follows an uninspiring passage aboutScotland:

Where once people had lived in theirhundreds and their thousands, therenow stretched only the unpopulatedemptiness of the vast estates with theirsheep-covered hills or the islands whichhad become bird sanctuaries or shootingranges for the well-to-do. He saw himselfa.s the descendant of victim.s of historyand changing economic times, betrayed,perhaps, by politics and poverty as well.

In the evenings around the hospitablewhisky bottle he tried to explain the land-scape of Cape Breton.

Here MacLeod has fallen again intostriped brochure prose—this is a ratherbanal description of the Scottish High-lands ("shooting ranges for the well-to-do") complete with a comfy evocation of"the hospitable whisky bottle."

Yet the story recovers. Still busy withhis memories, the man goes outside, andstands looking at a portion of his CapeBreton field, and reflects that "the sprucetrees had been there and had been clearedand now they were baek again. They wentand came something like the tide, he

thought, although he knew his analogywa.s incorrect." This is lovely, for by ad-mitting that the old man may clumsilyhave procured the wrong analog)', Mac-Leod enables it beautifully to become theright analogy, because it is right for thisman. MacLeod gently suggests, withouttoo deep a thematic impress, the links be-tween the original Highland Clearances,in which crofters were driven by theEnglish soldiers from their land, many ofthem emigrating to America and Canada,and the less eventful but more unavoid-able and ceaseless clearance of land inorder for it to be habitable.

Again, as at the end of "The Timingof Perfection," MacLeod is able to activatethe past, to make it surely ring, by amost delicate retrieval. And this finenesspasses through patches of crudity, likea dirty river cleansing itself by sheer forceof motion. At such moments, and in suehremarkable stories, Alistair MacLeodbecomes a writer far removed not onlyfrom the contemporary North Americannoise, but also from the ballad traditionin which some of his readers wronglywant to place him. He becomes only him-self, provokingly singular and rare, anisland of richness. •

Lambs Into LionsPAULA F R E D R I K S E N

Constantine and the Bishops:The Politics of Intoleranceby H.A.Drake(Johns Hopkins University Press, 609 pp., $68)

MORE CHRISTIANS WEREpersecuted by the Rom-an Empire after Con-stantine's conversion toChristianity- in 312 than

before. Within a century of that momen-tous event, bishops had become theimpresarios of urban violence, directingthe Christian mob's destruction of syna-gogues and great pagan temples fromMinorca to the edges of Persia, while theimperial government shut down tradi-tional public cults in North Africa and inRome itself. By the reign of the emperor

PAULA FREDRIKSEN teaches the historyof ancient Christianity at Boston Univer-sity. HeTnewhoQk,Augti,'itineandtheJews, will be published by Doubledaynext year.

Justinian, from 527 to 565, recalcitrantpagans risked crucifixion by the Christianstate. And yet Christianity was a religionthat prided itself on its passivism, and onits ethic of an expansive love extendedeven to enemies; a religion whose spokes-men, during the long centuries of its ownpersecution, had tirelessly argued thattrue belief cannot be coereed; a religionwhose founder, Jesus of Nazareth, hadhimself died by Rome's hand. Why, then,did the emperor decide to throw his pres-tige and his patronage behind sueh afaith? And how did Christians come soreadily to avail themselves of the powersof coercion?

Historians since Gibbon, when ad-dressing these two questions, have linkedtheir answers. Focusing their inquiry ontlie inner or spiritual quality of Constan-

tine's conversion, they have divided be-tween seeing him as either a sincere (ifnaive) believer or a craft\- opportunistexploiting the political possibilities of hisnew religious allegiance. Their variousreconstructions depend upon their view ofthe evidence that Constantine continuedto support and to appeal to traditionalpolytheist eults in the years after 312.Proponents of the insincere Constantinepoint precisely to his tolerance of theseother religions; defenders of the sincereConstantine find various ways to excuseor to explain his tolerance. But both theseinterpretations rest upon the same as-sumption: that a true Christian is an intol-erant Christian. And this assumption inturn supports the answer to the questionof Christianity's resort to violence: thatnormative Christianity, too, is intolerant.It embraced coercion as soon as the stateenabled it to. Any Christian societj' willinevitably, invariably, be a persecutingsociety.

