Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (41 page)

It was not long after Constantine, as Alasdair Maclntyre points out, that people of goodwill decided that maintaining justice, peace and civilized life did not require the maintenance of the Roman empire. Some left for monasteries, while others continued in the empire but not of it. Whatever Constantinian moment there had been was over, ironically assisted by Constantine himself, who not only failed to prevent the empire's inevitable collapse but probably helped to hasten it.

JEREMIAN ECCLESIOLOGY

In both the last chapter and this one, I have argued that to sustain his thesis of a "Constantinian shift," Yoder must discover a moment in the church's history in which the church was universally opposed to violence and war, universally hostile to empire and universally committed to a particular interpretation of Jesus' injunctions in the Sermon on the Mount. I have argued too that Yoder never did find such a starting point, and that he did not because he cannot, and he cannot because no such moment ever existed.

Yoder would respond by saying that the fixed starting point-the height from which the church fell-lies in the teaching and example of Jesus, as seen in the context of the "Jeremian" paradigm of the Jewish diaspora. Historians and exegetes have, he says, missed the point by quibbling "about this or that legalistic reading of a few words of Jesus" while "ignoring both the sociological and theological contexts within which first-century believers sustained their view of history under God." According to this "Jew
ish quietism," God is in charge, not humans, and accordingly the faithful renounce Maccabean or Zealot efforts to "take charge" of history through nationalism or violence. Jesus drew on and deepened that tradition.37

For Yoder, the Jeremian model of Jewish life and identity does more than simply provide a way of making sense of Jesus' teaching in the Gospels. It provides a model for the church in its relation to worldly powers.31
Jeremiah ranks with Constantine as symbol and legend, a marker of an epochal shift in the life of the people of God. Yoder's Jeremiah instructed the people to settle into the galuth, exile, not as a temporary "hiatus" before a new kingship and temple were established, nor simply as a punishment for their sins. Jews were to "seek the salvation of the culture" of Babylon by accepting their dispersion as a call to mission. They were to retain their separate identity by adherence to a peripatetic moral and liturgical lifethey defined themselves by a "text which can be copied and read anywhere," centered their worship on "reading and singing the texts," established places of worship without priesthoods wherever ten households gathered, maintained their international unity by "intervisitation, by intermarriage, by commerce, and by rabbinic consultation," found the "ground floor of identity" in "the common life, the walk, halakah," and confounded kings and emperors "with the superior wisdom and power of the one authentic God."39
There was no "Jewish emperor," and they were not to hope for one; their leaders might be in king's palaces, but it would be as "intermediaries" between "the community and the Gentiles."4°

Jeremiah's vision for Israel in exile was neither an effort to "Hebraize" Babylon (they were not asked "to teach the Babylonians Hebrew") nor a retreat from cultural engagement. Jews served "the entire ancient Near Eastern world as expert translators, scribes, diplomats, sages, merchants, astronomers." They were to turn their status as resident aliens to "cultural advantage" because they refused to expend themselves or their resources "fighting over civil sovereignty."4'
Far from being a place of resignation and lament, "Babylon itself very soon became the cultural
center of world Jewry."42
Dispersion became the permanent setting for Jews, and this is the cultural and political program that the church inherited from Judaism.

Yoder's vision of Christian engagement with the powers that be is invigorating, and is just right in many respects. As a historical thesis, it accurately describes the experience of the church in the first three centuries. In the end, however, it is unconvincing. It fails mainly because it badly truncates the biblical story on which it relies. Yoder makes only a passing reference to the hope for return found in Isaiah, but more important, he does not even read Jeremiah to the end. Jeremiah repeatedly holds out the hope for a renewed Davidic dynasty (23:5; 30:9; 33:15-17) in a community that has been restored to the land (30:1; 31:8, 16-17, 27-28). If exile was supposed to be permanent and normative, should Daniel have given up praying for release (Daniel 9)? Yoder sees the scattering at the original Babel as a similar call to mission, insisting that "the `confusion of tongues' is not a punishment or a tragedy but the gift of new beginnings, liberation from a blind alley," and that the diversity that resulted was God's "original divine intent."43
He is entirely correct that the diversity of Babel presented no problem to the "polyglot Jews," just as multiculturalism should be no problem for Christians. But if Babelist diversity is the original divine intent, what was the Spirit up to when he began to reverse Babel's scattering with the language miracle of Pentecost?44

