The Conversion of Europe

Ninth, and almost finally, there are the cultural consequences of conversion, already glanced at. We do not know exactly where Edwin’s wooden chapel stood, though there is some likelihood that it was in the pillared square of what had once been the praetorium or headquarters building of the Roman fortress at York. Excavation has shown that this enormous and imposing structure was still standing in Edwin’s day. If this supposition about the siting of York’s earliest Anglo-Saxon cathedral is correct, Edwin’s baptism at the hands of an Italian missionary bishop took place in an unambiguously Roman architectural setting. Bede tells us that Edwin used to have a standard of Roman type carried before him. He quotes papal letters which addressed Edwin with exalted Latin titles, ‘glorious king of the English’, ‘most excellent and surpassing lord’. To Bede it was clear that there was something Roman about Edwin’s kingship after his conversion. Whatever the reality might have been, from Bede’s angle of vision the perception was a just one. Within little more than a century of Edwin’s death the cathedral school at York had become the most important centre for the study of Christian and classical learning in western Europe. Among others it educated Alcuin, that early example of the brain-drain who, head-hunted by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was the architect of that revival of literature and learning under royal patronage, the so-called Carolingian renaissance, which was the threshold to the cultural achievements of western Christendom in the Middle Ages.

These are all questions to which answers may be found – however hesitant or provisional, however swaddled in circumlocutory cautions our formulations may need to be – in the meagre sources which are all that have come down to us from a remote epoch. The tenth and last question on our agenda is the most perplexing because it was never specifically addressed in our sources. It is no more and no less than this: What makes a Christian? At what point may one say of an individual, or a society, ‘He (or she, or it) has become, is now Christian’? If the saving grace imparted by baptism makes the Christian, then the hundreds of Northumbrian farmers and their families dunked in the waters of the river Glen by Paulinus were indeed made Christians in the course of those thirty-six days. It is a sound sacramentalist point of view. Was it enough for Paulinus? Was it enough for Bede? As it happens, we know how Bede would have answered that question. His requirements for right Christian living were rigorous. To investigate what more beyond baptism might be required is to discover that the question ‘What makes a Christian?’ was very variously answered in the span of place and time embraced by this book. Being a Christian was obviously a rather different operation for Pope Gregory I than it was for King Ethelbert of Kent. Being a Christian in seventh-century Northumbria was not the same as being a Christian in twelfth-century Northumbria (or, for the matter of that, in sixteenth- or twentieth-century Northumbria). Conversion could mean different things to different people at the same time. What was required of the convert could vary as circumstances or tactics or the pressure of time or the level of moral resources also varied. Investigators will choose diverse indicators of Christianization and frame judgements accordingly. For the historian the study of early medieval conversion can be bewildering; a game played in swirling mist on a far from level playing field in which unseen hands are constantly shifting the dimly glimpsed goalposts.

The theme is a grand one and the agenda (quite frankly) daunting. This is the more so because the sources to which we may turn for information are sparse and uniformly problematic. Early medieval Europe was a society of restricted literacy. Most of those who could read and write during the period which is my concern were ecclesiastics. In consequence, very nearly all the surviving written narratives were composed by what might be called professional Christians for a primary audience of other professional Christians. Works thus composed reach us only after a process of passing, so to say, through several different filters which have impeded the free flow of information. In the first place there was a kind of voluntary censorship practised by their authors. There are many things we should like to know about which these writers never tell us. A notorious example is furnished by Bede’s reluctance to tell us much about Anglo-Saxon paganism. A second source of difficulty is that these narratives are almost invariably to some degree didactic. I have already said that Bede’s portrayal of Edwin and Paulinus was drawn with an eye to the kings and clergy of his own day a century later. Indeed, there is not a single chapter in Bede’s great Ecclesiastical History which cannot be shown to have had a didactic purpose of one sort or another. The lessons which such writers sought to teach may not always be clear to the modern reader, but the didactic intent usually is. Now teaching lessons involves a measure of selection, of emphasis, of simplification, of omission. Here then is another filter through which the information has to pass. Bede presented Edwin as a sober statesman and an earnest seeker after truth. One cannot help suspecting that there may have been other sides to Edwin’s character than these. But this is how Bede wanted his audience to see him.

The most overtly didactic narrative literature of the period is that branch of Christian biography known as hagiography, or the lives of the saints. During the early Middle Ages the control of saint-making with which we are familiar – a formal process of canonization under papal supervision – did not exist: canonization in this guise was an invention of the ecclesiastical lawyers of the twelfth century. Instead, holy men and holy women (sancti, sanctae) were simply recognized and revered as such by neighbourhood and community. One way of keeping the memory of a saint fresh was by the composition of a memoir, the saint’s life (vita), which could be read aloud for edificatory purposes in the religious community to which the holy man or woman had belonged in life, and where his or her relics were treasured after death. Edification is the key word in this context. Although hagiography came – as it still comes – in many different costumes its aim was consistently to edify – to hold the saint up as an example of godly living and holy dying, to spur listeners or readers to compunction and devotion. One means of edification which may cause disquiet to the modern reader was the recording of wonders and miracles worked by the saint. Early medieval Europe was a world in which persons of every level of intellectual cultivation accepted without question that the miraculous could weave like a shuttle in and out of everyday reality. We need to remember this, and to resist the temptation to dismiss it out of hand as infantile credulity: patronizing the past never helped anyone to understand it. Hagiographical writings survive in great abundance from this period. They constitute an important source of information for the historian. At the most obvious level the lives of the saints contain an enormous quantity of incidental information about daily life. To give a trivial example, we learn from Chapter 20 of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert that the saint used pig’s lard as a kind of dubbin with which to grease his leather shoes. At a more subtle level of interpretation saints’ lives can tell us something of the expectations which people held of their holy men and women. Did the saint foretell the future? Heal the sick? Found monasteries? Rebuke the mighty? Control the weather? Preach to the heathen? Wreak vengeance on his enemies? See visions? Practise ascetic self-denial? Sensitively used, hagiographical writings can enable us to peer into some at least of the more intimate religious feelings and aspirations of a people distantly removed from us in time.