NOT so, RESPONDS H.A. Drake.He urges that these answers, andthe questions that frame them,

are essentially misconceived. "Coercion,"which is a social practice of politicalorganizations, cannot be understood byappeal to "intolerance," whieh is a charac-teristic of religious systems. Owing totheir persistent use of theological con-cepts in the effort to understand politi-cal problems, Drake maintains, mosthistorians have seriously misdiagnosedthe causes, the origins, and the nature ofChristian coercion. His proposed remedyis to study not theology, but social pro-cesses; to analyze not religion or theologyas sueh, but politics.

By concentrating on politics, whichhe calls "the art of getting thing.s done,"Drake reveals how various Christians inthe fourth century won agreement, mobi-lized support, and gained consensus bothinside and outside the imperial govern-ment. In his pages. The Power Game: HowWashington Worku stands shoulder toshoulder with The Decline and Fall of theRoman Empire; Saul Alinsky and RichardNixon together illumine the near-solidmurk of the Chiistological controversies;and Athanasius of Alexandria emerges asantiquity's equivalent of a Tammany Hallboss. The result is a refreshingly originaland powerfully argued re-conception ofthe issues and the forces at work in thisperiod of the conversion not of Constan-tine, but of Christianity;

To build his case, Drake begins wherethe empire began—with Octavian, JuliusCaesar's nephew and heir. After heemerged victorious in the civil war againstMark Ajitony, Octavian consolidated hisposition without alienating the Senate

THE NEW REPUBLIC : JUNE 18, 2001 : 35

I

m•V

COI—

o

as his uncle had done. About his power,there was no question: his command ofthe army ensured it. To rule effectively,however, he sought auctoritas, legitimacy,which in this post-Republican momentonly the Senate could confer. Throughelaborate public displays of mutual re-spect, both Octavian and the Senate en-acted the pretense that he ruled at theirrequest, as primus inter pares.

In modern political terms, Octavianand the senators were "players." They eachhad "constituencies." In Octavian's case,this was the army, especially the Praeto-rian Guard, the elite force that he retainedin Italy; and the senators' constituencieswere the literate, highly educated clientspopulating their patronage networks,upon whose talents the administration ofthe empire depended. Running the em-pire was "the Game" that they all played(wherein each player tries to get maxi-mum value for the interests of his or herconstituency while pa>ing the minimumfor those of any other player). As long asthe frontiers remained quiet, the charadeof civilian control eould remain intact,and the government could continue topresent itself as SPQR, or senatus popu-Ivsque romantis, "the Senate and the peo-ple of Rome." In reality, however, armiesmade emperors. An emperor's auctoritaswas only as secure as his potestas, his mil-itary power.

The empire's well-being, in the view ofits ancient inhabitants, depended not onlyon this concert of armies, senators, andemperors. Even more important was thegood will of the gods. Heaven super-intended the empire and the myriadcities that made it up. Ancients soliciteddivine beneficence through innumerablepublic and communal rituals of proces-sion, blood sacrifice, lustration, offerings,and song. These observances were em-bedded in the social life of the ancient city,where activities that to us might seemnon-religious—the theater, rhetorical orathletic competitions, the convening of aeity council or a court of law—invariablyinvolved some sort of acknowledgment ofand offering to traditional deities, as wellas to the numcn of the emperor.

Thus both the Roman state and theindividual cities constituting it can mostusefully be thought of as religious institu-tions. Octavian knew this well; and theimportance of this vital dimension ofancient politics is attested by the noveltitle "Augustus"—a term with vaguely reli-gious connotations—that was conferredupon him by the Senate. As Augustus,Octavian ruled by the mandate of heaven.More than just a general or a leader,he was pontifex maxivius, the "supremepriest," the pope of the Roman statereligion.

