Constantine, religious revolutionary
When Our World Became Christian,
312-394
Paul Veyne, trans. Janet Lloyd
POLITY PRESS, 240PP, £55
Tablet Bookshop price £49.50 Tel 01420 592974
n “this little book”, as its author calls it, Paul Veyne, one of the most distinguished and interesting of historians of the ancient world, has turned his attention to the 80 years following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312, after a vision he had on the eve of a decisive victory in a battle just outside Rome. The revolution inaugurated by Constantine in 312 took two centuries or more to turn the Roman Empire, and longer still the societies that succeeded it, into Christian Europe. A few years after the last and most severe of the persecutions, Christianity now became the emperor’s religion. He adopted the new religion because it seemed to him superior to the established cults, without any expectation that it might strengthen support for the Empire or provide ideological legitimation for his regime. He was a sincere believer, felt personally chosen by God, charged with the mission of creating a universal Christian Empire. In the conviction that God had called him to spread Christianity, to protect his Church and to safeguard its unity, he acted as its “president”.
I
Although he favoured the Church
extravagantly, he never resorted to coercive measures to promote it or oppress its opponents. Through his favour and munificence, the Christian Church gained wealth, privilege and growing influence in public life. Christianity became respectable, many of its adherents rising to high status and office. All this without coercion and without, at any rate until the final years of the fourth century, any official attack on the religions now widely labelled as “pagan”. All this would be generally accepted nowadays, but it is here stated and repeatedly restated with somewhat tiresome insistence. Why a distinguished historian of the Greco-Roman world, a self-proclaimed unbeliever and former Communist, should wish to retell this conventional story is not a little puzzling. In an interview Veyne gave in 2007, when the book was first published in France, he said he had stumbled on a text of Constantine's in which the emperor claimed to have received a mission from God “to open humanity to Christianity”. The claim reminded him of his youthful Communist ardour, when the Bolshevik revolution was seen in a similarly apocalyptic light, as having brought the world to the threshold of a new age in human history. For Veyne, Constantine is the Lenin of his age. In the book, the
“deliberately bizarre comparison” with the October Revolution is the key to understanding Constantine’s conversion as a new dawn. In a surprising chapter on the appeal
of Christianity, oddly saturated with the language of simple Christian piety, its “manifest superiority over paganism” is taken for granted from the start. “Early Christianity”, we are told, “owed its initial rapid success among the Roman elite to its great originality, namely that it was a religion of love”; along with this, there was the appeal of the charismatic authority “that emanated from its master, the Lord Jesus”. Unexpected words from a non-believer but, although no evidence is offered, they could well be true. But the underlying comparison of
Christianity with “paganism” is doubly dubious: first, there was no such thing as “paganism” until, later in the fourth century, Christians created it, lumping together a huge and varied range of cults, public and private, everything that was not Christian or Jewish, under the label of “pagan”. The label should not mislead us into thinking of a “pagan” religion. Moreover, as that great scholar of ancient religions A.D. Nock pointed out, the comparison is not of like with like: Jews and Christians offered religions as we understand the word; the others offered worship and cult. Contemporaries would not look to them for a guide to life or a world view. That was the business of philosophy. As Augustine knew, Christianity offered its adherents both a cult and a philosophy. But this aspect of its originality, though sometimes obliquely glimpsed, seems to elude Veyne. Misapprehensions and oddities abound, many of them astonishing. The final chapter is intended to show that Europe has no Christian roots. If it ever had any, it has abandoned them. What, most disappointingly, it fails to do is to give some indication, however summary, of what the revolution set in motion by Constantine, the Christianisation of the ancient world, consisted in. It transformed Christian thought and practice, gave the Church a dominant position in European society, whose contours came to be defined in religious terms, its discourse to be expressed within the framework of Christian categories.
And what did it mean for the Church to
be raised to a position of dominance that placed it beyond censure? This European “Christendom”, as we have come to call it, may have crumbled in the time of the Enlightenment, but it is far from clear that we are entirely free of its legacy. Veyne, the unbeliever, seems oddly reluctant to see his hero setting Europe on a course that many Christian thinkers from Augustine to John Howard Yoder saw as a historic betrayal of the Gospel. In becoming a Church of the Establishment, the Church had forsaken its calling. R.A. Markus
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