Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (36 page)

The usefulness ofYoder's formulation-"rejection of Caesar's wars"-is questionable. For starters, it is ambiguous. Does "rejection of Caesar's wars" mean that Christians refused to fight or that they refused to support Caesar's wars in any way? Is a Christian who prays for the success of Caesar's wars, yet refuses to fight himself, "rejecting Caesar's wars"? And who is Caesar? Does "Caesar" stand in for any political ruler? For pagan political rulers? As we shall see below, this is a central question in assessing the early church view of war. If early Christians opposed wars because they were "Caesar's," what would happen if they become convinced (rightly or wrongly) that the wars were no longer Caesar's but Christ's? Would they still reject them? Or does Yoder consider all wars to be "Caesar's wars" and thus illegitimate for Christians? Yoder wants to subordinate the question of why to what he claims is the universally held view that Christians rejected Caesar's wars, but the why question cannot be put aside so swiftly. To make his historical case for a "Constantinian shift," Yoder has to prove not only that Christians "rejected Caesar's wars" but that they would have rejected wars regardless of whose they were.

Yoder knows that the change he describes did not happen all at once in the early fourth century, but that admission does not get him off the historical hook. Debating about the timing does not get at the issue. It does not matter when the shift happened, but if there was a shift at all, it had to happen sometime. This is crucial if Yoder is going to present a coherent account of the "Constantinian heresy." He argues that the early church was uniformly, or almost uniformly, pacifist and that Christians who served in the military would have been excommunicated. Then he argues that the evidence for Christians in the army in the mid-second century represents an accommodation to worldliness, a sign of drift and ultimately apostasy. Finally, he claims that Constantine consolidated and institutionalized this drift into a centuries-long apostasy. If the first premise is false, however, and the church was not uniformly pacifist, then the other stages of the argument collapse.

To assess the evidence of a shift, we have to examine befores and afters. What did Christians think and say about military service before "Constantinianism" took hold, and what, if anything, did they say differently after? More specifically, did the earliest Christians who wrote on the subject take a "pacifist" position, and if so, what were their reasons? On the other hand, did Christians after Constantine become bloodthirsty warmongers? Or do we find as much commitment to the Sermon on the Mount among "Constantinian" theologians as we find among pre-Constantinian theologians?8
Equally important, what did Christians do with regard to the Roman army prior to Constantine? Af
ter all, however vigorously intellectuals like Origen and Tertullian opposed service in the army, and whatever their reasons, it is entirely possible that they represented a small, articulate minority that has come to be considered spokesmen only because they had the wherewithal to speak. What did the countless, nameless and forgotten local pastors think? How did they treat the converted soldiers who dropped in wanting to share the Eucharist with them? We have little evidence one way or another, but the sparseness of the evidence is crucial. How can we conclude anything about "what all Christians thought and did" when we are relying on tiny fragments of extant evidence?9

My argument does not bear the same burden as Yoder's. Yoder is correct only if he can prove a high degree of early Christian consensus in favor of pacifism. My argument, fortunately, does not have to leap such a high bar. If I can demonstrate that the evidence shows that the pre-Constantinian church uniformly acknowledged the legitimacy of Christian participation in the military, then of course I have shown that there was not a shift of the sort that Yoder claims. There may still have been a shift, as one would expect with a professing Christian running the empire and the army, but it would not be the fundamental change that Yoder claims. But I do not have to prove that the early church uniformly acknowledged the legitimacy of war and violence to make my case. I have to prove only diversity or ambiguity. If the church was not united on these issues prior to the "Constantinian shift," then it is possible that the church after Constantine took up one thread of earlier teaching, the thread that seemed most relevant to its changed political circumstances. Again, this would be a shift, but it would have been an internal shift of emphasis as the church applied Christ's teaching with a new set of responsibilities, rather than a fall from grace. That is not only possible but, I will argue, precisely what happened.'°

Yoder's argument depends on drama, the drama of a fall from a primitive pacific paradise. To prove that a shift happened, Yoder has to find a starting point-a first act when Christians were exclusively or predominantly anti military pacifists-and then show that at some later time they no longer were pacifists. Can he do that? The answer is, unequivocally, no.

