Free Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom by Peter J. Leithart

the irony that Constantine is condemned both for imposing religion on an unwilling populace and for failing to be explicitly Christian.

    "Norman H. Baynes (Constantine the Great and the Christian Church, Raleigh Lecture on History [London: Humphrey Milford, 1929]) bases his similar conclusion on a survey of Constantine's own writings.

    46Eusebius Life 1.19.

    47Ibid., 1.32; 4.17.

    48Depending on your angle of vision, you can call this "betting on the winning horse," or you can call it a healthy fear of God. Given the religious instincts that Constantine showed even before becoming a Christian, it is as likely the latter as the former. And the simple faith is a biblical one: my summary above-God destroys those who destroy his temple-comes from Paul (1 Cor. 3:17), no simpleton.

    49Repoliticizing Constantine is one of the central themes of Drake, Constantine and the Bishops. Unfortunately, Drake regularly falls back into a religious-political dichotomy that he recognizes was not available in the fourth century. He claims, for instance, that Constantine's efforts to reform the judicial system were part of a social program rather than an effort to secure the triumph of the church, but in this he fails to recognize that the social program was itself religiously motivated. As Drake himself knows, there was little support within Roman social or religious life for the kind attention that Constantine showed toward to humiliores.

    "Johannes Roldanus, The Church in the Age of Constantine: The Theological Challenges (London: Ashgate, 2006), p. 37. He notes (p. 41) that after Constantine the traditional religions no longer guaranteed the Empire's salus, since "this vital function was from now on assigned to the Christian religion."

    "Jones, Constantine and the Conversion ofEurope, p. 73, notes that Christians were such a minority that favoring them brought little immediate political advantage.

    52Optatus Against the Donatists.

    "Ibid., 4.42.

    "Ibid. MacMullen (Constantine, p. 111) doubts that the letter is wholly from Constantine.

    54Eusebius Life 2.64-72.

    56Augustine City of God 19.21. See Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

    17This is one of Yoder's central charges against the "Constantinian church," and it was true of some Christians in Constantine's time. But it was most true for a brief moment in the early fourth century. As I argue throughout this book, what happened in the early fourth century, insofar as it fits Yoder's paradigm at all, was more a "Constantinian moment" than a "Constantinian shift."

    "Quoted in Baynes, Constantine the Great, pp. 27-28.

    59Eusebius Life 3.12.

    60Quoted in Baynes, Constantine the Great, p. 27.

    61Drake, in Constantine and the Bishops, goes too far in claiming that Constantine aimed to articulate an "inclusive" Christianity with a low bar to the entry of pagan monotheists.

    67Eusebius Church History 1.9.

    68The testing comes from later tradition: a piece of each cross was touched to a corpse, which sprang to life when touched by the true cross's wood. Two versions of the story are available in Mark Edwards, trans., Constantine and Christendom (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).

    64Ibid., 2.46.

    65Ibid., 2.64-72.

    66Ibid., 3.17-20.

    62Optatus Against the Donatists.

    63Eusebius Life 4.35.

    69The cross is so central to Constantine's piety that Carroll, Constantine's Sword, suggests that he virtually invented a cross-centered, and therefore anti-Semitic, Christianity.

    77Ibid., 2.28; 4.9.

    78Ibid., 1.41.

    73Eusebius Life 4.36.

    741bid., 2.4, 12, 14; 4.22.

    751bid., 1.42-43; 2.13.

    76Ibid., 2.29.

    70Eusebius Oration 11.

    71Eusebius Life 3.60.

    72Eusebius Church History 1.9.

    79Cf. Baynes, Constantine the Great, pp. 50-56. Baynes's doubts about the authenticity of the sermon were sufficient to keep him from using the text as evidence of Constantine's religious beliefs.

    80H. A.