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

by Peter J. Leithart

  27Later in his reign, Constantine employed pagan deities in much the same way as medieval Renaissance artists. See Jean Seznec, The Survival ofthe Pagan Gods (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1995).

  2'Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, pp. 195-97, highlights the importance of the ambiguity. Drake argues that this indicates Constantine's effort to form "the most broadly based coalition possible" (p. 196), but in making this point he mistakenly minimizes the preferential treatment Constantine gave to Christianity and the force of the legal impediments he placed on paganism. See chapter 9, below.

  26Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, p. 168.

  29Andreas Alfoldi, The Conversion of Constantine and Pagan Rome, trans. Harold Mattingly. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), p. 40.

  3oWeiss, "Vision of Constantine," pp. 247-50. Weiss's reconstruction is endorsed in Timothy D. Barnes, "Constantine After Seventeen Hundred Years: The Cambridge Companion, the New York Exhibition and a Recent Biography," International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14 (2008; but I am relying on an unpublished 2007 version of this review essay generously provided by the author). Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, p. 85, also suggests a sun halo.

  31Patrick Bruun, "The Disappearance of Sol from the Coins of Constantine," Arctos, n.s. 2 (1958). Weiss makes this connection by claiming that the appearance of Apollo mentioned by the panegyric of 310, when Constantine was marching between Massilia to the Rhine frontier, is the same as the cross-vision.

  32Eusebius reports that the phrase "in this conquer" was "written," but the verb can mean "signify" or "mean."

  33Google "sun halo" for some striking images.

  34Weiss, "Vision of Constantine," p. 250.

  35lbid., pp. 250-56.

  36See the very sharp discussion of models of conversion in Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, pp. 187-89.

  37 Ibid., p. 187.

  38Ibid., p. 191.

  39Zosimus New History 2.

  40See Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, p. 282, for a publishing history of Zosimus; Voltaire, "Arianism," in PhilosophicalDictionary, Volume 1, available online at Google Books.

  41Burckhardt, Age of Constantine, pp. 245, 261, 292-93. Burckhardt's analysis of Constantine needs to be historicized. It was a response to the state-building thugs of his own time as much as historical analysis of Constantine and his era, and imposes what Drake calls the "conceptual anachronism" of secular politics onto a fourth-century emperor for whom religion and politics are inseparable (see Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, pp. 13-18; Timothy D. Barnes, "Constantine, Athanasius and the Christian Church," in Constantine: History, Historiography and Legend, ed. Samuel Lieu and Dominic Montserrat (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 8-9.

  43Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 231-34.

  42Carroll, Constantine's Sword, p. 182.

  44Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A PostChristendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), pp. 81-82, 86. In a later chapter I will explore the irony that Constantine is condemned both for imposing religion on an unwilling populace and for failing to be explicitly Christian.

  "Norman H. Baynes (Constantine the Great and the Christian Church, Raleigh Lecture on History [London: Humphrey Milford, 1929]) bases his similar conclusion on a survey of Constantine's own writings.

  46Eusebius Life 1.19.

  47Ibid., 1.32; 4.17.

  48Depending on your angle of vision, you can call this "betting on the winning horse," or you can call it a healthy fear of God. Given the religious instincts that Constantine showed even before becoming a Christian, it is as likely the latter as the former. And the simple faith is a biblical one: my summary above-God destroys those who destroy his temple-comes from Paul (1 Cor. 3:17), no simpleton.

  49Repoliticizing Constantine is one of the central themes of Drake, Constantine and the Bishops. Unfortunately, Drake regularly falls back into a religious-political dichotomy that he recognizes was not available in the fourth century. He claims, for instance, that Constantine's efforts to reform the judicial system were part of a social program rather than an effort to secure the triumph of the church, but in this he fails to recognize that the social program was itself religiously motivated. As Drake himself knows, there was little support within Roman social or religious life for the kind attention that Constantine showed toward to humiliores.

