Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (35 page)

Did Eusebius become a "Constantinian" by identifying the emperor as the "primary bearer of meaning in history"?61
It might seem so, but the fact that he took the unprecedented step of writing a history of the church suggests otherwise. Earlier chroniclers wrote about battles, kings, warriors, but the backbone of Eusebius's history was a chronological list of bishops.62
Even when he wrote about Constantine, he emphasized his piety rather than his prowess. History writing had been baptized.

Prudentius (348-c. 413) gave poetic expression to a similar theology of empire. Rome's story was not the master narrative of history. Instead history was structured by biblical episodes of creation, fall, redemption, judgment. Yet Rome, like every other people, had its place within that narrative. Pagan Rome functioned typologically, as "all kings, prophets, judges,
and rulers / . . . did not cease to depict the form of the cross."63
Rulers provided various goods for their subjects, and so Christians offered prayers for the emperor "so that his battle-array may be favorable, and / that when his enemies are subdued he as leader may govern with his laws a peaceful world."64
Alone among fourth-century writers, Prudentius went so far as to suggest that Christ rather than Romulus was the true founder of Rome (auctor horum moenium). Christians therefore rightly inherit what their Lord founded. Overarching this endorsement of a Christian empire is Prudentius's insistence that the conversion of the soul is the key to Christian politics and to the renewal of Rome after Constantine. Peace, he writes, is the true sacrifice: "Whoever would worship God / properly with the whole burnt offerings, let him above all offer peace. / No sacrifice is sweeter to Christ; this gift alone pleases him with a pure / aroma when he turns his face toward the holy altar.
1161

Augustine and Eusebius held the same views at least on this point: The virtues that make an emperor worthy of the title "the Great" are not love of honor, prowess in battle or bloodthirsty ruthlessness. Rather,

we say that they are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honors, and the obsequiousness of those who salute them with an excessive humility, but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love and worship God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have partners; if they are slow to punish, ready to pardon; if they apply that punishment as necessary to government and defense of the republic, and not in order to gratify their own enmity; if they grant pardon, not that iniquity may go unpunished, but with the hope that the transgressor may amend his ways; if they compensate with the lenity of mercy and the liberality of benevolence for whatever severity they may be compelled to decree; if their luxury is as much restrained as it might have been unrestrained; if they prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatever; and if they do all these things, not through ardent desire of empty glory, but through love of eternal felicity, not neglecting to offer
to the true God, who is their God, for their sins, the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer.66

Rather than fitting the church into a grand narrative of Roman imperium, Eusebius was trying to find a place for the empire in the Christian story. It may all be exaggerated, or worse, Eusebius may have been nothing more than a court toady, worming himself into the emperor's favor. I think not. Even if he is, panegyrists tell emperors what they want to hear, and we can be sure that if Constantine was not the kind of man Eusebius said he was, at least we may conclude that the emperor Eusebius described was the emperor Constantine aspired to be. Even if we do not trust a word Eusebius said about Constantine, he delivered to the emperor a dramatically novel vision of imperial character and conduct.

FALL OF THE CHURCH?

Still, it was an empire, and there's the rub."
If it is empire, no matter how Christian the emperor might be, it is not good.

So, at least, is the widespread opinion among Christian thinkers. Yoder and other theological critics of Constantine have three main criticisms of Constantine and Constantinianism with regard to his imperialism. First and foremost, Constantinianism simply is the identification of nation or empire with the purposes of God. By misidentifying the location of God's action in history-which Christianity assigns to the church, but Constan
tinianism assigns to the prince, the empire or the nation-Constantinians operate on the premise "that one nation or people or government can represent God's cause in opposition to other peoples who, being evil, need to be brought into submission."6S
This is ecclesiological and eschatological "heresy"-ecclesiological because the church gets absorbed into some worldly system, eschatological because the eschatological community, the church, gets absorbed into the realm of this world (empire) and because the eschatological order is dragged forward into the present age. As a result of the collapse of the church's independent identity and the mergence of Romanitas with Christianitas, the mission of the church was, after Constantine, profoundly distorted.

The fall into Constantinianism, second, represents a shift from an earlier anti-imperial stance.69
Earlier, most Christians would have agreed with the sharp antithesis drawn by Tertullian: "One soul cannot be indebted to two, God and Caesar."70
Origen, Tertullian and Cyprian all believed the empire to be "diabolical.
1171 Yet during the second and third centuries something was changing. Christians were becoming comfortable with the Roman world, a comfort evidenced by the apologists who cared about the unbelieving world, its culture and its patterns of thought and language. There are signs of "creeping empire loyalty."72
After Constantine, this loyalty stopped creeping and began to gallop as Christians found it quite easy to serve God and Caesar both, even-and this is the third of Yoder's criticisms-when Caesar told Christians to kill. Yoder argues that early Christians were uniformly opposed to Christians in military service. During the second and third centuries, Christians entered the Roman military and slowly acclimated to using violence. It was wrong, it was apostasy, but there was a "growing tolerance of apostasy," and so even though "nobody approved" their presence in the army, they were "not excommunicated."73
Constantine opened the floodgates and thus has come to symbolize, for Yoder and his followers, the transition from the church of the martyrs, ready to be killed rather than kill, to the church of the Crusaders, ready to smash in Arab skulls with a cry of lesu Dominus.

