Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (42 page)

Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus died during the Pentecost season, A.D. 337, having, at long last, been received into the bosom of the church.

Eusebius's account is revealing for our purposes, particularly in the contrast that Eusebius draws between Constantine the emperor and Constantine the baptized Christian. Baptism was the moment of his "regeneration and perfection," the moment when the emperor was received into the people of God. Constantine had the same view. Not only did he discard the imperial purple when he took on the baptismal white, but in his final speech to Eusebius and the other bishops he expressed his wish that, should his life continue, he would be "associate[d] with the people of God, and unite with them in prayer as a member of his church" and devote himself to "such a course of life as befits his service."52
This comes in the closing chapters of a biography that has described Constantine's vision before the battle with Maxentius, his support for the church and suppression of paganism, his Christian legislation, his devotion to prayer and study, his victories in wars often presented as holy wars, his missionary zeal. At the end of all this, Eusebius quoted Constantine saying that in the future he would devote himself to the service of the God whose salvation was sealed to him in his baptism. As Eusebius recounted the story, Constantine seemed to believe there was a basic incompatibility between being an emperor and being a Christian, between court and church, warfare and prayer, the purple and the white.

It would be an ironic conclusion: Constantine, the first anti-Constantinian. Constantine the Yoderian.

God is not the ruler of the city of the impious, because it disobeys his commandment that sacrifice be offered to himself alone.

AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

Constantine was a soldier, and a great one. He rarely lost a skirmish and never lost a war. He was not an ignorant grunt. Educated in Diocletian's court, he retained an interest in theology, philosophy, and literature throughout his life, his dabbling that of a competent amateur. A man of high moral standards, of which he was somewhat vain, sometimes a bit of a prig, he expected everyone else to live up to his expectations. He liked to see the big picture and could be impatient with details. He had a strong sense of justice, and when aroused by what he believed unjust, he could be imperious, brutal, hectoring. He was aggressive and ambitious but was a strategist with the self-restraint to wait out an opponent. When the situation called for it, he knew how to politick, compromise and build consensus. He had a sense of symbol and ceremony, knew the right gesture. He enjoyed the kitschy gaudiness of the court and its adornments; the flowered robe rested easily on his shoulders, he liked his jeweled slippers, and he did not think a golden throne too much. But he also knew that he should treat it with disdain, and that disdain was sincere too. He was an imperial performer who liked performing but knew he was assuming a
role. He was formal and cold, keeping a safe distance even from those who knew him best. He could be witty in conversation. When the Novatian bishop Acesius opined that someone who sinned mortally after baptism should be barred from the sacrament, Constantine cracked, "Place a ladder, Acesius, and climb alone to heaven."'
His religion went to the edge of superstition; he was a dreamer and visionary and never quite gave up the expectation that examining a liver or the stars might yield a clue about the future. He believed that the Christian God guaranteed the success of his wars and that God had called him to support the church, expand Christianity in the Roman world and extend the faith beyond.

Constantine grew up in a family that respected Christianity and may have included Christians, but he did not personally identify with Christianity until after 312, when Christians provided a Christian reading of a stunning sun halo he had seen two years before and interpreted his dream on the night before a battle as a dream of Christ. From that time on, Constantine used his imperial power to protect and support the Christian church. He was a sincere if somewhat simple believer. He knew some portions of the Old Testament and perhaps the basic outline of biblical history, and he could summarize the story of the Gospels. For Constantine, God was a providential Judge who supports the righteous and destroys the wicked, and he believed that the church had to be unified if it was going to offer pleasing worship to God.

Constantine ended the persecution of Christians in the Western empire and restored property to the Western churches several years before he defeated Maxentius at Rome. In 313 that policy was extended, because of the agreement between Constantine and Licinius at Milan, to the Eastern empire. When he took the Eastern empire in 324, Constantine adopted a religious policy that, with some limits, tolerated pagans and Jews while giving obvious favor to the church. He destroyed some temples, plundered more, decreed that sacrifice should end, and reiterated and slightly intensified legal limits on Jewish proselytism. He did not adopt a policy of forced conversion, did not punish pagans for being pagans or Jews for being Jews. Pagans remained at his court and were given weighty responsibilities in the empire. His rhetoric against both pagans and Jews was forceful, some times vicious, and this, along with the legal restrictions, created an atmosphere that discouraged but did not destroy paganism. He Christianized public space in Rome, funded the restoration of sacred sites in Palestine, and founded Constantinople.

Constantine expended an enormous amount of treasure on churches; it was used both on buildings and, with the emperor's explicit encouragement, on establishing ministries of mercy to the poor, sick and widows. When disputes arose in the church, Constantine believed it was his right and duty as Roman emperor to guide the warring factions toward a resolution. His first instinct was to pacify and negotiate, working toward concordia, but he found that many of the bishops did not share his passion for unity. He called councils of bishops and provided venues, funding and transport. He attended some of the councils and contributed to discussions but did not chair any council or determine the outcome. Once the bishops had arrived at a decision, Constantine accepted it as a divine word and backed up conciliar decisions with legal sanctions, mainly exile for those found guilty of heresy. Though he preferred bishops who were team players, he admired the uncompromising holy passion of Athanasius. Councils could be rancorous, and during Constantine's lifetime council fought with council. The emperor meddled in church affairs when he did not see the bishops coming to a decent and timely resolution. He eventually took up the Donatist controversy directly, and he met with Arius and tried to force Alexander and Athanasius to restore the heretic to the Alexandrian church. Many of the bishops quietly went along or were too distant from the center of activity to know or care. Some bishops, especially Athanasius, stood up to Constantine when they believed the truth was at stake.

