Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (29 page)

Adenauer was one of the reasons for our pilgrimage to Maria Laach, the Benedictine monastery about halfway between Wiesbaden and Cologne. In the western nave of the twelfth-century abbey church is displayed a modern stained-glass window showing figures from the Bible. The window is inscribed,
Dr. Konrad Adenauer, Bundeskanzler, 1956.
He donated the window to the abbey in gratitude that year because in 1933, after defying the newly empowered Hitler, and drawing down a death sentence on himself by refusing to fly the swastika in Cologne, he had taken refuge there. The abbot, Ildefons Herwegen, and Adenauer had gone to school together, and so the abbot had offered him refuge. Adenauer was able to melt into the monastic community. For most of a year, he hid in a monk's cell at Maria Laach, and he fled only when Herwegen alerted him that he was in danger of being found out. Ever after, the ancient abbey has been associated with Adenauer's anti-Nazi resistance. A film shown to visitors in the pilgrims' hall refers to the connection even today. We will return to this story later.

The nearby lake, which the monastery dedicates to Mary, is a water-filled volcanic crater, set dramatically in the Eifel Mountains a few miles back from the river. The abbey is a walled cluster of buildings in various styles several hundred yards up a gradual slope from the shoreline. Lush pastures and woodlands still in the abbey's domain surround the lake. For more than a thousand years, with few breaks, monks have been chanting the office here. The pillared arcade at the entrance to the Romanesque chapel dates to the eleventh century, and is a source of our most cherished, if stereotyped, image of cloister architecture.

When my mother and I prayed at Maria Laach, we would have heard the Dialogue Mass, the liturgical innovation for which the abbey was then famous. It involved the congregation in the Eucharistic prayer, an antiphonal recitation of the Latin verses. In the 1950s the Dialogue Mass
(Missa Recitata)
was sweeping the Church, marking a shift away from clerical domination toward a more democratic expression in worship. Instead of being mere spectators to the priest's act, the people participated in it. The Body of Christ was all of us. Begun at the abbey decades before and championed by Maria Laach's foundation in the United States, St. John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, the Dialogue Mass was resisted by the Church's old guard, but its democratic impulse would be fulfilled by Vatican II in 1964, not only by its liturgical reform but by its new definition of the Church as the People of God.

My mother and I would have been oblivious of all this. I could handle the recitation, despite its being in Latin, because of my time as an altar boy, but my mother preferred her rosary. Neither of us could have been unmoved, however, by the mystical lilt of the monks' voices, the timeless quality of their chant, and its antiphonal rhythm with silence. Before coming to Germany, I had attended a Benedictine school in Washington, St. Anselm's, and even as a young teenager I had joined the Oblates, a lay affiliate, which entitled me to spend the night in the cloister on occasion, to eat with the monks at the narrow table of the refectory. I remember the dark bread, the porridge, and that no one sat across from you. I remember getting up before dawn to listen to the song of matins, an order of hours going back to the seventh century. I remember that I loved it.

I felt at home in monasteries, and I still do. A favorite, forever-repeated family story tells of the time my mother brought me to a monastery when I was five or six—this would have been to pray for Joe. And I said to a bald, bearded monk, "Why do you have hair on your chin but not on your head?" His answer, if he made one, was not a feature of the story. We always laughed at my innocent impudence, and I could always picture the arches of the cloister colonnade. Years later, I saw that the peculiar revelation of the story, apart from its dead-on notation of a monastic propensity for baldness, was that a child should have been in such a place at all. Yet what the monks offered me was a quickening of that religious imagination I had from her. Now I see that my mother's offer was being responded to. I was being subtly recruited in those places. In time I was conscripted by the Benedictines of St. Anselm's, and then, because I loved it at once, commissioned somehow by Maria Laach. Not many years later, when I entered the religious life, it was to build an identity around the mystery—brothers in the choir, the balance of solitude and solidarity; a devotion to art, architecture, song; a hint of anti-Hitler heroism that defused the hint of the effete—the mystery I had glimpsed at that German cloister.

