Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (34 page)

It was no little thing when Christians taunted Diocletian about his military failures. Their criticisms challenged "the foundations of his claim to rule
"31

The turmoil that followed the retirement of Diocletian and Maximian created conditions similar to those of the previous century, but Constantine's rise to sole imperial power again gave the empire internal stability and helped prevent further incursions. Much of Constantine's imperial propaganda supported the image of the emperor as protector of Rome against barbarians. He gave up his family's mythical connection with Hercules and replaced it with a genealogical connection to Claudius, known as Gothicus for his defeat of the Goths during his reign, and linked himself symbolically to Trajan.32
He claimed to be successful in defending the empire.

Not everyone agreed. In his satirical symposium Caesares, Constantine's grand-nephew, the emperor Julian, depicts Constantine boasting of his achievements before an assembly of great conquerors-Alexander, Julius and Octavius, and Trajan. Constantine claims victories over Romans, Germans, Scythians and Asian barbarians. When the host Silenus suggests he has offered "mere gardens of Adonis as exploits," Constantine is confused. Silenus explains that by "gardens of Adonis" he means "those that women plant in pots, in honour of the lover of Aphrodite, by scraping together a little earth for a garden bed. They bloom for a little space and fade forthwith." Julian concluded, "At this Constantinus blushed, for he realised that this was exactly his own performance."33

Zosimus too was a critic of Constantine's military and imperial policies.
Far from protecting the empire against barbarian invasion, Constantine left the empire far more vulnerable than it had been. He "gave the Barbarians free access into the Roman dominions" by reversing Diocletian's policy of garrisoning towns and establishing fortresses along the frontier." Instead Constantine removed "the greater part of the soldiers from those barriers of the frontiers" and sent them to towns farther from the borders. People along the frontier "were exposed to the Barbarians" without defense, and the towns were oppressed "with so great a multitude of soldiers, that many of them were totally forsaken by the inhabitants." In short, "he was the first cause of the affairs of the empire declining to their present miserable state."34
The anti-Christian bias of Julian and Zosimus distorts their story here. Constantine's reign was marked by comparative peace along the frontier, as well as internally.

Constantine did have one opportunity at the end of his reign to mount a large-scale campaign. Persia had long been the eastern nemesis of the Roman Empire. In 260, the Roman emperor Valerian was defeated and captured by the Persian ruler Shapur I. Galerius recovered some of Rome's dignity with a devastating victory over Shapur's son Narseh in 297, but the memory of Valerian's flayed skin, which was dyed and hung in a Persian temple after his death, continued to haunt the Roman consciousness."
Gripped by the anxiety of influence, Constantine was again playing Trajan, contemplating an eastern campaign that would surpass his predecessor's.
36

Constantine had contemplated an invasion of Persia since 325. Around that time, he minted a medallion depicting him as Jupiter with an orb and phoenix, a symbol of eastern revival. The medallion also depicted Dionysus, a deity associated with Galerius and thus evoking the memory of that emperor's earlier triumph in Persia. According to Elizabeth Fowden, "Dionysus, the mythical conqueror of India, combined with the Phoenix looked forward not simply to the defense of Rome's eastern frontier but to the expansion toward the world's eastern reaches."37

Only in 336 did he follow through on those plans. When he learned "of an insurrection of some barbarians in the East," the emperor "observed that the conquest of this enemy was still in store for him, and resolved on an expedition against the Persians. Accordingly he proceeded at once to put his forces in motion." Winning the bishops' approval was an essential part of the preparation, since "he judged it right to take [some] with him as companions, and as needful coadjutors in the service of God." For their part, the bishops cheerfully "declared their willingness to follow in his train, disclaiming any desire to leave him, and engaging to battle with and for him by supplication to God on his behalf. Full of joy at this answer to his request, he unfolded to them his projected line of march." To provide a place for their ministry, "he caused a tent of great splendor, representing in shape the figure of a church, to be prepared for his own use in the approaching war. In this he intended to unite with the bishops in offering prayers to the God from whom all victory proceeds.""

