Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (19 page)

As usual, Yoder is aware of antecedents. Conflicts between Christians and Jews in the New Testament were, he argues, intramural conflicts within Judaism, and he acknowledges that the pre-Constantinian Christians were virulently hostile to Jews. Christian writers prior to Constantine already claimed that the Jews' status as people of God had been revoked, often pointing gleefully to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem as proof of God's abandonment. Christians prior to Constantine were, moreover, often flirting with a de-Judaized form of Christianity. Though he wrote in reply to Marcion, Tertullian repudiated the carnality of the Old Testament, its sacrifices and circumcisions, almost as vigorously as did his opponent.27
Origen believed that Old Testament sacrificial law was a test; God never wanted the Jews actually to offer animals. Faustus the Manichaean hit his target when he noted how "daintily" the Catholics sipped from the Old Testament.21

Yet it was one of Yoder's main "Constantinian" theologians, Augustine, who stemmed the tide. Augustine's sermons are nearly as full of the themes of adversus Iudaeos as those of any church father,29
but after working through his "literal" commentary on Genesis and formulating a response to Faustus, he came to a quite different position.30
Crucially, he affirmed that the sacrifices and rites of the Old Testament were commanded by God and, moreover, that precisely by putting the law into bodily practice, the Jews became fitting types of the coming Lord. Their dignity in salvation history depended on obedience to what earlier Christians had dismissed as "carnal" law. God told them to sacrifice, and when they did, they foreshadowed the passion of the incarnate Son. It was a brilliant maneuver, striking down the anti-incarnational and anti-Jewish elements of Faustus's theology at a single blow while simultaneously correcting the soft Marcionism of Catholics by binding Old and New unbreakably together.31

Augustine's pro Torah and pro Jewish theology had direct policy implications. The Jews' complicity in the death of Jesus was foreshadowed by Cain's slaughter of righteous Abel, but Augustine insisted on following the story through to the end. Just as Cain received a mark that protected him from vengeance for his fratricide, so the Jews had been marked for protection and given a promise of perpetuity to the eschaton. "Slay them not," Augustine warned, and even when he crowed about the destruction of pagan altars and defended the forcible suppression of Donatists, he never wavered in his opposition to persecution of Jews.32

Through Augustine, Western theology inherited a large theological problem that never went away, even to the present, the problem of relating Old to New. Medieval theologians differed about how to relate the sacraments of the "Old Law" to the Christian rites, and the Lutheran and Reformed gave different answers still. No one in the mainstream of the tradition, however, believed, as some early fathers had suggested, that the Old could simply be ignored or condemned as unworthy of God. Marcion made a comeback, but that was much later, in the modern period.

I do not suggest any causal relation. I only note the fact: contrary to Yoder, Christian theology was re Judaized in the century following Constantine.

NEW JERUSALEM

Though Jews like pagans were granted "limited toleration" in Constantine's empire,33
they were, also like pagans, living in a public environment that was increasingly Christian. Again, architecture provides a helpful gauge of the situation, particularly Constantine's architectural efforts in Palestine and Jerusalem. Memories and remnants of the ancient Jewish Jerusalem had been so thoroughly buried by the Hadrianic-era Roman city that replaced it, known as Aelia Capitolina, that Roman officials thought Christians who identified their home as Jerusalem were referring to a secret Christian military base in the east.34
There is no overt evidence that Constantine's project to erect a "new Jerusalem" on the ruins of the old was motivated by an anti-Jewish agenda. Like his building projects that used pagan spolia or basilica forms for churches, however, Constantine's buildings in Jerusalem advanced his Christianization of public space, a triumph over the old world by their erection on space once claimed by Jews. By building grand churches in Jerusalem he rivaled Solomon35
and went some way toward satisfying Christian "temple envy."36
It was perhaps, Eusebius thought, the fulfillment of the prophecies of Ezekiel concerning the restored temple.31
Vetus Israel was giving way to nova Israel.