BEFORE CONSTANTINE

Christians are called to manifest and pursue the peace of Christ, and for some early Christian writers this quite directly implied that public life and particularly martial life was off limits. Athenagoras said that Christians never "strike back, do not go to law when robbed; they give to them that ask of them and love their neighbors as themselves.""
Tertullian (ca. 160-ca. 220) did not remain consistent over his career. As we will see in the next chapter, early in his career he articulated a theory of empire that anticipated Eusebius, yet even in the pre-Montanist Apology he argued that Christians have put to death "all ardour in the pursuit of glory and honour" and thus "have no pressing inducement to take part in your public meetings." In fact, nothing is "more entirely foreign to us than affairs of state" (nec ulla magis res aliena, quam publica).12
Origen admitted that public coercion and violence provide goods but found in this no endorsement of political power as such. A criminal might be condemned to "public works useful to the community" while in fact "he himself was engaged in an abominable task, in which no one possessed of moderate understanding would wish to be engaged." Wicked rulers too "contribute to the good of the whole, while in themselves they will be among the vile," but that is no argument for joining them.l3

Participation of Christians in the Roman military, however, is more difficult to judge. The New Testament includes accounts of converted centurions (Matthew 8:1-13; perhaps Matthew 27:54 and Mark 15:39; Acts 10-11) and soldiers who sought baptism from John (Luke 3:14). It was part of Jesus' anti-Zealot program to minister to representatives of the Roman establishment, including tax collectors and soldiers. After the New Testament, we have no evidence whatever prior to 170-180.14
The total absence of evidence is important. Between the New Testament, where we have explicit evidence of Christians in the Roman military, and the latter part of the second century, we hear nothing about Christian soldiers. We could bridge this gap of silence by saying that after the events chronicled in the book of Acts no soldiers converted and no Christians entered the military; or we could bridge the gap by assuming that the pattern we find in the Gospels and Acts continued until new evidence emerges. One option receives as much support from the nonevidence as the other. I happen to think that one way of bridging the gap is more plausible than the other, but the only thing we can conclude with certainty is that we do not know whether the church of the first two centuries was pacifist in practice. Because we do not know about the practice of the church, we cannot really know about its convictions. The few writers whose works are preserved from the early centuries speak against Christian participation, but do their convictions match the view of the majority of Christians? What were local pastors saying? We simply cannot know.

After the mid-second century, there is a good deal of evidence for Christians in the army. From Celsus's charge that Christians would leave the emperor and empire defenseless we can infer that he knew of no Christians in the Roman military."
But by the latter decades of the century, we know for sure. When Marcus Aurelius was fighting Germans and Sarmatians in the late second century, the army ran out of water. Christian soldiers "kneeled on the ground" to pray, and soon "lightning drove the enemy to flight and destruction, but a shower refreshed the army of those who had called on God
.1116 A handful of pre-Constantinian tomb inscrip
tions for Christian soldiers survive, which not only show that there were Christians in the Roman army but "prove that the Christian communities where these men were buried did not prohibit the recording of the military profession upon their tombs."17
Regional variations were important. Opposition to military service was most prevalent in the safe "interior of the Pax Romana and [was] less prevalent in the frontier provinces menaced by the barbarians." The exception to this generalization was Rome, where the church was more accommodating to military service than elsewhere. The Hellenistic East, with its base in Alexandria, was the most rigidly opposed to military service.18

