Constantine vs. Constantinianism

Constantine is usually accused of mixing church and state, as if the Roman world prior to him were a secular state. But Roman emperors before to Constantine claimed to be part of the Pantheon of gods to whom the Romans were to sacrifice.

When Constantine broke with the Roman sacrificial system, he sided with Christianity, but far from mixing church and state, he distinguished them for the first time. He did this by recognizing the church as a distinct polis with its own authority structure and by tolerating paganism. Constantine was only an interested observer at the council of Nicea and not the final judge, and he allowed pagans to continue to serve as government officials.

What Constantine actually did was allow the church to reform the state without making the church an arm of the state. The church introduced equal rights for all and charity toward the poor, but wasn't yet used to oppress pagans. Constantine recognized the need for church unity within the empire and called the council of Nicea, but his Christian successors thought the empire needed to be uniformly Christian and called for the removal of paganism. As a result, some began to condone force and the empire became less and less Christian.

Debating Instead of Demonizing

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis is lively, well-written book, which argues that the founders succeeded not because they liked each other or got along, most of the time they didn't, but because they resolved their differences by doing politics face to face.

Ellis writes in vivid images and analogies but is sometimes too wordy for his own good. For instance, Ellis demonstrates that Adams wanted, in modern terms, to "deconstruct" all romanticized accounts of the founding. But this is because Adams thought the historians of his day didn't do justice to the greatness of his own contribution. Ellis writes: "At its nub, his [Adam's] critique of the historical fictions circulating as seductive truths was much like a campaign to smash all the statures, because the sculptor had failed to render a satisfactory likeness of yours truly" (217). What a vivid and memorable sentence, but could've been more effective if shortened into a  punch.

Ellis goes on to show just how much the ambitious Adams wanted to be the central figure of the American pantheon of heroes. When Adams was hidden between the lines given to Washington and Jefferson, he wanted to grab the pages of history and start shredding. Privately he mocked Washington for his lack of classical education and once referred to him (though not cited in Ellis) as "old mutton head." Ellis says Washington read mostly newspapers.

Adams was almost post modern in wanting to show that reality defies neat dissection into good guys sporting white hats and bad guys in black hats. He especially wanted to expose Jefferson's betrayals of the Adam's administration. He also wanted to vindicate himself to his critics showing, among other things, that he was responsible for averting war with France in 1800 and not interested in creating an Adam's dynasty by passing on the presidency to John Quincy.

Ellis shows that Adams was jealous of Jefferson because the July 4th Declaration of Independence came to be seen as the defining moment of the new nation. Instead, Adams pointed to the debates in Congress that made that declaration possible. It turns out that Jefferson hadn't participate in those debates, shy as he was, but Adams held forth there and won the day when, on MAY 15, 1776, "Congress passed a resolution calling for new constitutions in each of the states" (242-43).

This was definitive, Adams thought, because the states were creating "separate and independent American governments" and thus breaking with their British Charters. This was the true and original declaration of independence. He looked back on Jefferson's writing of the Declaration as a historical accident that occurred because Adams himself deferred to his junior partner in order to give him something to do. Why couldn't people like his historian friend Mercy Otis Watson see John Adams as the ultimate American hero that he was?  

Ellis also argues that historians do their best work when they realize that history doesn't look inevitable at the moment when it was happening. Historians must give uncertainty back to the actors in the historical moment, while also considering the outcomes from the modern vantage point. He writes: "We need a historical perspective that frames the issues with one eye on the precarious contingencies felt at the time, while the other eye looks forward to the more expansive consequences perceived dimly, if at all, by those trapped in the moment. We need, in effect, to be nearsighted and farsighted at the same time" (6-7). Ellis is the master of using alliteration like "contingencies" and "consequences," which stick in the mind. He is the truly rare combination of a competent historian and clear writer. He proves his thesis in spades showing how the founding fathers were indeed brothers who succeeded not because they didn't clash, but because they looked at each other across the table of creative compromise.

