Constantine 1700 Years Later: The Imperial Church of John Paul II
Centuries later, the polemics against the "Constantinian" Church are still active. Their latest version is the accusation of reducing the faith to a civil religion, allied with the powers of the world. A book of Giovanni Maria Vian
by Sandro Magister
ROMA - On April 16, John Paul II sent an official message to the president of the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences, Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, enthusiastically recommending an "ever more deepened knowledge" of history, and of the history of the Church in particular. It is, he said, "magistra vitae christianae," and has much to teach to the Christians of today.
One of the historians of the Pontifical Committee is Giovanni Maria Van, the author of a book - released just a few days ago in Italy - dedicated to the most famous and discussed forgery in the history of the papacy: the donation of Constantine.
The donation of Constantine is the act whereby the emperor - just before moving to Constantinople - was said to have granted to pope Sylvester and his successors the power over Rome, Italy, and the West.
The act appears for the first time in the 8th century, four hundred years after Constantine. As early as the 11th century, it was regarded dubiously by the pope at the time, the sophisticated Sylvester II. In the 15th century, it was definitively revealed as a forgery by the bishop Nicholas of Cusa and by the humanist Lorenzo Valla. And after the Council of Trent, none of the Church leadership gave it any credit.
So it was only during a few historical periods that the papacy used this document to support itself.
But, in fact, the donatio'n of Constantine was immediately and permanently chosen as the symbol of the Roman Church's political power, the target of scathing criticisms on the part of Dante, Machiavelli, Luther... up until our time, both within and outside of the Church.
Even after the loss of the Papal States and Rome in 1870, even after the pacts of 1929 and the birth of Vatican City, and even after the abandonment of the tiara in 1964, the papacy continued to be targeted as the nefarious expression of a "Constantinian" Church.
The years of the Second Vatican Council are the epicenter of the modern anti-Constantinian polemics.
In the last chapter of his book, Vian treats with great clarity the two theses in confrontation at that time.
For the anti-Constantinians, Vian reproduces a page from the diary of Yves Congar, the highly prominent Dominican theologian and a future cardinal, which he wrote on the very opening day of the council, October 11, 1962:
"I see the weight, never disowned, of the period in which the Church played the master, in which the popes and the bishops were lords, had a court, protected artists, and aspired to a pomp equal to that of the Caesars. The Church has never repudiated all of this, from Rome. Moving on from the Constantinian Church has never been its intention. Poor Pius IX [...] was called by God [...] to bring the Church out of the miserable donation of Constantine, converting it to an evangelism that would have permitted it to be less 'of' the world and more 'in¿ the world. He did exactly the opposite. He was a catastrophe; he didn't even know what ecclesia was. [...] And Pius IX reigns still. Boniface VIII reigns still: he has placed himself above Simon Peter, the humble fisher of men."
And again Congar says, in a page from his diary three days later:
"All this, which is the non-Christian part of the Roman Church, and which conditions, or rather hinders, its openness to a fully evangelical and prophetic commitment; all this comes from the deceit of the donation of Constantine. I see this plainly during these days. Nothing decisive can be done until the Roman Church has completely left behind its feudalistic and worldly pretenses. All this must be destroyed: and it will be!"
On the opposite side, Vian cites Jean Daniélou, a Jesuit, also a theologian and later a cardinal.
In a brief volume published in 1965, "Prayer as a Political Problem," Daniélou upbraids the anti-Constantinians for wanting a "pure" Church, one like "a confraternity of the initiated," and for losing thereby the very "poor" they have so much at heart: the poor "in the sense of the immense mass of humanity," made up also of "the many baptized persons for whom Christianity is nothing more than an external practice."
