Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (43 page)

This book, however, is not intended to be a Big Book of Quibbles. That would be too easy and also would set me up as a target for similar treatment, as readers (if any there be) sift through this book and (inevitably) discover my own historical errors, big and small. My main interest in this project has been theological. Theology and history, as Yoder is the first to remind us, are not ultimately divisible. My historical portrait has implied a political theology. But it is time to make that political theology more overt, to explain where I think Yoder goes wrong and to offer an alternative account of the theological meaning of Constantine.

ANTI-CONSTANTINIANISM

Anti-Constantinianism has a long history. Early on, most of the opposition came from pagans like Julian and Zosimus, and in the modern era Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Gibbon and Burckhardt assaulted the first Christian emperor as a usurper, a murderer, a tyrant whose only redeeming quality was his impatience with theological dispute. That pagans and rationalists would dislike Constantine is unsurprising, but there has also been a strong anti-Constantinian tradition within the church that is more interesting because it is more unexpected.

Francis of Assisi already traced the corruption and degeneration of the church to the Constantinian period, and in the fourteenth century "protoReformers" like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus took up the theme. Often medieval critics of the Constantinian settlement focused their attacks on the Donation of Constantine, mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, Constantine's legendary gift of Rome, Italy and episcopal supremacy to the bishop of Rome. Anti-Constantinianism was thus entwined with antipapalism, leading Wycliffe, for instance, to repudiate "the entire papal system on the grounds of having been founded by Constantine and not
Christ."2
Papal supporters like Bernard of Clairvaux also condemned the Donation, because it corrupted the church with a grant of worldly power and property.'
Dante's allegorical vision of church history at the end of Purgatorio gave this view its classic poetic expression, as the golden wings of the Roman eagle drop into and damage the chariot of the church, just before the fox of heresy slips in.

Radical Reformation attacks on the Constantinian church made the same linkage with papal power. Radical Reformers aimed, they said, to reach back beyond the Constantinian corruption to a primitive church that was spiritually alive, simple, nonsacramental. For Melchior Hoffmann, the church of Constantine corresponded to the church of Perga- mon in the book of Revelation, a church "where divine truth became polluted by human wisdom and moral compromise was generally accepted." This was the period when "the pope and antichrist were very pleased to accept the same power, authority and strength of worldly rule."
Pietist Lutheran Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714) reinterpreted the whole of church history along anti-Constantinian lines, brandishing an early "pure church" as a measuring rod to show how far the mainstream church fell into "the poisonous embrace of Constantine." In Arnold's story, the true church "had been preserved over the centuries, not by powerful prelates and conciliar decrees, but by the despised dissenters, sometimes labeled as the heretics of the age."5
During the nineteenth century Ludwig Keller developed a similar account of the church's history, tracing a persistent altevan- gelische Briidergemeinden from the apostles through the Waldensians to the Reformation Anabaptists, a paradigm that, in turn, inspired the work of Ernst Troeltsch.6

From at least the seventeenth century, criticism of Constantine has taken the form of a critique of "caesaro-papism." In early usage, as in the work of the Protestant jurist lustus Henning Bohmer, the term referred equally to systems in which popes take worldly power and to systems in
which laymen assume the responsibilities of bishops. Eventually "only the second caught on," and the term was used less as an analytic concept than as a Western club specially designed to beat Byzantine Christianity. Johann Christian Hesse made caesaro-papism the hinge of his account of Western political Christianity: "Constantine was now the villain of the piece; he had opted for Christianity for political reasons and had made religion serve what he perceived as his own interests." Taking up this tradition, Jacob Burckhardt found analogies between Byzantine and Islamic political order, and thereby discarded Byzantium as "un-European."7

