Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
Number of quotes: 46
Book ID: 35 Page: 0
Section: 1A
He examines the social factors which muted the sharp intolerance which pervades the contemporary literary evidence, and he shows how Christian holy men were less representatives of a triumphant and intransigent faith than negotiators, at ground level, of a working compromise between the new faith and traditional ways of dealing with the supernatural world.
Quote ID: 670
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 35 Page: 4
Section: 3C,3D
It is this story to which we are accustomed. Put briefly: the notion that a relatively short period (from the conversion of Constantine, in 312, to the death of Theodosius II, in 450) witnessed the ‘end of paganism’; the concomitant notion that the end of paganism was the natural consequence of a long-prepared ‘triumph of monotheism’ in the Roman world; and the tendency to present the fourth century AD as a period overshadowed by the conflict between Christianity and paganism - all this amounts to a ‘representation’ of the religious history of the age that was first constructed by a brilliant generation of Christian historians, polemicists and preachers in the opening decades of the fifth century.2Pastor John’s Note: This author uses the word “representations” in a special way- in reference to the way Christian writers of the 4th/5th saw events.
Quote ID: 673
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 5/6
Section: 3A2B
Narratives of the end of paganism - such as the dramatic destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria in around 392 - follow an analogous, brisk rhythm.5 It was enough that Serapis should be seen to have been driven from the shrine that he had ‘possessed’ for so many centuries, by the power of Christ, made palpable through the successful violence of His servants. It was assumed that Alexandria had been ‘healed’ by the passing of its greatest god, and could henceforth be treated as a Christian city.More important still, such an otherworldly narrative even enabled the devotees of the old gods to accept what was, often, a brutal fait accompli. The worshippers of Serapis declared that, in a manner characteristic of the gods of Egypt, their god had simply withdrawn to heaven, saddened that so much blasphemy should happen in his favoured city.[6] The end of sacrifice and the closing of the temples merely reflected on earth the outcome of a conflict of mighty invisible beings.
Quote ID: 674
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 12
Section: 2B2,3C
The drastic rearrangement of so many classical traditions in order to create a whole new heraldry of power was one of the greatest achievements of the late Roman period. Yet, it would be profoundly misleading to claim that changes in this large area of social and cultural life reflected in any way a process of ‘Christianization’. What matters, in fact, is the exact opposite. We are witnessing the vigorous flowering of a public culture that Christians and non-Christians alike could share.
Quote ID: 680
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 13
Section: 1A
Rather, the classical elements have been redeployed. They are often grouped in such a way as to convey, if anything, an even heavier charge of meaning. The gods make their appearance, now, as imposing emblems of power and prosperity.
Quote ID: 682
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 35 Page: 14
Section: 1A
Whenever we meet groups involved in mobilising the ‘set of symbolic forms’ that expressed the unbroken will to rule of the Roman empire, in its major cities and most stable regions, we find ceremonials which, though not ‘pagan’ in the strict sense (in that blood-sacrifice was pointedly avoided),…
Quote ID: 683
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 35 Page: 18
Section: 4B
Leading members of Augustine’s congregation at Hippo opined that rites performed for so long according to the ancient libri pontificales must have enjoyed the favour of God, and that it was only modern, secretive magic that should be condemned.
Quote ID: 684
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 35 Page: 18
Section: 4B
Christians who thought like this did not feel polluted in the eyes of God that pagan rites continued to exist. It was sufficient that they themselves should remain clean. This attitude was summed up in the ruling of the pre-Constantinian Council of Elvira: landowners who feared the violence of their slaves would not be held guilty for having failed to forbid sacrifices on their estates; it was enough that they should not participate in them.42
Quote ID: 685
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 19
Section: 3A2
Yet we should not underestimate the long-term impact of a new, more drastic definition of monotheism on notions of authority among lay elites. In many provinces of the Western empire, in the course of the late fourth and fifth centuries, Christian exhortation presented the elites with a new model of power. It assumed a chain of command drawn as starkly on earth as it was in heaven. An emperor, hailed by Ambrose as militans pro Deo, on active service for the Christian God, was linked to his upper-class subjects, and, through these, to all inhabitants of the empire.
Quote ID: 686
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 35 Page: 19/20
Section: 1A
For an imperial administration and a landed aristocracy which now faced, in heightened form – at a time of political dislocation associated with the barbarian invasions – the perennial problem of how to make their presence felt at a distance, to ally with a more exclusive and universalist notion of monotheism was to gain a strong sense of agency on the local level. It was to believe that actions pleasing to God could be microcosmic re-enactments, in one’s own region, of a universal order. The presence of a pagan temple, of an altar, of a schismatic conventicle on a faraway estate became, even for a relatively minor representative of the Roman order, an opportunity to show, in its destruction, paternal authority over others, rendered active and majestic by the service of the one God.
