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

by Peter J. Leithart

  Martin of Tours apparently operated by the principle articulated in the Arles canon. Converted while serving in the Roman military in a campaign in Gaul in 336, he remained in the Roman army until the day before a battle. When his turn came to receive the donative, he said, "Hitherto I have served you as a soldier: allow me now to become a soldier to God: let the man who is to serve you receive your donative: I am the soldier of Christ: it is not lawful for me to fight." His commander charged that Martin had withdrawn "from fear of the battle" rather than "from any religious feeling." Martin, however, offered to stand at the front of the battle without shield or helmet, protected only by the cross. He was arrested overnight, and plans were made to make good on his offer the next day. Before that could happen, the enemy sought peace and Martin was released.54

  Ambiguity continued to mark the church's relation with the military after the church was thoroughly integrated into public life. Late in the fourth century, Basil claimed that the church had not condemned killing in war as murder and that it did not in his time exercise discipline against active soldiers: "Homicide in war is not reckoned by our Father as homicide; I presume from their wish to make concession to men fighting on behalf of chastity and true religion." Yet Basil also advised that it may be well to counsel that those "whose hands are not clean only abstain from communion for three years."55 With Athanasius, ambiguity yielded to endorsement of military virtues and the military life: "Whereas killing is otherwise forbidden, in war it is legitimate and even praiseworthy to kill enemies. He who distinguishes himself in this receives great honor."56 Eventually things turned full circle, and pagans were excluded from the army.

  JUST WARRIORS

  Even so, the church did not become a hotbed of militaristic mania. The very writers who formulated the Christian version of "just war" theory continued, in fact, to emphasize some of the main points, and use the same passages, that the early fathers had. Ambrose defended violence not only on the part of civil officials in war and punishment but even in some private circumstances, when one acted-as Moses did-to defend the innocent against the oppressor.57 At the same time, Ambrose renounced selfdefense and claimed that even the "thought of warlike matters seems to be foreign to the duty of our office," the office of priests. It is not the priest's business to "look to arms, but rather to the forces of peace.."5S He famously faced down the emperor Theodosius, forbidding him to receive the Eucharist with the blood of innocents on his hands. It is inaccurate to say that he is simply giving a Christian gloss to the just war tradition of Roman political thinkers. Even in Ambrose, "pacifist arguments retained much of their old vigor, and the dilemma of Christian violence and love remained to a considerable extent unresolved."59

  Ambrose did not penetrate the problem with anything like the depth of Augustine. Like Ambrose, Augustine is often accused of adopting a thinly Christianized version of the Roman defense of war, but that does little justice to the profundity of his wrestling with questions of war and peace. Against the Manichaean Faustus, Augustine argued that the Old Testament retains its authority and gives sanction to war and even to religious coercion. As he grew older he became less sanguine about politics, more cynical about the uses of violence. While he continued to defend the necessity of war and violent coercion, in the City of God he did it in the context of a radical subversion of Christian national and ethnic loyalties.60

  Even where he defended the use of violence and coercion, he consciously defended it from within a Christian framework, with Jesus' demand for love of enemies always at the forefront of his mind. Turning the other cheek

  does not forbid punishment which serves as corrective. In fact, that kind of punishment is a form of mercy.... The only person suitable for inflicting punishment is the man whose love has driven out that normal hatred which rages in us when we have a desire for revenge. We do not have to fear, for instance, that parents seem to hate their young son if he has done wrong, and they box his ears to prevent a recurrence.... This example is the best illustration of the fact that one can love and punish a son all at the same time. 61

  Augustine appealed to the same analogy to draw a conclusion about war. When "the earthly city observes Christian principles," then it wages war "with the benevolent purpose that better provision might be made for the defeated to live harmoniously together in justice and godliness." Freedom is not the ultimate good, and restraining freedom can be a good when the freedom is being use to do evil. If possible, "wars would be waged as an act of mercy by good men so that by controlling unbridled passions they could stamp out those vices that ought to be removed or suppressed by any responsible government."62

  Augustine was no jingoist, and he knew that warfare was most often perverted with pride, greed, lust for domination. He knew that the wars waged for just causes were few and far between. For Augustine, war had to be waged, when it was waged, for the sake of peace. Peace, not war, was still the Christian vision of the world subdued by the gospel.