36 : JUNE 18, 2001

BUT IN THE third century thingswent drastically wrong. Everyfrontier of the empire, battered by

foreign invasions, collapsed; and inflationraged; and domestic and military chaosensued. During the five middle decadesof the third century, the army put uptwenty-four emperors. The political crisisreflected a religious one. Such cataclysmicdisasters could only have come about be-cause of a breach of the pax dcorum, thepeace of the gods. The empire sufferedbecause the gods were angry. Why? In250, the emperor Decius seized uponthe same answer that the empire's cities,for almost two centuries, had proposed toaccount for disaster on a more local scale:human impiet)' had angered the gods. Putyet more simply, the problem was theChristians.

Christianity had begun to penetratethe cities of the Mediterranean by themiddle of the first century. As long as itremained primarily a Jewish movement,it was by and large lef̂ alone. The earliestChristians were protected by the generaltolerance that pagan culture had longaccorded Diaspora Judaism, which was afamiliar fixture of the Mediterranean reli-gious landscape. This fact in itself maynot seem so remarkable, since religiouspluralism was a hallmark of majorityculture in genera! and of the RomanEmpire in particular. Ancient peoplestypically worshipped their own ancestralgods, which formed aggregates of largerpantheons as politics required. ThusRome's principled ecumenism was cultur-ally congenial and politically pragmatic:as long as taxes were paid, tribute col-lected, and domestic tranquillity assured,its subject peoples were free to worshipas they would, while the divinities ofRome and its emperors took their place inthe congested liturgical calendars of theempire's wide-flung municipalities.

Diaspora Judaism did and did not fitinto this general picture. Like their paganneighbors, Jews welcomed the interest ofoutsiders in their communities, permit-ting and even encouraging sympatheticGentiles to participate in Jewish religiouscelebration, and to contribute to commu-nity charities, and to sponsor the con-struction of synagogue buildings. Whatset Judaism apart was its exclusiveness:alone of all of antiquity's cults, Judaismrequired exclusive devotion to its deity onthe part of Jews themselves.

Although Jews made room for foreign-ers to worship Israels god in Jerusalem'sgreat temple until its destruction in 70,and in innumerable synagogues scatteredthroughout the Diaspora before and afterthe coming of Rome, they could not joinpagan neighbors in the worship of for-eign gods. This was a matter of Jewish

principle. For this reason, Jews livingabroad had to wrangle various conces-sions from civic authorities—permissionnot to appear in court on the Sabbath oron holy days, exemption from public riteswhen offering testimony—when partici-pating in the social life of their cities ofresidence. And they alone were excusedfrom active participation in the cults ofthe city and the empire.

Majority culture, in sum, tolerated Jew-ish religious difference; and this was sobecause of Judaism's antiquity and ethnic-itj'. Respect fbr ancestral tradition ran sodeep, and was so fimdamental to the reli-gious, political, and legal culture of theancient Mediterranean, that cities wereprepared to grant various exemptionsfrom pagan civic cult to their Jewish resi-dents on this same grounds: Jews, too,should honor their own ancestral cus-toms, ta patria ethe, even if this meantnot honoring the city's own gods. Thus,though some hostile pagan observers con-sidered Jewish exclusivism rude and evenseditious, the good will of the majorit>'generally prevailed. Quite remarkably, itextended even to the point of acknowledg-ing the special status of former paganswho, as converts to Judaism, sought thesame rights and exemptions as "native"Jews.

CHRISTIANITY INHERITED ITStheological exclusivism directlyfrom Judaism. But as its ethnic

base shifted and, in some communities,its distance from the svTiagogue grew,problems accrued. Gentiles began to joinfledgling churches in significant numbers,and they ceased to worship the gods nativeto their own culture. In other words, theseGentile Christians acted as if they had thereligious prerogatives of Diaspora Jews,though they did not convert to Judaism.But a.s members of a new movement theylacked precisely what legitimated Jew-ish non-participation in cult: ancestraltradition. To their pagan neighbors, theseChristian Gentiles were betraying theircommon religious patrimony, the mmmaiorum, or "traditions of the fathers."Worse: by deserting the traditions of theirown fathers, they angered the gods whowere theirs by birth and blood.

