Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

by Peter J. Leithart

  We can never uncover exactly what Constantine experienced in 310 and 312. But we do not have to. More important for assessing Constantine's sincerity is the question of Constantine's words and actions following 312. Did he talk like a Christian after his conversion? Did he act like one?

  Zosimus certainly did not think so. He characterized the emperor as untrustworthy in alliances, addicted to luxury, wasteful in finance, and destructive of the empire's security.39 Zosimus's analysis influenced Voltaire, who wrote his Philosophical Dictionary that Constantine was a "scoundrel," not to mention "a parricide who smothered his wife in a bath, butchered his son, assassinated his father-in-law, his brother-in-law, and his nephew," "a man bloated with pride and immersed in pleasures," as well as a "detestable tyrant, like his children." But Voltaire recognized that Constantine could not have achieved the heights he did without some good sense, which he manifested in a "belligerent letter" to Arius and Alexander of Alexandria, urging them to give up the "trifling matter" of their quarrel concerning the divinity of the Son.40 Burckhardt thought Constantine a "genius" and did not begrudge the traditional title "the Great," but argued that Constantine was "driven without surcease by ambition and lust for power." He was a "murderous egoist who possessed the great merit of having conceived of Christianity as a world power." His only concern was success, though he may have had a "superstition" in favor of Christ.41 James Carroll likewise claims that Constantine was "infinitely shrewd" for making use of the Christian church as he did.42 Edward Gibbon aimed at providing a "balanced portrait" that combined the virtues celebrated by Constantine's promoters with the vices decried by his detractors, but Gibbon ended up with a schizophrenic Constantine whose early greatness trailed off into elderly sensuality. Gibbon gives us a young Eusebian Constantine and an old Zosimian one.

  Dan Brown's smashingly popular The Da Vinci Code continues in the same vein, and then some. For Brown's oh-so-highly educated characters, if not for Brown himself, Constantine was a lifelong pagan whose decision to support Christianity was nothing more than "backing the winning horse." Pagan symbols dominated Constantinian iconography, Brown's character claims, and his shift of the sabbath to Sunday signifies his continuing adherence to the god Sol. Constantine was responsible for elevating the all too human Jesus to deity, and he did it to buttress his imperial power: "By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world." To ensure that the church conformed to the divine Jesus of Constantine, he called the Council of Nicaea, suppressed all the earlier gospels, and compiled the New Testament canon.43

  Bits and pieces of the pagan and post-Enlightenment assessment of Constantine's Christianity are commonly invoked among contemporary theologians, evidence that prejudice against Constantine crosses the cultural spectrum from popular novelists to sophisticated theologians. Theo logian Craig Carter is certainly no Dan Brown, but he is nearly as hostile to the first Christian emperor and gives nearly as distorted an account of Constantine's career. Carter argues that Constantine's support of the church had nothing to do with his real convictions, since it was a rational policy decision. More damningly, Carter claims that Constantine never really promoted Christian faith per se but adhered to and supported a synthetic monotheism that could hold Christians and pagans together in a single empire. He "never had much to say about Jesus," Carter claims.44

  CONSTANTINE IN HIS OWN WORDS

  I beg to differ. Constantine's own writings reveal, in my judgment, a seriously Christian ruler.41 Constantine does not display the polemic acuity of an Athanasius or the subtlety of a Gregory of Nyssa, but that is not surprising given his background and vocation. Still, he was not so ignorant as many have claimed. According to Eusebius, he was educated in the liberal arts,46 a claim that is consistent with his presence in the court of Diocletian as a young man, a court where philosophers were welcome. After 312, Eusebius informs us, Constantine became a student of the Scriptures, listening to the doctors and spending long hours in study and reading.47

  One simple conviction was central to Constantine's beliefs: the Christian God was the heavenly Judge who, in history, opposes those who oppose him. He believed that God destroys those who destroy his temple. Convinced of Lactantius's arguments concerning God's vengeance on emperors who persecuted the church, he feared arousing that wrath.48 Lactantius, who wrote a history of the persecutions based on this conviction, was no simpleton. Known as "the Christian Cicero," he was the first Christian to write polished Latin, the first to write a "systematic theology" in the Divine Institutes, and the holder of an imperial post in rhetoric in Nicomedia. Yet he shared Constantine's conviction that God frustrates enemies of the church and blesses those who defend, befriend and support it. Eusebius adhered to the same conviction. It was an essential part of the theology of the martyr church, one of the bases for their utter confidence that someday their blood would be avenged.