Maria Laach was tied to the web of our Rhineland pilgrimages, too, in the chain of consequence that began with Helena, for it was founded in 1093 by monks from the Abbey of St. Maximin at Trier,
³
which had been founded, in turn—yes, the tradition insists on this—by Constantine's mother.
⁴
No one explained how a Benedictine monastery could have been established more than two hundred years before Benedict. The point for us was Helena—and Helena, beyond everything else, meant Trier. Because of her, we could go there, her hometown, and nearly touch what had touched the very flesh of the Lord, the son of Mary.

In previous chapters, we followed the story as it ran from Jesus through the first generations of his followers, whose claim to the mantle of Israel was denied by the followers of the rabbis. Jews and Christians coexisted both as rivals and as overlapping communities on the margins of the Roman Empire, but that all changed with Constantine. Politics and theology were fluid until then, but boundaries were suddenly defined around the grid of the True Cross. A symbol then and ever after associated with Helena, it now became the touchstone of membership, not only in the Church but in the empire. That made it the touchstone of survival. Saint Ambrose, the greatest theologian of the age, would use the True Cross explictly against the Jews, finally urging violence as the proper response to their denial of Christian claims. Saint Augustine, the protégé of Ambrose, would demur, and Jews would live, but only in a certain way—one that stamps history still. All of this unfolds from where I stood, knowing nothing, in Trier.

17. The Story of Constantine

C
AESAR
AUGUSTUS DID
not reach the Elbe, but his armies, and those of his immediate successors, planted the Roman standard all over Europe west of the Rhine, through central Europe south of the Danube, into the Near East, and in North Africa along the southern edge of the Mediterranean. These conquests would not be expanded upon, and indeed, from the first century on, the posture of Roman legions was defensive, largely holding on to what had been won. For nearly two hundred years, until the beginning of the third century, the Roman world was more or less orderly and prosperous. Spurred by the efficiencies of Roman transportation and communications, much of northern and western Europe was brought into a regional economy of trade, industry, and finance. But such consolidation brought its own stresses. Because the military was so well established throughout most of the empire, more and more power shifted to the armies. The makeup of the legions, meanwhile, had become less and less Roman, as the "barbarians" of the provinces and frontiers filled out the ranks, and ultimately the officer corps.

The third century was a period of civil war, barbarian invasion, and general social breakdown throughout the empire. As chaos mounted, so did the power of the military, which successfully asserted authority over the Roman Senate, and even over the seat of the emperors, who came and went so quickly (twenty between 235 and 284) that they were unable to establish power centers of their own. Rebellious generals and self-anointed general-emperors became features of the time. Militarization eclipsed all other aspects of Roman culture. Intellectual life collapsed, and the skills of classical art were lost. Archaeologists studying Rome from the early third century on, for example, find few inscriptions on public buildings and monuments.

Late in the third century, a general named Aurelius Valerius Diocletian, a commoner from Illyria, in the Balkan peninsula, was declared emperor by his soldiers. In 284, his claim was widely recognized, and he immediately applied what would prove to be his administrative genius to the task of drawing order out of the chaos into which the empire had fallen. In 285, Diocletian divided the empire in half, assigning the more vital and less conflicted East to himself, and taking the title Augustus. The thrust of his dividing line, running south from the Danube, is still more or less visible today on the much disputed border between the Roman Catholic territories of Croatia and the Orthodox territories of Serbia. Diocletian established his seat of government at Nicomedia, on the eastern side of the Bosporus.

As for the West, he designated as his fellow Augustus one of his fellow generals, Maximian. The idea was that each Augustus would be equal to the other, but in fact Diocletian was supreme. Each of the two Augusti had a deputy, with the title Caesar, with authority over a further division of the empire and a presumed right of succession to the office of Augustus. With four rulers in place, the period of Rome's tetrarchy had begun. It was an experiment in administration that would not last. Diocletian's Caesar was Galerius, who ruled in the East. Maximian named a general of the legions in Gaul, Constantius, who ruled from a capital at Trier. Maximian established himself not in Rome but in Milan, because it was closer to the threatened Alpine frontier of Italy. A military purpose thus dictated the momentous shift away from the ancient capital, but this is not surprising, since the entire rearrangement of power presumed the consent not of the Senate or of the citizenry, but of the armies.

