The first Christian emperor
Written: Aug 04 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Well-researched book on an important topic.
Cons: Limitations of the source material-not all of it is reliable, as the author acknowledges.
The Bottom Line: Constantine did good things for the Church. This book reminds us of this, without glossing over Constantine's bad traits.
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| lilburne's Full Review: T. G. Elliott - The Christianity of Constantine th... |
Back when I was a Protestant, I knew all about Constantine the Great. He was the Roman Emperor who cynically co-opted and destroyed the Christian Church by making it part of the state establishment. The Church, by going along with this action, gave up its pure apostolic simplicity and became corrupt and depraved. It wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation that there was a new opportunity to bring back the original purity of the Church.
The only problem with this way of looking at things is that it is utterly false. As I came to Orthodox Christianity, I learned that the reign of Constantine was certainly an important stage in church history, but not the utter disaster portrayed by Protestant mythmakers. In fact, the Orthodox Church honors Constantine as a saint. Now here comes T. G. Elliott’s book on Constantine, which is, I think, the most recent (1996) attempt to cut through the layers of obfuscation and propaganda and present a fair and balanced portrait of the famous ruler.
Elliott has his work cut out for him. There are many people who wrote about Constantine while he was still alive, or within a short time afterwards. These writers, however, are not necessarily reliable. A bishop named Eusebius, whose see was in Caesarea in Palestine, wrote a life of Constantine as well as a history of the Christian Church. Eusebius has the disadvantage to historians of being a clearly biased source, who fawns over Constantine and presents him as the greatest thing since sliced bread, which is saying a lot when we consider that sliced bread hadn’t been invented yet. Other biased contemporary and near-contemporary sources include a Christian named Socrates (not the hemlock guy) and another Christian writer named Sozumen. There is also Saint Athanasius, the patriarch of Alexandria and a foe of heretics-such a determined foe, Elliott thinks, that he unfairly maligned these heretics and even fabricated documents. Another source Elliott uses is the texts of laws enacted by Constantine, again not an unbiased source.
Whether Elliott manages to take appropriate account of the biases in his sources I do not know. He certainly tries his best to extract the truth from the old sources. I leave it to people with more expertise than I have to say how well Elliott succeeds in getting at the truth. All I can say is that Elliott’s story has a lot of plausibility, and is probably close to what really happened, as far as this can be reconstructed today.
The story Elliott tells is not fully favorable to Constantine, but it’s much more favorable than the Protestant demonization which the emperor has often gotten. Here’s the basic outline of Constantine’s life:
He grew up in what is now England, son of a very powerful man who shared in the government of the Empire. Contrary to traditional stories about Constantine being a sun-worshipping pagan until the middle of his life, Elliott believes that Constantine was brought up as a Christian. Contrary to Constantine’s own later claims that he was just a kid when the persecutor Diocletian was Emperor, Elliott believes that Constantine was a young man at the time. The significance of this is that Diocletian, as part of his attempt to extirpate Christianity, required officials and high-ranking people, Constantine included, to make pagan sacrifices, in order to compel the Christians to give up their religion. At a time when Christian martyrs suffered death rather than make these pagan sacrifices, Constantine (if Elliott’s theory is correct) was among those Christians who made sacrifices. Elliott thinks that this is how Constantine avoided being executed during Diocletian’s Great Persecution, and that Constantine was too proud to do any penance for these actions in order to fully reconcile himself with the Church.
Despite apparently being unwilling to do penance for submitting to paganism, Constantine, in Elliott’s version of events, returned to his Christian faith once it was safe to do so. He ended up being Emperor of the West, commanding troops against the pesky Germans who were threatening the frontiers of the Empire. After fighting a couple of civil wars with the Emperors of the East, Constantine was finally acknowledged as ruler of the entire Empire. It was during this period that Constantine reportedly had his vision of the cross and the divine command, “in this sign conquer.” Elliott is skeptical of the story told by Eusebius that this vision, and the military victory that followed it, convinced Constantine to become a Christian.