Little wonder that the gods wereangry; and when the gods were angry,humans paid the price. Thus "if the Tiberoverflows or the Nile doesn't," as the late-second-century church father Tertulliancomplained; if plague struck, or famine,or earthquake, "al! at onee the cry goesup: 'the Christian to the lion!'" Sittingtargets for local anxieties. Gentile Chris-tians who would not sacrifice to propitiatethe gods cou!d find themse!ves sacrificedinstead.

In this first phase, anti-Christian per-secution was as random, sporadic, andlocal as the different disasters that niightspark it. But in the crisis of the third cen-tury, disaster was pandemic; and so,accordingly, were attempts to halt it. Thusin an unprecedented move, the emperorDecius in 250 mandated universal partic-ipation in public cult for all citizens of theempire. (In keeping with long-establishedlegal tradition and social practice, Jews—and thus Jewish Christians—were ex-empt.) Decius did not forbid the practiceof Christianity. He simply wanted to en-roll all he could in a renewed effort topersuade the gods to protect Rome onceagain.

Christian responses varied. Many foundways to avoid, or to finesse, or to justifyconforming to the emperor's edict. Othersdefied it, and some of these dissenterswere martyred. For the next several dec-ades, occasional imperial efforts to coercereligious conformity would set off anotherround of persecutions. By 284, however,when the general Diocletian seized powerand imposed order on the batteredempire, these cycles of internal violenceseem to have subsided.

This was why, in .303, Diocletian's deci-sion—after nearly twenty years of domes-tic peace—to enact a new and specificallyanti-Christian policy caught everyone offguard. The staccato composition of theseedicts panicked his Christian subjects,choked the prison system, and causedwidespread confusion. Diocletian's pagansubjects, disgusted and alienated by theviolence, themselves risked imprisonmentand loss of property in order to shelterChristian fiigitives. A surge in pagan sym-pathy for Christianity was one social re-sult of his ill-starred policy. And there wasalso an important political result, arguesDrake. It was Constantine's decision, in312, to convert to the cross.

I T IS IN his discussion of Constan-tine-not of the emperors psycho-logical inner state or personal spiritu-

ality, but of the practical problems thathe faced and the ways in which his alle-giance to the church both solved and com-pounded them—that the \irtue of Drake'scommitment to political analysis becomesabundantly clear. Constantine was one offour contenders for sole power once Dio-cletian quit the scene. He faced a crowdedfield in which some of his rivals hadalready struck deals by forming coalitionswith groups of Christians. By alKing him-self in such a novel way with the ChristianGod, Constantine outflanked his competi-tion, and acquired a new constituency(this particular Christian population wasa minority in the empire as a whole, butit was strongly concentrated in the cities).

and initiated a new imperial effort atreligious unity-within-diversity—namely,state support of a non-specific monothe-ism. Becoming a Christian enabled Con-stantine to build new and stabilizingurban coalitions across the pagan/Christ-ian divide, thereby healing the injuries ofnear civil war that Diocletian's persecu-tion inflicted. He pursued, in a novel way,a domestic policy of unity and peace.

Despite the undeniable novelty of hisparticular religious choice, Constantine'snew policy rested upon two of the mostancient and traditional of imperialRoman religio-political concepts: the ideathat heaven underwrote the well-being ofthe empire, and the idea that the emperorhimself was representative of this rela-tionship and responsible for its mainte-nance. Seen in this light, evidence thatotherwise seems to point to personalhypocrisy or compromise—coins (antiq-uity's "soimd bites," Drake nicely callsthem) representing the emperor in profilewith the Sun God, or Constantine and hissons' receiving victors' crowns from anon-specific hand from heaven—bespeaksinstead a deliberate effort to craft a stablepolitical coalition of pagan and Christian(and, though Drake fails to factor them in,Jeviish) monotheists committed to Con-stantine, his dynasty, and his peace.