Of course, matters are rarely straightforward. In the path of every historian of the early Middle Ages – and especially but not exclusively those who concern themselves with hagiography – there lies like some Slough of Despond the quagmire of the topos. The Greek word for ‘place’, topos has been adopted into the jargon of literary scholars to mean, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a traditional motif or theme (in a literary composition); a rhetorical commonplace, a literary convention or formula’. In the context of hagiography what this means is that there existed, as it were, a bank of stock tales, themes, phrases on which the hagiographer could draw without restraint or acknowledgement: for example, future sanctity foreshadowed in childhood; renunciation of home and kinsfolk; the edifying deathbed, etc. But we need not restrict ourselves to hypothetical examples: let us return to Cuthbert and the pig’s lard. In the story it was brought to him on Farne Island by a pair of ravens (and if you want to know the ostensible reason why you had better read it for yourself). Bede himself tells us that the story of Cuthbert and the ravens was ‘after the example’ of a tale told by Pope Gregory in his account of St Benedict, founder of Montecassino and author of the Benedictine Rule. Behind this lies the story, well-loved in the early Middle Ages, of how the hermits Paul and Antony were sustained by a raven who brought them bread in the desert. Lurking still further back is the story in I Kings xvii of how the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens at the Lord’s command when he lay concealed beside the brook Cherith. It is extremely common to find that episodes in one saint’s Vita were modelled upon episodes in another or in the Bible. This feature of the literature raises nagging anxieties about historicity. To what extent might the demands of matching form and content to a literary model have distorted the reality which the writer professes to convey?

Conversion narratives, of which Bede’s account of Edwin is but one of many that we shall encounter, offer an open door to colonization by formulaic topoi. They present additional snags all of their own. The business of organizing a narrative round a conversion is in itself liable to project sharpness of outline on to a historical reality which was more likely than not blurred and indistinct. Hagiographical piety and didactic intent might highlight the missionary’s role by casting as unalloyedly pagan a people who had already been touched by Christianity. Narrative drama could be enhanced by presenting conversion as a moment rather than a process. Hindsight could show as smooth and harmonious the growth of a church which in reality had been characterized by improvisation and quarrelling. Even – or perhaps especially – the simple and fundamental opposition ‘pagan/Christian’ might be deceptive. In a word, we have to exercise great caution in our handling of the conversion narratives which have come down to us.

Narratives such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and hagiographies such as his Life of St Cuthbert are our most important written sources but not our only ones. They can be supplemented with sermons, tracts, letters, legislative enactments, deeds relating to property, poetry both sacred and profane. Each presents difficulties of interpretation. Sermons and lawcodes are normative or prescriptive; their authors tend to encourage the ideal rather than to describe the actual. Lettercollections such as Alcuin’s were on the whole valued and preserved rather for their style than for their content. Deeds rarely survive in their original form; the texts of the copies which have come down to us may have been tampered with in the course of transmission. Unattributed poetry is hard to date.

These diverse sources of information in written form may be supplemented by the material evidence of surviving objects or structures. Two notable excavations have helped us to grasp something of the setting of Edwin’s kingship. Aerial photography above the valley of the river Till, near Wooler in Northumberland, revealed in 1948 a complex of markings which were initially taken to indicate the remains of a hitherto unknown monastic settlement. Excavation in the 1950s revealed the site of Edwin’s residence at Yeavering with its associated structures, scene of the mass baptisms administered by Paulinus. Some years later, in the early 1970s, threats to the stability of the central tower of York Minster necessitated a strengthening of the foundations, which permitted some limited and hazardous archaeological excavation. It was in the course of this operation that it was discovered that the pillared square of the Roman praetorium was still standing in good repair in Edwin’s day. Some of the archaeological materials from this age may speak to us even more directly of conversion, as we shall see in due course.

There are hard questions to be faced, and intractable evidence to answer them with. But face them we must, and do with it what we can, if we are to do justice to the grandeur of our theme. Yeavering is a long way beyond what had been Rome’s northernmost frontier, Hadrian’s Wall. Edwin’s great hall was an enormous barn-like structure of timber, with doorways in the long sides through which a sparrow might pass from winter darkness to winter darkness. The quantities of cattle bones excavated near by suggest that the king and his retainers gorged themselves on beef, washed down no doubt by copious draughts of beer from generous drinking-horns like those found at Taplow or Sutton Hoo. A barbaric scene: yes, but not far from the hall there stood a flight of curved benches, rising in tiers and lengthening as they rose, whose occupants’ gaze would have focused upon a dais at ground level backed by a massive wooden post. This structure can only have been designed for seating an assembly which might be addressed from the dais. The design of this auditorium irresistibly recalls as it were a segment from a Roman theatre. Did Paulinus address Edwin’s warriors from that dais? Perhaps. The encounter between Paulinus and Edwin was one between Roman and barbarian, Christian and pagan, Latin and Germanic, literate and oral, wine and beer, oil and lard, south and north. It opened up perspectives on to distant notions and activities beyond the wildest surmises of the participants.

