Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy

A. Edward Siecienski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351976114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy brings together some of the English-speaking world's leading Constantinian scholars for an interdisciplinary study of the life and legacy of the first Christian emperor. For many, he remains a "sign of contradiction" (Luke 2: 34) whose life and legacy generate intense debate. He was the first Christian emperor, protector of the Church, and eventually remembered as "equal to the apostles" for bringing about the Christianization of the Empire. Yet there is another side to Constantine's legacy, one that was often neglected by his Christian hagiographers. Some modern scholars have questioned the orthodoxy of the so-called model Christian emperor, while others have doubted the sincerity of his Christian commitment, viewing his embrace of the faith as merely a means to a political end.

Drawing together papers presented at the 2013 symposium at Stockton University commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan, this volume examines the very questions that have for so long occupied historians, classicists, and theologians. The papers in this volume prove once again that Constantine is not so much a figure from the remote past, but an individual whose legacy continues to shape our present.

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Part I

Debates

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1 Constantine and religious extremism^*

H. A. Drake

The art historian Ernst Gombrich once observed that artists do not learn to draw from nature, they learn to draw from other artists; in his words, “Art is born of art—not of nature.”¹ What he meant by that remark was that the way artists see what they paint is influenced by the techniques of perspective, composition, and lighting that they learned by studying the styles and mechanisms developed in their cultural tradition. “What painter,” he asks, “ever learned to represent everything that exists in nature? . . . [H]is representation of ‘everything that exists in nature’ will still be linked with those representations that were handed on to him by his teachers.”² Gombrich used this observation to analyze that indefinable something called style and to call into question our use of such terms as natural and realistic. The resulting book is a virtuoso tour of the history of art through topics as varied as optics, psychology, and psychoanalysis.

In citing Gombrich’s oft-quoted dictum, I have no such grandiose aims. The point I want to make is that what holds for artists is true for other professions as well, and especially true for the study of history. A question gets posed in some seminal work—usually it is an either-or proposition—and then future generations of historians proceed to study the issue through the lens of that question. Nobody starts from scratch. In this chapter, I want to apply this insight to what might be called “the Constantine question.” For about two centuries, the Constantine question has been, “Was he sincerely converted to Christianity?” What I am going to argue is that this is the wrong question.

This “Constantine question” has been argued for about as long as the modern profession of history has existed. It is an argument primarily associated with the name of the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, lashed out at the long-established image of a saintly Constantine. What drove this emperor, he concluded, was power. Constantine’s genius was to grasp the potential the Christian Church offered for his plan to seize sole control of the Roman Empire; that, and that alone, is what motivated him. For an individual such as this, Burckhardt concluded, it is simply irrelevant to talk about religious faith. “In a genius driven without surcease by ambition and lust for power there can be no question of Christianity and paganism, of conscious religiosity or irreligiosity; such a man is essentially unreligious, even if he pictures himself standing in the midst of a churchly community.”³

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It is in the nature of scholarship that a strong thesis like this one will eventually provoke an equally strong reaction. In this response, Constantine appeared as a simple soldier, in over his head. His conversion to Christianity resulted from a primitive test of battle gods and turned him into a pawn for the interests of a newly worldly Church triumphant, as illustrated in a famous panel from a series of frescos celebrating the papacy of St. Sylvester in Rome, where Constantine obediently holds the reins for a firmly saddled pontiff. The fresco illustrates the roughly contemporary forgery of the “Donation of Constantine,” used by the Medieval papacy to substantiate its claim to hegemony over the lands of the former Roman Empire in the west.⁴ There are many variants to this story, but probably its most famous exponent was the English Byzantinist Norman Baynes, who argued in the 1930s that Constantine’s reign “was based upon the conviction of a mission in the service of the Christian God.”⁵ In his seminal Constantine and the Christian Church, Baynes asserted that “the emperor’s consistent aim was the triumph of Christianity and the union of the Roman state with the Christian Church.”⁶

Despite enormous advances in scholarship on the age of Constantine since the 1930s, this question of Constantine’s motivation remains heavily polarized around the question of “sincerity.” An English translation of Burckhardt’s book is still in print, and his view of a politician who manipulated religion to achieve power seems to the general public to reflect life as we know it. To specialists, however, it is clear that Burckhardt projected nineteenth-century views of the Great Man—and a touch of what would become the Nietzschean Superman—onto an age where this kind of political thinking simply does not apply. This is such a fundamental error for a historian to make that as a result, Burckhardt’s shadow falls over any scholars who looks for answers to Constantine’s motives and intentions in what today we would call the political realm.