Much of this critique, especially in the modern period, is fairly easy to dispose of. Burckhardt's hostility to what he thought of as caesaro-papism is based on the conviction that religion and power can never mix; politics is the arena of amoral combat, religion of contemplation, prayer, soft pieties. The charge of caesaro-papism deconstructs into an unlikely alliance of "Roman [Catholic] fundamentalism" and Protestant pietism, and relies on "the radical distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, which was intended to separate religion from politics" and has the ironic consequence of endorsing clerical power and reproaching "the founder of the Christian empire ... for having lacked an ideal of laicity."8
In short, critiques of Constantinianism, especially in the modern period, have lacked an ecclesiology and have operated with what John Milbank describes as the "liberal Protestant metanarrative," according to which the church gradually sheds its external political encrustrations and is revealed as what in essence it always has been, something "purely religious." On those premises, the critique of Constantinianism is preloaded; no matter how faithfully the church gives cultural form to its gospel, it is abandoning the "spiritual" message of Jesus.

For all its celebration of the martyrs, furthermore, Christian antiConstantinianism does little justice to the martyrs' hopes. Martyrs endured flame and sword because in that anguish they shared in the sufferings of Christ. But they also knew that the sufferings of Christ were not perpetual. Jesus suffered, died, was buried and then rose again, vindicated by his Father over against all the condemnations of the world and the devil. Mar tyrs went to their deaths expecting vindication, and expecting that vindication not only in heaven and at the last day but on earth and in time. That is what Lactantius's treatise on the death of persecutors is all about. "Behold," he writes to one Donatus, "all the adversaries are destroyed, and tranquillity having been re-established throughout the Roman empire, the late oppressed Church arises again, and the temple of God, overthrown by the hands of the wicked, is built with more glory than before." Just like Jesus.

The political reversal accomplished by Constantine is testimony to God's mercy:

For God has raised up princes to rescind the impious and sanguinary edicts of the tyrants and provide for the welfare of mankind; so that now the cloud of past times is dispelled, and peace and serenity gladden all hearts. And after the furious whirlwind and black tempest, the heavens are now become calm, and the wished-for light has shone forth; and now God, the hearer of prayer, by His divine aid has lifted His prostrate and afflicted servants from the ground, has brought to an end the united devices of the wicked, and wiped off the tears from the faces of those who mourned. They who insulted over the Divinity, lie low; they who cast down the holy temple, are fallen with more tremendous ruin; and the tormentors of just men have poured out their guilty souls amidst plagues inflicted by heaven, and amidst deserved tortures. For God delayed to punish them, that, by great and marvelous examples, He might teach posterity that He alone is God, and that with fit vengeance He executes judgment on the proud, the impious, and the persecutors.

God's vengeance against his persecutors comforts the mourners, vindicates the dead, and, more important, vindicates God himself, teaching that "He alone is God."

This form of anti-Constantinianism is theologically erroneous and historically hopeless. Fortunately, that is, by and large, not Yoder's brand of anti-Constantinianism.

YODER'S ANTI-CONSTANTINIANISM

Yoder's opposition to Constantine suffers from the same oversight as ear
her forms of anti-Constantinianism with regard to martyrs.10
He longs for the hardy faithfulness of the martyr church but does not recognize that the martyrs were motivated by something very different from antiConstantinianism. They died, one might almost say, in hope that the Lord would raise up an emperor very like Constantine, through whom the Lord would show that their blood had not seeped silent into the earth.

Yet Yoder's anti-Constantinianism is more challenging precisely because he does not sacrifice ecclesiology but highlights it. His is an ecclesiological and eschatological critique of Constantinianism. As noted a number of times before, Yoder does not identify "Constantinianism" with the achievements or policies of Constantine or any of his successors. Constantinianism is a set of mental, spiritual, and institutional habits that get into the blood of careless Christians. Yoder's is in part a historical thesis; he does believe that "Constantinianism" took its first form in the period between the mid-second century and the fifth, or, more narrowly, between the "Edict" of Milan and the City of God. Yet he discerns forms of Constantinianism in pre-Christian Judaism and even charges that ethnically restricted Anabaptist groups might become "Constantinian."