For Daniélou, the Church must not be "disconnected from the society in which it is feared that it might compromise itself." On the contrary, it is essential that "it exert itself within the society, because it is impossible that there should be a Christian populace in a society contrary to it." Hence the defense he makes of Constantine, the Roman emperor who was the first to permit Christianity to become a mass religion:
"This extension of Christianity to an immense populace, which belongs to its very essence, was hindered during the earliest centuries by the fact that it developed within a society [...] that was hostile. Belonging to Christianity thus required a strength of character of which the majority of men are incapable. The conversion of Constantine, by eliminating these obstacles, made the Gospel accessible to the poor; that is, to those not part of the élite, to the average man. Far from falsifying Christianity, this permitted it to perfect itself in its nature as being of the people."
Anti-Constantinian polemics continued throughout the entire Second Vatican Council. Paul VI shed light on one of its contradictory aspects when, on November 17, 1965, while the council fathers were voting on the document on religious liberty, he recalled that it was Constantine who acknowledged this liberty on behalf of the Church:
"É this emperor, now so opposed by the very men who support the religious liberty he inaugurated!"
But it was above all in the postconciliar period that Paul VI saw the dangers of anti-Constantinian polemics. In a speech on September 24, 1969, he described these dangers as follows:
"It is not rare today to find persons, including good and religious ones, and especially the young, who believe themselves qualified to denounce all of the Church's past [...] as inauthentic, outdated, and invalid for our time; and thus, using terms that are by now conventional, but extremely superficial and inexact, they announce the end of the Constantinian, preconciliar, juridical, authoritarian period, and the beginning of a free, mature, and prophetic period. [...] In order to be truly faithful to the Church today we must protect ourselves from the dangers, even the temptations, that follow from the proposal to remake the Church with radical intentions and drastic methods that would subvert it."
Today, in the reign of John Paul II, the anti-Constantinian polemics have not abated. And they strike at the pope himself, accusing him of wanting to make the Church a "social force" and of demanding the political implementation of the precepts he preaches.
The latest variation of this criticism is the accusation against the pope and his cardinal vicar, Camillo Ruini, of "falsifying" the faith by reducing it to a "civil religion," allied with the powers of the world.
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The book:
Giovanni Maria Vian, "La donazione di Costantino", > il Mulino, Bologna, 2004, pp. 246, euro 13,00.Giovanni Maria Vian teaches patristic philology at the Rome university "La Sapienza." His publications include "Bibliotheca Divina: Philology and the History of Christian Writings," translated into Spanish and previously reviewed on this website:
> Quella scrittura che comincia in Galilea (29.8.2001)
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The current campaign against Camillo Cardinal Ruini, the pope¿s vicar, and his neo-Constantinian "civil religion":
> The Church of the Opposition in Italy. The Rise, Activity, and Decline of the Progressivist Catholic Intelligentsia (13.4.2004)
> A Church of the Rich or a Church of the Poor? The Opposition to Cardinal Ruini (8.3.2004)
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One anti-Constantinian think tank that is influential in Italy, but not only here, is that of the Church historians who follow the thought of Giuseppe Alberigo and, farther back, Giuseppe Dossetti. Their "History of the Second Vatican Council," published in several languages, clearly represents their orientation:
> Vatican Council II: A Non-Neutral History (9.11.2001)
In 1984, Alberigo's think tank organized an international convention in Bologna dedicated to the feared arrival of "a new Constantinian treaty." The convention¿s proceedings were published a year later by Marietti. One of its theologians of reference was the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, author in 1961 of a conference in preparation for the Second Vatican Council entitled "La fin de l'"ère constantinienne" ("The End of the Constantinian Era").
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From the 13th century until today, a current parallel to the anti-Constantinian one is that of the spiritual Church cherished by the friar Gioacchino da Fiore and by his intellectual "posterity," the object of an important essay by Henri De Lubac:
> Riletture. Su Gioacchino da Fiore non tramonta mai il sole (29.8.2001)
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The message of John Paul II to the president of the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences, on the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation:
> Messaggio del Santo Padre a Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, April 16, 2004__________
On the much-discussed relationship between John Paul II and modern democratic powers:
> Democracy under the Care of a Guardian. The Backward March of John Paul II (14.11.2002)
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English translation by Matthew Sherry:
> traduttore@hotmail.com
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20.4.2004
