One Church

James Carroll’s account of Constantine ( Constantine’s Sword ) is riddled with half-truths and distortions. He’s not nearly as bad as Dan Brown, but he’s bad.

But the howler (thus far) is this: Christians had tried to work out how Jesus is God without coming to a consensus, but what had “eluded . . . finely tuned, passionate minds as variously engaged with the question as Irenaeus, Origen, and Arius – would now be imposed by imperial fiat. Unity would henceforth be the note not only of the political order but of a revealed truth. With holiness and catholicity, ‘unity’ would henceforth be, in the argot, a ‘mark’ of the Church – at least in theory.”

“Henceforth”? Carroll used to be a Roman Catholic priest: Surely, at some point in that earlier career he stumbled across John 17 or Ephesians 2-4 or Paul’s regular exhortations to “be of one mind.”