Christianity was a religion that prided itself on its passivism

THE NEW REPUBLIC: JUNE 18, 2001 : 35 - 38 Lambs Into Lions By PAULA FREDRIKSEN Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance by H. A. Drake (Johns Hopkins University Press, 609 pp.)

MORE CHRISTIANS WERE persecuted by the Roman Empire after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 than before. Within a century of that momentous event, bishops had become the impresarios of urban violence, directing the Christian mob’s destruction of synagogues and great pagan temples from Minorca to the edges of Persia, while the imperial government shut down traditional public cults in North Africa and in Rome itself. By the reign of the emperor Justinian, from 527 to 565, recalcitrant pagans risked crucifixion by the Christian state.

And yet Christianity was a religion that prided itself on its passivism, and on its ethic of an expansive love extended even to enemies; a religion whose spokesmen, during the long centuries of its own persecution, had tirelessly argued that true belief cannot be coerced; a religion whose founder, Jesus of Nazareth, had himself died by Rome’s hand. Why, then, did the emperor decide to throw his prestige and his patronage behind such a faith? And how did Christians come so readily to avail themselves of the powers of coercion?...

By concentrating on politics, which he calls “the art of getting things done,” Drake reveals how various Christians in the fourth century won agreement, mobilized support, and gained consensus both inside and outside the imperial government. In his pages, The Power Game: How Washington Works stands shoulder to shoulder with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Saul Alinsky and Richard Nixon together illumine the near-solid murk of the Christological controversies; and Athanasius of Alexandria emerges as antiquity’s equivalent of a Tammany Hall boss. The result is a refreshingly original and powerfully argued re-conception of the issues and the forces at work in this period of the conversion not of Constantine, but of Christianity...

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH had been a political actor well before the conversion of Constantine, as the shift in public sentiment caused by Diocletian’s policy of persecution revealed. What changed after 312 was the emergence of the bishops as power players. The bishops were distributed throughout the cities of the empire, and linked across vast spaces by their commitment to “party unity.” They were in constant contact with their Own urban power base (the laity), and long experienced in organizing opinion and administering resources. Thus they represented a new and enormous pool of administrative talent.

Constantine, disgusted and frustrated by the clogged and corrupt mechanisms of imperial governance, turned gladly to this new cadre of talented men. The enormous resources of goods and power that he made available to the episcopacy, as Drake reveals, was not an ill-conceived lurching on the part of a theology-besotted monarch, but a deliberate and bold effort to create in the bishops an alternative judiciary free of the material biases that plagued and paralyzed “the system.” And by using the bishops to distribute newly available imperial largesse, Constantine gained a huge and relatively efficient welfare system.

So what wrong? As Drake presents it, Constantine, by ceding so much to the bishops, lost control of the agenda. Owing to their situation at the nodes of urban power independent of the emperor and not accountable to him, and owing to the longevity of their tenure (government agents, by contrast, regularly and frequently rotated in and out of office) and to their intimate contact with their flocks (or, less piously, their urban power base), the bishops were too powerful to be mere pawns in an imperial game. They had a program of their own. Constantine’s initiatives served only to enhance their power.