Tertullian provides direct and indirect evidence of Christian participation in the army by the early third century. His treatise on the military crown was inspired by an account of a military martyrdom.'9
And in his early Apology, in response to the charge that Christians hold themselves aloof from the rest of humanity, Tertullian argued that Christians, though "but of yesterday," are still everywhere: "cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum." Immediately he added, "For what wars should we not be fit, not eager, even with unequal forces, we who so willingly yield ourselves to the sword, if in our religion it were not counted better to be slain than to slay?" But the previous statement indicates that not all Christians avoided military service. Tertullian's Latin is "urbes, insulae, castella, municipia, concili- abula, castra ipsa, tribus, decurias, palatium, senatum, forum," and two of these terms-castella and castra-refer to military bases or fortresses.20
Tertullian added the emphatic ipsa to castra; "even in military camps" captures the sense and suggests that the charge about Christian unsociability focused on their unwillingness to fight for the emperor.21
The fact that Tertullian used this as part of a defense of Christianity indicates that he did not object, at that stage of his career, to some level of participation in the army.

The sheer intensity of some of Tertullian's later opposition to military
service indicates that he was dealing with real Christians who were really entering military service. "To begin with," he wrote in his treatise on the military corona, "I think we must first inquire whether warfare is proper at all for Christians." His answer was no, but the negative answer had to be argued. That some Christians had been willing to take the sacramentum is evident from his impassioned, "Do we believe it lawful for a human oath to be superadded to one divine, for a man to come under promise to another master after Christ, and to abjure father, mother, and all nearest kinsfolk, whom even the law has commanded us to honor and love next to God Himself?" If Christians are forbidden to take suits to court, "shall the son of peace take part in the battle?" If Christians are not to avenge their own wrongs, "shall he apply the chain, and the prison, and the torture, and the punishment?" How can a Christian guard temples, protect demons in the process, carry a flag or obey orders from the emperor? "Shall he be disturbed in death by the trumpet of the trumpeter, who expects to be aroused by the angel's trump? And shall the Christian be burned according to camp rule, when he was not permitted to burn incense to an idol, when to him Christ remitted the punishment of fire?" According to Tertullian, "many other offences there are involved in the performances of camp offices," but this should be sufficient to keep Christians far away.22
What is the point of all this rhetorical fervor unless some Christians were answering yes? Far from providing evidence for a universally pacifist church, Tertullian's antimilitary writings demonstrate "a divergence in Christian opinion and practice" by his time.23

Tertullian was reacting to the way many Christians responded to significant changes in the reputation and work of the Roman military. During the imperial reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla, power was shifting from the Senate to the military. Severus's deathbed advice to his sons, Geta and Caracalla, was probably legendary, but it captures the shifting balance of power: "Agree, enrich the soldiers and you can despise everybody else." Military settlements were established throughout the empire, soldiers at the frontier were given land of their own, and many of the soldiers settled down to a life of local service rather than campaigning. Marriage rules for soldiers were made more regular, and "families were
allowed to live within the camp precincts."24
As the empire became militarized, the military became civilianized. With military life becoming more settled, it became an increasingly attractive life for Christians, a development that alarmed Tertullian. This, Stephen Gero has argued, accounts for the striking shift in his writings on the army. When fewer Christians were in the military, Tertullian happily used their participation to score apologetic points; when Christians began clamoring to enter the army, he sternly warned about the evils of military service.

By the early fourth century Christian participation in the army was widespread, though participation in the army did not entail unquestioning obedience. Some of the Christians in the Roman military became martyrs. St. Sebastian is one of the best-known icons in Western art. Mantegna gave us a sculpted classical figure, arms and feet tied to a column in the ruins of a temple, looking mournfully to heaven as arrows protrude from his torso and legs. Carlo Saraceni's seventeenth-century depiction is softer, more clinical, as the figure reclines like an eroticized pieta with a single arrow that has penetrated near his groin. George de la Tour depicts a later part of the story, when the dead martyr is discovered to be alive by St. Irene. In all paintings the pincushion saint is nearly naked, clothed only in a loincloth, a sign both of his identification with Christ and of his renunciation of his military calling.25