Unfortunately, many of the compromises, like the three-fifths compromise, just prolonged the debate until the slave question erupted into civil war. The founding fathers also feuded over whether federal or state power had ultimate sovereignty. This too was finally settled by civil war, and yet the debate goes on in the fallout over how much federal power should be wielded over states, private individuals, and corporations.

In terms of feuding fathers, one squabble went out with a bang, but Ellis argues that the Burr-Hamilton duel was an anomaly. Most quarrels were settled like the Hamilton-Madison argument over whether the federal government should shoulder the burden of state debts after the Revolution. Hamilton, the federalist of federalists, wanted the government to assume this responsibility for the states it was going to rule. Madison feared this would make the states dependent upon and thus subservient to federal power. Jefferson invited the two disputants to dinner, where Madison promised not to make it a hill to die on as long as the future capitol would reside in Virginia. Jefferson and Adams feuded over Jefferson's role in paying a newspaper to print libels against Adams when they were serving together as President and Vice President. Adams had some newspaper men thrown in prison under his controversial "Alien and Sedition Acts" and probably wished he could do the same to his VP. But even this row resolved itself as the two "explained" themselves to each other through statesman like correspondence in their twilight years.

It was the Founders way to feud, and then work it out after "looking each other in the eye." The founders successfully created a new nation because they talked, broke bread together, and lived cooperatively. They would probably be amazed that their union is still together and using their legacy to debate the same issues. But today's political wars tend to be fought on the impersonal battle fields of cyber space and the air waves. Could we accomplish more by settling our differences in community, instead of demonizing each other to our constituents in the partisan media outlets or over twitter or facebook? I think Ellis's Founding Brothers suggests we could.


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Did Everything Good in the State Come From the Church?

Defending Constantine by Peter J. Leithart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americans tend to assume that we cannot have religious freedom without a separation of church and state. But Leithart shows that Constantine created true religious freedom almost a millennium and a half before the US Constitution and within a Christian empire. How did he do this?

First of all he didn't try to turn the church into an arm of the state. Constantine tried to reform his empire with the gospel of Christ, but he did not try to control the church. He respected the church as a distinct polis with its own sphere of authority. For instance, he called the council of Nicea but didn't attempt to determine its outcome. He tolerated paganism in the civil realm, but let the church carry on its own culture war with the empire's pagan past. Compare this to conservatives turning the Christian Coalition of the 1990s into a religious arm for the Republican party (See Stephan Carter's God's Name in Vain).

Now we might consider Constantine's Christian reforms of the Roman state dangerous, but without them, Leithart points out, the state would have continued to allow men to abandon their wives through divorce, treat their unwanted infants as disposable property, sell their children into slavery, and enjoy murder in the gladiatorial arenas as entertainment. Before Constantine, equality could not be assumed. That came from the Christian doctrine of creation, which taught that all people are made in the image of God.

Leithart shows that sacrifice to the Roman gods and the deified emperor was the central religious act in a very religious empire. Constantine broke with the pagan Roman past by not offering the customary sacrifices after his triumph at the Milvian Bridge in 312. He turned the back the demise of the empire by looking out for the disadvantaged. He gave tax breaks to poor parents who couldn't afford to raise their children. Constantine reformed the corrupt judicial system of Rome by turning justice for the those who couldn't afford representation over to ecclesiastical courts.

Constantine had his faults but he knew that the state needed the moral authority of the church in order to defend women, children, and the poor. We are now losing the ground he gained by promoting a secular understanding of the separation of church from the state. Without a transcendent basis for our laws everyone does what is right in their own eyes. There are no absolutes in Israel, and we are re-paganizing at an alarming rate with abortion, no-fault divorce, and commercial combinations that widen the gap between rich and poor.

Would to God that more Christians would, like Leithart, defend Constantine instead of Congress.


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