Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (33 page)

Of course the "proper cult" of Catholicism was not yet clearly established, as the multiplicity of what would soon be termed heresies indicated. Once the impulse to establish a "harmonious brotherhood" within a group is reified, discordances from outside, originating with distinct groups, become intolerable. The very fluidity of practice, belief, and membership between Jewish and Christian communities thus contributed to a first reneging on the Milan Edict's promise of equality among the three religions.
²⁷
In 315, Constantine issued the edict, referred to earlier, singling out Jews, making it illegal for them to proselytize. The decree signals the success Jews were having in attracting Christians to their cult and calendar. Moreover, the decree was prompted by a widespread Christian wish to maintain a lively connection with the Jewish origins of faith in Jesus. But the way the new law sought to protect the "harmonious brotherhood of worship" was to target Judaism, and not the "Judaizing" Christians. It therefore marked the decisive shift of weight in a balance that would now forever tilt against Jews.

The year 315 was decisive for Christian-pagan relations too. By then, Licinius, Augustus in the East, had realized that, despite similarities with the sun deity, the Christian God was different and would not readily take a place among the other gods of the Roman pantheon.
²⁸
It may well have occurred to Licinius that he'd been had by Constantine, for whom tolerance was only the first step toward a new, Christian domination. Licinius saw, too late, that the Milan Edict itself gave a kind of primacy to Christianity: "Christian religion" was named first, and Roman paganism, like all paganism, was referred to as "any other cult."
²⁹
The growing influence of Christianity would enhance Constantine's power and diminish his own. Seeing this, Licinius began to purge Christians from his civil service. The act gave Constantine the pretext he needed to declare war against yet another brother-in-law.
³⁰

If there was then a certain religious fluidity among the peoples of the empire—a vagueness about attachments and beliefs that reflected the dispersion of political power—there was also a lack of religious clarity in Constantine's own mind. But as his gradual accumulation of political power seemed tied to his affiliation with the Christian God, he became firmer over time in that affiliation, beginning, in all likelihood, before the mythic conversion date of 312 and continuing even after his revealing letter of 313. His soldiers, going from victory to victory, would have redoubled their devotion to the charm of their Christian standard. That Constantine's full embrace of a Christian identity—and of martial sponsorship by the Christian deity—took place gradually, and not all at once as in the legend, is revealed by the fact that Sol, the pagan sun god, continued to be honored on Constantine's coins until 321. By such a relatively slow process do social mutations usually occur, even if after the fact they are compressed, in the manner of boys' adventure stories, into moments of dramatic turnabout. What began, both in the empire and in Constantine's psyche, in the year 312 at Milvian Bridge did not reach completion until twelve years later.

In 324, at the Battle of Chrysopolis, on the eastern side of the Bosporus, Constantine defeated Licinius, his last political rival. Constantine became the sole ruler of the empire. The ambition he had set for himself in the
Aula Palatina
in Trier was, in this patient, almost plodding way, achieved. And as all could see more clearly in 324 than they could have in 312, it was achieved under the sponsorship not of Sol Invictus, not of Apollo, but of Jesus Christ. It was not the result of mystical vision or supernatural intervention, for Constantine's pragmatic alliance with Christian groups in various contested locations was really what had proved decisive. Christians had faithfully rallied to him, and made the difference. And he could see that his allegiance to Christ would continue to be useful as he set out to consolidate his power over Asia Minor, the Levant, and Africa, which could only regard him as a foreign figure from the rough northwest. Christians made up a greater part of the Eastern empire than they did of the West, so Constantine's cross standard would be more rallied to now than ever.

What the effect of all this was on the ruler's inner state is impossible to say, but from this point on, all apparent ambiguities in his own religious identity dropped away. After Chrysopolis, Constantine was firmly and publicly Christian. He was, of course, instantly the most important Christian in the world, and in that time of social and religious ferment, he was in a position to put his own stamp on Christianity—and he did. That stamp inevitably reflected what he had just been through.

The Church in 324 had to remind Constantine of the empire he had inherited in 306—a seething caldron of contention and rivalry, with doctrinal differences, even schisms, defined by regional loyalties. Bishops vied with each other for influence, and worshipers openly disagreed on the meaning of their worship. In addition to the Donatists, there were Docetists and Manichaeans and Arians with their cat's cradle of disputes about ways in which Jesus was man or God, and about the nature, substance, and personality of God. All of this must have seemed arcane to the soldier-monarch, appearing like religious versions of the tetrarchic factionalism he had set out from Trier to overcome. As a politician, Constantine had put his trust in the universalist spirit which, from above, appears as the humane bringing of order to chaos, while from below often appearing as totalitarianism. His method was to tolerate diversity and share power for only as long as he had to. The unity of the empire—under himself—was to him the absolute political virtue. His string of successful conquests had confirmed its divinely ordained righteousness. So in turning to religion, unity of belief and practice, not tolerance of diversity, had to seem paramount.

If the young Constantine had felt chosen by the gods to unify the empire, the mature, Christian Constantine likewise assumed a divine mandate to unify the empire's religion. "We strive to the best of our ability to fill with good hope those who are uninitiated in such doctrines [as the Gospel of Jesus Christ]." This is Constantine speaking to an "assembly of saints," Christian leaders, about the year 320. "For it is no ordinary task to turn the minds of our subjects to piety if they happen to be virtuous, and to reform them if they are evil and unbelieving."
³¹
Constantine fully understands himself by now as "the vice-regent of God,"
³²
and, as is clear from what he did as soon as he defeated Licinius, he did not hesitate to act as such, especially against the "evil and unbelieving."

