Constantine`s Sword: The Church and the Jews

0 Comments

Book Review by Paul J. Piccard,
Professor Emeritus of Political Science,
Florida State University

Constantine`s Sword: The Church and the Jews [i]
James Carroll Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflen, 2000

This powerful and disturbing book records and analyzes the long history of how Christians, especially Roman Catholics, have dealt with Jews. The work is both scholarly and very personal.

Carroll starts and ends an examination of his Church and Jews with the Cross at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] and Edith Stein[ii]. He starts his personal experience with the discovery that a childhood friend is a Jew and ends with his own children at the site of Hitler`s suicide bunker. He describes a virtual Oedipal relationship with his parents and his discovery of history that his Paulist seminary classes omitted.

The central theme of the book is that Christians took anti-Semitic forks in the road when they might well have written a less tragic history by following the other road. Carroll depicts Christian attitudes towards Jews as grudging acceptance at best, a general hostility, and a long series of atrocities culminating in the shoah-Hitler`s "final solution."

Carroll traces the reluctant acceptance of Jews to Saint Augustine. Augustine`s opposition to Jews was manifest, but he did not advocate killing them. They and their tradition provided Christianity with prophesies that proved the divinity of Christ. Carroll summarizes Augustine`s position as, "Let them survive, but not thrive!"

As for Jesus fulfilling Old Testament prophesies: Carroll distinguishes "prophecy historicized" from "history remembered." He touches a sensitive nerve. Christians make a major issue of the fulfillment of incidental prophesies (for example, the seamless robe), while rationalizing the failure of the great prophesy that the Messiah would usher in a new age of peace. Carroll says, in effect, that early Christians reified selected prophesies as a way of "proving" that Jesus was the Messiah.

Augustine`s was a moderate response to Ambrose and Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop of Antioch. Rosemary Radford Ruether, quoted by Carroll, termed the Bishop`s views "easily the most violent and tasteless of the anti-Judaic literature of the period." Christian hostility in a later era is illustrated by Martin Luther[iii] and the Roman Catholic priest, Father Leonard Feeney.[iv]

Polemical denunciation of Jews strikes Carroll as bad in itself but he links it to the sporadic outbreak of physical violence, lynching, and pogroms. He picks out examples: in Alexandria in 414; later crusaders running amok in the Rhineland (they could not wait until they reached the Holy Land to start the killing); in 14th century Spain; again in the Rhineland in the early 19th century; and climaxing for now with the Nazis. Carroll never holds the anti-Jewish views of the Church directly responsible for the atrocities. He sees clerical anti-Jewish expressions rather as enablers.

Carroll objects to supersessionism, arguing instead in favor of Judaism and Christianity-Christianity in addition to Judaism not in its place. Carroll likes that rascal Peter Abelard for his Christology (not for seducing his young pupil) and Emile Zola for his defense of Alfred Dreyfus.[v] Some of the heroes of the early church (including the author of John`s Gospel)[vi] do not fare as well in Carroll`s view.

Carroll condemns the 19th century doctrine of papal infallibility without mentioning the roughly contemporaneous rise of Fundamentalist inerrantism. Carroll also denies that individuals can become infallible by reading the Bible. Carroll says the Church made the Bible, not vice versa, and he construes the Bible as the product of its times. The New Testament, he sees, as the work of the second generation of Christians, not to be accepted at face value. He doubts that Jesus raged against the money changers at the Temple. The Resurrection becomes symbolic and Thomas-well, Carroll does not deign to debunk the story of Thomas` hands in the wounds. As for the True Cross and the Seamless Robe-forget it.

Like many other Christians, Carroll faces the problem of jettisoning superstition while keeping the faith.

Regarding the papacy, Carroll sees a mixed record. Popes have generally opposed violence against Jews, but they have often been hostile. While some locked the ghetto[vii] gates, others opened them at least temporarily. Of the recent Popes, Carroll is very hard on Pius XII (who excommunicated Communists wholesale but not Nazis), fuzzy warm on John XXIII (who gets credit for a more favorable view of Judaism than had prevailed), and ambivalent on John Paul II.

Carroll gives John Paul high marks for seeking reconciliation with Jews and especially for praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. But Carroll thinks the Pope has not gone far enough and Carroll has little patience with the Pope`s view that Catholic individuals, not the Church, are responsible for anti-Jewish crimes. (If bad things were done by people not by the Church, who did the good things?) Carroll is disturbed by the Pope`s canonization of Edith Stein and appalled at the prospect of sainthood for Pius XII. Carroll also objects to the Pope`s authoritarian claims.

Carroll tries valiantly to point to a better way for his Church by calling for a new Church council. He advocates an inclusive, democratic conclave that could "take up the unfinished questions . . . of power (Constantine, Ambrose, Augustine), of Christology (Crusades, Anselm, Abelard) of Church intolerance (Inquisition, Nicolaus of Cusa, the ghetto), of democracy (Enlightenment, Spinoza, modernism), and only then of repentance (Holocaust, silence, Edith Stein)." Don Quixote may have been more "practical" than Carroll, but if the Holy Spirit can give the Church Pope John XXIII in the twentieth century, who knows what it may produce in this?

So what about Constantine`s sword? It seems the old boy had a vision before the battle at Milvian Bridge in the year 312 on his way to conquer Rome. He saw a cross in the sky with the promise that by the sign of the cross he would triumph. A cross was then formed with a spear for the length, and a sword perhaps, for the arms. With this standard he won the battle. Constantine became a Christian and thus joined church and state. As Dante has the Lombard spirit Marco say, "sword and shepherd`s crook . . . go badly with each other."[viii]

Carroll`s account of the Church and Jews is a chronicle of atrocities and missed opportunities. It is also a warning against intolerance clothed in the garments of "the truth."

——————————————————————————–

[i][1] The book contains 616 pages of text and 140 pages of notes, bibliography, and index.

[ii][2] Canonized by Pope John Paul II as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

[iii][3] Carroll damns Luther simply by quoting his anti-Semitic vitriol.

[iv][4] Father Feeney, a very visible twentieth century anti-Semite, was excommunicated, although Carroll points out that he "had Saint Thomas Aquinas, logic, and exactly 650 years of church history on his side."

[v][5] For those interested in Constantine`s Sword but intimidated by its scope, I suggest starting with Chapter 44, "Alfred Dreyfus and La Croix."

[vi][6] Carroll sides with those who argue that John was written late in the first century.

[vii][7] In our time we have softened the word ghetto to include informal segregation, but the Popes dealt with harsh legal ones-walled and gated.

[viii][8] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: II Purgatory trans. into blank verse by Louis Biancolli (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966). 67.