At this point, therefore, the court of the emperor left Rome, never to return. Meanwhile, Christianity had grown, but slowly, with most of its converts being drawn from the lower classes of the Mediterranean world. The population of the Roman Empire in late antiquity is usually given as between fifty and sixty million.
¹
Christians accounted for perhaps a tenth of that number.
²
From the early informality of a house-based network of communities that had sprung up in the generations after the Gospels were written down, and partly because those texts, once canonized, served as an organizing structure, the early Jesus movement had developed, probably by the mid to late second century, into something we can call the Church. It had imitated the highly efficient political system of the empire, dividing itself into dioceses and provinces, with local bishops serving as ecclesiastical equivalents of regional governors.
³
The Church had defined Rome as its administrative seat—a decision tied as much to organizational as to religious demands, even if the ancient connection to Peter was always emphasized.

In the late third century, Christians were a distinct minority in Rome, but the city was riven with factions of every kind. With the emperor gone, the influence of the Christian bishop, revered as the successor to Peter, would only grow. But there was another reason that power might flow to the Church at this time. Despite the fact that most Christians were of the illiterate poor, the Church had grounded itself in the studious work of an intellectual elite. The great exception to the third-century decline of intellect and culture in the Roman Empire had been the flourishing of Christian theology, with such figures as Tertullian (c. 150–225), Cyprian (c. 200–258), and Origen (c. 182–251). These and other thinkers transformed Christianity's self-understanding by applying the categories of the classics to affirmations grounded in Scripture. Thinkers like these flourished in Alexandria and Antioch, less so in Rome. In the intellectual ferment of the period, a variety of sometimes conflicting interpretations of the meaning of Jesus Christ took hold, but to outsiders the Church, with its common Eucharistic liturgy, its defined canon of sacred texts, and the relatively clear, if diffuse, hierarchy based on numerous bishoprics, appeared to be monolithic. These institutional innovations served the Church well in times of oppression, and would do so even more when it came into power.

Like Judaism, Christianity was a religion of the One God. Jews and Christians were equally determined to refrain from participation in the cult rituals of Rome's pagan civic religion. But going back to the first century
B.C.E.,
Jews had been exempted from the requirements to offer sacrifices to and utter blessings in the name of pagan gods. When the Church grew apart from the synagogue. Christians lost that exemption, which posed a growing problem as the emperors themselves began, in the third century, to claim the prerogatives of deity. Jews were also exempt from military service, but Christians were not. Church members who were in the army, in particular, could face impossible pressures to drop incense in the bowl or put an offering of a bird on the fire. The religion of Mithras, a Persian god, had become popular in the military, and as the army's power grew—there were half a million men under arms by now—Christian soldiers found themselves pressed by their officers to participate in that cult, too. In general, they refused. The Church remembers this refusal as having resulted in a long tradition of martyrdom in ancient times, but in fact, violent oppression of Christians was relatively rare and sporadic. There was a persecution under the emperor Decius (249–251).
⁴
Another began in 303, when Diocletian, as a part of his overall attempt to impose order, declared a crackdown on Christians, whose dissent could seem like atheism. He also ordered the destruction of all Christian churches and texts.
⁵
The destruction of churches was so widespread in the East in this period that archaeology tells us little or nothing about their design.
⁶
Under Diocletian, Christians were liable to be put to death almost anywhere in the empire, with the exception of the northwestern provinces over which Constantius ruled. This was probably because the Church in Gaul, Germania, and Britain was far less well established than in the East, but also because, as the general of an army made up in large part of tribal recruits who maintained loyalty to their own gods and cults, Constantius had learned the value of religious tolerance.