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Constantine
Sep. 27th, 2011 10:45 am... no, not John Constantine, the other one.
It's interesting reading "chronologically backward". I've just been reading Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine -- which is, let me stress, still a valuable and worthwhile resource, especially for its treatment of the classical background, even though it was published in the mid-1940s. (Cochrane was a classicist by discipline.) However, I had previously read Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians, which focusses on the pre-Constantinian period and finishes with a treatment of Constantine, as well as several more recent studies of the Christianisation of the empire such as Peter Brown's Authority and the Sacred.
Cochrane represents the normative narrative against which the later authors' positions are set, and although many of the items remain the same, the overall picture changes remarkably with a change in perspective. The later writers draw on the same prominent authors from the period as principal sources, but draw more heavily on lower-level "social history" data where it can be determined.
In both cases, there's a reaction against identifying a core orthodox Christianity with a prominent "rigorist" perspective. In both cases, there is an argument that the rigorist view which is visible throughout the period -- Tertullian is an early example at an extreme -- is not representative of the Church as a whole at least until relatively late on, near or after the time of Augustine. Most Christians during the pre-Constantinian period were more flexible, and less idealized (and less like the members of a small vehement fringe movement) than we would have said a century ago; many converts to Christianity under Constantine were flexible and "worldly" not because their conversion was "surface" or incomplete but because the Church which they joined already had a sizeable flexible and worldly component.
Accordingly, where Cochrane sees, say, Lactantius as a figure who imcompletely absorbs Christianity because of his continuing attachment to a classical, Roman philosophical view Brown argues that there's a couple of generations (at least -- and probably more in the East where later discontinuities were less marked politically) in which one "mainstream" (and theologically orthodox, along Nicene lines -- we aren't worrying about the Catholic/Arian split here) Christian current was much more tolerant of continuing social patterns which were part of the structure of society than what eventually became the case.[1]
The other big difference is in the treatment of Constantine. Where Cochrane sees him as a "surface" quasi-convert, Fox makes a strong argument for him as a strong convert (to the version of Christianity which blends classicism and orthodoxy).
This is actually a significant difference -- because Cochrane's view of Constantine in the context of his competitors makes the adoption by the Empire of Christianity seem like an almost inevitable thing: if it was strong enough to hold on during the persecution under Diocletian, it was a significant enough power bloc that it had to be admitted into the arena of the licit and engaged as an imperial support rather than an adversary. In the alternative narrative, there was rather less inevitability about it -- we're far more in the domain of pure contingency, with changes hinging on the personal views of one man.
[1] This isn't necessarily even as much a change in Christianity as a change in the environment -- where the Church had to take over holding the social structure together, in the West, where there was a power vacuum, there was no longer a strong classical civic tradition to rely on, and the new overlords certainly were not steeped in it. With no balancing strong cultural tradition on the other side figures like Boethius or Fortunatus become odd survivals and have no successors.
It's interesting reading "chronologically backward". I've just been reading Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine -- which is, let me stress, still a valuable and worthwhile resource, especially for its treatment of the classical background, even though it was published in the mid-1940s. (Cochrane was a classicist by discipline.) However, I had previously read Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians, which focusses on the pre-Constantinian period and finishes with a treatment of Constantine, as well as several more recent studies of the Christianisation of the empire such as Peter Brown's Authority and the Sacred.
Cochrane represents the normative narrative against which the later authors' positions are set, and although many of the items remain the same, the overall picture changes remarkably with a change in perspective. The later writers draw on the same prominent authors from the period as principal sources, but draw more heavily on lower-level "social history" data where it can be determined.
In both cases, there's a reaction against identifying a core orthodox Christianity with a prominent "rigorist" perspective. In both cases, there is an argument that the rigorist view which is visible throughout the period -- Tertullian is an early example at an extreme -- is not representative of the Church as a whole at least until relatively late on, near or after the time of Augustine. Most Christians during the pre-Constantinian period were more flexible, and less idealized (and less like the members of a small vehement fringe movement) than we would have said a century ago; many converts to Christianity under Constantine were flexible and "worldly" not because their conversion was "surface" or incomplete but because the Church which they joined already had a sizeable flexible and worldly component.
Accordingly, where Cochrane sees, say, Lactantius as a figure who imcompletely absorbs Christianity because of his continuing attachment to a classical, Roman philosophical view Brown argues that there's a couple of generations (at least -- and probably more in the East where later discontinuities were less marked politically) in which one "mainstream" (and theologically orthodox, along Nicene lines -- we aren't worrying about the Catholic/Arian split here) Christian current was much more tolerant of continuing social patterns which were part of the structure of society than what eventually became the case.[1]
The other big difference is in the treatment of Constantine. Where Cochrane sees him as a "surface" quasi-convert, Fox makes a strong argument for him as a strong convert (to the version of Christianity which blends classicism and orthodoxy).
This is actually a significant difference -- because Cochrane's view of Constantine in the context of his competitors makes the adoption by the Empire of Christianity seem like an almost inevitable thing: if it was strong enough to hold on during the persecution under Diocletian, it was a significant enough power bloc that it had to be admitted into the arena of the licit and engaged as an imperial support rather than an adversary. In the alternative narrative, there was rather less inevitability about it -- we're far more in the domain of pure contingency, with changes hinging on the personal views of one man.
[1] This isn't necessarily even as much a change in Christianity as a change in the environment -- where the Church had to take over holding the social structure together, in the West, where there was a power vacuum, there was no longer a strong classical civic tradition to rely on, and the new overlords certainly were not steeped in it. With no balancing strong cultural tradition on the other side figures like Boethius or Fortunatus become odd survivals and have no successors.