When the Augusta Helena, Constantine's mother, made her pilgrimage to Palestine, she found the site of the death and resurrection of Jesus encrusted with paganism. To Eusebius, it looked like a deliberate plot to obscure the truth about Jesus:

For it had been in time past the endeavor of impious men (or rather let me say of the whole race of evil spirits through their means), to consign to the darkness of oblivion of that divine monument of immortality to which the radiant angel had descended from heaven, and rolled away the stone for those who still had stony hearts, and who supposed that the living One still lay among the dead; and had declared glad tidings to the women also, and removed their stony-hearted unbelief by the conviction that he whom they sought was alive. This sacred cave,38
then, certain impious and godless persons had thought to remove entirely from the eyes of men, supposing in their folly that thus they should be able effectually to obscure the truth.39

Constantine ordered the site cleared of idolatry, initiated an excavation, and soon discovered the cave in which Jesus had been entombed. Later legend added to this the discovery of the true cross, whose genuineness was confirmed by the fact that its wood brought a boy back from the dead. In those later accounts, Helena was said to have tortured a Jew to discover the whereabouts of the cross-a Jew who later became a bishop.40
Of that there is no word in Eusebius.41

Instead, Eusebius told the story of the sepulcher and of Constantine's decision to erect a magnificent church on the site. Eusebius's description of the church is breathless and not altogether clear, but the overall impression is unmistakable. It had the same massive size and luxurious ornamentation as the other structures Constantine built. Though the original church focused more on Golgotha than on the site of the resurrection, Eusebius was obsessed with the cave:

For at the side opposite to the cave, which was the eastern side, the church itself was erected; a noble work rising to a vast height, and of great extent both in length and breadth. The interior of this structure was floored with
marble slabs of various colors; while the external surface of the walls, which shone with polished stones exactly fitted together, exhibited a degree of splendor in no respect inferior to that of marble. With regard to the roof, it was covered on the outside with lead, as a protection against the rains of winter. But the inner part of the roof, which was finished with sculptured panel work, extended in a series of connected compartments, like a vast sea, over the whole church; and, being overlaid throughout with the purest gold, caused the entire building to glitter as it were with rays of light
.12

The Holy Sepulcher was the place of the theophany of all theophanies, and its church paralleled the design of ancient temples. "It was a place to be set apart, to be enclosed-or, more precisely, one that set itself apart." This was done partly through the erection of "a monumental entrance, a gate of heaven in the sense that in this holy place earth meets heaven and one may pass between." Beyond the gate was an atrium, "a place of preparation for the worshiper, of separation from the world." Another liminal area followed, "the house of prayer which afforded an opportunity for further preparation and a place for congregational worship." Finally, the worshiper "came to the place of the theophany proper. At the Holy Sepulchre there was an inner atrium enclosing another inseparable holy place, the rock of Calvary." Above the site of the resurrection was a dome, "the dome of heaven or of the cosmos which had an oculus at the apex like the Pantheon in Rome. This oculus gave direct access to heaven from the holy place, and the rotunda was the focal point of the whole, structurally and symbolically."a3

Set in Jerusalem, however, the church was more than the center of the city. It was conceived of as the new temple, the umbilicus mundi. "The twelve columns in the hemisphere of the apse symbolized the twelve disciples and the twelve tribes of Israel, and perhaps the columns and pillars of the Holy Sepulchre were echoes of the sacred forest of religious mythology, just as the inner atrium was in fact understood as a sacred garden or paradise."44
Jerusalem was, in imagination if not in administration, the hub of Constantine's Eastern empire, so much so that he celebrated his
tricennalia in Jerusalem rather than in Constantinople.45
Medieval maps that show Jerusalem as the center of the world perpetuated the Constantinian vision.

With the Christianization of the architecture of Jerusalem, the baptism of public space was complete. At the place where ancient sacrifices had been offered, in a building that rivaled the splendor of Solomon, Christians now gathered to offer their bloodless sacrifice of praise.

TOLERATION OR CONCORD?

