Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (31 page)

Around the figure of the famously converted emperor, in partnership with his mother, developed a new notion not merely of the Church, as has often been noted, but of Jesus himself—of the kind of God he is. Theologians, as if by imperial fiat—or rather, precisely
by
such fiat—now found ways to put the heretofore ineffable mystery into words, while liturgists gave it expression by moving a peripheral symbol into the dead center of the cult. A previously inchoate feel for the identity of Jesus became sharply defined from now on.

The content of that definition is important for our purposes, because at this time it also emerges, in theology and cult both, that the default custodians of the
proof
of the truth of this more fully realized revelation about Jesus, after all these years and still, are none other than the Jews. In the fourth and early fifth centuries, beginning with Constantine and ending with the great theologian Augustine, heretofore marginal Judaism (marginal to the Church, that is) became central to the argument and language of a renewed Christian proclamation. The foundation of the conflict between Christians and Jews was laid, as we saw, in the first decade after the death of Jesus—that "healing circle." In subsequent centuries, its structure took shape behind "the clumsy scaffolding of Hebrew prophecies," in the words of Augustine's most admired biographer, Peter Brown.
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But the post and beam of the conflict, as would become so clear in a field by a wall in Poland at the end of the twentieth century, was the cross.

Before Constantine, the cross lacked religious and symbolic significance. Paul had made the crucifixion essential to the salvation earned by Christ's death; being "crucified with Christ"
⁵
was an implication of accepting faith. But even in Paul, the cross as such did not compete, for instance, with the waters of baptism as the Christian community's metaphoric representation of dying with Christ. As he put it, "All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death."
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The Gospel of John has water flow from the side of Jesus after he has been pierced, a clear symbol of baptism.
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Water had a vivid hold on the Christian imagination; wood did not. The fathers of the Church followed Paul in developing the idea of salvation through the death of Christ, but Justin, for example, even in discussing the cross, keeps it at a metaphoric remove by seeing it more as the shape of Passover blood on the lintel than as the literal execution device.
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The blood of Christ, yes. The cross, not so much. Thus, on the walls of the catacombs in Rome prior to the fourth century were to be seen representations of palm branches, the dove, the peacock, the bird of paradise, or the monogram of Jesus.
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The sacred fish was a favorite symbol because of Gospel scenes, but also because the Greek word for fish,
ichthys,
renders an acrostic of "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior."
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Such symbols were ubiquitous in early Christianity, but the cross is simply not to be found among them. Some early Christians signed themselves, touching the forehead, shoulders, and breast, but even that is ambiguous, since, as we saw, Jews were known to make a similar sign.

The place of the cross in the Christian imagination changed with Constantine. "He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline"—this is Eusebius's account of Constantine's own report of what he saw in the sky on the eve of battle above the Milvian Bridge—"he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription
CONQUER BY THIS
."
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The story goes on to say that Constantine then assembled his army—"He sat in the midst of them, and described to them the figure of the sign he had seen"
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—and gave them the new standard to carry into battle. "Now it was made in the following manner. A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it." As we saw, the army behind this standard did conquer, and Constantine, so Eusebius heard him say, was thus convinced of the truth of Christianity. "The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his armies."
¹³

Some early versions of the legend of Constantine's conversion had described the miraculous vision as having been not of a cross but of the Chi-Rho, the monogram composed of the first two letters of the Greek word
Khristos.
This version of the story would have been in keeping with the ancient Christian reluctance to render the cross literally, as the gibbet on which Jesus had hung. But from Eusebius's account, not of the vision but of Constantine's own description of it, the actual "figure of the cross" is clearly what is meant. Constantine put the Roman execution device, now rendered with a spear, at the center not only of the story of his conversion to Christianity, but of the Christian story itself.

When the death of Jesus—rendered literally, in all its violence, as opposed to metaphorically or theologically—replaced the life of Jesus and the new life of Resurrection at the heart of the Christian imagination, the balance shifted decisively against the Jews. This was so because sole responsibility for that now pivotal death had long since been laid at their feet.
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For our purposes, the Age of Constantine can be said to extend from 306, when he replaced his father as one of the tetrarchy's four caesars, until 429, when a Constantinian successor, following in a direct chain of political and theological consequence, abolished the patriarchate of Israel.
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Not even the caesars, who twice leveled Jerusalem, had thus eliminated Jewish political autonomy—an abolition that would not be reversed until 1948. One could almost say that for Jews, the Age of Constantine came to an end only with David Ben Gurion.

That pivotal 125 years not only illuminates the conflict between Christians and Jews, but escalates it. In the new era, Christians went from being 10 percent of the empire,
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a despised and violently persecuted minority, to being its solid majority. Christianity went from being a private, apolitical movement to being the shaper of world politics. The status of Judaism was similarly reversed, from a licit self-rule, a respected exception within a sea of paganism, to a state of highly vulnerable disenfranchisement. What might be called history's first pogrom, an organized violent assault on a community of Jews, because they were Jews, took place in Alexandria in 414, wiping out that city's Jewish community for a time. Even in Palestine, Jews became a besieged minority. The land of Israel, long ignored by Christians who had happily left it behind for the centers of the empire, now became known as the Christian Holy Land. Christians returned to it, not for the last time, with a vengeance.

