Viewpoint Constantines cross is still a pact with the Devil
By JEFF DIETRICH
Nino doesnt sleep very well.
He lives in the bunk below me, and he tosses and turns all night. When he
finally does sleep, it is fitful, with his massive hands and feet sprawled over
the edge of the bunk. It is as though he is fighting a war in his sleep, and
indeed, that is exactly what is happening.
For seven years, Nino fought in the Iran/Iraq war. He showed me
the angry gash of shrapnel wounds still sprinkled with a purple dust of metal
filings, and the perfect round bullet wounds like vaccination scars on his
chest and abdomen. He demonstrated the maneuver of simultaneously pulling down
a gas mask and jabbing his thigh with a hypodermic of antitoxin as the
chemicals explode in mid-air. The ground is so polluted in those areas that the
rain itself continues to be red and poisonous a decade after the wars
end. After a 13-month stay in the hospital, he was discharged with a lifetime
prescription of psychotropic drugs.
I am not same man I used to be, he says in his broken
English. When I was young, I was fanatic. Many people in Iran are
fanatic. Now I think is better to talk than to fight.
Not surprisingly, Nino and Jesus are of a single mind on this
issue. They both understand that the difference between fanatical faith and
authentic faith is the willingness to use force rather than gentle persuasion.
That is why Jesus rejected the violent kingdoms of the world offered to him by
Satan in the wilderness. He refused to further his messianic project by the use
of violence, and for almost two centuries, his first followers practiced love
and cheek-turning rather than crusades and inquisitions.
Not until the time of Constantine did the church succumb to the
temptation and make a pact with the Devil. As James Carroll says in
his book, Constantines Sword, When the power of empire
became joined to the ideology of the church, the empire was immediately re-cast
and re-energized, and the church became an entity so different from what
preceded it as to be almost unrecognizable.
Central to this perverse transformation was the image of the
cross, which under Constantine became both the static instrument of Christian
self-affirmation and the idolatrous symbol of deadly state power that murdered
all who would not accept its salvific efficacy.
Beginning with the Council of Nicaea in the year 325, the
Constantinian church de-historicized and de-politicized the scriptural basis of
Christianity by reducing Jesus teachings to Hellenistic/philosophical
categories of personal and ontological salvation. Constantines need to
ground his universal empire in a universal spirituality was the driving force
behind the formation of a standardized, universal Christian theology and the
development of an absolute church authority to enforce it.
After Constantine, says Carroll, the metaphors
that Christians used to describe their faith were re-invented in the categories
of Hellenistic metaphysics.
Neo Platonism posited a dualism, as that
between sin and grace. Thus salvation came to mean the healing of an
ontological rift between God and man, body and soul in the ethereal realm of
eternity, rather than the fulfillment of Gods promise to Abraham in the
here and now of human history.
St. Pauls brilliant theology of sacrificial atonement
transformed Christs defeat on the cross into victory, his death into
life-giving martyrdom, and empowered first-century Christians to bravely endure
crucifixion. But it de-historicized Christs life and set it within the
context of a triumphal church and a newly benevolent empire, which recasts Rome
as a benign policeman and the cross as a symbol of automatic salvific power
rather than empowerment for martyrdom. This abstract, idealized cross now
becomes a symbol of a victorious church and the sacred foundation of a divinely
mandated state, emblematic of veneration rather than the dynamic of
discipleship, emphasizing idolatry rather than self-sacrifice.
The transformation of the cross was complete, says
Carroll, not a sign of real suffering any longer, nor even with Paul of
spiritual victory, but a sign of power in the world. This Constantinian
cross is the direct antecedent to the American Evangelical theology that claims
that Christ had to die, that he was not a victim of the Roman death penalty,
but rather a victim of divine wrath. Christ had to die to heal the ontological
rift between an angry God and a sinful humanity, thus saving all sinners and
opening the gates of heaven. While this theology may justify sinners who are
saved by its passive cross, it also justifies Constantine and Hitler and George
W. Bush. And it further justifies just wars and unjust wars,
crusades and inquisitions, death camps and death penalties. It justifies and
sanctifies the making of victims by the divinely sanctioned state. It falls
here to the temptation of Satan. It is a pact with the Devil.
And so I join my friend Nino, who in his battle-scarred wisdom
says, I think is better to talk than to fight. It is also better to
be in jail with the victims of state-sanctioned violence, than out of jail with
the victimizers.
Jeff Dietrich is a member of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker
community.
National Catholic Reporter, October 19,
2001
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