Constantine did not try explicitly to Christianize the legal system, Roman society or Roman government. He appointed Christians to leading positions in his administration, and many men, often Christians, rose from lower ranks of society to positions of power. One law made explicit reference to Christian principles (the image of God in man), and some were inspired by Christianity. The most important of these were exemptions from taxes and other public obligations for clergy and the emperor's legislation against sacrifice, but his laws closing the gladiatorial shows and condemning exposure of children also drew on Christian teaching. Constantine's laws were both conservative and innovative-conservative in maintaining or hardening legally sanctioned social divisions, innovative in the ways he provided for the weaker and poorer citizens of the empire. Like pagan emperors before him, Constantine addressed the obstacles that excluded the poor and poorly connected to justice, but unlike his predecessors he found part of the solution in allowing appeals to episcopal courts.

Constantine's laws were more often Christian in effect than in intent. Outlawing gladiatorial shows struck down one of the main institutions for the propagation of Roman values, culture and power and was more transformative than Constantine could have known. His support for the church made the church financially dependent on the empire to a large extent, but it also had the effect of enriching and empowering the bishops, who eventually provided a counterweight to imperial power. Whatever his intentions, over the long run Constantine's support of the church strengthened the church's status as an alternative society and polity within the Roman Empire. Already during Constantine's lifetime, and even more during the reigns of his sons, church leaders became more aggressively confrontational toward the empire, fighting to protect the church's independence from imperial intrusions.

Constantine spent his life in the Roman military. He fought with Diocletian, and with his father, and when he became emperor he continued to fight, sometimes against barbarians threatening from the frontier, sometimes against other Romans, who were usually members of his extended family. By the time his life ended, he was (indirectly in every case, so far as we know) responsible for the deaths of his father-in-law Maximian, his brother-in-law Maxentius, another brother-in-law Licinius along with his son, his wife Fausta and his son Crispus, and a few other relatives. Some or all of these executions may have been just acts of punishing rivals and rebels. Some or all of them may have been acts of a paranoid emperor eager to maintain his hard-won power. We know too little to be sure. On the other hand, he never engaged in a purge. Maxentius's supporters were not slaughtered in Rome when Constantine took the capital; Licinius's son died with his father, and Constantine ordered the execution of one of Licinius's chief supporters, but no other members of Licinius's family or court were executed. Constantine believed his military expeditions were divinely commissioned, and he attributed his victories to God. During his long reign, the empire was comparatively peaceful.

How did the church fare under Constantine? It is important to recall where our story began, with Diocletian's edict of persecution and the sacrificial slaughter of Christians. Toleration edicts had already been decreed in East and West before Constantine became the sole emperor, but he secured the church's freedom and made it permanent. Externally, the church flourished during the early fourth century. It had new, magnificent buildings and the prestige and power that partly arose from Constantine's conversion and his support for their mission. Church membership became legal, and attractive, and for reasons good (devotion to Jesus) and bad (tax exemptions, prestige) men sought church leadership. Constantine had considerable influence on the church but did not dominate it, dictate the election of bishops or make final decisions about doctrine. Councils met without his approval, and bishops were elected locally. He did not have "absolute authority" over the church, and there is no evidence that he wanted to get it. With power, money and prestige came the temptation to accommodate, a problem that nearly every church father after Constantine addressed repeatedly and explicitly. Christian missions did not cease after the fourth century. Barbarians who migrated into Constantine's empire frequently converted, and some missionaries crossed the frontier to shepherd Roman citizens living outside the empire or, in some cases, to evangelize barbarians. The conversion of many Romans bored holes in the fixed boundary between Roman and barbarian, and eventually dissolved the distinction entirely. Constantine's conversion was a crucial prelude to the decline of the empire and the rise of medieval Christendom's cultural cocktail of Romanitas, Germanitas and Christianitas.

That, I think, is a fair historical portrait of the man, his career, his times and his effect on the church. In my judgment, it is a history that John Howard Yoder and other theological and historical critics get wrong on many particulars and in the general outline. Yoder cannot know as much as he claims about the pacifist consensus of the early church, badly misreads major figures like Eusebius and especially Augustine, oversimplifies the history of "mainstream Christianity" to the point of caricature, and tries to convince us that the orthodox church handed missionary activity to heretics for a millennium after Constantine. His rhetoric of antiConstantinianism discourages Christians from a serious and sympathetic engagement with more than a millennium of Christian theological, and political theological, reflection. Using Yoder's definition of "Constantinian," I think it is more accurate to describe the early fourth century as a "Constantinian moment" than as an epoch-making "Constantinian shift"; further, the worst abuses that Yoder identifies arose after Constantine, sometimes long after. As I argue below, I think there was a "Constantinian shift," but it is one that Yoder quite misses.