Jerusalem, a long-neglected backwater still known by its Roman name, Aelia Capitolina, again became the spiritual navel of the world. "Jerusalem," Augustine would say, "with my heart stretching out in longing for it, Jerusalem my country, Jerusalem my mother."
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Even the Temple returned briefly as an emblem of faith, only to be superseded yet again—its ancient wall a screen onto which new meanings could be projected. For Jews, in the words of Jacob Neusner, "The world now had passed into the hands of their rivals, their siblings, sharing Scripture, sharing a claim to be 'Israel,' sharing the same view of history, sharing the same expectation of the Messiah's coming."
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For Christians, the dramatic and unexpected conversion of Constantine was a proof of the Church's proclamation, but the change of fortune it led to was proof of even more. "The creation of the Christian state," Neusner says, "claiming to carry forward the ancient Israelite state, and to appeal to its precedents, brought to a critical stage the long-term Christian claim that Christians formed the new Israel."
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But if the Christian stake to that claim was now decisively driven in, what was to be made of—done with—the survivors of that old Israel who stubbornly refused to disappear? The problem was complex. When Christianity was finally in a position to present itself on favorable terms to the pagan world, it was important to be able to do so not as an upstart religion but as the fulfillment of an ancient tradition, one that predated pagan heroes like Cicero, Socrates, Homer. Christians had no choice but to invoke their Jewish provenance, but that raised another problem. What were pagans to make of the clear rejection of those same Christian claims by Jews? How could the Gospel base its validity on its being the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, yet be repudiated by the holders of title to that prophecy?

Pagans were right to wonder. This Jewish recalcitrance threatened the project of Christian expansion—not in a new way exactly, but, in the changed circumstance, more powerfully than ever before. The other new circumstance, of course, was that now Christians were also in a position to do something about it, since their program of expansion was sponsored by the emperor, whose army marched behind that spear with its transverse bar. The gradual closing of the imperial vise on Judaism
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—from Constantine's edict in 315 making it a crime for Jews to proselytize to the edict almost a century later making it a crime punishable by death—was driven by the real problem that Jewish dissent from Christian claims made overcoming paganism far more difficult. In addition to the vexation it caused among pagans, Jewish dissent constantly threatened to undermine the devotion of the many Christians who continued to value the Jewish roots of faith in the One God. Indeed, in an age marked by aggressive persecution of heresies—one bishop catalogued 156 of them
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—the original heresy was understood to be derived from Judaism itself.
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Jews posed a threat from within the faith as much as from outside it.

19. The Vision of Constantine

T
HE MOMENTOUS SHIFT
in the delicate balance between Jews and Christians, a shift in the moral imagination of the West, began in the
Aula Palatina,
the basilica or imperial palace Constantine had constructed for himself at the outset of his rule. He had set out to impress, and did. "For no one was comparable to him for grace and beauty of person, or height of stature," Eusebius explains, "and he so far surpassed his compeers in personal strength as to be a terror to them. He was, however, even more conspicuous for the excellence of his mental qualities than for his superior physical endowments; being gifted in the first place with a sound judgment, and having also reaped the advantages of a liberal education. He was also distinguished in no ordinary degree both by natural intelligence and divinely imparted wisdom."
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Here we see Eusebius at work not as a historian but as the emperor's mythmaker. In fact, the entire story of Constantine, as rehearsed above, comes to us half cloaked in myth, but much of it was self-created. From the start, Constantine wanted to be taken as a man with a mandate from the gods. In large things and small, he declared his purpose and revealed its scope. For example, upon succeeding his father, he immediately ordered new coins struck at the mints he controlled in Trier, London, and Lyons, changing the inscription from the traditional "To the Genius of the Roman people" to "To the Unconquered Sun my companion."
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Constantine's overlarge sense of himself was nowhere more clearly manifest than in the palace he ordered built in Trier, a complex of numerous buildings attached to a massive throne room and audience hall. Such a palace was less an indulgence than a statement, for Trier was now to be an imperial capital fit for the ruler of the Roman world, not a barbaric northern outpost. The
Aula Palatina
was the perfect symbol of his purpose, a foreshadowing of his bold program.

The throne room remains. It is more than two hundred feet long and nearly one hundred feet high and wide. Its walls once would have been elaborately decorated, and the floor an intricately patterned mosaic. Today the stark purity of stripped hewn stone, emphasized by the clear glass panes of thirty huge arching windows, makes as much of an impression as a riot of color ever could have. To stand in the audience hall—having been gutted by bombing and fire during World War II, it was restored, as noted, in the 1950s—is to feel the capaciousness of Constantine's ambition. As mentioned earlier, my mother and I did not enter this magnificent relic during my visits in the late 1950s. Its designation as a Lutheran place of worship, which Protestant Prussians had imposed on it during the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf, had kept it off our pious Catholic itinerary. The Lutherans occupy the place lightly: a very large gilded cross is suspended in the apse, as if in the sky, but otherwise the space evokes empire more than church. It is easy to imagine a throne where the altar is.

How overpowering it must have been to traverse that enormous open space, approaching the Augustus. The hall itself—the great rounded arch of the apse, the double row of windows, the thick stone walls, the distance from the small entrance to the imperial seat—would have made a supplicant of everyone who crossed it. And wouldn't that have been the point? Almost nothing remains of Constantine's magnificent palace in Istanbul,
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but this basilica in now obscure Trier stands essentially as he made it, a true relic of his rule. That is as it should be, despite the surpassing prestige of those other cities, since it was here that his stature first revealed itself beyond the circle of his father's soldiers. "In short, as the sun, when he rises upon the earth, liberally imparts his rays of light to all, so did Constantine, proceeding at early dawn from the imperial palace..." This is the propagandist Eusebius, but the
Palatina
suggests that even this verbosity accurately evokes the impression he'd have made, going out from here."...and rising as it were with the heavenly luminary, impart the rays of his own beneficence to all who came into his presence."
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