Between Burckhardt and Baynes

H.A. Drake’s Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Ancient Society and History) is a remarkable piece of work. One of his opening moves is to show how, despite clear and overt differences, both Burckhardt’s pure-political Constantine and Baynes’s sincere-Christian Constantine share common assumptions about politics and religion.

He charges that Burckhardt is guilty of a “conceptual anachronism” when he projects the category of “purely political” motivation back onto the fourth century. Otto Seeck puts it wittily: “Show me a single individual in the fourth century who was not completely superstitious, and I will gladly subscribe to the prevailing opinion.” Religion and political action were simply not separable in the fourth century, which is why Eusebius doesn’t blush to tell us that Constantine’s conversion was bound up with his desire to defeat Maxentius.

Drake’s critique of Baynes is more subtle.

Burckhardt’s main evidence of Constantine’s insincerity was his toleration of paganism. A true believer, he thought, must be an intolerant believer. Baynes, intriguingly, makes the same assumption, but saw in Constantine evidence of increasing intolerance of paganism: “Since Baynes, Burckhardt’s critics instead have postulated a series of stages in Constantine’s religious policy to explain this apparent contradiction [i.e., his continued toleration and sometimes favor to other religions], holding that, while Constantine consistently desired the triumph of the Christian Church, he was initially forced by political realities . . . to make tactical concessions.” The burden of Drake’s book is to show that there was a strain of principled toleration within Christianity in the fourth century, and to show that Constantine’s policies followed this strain.

Given his criticisms of Burckhardt, however, it is odd to find him insisting on providing a “political” as opposed to a “theological” or “religious” account of Constantine. His construction of a Constantine who wheedles, rants, and blusters, who wheels and deals, is certainly accurate and refreshing. But how is his warning that “harm can be done by failing to separate spiritual and secular success” and his insistence that all collective and public behavior “becomes subject to certain principles of political behavior” not just another form of “conceptual anachronism”?