This perspective makes sense also ofConstantine's bark-but-virtually-no-bitepronouncements against traditional poly-theists, Jews, and other Christian groups("heretics") whom the bishops, the hard-right ideologues of his new constituency,condemned. A skilled politician, Constan-tine placated and neutralized these ex-tremists by stealing their rhetoric. Andby prohibiting public (though not private)blood sacrifices—which were a fixture oftraditional polytheist worship since timeimmemorial and, owing to the decades ofanti-Christian persecutions from Deciusto Diocletian, its particular symbol—Constantine created for government andsociety a religiously neutral public space.

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH had beena political actor well before theconversion of Constantine, as the

shift in public sentiment caused by Dio-cletian's policy of persecution revealed.What changed after 312 was the emer-gence of the bishops as power players. Thebishops were distributed throughout thecities of the empire, and linked acrossvast spaces by their commitment to "partyunity." They were in constant contact withtheir own urban power base (the laity),and long experienced in organizing opin-ion and administering resources. Thusthey represented a new and enormouspool of administrative talent.

Constantine, disgusted and frustrated

by the clogged and corrupt mechanismsof imperial governance, turned gladly tothis new cadre of talented men. The enor-mous resources of goods and power thathe made available to the episcopacy, asDrake reveals, was not an ill-conceivedlurching on the part of a theology-besotted monarch, but a deliberate andbold effort to create in the bishops analternative judiciar\' free of the materialbiases that plagued and paralyzed "thesystem." And by using the bishops to dis-tribute newly available imperial largesse,Constantine gained a huge and relativelyefficient welfare system.

So what went wrong? As Drake pre-sents it, Constantine, by ceding so much tothe bishops, lost control of the agenda.Owing to their situation at the nodes ofurban power independent of the em-peror and not accountable to him, andowing to the longevity" of their tenure(government agents, by contrast, regu-larly and frequently rotated in and out ofoffice) and to their intimate contact viiththeir flocks (or, less piously, their urbanpower base), the bishops were too pow-erful to be mere pawns in an imperialgame. They had a program of their own.Constantine's initiatives served only toenhance their power.

Committed to ideological purity—or, asthey saw it, theological truth—of a verj'narrow sort, these men had their ownideas about the pursuit of unity'. Constan-tine wanted to use the bishops as onefoundation of his empire-wide coalition ofmonotheists, but the bishops wanted touse him. They wanted him, first of all, tosettle issues of internal cohesion. That is,they wanted the emperor to enforce partydiscipline. And to gain their cooperation,Constantine had to oblige. Thus thevery first victims of the new Christiangovernment were other Christians—inthe view of the bishops, "false" Christians,or heretics.

IN 361, ALMOST twenty-five yearsafter Constantine had gone to hisreward, his nephew Julian subjected

this whole improvised imperial-ecclesias-tical "system" to an intolerable degree oftorque. Renouncing the orthodox Chris-tianity" in which he had been raised, Julianpublicly and energetically embraced tradi-tional pol>theism. He revoked many of theperquisites so freely given to the churchby Constantine and his sons. This wasbad enough; but worst of all in the eyes ofthe bishops, he issued a proclamation ofuniversal religious tolerance. Back fromexile came all the heretical bishops; outpopped their previously suppressed sup-porters. Deprived of imperial muscle,orthodox bishops could not enforce theirviews. Chaos reigned. By this one simple

THE NEW REPUBLIC : JUNE 18, 2001 : 37

Imzm

73pnTjc03I -

o

act, Julian proved what the orthodoxthemselves had always maintained: thattolerance and Christianity—"true," ortho-dox Christianity—were incompatible.