  Constantine also worried that the church would destroy itself, that the attacks on God's temple would come from God's own priests. As soon as he secured control of the Western empire and decreed that the Christian church would be tolerated alongside paganism, Constantine was greeted with appeals from the Donatists, who wanted him to intervene to solve the crisis in North Africa. No sooner had he secured the Eastern empire by defeating Licinius (324) than the Arian controversy broke out. Fierce controversies in the church grieved Constantine for several reasons. One of the reasons was certainly political. Constantine was a formidable politician'49 and his letters reveal an emperor who, unsurprisingly, was interested in gaining and maintaining power, preserving the unity and health of the empire, and determining how the church fit into his political aims. Constantine believed that a unified church was essential to the health of the empire. Like Diocletian, he continued to think of religion in political terms: as the old priesthoods kept the gods propitious, so the ministry of the priests and bishops would keep the Christian God from becoming displeased with Constantine.50

  Constantine's reasoning here was less sociological than many of the modern accounts suggest. When he rebuked Christians for their quarrels, he was not arguing that the church should remain unified so it could serve as the glue of imperial power. Such a claim would be nonsensical, since at the time of Constantine's conversion the Christian population-cohesive and well organized to be sure-amounted to about 10-15 percent of the population.5' The church did not provide enough glue to stick the empire together. Constantine's argument was directly theological. Divisions in the church displease the one God whose church it is, and God in his anger might well, Constantine thought, take his vengeance not only on the church but on the emperor himself. Constantine learned from Diocletian that politics and theology are inextricably mixed, and he operated in a similar framework. He had a different political theology from Diocletian's, but it was equally political, equally theological.

  For Constantine, it was specifically "catholic" worship that would secure the empire. After his efforts to heal the Donatist schism ended in frustration, he wrote to an official threatening to come to Africa to settle things personally. "By diligent examination," he wrote in a tone that verged on petulance, "I shall acquaint myself to the full with the things which at the present time some persons fancy they can keep dark through the allurements of their ignorant minds, and shall drag them into the light. Those same persons who now stir up the people in such a war as to bring it about that the supreme God is not worshipped with the veneration that is His due, I shall destroy and dash in pieces."52 In a letter of 314 to Ablavius, he stated his intention to summon bishops and priests to the Council of Arles to deal with the Donatist controversy, and again castigated those who bring war into the church. "I confess to your Lordship," the emperor wrote, "since I am well aware that you also are a worshipper of the most High God, that I consider it by no means right that contentions and altercations of this kind should be hidden from me." He feared that "God may be moved not only against the human race,
but also against me myself, to whose care, by His heavenly Decree, He has entrusted the direction of all human affairs, and may in His wrath provide otherwise than heretofore." Divisions in the church left him fearful, and he claimed that he could be "truly and most fully without anxiety, and may always hope for all most prosperous and excellent things from the ever-ready kindness of the most powerful God," only if he could ensure "that all, bound together in brotherly concord, adore the most holy God with the worship of the Catholic religion, that is His due."53 Pagans charged that the church endangered the empire because Christians failed to honor the ancestral gods, and Constantine's perspective here reversed the pagan criticism. He believed that his own safety, and therefore the safety of the empire whose management had been given into his hands, depended on the church maintaining right worship of the Christian God. And right worship involved, at least, unity.

  In a conciliatory 324 letter to Alexander of Alexandria and Arius at the beginning of the Arian controversy, Constantine returned to this theme, explicitly using language from Paul concerning the unity of the body: "A dissension arose between you, fellowship was withdrawn, and the holy people, rent into diverse parties, no longer preserved the unity of the one body. Now, therefore, do ye both exhibit an equal degree of forbearance, and receive the advice which your fellow-servant righteously gives."54 When the Arian controversy dragged on for a decade after Nicaea, Constantine wrote to summon the bishops to the Council of Tyre, reminding them of their duty of unity: "Surely it would best consist with and best become the prosperity of these our times, that the Catholic Church should be undivided, and the servants of Christ be at this present moment clear from all reproach."55 Constantine recognized that maintaining unity in the church required forbearance and patience. In his final intervention in the Donatist controversy, he gave up his earlier threatening tone and urged the bishops to return no evil for evil but to bear with their enemies patiently.

  Constantine could have found ample New Testament warrant for both this emphasis and his fiery response to disharmony. Nothing provoked Paul's wrath more immediately or more fiercely than division within the body of Christ. Paul's astonished "Is Christ divided?" is a fair summary of Constantine's perspective in these letters. There is even some similarity here to Augustine's later view of the nature of justice in the res publica. A commonwealth is truly a commonwealth only when it embodies justice. Without justice, a commonwealth is just a glorified robber band. Justice means giving to everyone his or her due, and "everyone" here must include the most important party to the commonwealth, God himself. Without right worship, there is no justice and no commonwealth.56 Where Augustine and Constantine differed, profoundly, was in the results they expected to see. Constantine and his theological supporters, flush with the victory of the church, believed that a Christian empire could only go from victory to victory. "Success," as John Howard Yoder charges, became a central criterion of Christian political ethics.57 A century later, Augustine knew better. Constantine hoped his commonwealth would be secured by right worship of the true God; Augustine saw before his eyes that a putatively orthodox empire was crumbling. Constantine was right; God is the Judge. Augustine agreed but emphasized equally that his judgments are inscrutable, his ways past finding out.

