Late Antiquity can often be made to seem coterminous with something like ‘‘Christian antiquity.’’ The chapters in this section illustrate why that might be so, but also why the notion would be misplaced. It goes without saying that Christianity began long before ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ can be thought of as an applicable label; and it is equally possible to argue that the Roman world, in whatever sense one uses that term, was never ‘‘Christian’’ in any complete sense.
One used to talk about ‘‘the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity,’’ as alluded to, for example, in the title of A. H. M. Jones’s famous little book Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (Jones 1948), not to mention Merivale’s Boyle Lectures of nearly a century before. The link with Constantine was not accidental: his personal ‘‘conversion,’’ whatever its form, was taken to represent a change of religious allegiance throughout his empire. The change was slow, however, geographically patchy in its achievement, and scarcely widespread in the countryside for many centuries (see Map 7). Hence a preference for the language of‘‘Christianity and’’ or (even better) ‘‘Christianity in’’ (Markus 1974; Chadwick 2001). Emphasis was to be on the association of Christianity with Rome, and the effect of that association on its own development - for example, famously, Christianity and Classical Culture (Cochrane 1940) or, more precisely, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (Chadwick 1966).
The ‘‘early’’ reference has its importance, for one might argue that Constantine presided over the closing stages of a Christianity that was superseded by models of piety and organization both novel and (in the eyes of some, both then and now) less true to its origins. Hence Robert Markus felt able to write about ‘‘the end of ancient Christianity’’ (Markus 1990), ‘‘Byzantine’’ or ‘‘medieval’’ Christianity being supposedly different (although Markus himself did not cast the debate in those terms). And, although the notion of ‘‘conversion’’ still has its value, even if we do not think of it in terms of some personal commitment or great awakening
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Map 7 Major Christian Centers in Late Antiquity.
(see the splendid essays in Mills and Grafton 2003; and compare Nock 1933; also Fletcher 1997), we tend now to use terms like ‘‘christianization,’’ although that is easier to recognize as an aspiration in certain sectors of late antique society than as a definable quality of that society itself (witness Brown 1992: ‘‘towards a Christian empire’’).
Gaddis (ch. 34), Lizzi Testa (ch. 35), Graumann (ch. 36), and Caner (ch. 39) make it clear in this section that an apparatus of power and clear traditions of thought and practice continued to characterize the Christian communities, even as they engaged with the new political dispensations made available to them by Constantine and his successors. But there is a dangerous tendency to privilege the Christian aspects of this story: for it is possible to argue that Judaism, for example, the seedbed of Christianity, and that range of cults and worldviews that we carelessly label ‘‘pagan’’ were themselves undergoing change, to the extent that we properly refer to late antique Judaism and late antique paganism (Koltun-Fromm and McLynn, chs. 37 and 38, respectively). They were becoming as ‘‘different’’ as Christianity, and one could toy with the notion of an ‘‘end’’ to ‘‘ancient’’ Judaism and ‘‘ancient’’ paganism. (Gnosticism, Mithraism, and Manichaeism - perhaps even Caner’s monasticism - would also be parts of that story: Michael Williams 1996; Ulansey 1989 and Beck 2006; and Lieu 1985.)
But we have to carry our caution one step further yet. A great body of secondary literature informs us of the degree to which the Roman Empire was a ‘‘sacred’’ society, even apart from the presence of Christianity within it. In the eyes of pagan ‘‘persecutors,’’ for example (Decius or Diocletian), it was as true as ever before that the Roman polity stood or fell in accordance with the favor of the gods, and that a sound worship of those gods was an essential guarantee, therefore, of the empire’s stability. The point is that Christians said exactly the same thing: this was the basis of their supposition that the Roman Empire, as it seemed to be progressing from the end of the third century onward (the heyday of Eusebius and Lactantius), was indeed ‘‘God’s empire’’ - the empire providentially foreseen by the ‘‘true,’’ that is the Christian, God. The implication is, in other words, not that one religious party was losing and another winning, but that late Roman society as a whole was changing its mind about the proper relations between the divine and the human spheres. Notions of cult, of community and individual, of law and conscience, of authority and inspiration were all affected.
It is harder to untangle another web of change: the notion that not every department of life could be characterized as wholly sacral. Paradoxically, as the focus of worship shifted to a single God (a notion not by any means strange to pagan theorists), and as religious devotion and loyalty became more intense and interior-ized, so some spheres of social activity acquired a more neutral or ‘‘secular’’ air. The ‘‘world,’’ the saeculum, once given a Christian definition, could become either imperfect, incomplete, unfulfilled, or else untouched by the immediate influence of the creator, a zone ofindifference, which might support or inhibit religious endeavor, not because of its inherent qualities but because of the motives of the agents who moved within it. It may be a mistake to suppose, therefore, that one species of sacrality was superseded by another. Rather, there developed an unresolved tension between, on the one hand, an optimistic eagerness to respect or transform or transcend the world of nature and, on the other, a gloomier sense of selfish, shortsighted, indulgent, or brutal ignorance of what that world was for. Since the tension could be played out even within the individual, tendencies latent in the earliest Christian reflections were given a new lease of life by the triumphs that supposedly rendered them irrelevant.
World History
