Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (18 page)

[Constantine] intended to restrain the idolatrous abominations which in time past had been practiced in every city and country; and itprovided that no one should erect images, or practice divination and other false and foolish arts, or offer sacrifice in any way.

EUSEBIUS, LIFE OF CONSTANTINE

Constantine's architectural expressions of favor toward the church were backed up by legislative and administrative initiatives. Soon after he defeated Maxentius, Constantine exempted the Christian clergy from tax burdens, explaining that this would protect them from being harassed by heretics (cf. CTh 16.2.1-2). He mounted various attacks on paganism. Early church historians celebrate the fact that he closed notorious temples,'
removed cult items and melted down metal objects for his own Christian buildings. He tore doors off some temples and removed the idolatrous images from others. Eusebius exaggerated the degree of destruction of pagan centers, but it happened.

In recent decades, the question of whether Constantine intended to
suppress paganism by force has focused on whether he issued a law prohibiting sacrifice.2
There is general agreement that he suppressed sacrifices on certain occasions and in certain settings. He prohibited his provincial governors from offering sacrifice at official functions, thus opening up civil offices to Christians, and he regularly expressed his personal unwillingness and revulsion at sacrifice in sometimes caustic terms. But did he issue a blanket prohibition against sacrifice?3

Eusebius claimed he did. In his Vita Constantiani, he referred to a law passed around 324 that "was intended to restrain the idolatrous abominations which in time past had been practiced in every city and country; and it provided that no one should erect images, or practice divination and other false and foolish arts, or offer sacrifice in any way."
Shortly after Constantine's death, his son Constans issued an imperial constitution reinforcing this prohibition by requiring punishment for anyone who violated the law of Constantine by celebrating sacrifice.5
Taking Eusebius at face value, "it may be argued that in 324 Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, and that he carried through a systematic and coherent reformation, at least in the eastern provinces."6

Can Eusebius be believed? Some think not, and Drake's Lactantian interpretation of Constantine's religious policies requires a negative answer.7
If Constantine allowed everyone to follow his own conscience in
worship, how could he suppress the central liturgical act of the majority cult? One reason for doubting the existence of this decree is that there is no record of enforcement in the early fourth century.'
So was there any law against sacrifice? Was the law issued and never enforced? And if the latter, why issue the decree at all?

We can resolve this issue by attending carefully to the nature of imperial decrees in the fourth century.'
Imperial edicts always depended on enforcement by provincial or local officials, who might be too lazy or busy to carry out the emperor's business. A provincial governor surrounded by convinced pagans would be hesitant to bear down. More important, emperors "never expected or intended that their anti-pagan legislation be vigorously enforced."10
Leafing through the codices, one gets the impression that the decrees of the early Christian emperors were concise and legally framed legislation, but when we examine the full text of certain decrees in Eusebius, we find that the legislative portion is fairly minor and often concludes a prolix moral lecture. The Codex Theodosianus consists of excerpts from Constantine and his immediate successors, but excerpting changes the genre and tone. In its original setting, much imperial legislation functioned more as moral appeal than as law in our modern sense of the term."
Given the nature of "law" in Constantine's empire, there was no necessary contradiction between his "We wholly forbid the existence of gladiators" and his permission to an Umbrian town to honor the emperor with combats.12
Nor was there any necessary contradiction between a decree suppressing sacrifice and continued toleration of sacrifice.

Constantine cannot keep himself from preaching. He did it in court, and when he issued decrees in his official capacity he was still the missionminded preacher. Eschewing sacrifice entirely was the best way to go, and
so he prohibited sacrifice; yet everyone should be free to follow conscience, so he did not enforce the prohibition. He was a politician-preacher, and his sharp language also pacified militant Christians in his empire who muttered that their pseudo-Christian emperor was soft on idolatry. His law against sacrifice was part of an effort to "clear public spaces of that aspect of the pagan cult considered most unacceptable in the eyes of Christians," and by the 350s sacrifice was rare enough that it took some daring to perform one. Constantine did not have to take up the sword against pagans. His "legislation" created an "atmosphere" in which sacrifice gradually faded away.13

AGAINST ALL HERESIES

The results of Constantine's wide-ranging antiheresy legislation (ca. 324) were similar. Around the time of his final war with Licinius, he issued a decree condemning a variety of heretics-Valentinians, Montanists, the Novatianists of Alexandria, and some others. Heretics, he said, were "haters and enemies of truth and life" and their heresies a "tissue of falsehood and vanity," promoting "destructive and venomous errors" that can only lead to "everlasting death." Their crimes were too many to catalog, and in a fit of rhetorical self-rebuke, he claimed that his policy of "protracted clemency" had only encouraged them to spread.

