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

by Peter J. Leithart

  AGAINST ALL HERESIES

  The results of Constantine's wide-ranging antiheresy legislation (ca. 324) were similar. Around the time of his final war with Licinius, he issued a decree condemning a variety of heretics-Valentinians, Montanists, the Novatianists of Alexandria, and some others. Heretics, he said, were "haters and enemies of truth and life" and their heresies a "tissue of falsehood and vanity," promoting "destructive and venomous errors" that can only lead to "everlasting death." Their crimes were too many to catalog, and in a fit of rhetorical self-rebuke, he claimed that his policy of "protracted clemency" had only encouraged them to spread.

  Given the menace of heresy, he said, he had no choice but to act. Since "it is no longer possible to bear with your pernicious errors," he wrote, "we give warning by this present statute that none of you henceforth presume to assemble yourselves together." Heretical church buildings were to be seized, and Constantine's "care in this respect extend[ed] so far as to forbid the holding of your superstitious and senseless meetings, not in public merely, but in any private house or place whatsoever." He reiterated the point:

  We have commanded, as before said, that you be positively deprived of every gathering point for your superstitious meetings, I mean all the houses of prayer, if such be worthy of the name, which belong to heretics, and that these be made over without delay to the catholic Church; that any other places be confiscated to the public service, and no facility whatever be left for any future gathering; in order that from this day forward none of your unlawful assemblies may presume to appear in any public or private place. Let this edict be made public.

  Heretics were, of course, always welcome to return to the "holy fellowship" of the catholic church, "whereby you will be enabled to arrive at the knowledge of the truth." But "the delusions of your perverted understandings must entirely cease to mingle with and mar the felicity of our present times: I mean the impious and wretched double-mindedness of heretics and schismatics." Constantine believed he enjoyed prosperity because of God's favor, and the poison of false teaching spewing from the church endangered him. He saw it as his duty "to endeavor to bring back those who in time past were living in the hope of future blessing, from all irregularity and error to the right path, from darkness to light, from vanity to truth, from death to salvation.""

  Like many of his edicts, this was something less than it seemed. For one thing, he concluded two years later that the Novatianists had been wrongly condemned. They were separatist schismatics but not heretics, and in a rescript of 326 he restored their rights.15 Further, there is no evidence that the law was ever enforced, since "Valentinian, Marcionite, and Montanist conventicles long continued to exist."16 Like Constantine's edicts against pagans examined above, Contantine's decree against heresies functioned more as moral exhortation than as a legally binding decree, and it was a rhetorical display that kept the orthodoxy-hounds satisfied. Still, the result was that by 324 heresy had officially been declared illegal. Orthodox Christianity, as defined by church councils, was the only unrestricted faith still permitted in the Roman Empire. And the edict, and other of Constantine's decisions, did have an effect. Heretics were exiled, and Arius's books were burned, just as the anti-Christian treatise of Porphyry was destroyed by imperial order. Constantine's religious policy created an "atmosphere" of hostility to heresy as much as to paganism.

  One suspects fourth-century Christians had the same question we do: was this man the liberator of the church, or its new lord?

  JEWS IN THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

  Though for different reasons, both historians and theologians have objected to Constantine's policies regarding Jews. James Carroll sees in Constantine's policies a coherent, if not entirely conscious, plot to suppress Judaism. Above all, Carroll argues, Constantine was a politician looking for some principle of unification in the empire, and the Jews, like the pagans, were a standing challenge to his ambitions. By Carroll's reading of history, Constantine was responsible for making "unity" a mark of the church, as he suppressed the delightfully diverse Christian expressions of earlier centuries. More subtly but more dangerously, Constantine elevated the cross to its central importance in Christian faith. Prior to Constantine, Christianity had been centered on resurrection, but Constantine's vision and then the discovery of the true cross coalesced in a cruciform faith that had dangerous political ramifications for Jews. For if the cross is central, so is the guilt of the Jews for the death of God's Son. Specific laws, Carroll argues, also worked against Jews. Constantine did not impose the death penalty for proselytizing, but his successors did, and Constantine's criminalization of proselytizing laid the foundations for legal persecution of Jews throughout the Middle Ages."

