The Life and Legacy of Constantine

Traditions through the Ages

M. Shane Bjornlie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317025658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The transformation from the classical period to the medieval has long been associated with the rise of Christianity. This association has deeply influenced the way that modern audiences imagine the separation of the classical world from its medieval and early modern successors. The role played in this transformation by Constantine as the first Christian ruler of the Roman Empire has also profoundly shaped the manner in which we frame Late Antiquity and successive periods as distinctively Christian. The modern demarcation of the post-classical period is often inseparable from the reign of Constantine.

The attention given to Constantine as a liminal figure in this historical transformation is understandable. Constantine's support of Christianity provided the religion with unprecedented public respectability and public expressions of that support opened previously unimagined channels of social, political and economic influence to Christians and non-Christians alike. The exact nature of Constantine's involvement or intervention has been the subject of continuous and densely argued debate. Interpretations of the motives and sincerity of his conversion to Christianity have characterized, with various results, explanations of everything from the religious culture of the late Roman state to the dynamics of ecclesiastical politics.

What receives less-frequent attention is the fact that our modern appreciation of Constantine as a pivotal historical figure is itself a direct result of the manner in which Constantine's memory was constructed by the human imagination over the course of centuries. This volume offers a series of snapshots of moments in that process from the fourth to the sixteenth century.

1 Imagining Constantine, then and now

Raymond Van Dam

The recent celebration of 1,700th anniversaries of important events in the reign of Constantine has produced a remarkable series of conference proceedings, as well as numerous books and articles. At the same time, however, this surge in studies of Constantine has not yet generated a corresponding upsurge in more theoretical and methodological studies of how we might study Constantine. Much of the scholarship on the emperor continues to emerge from perspectives of long standing. One is piety, which emphasizes Constantine’s impact as the first Christian emperor and his promotion of Christianity in the Roman world. Another is psychology, which focuses on the connection between the emperor’s private intentions and his public initiatives, often in the guise of biographies. Psychology and piety are closed linked, because typically one goal of such studies is to pinpoint the moment of the emperor’s conversion to Christianity, or to measure the strength of his personal religious convictions.¹ Another prominent impetus is positivism, which can be defined as a fascination with recovering true facts and correct data about the historical Constantine on the basis of critical readings of the ancient sources. Positivism has long been a mainstay of classical studies, and as more scholars trained as classicists have become interested in late-antique studies, positivism has spilled over from early antiquity to Late Antiquity.

One consequence of these traditional approaches to interpreting Constantine is a rather strict characterization of the information about the emperor and his reign. Constantinian studies typically distinguish among ancient sources, later traditions, and modern scholarship. “Sources” include the more-or-less contemporary written texts, inscriptions, coins, monuments, statues, and objects that provide supposedly reliable evidence about the historical Constantine. “Traditions” refer to the literary texts and works of art, usually from later eras, that retailed legends and folklore about a mythical Constantine. These texts described what Alexander Kazhdan called “Constantin imaginaire,” the imagined Constantine.² “Scholarship” is what we modern scholars are doing now.

More recently some scholarship has begun to challenge these conventional distinctions by reevaluating writings about early Christianity as literary texts first: for instance, the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea.³ Marie Verdoner has highlighted Eusebius’ skill in constructing his narrative of the history of the early church. In her perspective, Eusebius was already a postmodern historian, “successful in creating a historical reality by narrating it.” The literary artifices of his narrative have subsequently become the evidence for modern accounts of early Christianity. “The narrated world of historia ecclesiastica has thus long influenced a basic master narrative about the reality of the early Christian church.”⁴ Jeremy Schott has analyzed Eusebius’ oration commemorating the dedication of a new church at Tyre, which had been rebuilt after the proclamation of religious toleration in 313. Even as Eusebius described the appearance of the church, he interpreted it as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies and a representation of the triumph of Christianity. According to Schott, the church was the equivalent of a “text,” a site for the production of multiple meanings.⁵

These analyses emphasize the ancient authors’ literary and rhetorical techniques, as well as their specific agendas. They also imply that similar analyses should be deployed for reading the texts about Constantine. Ancient authors, even contemporaries and participants, were not recording forensic descriptions that they intended for us to use merely as sources of data about Constantine. Instead, they were responding to and trying to manage their own specific concerns. According to these literary and rhetorical analyses, ancient texts are more useful for studying the contemporary circumstances of the ancient authors, rather than for retrieving the past circumstances of their nominal subjects. Writing about the past was a presentist dialogue. If an author such as Eusebius “created” early church history in his narrative, then most likely he did the same for his history of Constantine. From this viewpoint Constantine, or perhaps we should say “Constantine,” was essentially a literary construct, a rhetorical trope, and a medium for communicating the authors’ own agendas.

Two important contemporary authors who discussed Constantine were Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, and Lactantius, a rhetorician who taught one of the emperor’s sons at Trier. As learned intellectuals they deployed literary and rhetorical techniques in their texts, and they certainly had their own agendas. But modern studies of their techniques and motives for writing should imply a complementary awareness of our techniques for reading and writing. How are we to read their texts as our sources? How do we transform their texts about Constantine into our scholarship about the emperor? Somewhat paradoxically, one response to these questions about sources and scholarship is to highlight the emergence of the later traditions, the intervening legends and myths, about Constantine. What both ancient authors were doing in their texts and we modern scholars continue to do in our books and articles is similar to the construction of traditions. Sources, traditions, and scholarship are all forms of representation, of imagining Constantine.