Given the menace of heresy, he said, he had no choice but to act. Since "it is no longer possible to bear with your pernicious errors," he wrote, "we give warning by this present statute that none of you henceforth presume to assemble yourselves together." Heretical church buildings were to be seized, and Constantine's "care in this respect extend[ed] so far as to forbid the holding of your superstitious and senseless meetings, not in public merely, but in any private house or place whatsoever." He reiterated the point:

We have commanded, as before said, that you be positively deprived of every gathering point for your superstitious meetings, I mean all the houses of prayer, if such be worthy of the name, which belong to heretics, and that these be made over without delay to the catholic Church; that any other places be confiscated to the public service, and no facility whatever be left for any future gathering; in order that from this day forward none of your unlawful assemblies may presume to appear in any public or private place. Let this edict be made public.

Heretics were, of course, always welcome to return to the "holy fellowship" of the catholic church, "whereby you will be enabled to arrive at the knowledge of the truth." But "the delusions of your perverted understandings must entirely cease to mingle with and mar the felicity of our present times: I mean the impious and wretched double-mindedness of heretics and schismatics." Constantine believed he enjoyed prosperity because of God's favor, and the poison of false teaching spewing from the church endangered him. He saw it as his duty "to endeavor to bring back those who in time past were living in the hope of future blessing, from all irregularity and error to the right path, from darkness to light, from vanity to truth, from death to salvation.""

Like many of his edicts, this was something less than it seemed. For one thing, he concluded two years later that the Novatianists had been wrongly condemned. They were separatist schismatics but not heretics, and in a rescript of 326 he restored their rights.15
Further, there is no evidence that the law was ever enforced, since "Valentinian, Marcionite, and Montanist conventicles long continued to exist."16
Like Constantine's edicts against pagans examined above, Contantine's decree against heresies functioned more as moral exhortation than as a legally binding decree, and it was a rhetorical display that kept the orthodoxy-hounds satisfied. Still, the result was that by 324 heresy had officially been declared illegal. Orthodox Christianity, as defined by church councils, was the only unrestricted faith still permitted in the Roman Empire. And the edict, and other of Constantine's decisions, did have an effect. Heretics were exiled, and Arius's books were burned, just as the anti-Christian treatise of Porphyry was destroyed by imperial order. Constantine's religious policy created an "atmosphere" of hostility to heresy as much as to paganism.

One suspects fourth-century Christians had the same question we do: was this man the liberator of the church, or its new lord?

JEWS IN THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

Though for different reasons, both historians and theologians have objected to Constantine's policies regarding Jews. James Carroll sees in Constantine's policies a coherent, if not entirely conscious, plot to suppress Judaism. Above all, Carroll argues, Constantine was a politician looking for some principle of unification in the empire, and the Jews, like the pagans, were a standing challenge to his ambitions. By Carroll's reading of history, Constantine was responsible for making "unity" a mark of the church, as he suppressed the delightfully diverse Christian expressions of earlier centuries. More subtly but more dangerously, Constantine elevated the cross to its central importance in Christian faith. Prior to Constantine, Christianity had been centered on resurrection, but Constantine's vision and then the discovery of the true cross coalesced in a cruciform faith that had dangerous political ramifications for Jews. For if the cross is central, so is the guilt of the Jews for the death of God's Son. Specific laws, Carroll argues, also worked against Jews. Constantine did not impose the death penalty for proselytizing, but his successors did, and Constantine's criminalization of proselytizing laid the foundations for legal persecution of Jews throughout the Middle Ages."

Like many critics of Constantine, Carroll is ill-informed about facts. He overstates the degree of diversity in early Christianity and also understates Christians' devotion to unity prior to Constantine. The New Testament itself is sufficient refutation of the idea that it took an emperor to introduce the notion of unity into the faith. Carroll also claims that Constantine is being innovative when he is being quite traditional. Jews had considerable liberty under the Roman Empire, but proselytizing was the point where they were most restricted. Long before Constantine, Jews had been prohibited from circumcising converts, with the exception of slaves."