Juhan died on a campaign in 363. Hissuccessor, a Christian scrambling to con-solidate his own position, promptly setabout trying to put things right. Theorthodox bishops roared back with avengeance. Uneonflictedly re-emhracingpower, they likewise embraced coercion:tolerance, as they saw it, was a creed forlosers. By century's end, equipped withparamilitary bands of roving monks andurban "hospital workers," tbe bishopsenforced their own views on religiousunity, while the enormous spiritual pres-tige of the monks legitimated their resortto violence. As the power brokers of thenew Roman state religion, they conferredlegitimacy (as onee the now-impotentSenate had) on the emperor who metwith their approval. State and churehwere now on the same page. They em-barked on a new period of cooperationand religious commitment. And the rest,as they say, is history.

W ITH LASER-KEEN insight,bold thinking, and also a largemeasure of WTy humor, Drake

has presented a plausible and powerfulinterpretation of this formative momentin Western history. His notion that socialprocesses should be analyzed not theo-logically but politically serves to makesense of much of the bewildering mass ofevidence from this period. And it is de-lightful to see how wildly anachronistictelevision-pundit terms ("game," "powerplayers," "hard-right," and so on) provide,when they are shrewdly applied, valuableexplanatory purchase on some of thesteepest slopes of the past.

Most of Drake's big book keeps reso-lutely focused on the seesaw of pagan-Christian relations in the fourth century.What he gains in argumentative clarity,however, he loses somewhat in the histor-ical fidelity of some of his characteriza-tions. The shortfall affects his portrait ofall three groups of ancient actors: pagans,Jews, and Christians.

To the pagans first. Drake interruptshis discussion of groups and politics topitch a surprisingly unpersuasive descrip-tion of the nature of religious change. Theterms turn suddenly psychological as hepresents religion as a response to "needs,"and religious change as the index of new"needs." And what are those needs? "Agrowing interest in personal salvation," adesire for more immediate and less imper-sonal deities. Already in the second cen-tury, he writes, individuals "were restlesslyseeking answers that civic religion couldnot provide." "A sentiment of personal reli-

gion, a search for the afterlife" was on therise. And so on.

Drake carefially asserts that Christianitywas a beneficiary, not a eause, of this newsentiment. Still, the whole digression un-happily recalls the pious explanations ofyesteryear, according to which paganism,which was ritual, public, and exterior,ceded to Christianity, which was personal,warmly communal, and interior. Moresimply, Christianity "won" because it wasa better religion. Paganism simply ranout of gas.

As explanations go, this one does notgo ver)' far. For a start, it misdescribespaganism, which was never a single phe-nomenon hut a thick farrago of practicesand beliefs. The civic cult's stately cere-monies, and the political liturgies of em-peror worship, were never designed forclose, personal connection with a deity.For such spiritual satisfactions, one wentelsewhere: to Penates (family deities) andrevered ancestors; to the nearly infinitevariety of sublunar demons and spirits;to gods of individual locales—a brook, atree, a glade; to personal manifestations ofthe holy in dreams. Domestic divinitiescrowded the pagan household. (Christianpreachers made easy i\in of such homelybeliefs, lampooning newlyweds' franticsearch for some nuptial privacy amidgroups of schmoozing gods gathered tobless the new conjugal union.) If andwhen pagans wanted a more personal sortof religious experience than state or citycould offer, they had plenty of options toband. Moreover, paganism did not go qui-etly into the good night of imperiallyenforced Christianity'. Barraged by legisla-tion enjoining seizure of property, physi-cal intimidation, and exile, pagans wentunderground, leaving a trail of martyrs oftbeir own.