  Like many critics of Constantine, Carroll is ill-informed about facts. He overstates the degree of diversity in early Christianity and also understates Christians' devotion to unity prior to Constantine. The New Testament itself is sufficient refutation of the idea that it took an emperor to introduce the notion of unity into the faith. Carroll also claims that Constantine is being innovative when he is being quite traditional. Jews had considerable liberty under the Roman Empire, but proselytizing was the point where they were most restricted. Long before Constantine, Jews had been prohibited from circumcising converts, with the exception of slaves."

  Constantine had a contempt for Jews that almost rivaled his contempt for pagans. In a letter sent to bishops following the Council of Nicaea, the emperor neglected to mention Arius or the christological controversy but celebrated the conciliar consensus on the date of Easter. One of his main reasons for rejoicing was that the church chose not to follow the Jews in dating their celebration of the resurrection of the Messiah whom the Jews had killed. But apart from his "violently prejudicial language,"" and it is both violent and prejudicial, his legislation changed the lives of Jews very little. Jews were permitted to serve on municipal senates, and Constantine extended the same tax exemption to synagogue heads and other Jewish leaders that he offered to Christian priests (CTh 16.8.2, 4), thus enabling "a system of Jewish self-government that strengthened Jewish life and identity."20 For the first time since Hadrian's devastation of Palestine, Jews were permitted to travel to Jerusalem, albeit only once a year and only to mourn its destruction. Jews did return to Palestine during his reign.21 The Jewish patriarch of Constantinople could judge not only religious issues but even civil cases among Jews.

  Some of Constantine's severe laws regarding Jews prohibited the Jews from attacking converts to Christianity (CTh 16.8.1). He threatened Jews who harassed converts to Christianity with burning; he forbade Jews to own Christian slaves and strengthened the rules against circumcision, extending the prohibition to slaves, whether pagan or Christian.22 Carroll's leading evidence is a decree that he dates to 315, in which Constantine threatened unspecified punishments to anyone who converted to Judaism (CTh 16.8.1.1).23 This was new but not revolutionary, since Roman law already prevented Jewish proselytizing.

  Even when a law seems to be directed against Jews, other concerns were more decisive than hostility to Judaism per se. In 321, for instance, Constantine legislated that Jews who were members of the curial class would be required to fulfill their civic duties, even if those duties conflicted with Jewish custom. Though this treated Jewish custom lightly, the point of the legislation was not to beat down Jews but to address the long-standing shortage of men willing to serve, and fund, city governments. Constantine backed off in any case, issuing a later law that gave Jews with synagogue offices exemptions from curial responsibilities.24

  Theological critics also attack the stance of the church toward Judaism during Constantine's day and after. "Constantinianism," if not the emperor himself, rests on and reinforces an untenable, perhaps even "heretical," supersessionism, the notion that the new covenant with the Christian church "fulfills" or "replaces" the Abrahamic promises and the Mosaic covenant with Israel. Constantine advanced this heresy because by forming a Christian empire he offered a this-worldly fulfillmen
t of Old Testament prophecies. Instead of being fulfilled in the spiritual realities of redemption, or the church, Abraham's promise of blessing to the nations was fulfilled in the Christian Roman Empire. The Old Testament was increasingly used as justification for imperial policies, and the Jews were essentially robbed of their Scriptures and their continuing place in redemptive history.