  "Johannes Roldanus, The Church in the Age of Constantine: The Theological Challenges (London: Ashgate, 2006), p. 37. He notes (p. 41) that after Constantine the traditional religions no longer guaranteed the Empire's salus, since "this vital function was from now on assigned to the Christian religion."

  "Jones, Constantine and the Conversion ofEurope, p. 73, notes that Christians were such a minority that favoring them brought little immediate political advantage.

  52Optatus Against the Donatists.

  "Ibid., 4.42.

  "Ibid. MacMullen (Constantine, p. 111) doubts that the letter is wholly from Constantine.

  54Eusebius Life 2.64-72.

  56Augustine City of God 19.21. See Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  17This is one of Yoder's central charges against the "Constantinian church," and it was true of some Christians in Constantine's time. But it was most true for a brief moment in the early fourth century. As I argue throughout this book, what happened in the early fourth century, insofar as it fits Yoder's paradigm at all, was more a "Constantinian moment" than a "Constantinian shift."

  "Quoted in Baynes, Constantine the Great, pp. 27-28.

  59Eusebius Life 3.12.

  60Quoted in Baynes, Constantine the Great, p. 27.

  61Drake, in Constantine and the Bishops, goes too far in claiming that Constantine aimed to articulate an "inclusive" Christianity with a low bar to the entry of pagan monotheists.

  67Eusebius Church History 1.9.

  68The testing comes from later tradition: a piece of each cross was touched to a corpse, which sprang to life when touched by the true cross's wood. Two versions of the story are available in Mark Edwards, trans., Constantine and Christendom (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).

  64Ibid., 2.46.

  65Ibid., 2.64-72.

  66Ibid., 3.17-20.

  62Optatus Against the Donatists.

  63Eusebius Life 4.35.

  69The cross is so central to Constantine's piety that Carroll, Constantine's Sword, suggests that he virtually invented a cross-centered, and therefore anti-Semitic, Christianity.

  77Ibid., 2.28; 4.9.

  78Ibid., 1.41.

  73Eusebius Life 4.36.

  741bid., 2.4, 12, 14; 4.22.

  751bid., 1.42-43; 2.13.

  76Ibid., 2.29.

  70Eusebius Oration 11.

  71Eusebius Life 3.60.

  72Eusebius Church History 1.9.

  79Cf. Baynes, Constantine the Great, pp. 50-56. Baynes's doubts about the authenticity of the sermon were sufficient to keep him from using the text as evidence of Constantine's religious beliefs.

  80H. A. Drake, "Suggestions of Date in Constantine's `Oration to the Saints,'" AmericanJournal of Philology 106, no. 3 (1985): 335; Timothy Barnes "The Emperor Constantine's Good Friday Sermon," Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1976): 414-23; M. J. Edwards, "The Arian Heresy and the Oration to the Saints," Vigiliae Christianae 49, no. 4 (1995); Edwards, Constantine and Christendom, pp. xvii-xxix; Bruno Bleckmann, "Ein Kaiser als Prediger: Zur Datierung der Konstantinischen `Rede an die Versammlung der Heiligen,' " Hermes 125 (1997). Barnes, "Constantine After Seventeen Hundred Years," claims that the "Oration" is today "universally accepted." Edwards, Constantine and Christendom, provides a lucid, heavily footnoted translation.

  81The phrase is John Milbank's, but it expresses, I think, Constantine's point.

  "Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to FourthCentury Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), argues that the fourth-century debates were debates about different notions of divine generation.

  83Eusebius Life 4.10.

  84The evidence is explored in Oliver Nicholson, "Constantine's Vision of the Cross," Vigiliae Christianae 54, no. 3 (2000).

  85Van Dam, Roman Revolution, p. 285, links the interest in Palestine with Constantine's selfimage and his inclination toward Arianism.

  881bid., p. 308.

  "Ibid., p. 307.

  "Ibid., pp. 307-8.

  "Baynes, Constantine the Great, attends to Constantine's own writings and draws a similar conclusion, though he sets aside the "Oration to the Saints" because he doubts its authenticity.

