Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (25 page)

To enter this heavenly city, one leaves behind, often in painful turns of repentance, the earthly city we thought our only possible home. Hauerwas' polemics against Constantinianism should be understood as ad hoc criticisms of the many ways in which the church has tried to demolish the walls of separation and moderate the wrenching turn of repentance, whether by so distancing faith from practical affairs that "spiritual" becomes a synonym for "impotent," or by so intertwining faith with the habits and practices of the wider culture that the Christian life becomes invisible.40

INVISIBLE CHURCH?

I will return to the more subtle theological aspects of Yoder's antiConstantinianism in the final chapter. Here my question is a more or less strictly historical one: Did the church of the fourth century allow itself to be absorbed into the machinery of power? Did the bishops of the fourth century who accommodated themselves to Constantine lose their critical, prophetic edge? Did they become yes-men to a brute and a tyrant? Did the church become weightless and invisible? Yoder, I submit, misrepresents the fourth century, and his answers to these questions are misleading or outright false.

Some regard criticism of Yoder's historical imprecision as a "significant misreading" of his intentions.41
Yoder is, after all, skeptical that we can know much of anything about Constantine himself, and more important, he wonders whether asking detailed questions about Constantine's sincerity, his control of councils, his self-image as "savior of the church" is a fruitful enterprise.42
He is concerned not with Constantine the man but rather with the shift that Constantine symbolizes: "The shift is what matters," he regularly reminds us. Yet it is not so easy for Yoder to escape the charge of inaccuracy, distortion or misrepresentation. He portrays himself as, and is, a notably particularist theologian, and if he gets his facts wrong,
he is being inconsistent with his fundamental historiographical outlook.43
Yoder makes specific historical claims, and specific historical mistakes, and those historical mistakes contribute to distortions within his complex concept of "Constantinianism."

Yoder to the contrary, Constantine did not call himself "bishop of bishops."44
That was a concept his son, Constantius II, promoted, and it was roundly condemned by the real bishops. Yoder claims that throughout the Middle Ages "church government was in the hands of the civil government,"45
which, true in many cases, would be news indeed to Hildebrand and Henry. He contrasts the hardy heroic church of the martyrs to the accommodated post-Constantinian church by pointing out that earlier the catechumenate demanded that converts learn the faith and take time for baptism,46
but much of the information we have about the catechumenate and the awe-inspiring rites of initiation comes from the mystagogical catecheses of Chrysostom and Ambrose, both doubly disqualified by Yoder as being Constantinians and sacramentalists.47

These are not quibbles, but they are comparatively small matters. Yoder also gets more central and substantive issues wrong-or, more modestly, Yoder's interpretations of key figures are misinterpretations. He sums up Eusebius's political eschatology with a brief paraphrase, "God gave Constantine the victory, so this must be the millennium,"4S
and claims that for Eusebius the state is brought entirely within the realm of redemption.49
Yoder is right that Eusebius believed that God's work was discernible in history, in the rise and fall of rulers and princes.50
Yet Yoder's overall summary of Eusebius is misleading. To be sure, Yoder is not entirely to blame for this, since mainstream scholarship has long considered Eusebius nothing more than a "political propagandist, a good courtier, the shrewd and worldly advisor of the Emperor Constantine, the great publicist of the first Christian emperor, the first in a long succession of ecclesiastical politicians, the herald of Byzantinism, a political theologian, a political metaphysician, and a caesaropapist," not to mention a toady whose obsequiousness can only make us cringe until it makes us vomit.51

