Beauty So Ancient and So New: 7 Part Series: Post 5: What Constantine Gave Us and What He Cost Us

Let me say upfront that I am not doing the easy version of this argument. That’s a little too disingenuous for my taste.

The easy version goes: Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire, the church got comfortable, and everything went downhill from there. It is satisfying, for sure. But it is also too simple, and the fathers who lived through it and after it were more complicated than that reading allows.

Athanasius spent much of his life being exiled by emperors, including Christian ones, who wanted him to compromise on the full divinity of Christ for political reasons. He refused. Five times exiled. Athanasius contra mundum: Athanasius against the world. The access to imperial power that Constantine created did not, in Athanasius’s case, produce a compliant church. It produced a man stubborn enough to hold the line on Nicaea when virtually every institutional force was arrayed against him. We have the Nicene Creed in part because a bishop was willing to be a political inconvenience. Or, a term I like, is "Holy Troublemaker."

The councils themselves: Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, all required imperial infrastructure to convene. Bishops traveled from across the empire at imperial expense to hammer out the language that would define Christian orthodoxy for every subsequent generation. The creed we confess on Sunday mornings exists because Constantine called a council. That is not nothing.

So I want to hold this honestly: the Constantinian arrangement gave us things we should be grateful for.

But it cost us things we are still paying for.

Here is what it cost us. When the church became the religion of the empire, the shape of the church slowly changed. Leadership that had been recognizable by suffering became recognizable by status. Buildings replaced homes. The bishop’s chair began to look more like a throne. Theological controversy, which had previously been a matter of community discernment (the gathered body weighing the teaching, the elders maintaining the rule of faith) became a matter of imperial politics. Emperors called councils, emperors enforced decisions, and emperors exiled bishops whose theology was inconvenient.

The church did not become purely an instrument of empire, there were always Athanasiuses about, always Basils writing furious letters from Caesarea, always desert fathers fleeing into the wilderness specifically to escape the compromised institutional church. But the logic of empire began to colonize the logic of the church in ways that are still with us.

We still assume that a larger church is a more successful church. We still assume that influence and platform are legitimate measures of faithfulness. We still assume that the goal is something like Christendom: a culture shaped by Christian values, a nation under God, and a civilization that bears our imprint. These are Constantinian assumptions. They are not apostolic ones.

The apostolic church did not try to run the empire. It tried to be an alternative to it. “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,” Jesus said, “and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you.” (Mark 10:42-43) The church was supposed to be the place where a different politics was visible; where the last were first, where the servant was the leader, where the measure of greatness was the basin and the towel. The church was and is supposed to be a paradoxical political movement.

Constantine did not invent the temptation to abandon that vision. The disciples were arguing about who was greatest before the crucifixion. But he gave the temptation unprecedented institutional form, and we have been rationalizing it ever since.

Basil saw it clearly. He watched bishops trade theological integrity for imperial access, watched the church’s leadership become a prize worth scheming for, and watched men pursue episcopacy the way other men pursued political office. His letters from this period have the tone of a man watching something he loves be slowly dismantled by people who think they’re protecting it.

The future church, the one the Spirit seems to be building in the ruins of Christendom, will probably look less like what came after Constantine and more like what came before him. Not because the pre-Nicene church was perfect. It wasn’t. But because the conditions of our moment are more like theirs than like the medieval synthesis: a church operating without cultural privilege, without state support, without the assumption that the surrounding culture is basically on its side.

That is not a tragedy. It is an opportunity. The church has always been most itself when it had the least to protect. And that is where the foundation of its beauty rest.

Part 6: The Didache- The Earliest Anarchist Church Manual, next.