Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (11 page)
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Authors: Peter J. Leithart
Tags: #Non-Fiction
Pagan signs continued to appear on Constantine's coins and other depictions, but he added explicitly Christian symbols like the Chi-Rho and the cross, and these symbols gradually replaced the pagan signs.25
When he did employ pagan religious symbolism, it was typically monotheistic symbolism associated with Sol/Apollo, but even these were removed from Constantine's coins between 318 and 321, before he conquered the Eastern empire.26
Pagan symbolism never completely disappeared from Constantine's propaganda, and the monotheistic symbol of Sol continued to play double duty, but pagan significations receded. Far from being central to the imagery of his empire, they were reduced to symbols, still potent, but metaphors rather than realities.27
Like the inscription on the arch, the inscriptions, panegyrics, and iconography adopted after 312 were ambiguous enough to be acceptable to both pagans and Christians. God was described as "the highest divinity" (summa divinitas) and "whatever divinity in the seat of heaven" (quicquid divinitatis in sede caelesti).28
Ambiguity was more than fence-sitting. In a world where Diocletian had recently identified himself unambiguously with Jupiter, and where the Western Emperors were known as Heracleans, Constantine's refusal to use those titles and that imagery marks a new course. The Senate and panegyrists were not sure what divinity Constantine had contact with, but they avoided calling him Jupiter.
To those who consider such evidence trivial, Andreas Alfoldi wisely remarks:
CROSS IN THE SKY
The objective, visual and tangible evidence is this: Prior to 312, Constantine's coinage and military standard honored pagan gods, particularly Sol or Apollo. After 312, he adopted a Christian standard and military insignia and put Christian symbols on his coins, which gradually replaced pagan signs. Something happened in between. Constantine said he changed because he received a sign from the Christian God. Was that true?
I believe the answer is yes. Peter Weiss has offered a convincing account of Constantine's conversion and its aftermath that merges the two contemporary versions of the story and illuminates a great deal about Constantine's entire career.30
The two versions refer, Weiss says, to two differ
ent incidents. Eusebius's was a public vision, witnessed by both Constantine and his men while the army was marching "somewhere." This probably occurred in Gaul in 310, two years prior to the battle of Milvian Bridge, at the time when other evidence indicates that Constantine began to devote himself to the invincible sun god, Sol invictus.31
Constantine kept the vision in the back of his mind for some time, pondering what it could mean. On the eve of the crucial battle with Maxentius, he had a dream. When he discussed the dream with some Christians in his entourage, they told him that Christ had appeared, and they gave him a Christian interpretation of the sign he had witnessed two years before.
Weiss makes a convincing case that the sign was not the flying scroll32
envisaged by Raphael, Rubens and the popular imagination, but a sun halo, a circular rainbow formed when ice crystals in the atmosphere refract sunlight. In a sun halo, the sun is at the center of the circle and often radiates beams in a cross or asterisk shape.33
In 310, Weiss concludes, "Constantine, with his army, unexpectedly witnessed a complex halo-phenomenon. He saw a double-ring halo, each ring with three mock suns arranged in cross-formation around the sun, tangent arcs or points of intersection with the circle, presumably with a more or less distinct light-cross in the middle. He saw it in the spring and in the afternoon, which is when the phenomenon mainly occurs."34
A cross of light in the sky, encircled by a "crown"-for fourth-century Christians, how can that be anything other than a sign of conquest by the cross?
Weiss's scenario explains a great deal about Constantine's subsequent career and faith: his recurrent use of light and sun imagery, his tendency to use solar imagery when referring to Christ and to merge Christ with Sol the sun god, his sense of divine commission and his confidence of success, his devotion to the cross as a sign of victory and kingship, and the iconog
raphy of the sun that appears on Constantine's constructions and those of his heirs.3s
If David Petraeus had recommended a surge in Iraq based on an eclipse or a sign in the heavens, he would have been forced into psychiatric treatment, followed by early retirement. Constantine, though, was a fourthcentury Roman who, like everyone else in his time, believed that the gods guided humanity with signs and portents. He saw something, something he interpreted as a sign that committing himself to the God of the Christians would give him victory.
CONSTANTINE THE CHRISTIAN?
Constantine's conversion is one aspect of the "question of Constantine." A bigger and more important question is whether this experience, whatever it was, had an effect on his personal and political conduct. After he defeated Maxentius, did he conduct himself like a Christian? Was his conversion a real conversion?
Modern historians, as H. A. Drake points out, often project the very modern notions of conversion found in William James and Arthur Darby Nock back into the fourth century and expect Constantine to experience what Nock, in one of his most striking phrases, called the "clean and beautiful newness" of a spiritual epiphany.36
Perhaps Constantine did, but the more important question is whether this is the right model of conversion to apply to a fourth-century Roman commander. Though later writers, and perhaps Constantine himself, saw parallels between the emperor's vision and Paul's Damascus Road experience, it is clear that the two experiences were quite different and had different effects.