In 312 AD, Constantine (with his soon-to-be-defeated co-emperor) issued the Edict of Milan which put an end to the persecution of the Christian Church in the name of paganism. No longer would Christians be ordered to renounce their faith on pain of death. Instead, property which had been taken from the Church would be returned, and Christians and pagans would be left free to follow their respective religions unmolested. Elliott rejects the story that Constantine prohibited pagan sacrifices throughout the empire-such a prohibition must have been made only in the city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul), which was a special case. Constantinople was built on Constantine’s orders as a new capital, in which the inhabitants would be Christians, as befitted a ruler who was Christian.
Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. He sought, within the limitations imposed by political circumstances, to allow true religious freedom. He was himself a Christian, and in his decrees repeatedly discoursed on the wonders of the Christian religion, but no-one was to be forced to join the Christian Church.
This did not stop Constantine from using the Church as an instrument of his policy. Roman law provided for the conscription of wealthy persons to collect Imperial taxes from the people in the person’s community. The kicker was that if the conscripted person couldn’t collect his quota of taxes from his neighbors, he had to pay the difference out of his own pocket. Naturally, then, this was a type of public service which people in the empire shunned. Bishops were, by a decree of Constantine, relieved of this burdensome duty, in order that they might give more attention to their pastoral duties. These pastoral duties often included the relief of the poor, Christian and non-Christian. Constantine encouraged bishops in this charitable work, a foretaste of President Bush’s faith-based-initiative policy.
Constantine also allowed bishops to hear lawsuits, if the defendant didn’t want to risk being screwed in the notoriously-corrupt Roman judicial system. Bishops, Elliott argues, were more likely than regular judges to do justice to the poor. However, if the parties wanted their case tried in the regular judicial system, the bishops weren’t allowed to interfere. Another decree Constantine made was by allowing masters to emancipate their slaves in a ceremony in a Christian church (the law already allowed masters to emancipate their slaves by various other methods). Elliott thinks that Constantine was trying to get people to associate the Church with freedom.
One cluster of problems Constantine had to face involved divisions within the Church. In North Africa there was a group of people called the Donatists. These folks thought that other Church leaders had caved in to the persecutors during the recent persecution. The Donatists established an organization which they claimed to be the pure, unsullied Church. Some of the Donatists, known as Circumcellions, were known to engage in terrorism against supporters of the established church. Constantine, not surprisingly if you accept Elliott’s idea that he had compromised the faith under Diocletian, took sides against the uncompromising Donatists. Constantine didn’t solve the Donatist problem-the Donatists remained a thorn in the side of succeeding Emperors.
The Donatist problem was limited to North Africa. The Arian problem, on the other hand, involved the whole Eastern part of the Empire. Arius was a presbyter (priest) in Alexandria. He was one of many people who had heretical views about the nature of Christ. Arius wasn’t the highest-ranking person with such views, but his opponent Athanasius used to term “Arian” to categorize all those who had the same kind of opinions Arius had. Briefly, Arius said that Christ was not God, and that He was a created being. These radical views were set out in a catchy poem aimed at popularizing this heresy. People like St. Athanasius defended the orthodox position that Christ does not have a beginning, and that He is God.
Elliott thinks that Constantine used clever political tactics to deal with the Arian problem. Constantine summoned a Council of bishops to meet at Nicea and reject Arianism (or at least the extreme version of it). Elliott examines various documents relating to the Arian controversy, concluding that Constantine was not fully candid in his public statements on the issue, but that he was working to promote the unity of the Church. Constantine did not solve the Arian problem-some of his successors tried to force Arianism on the church, but ultimately orthodoxy prevailed.
Constantine didn’t get baptized until just before he died. Traditionally, the explanation has been that Constantine was voluntarily following the example of some other Christians who postponed baptism as long as possible. Elliott believes that Constantine had not been *eligible* for baptism until his last illness. If he had made pagan sacrifices under Diocletian, and if he had not done penance for this, then Constantine would have been ineligible for baptism, under Church rules, until he was at the very point of death. In other words, Elliott believes that the Church wouldn’t baptize Constantine until the very end because Constantine was too proud to do penance for caving in to the pagan persecution many years earlier.
This is a fascinating biography of a fascinating person. Elliott’s interpretation of events is certainly plausible, and it is based on a careful study of the available sources.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
lilburne
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Member: Maximilian Longley
Location: Durham, NC, USA
Reviews written: 84
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