Christianity traces its historic roots to the ministry of a Jewish preacher and exorcist in a backward province of the Roman empire. As an offshoot of Judaic stock, early Christianity was heir to the proselytizing zeal of its parent. Accustomed as we are to a merely self-perpetuating style of Judaism which was brought about by subsequent centuries of Christian and Islamic religious repression, it is easy to forget that the Judaism of the Hellenistic world was an evangelizing faith, and not one by any means conceived as being exclusively for adherents who were of Jewish ethnicity. The diaspora, or dispersion, of the Jewish people from their homeland had begun several centuries earlier with the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities of the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. respectively. Thereafter it trickled on, quickening to a flood of emigration after the Jewish revolt of 66–70 A.D. and the destruction of Jerusalem, and again after the rebellion of Bar-Kochba in the years 132–5. By the first century of the Christian era there were significant Jewish communities to the east of the Roman empire in Armenia, Iraq, Iran and Arabia, and throughout the Mediterranean world in Egypt, Asia Minor, Italy and Spain; communities that were thriving and growing by evangelistic effort. We shall meet some of these scattered Jewish communities of the Mediterranean in a later chapter.

As a sect within Judaism, early Christianity followed in its parent’s geographical footsteps. It was characterized from the outset by its mobility. This rapid dissemination found its earliest chronicler in the author of the Acts of the Apostles, traditionally identified as St Luke, a masterly account focused principally upon the missionary labours of St Paul. But the impression given by Luke of an orderly and controlled diffusion – reinforced for many of us by map and mnemonic in the scripture lessons of childhood – is misleading. Our evidence is patchy. The spread of Christianity to Alexandria and beyond along the coast of north Africa to Carthage has left no narrative trace of any kind. But it is reasonably clear that Christianity spread to east and to west both quickly and anarchically, without overt strategy or leadership. In his epistle to the Romans Paul was not addressing a Christian community which he had founded, in contrast to the young churches of Ephesus, Corinth or Thessalonica. The Christian community in Rome already existed by at latest the middle years of the first century. It had just mysteriously come into being – mysteriously, that is, if one doubts (as most scholars now do) the traditions attributing its foundation to St Peter. This intimate association with Judaism continued to provide a ramifying network of communication for Christian churches throughout and beyond the long-drawn-out and messy process of the detachment of church from synagogue, of the law of Christ from the law of Moses.

Alexandria, Carthage, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, Thessalonica: the expansion of Christianity took place in a social setting that was predominantly urban. It was in the cities of Asia Minor and Greece that St Paul found, or founded, the Christian communities which he nurtured, lectured, scolded or bullied. It was in the cities round the Mediterranean that a church organization developed, in the cities that martyrs suffered and were commemorated, in the cities that Christians organized the charitable works for which they were renowned. The early Christian communities were composed of city-dwellers of fairly lowly social rank. It is true that when, in the course of time – and hardly at all before about the year 200 – the Christian faith began to attract adherents of higher rank and greater wealth, such persons might possess country houses in which they and their families would spend part of the year. But these country villas were, in Ramsay MacMullen’s striking phrase, like ‘pieces of cities broken off’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even in the country houses of the rich Christianity remained an urban religion.

Such observations have long been truisms of early Christian studies. Like all truisms they need some qualification. The contrast between urban and rural may be made too clear-cut by our industrialized perceptions of that distinction. Before the era of railways, tinned food and refrigeration it was impossible for towns to be isolated from rural life. Apart from a handful of really big cities (Alexandria, Antioch and, of course, Rome) and a larger number of towns of middling size (such as Athens or Naples), most of the towns round the Mediterranean were small and closely integrated with their rural hinterland. Very many farmers would have lived in towns and walked out to their fields by day, as some still do twenty centuries later. In addition, we do have a few tiny fragments of evidence which suggest an early rural dimension to the spread of Christianity in, for example, Syria, Egypt or Asia Minor. The younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, addressed a famous letter to the Emperor Trajan in about 112 asking for guidance on the treatment of Christians, in the course of which he referred to a Christian presence in the countryside. Possibly he exaggerated; but it would be unwise to disregard his testimony altogether.

So a degree of circumspection is needed. Nevertheless, the old truism still has validity if we introduce a geographical modification. The early evidence for rural Christianity comes exclusively from the eastern provinces of the empire (and especially from those that were close to the Mediterranean). It does not come from the western ones which are the main concern of this book, those provinces embraced by north Africa west of Carthage, Spain, Italy and the Alpine regions stretching up as far as the Danube frontier, Gaul and Britain. There were no great cities at all in the west, if we exclude Rome, and far fewer of middling rank. Towns of modest size were generally even smaller than in the east, and thinner on the ground, further apart from one another. There were enormous tracts of countryside which were to all intents and purposes untouched by Romanization. We shall see evidence in the following chapter that they were untouched by Christianity too.