  In a wide-ranging revisionist account of early Jewish-Christian relations, John Howard Yoder placed "Constantinianism" at the center. Jesus and Paul were thoroughly Jewish, and the earliest church operated within a Jewish conceptual and practical world. Jesus' commands were treated as commands, the Torah was not played off against the gospel, and the Christians patterned their communal life after the example of diaspora Judaism. Constantine's rise to power, and the shift in Christian con sciousness associated with that, changed everything. By merging Christian faith with the power of the empire, Constantinianism de-Judaized Christianity. In place of the transcendent demands of the Torah, Constantinianism put the judgment of a general, producing a morality "serviceable to present power structure." Christians abandoned the specificity of Jewish law, which was now played off against the gospel; they abandoned Jewish universalism for the pseudo-universalism of Greek culture and Roman power; and when they picked up the sword they left behind the "Jewish pacifism" of Jesus. The Judaism that the West has known since is a product of Christianity, and specifically of the Constantinian apostasy.25 In an ironic twist of providence, the isolation of Judaism forced the Jews to adopt a communal lifestyle closer to that of the original community envisioned by Jesus than the imperial church, so that Judaism serves as a continuing witness against the Constantinian attempt to seize godlikeness and control history.26

  As usual, Yoder is aware of antecedents. Conflicts between Christians and Jews in the New Testament were, he argues, intramural conflicts within Judaism, and he acknowledges that the pre-Constantinian Christians were virulently hostile to Jews. Christian writers prior to Constantine already claimed that the Jews' status as people of God had been revoked, often pointing gleefully to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem as proof of God's abandonment. Christians prior to Constantine were, moreover, often flirting with a de-Judaized form of Christianity. Though he wrote in reply to Marcion, Tertullian repudiated the carnality of the Old Testament, its sacrifices and circumcisions, almost as vigorously as did his opponent.27 Origen believed that Old Testament sacrificial law was a test; God never wanted the Jews actually to offer animals. Faustus the Manichaean hit his target when he noted how "daintily" the Catholics sipped from the Old Testament.21

  Yet it was one of Yoder's main "Constantinian" theologians, Augustine, who stemmed the tide. Augustine's sermons are nearly as full of the themes of adversus Iudaeos as those of any church father,29 but after working through his "literal" commentary on Genesis and formulating a response to Faustus, he came to a quite different position.30 Crucially, he affirmed that the sacrifices and rites of the Old Testament were commanded by God and, moreover, that precisely by putting the law into bodily practice, the Jews became fitting types of the coming Lord. Their dignity in salvation history depended on obedience to what earlier Christians had dismissed as "carnal" law. God told them to sacrifice, and when they did, they foreshadowed the passion of the incarnate Son. It was a brilliant maneuver, striking down the anti-incarnational and anti-Jewish elements of Faustus's theology at a single blow while simultaneously correcting the soft Marcionism of Catholics by binding Old and New unbreakably together.31

  Augustine's pro Torah and pro Jewish theology had direct policy implications. The Jews' complicity in the death of Jesus was foreshadowed by Cain's slaughter of righteous Abel, but Augustine insisted on following the story through to the end. Just as Cain received a mark that protected him from vengeance for his fratricide, so the Jews had been marked for protection and given a promise of perpetuity to the eschaton. "Slay them not," Augustine warned, and even when he crowed about the destruction of pagan altars and defended the forcible suppression of Donatists, he never wavered in his opposition to persecution of Jews.32

  Through Augustine, Western theology inherited a large theological problem that never went away, even to the present, the problem of relating Old to New. Medieval theologians differed about how to relate the sacraments of the "Old Law" to the Christian rites, and the Lutheran and Reformed gave different answers still. No one in the mainstream of the tradition, however, believed, as some early fathers had suggested, that the Old could simply be ignored or condemned as unworthy of God. Marcion made a comeback, but that was much later, in the modern period.

  I do not suggest any causal relation. I only note the fact: contrary to Yoder, Christian theology was re Judaized in the century following Constantine.

