Introductory Explainer

‘Constantinianism’ is a yearning on the part of some Christians for a new union of church and state, in the aftermath of the collapse of most remaining church-state unions in the 20th century, and the rise of secular liberalism.

In the article that follows the distinguished scholar Wolfgang Palaver explains why he believes the philosopher René Girard would have seen great danger in the proposal, and how he interpreted the Gospel as supportive of the principles of religious freedom and a separation of church and state.

Peter Thiel is a former student of René Girard and a former mentor of the Republican nominee for the US vice-presidency in the November 2024 presidential election, J.D. Vance.

The ‘annual meeting’ to which Wolfgang refers in his first paragraph was that of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, a community of scholars dedicated to the ideas of René Girard, to which both he and Peter Thiel belong.

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Wolfgang Palaver

After Peter Thiel gave his keynote address, “Nihilism is Not Enough,” at our annual meeting in Paris 2023, he was asked by his respondent Frederic Worms what would possibly be enough—or, if there is nothing that is enough, what would be necessary—after Thiel referred to a long list of concepts and perspectives that are not enough (philosophy; scapegoating; katechon; early, middle, and late modernity; decadence; Hamlet). Thiel’s answer was that he, like Girard, does not provide positive answers but sees the avoidance of the Antichrist (identified with a totalitarian world state) as the most important task of today. I disagreed regarding Girard and referred to his pointing to religion when people questioned him what they should do. He either recommended to them that they should go to church or even mentioned saintliness as an important personal goal to aim at.

When Thiel delivered this paper at the Novitate Conference at the Catholic University of America in Washington in Fall 2023, he explicitly addressed during the discussion also his view of Christianity. I did not attend this conference but heard from Curtis Gruenler and others that he summarized his attitude with the provoking statement that he prefers “the Christianity of Constantine to the Christianity of Mother Theresa” ¹.

When I read this statement, I was worried because it could recommend a type of Christianity that I hope the churches overcame decades ago. I asked Thiel how he meant his provoking thesis, and he told me that his main aim was to defend an understanding of the church that is not completely powerless or apolitical. According to him, it is necessary to find a proper relationship of the church with the state. An apolitical church is, in his eyes, not able to prevent the persecution of Christians. He also maintained that historically a Constantinian type of Christianity was the best that could have been achieved at that time. He understands it, with Girard, as a form of “historical Christianity” and as a “katechon,” a restrainer of the Antichrist (mentioned in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians). I agree with this historical evaluation. He again agrees with Girard and me that it is impossible to return to Constantine’s Christianity. By pointing toward Constantine in order to turn away from an apolitical Christianity, however, he plays with fire, if one understands the dangers that are connected with the Constantinian legacy. There are much better options for a proper understanding of a politically engaged church.

René Girard and Constantinian Christianity

In the following I will explain why I think that from Girard’s perspective it is neither possible nor desirable to return to Constantine. I show in what sense a Constantinian version of Christianity would significantly deviate from Girard’s understanding of it, would also fall behind the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church, and would even deviate from a main dimension of the post-axial religions.

With the term Constantinianism I do not address the personal faith of the Roman emperor but the amalgamation of church and political power that is usually connected with his name. With Constantine’s deathbed conversion, Christianity no longer remained a religion of a small minority in the Roman Empire but began to become its dominant religion. During Christian history, this Constantinian and imperial legacy shaped the relation between church and political power in various forms. John H. Yoder rightly observed, in an insightful essay², that not only Catholicism embodied this dangerous alignment of the church with political power; later movements that fought against it were not able to overcome it but led to versions of it that were even more problematic (Yoder, pp. 135-147). As an example, he mentions those Protestant churches that fought against the Constantinian Catholicism but resulted in an even closer alignment with a particular nation state.