Then there is the question of cultural attitudes. The educated and articulate elite of the classical Mediterranean believed that civilization and culture were to be found exclusively in cities. Our daily use of such words as ‘urbane’, ‘polite’ and, of course, ‘civilized’ shows what a good job that elite has done in persuading posterity of its point of view. Occasionally the writers who belonged to this tiny elite deigned to celebrate country life and the happy lot of the peasantry – their rude health, sturdy virtues and innocent pleasures. Reality was different. City-dwellers, parasitic upon the surrounding country for their essential supplies, repaid this dependence in the harsh coin of disdain. Most townspeople, most of the time, looked upon the rural peasantry with mingled disgust, fear and contempt. They were dirty and smelly, unkempt, inarticulate, uncouth, misshapen by toil, living in conditions of unbelievable squalor, as brutish as the beasts they tended. These attitudes are easy to document from surviving Greek and Latin literature. The peasantry of the countryside were beyond the pale, a tribe apart, outsiders. Such attitudes underpinned the failure of the urban Christian communities to reach out and spread the gospel in the countryside. We might regard this lack of initiative as negligent. But such an accusation would probably have bewildered the urban Christians. For them the countryside simply did not exist as a zone for missionary enterprise. After all, there was nothing in the New Testament about spreading the Word to the beasts of the field.

Unappealing as we might find this disposition of antique citydwellers, it was one which witnessed to a massive confidence in the urban order of imperial Rome. The Christian communities of the Mediterranean world had grown up in that order, if not quite of it. They took it for granted and they were right to be confident in it. From the beginning of the Christian era in the reign of Augustus for the next two centuries the Mediterranean (as opposed to the frontier) provinces of the empire had basked in almost uninterrupted peace and prosperity: the pax romana. The public buildings of the cities and the speeches which were declaimed in them alike display a bland and soothing mastery of their respective architectural and literary techniques; symptomatic of a social order which gazed upon its way of going about its business and was pleased with what it saw. Look at me, the colonnades and arches of Leptis Magna seem to say: relax; enjoy; and it’ll go on like this for ever.

But it didn’t. In the middle years of the third century the Roman empire experienced a phase of trouble more harrowing and profound than any that had occurred since the founding of the principate by Augustus. During the half-century which followed the death of the Emperor Severus Alexander in 235 there ensued a series of short-lived and for the most part incompetent rulers. Of twenty more or less legitimate emperors – not counting usurpers – all but two died violently. The average length of reign was two years and six months. A symptom, and perhaps to a large degree a cause of this instability was the inability of government to hold the allegiance of the armies. This played into the hands of the generals, who used the troops under their command to stage coups which made and unmade emperors or to set up breakaway ‘empires within the empire’. As central control slackened, imperial income fell. To make ends meet, and in particular to try to satisfy the insatiable demands of the military and thus to purchase loyalty, the government resorted time after time to that most irresponsible of expedients, debasement of the coinage. Debasement brought in its train, as it always does, inflation. By the end of the third century the purchasing power of the denarius stood at about a half of 1 per cent of what it had been at its outset.

Crippled by instability, civil war, fiscal chaos – and, just to make matters worse, by intermittent outbreaks of bubonic plague – the empire was in no position to defend its frontiers. From 224 onwards the new Persian dynasty of the Sassanids constituted a well-organized and hostile presence to the east, bent upon regaining the Syrian territories which Persian kings of old had ruled. For the Roman empire, the most humiliating moment of this time of troubles occurred in 260 when the Emperor Valerian was captured by the Persians. The Germanic tribes of the Goths, settled at this period on the northern shores of the Black Sea in today’s Ukraine, took to the sea to strike deep into Asia Minor. By land, they pressed hard on the Danube frontier, launching raids into the Balkans and Greece. The Emperor Decius was defeated and killed by them in Thrace in the year 251. Along the Rhine frontier new Germanic confederations, those of the Alamans and of the Franks, took shape. In 257 they broke into Gaul to plunder it at will. Some of them even penetrated as far as northeastern Spain, where they sacked the city of Tarraco (Tarragona). Berbers along the Saharan fringes attacked the long, thin, vulnerable littoral of Roman north Africa. In far-flung Britain the construction of coastal defences witnessed to new enemies from overseas – Saxons from Germany and Scots from Ireland. One of the most telling signs of the times was the building of town walls throughout the western provinces of Gaul, Spain and Britain, furnishing defences for settlements which had never needed them before.

The third-century slide into anarchy and helplessness was arrested by the Emperor Diocletian (284–305). His stabilizing reforms, fiscal, military and bureaucratic, were continued and extended under his successor Constantine I (306–37). Their work gave the empire the stamina and solidity it enjoyed in the fourth century. One feature of these reforms was the adoption of ideas about monarchy, together with the associated ceremonies and ritual, which drew on earlier Hellenistic and Persian thinking. The principal tendency of this body of political theory was to stress the power of the ruler in matters sacred as well as profane. It would encourage the moving together of church and state and, as time went by, their near merging in the imperial theocracies of the East Roman or Byzantine empire and, much later, in its Russian heir. It was a tendency which was less pronounced in the western provinces of the fourth-century empire. This was a difference which had important implications, to which we shall return shortly. A second feature was the division of the unitary empire into two halves, an eastern and a western. Diocletian had led the way here, dividing the empire into a tetrarchy – a senior emperor in east and west, each with a subordinate emperor – as part of his reforms; a decentralization intended to make more effective the emperors’ discharge of their primary responsibility, defence. This formal structure was not maintained after his death and practice varied in the course of the fourth century, but by its last quarter the political division into eastern and western empires had become permanent. One development which helped to institutionalize it was Constantine’s foundation of a new capital city in the east, named after him – Constantinople.

