Part II of a Series based on a Paper Given at the 11/06 ETS
What about Constantine? Why is this Roman Emperor dragged into modern debate by writers like Cornel West?
Constantine was the Emperor who ended the official Roman persecution of the Church and favored Christianity in his public acts. While he did not make Christianity the state religion, he sponsored many Churches and encouraged others (such as his mother Helen) to build and endow many Christian institutions. Christianity had been growing for centuries and acquiring wealth, philosophical skill, and power. Sometimes this power was used well and sometimes badly, but Constantine marked the official acknowledgement by the Empire that Christianity had triumphed over persecution. Oddly, modern Christians such as West view this triumph in wholly negative terms.
Much of the early Christian picture of Constantine comes from Eusebius, rightly criticized as overly sanguine about the short-comings of the Emperor. It is uncertain that Constantine was personally a Christian, like all Emperors of his time he was ruthless and cruel, and his patronage of the Church proved to be a mixed blessing.
Yet Eusebius says of him at the end of his magisterial History of the Church:
His adversary thus finally thrown down, the mighty victor Constantine, pre-eminent in every virtue that true religion can confer, with his son Crispus, an emperor most dear to God an in every way resembling his father, won back their own eastern lands and reunited the Roman Empire into a single whole, bringing it all under their peaceful sway, in a wise circle embracing north and south alike from the east to the farthest west. Men had now lost all fear of their former oppressors, day after day they kept dazzling festival; light was everywhere, and men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes. They danced and sang in the city and country alike, giving honor first of all to God our Sovereign Lord, as they had been instructed, and to the pious emperor with his sons, so dear to God. Old troubles were forgotten, and all irreligious passed into oblivion, good things present were enjoyed, those yet to come eagerly awaited. In every city the victorious emperor published decrees full of humanity and laws that gave proof of munificence and true piety. Thus all tyranny had been purged away, and the kingdom that was theirs was preserved securely, and without question for Constantine and his sons alone. They, having made it their first task to wipe the world clean from hatred of God, rejoiced in the blessings that He had conferred upon them, and by the things they did for all men to see, displayed love of virtue and love of God, devotion and thankfulness to the Almighty.
Acknowledging this as gross flattery and even admitting all of Constantine’s defects as a ruler and Christian, it is still easy to see that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction in the middlebrow mind. Often one hears nothing of Constantine’s great merit as a ruler and only of his vices. There is no sensitivity to the rhetorical style of Eusebius day, given to flourishes, and only condemnation. Too often moderns replace naïve cheer leading for Constantine on the part of Eusebius with naïve cheer leading for the pre-Constantinian Church.
Constantine becomes the catch all for anything about the Church that the writer does not like. Constantine is blamed for “infiltration” of false pagan ideas into the Church. As the Gnostic gospels remind any Christian, the Church did not need Constantine to practice syncretism. Constantine is even “blamed” for things he did not do, such as making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. More appropriate is the qualified praise by Augustine of Constantine in City of God.
Constantine was after all only one of the founders of Christendom as the Church moved from the heroic days of the martyrs into power. Short of Christ return or missionary failure, nobody has ever suggested how such a change could have been avoided. Augustine, Boethius, and John Chrysostom were also important in the transition, but Constantine is used as a “devil figure” and the complex interactions between Church and Emperor are simplified. The Byzantine or Eastern Roman Emperors did not simply seize control of the Church and Constantine certainly did not tell Church councils what to decide. Since Constantine came first in working out the relationship between Empire and Church he made many mistakes. However, to pretend that the modern “religious right” is merely repeating his errors is grossly unfair. It is as if Anglicanism could be dismissed simply through historical association with Henry VIII as Henry-ism without examining other seminal figures (such as Cranmer) and the evolution of the movement from Henry’s time.
Constantine was a very great ruler after all. Bluntly, Constantine saved much of Greco-Roman culture from destruction. For example, most of Plato and classical thought would have been lost if a stalwart Eastern Empire had not kept alive such writings for one thousand years. The Roman Empire was failing and by radical surgery Constantine cut off the parts of the West dragging down the state and saved the Eastern half. Rome in that period was very imperfect, but her rule was greatly preferable in almost every way to the lawlessness and barbarism that descended when her rule ended. If Constantine had done nothing else but found Constantinople, the bulwark of the West, he would be a memorable monarch.
Constantine ended the persecution of the Church and the destruction of precious documents at just the right time. Persecution did not rid the Church of schism, cowardice, place seeking, or heresy. Simony, after all, got its name in the Age of the Apostles. Usually the argument is that Constantine sped up the process of “corrupting the pure Church” by giving it access to even more wealth and power, but this is an assumption without evidence. Though it seems true (on its face) that one cannot be tempted with wealth one does not have, anyone growing up around poverty understands that counter-intuitively the poor in the West (most of whom are not poor by ancient standards) are obsessed with the trappings of wealth. Coveting is, after all, a sin.
Constant persecution and an oppositional state are not always good for the Church. Sometimes the blood of the martyrs is the end of the Church. Persecution essentially wiped out the Church in Japan and Arabia while severely limiting it in early China. Second class status over centuries brought blessings but also severe problems, including an inability to practice missions to previously zealous Christian communities in the Middle East when placed under Islamic rule.
Constantine laid the foundation for a state that protected the freedom of Western Europe. The Eastern Roman Empire maintained a secular university tradition when most of the rest of the Mediterranean world had forgotten such things. The Eastern Empire brought Christianity and Christian civilization (including written language and the Bible) to large parts of the globe.
If Constantine is to be blamed for his errors, then he must also be given credit for his wisdom. If his rule is to serve as the paradigm of what Christians should not do because of the errors, then the critic must explain how the benefits could have been gained without the man. Do critics of Constantine indulge in historic utopianism willing only to accept divine greatness and not allow for great accomplishments from fallible human leaders? When the religious right is accused of “Constantinianism” they can only hope that their own fumbling attempts to work out a church-state relationship in the modern world will transmit modern knowledge one thousand years into the future saving their dying state, construct one of the world’s great cities, provide a place where world class art is produced, develop Creeds as philosophically interesting as Nicaea, and protect the world for centuries from barbarians and militant forms of Islam.
Next: Cornel West Goes Wrong. . .