I am one of those scholars. So, to avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to say at the outset that I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. What I do hope to demonstrate is that when we ask about the sincerity of Constantine’s conversion, we are simply asking the wrong question.

There are two reasons for this proposition. The first is that sincerity of belief is not really a political question; it requires us to open a window into the subject’s heart, to paraphrase the policy attributed to Elizabeth I, an operation that a historian should be disinclined to perform on any politician alive today, despite the vastly greater amount of documentation that is available to our age, much less for anyone in antiquity.⁷ Belief is a “spiritual” or maybe a “theological” question. It has its roots in the Protestant Reformation, which placed a premium on personal conviction and launched the debate over Constantine’s sincerity. By asking it, Burckhardt was still pursuing a theological question, even if his answer was intensely secular.⁸ Second, the test of Constantine’s sincerity has been based on a one-dimensional concept of what constitutes sincere Christian behavior. To put it simply, it is based on the notion that the refusal of Christians to recognize other gods makes Christians intolerant. Consequently, if Constantine demonstrated intolerance with regard to other religions, then he was sincere; if, conversely, he showed himself to be tolerant, then he was not.

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The underlying premise of what might be called the conflict school of Christian-pagan relations that prevailed in the 1950s and the 1960s is that there was only one kind of Christian around in Constantine’s day, and that type of Christian was invariably militant and intransigent, as well as intolerant. In this view, Christians and pagans were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, from which there could be only one clear victor. The last half-century has produced a flood of new scholarship challenging the idea of a monolithic Christianity that has opened our eyes to a variety of Christian positions, most particularly of the Christians who took what might be called an irenic, or peace-loving, stance, arguing that all Christians wanted was to be allowed to worship their own god in their own way. This new scholarship has changed what used to be a black-and-white landscape of Christians versus pagans into one rich with varied hues of thought. As Peter Brown has put it so delightfully, this was a world of pastels, not hard oils.⁹

For present purposes, what this new understanding means is that Constantine had options. In light of this changed environment, it makes no sense to use intolerance as the touchstone for Constantine’s sincerity. What we need to be asking is, what kind of Christian did Constantine become?

Again, for the sake of clarity, I am not trying to deny that militant and intolerant Christians existed or that once they gained access to the levers of power, Christians discovered they rather liked being able to push other people around. Nor am I trying to deny a millennium and a half of increasingly bloody religious wars fought in the name of a god of peace.¹⁰ What I am trying to say is that if we want to judge Constantine, rather than the effect of Constantine, we have to stop applying theological tools to what is at its core a political problem.

A much better way to conduct this inquiry would be to treat it as an issue of public policy, instead of theology. The “public sphere” is a modern concept, and a case can be made for saying there was no such thing in the pre-modern world.¹¹ But to say policy did not receive a public airing is not to say that there was no such thing as public policy. Ancient rulers may not have articulated and conducted policy the same way rulers do today, and, often enough, their policy amounted to little more than doing things the way they had always been done. But in periods of momentous change, such as occurred in the early fourth century, the policy underlying such decisions as Diocletian’s Great Persecution or Constantine’s adoption of Christianity can be isolated and studied without positing the existence of an ancient New York Times and without the religious polemic in which they have traditionally been enmeshed. All that is needed is a simple set of policy questions:¹²

1 What was the issue?

2 How did contemporaries perceive and define the issue?

3 What obstacles stood in the way of resolving the issue?

4 What tools were available for resolving the issue?

These are actually the same questions historians implicitly ask; a public policy approach keeps them in the foreground, which makes it easier to avoid some common mistakes. As an example, we can take the famous account of Constantine’s Vision of the Cross written by Eusebius of Caesarea in his essay on the Life of Constantine (De Vita Constantini, hereafter VC) shortly after the emperor’s death in 337.¹³ Constantine was in Gaul, having been made emperor by his late father’s troops. There he contemplated the persecution—what Eusebius calls “tyrannous oppression”—when he asked himself the fourth-century version of that famous question “If not me, who; if not now, when?” Realizing he needed divine support, he prayed for help from a god who would be stronger than the idols and magic tricks of his enemies, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Tom Papademetriou
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Debates
• Part II Historiography
• Part III Legacy
• Index