Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (34 page)

But the creed we recite is not the same as the one the bishops approved, and the difference marks a turning point in our inquiry. "We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things, visible and invisible ..."
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For the first several verses, what the bishops approved and what we say are identical, including the key statement of how Jesus is God. To us, these phrases are an arcane litany, but to the Nicene prelates they were a precise confession, full of implication. "And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things came into being, things in heaven and on earth, who for the sake of us men and for the purpose of our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming man, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead."
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The original Nicene statement goes on to issue a condemnation—"These the Catholic Church anathematizes"—of those who hold to the Arian position that the Son was somehow inferior to the Father, but that needn't concern us here. The point of comparison is with the phrase "becoming man, suffered and rose again on the third day." Here is how an expanded Nicene Creed is recited in churches around the world today: "... and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day, he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures."

In the original version of this pivotal profession of faith, not only is the death of Jesus not mentioned, neither is the crucifixion. In the second version, equal emphasis on incarnation, suffering, and Resurrection has been replaced by a strong emphasis on death, with the elaboration "suffered, died, and was buried." That strong emphasis is redoubled when the means of death—the only concrete, historical detail in the entire formulation—is given as "crucified under Pontius Pilate." Explicitly holding the Roman procurator responsible contrasts with Gospel accounts that emphasize his reluctance before Jewish bloodthirst, a change that may reflect the Church's new status in the empire as favored instead of persecuted, and that avoids self-accusation because, of course, Pilate was a pagan, and pagans have now joined the Jews as enemies par excellence. But the introduction of the phrase "in fulfillment of the Scriptures" makes a creedal affirmation of the supersessionist pattern of "prophecy historicized." We have seen how easily the proclaiming of the story of Jesus as "fulfillment" opens into anti-Judaism. There is a hint of the anti-Jewish spirit of the Nicene fathers in their ban of the celebration of Easter in the same week as Passover.
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The text of what we think of as the Nicene Creed evolved through a series of subsequent councils, more than a dozen of them,
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culminating in the Council of Constantinople in 381. (That council is known for its definitive condemnation of Arianism.) Finally, the creedal statement, as reflected in the text we know, put the crucifixion at the center of faith and the death of Jesus at the heart of redemption.
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That this is a mid-fourth-century innovation is emphatically revealed by the fact that the first Nicene formulation, in mentioning neither death nor crucifixion, had, in line with the constant tradition of the Church, left the emphasis on Incarnation and Resurrection. This change means that the Son of God became man not to be one of us, not to take on the human condition—which includes suffering but is not defined by it—and not, for that matter, to undergo the Resurrection, as the affirmation of the Father's covenantal faithfulness to the Son. Instead, according to the theological shift reflected in the amended creed, the Son of God became man in order to be crucified. The crucifixion takes the place of the Resurrection as the saving event, and Christ the victim takes the place of Christ the victor as the symbol of God's love for the world.

This shift has important implications for relations between Christians and Jews. With the cross at the center of a theology of salvation, it becomes the means of salvation. In this altered context, the Gospel slander that shifts chief responsibility for that cross from the Romans to the Jews—the creed's indictment of Pilate notwithstanding—sets in motion a dynamic that will keep Jews at the heart of a quickened, and quickly armed, Christian hatred. "Tell me, do you praise the Jews for crucifying Christ," Saint John Chrysostom will ask, around 387, "and for, even to this day, blaspheming Him and calling Him a lawbreaker?"
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Chrysostom (c. 349–407), the bishop of Antioch, still revered as the patron saint of preachers, was the master of the sermon genre known as
Adversus Judaeos.
Such words inevitably led to actions: assaults on synagogues, the exclusion of Jews from holding public office, expulsions. Can it be a coincidence that attacks on Jews, both rhetorical and physical, become a notable pattern of Christian behavior only after the cult of the cross is established, not at Nicaea precisely, but in its aftermath?

How did this happen? Part of the answer may lie, remarkably enough, with a postprandial speech delivered by Constantine to the fathers of Nicaea at a banquet marking both the conclusion of the council and the twentieth anniversary of the emperor's accession to power. Here is how Eusebius sets the scene, "the circumstances of which were splendid beyond description": "Detachments of the body-guard and other troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of these the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the imperial apartments, in which some were the emperor's own companions at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ's kingdom was thus shadowed forth, and a dream rather than reality."
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Those present at this banquet would all have just signed the creed that made no mention yet of the cross—but the cross was at the heart of what Constantine had to say.

Eusebius, having just attended the council as bishop of Caesarea, was present at this event. His account of what Constantine said is the first clear telling of the story of the vision that the emperor only now, thirteen years after the fact, claims to have had on the eve of the Battle of Milvian Bridge. Various traditions had already cropped up that explained Constantine's conversion. One writer, Rufinius, had described an apparition that was aural, not visual, with Constantine hearing angels singing "By this conquer."
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Other accounts, as we saw, said the miraculous vision was of the Chi-Rho, a kind of divine monogram. But now, through Eusebius, we have Constantine's own description of what happened. I offer a fuller version now of what I cited in part earlier, to underscore the fact that this primal Christian myth of the cross has its origin not only in Constantine's own words but in his words spoken at Nicaea, meant to advance a political agenda.

The emperor said that about the noon hour, when the day was already beginning to wane, he saw with his own eyes in the sky above the sun a cross composed of light, and that there was attached to it an inscription saying, "By this conquer." At the sight, he said, astonishment seized him and all the troops who were accompanying him on the journey and were observers of the miracle.

He said, moreover, that he doubted within himself what the import of this apparition could be. And while he continued to ponder and reason on its meaning, night suddenly came on; then in his sleep, the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies.

