Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 4

To the question posed earlier as to the historical meaning of the Edict of Milan, which so briefly suggested a genuine religious freedom, there can be only one answer: Constantine’s freedom was not the same as Christian freedom. It would be centuries before the new concept of the individual, stemming from the Gospels, resulted in a new concept of the state, limited by the individual’s inviolable rights. We now know how tortuous the development was; we know too, alas, that Christians themselves have not always been the bearers of genuinely Christian evangelical truth. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our recent history is the fact that the most Christian of all ideas in our world, that of the absolute value of human personality, has been raised and defended historically in opposition to the Church community and has become a powerful symbol of the struggle against the Church.

The origin of this tragedy lies in the Church’s own beginnings, when the Christian mind was bewitched by the conversion of Constantine. Not only did this prevent the Church from revising the theocratic absolutism of the ancient state in terms of the Gospel, but on the contrary, that absolutism itself became an inseparable part of the Christian world view. Constantine believed in the state as the “bearer” of religion because it directly reflected and expressed the divine will for the world in human society; only in the light of this theocratic conception can the freedom proclaimed in the Edict of Milan be correctly evaluated. It was freedom for the cult, for the outward forms of the worship of God; the state was no longer exclusively affiliated with any particular form. This did not mean that the state had become religiously neutral, but rather that the new religious and philosophical monotheism which Constantine had represented before his conversion regarded all exterior forms of religion — the cults of all gods — as more or less closely approaching the single highest deity, and in the long run saw everything as relative.

From this point of view the Edict of Milan was not a beginning but an end. It was the last expression of the religious syncretism in which ancient paganism was to dissolve and die. Yet the theocratic nature of the state remained untouched; religion was primarily a state matter, because the state itself was a divine establishment, a divine form of human society. Freedom was granted so that, in the of the edict, “the divinity abiding in the heavens might be mercifully and favorably inclined toward us, and to all who are under our authority.”

Although this freedom must be regarded as the last manifestation of imperial syncretism, the Edict of Milan reveals something new that was to follow. The emperor did not conceal his special sympathy for Christianity, and declared openly that he was granting freedom to non-Christians “for the peace of our time,” although his heart belonged wholly to the new faith. This was freedom for the transitional period, in expectation of the painless triumph of Christianity. Paganism was already doomed to ruin and persecution by the theocratic nature of the empire and by the persisting pagan concept of the state. Constantine considered himself the religious lawgiver of the empire, and as a Christian he could not combine Christianity with pagan falsehood. The more he became aware of his Christianity, the more obvious became his hostility to paganism. Two logics, two faiths, the theocratic and the Christian, were interwoven in this ambiguous union, which was to define the fate of the Church in newborn Byzantium.

Donatism was only an introductory chapter in the history of the new relations between Church and state, whose significance was to be revealed far more fully and tragically in the Arian controversy that took up the whole first century of the age of Constantine.

 

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