As in the previous chapters, my interest here is historical rather than theological.74
I realize that this does not get to the heart ofYoder's thought. Still, asking the historical questions is important since Yoder's theology is so deeply bound up with an account of Christian history. If he got Christian history wrong, that sets a question mark over his theology.

Taking Yoder's criticisms in reverse order, the following chapters probe a series of questions: First, in the next chapter, Was the early church in fact uniformly opposed to Christians serving in the Roman army? Was there a shift in Christian attitudes toward war and violence with Constantine's ascent to the throne? If so, what sort of shift was it, and what drove the shift? Then, in chapter thirteen: did the earliest Christians oppose the Roman Empire, and was there a dramatic change during the second to fourth centuries? Finally, also in chapter thirteen: did the Roman Christians so identify the church with the empire that they ignored or despised the barbarians who encircled it?

At every point Yoder can point to evidence to support his claims, and at times he provides a provocative new framework for addressing a question. As I demonstrate in the following chapters, however, his claims are, as historical claims, sometimes questionable, sometimes oversimplified to the point of being misleading, sometimes one-sided, sometimes simply wrong.

Concerning those who lay down their weapons in peacetime it is resolved that they be excluded from fellowship.

CANONS OF THE COUNCIL OF ARLES, 314

The Christian faith burst into the world as a message of peace.'
At Jesus' birth, angels descended singing, "Peace on earth among men of God's favor." Jesus the Prince of Peace preached an anti-Zealot message of reconciliation and renunciation of vengeance. "Turn the other cheek" replaced, in the eyes of some interpreters of Jesus' teaching, the Torah's "an eye for an eye" as the rule for Christians. While Paul acknowledged that the civil authorities were established by God and that they provided some goods, the relation of Christians to the state was, it is argued, mainly a relation of antagonism and enmity.

The early fathers emphasized that the gospel brought peace wherever it took hold. Justin pointed the Jew Trypho to the fact that humans "who were filled with war, and mutual slaughter, and every wickedness, have each through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons-our swords into ploughshares, and our spears into implements of tillage." In place of warfare, "we cultivate piety, righteousness, philanthropy, faith, and hope,
which we have from the Father Himself through Him who was crucified."2
He returned to the theme in his first Apology, noting the radiating effects of piety from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. "From Jerusalem there went out into the world, men, twelve in number," he wrote, and by the power of God these illiterates "proclaimed to every race of men that they were sent by Christ to teach to all the word of God." "As a result, we who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making war upon our enemies, but also, that we may not lie nor deceive our examiners, willingly die confessing Christ." He compared the commitment of martyrs to that of loyal soldiers and sons: "If the soldiers enrolled by you, and who have taken the military oath, prefer their allegiance to their own life, and parents, and country, and all kindred, though you can offer them nothing incorruptible, it were verily ridiculous if we, who earnestly long for incorruption, should not endure all things, in order to obtain what we desire from Him who is able to grant it."3

Christians, of course, were exhorted to love their enemies, and that meant cheerful submission to political powers. Yet early Christians, Yoder alleges, would never have considered exercising that power themselves, and they explicitly and absolutely refused to share in the violence of the state. According to Yoder, this is not capitulation to the powers but instead a revolutionary "free subordination" that undoes the knots of power. Nor is this an apolitical stance. Submission to the authorities for the sake of Jesus, the King of all creation, is a radical political stance, one that challenges the claims of power just as thoroughly as any movement of violent revolution.

Yoder claims that the church "fell" from this gospel of peace into endorsement of violence and war, and this is an important, though, Yoder says, not the most fundamental, dimension of the Constantinian apostasy.4
Yoder
does not insist on the term pacifist as a description of the early church views, suggesting that much of the debate over early church pacifism indulges in "semantic quibble[s]." Rather, he claims that "Christians rejected Caesar's wars," which he describes as "a fact that no historians deny." The debate, he indicates, is only "about just why they did so."5

Yoder has in mind historical work such as that of John Helgeland, who concludes that "there is practically no evidence from the Fathers which would support the argument that the early church denied enlistment on the ground that killing and war were opposed to the Christian ethic." Having defined pacifism in that specific fashion, he adds that "the pacifist argument is an artificial construct" that arranges patristic fragments "in a way no Father ever could have done." After his exhaustive survey, Helgeland finds "no unequivocal statement to support" pacifism, and "certainly not one of any length such as a paragraph."6
Yoder's point is that narrowing the definition of pacifism misses the larger picture. Early Christians, he argues, may not have had a worked-out pacifist ethic, but we can still speak in global terms of the "primitive Christian rejection of Caesar's wars."
7 My use of pacifist throughout this chapter acknowledges Yoder's proviso. I am using it in a loose sense not to denote a specific rationale for Christian opposition to war and violence but in reference to the simple fact of Christian opposition to violence and war. No matter what his reasons, a church father who condemns all Christian participation in war, or violent service to the state, is "pacifist."