At dawn of day, he arose, and communicated the marvel to his friends; and, then, calling together the workers in gold and precious stones, he sat in the midst of them, and described to them the figure of the sign he had seen, bidding them represent it in gold and precious stones. And this representation I myself have had an opportunity of seeing.
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Eusebius then goes on to describe the making of the military standard, "the spear and transverse bar" we saw before.

What is going on here? This is mythmaking by the emperor himself. That the occasion for this first and only elaboration of that vision from years before, an explicit vision of the cross, was the Council of Nicaea tells us everything. It is at this moment, far more than in 312, that a unifying and universalizing symbol can serve the emperor's purpose. The cross, even apart from its association with the death of Jesus, is the perfect emblem of Constantine's program, with its joining of horizontal and vertical axes and with its evoking of the four directions: north, south, east, west. The cross of the compass unites the globe; a hand-held globe surmounted by a cross would be, with the crown and scepter, a symbol of the Christian king.

The public display of the cross as a religious symbol, especially as rendered in gold and jewels, would be a step away from the second-commandment prohibition of graven images. Indeed, a flowering of the Christian imagination would follow upon Constantine's innovation, with an elaborate iconography that would forever set Christianity apart from Judaism. But no creation of the Christian aesthetic would surpass the satisfactions of the cruciform image because of its subliminal but powerful evocation of the universal.
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And it should be noted that, as Constantine was elevating the cross to the realm of the sacred, he was abolishing crucifixion as the Roman form of capital punishment. Soon enough, the memory of its true horrors would be smothered in pious stylization. Once unleashed, the impulse to raise the cross would lead not only to its hanging around necks and at the ends of strings of prayer beads, not only to placement on the walls of churches, but to the design of churches themselves, with the imperial basilica transformed into an apse by an intersecting transept. Christians would recognize the cross in the human body and in the tree, in the way light flares and in the conjunction of planets at the sun. Eventually they would see the cross, as I do, in telephone poles and in airplanes flying overhead.

The cross would become an object of adoration and a means of warding off evil. The thing itself would serve as a kind of primal sacrament. Even when Byzantine iconoclasts, years after Constantine, throw out the images of faith, they will make an exception of the cross,
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the sign under which they, too, will seek to conquer. The letters IHS are ubiquitous in the Church—on vestments, altar cloths, baldachins, even impressed on the unleavened wafers of Holy Communion. The initials are the first three letters of the Greek word for Jesus, but after Constantine they also became understood as referring to his vision of the cross:
In Hoc Signo (Vinces).
In my experience, that is the meaning most commonly attached to the monogram, a sign that the myth of Constantine's conversion remains firmly in Catholic memory. Once, however, kneeling beside my mother in St. Mary's Church, I asked her to explain the IHS above me, and she answered, "I Have Suffered."

It is not my purpose here to deny or establish the authenticity of Constantine's account, but only to observe that his choice of that first-ever council meeting at Nicaea as the place from which to promulgate his vision of the cross as a foundational myth of the church-state and state-church reveals a kind of imaginative genius. The cross and the creed
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unified the Church. It seems at first only a nice coincidence, soldier that he was, that the cross so well lent itself to construction as a spear, but eventually that, too, would seem ordained. The appeal of the cross as a universalizing symbol would achieve its mobilizing critical mass as the emblem of the process begun at Nicaea only if the Christian sense of the cross's central place in the death of Jesus—and that death's central place in the redemptive plan of God—could be quickened. And for that, Constantine turned to his mother, Helena Augusta. Here enters the legend of the True Cross, which meant so much to my mother and me at Trier. Legend, yes, but the "discovery" is an event to which Constantine himself refers in a letter preserved by Eusebius.
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The finding of the True Cross was a marvel Constantine rejoiced at and immediately publicized. What the emperor began with his speech to the bishops at Nicaea in 325, Helena carried forward with her pilgrimage to Jerusalem the following year.

20. The True Cross

J
UST AS CONSTANTINE'S
battle-eve vision of the cross at Milvian Bridge in 312 was not reliably recounted until 325, so the full story of Helena's "discovery" of the True Cross was first told only years later, by Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, in the year 395.
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As is true of the vision, so with the discovery: the context in which each story was first told lays bare its meaning. If the tide turned against the Jews in the first instance, it began to flood in on them in the second, as will become clear when we look at Ambrose's stance on the use of violence against Jews.

Eusebius, our source for Constantine's Nicaean telling of his vision, was, as we saw, the bishop of Caesarea in Palestine. In that role, he accompanied Helena on her pilgrimage, and he records the fact of that journey's having taken place.
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Attributing a pious motive to her, Eusebius says that she wanted to pray on the very earth on which Jesus had walked. That is an impulse the power of which I know from my own experience. But Helena's journey to the East seems to have been as much an exercise in diplomacy as piety. After the Council of Nicaea, Constantine had returned to Rome, but the promulgation of the creed, unanimous or not, hardly settled the quarrels in the Church, with objections being raised especially in the East. "It would have been Helena's task on her 'pilgrimage' to help solve these problems," the scholar Jan Willem Drijvers has written. In his biography
Helena Augusta,
published in 1992, Drijvers provides an exhaustive history of the legend of the True Cross, and in what follows I rely on his account. "Helena's journey was not restricted to Palestine, but included in fact a visit to all the eastern provinces, as Eusebius himself states. She did not travel as a humble pilgrim but as an Augusta."
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Helena had become her son's regent—in effect the First Lady of the empire—only the year before, upon the death of Fausta, Constantine's wife, an event to which we will return. In Drijvers's view, Helena made her dramatic journey to further Constantine's effort to Christianize pagans.
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Her related purpose was to help Christians overcome their reluctance to embrace his policy of unification of the Church.