Sayers and Constantine: 6

Our attempts to understand the character of Constantine are befuddled by two mysteries, the first of which is: Constantine had his (second) wife Fausta and his (eldest) son Crispus executed, and we don’t know why. Some have speculated that he caught the two of them having an affair; Gibbon, more plausibly and with more deference to rumors current at the time, believes that Fausta falsely implicated Crispus in a plot against his father in order to clear the way for her own sons — Crispus being the son of Constantine’s first marriage — to inherit the throne. Gibbon:

The innocence of Crispus was so universally acknowledged, that the modern [by which Gibbon usually means “medieval”] Greeks, who adore the memory of their founder, are reduced to palliate the guilt of a parricide, which the common feelings of human nature forbade them to justify. They pretend, that as soon as the afflicted father discovered the falsehood of the accusation by which his credulity had been so fatally misled, he published to the world his repentance and remorse; that he mourned forty days, during which he abstained from the use of the bath, and all the ordinary comforts of life; and that, for the lasting instruction of posterity, he erected a golden statue of Crispus, with this memorable inscription: To my son, whom I unjustly condemned. A tale so moral and so interesting would deserve to be supported by less exceptionable authority; but if we consult the more ancient and authentic writers, they will inform us, that the repentance of Constantine was manifested only in acts of blood and revenge; and that he atoned for the murder of an innocent son, by the execution, perhaps, of a guilty wife. They ascribe the misfortunes of Crispus to the arts of his step-mother Fausta, whose implacable hatred, or whose disappointed love, renewed in the palace of Constantine the ancient tragedy of Hippolytus and of Phaedra.

Sayers in The Emperor Constantine more-or-less endorses this interpretation, though she differs from Gibbon in another respect: Sayers has Constantine executing Crispus in a blind rage, whereas Gibbon says that his murder was carefully planned well in advance. It was a settled decision, not a moment of wrath. (As we shall see in a future post, this sets a pattern for his family.) Sayers is not excusing him, but I think she does make him a more impetuous and less coldly calculating figure than the real Constantine was — though Sayers’s Constantine does inform Fausta that he will have her executed, but only after she accompanies him as his consort in a grand public ceremony. Which is pretty cold: The imperial show must go on. (And Fausta calmly plays her part.)

The second puzzle about Constantine: Why did he delay his baptism until he was on his death-bed? One possible answer: it was not uncommon in that era for converts to delay baptism until near death, because they believed that if they died immediately after baptism — without the opportunity to commit more sins — that would allow them to go straight to Heaven. Sayers hints that Constantine may have been aware of this: in the scene in which he orders the death of his son Crispus and others he believes to have been conspiring against him — about which more in a moment — he says, “How fortunate that I was never baptised! I can damn myself with a clear conscience.” As though to say: I am not officially a Christian and so do not betray my Lord by this sin — though I can make amends later.

(FYI: You may now choose to read an exemplary tale, taken from an American novel published in 1964, that illustrates in a distinctive way the theological and moral implications of the once-common theology of baptism that I have just described. Or you may simply continue.)

However we might read Constantine’s murderous gratitude that he is unbaptized, something becomes quite clear in the play’s last scene, when the people whom Constantine has had murdered appear before him as spectral images, horrifying him. It is then that, for the first time in his life, he confronts the true depth and extent of his sins: 

Sin is more terrible than you think. It is not lying and cruelty and murder — it is a corruption of life at the source. I and mine are so knit together in evil that no one can tell where the guilt begins or ends. And I who called myself God’s emperor — I find now that all my justice is sin and all my mercy bloodshed…..

How can he be forgiven? How can he not pay the price for his wickedness?

It is Helena, his mother — yes, in fact she predeceased him, but shut up about that — who tells him the terrible and wonderful truth:

HELENA: The price is always paid, but not always by the guilty.

CONSTANTINE: By whom, then?

HELENA: By the blood of the innocent.

CONSTANTINE: Oh no!

HELENA: By nothing else, my child. Every man’s innocence belongs to Christ, and Christ’s to him. And innocence alone can pardon without injustice, because it has paid the price.

CONSTANTINE: That is intolerable.

HELENA: It is the hardest thing in the world — to receive salvation at the hand of those we have injured. But if they do not plead for us there is nobody else who can. That is why there is no redemption except in the cross of Christ. For He alone is true God and true Man, wholly innocent and wholly wronged, and we shed His blood every day.

What Constantine must understand, here at the end of his life, as the waters of Holy Baptism are prepared for him, is that the formulation he himself oversaw at Nicaea — that Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, is also “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father” — is not just a theologically accurate statement, but the only hope of the dying. Constantine must throw himself upon the mercy of the Crucified One — the one whom he himself, in his sins, helped to crucify. As John the apostle put it: “He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

And this is where the two helices of the story of this flawed but remarkable play meet and merge. It is when we grasp for ourselves the truth of what was articulated at Nicaea that the dogma indeed becomes the drama.