  90Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, p. 275.

  'Lactantius Death 34.

  'Stephen Mitchell, "Maximinus and the Christians in A.D. 312: A New Latin Inscription," The JournalofRoman Studies 78 (1988): 113-14.

  3David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180-395, Routledge History of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 365.

  'Oliver Nicholson, "The `Pagan Churches' of Maximinus Daia andJulian the Apostate,"Journal ofEcclesiasticalHistory 45, no. 1 (1945): 4. Daia's reforms of the priesthood and his efforts to revive paganism are often compared to the later pagan revival of Julian, who drew his plans for reform from the church. Nicholson makes a compelling case against this interpretation, arguing that Daia's priests, though sincere in their paganism and their desire to eliminate Christianity, were political appointees who had little in common with Christian or Julianic priesthood.

  6Mitchell, "Maximinus," p. 117; he cites Eusebius Church History 9.9.4.

  5Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, pp. 364-65.

  'In what follows I am particularly indebted to Timothy D. Barnes, "Constantine After Seventeen Hundred Years: The Cambridge Companion, the New York Exhibition and a Recent Biography," International, journal ofthe Classical Tradition 14 (2008). Simon Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284-324, rev. ed., Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 189, also notes that the "edict" is not in fact an edict.

  'Barnes, "Constantine After Seventeen Hundred Years."

  9Lactantius Death 48. Eusebius's version is in Church History 10.5.

  10Hermann Dorries, Constantine and Religious Liberty, trans. Roland Bainton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 23. On the "edict" of Milan, Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: APost-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), is a bundle of contradictions. He faults Constantine for establishing religious freedom without any explicit acknowledgment of the truth of Christianity (p. 80) but then complains that Constantine set the trajectory for the persecution of non-Christians and heretics (p. 96). He suggests that Constantine might have used his power "to promote religious liberty and increase respect for human life and dignity" (p. 96), but he has already told us that the edict accomplished the first. It is not at all clear what Carter wants: if Constantine's laws are explicitly Christian, he's a theocratic tyrant; if not, then he's promoting vanilla monotheism.

  "For the prayer, see Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, p. 366.

  "Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 63.

  13potter, Roman Empire at Bay, p. 366.

  14The history of this period is complicated and controversial, and what follows is a sketch of events. For a more thorough treatment, see Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, pp. 62-77; Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, pp. 364-66, 377-80. For Daia's role, see Nicholson, "Pagan Churches," pp. 1-10; Mitchell, "Maximinus," pp. 105-24.

  "Charles Matson Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 162-64; A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 109. The Origo (5.14) claims that Constantine's aim was to set up a buffer (medius) between the two Augusti (Samuel N. C. Lieu and Dominic Montserrat, eds., From Constantine to fulian: Pagan and Byzantine Views -A Source History [London: Routledge, 1996], p. 45). Barnes (Constantine and Eusebius, pp. 66-67) claims that "chronology suggests a cynical view of Constantine's conduct." Constantine's initial aim in offering Bassianus as a Caesar was to head off Licinius's attempts to put his own infant son in that position. Once Constantine had his own child, Bassianus was a rival rather than an ally, both "expendable, and vulnerable." Whatever Bassianus's follies, Barnes suggests, the charges against him bear too much resemblance to the charges against Maximian to be taken seriously. Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, p. 377, tells a similar story.

  161 am dependent primarily on Barnes, Constantine andEusebius, p. 67. See also Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, pp. 164-65; Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, pp. 377-78.

  "Ramsay MacMullen, Constantine (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 132.

  "Jacob Burckhardt, TheAge of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 279-80.

  19This information is taken from Eusebius's Proofofthe Gospel and summarized by Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, pp. 71-72. Accounts of martyrs under Licinius are almost universally regarded as fictions. Potter (Roman Empire at Bay, p. 378) goes so far as to say that there is no evidence that Licinius was hostile to Christians at all. Barnes (Constantine andEusebius, p. 70) argues instead that Licinius "drifted from toleration of Christianity to implicit disapproval, and finally toward active intolerance."

