Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (36 page)

Drijvers summarizes Ambrose's argument against the Jews this way: "They thought they had defeated Christianity by killing Christ, but through the finding of the Cross and the nails, as a result of which Christ and Christianity had come to life again, they themselves were defeated. Now, even the emperors recognize Christ and they have made themselves subservient to his power. Ambrose evidently presents Judaism as a force by its nature opposed to Christianity...[and] is undoubtedly of the opinion that the emperors should combat Judaism and that the Church and the secular authorities should consider the ruin of Judaism their common cause."
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Thus the finding of the True Cross is the definitive victory over the Jews, the end of a two-hundred-year-old sibling rivalry. An inch below the surface of piety, the discovery is a mythic sacralization of the momentous political event by which one of the siblings, for the first time, gained power over the other. Rivalry assumes a relative equality of force that would simply never exist again between Christians and Jews. So a shift here was inevitable, whether handled benignly or not. Alas, in this case, the newly empowered younger sibling, embodied in the
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Ambrose, reacted as if the very existence of the other were more a threat than ever.

Clearly, the uses to which Ambrose puts the legend of the True Cross mark a turning point in what will come to be known, in Jules Isaac's phrase, as the "teaching of contempt."
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Because promulgated by one of the greatest minds of the era, this contempt, now tied directly to the cross, will take hold as never before. For a time, it threatens to underwrite a version of what will come to be known as the Final Solution. And this all takes place in the name of Helena, the saint, the queen, the friend to nuns and priests, the patroness of armies, the benefactress of churches, the devoted mother of the emperor, and—through all of this—a model for my own. Helena, with Constantine, was seen to preside over a version of the Holy Family, the amity of which was a sacrament of the unity of the empire. In the name of that unity, the empire was to be a univocal totality now, whose mortal enemies within and without were at last to be defined and named. And once defined and named, targeted.

The sad truth is that Flavia Julia Helena Augusta was no such woman. The irony would be only poignant if so much violence did not hang on her legend. She began as a jilted wife—as we saw, her husband, Constantius, had turned her out of his household in favor of another woman. Only the coming to power of her son rescued her from bitter disappointment. She was brought back into the center of his family. But then, no sooner had they been put forward as the familial version of the concord Constantine wanted from Nicaea, these people turned on each other.

Before marrying Fausta in 307 (recall that she was the daughter of Maximian, Constantine's rival), Constantine had had a son by a concubine. That son's name was Crispus, and he had grown up to rule the northern empire as his father's regent, based in Trier. The family implosion that took place just as Constantine consolidated his power was probably some kind of dynastic intrigue, with Helena favoring Crispus, who lived in the Trier palace associated with her, on the site of the present cathedral. As Constantine's wife, Fausta would have had good reason to oppose Crispus as Constantine's favorite, in favor of her own son. (Sibling rivalry now comes to seem a kind of cancer in the marrow of this story.) Some historians conjecture that Fausta hatched a plot to inspire Constantine's suspicions against Crispus.
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All that is certain is that in 326, the year after the enforced love feast of the Council of Nicaea, Constantine ordered the murder of his firstborn son and the obliteration of the name Crispus from imperial history. That order may account for the destruction of Crispus's residence in Trier that year. The holy legend remembers this demolition as prompted by Helena's desire to replace her palace with the new cathedral built to enshrine the relic she brought to her hometown, which was the Seamless Robe of Jesus.

If Fausta did falsely conspire against Crispus, and if, after the murder, Constantine learned (from Helena?) that he had been misled by Fausta, that would account for what happened next. So would another, simpler explanation that some historians favor—namely, that Crispus and his stepmother Fausta were lovers.
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What we do know is in that same fateful year, shortly after murdering his son, Constantine murdered his wife. It was then, and only then, that Helena assumed her sole place at her son's side, and it was then that she went out into the world to represent him—and the image of his family's unity. What could Helena's inner state have been when she made her pilgrimage to Jerusalem? Were her acts of charity, so celebrated by Eusebius, a kind of penance? Eusebius promoted only the happiest of images in all his accounts, and having designated Constantine as the new Moses, he makes no mention of the murders of his wife and son.