  CONCLUSION

  Yoder claims that the church slid or fell into Constantinianism from an earlier renunciation of violence and war. In fact, things are more messy and complicated, and therefore Yoder is wrong. Where Yoder needs an unambiguous consensus in the earlier church, the evidence is instead small, divided and ambiguous. Where Yoder needs a uniform pro-Constantinian consensus after the fourth century, the evidence continues to be divided and ambiguous. There was certainly a shift. After Constantine, when the Roman emperors began to look to the church for ethical guidance, the church began to be more overt in making the discriminating decisions that characterize the "just war" tradition. But the shift is more plausibly a result of a change in the church's political position than a result of a fundamental theological modification. Some Christians after Constantine maintained the pacifist views expressed by some of the earlier fathers, and even the theologians most responsible for the development of mainstream Christian views on war and violence were hardly warmongers. In short, the story of the church and war is ambiguity before Constantine, ambiguity after, ambiguity right to the present. Constantine is in this respect a far lesser figure than Yoder wants to make him.

  So far the argument about war and peace. What about early Christian views of empire, and later views of the empire and Christian mission? That is the subject of the next chapter.

  [Christians give the emperor] such reverential homage as is lawful for us and good for him; regarding him as the human being next to God who from God has received all his power, and is less than God alone.

  TERTULLIAN, AD SCAPULUM

  Though he labeled what he opposed "Constantinian," John Howard Yoder knew that it did not begin with Constantine. Christians in the second and third centuries were already, he says, in the grip of a proto- "Constantinianism," and this had an effect on their beliefs and practices about war, empire, the world, the church and its future. Still, Yoder's thesis relies on a historical narrative. He needs to demonstrate that there was a time of pacifism from which the church declined. As I have argued, he cannot do that.'

  Yoder cannot prove that the church "fell" from an anti- into a proimperial stance either. As with Yoder's claims about pacifism, it is essential for him to establish an ante quo in order to prove a "shift." Yoder must show that there was a time when the church was uniformly anti-imperial and that the church fell from that holy consensus. He cannot prove that Christians were united in opposition to the empire any more than he can demonstrate that all early Christians were pacifists. In fact, there is even less evidence for the sort of shift in attitudes toward the empire that Yoder describes than there is for a shift in ideas about war and peace.

  PAX ROMANA

  The New Testament does not, in my view, help Yoder. Jesus was condemned by a time-serving Roman governor, and his claims to be King and Lord frontally challenged imperial claims. Yet he did not urge his followers to throw off the shackles of empire; He ate with tax collectors and invited one to join his band of intimates. In Acts, Luke repeatedly shows us Roman of
ficials intervening to protect Christians from mobs, usually mobs of Jews. Paul used his Roman citizenship to advance his ministry, and Roman roads and Roman ships as he traveled. He spoke respectfully to Roman authorities and urged the Christians at Rome to submit even to hostile governing authorities because of the "good" they provided. Revelation 13 indicates that the bestial empire has turned demonic, but that is only one side of the New Testament's complex portrait of the Roman empire.

  After the New Testament, nearly every writer who commented on the subject expressed the views summed up nicely by Tertullian. Writing about military service, Tertullian, in his charmingly antithetical way, asked whether Christians could serve God and the emperor. He thought not, but he and other writers were glad that somebody was serving the emperor, because they believed the empire guaranteed stability.

