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Christian and Roman Universalism in the Fourth Century

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Christian and Roman Universalism in the Fourth Century CHRISTIAN AND ROMAN UNIVERSALISM IN THE FOURTH CENTURY HENRY CHADWICK Adherence to Christianity was no doubt a matter of religion rather than political calculation to the emperor Constantine the Great. But there is an element of unreality to the old contrast between the saintly emperor 'canonised', so to speak, by a grateful Church and the ambitious, power­ hungry military commander who, in Burckhardt's eyes, could not have decided to worship the God of the Christians unless he had carefully cal­ culated that this would be to his political advantage. Calculation or no, he needed something the Church could provide, namely legitimation. There is paradox in this. For the emperor, already under question for usurpation in 306, to be identified with a body so un-Roman as the Church cannot prima facie have assisted him in acquiring wider recog­ nition of his legitimacy. Might rather than any form of right had been decisive in his meteoric rise of 306. His admission to the second tetrar­ chy with the rank of Caesar was accepted by Galerius in 307 surely in recognition of the legions which Constantine commanded. Any reluc­ tance that Galerius may have felt would have been far stronger if, fol­ lowing the opinion of T.D.Bames, Constantine's identification with Christianity was already a public fact as early as 306.1 In 312 the lightn­ ing war against Maxentius made necessary the justification that a reli­ gious ideology could provide, and he won the battle instinctu divinitatis, t T.D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Harvard University Press 1981). Lac­ tantius (De mortibus persecutorum 24.9 and in the addition of 324 to Div. lnst. 1.1.13) says that Constantine's flrst act on being invested with the purple was to restore free­ dom of worship to the Christians. This text is insufficiently explained away by Bar­ nes' critics, e.g. Thomas Grunewald, Constantinus Maximus Augustus: Herrschafts­ propaganda in der zeitgen0ssischen Uberlieferung [Historia Einzelschriften, 64] (Stuttgart 1990), 80. I am not able to follow Barnes in his refusal to flnd any tendency to tolerate non-Christian cults or any syncretism in Constantine, and would be inclined to discern polemic against syncretism with sun-cult in Eusebius' interpretation of the Logos as the Sun (Laus Const. 6.19-20). Averil Cameron's remarks (Journal of Roman Studies 83 (1983), 197) are surely judicious. CHRISTIAN AND ROMAN UNIVERSALISM IN THE FOURTH CENTURY 27 mentis magnitudine, as the triumphal arch would declare.2 The anonym­ ous orator who in 313 delivered a panegyric in his honour included cautious words about the divine power which had moved Constantine to launch his attack 'against the advice of men, against the warnings of the haruspices'. The panegyrist felt sure that the amazingly successful Constantine possessed a private line of communication to 'that divine mind which delegates the care of us to inferior divinities and deigns to disclose himself to you alone' .3 The highest god was on his side; and none knew more about the worship of the highest than the Church. That Constantine did not identify himself with the Church to impress the citizens of the empire seems certain. Eusebius of Caesarea's oration for Constantine's thirtieth anniversary mentions the way in which scorn­ ful people laughed at him for supporting the Church.4 Constantine both consulted the haruspices and ignored their advice: it encapsulates the ironic problem of his religious allegiance. To consult them and then to do the opposite of what they told him was a kind of assertion that he had a higher power to guide him, namely the 'supreme Creator of the world who has as many names as there are peoples', and whose preference among these names we humans cannot know-a power immanent in the visible world and transcendent beyond and above it.5 The audience for an imperial panegyric in 313, or for that matter in 321, was largely pagan, and the terms used by the panegyrist cannot be squeezed to force the conclusion that not only the emperor but the selected singer of his praises was already Christian. The panegyric of 313 nevertheless presupposes that Constantine was a man for whom the highest deity had a grand purpose to fulfil, and that to achieve this end he needed special protection. The God of the Biblical record was held in awe and respect by pagan intellectuals. Porphyry himself praised the piety of the ancient Hebrews in worshipping 'the great and true God who is terrible even to the other deities', and thought it correct to distinguish among the inferior powers benevolent angels in the ethereal realm from the daimones inhabiting the air whose benevolence could not be taken for granted.6 Nothing in the panegyric of 313 goes beyond what Porphyry could have approved. 2 Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae 694. 3 Paneg. Lat. 12.2.4. 4 Laus Canst. 11.3, 224,15 Heikel. 5 Paneg. Lat. 5,26. 6 Cited by Augustine, De civitate Dei,[= DCD] 20.24.1; 10.9. .
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