Yoder dismisses the "standard account" that "sees the course of history moving back from Babylon to Jerusalem" and argues that if we take Jeremiah seriously both Ezra and Nehemiah "need to be seen as inappropriate deviations from the Jeremiah line, since each reconstituted a cult and a polity as a branch of the pagan imperial government."45
That is a highly prejudicial reading of Ezra-Nehemiah, but it is true that they reestablished a Jewish community in the land with imperial money and support. The author of Ezra-Nehemiah, however, does not breathe a critical word against his heroes. Nor is the author of Ezra-Nehemiah alone in endorsing the project. Isaiah goes so far as to designate the temple-building Persian emperor Cyrus as Yahweh's "Christ" and "shepherd" (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1). What Yoder calls the "standard account" is the canonical account, which does not dismiss Ezra and Nehemiah as agents of a pagan empire but rather sees them as fulfillment of prophecies, Jeremiah's prophecies not least.

It is not clear, further, how Yoder distinguishes between the "deviations" of Ezra and Nehemiah on the one hand from what he sees as the faithful witness of Joseph, Daniel, Esther and others on the other. Such heroes "found themselves involuntarily at the heart of the idolatrous empire" and "ran the risk of faithfulness" by "civil disobedience" that could have cost them their lives. God saved them, and as a result "the pagan tyrant was converted to the recognition of the one true God."46
All true, and Yoder is also ready to endorse Joseph's management of famine relief and Daniel's assistance to Darius as contributions "to secular well-being which is far more than mere minority survival." These efforts fulfill the Jeremian injunction to "seek the salvation of the culture to which God has sent you."47
But surely Daniel and Joseph both did their share of "politicking" and, even more than Ezra and Nehemiah, were dependent on the imperial treasury. If an anti-imperial Jew were looking for a minion of the emperor, it would probably be Daniel. Babylon, it is true, did not get a Jewish emperor, but it got (at least) four Jewish administrators (Daniel 2:46-49), and Persia got more than one (Daniel 6:1-3; Esther 10:3). By what measure does Yoder distinguish Daniel's fulfillment of the Jeremian vision from Ezra's deviation? Why do they not represent two different, equally legitimate, responses to empire? Whatever the measure, it is not the measure of the text itself, which celebrates the achievements of both
.41

The examples of Joseph, Daniel, Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah take us back where we started, to Constantine. I wrote above that Yoder's vision of Jewish mission in exile is invigorating, and I meant that. It is the key vision that should guide the twenty-first-century Christian response to empire in a world after Christendom. It is what Christians should be busy doing. But it does not address the question that Constantine's career raises: what does the church do if the emperor sees a vision and wants to help Christians start building a temple back in Jerusalem? Yoder does not think that is "an available option."49
St. Sebastian may have thought the same as he was shot full of arrows and then pelted with stones, but as Yoder himself would be the first to admit, God tends to surprise us with unavailable options. That's what makes him God.

If we are going to do justice to Constantine, we cannot sidestep certain questions: Should fourth-century Christians, like the Jews, have rejoiced in the king's confession of the God of heaven? They did. Should they, like Daniel and Joseph and Mordecai, have served in the imperial administration? They did. Should they, like Ezra and Nehemiah, have gratefully accepted the king's largesse, which helped them build magnificent places of worship? They did. Should they, like Joseph and Daniel, have witnessed to the truth even in the face of enticements, threats and imperial fury? The best of them did. Should they, like Daniel, have acknowledged that God, not the emperor, controlled history and that God's people, not Babylon or Rome, was the secret center of the world? Nearly all of them did. Should they have recognized that the church has its own power and does not need to be bound to the sword to carry on its mission? Most of them did.

By what measure does Yoder characterize "legends" about the conversion of pagan Pharaoh and pagan Nebuchadnezzar as fulfillments of the Jeremian mission to "seek the salvation of the city," while dismissing the imperial church of Constantine as apostate and heretical? There is, I think, an answer to that question, but it will have to wait until the final chapter.