  Tertullian knew the evils of empire. Rome did not grow powerful through its pietas, as Rome's apologists liked to claim. On the contrary, "all kingship or empire is sought in war and extended by victory." War destroys cities; cities enclose sanctuaries and priests and the stuff of the gods. War is sacrilege, and "the sacrileges of the Romans are exactly as many as their trophies; their triumphs over gods as many as over races; their spoils in war as many as the statues still left of captured gods." Impietas, not pietas, was the secret of Rome's success.2 Yet Tertullian also wrote that "a Christian is enemy to none, least of all to the Emperor of Rome," whom he knew to be "appointed by his God" and whom therefore he was bound to "love and honor." Tertullian was committed to desiring the "well-being" of both the emperor and "of the empire over which he reigns so long as the world shall stand- for so long as that shall Rome continue."

  Anticipating Eusebius, he insisted that Christians rendered "such reverential homage as is lawful for us and good for him; regarding him as the human being next to God who from God has received all his power, and is less than God alone." Christians, Tertullian argued, were even perfectly willing to offer sacrifice on behalf of the emperor, though it had to be a Christian sacrifice: "We therefore sacrifice for the emperor's safety, but to our God and his, and after the manner God has enjoined, in simple prayer." Pagan sacrifices are useless, the "food of devils." Christians appeal to God, praying "for the imperial well-being, as those who seek it at the hands of Him who is able to bestow it."3 The Latin of the relevant line is "Itaque et sacrificamus pro salute imperatoris sed Deo nostro et ipsius: sed quomodo proccepit Deus, prece pura." Tertullian cleverly makes use of the language of the imperial cult, which required sacrifice for the health of the emperor (sacrificium pro salute imperatoris).4 Christians do just what the imperial cult demands, though in their own way.5

  Tertullian drew on "the Greek apologists of the previous generation, such as Melito of Sardis," in developing his ideas of empire. Following their lead, he "regarded the empire as a God-ordained institution, whose end would portend the chaos accompanying the last times, and that its ruler should be honoured and obeyed." In short, "his quarrel was not with the empire as such but against its administrators who made unlawful de mands on its Christian inhabitants." His attacks on "the `bad emperors,' Nero and Domitian, who persecuted the Church, were no harsher than Tacitus' or Dio's. In his assertion that Rome did not gain her empire by justitia, he was following criticisms that had been made by Cicero (e.g., De Republica v. 2). Where he went further than the Stoic critics was his addition of irreligiositas to Rome's other failings. Only when it turned from Jupiter to Christ would Rome deserve to become eternal." Far from being a critic of empire as such, Tertullian upheld the ideal of "a Christian empire," and until that arrived he remained "a loyal servant to the emperors whom he recognized as protectors of all their subjects, including the Christians."6

  In his apologetic works, Tertullian focused incessantly on the question of origins, arguing against defenders of classical culture that Judaism was older, and hence more reliable, than Greek philosophy or Roman law. Seeds come before trees, and Jewish law is the seed from which Roman law grew. Christians are the heir to Judaism, separated from the parent, and the church therefore is the carrier of this ancient wisdom into the Greco-Roman world. Christianity, in short, is not simply compatible with Roman citizenship and involvement in Roman life; it is the foundation of Romanitas, and Christians are truer to Rome's original heritage than are polytheist pagans. Christianity is new as yesterday yet as old as creation; nova et vetera, and hence "we alone are innocent." Pagan Romans, not Christians, despise their tradition.?

  Origen agreed. When Celsus charged that Christians would leave the emperor alone against the barbarians, Origen protested,

  We help the emperor in his extremities by our prayers and intercessions more effectively than do the soldiers. Just as the priests must keep their hands unsullied for sacrifice, so also must the Christians, who are all priests and servants of God, keep their hands unstained by blood that they may be able to pray for the Emperor and the army in just cause. In this way we overcome the real disturbers of the peace, the demons. Thus we fight for the Emperor more than the others, though we do not fight with him, nor at his command. We constitute an army of piety by our intercession with the Deity.