A Different Christ

To understand the dangers coming along with a Constantinian interpretation of Christianity, we can turn to the political theology of the infamous German law scholar Carl Schmitt, who endorsed a Constantinian church that seeks to govern and dominate worldly affairs. In his book Roman Catholicism and Political Form³ he understands the Roman Catholic Church as a “world-historical form of power” (Schmitt, p. 21). He neither puts the longing for eternal goods first nor does he understand how central servanthood and the cross are to avoiding mimetic rivalries in the way Jesus showed us to do. A hugely different Christ characterizes Schmitt’s understanding of the Church when he states that “it represents Christ reigning, ruling and conquering” (Schmitt, p. 31). Schmitt’s book appeared more than one hundred years ago and might be seen as a work that has nothing to say to our current world. Schmitt, however, is today widely read all over the world. His work is eagerly consulted in China and Russia and has also influenced those ideologues who call for a new Christian nationalism or support the revival of a Catholic integralism ⁴.

The Constantinian Church Found Scapegoats

A careful reading of Girard’s oeuvre shows his critique of a Constantinian view of Christianity. There is a passage in his book The Scapegoat⁵ that describes how the Constantinian legacy turned the religion that revealed the persecutory dimension of early religion into a religious system with its own type of persecution:

Close to what Yoder has observed in his essay, Girard also remarked in a radio interview with David Cayley⁶ that criticism of Constantinianism is, however, not protected from being contagiously infected by the very violence that it wants to overcome:

What Girard addresses in this warning is the real temptation of the Antichrist that means to follow Christ but only leads to a scapegoating of scapegoaters or to “a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree”⁷

A Separation of Powers is Affirmed in the Gospel

In an interview from the late 1980s⁸, Girard expressed his distance from Constantinian concepts by referring to the Biblical principle “of give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what us God’s” and to the “idea that Satan is the prince of this world,” therefore claiming that the “absolute separation between religion and the state is essential” and that it “is clearly affirmed in the Gospel” (Dormoy/Girard, p. 56).

Girard deals with the Constantinian temptation even more broadly in the chapter “The Pope and the Emperor” in his last book Battling to the End⁹. He focuses on the history of the papacy and shows how it slowly was able to detach itself from political power and won through this its moral authority. He sees a culmination of this in Pope John Paul II’s repentance by confessing the sins of the Church in the year 2000:

In this chapter of Battling to the End,Girard remarks that the Byzantine Empire did not know this separation from worldly power that has increasingly characterized Western Christianity (Battling,p. 200-201, 209). This insight helps us to understand the problematic position of the Russian Orthodox Church of today that legitimizes Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine as a “holy war.”

Vatican II and Pope Benedict XVI Opposed Compulsion in Religion

Girard praises in this chapter also Pope Benedict’s opposition to any “compulsion” in religion (Battling,p. 209) and underlines by this the endorsement of religious freedom by the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church:

Girard reads the Biblical revelation—especially the teachings of Jesus—in the same way as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council who understood that it excludes compulsion in religion. The most decisive step of the Catholic Church in our modern world was indeed its overcoming of Constantinianism in the Second Vatican Council. The declaration on religious freedom Dignitatis Humanae¹⁰, in which coercion in matters of religion is clearly rejected, is one of the most important documents of the Council. According to this document, religious freedom finds its justification in the Biblical revelation.

Dignitatis Humanae and Pope John Paul II

Dignitatis humanae openly declares that the Church must reject all means that “are incompatible with the spirit of the Gospel” (No. 14). The example of Jesus Christ—his nonviolence, patience, and rejection of force—must also become the way of the Church: “Christ is at once our Master and our Lord and also meek and humble of heart. In attracting and inviting His disciples He used patience. […] He refused to be a political messiah, ruling by force. […] He acknowledged the power of government and its rights, when He commanded that tribute be given to Caesar: but He gave clear warning that the higher rights of God are to be kept inviolate: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ (Matt. 22:21)” (No. 11). This biblical turn of the Council has become the starting point of the Catholic social ethics as Pope John Paul II later developed it. This pope brought the legacy of the Council to its blossoming. He was really the first non-Constantinian or post-Constantinian pope, a fact that Girard highlighted by praising the Pope’s repentance in 2000.