Constantine's death at Nicomedia in 337 cut short what might have been his most important campaign. Shapur wasted no time in taking advantage. He devastated Mesopotamia and then besieged Nisibis for two months before the city surrendered. The only descendant of Constantine who attempted to revive the effort was Julian, and he died from a hemorrhage caused by a spear wound after being pushed back from the walls of Ctesiphon. In 363, Shapur II forced major concessions from Julian's successor Jovian. Territories returned to their pre-Galerian borders, as Rome ceded five regions and fifteen forts to the Persians and agreed not to assist the Armenian king Arsak.39

GOD AND EMPEROR

Constantine's abortive Persian conquest looks like another Roman adventure driven by sacrificial frenzy for honor, vengeance and a desire to keep enemies in their subordinate place. Yet there are hints that between 306 and the 330s something had changed. Sometime before, Constantine had written a "tactful, allusive, and indirect"40
letter in his own hand to
Shapur.4'
Addressing the Persian king as a "brother," he summarized the "most holy religion" that had given him "deeper acquaintance with the most holy God." Finding common ground with nonsacrificial Persian Zoroastrian practice, Constantine emphasized that the "God I invoke with bended knees" is horrified by "the blood of sacrifices" and recoils from "their foul and detestable odors." The sacrifice he craves is "purity of mind and an undefiled spirit" that manifests itself in "works of moderation and gentleness." "He loves the meek," Constantine continued, "and hates the turbulent spirit. . . . While the arrogant and haughty are utterly overthrown, he requites the humble and forgiving with deserved rewards."

The purpose of the letter was to advise Shapur about how to deal with the sizable Christian community in his own realm. Constantine was an eyewitness of "the end of those who lately harassed the worshipers of God by their impious edicts," and he warned Shapur not to follow their example. Everything is "best and safest" when men follow God's laws and recognize that God is at work through the church, endeavoring to "gather all men to himself." He expressed his joy at hearing that Persia was full of Christians, and he closed the letter with a prayer that "you and they may enjoy abundant prosperity, and that your blessings and theirs may be in equal measure," so that "you will experience the mercy and favor of that God who is the Lord and Father of all."

Constantine's letter has been called a "veiled warning"42
and has been interpreted as a provocation, a threat and a sign of his belief that as Roman emperor he had responsibility for all Christians. Constantine's Persian policies certainly backfired. He initiated his final campaign when a delegation from Armenia visited Constantinople in 336 to ask him for assistance against a Persian coup. Since the conversion of the Armenian king Trdat (Tiridates) in 314, Armenia had been officially Christian, more explicitly so than was the Roman Empire under Constantine. In the 330s, Persians under Shapur II had invaded, captured and blinded the Armenian king Tirhan, and placed Shapur's brother Narseh on the Armenian throne. Constantine responded swiftly. He designated his nephew Han- nibalianus as "king of kings" and gave him authority over Armenia and
Pontus.43
Like his letter, his preparations for war with Persia were intended, among other things, to defend a Christian people. When Constantine died before the campaign could be launched, Shapur, apparently suspicious that the Christians of Persia were allied with Rome, initiated a violent persecution. Persian Christians, in response, kept themselves aloof from the dominant orthodoxy of the West.44

Yet I cannot agree that the letter to Shapur was intended as a provocation. Constantine warned Shapur, but he warned him of divine judgment, not that he would personally take vengeance if Shapur were to attack Christians. In the closing section Constantine issued an altar call, inviting Shapur to protect Christians and to join him in worship of the high God, the God of the Christians. Hermann Dorries summarizes the message of the letter as an invitation to share in the blessing of Christianization: "what the true faith had done for the Roman Empire," Constantine urged, "it could do also for the Persian." It was an unprecedented diplomatic movea Roman emperor who "attributed his success to heavenly assistance ... invited his only formidable enemy to share in this aid." More broadly, the letter reveals how far Constantine had moved from tetrarchic political theology. For Diocletian "religion and nation meant the same thing," but for Constantine there was a potential unity, even between East and West, even between Persia and Rome, that transcended boundaries and national interests.45
Dorries says that Constantine wrote to Shapur like a modern politician disclosing to his rival the secret of the atom bomb.46

Constantine's letter to Shapur was not an isolated anomaly. Panegyrists told emperors what they thought emperors wanted to hear. It signaled a "Constantinian shift" (though not the one Yoder identifies) when the panegyrist Nazarius refused to tell the emperor in 317 he was a god, referred instead to "God the ruler of things [who] regards us from on high" and made other clumsy references to a God he did not know.47
Nazarius still reviewed Constantine's conquests of Italy and ran through a quick list of
Frankish peoples subdued by the emperor- `Bructeri, Chamavi, Cher- usci, Lancionae, Alamanni, Tubantes."4S
But these conquests were placed in a different, uncertain, theology of empire.