It was a ruthless time. We have already seen how, in his ascent, Constantine had not hesitated to dispatch a pair of rivals who were also his brothers-in-law. But a son! A father who slays a son! A father who slays his son in righteousness! It is impossible to consider the hidden tragedy of 326 apart from the glories of that year. Constantine's embrace of the ethos of the cross was already firm by then, but one needn't be a Freudian to sense the new power that the myth of the cross would have had over him. Evoking the binding of Isaac as it does, the story of the all-powerful father forced to put to death his beloved son—but for a redemptive purpose—must have obsessed the emperor at that moment. If God can kill his Son, so can God's coregent. Not that either need be left with a feeling of triumph. So, of course, the emotional appeal of the crucifixion would have outweighed the glories of the Resurrection. It was in 326 that Constantine insisted on the construction of the greatest church in the world, the Martyrium, on the site of that "token of the holiest Passion," which, against Eusebius, was decidedly not a token of new life but of death. And how could a father, after a year like that, have done otherwise?

In all of this, the family of Constantine was an authentic sacrament of the true state of the empire he had created—not in the holy concord of the legend but in its unleashed murderous violence. The irony was that the violence could be justified in the name of unity. After Constantine died in 337, his three surviving sons—Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius—were named by the Senate as coequal Augusti.
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But they were immediately embroiled in a succession struggle that led to a bloodbath in Constantinople. At the end, apart from the three sons, only two males out of more than a dozen members of Constantine's household were left alive. Soon enough, the sons set upon each other. Constantine II challenged Constans in 340, and was killed. Constans ruled in the West for a decade, to be murdered by a rival in his own army. Only about 353 did the third, Constantius, reestablish control over the whole empire.
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For more than two decades after Constantine's death, a kind of murderous internecine chaos reigned. There was ample precedent for such a turn in Roman history, but this went by the name of Christianity, with various rivals outdoing each other in claiming pious motives for political machinations.

The result? In 361, a member of the family who had been raised in this pathological culture of holy violence succeeded to the throne. His name was Julian. He was the son of a half-brother of Constantine's who had been murdered by supporters of Constantine's sons. Julian had been six at the time and barely survived the massacre. As emperor, he reigned for less than two years, but his impact on Christian attitudes, and on the arc of the Jewish-Christian narrative, was explosive. Julian tried to overturn the Constantinian revolution. He is remembered as the last pagan emperor, but it is important to note that he was raised a Christian—he is known as Julian the Apostate. Only after his army had saluted him as the new Augustus did he reveal that he had become a pagan, and that he intended to return the empire to paganism.
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Given what he had seen in the household of Christianity, why not? But if his objection was to sacred violence, one would not know it from the ruthless campaign he immediately launched against Christian churches. "The Church again had martyrs," T. D. Barnes comments.
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Julian was a well-educated man, schooled in Athens. To him, paganism was not, as to us, a matter of taking cues from the entrails of pigeons, but a matter more of the wisdom of Socrates. He had a genius for sensing the Church's weak point—and wasn't that the Jews? Since the entire inverted pyramid of Christian belief had come to rest on the point of "prophecy historicized," Julian understood that if he could demonstrate that the Christian claim to have replaced Judaism as the "true Israel" was false, he could undermine the Christian religion. That is, if he could show that the "fulfillment" of ancient Hebrew prophecy, on which the Church based every claim it made for Jesus Christ, was illusory, the Christian God would fail. How to do such a thing?

In the beginning of this story lies the answer, and it is the Temple in Jerusalem, which is why the end of the story—John Paul II reverencing the Western Wall—is so compelling. So much had come to rest on the initiating moment described in Luke: "And as some spoke of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said, 'As for these things which you see, the days will come when there shall not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.'"
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And hadn't just such a thing come to pass? The Temple's destruction in 70 and again in 135 was concrete proof that God had withdrawn his favor from the old religion to bestow it on the new. "Destroy this Temple," Jesus was remembered as having said, referring to himself. That he was the new Temple was proven when the old was destroyed.