  20Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, p. 174. Odahl also credits the claims that there were some martyrs in eastern Anatolia during 323-324 and says that it was on this basis that Christians came to regard Licinius as a tyrant and "savage beast" who plunged his territories into "the darkness of a gloomy night."

  21Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, p. 163.

  22Many historians see Constantine as the instigator of this conflict, but Odahl (Constantine and the Christian Empire, pp. 174-75) argues that Licinius, not Constantine, provoked the final showdown by initiating the persecution of Christians in the Eastern Empire.

  23Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, p. 379.

  24Both sources quoted in T. G. Elliott, The Christianity of Constantine the Great (Scranton, Penn.: University of Scranton Press, 1996), pp. 127-28, 131.

  25Eusebius Life 2.3.

  26MacMullen, Constantine, pp. 134-35.

  27Ibid., 2.4-19.

  2$MacMullen, Constantine, p. 135; Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, p. 112. Odahl (Constantine and the Christian Empire, pp. 176-77) describes it as a religious war.

  29Drake, Constantine and the Bishops. Drake is correct that Constantine did not impose Christianity or completely suppress paganism and that he established a form of religious toleration. As I argue below, however, Drake overstates his case, and besides that, elements of Drake's analysis are self-contradictory. On the one hand, he argues that Constantine's religious beliefs should not be confused with his policy decisions (p. 200), yet a few pages later he argues, on the basis of Constantine's religious policy, that the emperor tried to secure "a definition of Christianity which would include a broader array of Roman beliefs" (p. 205), and later argues that Constantine saw "Christianity in broadly inclusive terms" (p. 242) and that he "favored an umbrella faith of compromise and inclusion" (p. 306). But these are policy decisions, and Drake has warned us against attempting to read the emperor's religious beliefs from policy. Constantine did not offer a definition of Christianity at all; that was something he rightly left to the bishops. Rather, he sought a policy that both expressed his support for the church and the God of Christianity and also honored the humanity of pagans. Drake's formulation on p. 315 is more accurate: Constantine adopted as "conscious policy to achieve Christian objectives by concentrating on the broad areas on which Christians and at least educated, monotheistic pagans could agree."

  3oLactantius Divine Institutes 49, quoted in Andreas Alfoldi, The Conversion of Constantine and Pagan Rome, trans. Harold Mattingly
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), p. 53; cf. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 211.

  "Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 108.

  32Lactantius Divine Institutes 5.20; see Digeser, Making ofa Christian Empire, pp. 57-60.

  34A1fo1di, Conversion of Constantine, p. 64.

  3"A11 the details are in ibid.

  "Chaim Wirszubski, "Libertas" as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).

  36Alfoldi (ibid.) makes the case for this policy very effectively and concisely. The inscription is in ibid., p. 83. He reconstructs the Latin as "Hoc salutari signo ... senatui populoque Romano et urbi Romae iugo tyrannicae dominationis ereptae pristinam libertatem splendoremque reddidi."

  37Eusebius Life 2.56.

  38The whole edict comes from Eusebius Life 2.48-60. See also Corcoran, Empire ofthe Tetrarchs, p. 189, for Constantine's treatment of public and private divination.

  "Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, pp. 247-49. Drake quotes the phrase "bearable evil" from Friedhelm Winkelmann. See also Raymond Van Dam, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 31: "Both Christians and pagans seemed to recognize that Constantine was quite tolerant in religious matters."

  40Dorries, Constantine and Religious Liberty, pp. 37-39.

  41John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiologicaland Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 254.

  42H. A. Drake, "Constantine and Consensus," Church History 64 (1995): 7.

  43Theodoret Ecclesiastical History 1.14.

  44Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 362. Veyne is the chief source on imperial euergetism.

  45Mark J. Johnson, "Architecture of Empire," in The Cambridge Companion to theAge of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 278-97.