Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (4 page)

Romans could be cruel, but there is something more than cruelty behind these tortures. Romans thought long and hard about not only the pain of their modes of punishment but the rhetoric of punishment. Punishments were humiliating but not, the Romans thought, inequitable. Romans believed criminals got exactly what they deserved. Roman punishments were often enactments of the crimes committed. Sometime in the first century B.C., one Selurus, calling himself "son of Etna," gathered an army and overran the region around Mount Etna. In Rome Strabo saw Selurus "torn to pieces by wild beasts at an organized gladiatorial fight." He was raised on "a tall contraption, as though on Etna," and then the "contraption suddenly broke up and collapsed, and he went down with it into the fragile cages of wild-beasts." His death reenacted the superbia of his rise and then his sudden and shameful fall.
41 According to John's Gospel, Jesus' death was a parodic coronation and enthronement, but for the Romans every cross was a mocking throne for rebels, especially slaves who had "lifted themselves up" above their station.42
Martyrdoms were similar. Peter of Nicomedia's martyrdom was a meal-the Roman soldiers were symbolically cannibalizing him. More commonly, the tortures resemble sacrificial procedures: human beings were flayed and dismembered and
burned like animals offered to the gods. One way or another, the Romans said, Christians would offer to the gods. Timid Christians could be compelled, and the bolder ones could be made into living sacrifices. Occasionally the logic of execution was more overt. Perpetua refused to die in the garb of a priestess of Ceres, but her executioners forced it on her to show that Christian criminals fulfilled the double significance of the term "the condemned" (damnati [masc.] and damnatae [fem.]), which referred to both the offering priest(ess) and the offered sacrifice.43

PERSECUTION, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS

"Such was the mild spirit of antiquity that the nations were less attentive to the difference than to the resemblance of their religious worship," Edward Gibbon wrote from the comfort of his study. He avowed that Roman magistrates who persecuted Christians did so reluctantly, "strangers" as they were to the "inflexible obstinacy" and "furious zeal" of bigoted Christians. If Christians were persecuted, they had only themselves to blame: "as they were actuated, not by the furious zeal of bigots, but by the temperate policy of legislators, [the officials'] contempt must often have relaxed, and humanity must frequently have suspended, the execution of those laws which they enacted against the humble and obscure followers of Christ."44
Ever creative, Jacob Burckhardt found hints that Christians were plotting to convert the emperor and take over the empire, and argued that Diocletian persecuted in defense of his fragile empire; his actions are those of a man "on track of a plot."4s

Gibbon, Burckhardt and other modern historians draw a delicate veil across the horrors of the Roman persecution. Well they might. Some Roman magistrates were reluctant to force a showdown with the Christians, fearing that the Christians might make them look foolish. Officials did not want to risk giving the martyrs a victory.46
Still, it is hard to make the Romans look noble and businesslike when they are flaying Christians alive, and it is even more difficult to make Christians look like ignorant zealots when they are treated with such intense hatred.

Faced with the actual practice of Roman torture and execution, it is also difficult to maintain the common distinction between theologically motivated persecution and secular, political persecution. Voltaire hinted at this distinction. From Romulus to the Christians, he argued, Romans persecuted no one. Even Nero persecuted no one for religious belief but because Christians, carried away by their own passions, set fire to Rome. When the Romans did finally get around to persecuting Christians, it was not on religious grounds but for reasons of state, and in any case, the persecutions were not as bad as Christian apologists say. Simply being a Christian was not enough to get one condemned. "St. Gregory Thaumaturgus and St. Denis, bishop of Alexandria.... were not put to death," even though they "lived at the same time as St. Cyprian." It must be that Cyprian "fell a victim to personal and powerful enemies, under the pretext of calumny or reasons of State, which are so often associated with religion, and that the former were fortunate enough to escape the malice of men."'

In 1882, Frederick Pollock gave the distinction its classical form in his essay "Theory of Persecution.."4S
Though Pollock ultimately concluded that modern states have outgrown persecution, he regarded "modern persecution for the sake of public welfare" as more rational, because more testable, than the "theological persecution" of the church and state during the Middle Ages. No one can prove that heresy endangers the soul, and persecution founded on the desire to protect people from perdition cannot be proved useful. On the contrary, modern societies, which tolerate heresy, have proven that heresy is not socially destructive, and so modern states have ceased persecuting even while laws permitting persecution remain on the books.

Even Roman persecution is more defensible than Christian. Romans had no "distinctively theological incitement to persecution." Believing they had a corner on the truth, however, medieval Christians became intolerant of error out of love for the wandering soul of human beings. Roman persecution of Christians was "tribal." True, the gods figured into the
picture, but they figured into apolitical picture. Regarding the gods as "the most exalted officers of the state," Romans naturally saw Christians as either "a standing insult to the gods" or "a standing menace to the Government," but in either case "bad citizens." Christians who refused to honor the gods who are guarantors of Roman imperium were more than a nuisance; they endangered the prosperity and existence of Rome itself. Roman persecution was thus "essentially a measure of public safety." For Roman emperors, "the removal of the danger ... is not merely justifiable, but a plain duty of self-preservation."49
Romans did not persecute from bigotry and zeal, as Christians later did, but out of political necessity.

