A Book Review . . . The Shadow Of Constantine

By JUDE DOUGHERTY

Demacopoulos, George E. and Aristotle Papanikolaou, editors. Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. viii + 290 pp.

This is a collection of 14 studies by distinguished scholars who participated in a conference that took place under the sponsorship of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University in 2013. Its focus is the relation of religion to state, to society, and to culture, particularly in Eastern Europe, where Orthodox Christianity prevails in a variety of national identities.
Essays address the relation of religion to human rights, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the forced secularization of society under Communism, the secularization of Western Europe, the European Court of Human Rights ruling against the Italian government in a case known as Lautsi v. Italy, and, as the title of the volume indicates, the historic implications of Constantine’s establishment of Christianity as a state religion.
We are told by Timothy Barnes, in an essay entitled “Emperors and Bishops of Constantinople (324-431),” that Constantine’s relations with the Church were shaped by the existing framework of attitudes and beliefs found in the pagan Roman Empire. Christianity was first formally recognized as a religion in 260, but Christian worship was not decriminalized until the Edict of Milan in 313. Constantine established Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire in 380.
From the time of the apostles onward, Christians accepted the common belief that Roman emperors had not only the God-given right to rule but were charged with the spiritual health of their subjects.
Thus they had the duty to maintain religious orthodoxy and the power to adjudicate religious disputes among their subjects. Constantine summoned the Council of Nicaea, which settled the Christological dispute between the Arians and orthodox Christians who upheld the divinity of Christ and His eternal oneness with the Father. In the eighth century, Charles the Great did not shirk from the duty to increase the education level of many, especially the clergy, and to ensure uniformity in the liturgy.
Emmanuel Clapis explains in his essay, “An Orthodox Encounter With Liberal Democracy,” that Constantine’s understanding of the relationship between church and state has prevailed in Eastern Orthodox communities to this date, as they resist the secularism seemingly imposed by the doctrine of state neutrality with respect to religion.
The radical secularism that prevailed in Communist countries through much of the 20th century was grounded in an atheistic philosophy that regarded religion as oppressive and superstitious. Where the Communists prevailed, it became the mission of those countries to cleanse religion from society. That included the eradication of Christian symbols. Churches were destroyed, turned into museums, or into housing projects.
Marxists taught that the state even had the duty to eradicate the continuing influence of the nation’s history. Any state in pursuing these objectives, in effect, imposes a secular norm based on a doctrinal principle, rather than on one derived from the democratic will of the people.
Confessional neutrality of the state is a feature, if not a condition, of Western democracy. The pursuit of pluralism ironically results in the exclusion of the very possibility of plurality by imposing a monopoly of secularism. From the Orthodox perspective, the presuppositions of the modern liberal political philosophy are antithetical to those inherent in Christianity.
On the relationship between religion and human rights, Orthodox religion is suspicious of human rights, because it believes it has no need for that idea. Religion speaks of the good, the common good, and of duties, not of individual rights. “Human rights” is a political idea, one that gives priority to personal freedom over social cohesion and sanctions immoral activity as a right.
Gerard Baker, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, reporting from Davos, Switzerland as the recent World Economic Conference was taking place (WSJ, January 17, 2017), inadvertently describes the ideology confronted by the Orthodox. Davos, he says, is not merely a place, nor just an assembly of a group of people. It is an idea, a very successful one, the dominant idea of the 25 years since the end of the Cold War.
“Its essence,” he writes, “is that the world is one great market, opportunity and polity. That barriers to global economic activity should be removed — that national barriers and national sentiment and national sovereignty need to be subordinate to global and supranational institutions, that in the face of challenges such as climate change and global poverty and disease the nation state is not only powerless but actually a dangerous impediment to progress.”
Professor Kristina Stoeckl of the University of Innsbruck contributes an essay under the title “Moral Arguments in the Human Rights Debate of the Russian Orthodox Church.” Following the lead of Patriarch Krill of Moscow, the primate of Russia, she points out that while the Russian Orthodox Church supports human rights, its understanding of rights is different from that which prevails in the West.
Eastern Orthodox communities, she notes, never passed through the long historical process from Luther to the French Revolution that reduced religion to a private affair. By contrast, religion and politics are deeply intertwined in Orthodox countries. From the Orthodox perspective, the presuppositions of modern liberal politics are antithetical to those inherent in Christianity. The pluralism or inclusion by which the state is compelled to confessional neutrality ironically results in the impossibility of plurality by imposing the secularism on which it is based.
On the other hand, the Orthodox find it appropriate to use the power of the state to advance Christian objectives, and they find no fault with the state when it makes use of the institutional Church and Christian symbols to advance state interest.
In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in a decision known as Lautsi v. Italy that the Italian government was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights by permitting crucifixes to be displayed in public school classrooms, arguing that such action broke the principle of the confessional neutrality of the state.
Fr. Capodistrias Hammerli in his essay shows that the decision reveals a legal and political conflict in Europe concerning the way states should deal with the religious dimension of their national identities. The issue of religious neutrality divides Western and Eastern Europe, and further underscores conflicting interpretations of human rights.
The decision of the court was not well received. Twenty-four of the 47 member states that make up the Council of Europe intervened in the case, supporting the appeal of the Italian government against the ECHR. The majority of those countries were post-Communist countries and traditionally Orthodox countries. The Vatican condemned the decision, as did the Patriarch of Moscow.
The issue: Does the Italian government have the right to give visibility to the religious dimension of its national identity? Must the state renounce its national identity in order to respect human rights? The Italian government in its appeal said that it could not accept the court’s ruling without showing contempt for the majority of its population and for its historical and cultural traditions. The decision was eventually reversed by a higher court within the ECHR.
Each of the many essays included in this volume is worthy of examination but obviously not within a short review. Although most of the contributors are European, two American-based scholars stand out, Stanley Hauerwas of Duke and J. Bryan Hehir of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, both of whom make valuable contributions to the volume.