Constantine moved at once against paganism. Pagans would continue to make up a majority of the empire until well after his death, and as his successors would learn, their resistance to Christian dominance would increasingly threaten an imperial power that defined itself as Christian. Once Constantine had cast his lot with the Christians, and once besieged pagans had looked to Licinius and his other enemies, Constantine knew that pagan submission would never mean loyalty. In some places he ordered pagan temples burned, as Diocletian had churches. He confiscated temple treasuries and outlawed the showing of sacrificial smoke—a jettisoning of the tolerance of Milan. "Hence it was that, of those who had been slaves of superstition," Eusebius wrote of the pagans, "when they saw with their own eyes the exposure of their delusion and beheld the actual ruin of the temples and images in every place, some applied themselves to the saving doctrine of Christ; while others, though they declined to take this step, yet reprobated the folly they had received from their fathers, and laughed to scorn what they had so long been accustomed to regard as gods."
³³

But Constantine knew the impossibility of forcing conversion on the pagan majority, and so, despite evidence of some such attacks, the main mark of his program was not violent persecution. That would come later in the century. Constantine wanted his pagan subjects to be won over as he himself had been—by seeing the benefit to the Roman world of a unifying affiliation with the Christian deity. But how could they see that if Christians themselves were not unified? Christians could not even agree on how to calculate the date of Easter, much less on how Jesus was God.
³⁴
Thus Constantine's political problem opened immediately into his religious one. That led to his—for our purposes—most fateful action yet. Immediately upon coming to power as the sole ruler of the empire, but only then, Constantine asserted the right to exercise absolute authority over the entire Church. He did this despite the fact that he was not baptized, and, as was not unusual, would not be until shortly before he died. The necessarily blurred lines of mystical feeling and spiritual paradox—what our contemporaries would call the religion of the analogical imagination, as opposed to the univocal or one-dimensional faith
³⁵
—would be erased now in favor of clearly drawn boundaries of dogma. As regionalisms of a once divided empire had to be deleted—a common calendar had to be enforced—so with faith and its calendars. Constantine saw, in other words, that only a unified, sharply defined, and firmly advanced Christianity would overcome paganism.

Suddenly tolerance of theological disagreement and ecclesiastical particularities, which had been a given among Christians since Saints Paul and James had reached a modus vivendi at the Council of Jerusalem in the first century, was now deemed unchristian. Religious diversity fell under suspicion of being an overly relativized polytheism, a mark of the Pantheon, not the Church—although for two centuries Christian monotheism, like Jewish monotheism, had included a multiplicity of meanings and traditions. If that multiplicity became an unacceptable choice—"heresy" comes from the Greek word for "choice"
³⁶
—it was more because of a political requirement than a religious one. The aim was
E pluribus unum. Pluribus
would be defined not as a principle of coequality but as the expendable means to the self-justifying end that is
unum.

How is Jesus God? We saw that this question, is question, had been the essence of Christian conversation since his first followers had allowed themselves, in grief, first to pray to Jesus, then to speak aloud their tremendous intuition about him. But now an answer would replace the question in discourse. The single, definitive, univocal answer that had so far eluded the Christian consensus—eluded, that is, finely tuned, passionate minds as variously engaged with the question as Irenaeus, Origen, and Arius—would now be imposed by imperial fiat. Unity would henceforth be the note not only of the political order but of a revealed truth. With holiness and catholicity, "unity" would henceforth be, in the argot, a "mark" of the Church—at least in theory.

Differences in Christian belief and practice were often rooted, as in New Testament times, in the regional differences between, say, an Antioch in Syria or a Corinth in Greece, where Saint Paul composed his hymn to diversity.
³⁷
Differences were natural in such a world, but now an emperor with a "celestial" mandate for "the government of all earthly things"
³⁸
was determined to change that world. For Constantine, religious differences were impediments to the power that had replaced Maxentius and Licinius. In this way, the choice ("heresy") to be religiously different became defined as treason, a political crime. But different from whom, and from what? For the first time in its history, the universal Christian Church was seen to need a defined orthodoxy, a word derived from the Greek for "right thinking." This resulted from what might be called the first law of exclusion: You can't say who is out unless you can say what it is to be in. "No heretic," as the proverb has it, "without a text."
³⁹
It is important to emphasize that this need, which has so dominated Roman Catholicism that even now the Church cannot break free of it, was first defined not by the Lord, a Jew who identified with dissenters; nor by his apostles, who did not hesitate to differ from one another; nor by their successor bishops who defended regional interests; nor by evangelists who produced not one version of the Jesus story but four; nor by theologians who introduced innovative Hellenistic categories into Scripture study; nor by preachers who readily put their eccentric personal stamps on the kerygma—but by an all-conquering emperor for whom one empire had come to equal one religion.

Thus, the now absolute and sole Caesar, demonstrating an authority no one had ever exercised before, summoned the bishops of the Church to a meeting over which he himself would preside: "Wherefore I signify to you, my beloved brethren, that all of you promptly assemble at the said city, that is at Nicaea..."
⁴⁰
Two hundred and fifty of them came.
⁴¹
He would not let them leave until they had begun to do for the Church what he was doing for the empire. This meeting was the Council of Nicaea, the first Ecumenical Council of the Church. It took place in 325, only a year after Chrysopolis. In response to the emperor's mandate, the bishops did, in fact, agree to a formulaic statement of belief, defining especially, and in explicit terms, how Jesus is God.
⁴²
They did so unanimously—well, almost unanimously. Those who dissented were exiled by Constantine. (More than one bishop—and most famously Athanasius, banished later—would serve out his exile in Trier.)
⁴³
Christians still recite this formula today, as the Nicene Creed. As we stand solemnly at the midpoint of a Sunday liturgy, letting the familiar words roll off our tongues, we think of the creed as a religious necessity, perhaps treasuring it as such, as I do. We give not a thought to its first function as a kind of loyalty oath, fulfilling a political necessity as much as a religious one.