But then we are brought back to the accounts of the church historians, and the Romans hardly look like practitioners of rational politics. They look bloodthirsty, as Eusebius and others intend, but they also look like practitioners of a form of political theology. Pollock notwithstanding, the Romans did not conceive of an irreligious politics or apolitical religion. Christians were a threat to peace and security because they were a pollution that aroused the wrath of the gods. Romans sacrificed Christians to protect Rome by fending off the unthinkable prospect of the end of sacrifice.50

The closest thing we have to a rationale for the Great Persecution itself comes from Galerius, putatively the architect of the edict, who in his obese, worm-ridden, decaying old age revoked the persecution edict in 311 and asked the Christians to pray for him. In an effort to secure "the permanent advantage of the commonweal," the emperors "studied to reduce all things to a conformity with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Romans." The aim was to get Christians, who had "abandoned the religion of their forefathers" and whose "willful folly" had led them to reject "ancient institutions" and make their own laws, to "return to right opinions." It did not work. "Because great numbers still persist in their opinions, and because we have perceived that at present they neither pay reverence and due adoration to the gods, nor yet worship their own God," Galerius wrote, "we, from our wonted clemency in bestowing pardon on all, have judged it fit to extend our indulgence to those men, and to permit
them again to be Christians, and to establish the places of their religious assemblies." The only demand was that they not offend "against good order."51
This might be read as a purely political justification for persecution, but the "ancient laws" and "public discipline" to which Christians failed to conform included religious laws and disciplines.52
The persecutions were not conflicts of church and state but conflicts between different visions of political theology, Roman versus Christian. Galerius saw the refusal of Christians to sacrifice as a dangerous "cult vacuum" that could undermine the welfare of the empire.53

Theological critics of Constantine have surprisingly little to say about the historical context in which Constantine rose to the purple.54
They occasionally acknowledge, with gratitude, that Constantine brought a final end to persecution, but they are as squeamish about details of the persecution as are Gibbon and Burckhardt. This has several results. Because they are reluctant to emphasize the religious motivations behind the persecution, they make Constantine seem far more innovative than he was. Constantine was very much a fourth-century Roman soldier and politician, whose thinking about the empire was thoroughly infused with religious concerns. By giving minimal attention to the persecutions, theological critics of Constantine make it difficult to sympathize with the sometimes fawning response of Christian leaders. Eusebius exaggerated Constantine's virtues and ignored his vices, but his attitude toward a Christian empire makes more sense once we realize that he had personally witnessed some of the horrors of persecution in Palestine. Christians delivered from persecution would regard Constantine the way Poles or Czechs regard Ronald Reagan or John Paul II. These early Christians had survived through the gulag, and they were profoundly grateful to the skilled ruler who led them out.

Persecution also had the unfortunate but obvious consequence of weeding out some of the most determined leaders from the church. Persecutors targeted bishops and priests, and bishops who capitulated survived to rule the church once the persecution ended. Those who did not cooperate often died. It is hardly surprising that, with a few exceptions like Athanasius, the church leaders of the early fourth century were not men of the strongest character.

Finally, critics who ignore Constantine's setting are doing bad political theology. If anything should characterize Christian political thought, it is attention to the gritty realities of history. Creation, incarnation, cross, resurrection-all the cardinal doctrines of Christian faith reveal a God who acts in history. To do political theology without attention to historical context and circumstance is to replace a Christian political theology with a Platonic one. Without detailed attention to the details of history, political theology becomes perfectionistic. Relative judgments-Constantine was better than Diocletian or Galerius-give way to absolute, global, often ill-informed polemics against a Constantine who has become more an idea than a man.

Persecution reveals one dimension of the complex situation in the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. To do justice to Constantine, we must attempt to make some sense of that period, and to do that we need to reach back to the previous century.

The immortal gods will be ... well-disposed and favourable to the name ofRome, if we scrutinize thoroughly everyone under our rule and see they properly cultivate in every way a pious, observant, peaceful, and chaste life.

EMPEROR DIOCLETIAN

Mother Rome was not well when Diocletian assumed the imperial throne in 285.1
Over the previous decades, Rome had been shaken by multiple crises: "a constant and rapid turnover of emperors between A.D. 235 and 284 ... near-continuous warfare, internal and external, combined with the total collapse of the silver currency and the state's recourse to exactions in kind
.112

Trouble lay at the heart of the imperial system. From its beginning, the empire rested on a delicate political dance, the emperor's ability to balance
the interests and cultural assumptions of the Senate with the brute force of the military, which he commanded. Octavius3
was a consummate player of the imperial game, ostentatiously humble in relation to the Senate, careful to keep up republican appearances by avoiding threat and intimidation. Imperial power was founded on modesty, on a combination of kingship and citizenship that expressed itself in the ritual of recusatio, the emperor's ritual reluctance to assume the imperial post.'
In theory, the emperor under the Augustan system was no more than a princeps, the "first man" of the Senate, a first among equals.