Yet Eusebius has been misread, largely because his biography and panegyric in praise of Constantine have been studied without reference to his apologetic and biblical works, which make up the bulk of his corpus. Eusebius was not in fact a court insider but probably met the emperor only four or five times.52
While he did muse that Constantine's buildings in Jerusalem might be the new Jerusalem of prophecy53
and did find hints of a Christian empire in Old Testament prophecies like Micah 5 and Isaiah 2, he did not reinterpret prophecy wholesale so that Christ was displaced by Constantine and the church by the empire. In his commentary on Isaiah, published soon after the Council of Nicaea, he writes-using terminology that Yoder would endorse-that the church is the "godly polity" (theosebespoliteuma) and "city of God" (polis tou theou), ruled by bishops, not by the emperor. On Isaiah 11:6, Eusebius interprets the wild animals "as imperial officials, and the little child who leads them symbolizes the Christian clergy."54
Yoder's claim that Eusebius identifies the millennium with Constantine's empire is doubly wrong, first because Eusebius was antimillenarian and second because Eusebius regularly refers to the future advent of Christ.55
Craig Carter claims that "Constantinianism for Yoder is an eschatological heresy which tries to reach forward and pull the future kingdom of God back into the present sphere of history with no regard for
the necessity of a still-future Second Coming of the Messiah, thus turning the kingdom into a human political project."56
If Carter is correct that Yoder's "Constantinianism" is nothing more than a complete immanenti- zation of the eschaton ("no regard for . . ."), then it becomes difficult to find any Christian theologian who qualifies as a Constantinian. Eusebius certainly does not, and he is one of the prime candidates.

Even when Eusebius celebrated Constantine's role in the church, he hedged. When he described Constantine as a "sort of bishop," the "quasi" was as important as the "bishop." By "opening the door to a conception of the emperor as a quasi-bishop, Eusebios [sic] was closing it to a more radical conception" adopted by Constantine's son Constantius, the notion that the emperor was episcopus episcoporum.57
In any case, Eusebius's enthusiasm was slowly cooled and curbed by later historians. Rufinus's translation or paraphrase of Eusebius's history reworked Constantine's career to highlight the emperor's respect for bishops: the emperor "did not think it was appropriate for the clerics of God if he presented himself as an equal or if he did not greatly privilege them.""
Socrates and Sozomen are more distant still from Eusebius, both theologically and politically.59
Augustine is the high point of this revisionism. On Yoder's reading, Augustine merges New Testament teaching on reconciliation with classical notions of peace, especially the pax Romana, "as if they were all the same thing." Augustine wrote a large book on that subject, and the basic thrust of it was the opposite-to distinguish the Roman peace from the peace of the kingdom. Yoder regularly places Eusebius and Augustine together as chief representatives of Constantinian theology, but Augustine wrote City of God as an antidote to Eusebianism.60

Yoder also makes questionable claims about the relationship between Christology and politics in the fourth century. He disputes the "Catholic axiom" that the early creeds and councils are above criticism. While we
must learn from the council and sympathize "deeply with what it tried to say," we cannot help but be struck by the fact that "heretics" were often more politically faithful than the "orthodox": "it must mean something to us that the Arians and the Nestorians-each in their own age-were less nationalistic, less politically bound to the Roman Empire, more capable of criticizing the emperor, more vital in missionary growth, more ethical, and more Biblicist than the so-called orthodox churches of the Empire."61
While there is some truth here (heretics were expelled from the Christian empire and therefore naturally were less attached to it as a result), it is so oversimplified as to be misleading. In the fourth century at least, it was the orthodox Athanasius who resisted Constantine when he believed the emperor wrong, while it was the soft Arian Eusebius of Caesarea who delivered orations in praise of Constantine and the harder Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia who was more likely to be hobnobbing at the Nicomedian court. The relation of Christology and politics is complex, and I do not mean simply to reverse Yoder's equation. Since Erik Peterson's Monotheism as a Political Problem (Monotheismus als politisches Problem), many scholars have believed that Arianism lent itself to accommodation to empire while trinitarian orthodoxy resisted it.62
The truth is probably that there simply was no one-to-one correspondence between political and theological convictions.

More fundamentally, Yoder utterly fails to grasp the motivations and passions of fourth-century actors. This is part of his deliberate avoidance of a "great man" historiography of the period, but given his claims about how history should be done, it is a significant historical lacuna. For all his interest in martyrs and the suffering church, Yoder makes virtually no effort to enter into the mentality of beleaguered Christians or to understand the relief they felt at the gradual realization that Constantine was on their side and he was going to be there for a long time.63
I have not found in Yoder a single word of gratitude to Constantine for keeping Roman officials from killing Christians for being Christians. I have not found a single word that shows any effort to get under the "psychic skin" of bishops (like Eusebius) who witnessed Christians being roasted alive and then witnessed Constantine kissing the empty eye-sockets of a persecuted brother. Yoder shows little sign of trying to understand why the bishops answered the question "Where should the emperor sit in Council?" the way they did.

