Constantine and the Cities by Lenski Noel;

Author:Lenski, Noel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Strong-Arm Tactics

Constantine’s willingness to accept advances from constituencies that were far from orthodox Christian (like the Hispellates or Athenians) and to permit the construction of his own self-image at the provincial level in ways that strike us as surprisingly pagan (as happened at Termessus or Lepcis Magna) should not lure us into assuming that his stance toward traditional religions was unwaveringly tolerant and welcoming. In certain cases, he quite unapologetically ordered the destruction of pagan shrines or monuments and even their replacement with Christian structures.

Nowhere was this more decisively undertaken than in Jerusalem. Eusebius is our sole contemporary source, but valuable though his testimony is, it must be used with caution.25 Fortunately it has the advantage of preserving a letter of Constantine’s to the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, that offers the emperor’s own perspective on the process. By Eusebius’s report, the site of Christ’s passion (Golgotha) had been deliberately covered with a layer of earth and paving stone and then built upon by Roman emperors with a temple of Venus.26 Reversing this defilement, Constantine had the temple destroyed and the layer of earth removed and carted away. Beneath it, Eusebius tells us, was discovered the cave in which Christ was entombed. In his letter to Macarius, Constantine terms the object discovered “the monument of his most holy Passion,” which some have taken to be a reference to the discovery of the True Cross.27 Our first direct references to this most prized of relics date to the 350s, but this does not preclude the possibility that the Cross was discovered earlier and may be referenced here.28 If Constantine is in fact referring to what he thought was Christ’s cross in this letter, Eusebius has certainly made no effort to draw attention to this in his literary frame.29

For our purposes a matter of greater import is the fact that, at least by Eusebius’s reckoning, the destruction of the Venus shrine and the uncovering of Golgotha were carried out on Constantine’s initiative, and that this preceded his decision to construct an elaborate church on the site of the Holy Sepulchre.30 Constantine implies the same when he claims in his letter, “I have no greater care than how I may adorn with a splendid structure that sacred spot, which, under divine direction, I have disencumbered as it were of the heavy weight of foul idol worship.”31 This sequence is extremely important for two reasons: first, it indicates a willingness on the part of the emperor to destroy a pagan shrine prior to formulating firm plans for the reuse of the real estate it occupied; second, it shows that Constantine claimed he was operating not at the prompting of some petitioner but rather on his own initiative, or rather, driven by what he himself terms “divine direction.”32

Even if the uncovering of Golgotha was originally Constantine’s idea, his letter to Macarius gives the bishop considerable latitude to make crucial programmatic decisions about the construction of the church over the site. For these purposes, Constantine permits Macarius

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