Hal Drake's Constantine and the Bishops

Abstract

The subtitle of Drake's book, ‘The Politics of Intolerance’, provides an apt starting place. First, ‘Politics’: it is Drake's contention that many earlier scholars’ investigations of Constantine have run amok by adopting largely theological perspectives, by worrying whether Constantine was ‘sincere’ in his Christian profession. Indeed, much in Constantine's practices and discourse (such as we can recover them) suggested to previous commentators that he had little understanding of theological niceties, and that his Christian commitment was to some degree feigned. Drake argues that we should rather look to the political problems that Constantine faced and the policy options available to him. (For one, Diocletian's persecution had proved a massive and costly failure: where to go from there?) If ‘politics’ is the arena in which we assess Constantine, scholars should investigate social processes, not theological puzzles. We have been using the wrong map: ‘political symptoms’ should not be treated with ‘theological remedies’ (465). Public policy studies, in particular, is the field to which we should turn.