Traditions

Sources and scholarship are obviously linked. This close connection ensures the enduring revival of positivism in historical studies. Positivism, sometimes in the guise of empiricism or higher criticism or Wissenschaft, aims for the reconstruction of what actually happened in the past. Its primary method is criticism of sources, that is, close readings of texts and objects, which in turn can determine, it asserts, reliable evidence and true facts.

Positivism is having a dampening effect on Constantinian studies, for several reasons. One is its fixation on “facts.” An insistence on accuracy and an overtly critical stance are some of the constructive benefits of the positivist mindset. But that concern about accuracy and criticism is not exclusive to a positivist approach; presumably all scholars, whatever their interpretive perspectives, want their research to be accurate and critical. Positivism, however, goes beyond accuracy with its claims to exclusive truth. Positivism highlights truths and falsehoods in ancient texts; as a result, it promotes an outcome of certainty and finality, as if it were possible to produce a singularly correct master narrative of events.

Claims about exclusive truth and singular narratives have had detrimental outcomes. Positivistic scholarship becomes inflexible, unchanging, and repetitious. Positivistic scholarship becomes malicious, with intellectual disagreements too readily transformed into personal attacks on other scholars. This sort of dogmatic scholarship resembles nothing so much as the great theological controversies of Late Antiquity among feuding churchmen and emperors. In those controversies too mean-spirited invective often substituted for genuine intellectual arguments.⁶ Perhaps the most damaging outcome is to divert attention from the larger historical trends and developments of the Constantinian era. Those great transformations include the changing relationship between politics and religion (but not just Christianity); new ideas about the extent of the Roman Empire, including the emergence of both the reality and the concept of an eastern Greek empire; the roles of Greek and Latin in shaping culture and religion; and new attitudes about leadership and community, from emperors and bishops to monks and philosophers. Positivistic scholarship is myopic. It is easy to lose sight of the larger ecosystem when only whacking at the weeds.

Another reason positivism is hampering Constantinian studies is its suspicion of theory. With its claims to be scientific and objective, contemporary positivism is a throwback to nineteenth-century historiography. Its patron saints include the distinguished historians Leopold von Ranke and J. B. Bury. In 1903, in his inaugural lecture as professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, Bury quoted, with strong approval, Ranke’s claim to have narrated only what actually happened. Bury furthermore insisted that “history is a science” and criticized the association of history with literature, which was “a sort of vague cloud.”⁷ In Bury’s era the assimilation of history and science seemed both attainable and desirable. Science was still dominated by the Newtonian physics of cause and effect and the Darwinian biology of the survival of the fittest. Historians of antiquity looked for similar sorts of explanations, for instance, by highlighting the impact of great men such as prominent emperors, or by explaining the success of Christianity in terms of its intrinsic attributes. Since then science has changed radically. Now the dominant paradigms are the physics of relativity, the mathematics of probabilities, and the biology of contingencies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the historical enterprise struggles to catch up with the epistemological implications of the scientific revolution of the twentieth century.

These paradigm shifts have exposed again the shaky foundations of neo-positivism in Constantinian studies. Positivism is simultaneously hyper-critical and hyper-credulous, because it can only critique one source by assuming the reliability of another source as a controlling criterion of truthfulness.⁸ In its search for truth in the historical past, positivism becomes ahistorical, first by appealing to transcendent standards of objectivity that are outside historical events, and then by failing to acknowledge that the same critique should be applied to modern scholarship, too. A pointed suspicion of ancient texts ought to raise similar questions about the objectivity and truth of any modern narratives.

These days the so-called cultural turn or literary turn or rhetorical turn dominates historical studies. This perspective would approach ancient texts as unique attempts to find understanding and construct meanings. Rather than castigating ancient texts for being tendentious, disingenuous, or false, this approach would highlight the intentions of the ancient authors and/or the reactions of ancient readers. In the case of texts and monuments concerning Constantine, the authors (or artists or builders) did not misrepresent the emperor; instead, they deliberately represented him in a particular way that happened to correspond to and support their own agendas. Likewise, the readers (or spectators or listeners) brought their own agendas in order to understand the texts, monuments, and images. Authors’ intentions and readers’ reactions did not always coincide. The proper way for us to evaluate and use the ancient texts and images is by assessing the multiple meanings of texts and images both at specific moments and over time.

Texts and monuments conjured up different meanings already at their moment of composition; they invoked even more meanings over the centuries that separate them from us. Many effective interpretive perspectives are available for examining these differences and changes in meaning. Reception theory and memory studies provide general umbrella overviews emphasizing changes in meaning over time. Intertextuality focuses on the citations of and allusions to earlier texts and monuments that allow readers and viewers to expand the significance of later texts and monuments. Narratology highlights the construction of narratives and, in particular, the use of historical actors as envisioned characters in both contemporary and later accounts. The study of orality examines the wonderful pliability inherent in the transmission of oral traditions. All of these approaches emphasize the construction of the past by ancient and medieval authors and their readers over the centuries, including us modern scholars. All of these approaches also challenge, even undermine, the positivist enterp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Imagining Constantine, then and now
• 2 The reception of classical pastoral in the Age of Constantine
• 3 Platonism in the palace: the character of Constantine’s theology
• 4 What hath Constantine wrought?
• 5 Constantine and Silvester in the Actus Silvestri
• 6 Constantine in the sixth century: from Constantinople to Tours
• 7 Back to the future: Constantine and the last Roman emperor
• 8 Charlemagne: a new Constantine?
• 9 Dante, Constantine the Christian, and the illegitimate Donation of Constantine
• 10 “If possession be poison”: endowment, sophistic, and the legacy of Constantine in late medieval England
• 11 Constantine in late medieval western art: just the son of a holy mother?
• 12 Constantine and the Renovatio Romae in the Renaissance and Baroque
• List of Contributors
• Index