A third feature of the reforms of the Diocletianic-Constantinian period was the change in the status of Christianity within the empire. Towards the end of Diocletian’s reign there occurred the last and most serious persecution of the Christian communities ever mounted by the imperial authorities. It was immediately halted by a respite. The story of Constantine’s conversion is well known but needs to be told again in outline here because it became such a potent model – indeed, a topos – of how a ruler should be brought to the faith. Constantine had been proclaimed emperor in Britain in 306. Six years later, having by then made himself master of Gaul and Spain as well, the emperor was leading his army south to do battle with his rival Maxentius for control of Italy and Africa. At some point in the course of this journey – much later tradition would locate this at Arles – Constantine saw a vision of the cross superimposed on the sun above the words In hoc signo vince, ‘Conquer in this sign’. He advanced over the Alps and down towards Rome. His troops were ordered to mark their shields with the sign of the cross. In the battle of the Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome, Constantine was victorious against all odds. The Christian God – a god of battles – had been on his side. A few months later, in March 313, the so-called Edict of Milan put an end to the persecution of the Christians.

In what sense and when Constantine became a Christian are questions that have been endlessly and inconclusively debated. In the formal sense of the word he was not initiated until shortly before his death in 337. Like many others in the early church he chose to postpone baptism until his deathbed. But his adhesion to Christianity from 313 onwards was not to be doubted. Its most enduring manifestation was in open-handed patronage. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, though this is often said of him. What he did was to make the Christian church the most-favoured recipient of the near-limitless resources of imperial favour. An enormous new church of St Peter was built in Rome, modelled on the basilican form used for imperial throne halls such as the one which survives at Trier. The see of Rome received extensive landed endowments and one of the imperial residences, the Lateran Palace, to house its bishop and his staff. Constantinople, begun in 325, was to be an emphatically and exclusively Christian city – even though it was embellished with pagan statuary pillaged from temples throughout the eastern provinces. Jerusalem was provided with a splendid church of the Holy Sepulchre. Legal privileges and immunities rained down upon the Christian church and its clergy. The emperor took an active part in ecclesiastical affairs, summoning and attending church councils, participating in theological debate, attempting to sort out quarrels and controversies.

1. The Mediterranean world in late antiquity.

The adhesion to Christianity of Constantine and his successors with the single exception of the short-lived Emperor Julian ‘the Apostate’ (361–3) – was a development of the utmost weight and significance in Christian history. All sorts of relationships were turned topsy-turvy by it. From being a vulnerable, if vibrant, sect liable to intermittent persecution at the hands of the secular authorities, Christians suddenly found themselves part of the ‘establishment’. The end of persecution meant that martyrdom must thenceforward be found only outside Christendom or be understood in a metaphorical rather than a literal manner. Christian bishops were no longer just the disciplinarians of tightly organized sectarian cells but rapidly assimilated as quasi civil servants into the mandarinate which administered the empire. Their churches were no longer obscure conventicles but public buildings of increasing magnificence. So much, and more, flowed from Constantine’s spiritual reorientation.

The church repaid Constantine’s generosity by presenting him as the model Christian emperor, the ‘friend of God’ who ‘frames his earthly government according to the pattern of the divine original’. The words are those of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, who lived from c. 260 to c. 340. Eusebius was a notable scholar and a prominent member of the little circle of court clerics who helped to school Constantine in Christian ways and to shape an image of him for contemporaries and for posterity. His Oration in Praise of Constantine, from which the passages quoted above are taken, is a prime example of fourth-century rhetoric, a work of oily panegyric which was hugely successful in carefully directing attention to all that was most admirable in its subject while discreetly drawing a veil over the less appealing features of the emperor’s character. It is not to Eusebius that we must go to learn that Constantine murdered his father-in-law, his wife and his son. On the contrary, Constantine was ‘our divinely favoured emperor’, who has received ‘as it were a transcript of the divine sovereignty’ to direct ‘in imitation of God himself, the administration of this world’s affairs’.

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Eusebius’ handling of Constantine requires to be considered in the context of early Christian thinking about the relationship between the church and the world. For simplicity’s sake one may distinguish two contrasting tendencies. The first was an attitude of wariness towards the secular world, of distrust, even of hatred for it. The Christian church was a society set apart, a ‘gathered’ community of the elect salvaged from the polluting grasp of the world, though still menaced by it in the form of the secular state, the Roman empire. The most violent expression of these views in early Christian writings is to be found in the book of Revelation, composed towards the end of the first century. The Roman empire is the beast, the harlot, ‘drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus’. Keeping the world at arm’s length long remained an urgent concern among some Christian groups. We shall return shortly to some of its manifestations in the late antique period.

The second tendency was the quest for some form of accommodation with the secular world and the empire. This search was muted and hesitant at first but gained in confidence and assertiveness as time went on. The earliest sign of it may be glimpsed in the two New Testament books attributed to Luke. It is significant that both were dedicated to Theophilus, a patron of social or official eminence in that very world, secular, gentile and Romano-Hellenistic, which other Christians regarded with misgiving. A next step was to ponder the implications of the coincidence in time between the establishment of the Roman peace and the growth of the Christian church within the empire. Bishop Mellitus of Sardis, addressing an Apologia to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius about the year 170, could claim that the Christian faith was ‘a blessing of auspicious omen to your empire’ because ‘having sprung up among the nations under your rule during the great reign of your ancestor Augustus … from that time the power of the Romans has grown in greatness and splendour’. The next move was to suggest that the Roman empire was in some sense itself related to God’s scheme for the world. The first who dared to think such a thought was the great Alexandrian scholar Origen. In his work Contra Celsum, composed between 230 and 240 to refute the attacks on Christianity by the pagan philosopher Celsus, Origen had occasion to comment upon the following words in Psalm lxxii.7: ‘In his [the just king’s] days righteousness shall flourish, prosperity abound until the moon is no more.’ Origen observed that ‘God was preparing the nations for His teaching, that they might be under one Roman emperor, so that the unfriendly attitude of the nations to one another caused by the existence of a large number of kingdoms, might not make it more difficult for Jesus’ apostles to do what He commanded them when He said “Go and teach all nations” …’ Augustus therefore, who first ‘reduced to uniformity the many kingdoms on earth so that he had a single empire’, could be presented as the instrument of God’s providence.