Yoder also pays little attention to the intellectual, legal and constitutional context in which Constantine arose. Constantine, and everyone in the empire, inherited a set of assumptions about the responsibilities of the Roman emperor. Caesar was responsible for the defense of the empire, for the administration of justice, and, equally important, for the sacra and sacerdotes of Rome. Cult was within his jurisdiction as one who had care of the status rei Romanae.64
That the emperor had oversight ("episcopacy") of religious life was as natural to fourth-century Romans as the First Amendment separation of church and state is to modern Americans. It is hardly fair to expect Constantine and all the bishops of the fourth century instantly to abandon centuries of imperial practice as soon as Constantine converted.

I return to a point made earlier: no emperor had ever had to deal with something like the church. The Romans knew of Jews, but they were a recognizable ethnic group, and their independence from the Roman way
of life, unique as it was, made some sense to Romans. A new Israel, an independent "nation" within the empire without ethnic or social or geographic boundaries-this was unprecedented. Gibbon recognized the problem: the church was already a state within a state before Constantine, and with the conversion of Constantine the church and the empire both were faced with the challenge of figuring out how the Christian polity and the Roman polity were to relate. For many Christians, such as Eusebius, the task of the hour was not to integrate the church into the empire. The empire had lost the battle with the church, and it was the empire that should make concessions. The church was not incorporated but victorious; the martyrs' faith had been vindicated, and the task was now to integrate the emperor into the church.6s

NOT CHAPLAINS

It is hardly astonishing that the first Christian emperor had his hands full trying to make legal and constitutional sense of the church, and hardly astonishing that churchmen themselves took some time to recover their balance and learn how to maintain a proper "vis-a-vis" toward a Christian emperor.66

Yet even with a Christian on the imperial throne, the church had not lost the capacity to be critical.67
Even before the days of Ambrose and Augustine, churchmen began to act in critical judgment toward ruthless powers. Opposition was already taking shape in the fourth century, even before Constantine died. It is certainly a testimony to Constantine's political skills, the overwhelming power of his personality, and the relief that many bishops felt at the end of the persecution that Constantine maintained as much sway in the church as he did. We should also recall that the persecution had weeded out many of the hardiest church leaders, and the ones who survived were often the ones who knew how to go along to get along. Still, battles there were, and the bishops very quickly asserted their independent authority. There were bishops who refused to be reduced to "chaplaincy."6S

Eusebius was not as obsequious or unthinking, or as knavish, as he is often made out to have been, and besides, not every bishop was a Eusebius. When Athanasius showed up unexpectedly in Constantinople to plead his case directly to the emperor, he was initially successful. Something went wrong, and before long there was a "blistering exchange." As Epiphanius later told the story, "Angry as the emperor was, Pope Athanasius spoke painful words to him: `The Lord will judge between me and you, since you yourself agree with those who calumniate your humble servant.'
1169 Constantine did not take this well and summarily dispatched Athanasius to Trier, his first exile. Athanasius was not one to be reduced to a functionary, and he was not. He desired and sought Constantine's support for Nicene orthodoxy and wanted the emperor to judge in his favor against his Meletian and Arian enemies. But if Constantine failed to render a just verdict, Athanasius had a clean conscience about defying the emperor, just as he defied councils that were stacked against him. His relations with Constantine's successor, Constantius, were even sharper.70
In a remarkable rebuke to the emperor, he demanded to know "what concern the emperor had" with a judgment "passed by bishops." "When," he protested, "did a judgment of the church receive its validity from the emperor, or rather when was his decree ever recognized by the church?"71
One is tempted to say, "In 325, don't you remember?" Perhaps the bishop had forgotten Nicaea, or perhaps he worked himself into a rhetorical froth. Or, perhaps, these questions expressed his own understanding of what was actually happening in 325. Even in 325, he did not think of the emperor as the leader of Christ's church.