Constantinianism is not dependent on Constantine. What exactly is it? In his most systematic account, Yoder begins with the obvious: After Constantine, Christianity was no longer a minority religion, beleaguered and persecuted, but instead became the favored religion of the empire, in time the majority religion, eventually the established religion. This created a crisis of Christian identity and forced a shift in the meaning of Christian.
Prior to Constantine, it took some chutzpah to be a Christian; after, it took chutzpah not to be one. In short, "after Constantine the church was everybody.""

What interests Yoder here is the fact that this new social status brought with it a new ecclesiology. Prior to Constantine, the church could be identified concretely, visibly, by the lifestyle and practices of the Christian community, particularly the Christian renunciation of violence. If someone was baptized, gathered for Eucharist on Sunday and refused to pick up a sword or retaliate against enemies, he or she was a Christian. After Constantine, the visible markers of baptism, the Lord's Supper and church membership no longer identified the community of sincere believers, since everyone was in the church. A baptized person could be a rank pagan at heart, baptized only to secure a promotion in the provincial administration or to qualify for service in the army; or he could be a sincere, peaceable disciple of Jesus. Baptism told you nothing.

As a result, some new mark of Christian identity had to be found, and it could not be an external mark. It had to be an internal mark, the invisible mark of faith, or of regeneration or of some other spiritual reality. Because of Constantine, Christians developed a "doctrine of the invisibility of the true church" and the distinction between an inner ring of true (elect, believing) Christians, which remains a tiny minority within the visible community, and the vast majority of baptized tagalongs. Augustine's formulation of the idea of an ecclesia invisibilis is the dogmatic systematization of the identity crisis that followed Constantine's conversion and promotion of Christianity.
12 Among other things, this is politically problematic. An invisible church has no distinctive way of life that can critique, call, challenge or model an alternative to the wider society. Constantinianism is a historical irony: just when the church believes it has reached the pinnacle of influence and power, its political and social witness gets neutered.

A double church brings a double ethic. Because Christian changes meaning to include everyone, the church redefines discipleship on two levels. Not everyone is expected to obey the Sermon on the Mount, only the special and spiritual believers, monks and ascetics. Everyone else pretty
much goes about business as usual.13
In the world, Christians no longer operate by the example and teachings of Jesus but by an ethic of "vocation" that depends on a theory of natural law or "creation ordinances." There is a natural, created order to the family, for example. Being a father does not mean I bear the cross and imitate Jesus in my family. It means rather that I live by natural standards internal to the institution as created. This problem becomes especially acute, for Yoder, for Christians in politics. For someone of a Constantinian mindset, the state, with its violence and war, is a natural institution with its own rules of operation. When Christians assume office in that institution, they are "called" to function according to the demands of that calling. They punish others and fight wars, just like their pagan counterparts, and ignore Jesus' commands to do otherwise (Yoder thinks). A public-private dualism also results. What Christians would not, could not do in personal life (shoot an enemy) they can do if they have a public vocation in the natural institution of the state.

Along with this new ecclesiology come a new eschatology and a new view of providence. For Yoder, eschatology is central to the problem of Constantianism. Constantinianism is, he says in various places, an eschatological heresy. In the early church, eschatology focused on Christ's victory over the world, and especially over the powers and principalities that structure the world. In The Politics ofJesus, Yoder explains that the powers are good and necessary for human life, yet fallen. Because they are fallen, these structures (political and social institutions, traditions, mammon, power, etc.) are, or can be, demonic. God does overrule and orchestrate the powers so that they promote human flourishing. Tyranny is better than chaos, and tradition better than aimless innovation. But the powers are largely inimical to human existence. Jesus, however, has triumphed over the powers, and the very existence of the church is a declaration that the powers are not-gods whose authority is limited. In the church, and in the church only, is a people that refuses to bow the knee to the idols. The church's refusal to conform to fashion, to traditionalism, to violence is a continuous evangelical announcement: The gods are dethroned. By his triumph, Jesus liberates Christians. This liberation is not complete, but it has begun, and it is a sign of the inbreaking of the eschatological kingdom
and an announcement that the powers are doomed. The church's efforts are poured into resisting the seductions of the powers
.14