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These accommodating tendencies were carried to extreme lengths after Constantine’s adhesion to Christianity early in the fourth century. Faced for the first time with an entirely novel situation, churchmen had to come to grips with the question, How is a Christian emperor to be fitted into the scheme of things? The most comprehensive answer was provided by Eusebius, explicitly in his Oration, implicitly in the work to which the Oration was a pendent, the Ecclesiastical History – the earliest work of its kind, the most important single source for our knowledge of the first three centuries of Christian history, and a potent literary influence upon the work of Bede. Eusebius brought the Roman empire within the divine providential scheme for the world. It was an astonishing feat of intellectual acrobatics, here summarized in the words of a modern scholar:

Eusebius sees the achievement of a unified Christian empire as the goal of all history. He insists on the mutual support of Christianity and Rome, of the monarchy of Christ and the monarchy of Augustus. For him, Roman empire and Christian church are not only essentially connected; they move towards identity … Eusebius can say that the city of earth has become the city of God, and that the monarchy of Constantine brings the kingdom of God to men.

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This Eusebian accommodation between church and empire became and long remained a cornerstone of the ‘political theology’ of the eastern empire and its successors. For the historian of conversion it has two significant implications. If empire and church are moving towards identity, if they are (in the words of another scholar) but ‘two facets of a single reality’, then one of the questions from which we started – Who is Christianity for? – acquires at once a sharper urgency and an answer. If Romanitas and Christianitas are co-terminous, then the faith is for all dwellers within the ring-fence of the empire but not for those outside. All dwellers within means the ‘internal outsiders’, the huge rural majority, whose evangelization will occupy us in the next chapter. Those outside means the barbarians.

Barbarians could be as effectively de-humanized by the educated minority as were the peasantry. ‘Roman and barbarian are as distinct one from the other as are four-footed beasts from humans,’ wrote the Spanish Christian poet Prudentius in about 390. His contemporary St Jerome was sure that some of the Germans were cannibals. ‘The holy priesthood, chastity and virginity do not exist among barbarian peoples; and if they were to do so, they would not be safe,’ wrote Bishop Optatus of Milevis in north Africa in the 360s. Ingrained habits of thought are revealed in the turn of a phrase. The Spanish historian Orosius, writing in about 417, could begin a sentence with the words ‘As a Christian and as a Roman …’ Quite so.

(#litres_trial_promo) The identities were conflated. In such a climate of opinion there could be no question of taking the faith to the heathen barbarian. In the words of a leading modern authority, ‘Throughout the whole period of the Roman empire not a single example is known of a man who was appointed bishop with the specific task of going beyond the frontier to a wholly pagan region in order to convert the barbarians living there.’

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One qualification needs to be made. If Christian communities came into existence outside the imperial frontiers they might request the church authorities within the empire to send them a bishop to minister to their needs. There was a variety of ways in which such communities might come into existence, by means of trading settlements, diplomatic contacts, veterans returning from service in the Roman army in the course of which they had been converted, cross-frontier marriage, the settlement of prisoners carried away from their homelands by barbarian raids, and so on. Here is an example. At the end of the fourth century Rufinus of Aquileia translated Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History from Greek into Latin to render it accessible to the Latin-speaking west. He also brought it up to date, continuing it from where Eusebius had left off in Constantine’s day down to the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in 395. Rufinus had met the king of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, who told him that his predecessor King Miriam, who reigned in the time of Constantine, had acquired a Christian slave-girl who had converted her master to Christianity. Rufinus did not know her name, though later sources were to name her as Nounè or Nino. Whatever may lie behind this story – perhaps a jumbled memory of diplomatic relations between Constantinople and Tiflis – we may be certain that Christian communities did exist in Georgia in Constantine’s reign, because reliable sources reveal that a certain Patrophilus, bishop of Pithyonta (Pitsunda), attended the ecclesiastical council of Nicaea in 325. The site of his bishopric on the Black Sea coast at the foot of the Caucasus suggests that maritime contacts with the Roman empire had given rise to the Christian community over which he presided. We shall examine some further instances of these extra-imperial communities in Chapter 3.

However, the Eusebian accommodation would not commend itself in all quarters. It would be looked upon with disfavour by those of the ‘gathered’ tradition. It was persons of this persuasion, largely if not exclusively, who were responsible for perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of late-antique Christianity – the growth of monasticism. Withdrawal from the world by an individual to a life of ascetic renunciation and self-denial in a desert solitude had an obvious biblical precedent in John the Baptist. The gospel stories of the temptation of Jesus reinforced the notion that the desert, the wilderness, was the place where the truly committed might test their faith and overcome the wiles of the Devil. It was in the valley of the Nile, where the desert and the sown lie so close together, that Christian solitaries first made their appearance. The most famous of these early hermits was Antony, a Coptic peasant who ‘dropped out’ of his village community at the age of twenty, in about the year 270, and for the remainder of a very long life gave himself over to prayer and asceticism. His example was infectious. Though he retreated ever deeper into the desert he was pursued by disciples eager to follow his example and receive his spiritual guidance. It was to one of these followers, Pachomius – perhaps significantly, an ex-soldier – that there occurred in about 320 the idea that communities of ascetics might be organized, living a common life of strict discipline according to a written rule of life. Thus was monasticism born.