Given his evident preference for Christianity and his restrictions on paganism, it seems that Constantine was less Lactantian than the "Edict of Milan" suggests. And that creates a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Constantine's religious policy: If religion was a matter of free will, why did Constantine so vigorously oppose paganism in his decrees, letters and speeches, and how could he justify any restrictions on religion at all? If Constantine thought that religion should be free, what was he doing forbidding sacrifice?

Elizabeth Digeser offers terminology and categories that help make sense of Constantine's policies. She distinguishes forbearance from toleration, and tolerance from "concord."46
Forbearance is a pragmatic policy, not guided by moral or political principle. Forbearance might change to persecution if political conditions change. The periods of Roman acceptance of Christianity were periods of forbearance. Toleration is "disapproval or disagreement coupled with an unwillingness to take action against those viewed with disfavor in the interest of some moral or political principle." This principle could arise, as for Lactantius, from a theory concerning the nature of religion, or, alternatively, from a theory about human nature or about the limits of state power. By this definition, toleration does not involve an idea of the equality of all viewpoints but the opposite. Toleration assumes disapproval of certain religious expressions but refrains for principled reasons from using state power to suppress the dis
approved religion. Beyond toleration, Digeser introduces the category of "concord": "(1) its attitude of forbearance is dictated by some moral, political, or even religious principle and (2) it expects that by treating its dissenters with forbearance it is creating conditions under which they will ultimately change their behavior to conform to what the state accepts."47
These three categories of religious policy build on one another: toleration assumes forbearance but is principled; concord assumes toleration, but in addition to basing forbearance on principle, it expects that the forbearance will have the ultimate outcome of unity if not complete uniformity.

Digeser concludes that Constantine remained Lactantian but gradually moved from a policy of toleration to one of concord, especially after his defeat of Licinius in 324. "Constantine's newly disparaging attitude toward some elements of traditional cult," she argues, "marked a move away from a policy of religious liberty-in which traditional cult was not criticized-toward a policy of concord, in which forbearance toward the temple cults was intended as a means of achieving ultimate religious unity."4S
Digeser's argument is persuasive. Constantine's religious policy, expressed in law and architecture, formed a Christianized public that provided limited freedom for paganism while simultaneously pressuring pagans, more or less gently, to embrace the God of Christians, the God of the emperor.

CONSTANTINIAN FREEDOM, LOCKEAN TYRANNY

Historian H. A. Drake exaggerates Constantine's toleration of paganism when he concludes that Constantine embodied Jesus' exhortation to "turn the other cheek" in religious law, but his exaggeration gets at an important truth of Constantine's policy.49
Still, Constantine's religious policies had flaws, some significant. His rhetoric regarding Judaism, if not the specifics of his legislation, created an atmosphere in which Jew-baiting gained imperial approval. Augustine's re Judaizing of the faith was not known to everyone and did not convince everyone who knew of it. Enforcing civil penalties for heretics and schismatics risked compromising the indepen
dence of the church as a holy polity.50
Constantine's policies toward paganism were, as noted above, relatively mild; the main pagan practice he forbade was animal sacrifice, which is illegal even in hypertolerant twentyfirst-century America.

Theoretically, Constantine's policy has much to recommend it. On the one hand, he retained the virtues of toleration. In principle, he treated religion as a matter of choice and conscience, an area free of state meddling. At the same time, he saw this freedom as a time for conversion. He made no pretense of being neutral among religions but both verbally and practically supported the work of the one religion he regarded as true.51
Here, perhaps surprisingly, at one of the main points of criticism of Constantine, we find a policy that Christian political theory might in certain respects honor and emulate.

Constantine's position is certainly more politically and theologically coherent than that offered by many early modern defenders of religious toleration. According to John Locke's "A Letter Concerning Toleration,"52
freedom in religion requires a sharp distinction between religious and civil realms:

The end of a religious society ... is the public worship of God, and, by means thereof, the acquisition of eternal life. All discipline ought, therefore, to tend to that end, and all ecclesiastical laws to be thereunto confined. Nothing ought nor can be transacted in this society relating to the possession of civil and worldly goods. No force is here to be made use of upon any occasion whatsoever. For force belongs wholly to the civil magistrate, and the possession of all outward goods to his jurisdiction.