Constantine had a contempt for Jews that almost rivaled his contempt for pagans. In a letter sent to bishops following the Council of Nicaea, the emperor neglected to mention Arius or the christological controversy but celebrated the conciliar consensus on the date of Easter. One of his main reasons for rejoicing was that the church chose not to follow the Jews in dating their celebration of the resurrection of the Messiah whom the Jews had killed. But apart from his "violently prejudicial language,""
and it is both violent and prejudicial, his legislation changed the lives of Jews very little. Jews were permitted to serve on municipal senates, and Constantine extended the same tax exemption to synagogue heads and other Jewish leaders that he offered to Christian priests (CTh 16.8.2, 4), thus enabling "a system of Jewish self-government that strengthened Jewish life and identity."20
For the first time since Hadrian's devastation of Palestine, Jews were permitted to travel to Jerusalem, albeit only once a year and only to mourn its destruction. Jews did return to Palestine during his reign.21
The Jewish patriarch of Constantinople could judge not only religious issues but even civil cases among Jews.

Some of Constantine's severe laws regarding Jews prohibited the Jews from attacking converts to Christianity (CTh 16.8.1). He threatened Jews who harassed converts to Christianity with burning; he forbade Jews to own Christian slaves and strengthened the rules against circumcision, extending the prohibition to slaves, whether pagan or Christian.22
Carroll's leading evidence is a decree that he dates to 315, in which Constantine threatened unspecified punishments to anyone who converted to Judaism (CTh 16.8.1.1).23
This was new but not revolutionary, since Roman law already prevented Jewish proselytizing.

Even when a law seems to be directed against Jews, other concerns were more decisive than hostility to Judaism per se. In 321, for instance, Constantine legislated that Jews who were members of the curial class would be required to fulfill their civic duties, even if those duties conflicted with Jewish custom. Though this treated Jewish custom lightly, the point of the legislation was not to beat down Jews but to address the long-standing shortage of men willing to serve, and fund, city governments. Constantine backed off in any case, issuing a later law that gave Jews with synagogue offices exemptions from curial responsibilities.24

Theological critics also attack the stance of the church toward Judaism during Constantine's day and after. "Constantinianism," if not the emperor himself, rests on and reinforces an untenable, perhaps even "heretical," supersessionism, the notion that the new covenant with the Christian church "fulfills" or "replaces" the Abrahamic promises and the Mosaic covenant with Israel. Constantine advanced this heresy because by forming a Christian empire he offered a this-worldly fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Instead of being fulfilled in the spiritual realities of redemption, or the church, Abraham's promise of blessing to the nations was fulfilled in the Christian Roman Empire. The Old Testament was increasingly used as justification for imperial policies, and the Jews were essentially robbed of their Scriptures and their continuing place in redemptive history.

In a wide-ranging revisionist account of early Jewish-Christian relations, John Howard Yoder placed "Constantinianism" at the center. Jesus and Paul were thoroughly Jewish, and the earliest church operated within a Jewish conceptual and practical world. Jesus' commands were treated as commands, the Torah was not played off against the gospel, and the Christians patterned their communal life after the example of diaspora Judaism. Constantine's rise to power, and the shift in Christian con
sciousness associated with that, changed everything. By merging Christian faith with the power of the empire, Constantinianism de-Judaized Christianity. In place of the transcendent demands of the Torah, Constantinianism put the judgment of a general, producing a morality "serviceable to present power structure." Christians abandoned the specificity of Jewish law, which was now played off against the gospel; they abandoned Jewish universalism for the pseudo-universalism of Greek culture and Roman power; and when they picked up the sword they left behind the "Jewish pacifism" of Jesus. The Judaism that the West has known since is a product of Christianity, and specifically of the Constantinian apostasy.25
In an ironic twist of providence, the isolation of Judaism forced the Jews to adopt a communal lifestyle closer to that of the original community envisioned by Jesus than the imperial church, so that Judaism serves as a continuing witness against the Constantinian attempt to seize godlikeness and control history.26