It spread like wildfire in the fourth century. In part this was perhaps because, in a church now at peace after the Constantinian revolution, ascetic monasticism offered a means of self-sacrifice which was the nearest thing to martyrdom in a world where martyrs were no longer being made. In part the call of the ascetic life could be interpreted as a movement of revulsion from what many saw as the increasing worldliness of the fourth-century church, the merging of its hierarchy with the ‘establishment’, its ever-accumulating wealth, the growing burden of administrative responsibilities which encroached upon spiritual ministry. Monasticism offered, or demanded, a manner of life in which individualism had to be shed. To be ‘of one heart and of one soul’ within a community, to have ‘all things common’, was not simply to follow the example of the apostles commended in Acts iv.32: it was also to be liberated from the insidious temptation of private cares, selfish anxieties. Such liberation offered the possibility to humans of building a heavenly society upon earth. The monastic vocation was a call to a new way of apprehending, even of merging into, the divine.

Its appeal was made the more seductive by some persuasive advocates. A Life of St Antony was composed by Athanasius, the great bishop of Alexandria, in 357. It is one of the classics of Christian hagiography. Its speedy translation from Greek into Latin made it accessible in the western provinces of the empire. By a happy chance there has survived a vivid account of the effect this work had upon a pair of rising civil servants in the early 380s.

Ponticianus continued to talk and we listened in silence. Eventually he told us of the time when he and three of his companions were at Trier. One afternoon, when the emperor was watching the games in the circus, they went out to stroll in the gardens near the city walls. They became separated into two groups, Ponticianus and one of the others remaining together while the other two went off by themselves. As they wandered on, the second pair came to a house which was occupied by some servants of God, men poor in spirit, to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs. In the house they found a book containing the life of Antony. One of them began to read it and was so fascinated and thrilled by the story that even before he had finished reading he conceived the idea of taking upon himself the same kind of life and abandoning his career in the world – both he and his friend were officials in the service of the state – in order to become a servant of God. All at once he was filled with the love of holiness. Angry with himself and full of remorse, he looked at his friend and said, ‘What do we hope to gain by all the efforts we make? What are we looking for? What is our purpose in serving the state? Can we hope for anything better at court than to be the emperor’s friends? … But if I wish, I can become the friend of God at this very moment.’ After saying this he turned back to the book, labouring under the pain of the new life that was taking birth in him. He read on, and in his heart a change was taking place. His mind was being divested of the world, as could presently be seen … He said to his friend, ‘I have torn myself free from all our ambitions and have decided to serve God. From this very moment, here and now, I shall start to serve him. If you will not follow my lead, do not stand in my way.’ The other answered that he would stand by his comrade, for such service was glorious and the reward was great …

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The author of this account, numbered among the audience of Ponticianus, was Augustine, later to become bishop of Hippo in north Africa. It occurs in his Confessions, the greatest work of spiritual autobiography ever written.

Augustine is important for us because out of his voluminous writings can be constructed a theology of mission which was to have far-reaching influence upon the concerns of the western church. In the first place, he was an African, and thereby the heir to a distinctive Christian tradition. The African church looked back to Tertullian (d. c. 225), lawyer and prolific Christian controversialist, and to Cyprian (d. 258), bishop of Carthage and martyr. The writings of these two fathers of the African church had expressed a rigorist view of Christianity, one which sought to keep the secular world at a distance. This intellectual tradition, widely respected in the western, Latin provinces of the empire, gave a twist to the character of western Christianity which differentiated it from the Christianity of the eastern, Greek provinces of the empire. Where the east, schooled by Origen and Eusebius, was assimilationist and welcomed the co-existence of the church and the world, the west tended to see discontinuities and chasms, and maintained a distrust for secular culture. If in the east church and state were nearly identical, in the west they were often at odds. Harmony was characteristic of the east, tension of the west. It was to be a critically important constituent of western culture that church and state should be perceived as distinct and indeed often competing institutions. Built into western Christian traditions there was a potential rarely encountered in the east for explosion, for radicalism, for non-conformity, for confrontation. To these traditions Augustine was the heir; to them he contributed in no small measure. His was a discordant voice in the general chorus orchestrated by Eusebius in celebration of the Christian empire. It would matter very much indeed that Augustine’s would prove to be among the most powerful and influential voices that western Christendom has ever heard.

It has not always been discordant. As a young man Augustine enjoyed a brilliant career as an academic in Milan. (He was living in Milan when he heard the story of the encounter at Trier quoted above.) At that date Milan was the political and intellectual capital of the western half of the empire. Its bishop, the great St Ambrose (d. 397), was the most prominent western advocate of the views of Eusebius (though not without some qualifications). Ambrose exerted considerable influence on Augustine, who was attracted to the Eusebian perspective. Significantly, it was only when Augustine abandoned this glossy metropolitan life in 395 and returned to his native Africa to become a small-town bishop – living in obedience to a monastic rule with his diocesan clergy – that misgivings began to arise in his mind. But they were not formulated in any coherent fashion until he composed the work for which he is most famous, De Civitate Dei (The City of God), between 413 and 425. This is a book so big, so complex, so alive, so rich in ideas, so brimming with passion, that it is difficult to summarize it in any manner which does it justice. It is commonly said that the work was occasioned by the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410: an attempt to answer the pagans who claimed that Rome had been sacked in punishment for her abandonment of the gods who had always previously protected her. But Augustine’s book was intended, or at any rate turned out to be, a great deal more than this. In its final form it was an extended meditation on the meaning of history, on the place of man and society and the state in the divine scheme of things, and on the nature of the Christian community within the world. In the course of it Augustine came out with views sharply at variance with the Eusebian accommodation.