  Origen was opposed to Christian involvement in war, but Christian misgivings about bloodshed did not translate into opposition to the imperial order. Origen "linked the Church to the Roman peace," arguing that "in the days of Jesus justice came forth and fullness of peace. God prepared the place for his teaching and arranged that the Roman Empire should rule the whole world." Since Christianity was disseminated under conditions of relative peace, "Christians had a responsibility ... to maintain this peace. If they could not contribute to the support of the empire against external assault, they were all the more obliged to strengthen it from within."'

  Most of the works of Melito of Sardis (died ca. 180) have been lost, particularly the apology in which he addressed the emperor Marcus Aurelius concerning what he claimed were recent efforts to suppress Christi anity.' Eusebius preserved a portion of that apology, in which Melito made it clear that he considered Christianity a boon to the empire:

  For our philosophy formerly flourished among the Barbarians; but having sprung up among the nations under your rule, during the great reign of your ancestor Augustus, it became to your empire especially a blessing of auspicious omen. For from that time the power of the Romans has grown in greatness and splendor. To this power you have succeeded, as the desired possessor, and such shall you continue with your son, if you guard the philosophy which grew up with the empire and which came into existence with Augustus; that philosophy which your ancestors also honored along with the other religions.10

  Melito thought that Christianity helped the empire flourish; he offered as proof the fact that "there has no evil happened since Augustus' reign, but that, on the contrary, all things have been splendid and glorious, in accordance with the prayers of all.""

  These expressions of qualified appreciation for the goods that the Roman empire provided the church may be evidence of "creeping empire loyalty," but it is important to put them in context. As noted in an earlier chapter, Persia's defeat of Valerian in 258 began nearly a half-century of toleration during which the church grew rapidly and Christians, naturally enough, began to think that the empire was not so bad. That was naive, but it is understandable, and it helps to explain Christian attitudes toward the state. Christians had one less danger to worry about, one very large item: emperors were no longer killing them.

  Be that as it may, the main point is that Yoder's thesis of a "fall" fails. From the New Testament through the first three centuries, Christians acknowledged the goods provided by the empire as well as its idolatries and evils. What happened after the emperor saw his cross and began building churches?

  AUGUSTINE, CONSTANTINIAN?

  By Yoder's account, Constantinian Christians identified the "church and world in the mutual approval and support exchanged by Constantine and the bishops." This merging came to its classic expression between 313 and the ea
rly fifth century, and Yoder uses as his symbolic reference points the Edict of Milan and the completion of Augustine's City of God. Yoder sees this history as a straight line, Eusebius and Augustine as equally "Constantinian" theologians. In fact, this is true only in the sense that both wrote during or after Constantine and both wrote in a baptized empire. In purpose and substance, however, Augustine wrote the City of God precisely to rebut "Eusebian Rome-theology."12

  Yoder's scattered comments on Augustine are among the worst moments in his writing.13 Occasionally he hits on something true, such as his claim that Augustine was "Neoplatonic" in philosophical orientation, but usually his comments are glaringly wrong, not merely in niggling details but in the big picture. Augustine, he says, identified the "Roman church" with the "millennium," which, Yoder thinks, is not surprising since he took the "Constantinian church as a matter of course." As a result, in Augustine eschatology evaporates because "the conquest of the world by the church," the goal of human history, "had been reached." Yoder concedes that Augustine did not "underestimate the reality of sin," but he thinks the bishop "seriously overestimated the adequacy of the available institutional and sacramental means for overcoming it."14 There is a kernel of truth in one of Yoder's statements: According to Augustine, John used the image of a thousand years as a symbol "for the whole duration of this world."" But even that accurate comment is undermined by Yoder's blatant misreading of its significance. Though the church age and the millennium are identified, Augustine surely did not see this period as a time of uninterrupted progress. It was the time of wheat and tares, the saeculum, the time between. Augustine did not think that he had reached the end of history. Anyone who thinks eschatology is missing from Augustine has not read him with much sympathy.