Modern conceptions of conversion often assume a dichotomy of political and religious spheres that is foreign to the fourth century. There is no reason to deny that Constantine's vision was a political as well as a spiritual epiphany. As Drake puts it, "Three and a half centuries earlier, under similar pressure to find a more stable counterweight for the heavy reliance he had heretofore placed on the army to support his claim to rule, the first Augustus had turned instinctively to the Senate. In the new climate of the
late empire, Constantine turned equally instinctively to the heavens."37
Constantine knew that his position in the empire depended on his highly competent, highly successful armies. He also knew, from Diocletian not least of all, that sheer brute force was an insufficient basis for political order. He also knew that the empire faced a "Christian problem," and he had witnessed the failure of Diocletian's attempt to solve it. The Christian interpretation of the sun halo cut the political knot. From 312 on, Constantine had both a personal calling and mission and, inseparably, a political program. It is no contradiction to say both that God called Constantine and that he "emerges as one of several talented and ambitious players seeking a formula to reconcile the imperial need for religious justification with the refusal of Christians to pay divine honors to any other deity."31
Constantine had discovered a way to solve the Christian problem. Not only would he cease to persecute, but he would actively promote the church. It was not only good politics; the God of the Christians, Constantine believed, had given him a sign that this was the right thing to do.
We can never uncover exactly what Constantine experienced in 310 and 312. But we do not have to. More important for assessing Constantine's sincerity is the question of Constantine's words and actions following 312. Did he talk like a Christian after his conversion? Did he act like one?
Zosimus certainly did not think so. He characterized the emperor as untrustworthy in alliances, addicted to luxury, wasteful in finance, and destructive of the empire's security.39
Zosimus's analysis influenced Voltaire, who wrote his Philosophical Dictionary that Constantine was a "scoundrel," not to mention "a parricide who smothered his wife in a bath, butchered his son, assassinated his father-in-law, his brother-in-law, and his nephew," "a man bloated with pride and immersed in pleasures," as well as a "detestable tyrant, like his children." But Voltaire recognized that Constantine could not have achieved the heights he did without some good sense, which he manifested in a "belligerent letter" to Arius and Alexander of Alexandria, urging them to give up the "trifling matter" of their quarrel concerning the divinity of the Son.40
Burckhardt thought Constantine a
"genius" and did not begrudge the traditional title "the Great," but argued that Constantine was "driven without surcease by ambition and lust for power." He was a "murderous egoist who possessed the great merit of having conceived of Christianity as a world power." His only concern was success, though he may have had a "superstition" in favor of Christ.41
James Carroll likewise claims that Constantine was "infinitely shrewd" for making use of the Christian church as he did.42
Edward Gibbon aimed at providing a "balanced portrait" that combined the virtues celebrated by Constantine's promoters with the vices decried by his detractors, but Gibbon ended up with a schizophrenic Constantine whose early greatness trailed off into elderly sensuality. Gibbon gives us a young Eusebian Constantine and an old Zosimian one.
Bits and pieces of the pagan and post-Enlightenment assessment of Constantine's Christianity are commonly invoked among contemporary theologians, evidence that prejudice against Constantine crosses the cultural spectrum from popular novelists to sophisticated theologians. Theo
logian Craig Carter is certainly no Dan Brown, but he is nearly as hostile to the first Christian emperor and gives nearly as distorted an account of Constantine's career. Carter argues that Constantine's support of the church had nothing to do with his real convictions, since it was a rational policy decision. More damningly, Carter claims that Constantine never really promoted Christian faith per se but adhered to and supported a synthetic monotheism that could hold Christians and pagans together in a single empire. He "never had much to say about Jesus," Carter claims.44
CONSTANTINE IN HIS OWN WORDS
I beg to differ. Constantine's own writings reveal, in my judgment, a seriously Christian ruler.41
Constantine does not display the polemic acuity of an Athanasius or the subtlety of a Gregory of Nyssa, but that is not surprising given his background and vocation. Still, he was not so ignorant as many have claimed. According to Eusebius, he was educated in the liberal arts,46
a claim that is consistent with his presence in the court of Diocletian as a young man, a court where philosophers were welcome. After 312, Eusebius informs us, Constantine became a student of the Scriptures, listening to the doctors and spending long hours in study and reading.47
One simple conviction was central to Constantine's beliefs: the Christian God was the heavenly Judge who, in history, opposes those who oppose him. He believed that God destroys those who destroy his temple. Convinced of Lactantius's arguments concerning God's vengeance on emperors who persecuted the church, he feared arousing that wrath.48
Lactantius, who wrote a history of the persecutions based on this conviction, was no simpleton. Known as "the Christian Cicero," he was the first Christian to write polished Latin, the first to write a "systematic theology" in the Divine Institutes, and the holder of an imperial post in rhetoric in Nicomedia. Yet he shared Constantine's conviction that God frustrates enemies of the church and blesses those who defend, befriend and support it. Eusebius adhered to the same conviction. It was an essential part of the theology of the martyr church, one of the bases for their utter confidence that someday their blood would be avenged.
Constantine also worried that the church would destroy itself, that the attacks on God's temple would come from God's own priests. As soon as he secured control of the Western empire and decreed that the Christian church would be tolerated alongside paganism, Constantine was greeted with appeals from the Donatists, who wanted him to intervene to solve the crisis in North Africa. No sooner had he secured the Eastern empire by defeating Licinius (324) than the Arian controversy broke out. Fierce controversies in the church grieved Constantine for several reasons. One of the reasons was certainly political. Constantine was a formidable politician'49
and his letters reveal an emperor who, unsurprisingly, was interested in gaining and maintaining power, preserving the unity and health of the empire, and determining how the church fit into his political aims. Constantine believed that a unified church was essential to the health of the empire. Like Diocletian, he continued to think of religion in political terms: as the old priesthoods kept the gods propitious, so the ministry of the priests and bishops would keep the Christian God from becoming displeased with Constantine.50