THE JEWS ARE largely absent fromDrake's picture, and this is toobad, because they afFord a useful

comparison with their Christian contem-poraries. Drake briefly mentions hothcommunities together when he considershow both were "exclusive" in their reli-gious demands for insiders, and thus"intolerant" of outsiders; and he goes on tonote how such postures can foster socialactions such as persecution (the attemptto prevent the variant belief from exist-ing) and coercion (the attempt to compelconformity). But Jews outside of tbeirown land had long since made their peace,religiously and socially, with tbeir non-Jewish neighbors, who were, after ail, thevast majority of humankind. Intolerant ofvariety within the fold—battling witheach other over the correct way to be Jew-ish is a timeless Jewish activity—Jewswere in fact extremely tolerant of those

outside the fold. The Jewish habit ofreceiving non-committed Gentiles intosjTiagogue life drove later Christianspokesmen to distraction, especially ifsome of the Gentiles strolling in were nolonger pagan, but Christian. Commodianchided Jev\'s for allowing pagans to co-celebrate ("tbey ought to tell you whe-ther it is right to worship the gods"). JohnChrysostom, dreading the onslaught ofthe High Holidays in 387, browbeat hiscongregation to let go of Rosh Hashanaband the fast of Yom Kippur: "Don't you seeif their [the Jews'] way of life is true, tbenours must be false?"

THIS BRINGS us, finally, to theChristians. If Christians bad beenmore like Jews, they would have

better tolerated pagans; but they did nottolerate pagans. And if Christians hadbeen less like Jews, they v\'ould have bettertolerated other Christians; but they didnot tolerate other Christians. Nowheredoes Christianity more clearly reveal itsJewishness than in its intolerant responseto its own diversity. This was true from thevery beginning, clearly present in the ear-liest strata of evidence available in theNew Testament.

In his letters, from the middle of thefirst century, Paul ftilminates against "so-called apostles," "super-apostles," and "de-ceitftil workers," by whom he means otherJews like himself who were also apostlesto Gentiles preaching salvation in Christ.The problem, in Paul's view, was that theGospel that they preached was differentfrom his own, which was enough to makeit false. Similarly, in the Gospel of Mat-thews Sermon on the Mount, the show-case of tbe much-praised injunctions tolove one's enemies and to turn the othercheek, Jesus levels a withering blast atfalse insiders—that is, at other Christians:

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord,Lord," shall enter the kingdom of heaven,but he who does the will of my father whois in heaven. On that day [the final Dayof the Lord] many will say to me, "Lord,Lord, did we not prophesy in your name,and cast out demons in your name, anddo many mighty works in your name?"And then I will declare to them, "I neverknew you; depart from me, you evil-doers."

The Johannine epistles make the samecase with more economy: Christians whoshare the views of the writer are "of God,"and those who do not are "not of God":"Such a one is the deceiver and theantichrist."

Different interpretations of the Christ-ian message only increased with time. Bythe middle of the second century, titanic

38 : JUNE 18, 2001

battles raged between various groups oversuch fVindamental questions as the statusof Jewish scriptures, tbe relationship be-tween Christ and the High God, his father,to material creation, and tbe nature ofChrist's earthly body. The scope for argu-ment was seemingly limitless, and feel-ing ran high. As the late-second-centurypagan Celsus observed, Christians "slan-der one another with dreadful and un-speakable abuse. And they make not eventhe least concession to reach agreement;for they utterly detest each other." Evenin the heat of the Decian persecutions,orthodox teachers warned their flocks notto consort with other pri.soners if thoseothers were only "so-called" Christians, ormembers of a different Christian sect.Neither death, nor the moral fortituderequired to refuse to worship the em-peror, nor common suffering in witness toChrist could close the ideological gap. Theheretic remained the child of Satan.

H ow SHOCKING IS it, then, thattlie Church persecuted otherChristians as soon as it could?

The language of hate, the ethic of exclu-sion and excision, had co-existed from thebeginning with the language of forbear-ance and the ethic of love: their relationwas simultaneous, not sequential. Butlacking the ethnic glue that kept the quar-reling Jews together, Christians of vari-ous persuasions vilified each other withabandon. And once the commonwealthwas Christian, the newly empowered bisb-ops availed themselves of a much moreancient—and scripturally warranted—Jewish paradigm for handling pagannon-believers: the prophets' destructionof "dumb images" and their worshipperswhen purging the land of false gods.When imperial troops closed dovm pagantemples in North Africa in 399, no onecould doubt, said Augustine, that this wasdone secundum vi-ritatem propheticam,"according to prophetic truth."