  NEW JERUSALEM

  Though Jews like pagans were granted "limited toleration" in Constantine's empire,33 they were, also like pagans, living in a public environment that was increasingly Christian. Again, architecture provides a helpful gauge of the situation, particularly Constantine's architectural efforts in Palestine and Jerusalem. Memories and remnants of the ancient Jewish Jerusalem had been so thoroughly buried by the Hadrianic-era Roman city that replaced it, known as Aelia Capitolina, that Roman officials thought Christians who identified their home as Jerusalem were referring to a secret Christian military base in the east.34 There is no overt evidence that Constantine's project to erect a "new Jerusalem" on the ruins of the old was motivated by an anti-Jewish agenda. Like his building projects that used pagan spolia or basilica forms for churches, however, Constantine's buildings in Jerusalem advanced his Christianization of public space, a triumph over the old world by their erection on space once claimed by Jews. By building grand churches in Jerusalem he rivaled Solomon35 and went some way toward satisfying Christian "temple envy."36 It was perhaps, Eusebius thought, the fulfillment of the prophecies of Ezekiel concerning the restored temple.31 Vetus Israel was giving way to nova Israel.

  When the Augusta Helena, Constantine's mother, made her pilgrimage to Palestine, she found the site of the death and resurrection of Jesus encrusted with paganism. To Eusebius, it looked like a deliberate plot to obscure the truth about Jesus:

  For it had been in time past the endeavor of impious men (or rather let me say of the whole race of evil spirits through their means), to consign to the darkness of oblivion of that divine monument of immortality to which the radiant angel had descended from heaven, and rolled away the stone for those who still had stony hearts, and who supposed that the living One still lay among the dead; and had declared glad tidings to the women also, and removed their stony-hearted unbelief by the conviction that he whom they sought was alive. This sacred cave,38 then, certain impious and godless persons had thought to remove entirely from the eyes of men, supposing in their folly that thus they should be able effectually to obscure the truth.39

  Constantine ordered the site cleared of idolatry, initiated an excavation, and soon discovered the cave in which Jesus had been entombed. Later legend added to this the discovery of the true cross, whose genuineness was confirmed by the fact that its wood brought a boy back from the dead. In those later accounts, Helena was said to have tortured a Jew to discover the whereabouts of the cross-a Jew who later became a bishop.40 Of that there is no word in Eusebius.41

  Instead, Eusebius told the story of the sepulcher and of Constantine's decision to erect a magnificent church on the site. Eusebius's description of the church is breathless and not altogether clear, but the overall impression is unmistakable. It had the same massive size and luxurious ornamentation as the other structures Constantine built. Though the original church focused more on Golgotha than on the site of the resurrection, Eusebius was obsessed with the cave:

  For at the side opposite to the cave, which was the eastern side, the church itself was erected; a noble work rising to a vast height, and of great extent both in length and breadth. The interior of this structure was floored with marble slabs of various colors; while
the external surface of the walls, which shone with polished stones exactly fitted together, exhibited a degree of splendor in no respect inferior to that of marble. With regard to the roof, it was covered on the outside with lead, as a protection against the rains of winter. But the inner part of the roof, which was finished with sculptured panel work, extended in a series of connected compartments, like a vast sea, over the whole church; and, being overlaid throughout with the purest gold, caused the entire building to glitter as it were with rays of light .12

  The Holy Sepulcher was the place of the theophany of all theophanies, and its church paralleled the design of ancient temples. "It was a place to be set apart, to be enclosed-or, more precisely, one that set itself apart." This was done partly through the erection of "a monumental entrance, a gate of heaven in the sense that in this holy place earth meets heaven and one may pass between." Beyond the gate was an atrium, "a place of preparation for the worshiper, of separation from the world." Another liminal area followed, "the house of prayer which afforded an opportunity for further preparation and a place for congregational worship." Finally, the worshiper "came to the place of the theophany proper. At the Holy Sepulchre there was an inner atrium enclosing another inseparable holy place, the rock of Calvary." Above the site of the resurrection was a dome, "the dome of heaven or of the cosmos which had an oculus at the apex like the Pantheon in Rome. This oculus gave direct access to heaven from the holy place, and the rotunda was the focal point of the whole, structurally and symbolically."a3