Dismantling the Cross. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Jan 26, 2001 by Robert Louis Wilken

Constantine's Sword
The Church and the Jews:
A History
James Carroll
Houghton Mifflin, $28, 756 pp.

Novelist and National Book Award winner James Carroll claims that Constantine's Sword is a work of history, and he even uses the term in his subtitle. But it is evident from the outset and amply displayed in chapter after chapter that the word "history"is a euphemism. This is a book driven by theological animus and padded with irrelevant, distracting material from Carroll's own obsessively chronicled life. Too many pages of the book are self-absorbed meditations on the author's likes (Bob Dylan, John XXIII) and dislikes (Cardinal Francis Spellman and Pius XII), all delivered with pompous solemnity ("I presume to measure the sweep of history against the scope of my own memory"). The book is filled with information, much of it familiar. Carroll bases his narrative almost wholly on the works of others. If one turns to the notes to check the basis for his comments, the most frequent phrase one finds is "quoted by" whether the passage be from Rosemary Radford Ruether, Salo Baron, Marc Saperstein, Hans Kung, John Cornwell, or others. In a work of such scope it is inevitable that one will have to rely on the scholarship of others, but Carroll displays little understanding of the ambiguities or shortcomings of his sources. Constantine's Sword is a six-hundred-page indictment of the church for its attitudes toward and treatment of the Jews, deploying historical information to support its accusations. It is an effort not to understand but to use history to advance a tendentious agenda.

The central thesis can be stated simply: "Auschwitz is the climax of the story that begins at Golgotha. Just as the climax of Oedipus Rex...reveals that the hubris that drove the play's action was itself the flaw that shaped the king's character, so we can...say that Auschwitz, when seen in the links of causality, reveals that the hatred of Jews has been no incidental anomaly but a central action of Christian history, reaching to the core of Christian character."

Though the author shifts repeatedly from recent events (even Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was murdered in Wyoming in 1998, appears) and his own experiences to ancient and medieval times, the material in Constantine's Sword breaks down into three large historical periods: Christian beginnings and the early church; the Middle Ages through the Reformation; and the modern age, beginning with the Enlightenment and ending with Pius XII and Edith Stein. At the end Carroll appends a wordy fifty-page proposal for the future titled "A Call for Vatican III" and an epilogue, "The Faith of a Catholic."

The first section argues that a fatal mistake was made at the very beginning of Christianity. Following the thinking of Ruether, Carroll adopts the view that Christian contempt for the Jews is derived from Christology, in particular the claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Because most Jews did not accept Jesus as Messiah, rejection of the Jews became a defining characteristic of orthodox Christianity. This leads Carroll to conclude that the "death camps are causally linked through two millennia to mistakes made by the first generation of Christians." Hence Christianity is inherently anti-Semitic and the only way forward for the church is "a revision of what we believe about Jesus." The church needs to recover the Jesus who lived before Christians imposed an alien creed on his life and teachings, the Jesus who preached a message of love of the God who created not just one group but all human beings.

With this as foundation, Carroll proceeds to Constantine and the church fathers. His aim is to show that Christianity's fatal flaw (its belief in the uniqueness of Christ) now takes social and institutional form. But Carroll's evidence is thin and largely rhetorical (especially sermons), not legal or social. Jewish life went on uninterrupted across the Roman Empire, new synagogues were constructed, and Jewish cultural life flourished. In this period Christians were rivals to the Jews, not oppressors. To be sure, the rhetoric of the church fathers is sometimes extreme (the synagogue is called "a haunt of infidels," "home of the impious," "under the damnation of God"), and when ancient sermons were read in medieval Europe, they had unforeseen consequences. But there is no basis for seeing in early Christian writings on the Jews a portent of the Inquisition or a premonition of the Final Solution. Christianity and Judaism, it must not be forgotten, had a quarrel over the significance of Jesus of Nazareth and the Law. Once Christians embraced Jesus as the Messiah and dispensed with the authority of the Law, it was inevitable that Jews, who continued to live by the Law, would be the object of criticism. It was the spiritual challenge of a vibrant Judaism that spawned sermons and treatises against the Jews. It is perhaps too much to ask that a writer who consciously overheats his language to arouse the emotions of his readers show some sensitivity to the polemical rhetoric of another age.