to which it has been put. Approaching Rome, Constantine was no underdog. He knew that Maxentius, whose army had been decimated in an earlier battle in Verona, had no chance. In a superior position, Constantine denounced his rival as a bastard and no true ruler.
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The battle at the Tiber was a predictable rout, with Maxentius unable even to mount an orderly retreat. As he withdrew across the Milvian Bridge—which was in fact a jury-rigged pontoon construction—he fell into the river. He died, perhaps by drowning. Constantine may or may not have ordered it, but his wife's brother's head was carried through the city on a pike.
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It may indeed be that Constantine entered Rome with an army bearing the cross, although some contemporary accounts attribute his victory to intervention by pagan deities,
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and others are vague in identifying his religious association. The inscription on the Arch of Constantine, which was erected within three years of the battle and still stands near the Colosseum, cites victory only "by the inspiration of the divinity."
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Although a public conversion to a despised religion on the eve of battle might be considered supernaturally motivated maverick politics on Constantine's part, there are compelling reasons to think it would have been infinitely shrewd. Remember that Diocletian's order that Christian churches be burned had been issued only in 303. Since then, the persecution had eased, but Christian property was still in danger of being confiscated. Though it served Constantine's later purpose to have emphasized how threatened Christians were before his coming, especially in Maxentius's Italy,
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it seems clear that a true state of Christian dispossession played a part in shaping his strategy in 312. If Constantine was to succeed in imposing authority on a restless Roman populace whose loyalties were divided among contending tetrarchs, he needed a political base within the city. His arrival behind the standard of Christ would have instantly given him one—among Christians. They were a minority, but a well-organized one, and no claimant had the allegiance of a majority. Fierce Christian devotion to a conqueror whose miraculous conversion proved the truth of their faith would have made Christians powerful political allies.

Within a year of Milvian Bridge, Constantine controlled the entire Western empire. His one remaining rival was Licinius, who had replaced Galerius as Augustus of the East. Constantine shrewdly proposed an alliance, and offered his half-sister in marriage to Licinius, who accepted. Licinius assumed the marriage would consummate an equality between two caesars. Consistent with his new friendliness toward Christianity, Constantine proposed an end to the persecution of the Church, which he, like his father, had never carried out in any case. Licinius agreed. They met at Milan in 313 and jointly issued the Edict of Milan, granting universal religious freedom to pagans, Christians, and Jews. "Since we saw that freedom of worship ought not to be denied," the decree read, "...to each man's judgment and will the right should be given to care for sacred things according to each man's free choice."
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It is a moving, almost modern statement, but our assumptions are very different from what theirs would have been. Again, we think of the words "pagan," "Christian," and "Jew" as defining distinct groups, but the fluid interchange among them in that period of massive social mutation is striking. The potent movement toward monotheism among pagans is reflected in the fact that
Summus Deus
was by then a common Roman form of address to the deity.
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As seen in Constantine's originating piety, that supreme deity would have been associated with the sun,
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and pagans would have recognized, with reason, their own solar cult in such Christian practices as orienting churches to the east, worshiping on "sun day," and celebrating the birth of the deity at the winter solstice.

That Christian piety commonly included pagan practice and superstition would have been part of the broad appeal of the Gospel among the least educated. Constantine's famously converted army, for example, was made up of unlettered peasants and barbarians, and it is unlikely they would have grasped essential matters of their new religion. Indeed, to the Teutons and Celts among them—and an army mustered from Trier would have drawn heavily from such tribes—the cross of Christ as the standard to march behind would have evoked the ancestral totem of the sacred tree far more powerfully than it would have Saint Paul's token of deliverance.
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Such an association may have figured in Constantine's instinctive grasp of the cross as a sign to rally to, since his army of barbarians, which grew with every conquest, was the first population he had to unify. Beginning with that army, a pragmatic tolerance, up to a point, would have been Constantine's modus operandi.

While Jews kept themselves apart from pagans, the line between Jews and Christians, even after two centuries, was still not hard and fast. That blurring was greater in some places than in others. We have seen, for example, that the large and influential community of Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria—there were a million Jews in Egypt by the beginning of the second century
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—shared a Greek translation of Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint, with the Church. The distinctive Christian act of worship was the Eucharist, but many Christians also observed the contemporary Jewish form of Psalm recital and readings, vestiges of which are preserved in the Christian Liturgy of the Word and in the Latin breviary. No doubt some Christians and Jews during this time practiced this worship together. Symbols associated with early Christianity, like the fish, bread, and the cup representing wine, were Jewish cult symbols.
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Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora would have had more in common with some Greek-speaking Christians like the Arians, whose strict monotheism made them suspicious of divinity claims for Jesus, than with the more inward-directed rabbis of Palestine. Some Jews of the Diaspora, to cite another example, did not insist on circumcision for Gentile converts,
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which means that some Jews would not have seen Saint Paul's inflammatory position on this issue as the cause for rupture it is taken to be. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that some Jews in this period were religious in ways that, to the rabbis, would have been unrecognizable as Jewish.
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And, one needn't assume that all Jews were religious in any sense. Finally, in that ultimate indicator we saw earlier, modern archaeology finds it difficult to distinguish between Jewish and Christian tombstones in many places, even into this fourth century.

But as a dominant culture begins to define itself more sharply, attendant subcultures inevitably do so as well. Blurred lines become anathema to all, and there is no doubt that the process of rectifying those lines had to begin, for Constantine, within the culture he was trying to make his own, which was the Church. Thus, while he was ordaining tolerance among religions, he was preparing to abolish tolerance within Christianity. In a letter written in 313, the year of the liberal Edict of Milan, he instructed his prefect in Africa to move against the Donatists, schismatic Christians who posited sanctity as a prerequisite for valid administration of the sacraments. "I consider it absolutely contrary to the divine law," he wrote, "that we should overlook such quarrels and contentions, whereby the Highest Divinity may perhaps be moved to wrath, not only against the human race, but also against me myself, to whose care He has, by His celestial will, committed the government of all earthly things, and that He may be so far moved as to take some untoward step. For I shall really and fully be able to feel secure and always to hope for prosperity and happiness from the ready kindness of the most mighty God, only when I see all venerating the most holy God in the proper cult of the catholic religion with harmonious brotherhood of worship."
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