So Julian, right after declaring the end of the Christian empire, ordered the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem rebuilt, stone upon stone, to falsify the very words of Jesus. He ordered the city opened to Jews again, and he empowered Jews to govern it. All of this was a measure less of Julian's affection for Judaism than of his hatred for Christianity. And one can imagine how a Christianity newly enamored of the "Holy City" and of its own Temple, the Holy Sepulcher, took this reversal. The meaning of the survival of the Jewish people as rejecters of Jesus Christ had never been more powerfully on display. The whole Roman world would have understood what was at stake in the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple.

Jews, naturally, were overjoyed. Their long suffering was finally vindicated, and their restoration seemed at hand. They began to work on the reconstruction of the ruined Temple at once. To this day, Jerusalem's tourist guides point to the course of mammoth blocks they added to the Temple Mount, at the Western Wall. To place one stone upon another was a long-overdue rebuttal to the false Messiah.
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"The Church again had martyrs," Barnes wrote, but he added, "and again had vengeance from on high: Julian died during an invasion of Persia which had failed."
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Not only that. The Jews at work on new excavations for the Temple had touched off explosions in gaseous deposits, which Christians saw as the mighty and miraculous intervention of God.
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There were even reports that the explosions were accompanied by the appearance of the cross in the sky.
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"So ended the last attempt to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem, from then to now," Jacob Neusner comments. "Julian's successors dismantled all of his programs and restored the privileges the Church had lost. We need hardly speculate on the profound disappointment that overtook the Jews of the empire and beyond. The seemingly trivial incident—a failed project of restoring a building—proved profoundly consequential for Judaic and Christian thinkers. We know that a quarter of a century later, John Chrysostom dwelt on the matter of the destruction of the Temple—and the Jews' failure to rebuild it—as proof of the divinity of Jesus."
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Proof! Proof! But never enough. After the near reversal of Julian, Christians reacted with an unprecedented vengeance, both emperors and bishops, against both pagans and Jews. Such reaction was undoubtedly caused by fear and insecurity. It was only after Julian, through the successive reigns of the emperors Valentinian and Theodosius, that the empire came to be formally proclaimed Christian; only then that Christian heresy was pronounced a capital crime; only then that pagan worship was officially banned; only then that the authority of the Jewish patriarchate was abolished forever. And it was then that the question of what to do about the Jews who refused either to yield or to disappear surfaced in the official discourse of secular and religious authorities. From one side, it seemed simple. Once church and state had agreed that it was righteous and legal to execute those Christians—Docetists, Donatists, Nestorians, Arians—who dissented from defined dogma on relatively arcane matters of theology, why in the world should stiff-necked persons who openly rejected the entire Christian proclamation be permitted to live?

Here is the relevance of the explicitly anti-Jewish use to which Saint Ambrose of Milan finally put the legend of the True Cross. He recounted it as a historical sequence of events—as it would be recounted from then on, down to the time my mother told the story to me—complete with the supposedly factual detail that it was a Jew who led Helena to the long-buried crucifix. The Jew who betrayed Jesus—by this time, Judas Iscariot was remembered as the Jew among the Christian apostles—now betrayed his own people. In Ambrose's hands, sweet Helena became the mother of real Jew hatred, and she was the canonizer of his now open campaign to wipe out Judaism. In 388, a Christian mob, led by the bishop in Callinicus, a small city on the Euphrates, attacked and burned a synagogue, destroying it utterly. They also destroyed the chapel of a Gnostic sect, despite the fact that its leaders had just agreed, under pressure from the emperor Theodosius, to accept Nicene Christianity. So Theodosius ordered the Christians of Callinicus to rebuild the Gnostic chapel and the synagogue. This is the emperor whom Hugh Trevor-Roper called "the first of the Spanish Inquisitors."
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His command to rebuild the places of worship was a matter not of religious freedom but of imperial authority. Still, the action in defense of a Jewish community prompted an immediate and ferocious response from none other than Ambrose. In a direct written challenge to Theodosius—at whose funeral most of a decade later he would recount the Helena legend—the bishop of Milan declared himself ready to burn synagogues "that there might not be a place where Christ is denied." A synagogue, he said, is "a haunt of infidels, a home of the impious, a hiding place of madmen, under the damnation of God Himself."
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To order the rebuilding of such a place, once it had been burned, was an act of treason to the Faith.