THE PURPLE AND THE WHITE

Then there was the time when Constantine came down with leprosy.

He had already conquered the empire west to east when the "blighting leprosy possessed the whole flesh of [his] body." Doctors from every end of the empire tried to help and failed. Priests then came from Rome with a solution. It is going to take blood, they said: lots of blood, the blood of infants. When it "ran warm I could be cleansed by washing in it." Constantine collected thousand of infants, but then "perceiving the tears of their mothers," he suddenly "felt an immediate abhorrence of the crime," which had apparently not occurred to him before. He had pity and returned sons to their mothers, along with compensatory gifts.

Still he was a leper. Then one night he saw in a dream Peter and Paul, who commended him for putting "an end to the atrocities" and showing "abhorrence of shedding innocent blood," and promised in return that the emperor would be healed. Bishop Silvester of Rome had fled from the city because of Constantine's persecutions and was hiding out in mountain caves with the rest of the Roman clergy. Silvester will help, the apostles said: "he will show you the bathing-pool of piety, and when you have immersed yourself in this for a third time, this leprous condition will leave you." In return for restored health, Constantine would have to give up "all idolatrous superstition, and adore and worship the true and living God."

So Constantine summoned "the universal pope" Silvester, told him of the dream, and was able to identify Peter and Paul from portraits in Silvester's possession. The emperor prepared himself with "vigils, fasting, tears also and prayers," renounced "Satan's mummery" and all idols, and confessed the living God in the words of the Nicene Creed. Finally the day of his baptism came:

The font was blessed, and there the water of salvation purified me with a triple immersion. And when I had been placed in the bosom of the font, I saw with my own eyes a hand from heaven touching me. And rising from it clean, I apprehended that I had been cleansed from the whole blight of leprosy. And once I had been raised from the holy font, and had put on white clothes, he applied to me the sealing of the sevenfold Holy Spirit with the oil of the blessed chrism, and smeared the banner of the Holy Cross on my forehead.

From that day on, "my body had been cured of the blight of leprosy," and Constantine renounced all the demonic gods of the nations and worshiped only "the Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity." He helped build a church
for the pope with his own hands, handed over Rome, Italy and the entire empire to Silvester and his successors (the grant known as the "Donation of Constantine"), and took on "the office of a squire" to the papacy.50

This anachronistic account from a medieval bestseller does not give the facts about Constantine's baptism and tells us a great deal more about the time it was written than about Constantine. Still, it has some interest for our investigation. The writer depicts the transition from pre- to postConstantinian Rome in several ways: it marks the end of sacrifice, particularly human sacrifice, and persecution; it involves the devotion of the emperor and the empire to the church (and the pope in particular); it marks this transition with baptism. The Acts of the Blessed Silvester gives us a medieval perspective on the baptism of Rome under Constantine, a baptism that brought the end of sacrifice. That is a perspective I have implicitly endorsed throughout this book and will explain more fully in the final chapter.

Eusebius's account gives us the real story. In the midst of preparations for a war with Persia, building projects and general imperial administration, Constantine began to feel "some light bodily indisposition." According to Eusebius, his first desire was to visit hot baths and to spend time in prayer at the Church of the Martyrs in Constantinople, but he soon became convinced that he was dying. He did not want to die until he had purified his soul from "whatever errors he had committed as a mortal man" in baptism, and decided to travel to Palestine to be baptized, like Jesus, in the Jordan. He got only as far as Nicomedia before he was unable to go farther. Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia came to his bedside with other bishops and listened as Constantine expressed his desire to "obtain the salvation of God" through "that seal which confers immortality ... the seal of salvation." The bishops "performed the sacred ceremonies in the usual manner" and, having given him instructions, "made him a partaker of the mystic ordinance." By this, Constantine became "the first of all sovereigns who was regenerated and perfected in a church dedicated to the martyrs of Christ." Gladdened and "filled with heavenly light," Constantine put aside the purple that had lain on his shoulders since his father's
death thirty years before and "arrayed himself in shining imperial vestments, brilliant as the light, and reclined on a couch of the purest white." He refused to take up the purple again.51