We know that something more than a shift, something closer to a revolution, has occurred when Eusebius, at Constantine's tricennalia, delivered a panegyric that explicitly reminded the emperor that he was only a man. Half of Eusebius's oration was theology, and the portion that addressed the emperor subordinated him, in a fashion that recalls Hellenistic theories of kingship, to the One God whose rule he mimicked. Constantine derived not only his authority but all his imperial virtues from God. If he was wise, good and just, it was by participation, because he had "fellowship with perfect Wisdom, Goodness, and Righteousness."49
Eusebius commended Constantine for offering God no sacrifice, "no blood and gore," no smoke to "propitiate the infernal deities," but rather the sacrifice of a pure mind, of imitation of "Divine philanthropy" in "imperial acts." Above all, he offered himself: "wholly devoted to him, he dedicates himself as a noble offering, a first-fruit of that world, the government of which is entrusted to his charge."50
Eusebius celebrated victories since "the Almighty Sovereign ... has made him victorious over every enemy that disturbed his peace,"5'
but the virtues he celebrated were not traditional military virtues but contempt for "earthly sovereignty" over "a petty and fleeting dominion," disdain for "his vesture, embroidered with gold and flowers," self-restraint in food and wine, chastity.52
Gone were the celebrations of cruelty and terror, the endorsement of fame and pride, the sacrificial apparatus of the Roman imperial honor system. Yoder claims that under the Constantinian system Christian rulers were expected to act like non-Christian rulers, accepting the "natural" limits of their vocation.53
But Eusebius-the Constantinian theologian par excellence-did just what Yoder said nobody did, and went a step further. Yoder makes the broad, rather surprising claim that under the Constantinian system Caesar
can never be asked to live like a Christian because the gospel contains no ethics for officials.54
But Eusebius did expect Constantine to act like a Christian, and it was not unheard of for rulers in the subsequent "Constantinian" centuries to live like monks.

Eusebius maintained the same vision of empire and emperor in the Vita Constantini. He mentioned Constantine's conquests in passing, stressing, with suitable biblical echoes, Constantine's pietas and Moses-like meekness as barbarians are brought beneath his feet.55
He defeated Licinius, but Eusebius said nothing about tactics and little about the battle-that we have to get from Zosimus. Instead, he recorded the prayer that Constantine's soldiers said before the battle.56
Constantine prohibited images of himself in temples, spurned sacrifices offered to him, and went to battle wearing a cross on his shield behind a standard that is an explicitly Christian symbol.57
A flash of the old ideology comes through when Eusebius recounted how Constantine attacked the Scythians because he could no longer bear the "indignity" of paying them tribute, and then had the cheek to combine this very Roman motivation with a reference to Constantine's "confidence in the Savior's aid."5S
Even this, however, is on the far side of a chasm from standard imperial theology, according to which the emperor was the soter rather than reliant on One.59

HISTORY'S CORE

Thomas Heilke characterizes Eusebius's imperial theology as an expression of Constantinianism, the subservience of Christianity to the empire. Prior to Constantine, Heilke says, the ruler was "an agent with a specific role that is in accordance with good social order." In the Eusebian/Lactan- tian ideology of Christian empire, by contrast, the ruler becomes a "representative of cosmic order" such that "earthly rule imitates the heavenly." In
fact, Eusebius was normally doing precisely the reverse of what Heilke claims: his "Oration" and Life do not make the church subservient to the empire, nor do they accommodate Christian faith to the sacrificial honor system of the empire, but rather they fit the emperor and his empire into a cosmic Christian framework. As Heilke himself says, summing up Eric Voegelin's analysis of Christendom, "Secular rulership, as it begins to emerge in the panegyrics of Eusebius and Lactantius, becomes an explicitly Christian function, so that by the ninth century, the `royal function' has been integrated `into the order of the charismata.""'