For our purposes the most important point about Augustine’s social thought is that he detached the state – any state, but in particular, of course, the Roman state – from the Christian community. Under his hands the Roman empire became theologically neutral, drained of the positive moral charge with which Eusebius had invested it. For Augustine the empire was just one set of political arrangements among many. It was necessary for the purpose of ensuring certain limited ends such as the maintenance of peace and order, the administration of human justice or defence against aggression from outside its frontiers: necessary, but in no sense special or privileged. This was to strike at the root of the Eusebian position. The empire was not part of a divine providential scheme; not the vehicle for the furtherance of God’s purposes. Its emperor was not messianic, not quasi-divine; he no longer walked with God. Its institutions were ordinary institutions, human, fallible, random, limited and messy. Its history was not the unfolding of a plan for the harmonious ordering of the world under a God-directed emperor, but instead a squalid tale of lust for domination, of war and suffering, of oppression and corruption. Worldly empires would blow away like smoke; and, as Augustine dismissively observed, ‘smoke has no weight’.

Over against this earthly polity is set the city of God: that is, the community of Christians whose city is not of this world, who indeed are aliens (peregrini) in this terrestrial world. Such notions were not new. There was a rich Judaic literature of exile which was developed by early Christian writers. It was Paul who wrote to the Corinthians of ‘an house not made with hands’. The anonymous author of the Epistle to Diognetus, writing in about 200 and echoing another Pauline passage, had observed that Christians ‘spend their existence upon earth, but their citizenship is in heaven’.

(#litres_trial_promo) There were also influences at work from outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Neoplatonic philosophers who strongly influenced the young Augustine had written persuasively of the soul imprisoned in the body, trapped in the flesh, from which it strives to break free. What Augustine did was to express these ideas of exile and alienation with passion and force. To one word in particular he imparted a special resonance: peregrinus. ‘And so long as he is in this mortal body, he is a peregrinus in a foreign land,’ he wrote in Book 19 of De Civitate Dei, echoing II Corinthians v.6. It was a technical term in Roman law: to be a peregrinus meant to be a resident alien, a stranger, a person without kin, friends, sureties, patrons. It was also a word with further connotations within the Judaeo-Christian scriptural tradition. Exile or deprivation were often associated with sin and punishment, but sometimes also with a sense of divinely allotted destiny. Jacob fled into exile because of murderous conflict between kinsmen; his destiny was to inherit the land of his exile or pilgrimage (peregrinationis) and through him were all peoples of the earth to be blessed (Genesis xxviii). So a pilgrim could also be a harbinger, like John the Baptist. Augustine seized upon the possibilities latent in this everyday word. Here was an exacting standard for the Christian. He must become a peregrinus, an exile or pilgrim, make of his life a peregrinatio, a pilgrimage, cutting loose like a monk from the worldly ties that bind and accepting instead the liberating society and disciplines of the city of God: ‘The Heavenly City, while on its earthly pilgrimage, calls forth its citizens from every nation and assembles a multilingual band of pilgrims; not caring about any diversity in the customs, laws and institutions whereby they severally make provision for the achievement and maintenance of earthly peace.’

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Here then is Augustine’s vision of a Christian community not confined to the Roman empire. Other strands of his reading and reflection were woven into it. In common with other Christians of his day Augustine was convinced that the end of the world was near. But before this could happen there had to be a universal preaching of Christianity. ‘This gospel of the Kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the earth as a testimony to all nations: and then the end will come.’ Augustine was forced to elucidate this apocalyptic passage in Matthew’s gospel (Matt. xxiv.14) at the very time that he was working on De Civitate Dei. Prompted by an earthquake on 19 July 418 Bishop Hesychius of Salona (Split) consulted Augustine about Daniel’s prophecies of the end of the world. In his reply Augustine made reference to Matthew’s passage on the in-gathering of the nations which must precede the end and to other biblical passages of similar purport. But Hesychius, evidently a persistent man, was not satisfied and wanted more. He got it. Augustine, never one to skimp where doctrinal exposition was concerned, replied in a long letter divided into no less than fifty-four chapters. This second letter circulated widely as a separate pamphlet under the title De Fine Saeculi (On the End of the World). Hesychius had evidently claimed that the gospel had already been preached to all nations. Not so, argued Augustine, ‘for there are among us, that is in Africa, innumerable barbarian tribes among whom the gospel has not yet been preached … yet it cannot rightly be said that the promise of God does not concern them’ because ‘the Lord did not promise the Romans but all nations to the seed of Abraham’. He went on to elucidate ‘the prophecy made of Christ under the figure of Solomon, “He shall rule from sea to sea” (Psalm lxxii.8)’. This must mean ‘the whole earth with all its inhabitants, because the universe is surrounded by the Ocean sea’. All nations, therefore, ‘as many as God has made’ are to adore the Lord and call upon him.