The Distinction Between Politics and Religion

A return to a Constantinian understanding of Christianity goes, however, even beyond Catholicism because it challenges a key dimension of all postaxial religions that are characterized by their awareness of a transcendence that relativizes all worldly power and allows for the first time in human history a distinction between politics and religion. Unfortunately, the postaxial religions remain tempted to fall behind this religious achievement, as history shows. And this temptation is still with us if we think of the Hindutva movement in India that tries to create a Hindu state, of attempts in certain traditions of Islam to create a caliphate or an Islamic state, or of today’s Russian Orthodox Church, and of the rising Christian nationalism in the US and other countries. Whatever one thinks of Emperor Constantine’s personal faith, this brief essay should convince its readers that we should not return to a Constantinian understanding of Christianity.

My critique of Constantinianism, however, does not mean to opt for an apolitical Christianity. In this regard I side with Peter Thiel, at least to a certain degree. His statement is provoking because by opposing Constantine to Mother Theresa he contrasts an imperial type of church with a saintly person that presents an apolitical understanding of the church. I remember that as a student we argued with the church hierarchy at that time who always preferred Mother Theresa over our political activities following liberation theology or people like Oscar Romero. My knowledge about Mother Theresa is not enough to judge if she really was apolitical. My worries with Thiel’s statement stem from the fact that there are many different viable solutions for a political church between these two extreme poles. This essay tried to emphasize the dangers that a return to Constantine would bring with it.

The Katechon Needs Another Essay

Thiel’s statement asks for a positive response regarding a political type of church and its proper relationship to the state. Such a response also needs to show what a Christian understanding of the katechon might look like today. This will require another essay that I hopefully can draft soon. For a quick response I often refer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between the katechon and the church¹¹, in which he significantly differed from Carl Schmitt’s Constantinian endorsement of the katechon (Palaver, pp. 20-21). Schmitt viewed the katechon as a Christian concept of order by overlooking the fact that it not only restrains the Antichrist but also postpones the second coming of Christ. Bonhoeffer wrote that the katechon is neither identical with God nor without sin but is sometimes necessary to preserve the world from destruction. The church cooperates with the katechon without neglecting its primary task to embody “the miracle of a new awakening of faith” that provides orientation for the katechon, too. A proper unfolding of this difference will hopefully follow soon in one of the next issues of the Bulletin.

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Wolfgang Palaver is an emeritus professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the author of ‘René Girard’s Mimetic Theory‘ (Michigan State University Press, 2013), a lucid standard introduction to the insights of this Catholic anthropologist and philosopher, who died in 2015.

This important article was first published in August 2024, in the Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, centred on the ideas of René Girard. It appears here with the kind permission of COV&R and the author, Wolfgang Palaver, whom we thank for this privilege.

1. Gruenler, Curtis. “Be Not Conformed.”The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, no. 78 (December 2023).
2. Yoder, John Howard. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
3. Schmitt, Carl.Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.
4. Lilla, Mark. “The Tower and the Sewer.” The New York Review of Books71, no. 11 (2024): 14-18.
5. Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
6. Girard, René, and David Cayley. The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence and Religion. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio Interviews from March 5–9, 2001. Toronto, 2001.
7. Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.
8. Girard, René, and Nadine Dormoy. The World of René Girard: Interviews. Translated by William A. Johnsen Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2024.
9. Girard, René. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2010.
10. Second Vatican Council. “Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae: On the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Civil Freedom in Matters Religious.”  1965.
11. Palaver, Wolfgang. “Sacrifice and the Origin of Law.” In Law’s Sacrifice: Approaching the Problem of Sacrifice in Law, Literature, and Philosophy, edited by Brian W. Nail and Jeffrey A. Ellsworth, 12-22. London: Routledge, 2019.