Ironically, the one island of relativesafety for religious outsiders remained thes>Tiagogue. Jews, like everyone else, couldbe the occasional targets of mob violence;but Roman law generally obtained, andJudaism—unlike paganism or heresy-was never outlawed. Augustine evenargued (probably in the same year thatsaw the destruction of the pagan temples)that any Christian monarch attemptingto force the Jews to give up their Lawwould fall under the sevenfold curse bywhich God long ago had protected Cain.He extended no such theological protec-tion to others.

The gospels of the Church TViumphantthemselves depicted a Jesus who woreritual fringes (the tzitziot commanded inNumbers), worshipped in the synagogue

on the Sabbath and in Jerusalem on thegreat pilgrimage holidays, and advised hisfollowers on tbe correct size of their phy-lacteries (tefiUin). More: the Jewish scrip-tures enjoining and praising fidelity toJewish law were, as the Old Testament, apart of this church's own canon. Perhapsthese facts, too, were sufficient to makemost Christians most of the time feelsqueamish about persecuting Jews. In anycase, for this period and for a long timeafter, it was safer to be a Jew than a here-tic or a pagan.

Drake concludes his study by notingthat "this has not been a chcerfiil story,and it docs not have a happy ending." He isright. But it is a riveting story, and niaster-fiilly told. Anyone who rejoices in ourFounding Fathers' constitutional convic-tion that church must be kept separatefrom state will read Constantine and theBishops with deepest appreciation; andperhaps those who long for the oppositeshould read it, too. The lessons of lateantiquity remain pertinent, alas, to thepolitics of religion in our own day. •

Take What You NeedRADOSH

Positively 4th Street:The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan,Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farinaby David Hajdu(Fat-rar, Straus and Giroux, 310 pp., $25)

Down the Highway:The Life of Bob Dylanby Howard Sounes(Grove Press, 502 pp., $27.50)

No MODERN SINGER haSbeen more of an enigmathan Bob Dylan. As hetravels across the world onwhat has come to be called

the Never-Ending Tour, his fans, and his-torians of modern American culture, havecome to realize that despite his stagger-ing number of public appearances, weknow ver>' little about him. He defies thecelebrity culture of our times: he does notappear on television talk shows, he rarelytalks to the press, and in his infrequentinterviews he seems more intent on sow-ing confusion than on casting light. Fora biographer, certainly, Dylan presents achallenge.

But there are ways around the man'sopacity. David HaJdu has chosen to con-centrate on a specific time and place, theheyday of the 1960s, when Dylan andhis singing partner (and erstwhile lover)Joan Baez became the king and queen of

RONALD RADOSH'Smemoir,Commies:AJournet/ Through the OhlLifi, the NewLefi and the Leftover Lefi, has just beenpublished by Encounter Books.

the Great Folk Revival. Along with Joan'ssister Mimi and her fiiture husbandRichard Fariiia, the four found their pathstumultuously crossing; and together theycame to represent what so many (includ-ing themselves) regarded as the spirit of anew generation. Howard Sounes, by con-trast, has chosen to wTite a conventionalbiography: a daunting task not least be-cause four lives of Dylan have alreadybeen written. (But then Dylan's centralconceit is that he has many lives.) RobertShelton's and Anthony Scaduto's biog-raphies appeared early in Dylan's career,and are limited and outdated, while themost recent biography, by Bob Spitzand numerous versions by Clinton Heylin,are historically insufficient or simplyhagiographies written for the Dylan cult.Still, both Hajdu and Sounes have pro-duced fiiscinating and finely writtenaccounts of Dylan's life and times, whilemanaging at the same time to provideinteresting evaluations of his music andhis cultural contribution.

In the era of hip-hop, it is hard toremember that only a few short decadesago American culture was electrified by

THE NEW REPUBLIC : JUNE 18, 2001 : 39