  MISSIONAL EMPEROR

  The emperor was concerned with the internal conflicts of the church also because they gave ammunition to pagans to attack the church and reason to remain pagan. Division interfered with the church's universal mission. A letter to bishops Eusebius and Theognis (324) celebrated the union of various peoples in the empire and expressed the emperor's dismay that Christians should be divided. Calling himself a "fellow-servant" of the Christian God, he reminded the bishops of "the pledge of your salvation which I have in all sincerity made my care and through which we have not only conquered the armed force of our foes, but have also enclosed their souls alive to demonstrate the true faith of the love of man." His greatest success, though, was "the renewal of the oikoumene." He marveled that "so many peoples should be brought to the same mind-peoples which but yesterday were said to be in ignorance of God." But this marvel was diminished by the petty infighting that plagued the church: "Think of what they might have learnt if no shadow of strife had come upon them! Why, then, my beloved brothers, tell me, why do I bring a charge against you? We are Christians, and yet we are torn by pitiable disagreements."58

  At the outset of the Council of Nicaea, he reminded the bishops of the urgency of Christian unity and noted that their divisions had brought calumny on Christ's body. His "chief desire," he claimed, was "to enjoy the spectacle of your united presence." Seeing the assembled bishops, he added, "I feel myself bound to render thanks to God the universal King" for letting him "see you not only all assembled together, but all united in a common harmony of sentiment." Constantine warned the bishops to make the best use of the elimination of persecuting tyrants and begged them to resist the devil, who in Constantine's mind is almost always associated with conflict: "Now the impious hostility of the tyrants has been forever removed by the power of God our Savior, that spirit who delights in evil may devise no other means for exposing the divine law to blasphemous calumny." The blasphemy he had in mind was "intestine strife within the Church of God," which he considered "far more evil and dangerous than any kind of war or conflict; and these our differences appear to me more grievous than any outward trouble." He knew that he had been victorious by "the will and with the co-operation of God," but he thought that once the battle was done "nothing more remained but to render thanks to him, and sympathize in the joy of those whom he had restored to freedom through my instrumentality." Instead, he received unwelcome and unexpected "intelligence," namely, "the news of your dissension."

  Eager to heal the divisions, "I immediately sent to require your presence." Constantine's joy would be fulfilled only when he saw the bishops "all united in one judgment, and that common spirit of peace and concord prevailing among you all, which it becomes you, as consecrated to the service of God, to commend to others." He ended his speech with an exhortation to overcome their differences as quickly as possible: "Delay not, then, dear friends: delay not, you ministers of God, and faithful servants of him who is our common Lord and Savior: begin from this moment to discard the causes of that disunion which has come among you, and remove the perplexities of controversy by embracing the principles of peace. For by such conduct you will at the same time be acting in a manner most pleasing to the supreme God, and you will confer an exceeding favor on me who am your fellow-servant."59 He reminded the assembly that "it would be a terrible thing-a very terrible thing-that now that wars are ended and none dares to offer further resistance we should begin to attack each other and thus give cause for pleasure and for laughter to the pagan world."60

  Constantine was not just a Christian; he was a missional Christian.

  CONSTANTINE ON CHRIST

  Constantine frequently used ambiguous expressions like "most high God," "Divine Power," "Providence" and "Supreme God" in his correspondence, but these expressions too should be seen in their historical context. Fourthcentury Rome was a world of many gods, and the notion that there was a single supreme God beyond and above all those pointed not to modern deism but to monotheism or "henotheism."6' Constantine did not shy away from sharp polemics against paganism. Still, he was aware that a large proportion of his empire was still pagan, and especially when addressing a pagan audience, he expressed himself in ways that minimized offense.

  In one sense, it is hardly surprising that we find comparatively few explicit references to Jesus in Constantine's writings. So far as we know, he did not keep a spiritual journal, nor did he write hymns or mystical poetry. Most of the writing we have from Constantine's own hand consists of official correspondence with subordinate civil rulers or bishops, a genre not known for pious flourishes. Given the nature of most of the extant writing of Constantine, the striking thing is how often he turns to theological, and frequently specifically Christian, the
mes. I dare say that one will find more frequent references to Christ in Constantine's official pronouncements than one could find in the Federalist Papers.

  In the 314 letter summoning bishops to Arles, he repeatedly referred to "Christ our Savior" and warned that the "mercy of Christ" has departed from hardened Donatists. He expressed surprise that the Donatists had appealed to him to judge in this case, since he himself was under judgment, awaiting the "judgment of Christ." An assembly of bishops would heal the division, he hoped, since bishops could speak or teach nothing but what they learn from the "teaching of Christ." He accused the Donatists of being traitors to the church and wondered what their behavior said about their regard for "Christ the Savior."62 Elsewhere, he praised Eusebius for his treatise on Easter, since it so clearly explained the "mysteries of Christ."63 In another letter to Eusebius, he reminded him of the tyrants who once persecuted the "servants of our Savior."64 He urged Alexander and Arius to resist the "temptations of the devil" that would lead to dissension and to recognize that "our great God and common Savior of all has granted the same light to us all."65 Summarizing the findings of the Council of Nicaea on the date of Easter, he distinguished the church from Judaism, contending that "we have received from our Savior a different way."66 After Nicaea, he wrote to the church of Alexandria to express his horror at Arius's errors and his gratitude to God for the council's wisdom, and along the way he expressed a hope that "the Divine Majesty pardon the fearful enormity of the blasphemies which some were shamelessly uttering concerning the mighty Savior, our life and hope."67