Quote ID: 687
Time Periods: 146
Book ID: 35 Page: 20
Section: 4B
Churches set up on estates, gifts to the local clergy, the support of local zealots in the destruction of shrines, such as that enjoyed by Saint Martin in Gaul from landowning families, ensured a more prominent role for Christian lay persons as filii ecclesiae, loyal and visible ‘sons of the church’ in their own city and region. These gestures brought a Christianised lay elite appreciably closer to the distant basis of their wealth at a time of growing uncertainty, when safety lay, in fact, in being on the spot, and active,…
Quote ID: 688
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 31
Section: 4B
With his habitual clarity, Paschoud sums up the situation for fourth-century pagans. They were as inflexible in their expectations as were the Christians.7
Quote ID: 690
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 34
Section: 4A
Throughout the late classical period, philosophers were at one and the same time admired and mocked by their contemporaries for practising a form of hyper-individualism. Though often a man of high status and culture, the philosopher presented himself as a person pointedly free from power. He had rejected office, in his city and at court, and the accumulation of wealth that invariably went with the opportunities for self-enrichment associated with the exercise of power.
Quote ID: 691
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 35 Page: 34
Section: 4A
The philosopher lived by his free logos alone. He did not feel bound, as the majority of unthinking persons of his own class felt themselves to be bound, by the heavy restraints of nomos – by respect for traditional custom and for the obligation imposed by traditional civic ritual. If a philosopher made religious choices, he was expected to justify and to communicate these without peremptory commands and without slavish appeals to common custom.
Quote ID: 692
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 35 Page: 36/37
Section: 4A,4B
Yet one only had to look at a professional philosopher such as Themistius to know that he was not for real. Themistius was a past-master at the art of ostentatiously rejecting the marks of power. When dining with the emperors, he was always careful to wear his philosopher’s dark tribonion. He even eschewed an official salary.19 But it was impossible not to notice that Themistius usually made his appearance when the emperor was intending to back down from a course of action that had proved unfeasible or unpopular.
Quote ID: 693
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 37/38
Section: 4A,4B
The philosopher moved in a basically conformist upper-class world. I do not mean conformist only in the pejorative sense. In the Roman empire, young men of the upper classes were socialised, from childhood up, to reverence ancestral custom, to value solidarity, and to appreciate and use power. To his peers, the philosopher was an invaluable safety-valve. He was a licensed maverick in an otherwise deadly serious class of persons.
Quote ID: 695
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 39
Section: 3A2
There is one feature of the practice of politics that is directly relevant to the impact of religious intolerance in this period. For all its autocratic overtones, and horrendous reputation in most modern accounts of the age, it is well known that the imperial government continued to depend, to a very large extent, for its effectiveness, on the consensus of a widely diffused network of local elites. Devotio, the loyalty and prompt obedience that was expected of upper-class subjects of the empire, had to be wooed, or, at least, not allowed to go entirely off the boil – it could not be imposed by force alone.
Quote ID: 696
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 40
Section: 3A2
As a result, the exercise of power in a hard-driving and potentially abrasive system was not controlled, in the sense of being subject to legal restraints. But it had to be, at least, rendered dignified.
Quote ID: 697
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 40
Section: 3A2
Like a miraculous calm spreading across the face of a choppy ocean, the ‘serenity’ associated with the vast notional omnipotence of the emperor was mediated, throughout the imperial system, by a succession of representatives and collaborators, by means of innumerable interchanges in which courtesy, self-control and quiet confidence – the marks of innate superiority – were believed to have prevailed. As a result, among the elites, the issue of toleration was swallowed up in a specifically late Roman emphasis on civility. Paideia, not philosophy, set the limits to intolerance.
Quote ID: 698
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 35 Page: 44/45
Section: 4B
If authority was to work without overt violence, it had to seem ‘natural’; it had to relay commands with quiet certainty from a position of unchallenged superiority to persons whose inferiority, also, was to be taken for granted. As a result of the religious changes of the age, the social hierarchy became even more high pitched. Peasants, and increasingly pagani, pagans treated as no better than countryfolk, were consistently presented as passive and congenitally simple minded, so that they could be expected to follow the gentle, because orderly, lead of their natural superiors in the true faith.
Quote ID: 701
Time Periods: 045
Book ID: 35 Page: 46
Section: 3A2
Newly ordained as the bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius mounted the ambo of Hagia Sophia and turned to the emperor: ‘Give me, my prince, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven as a recompense.’ This was far worse than intolerance. It was a lapse in good taste.
Quote ID: 702
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 35 Page: 47
Section: 3C,4B
As far as the formation of the new governing class of the post-Constantinian empire was concerned, the fourth century was very definitely not a century overshadowed by ‘The Conflict of Paganism and Christianity’. Nothing, indeed, would have been more distressing to a member of the late Roman upper classes than the suggestion that ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ were designations of overriding importance in their style of life and in their choice of friends and allies.
Quote ID: 703
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 47
Section: 3C
Rather, as we saw in the previous chapter, studied ambiguity and strong loyalty to common ‘symbolic forms’, which spoke with a strong, but religiously neutral, voice of the authority of the empire and the security of its social order, prevailed at this time.
Quote ID: 704
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 49
Section: 3A2
To a very large extent, then, the history of tolerance and intolerance in the later Roman empire is not to be sought through the examination of a few proof texts, nor can its quality be assessed through a few well-known incidents, admirable or repugnant though these may be. It belongs to the wider topic of the political and cultural factors that went to make up the basically unheroic, but tenacious, moral fibre of the late Roman local elites.
Quote ID: 705
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 49
Section: 3A2
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than do the wider repercussions of the incidents of spectacular violence against pagan temples and Jewish synagogues that emerge in high profile in all Christian narratives of the reign of Theodosius I, from 379 to 395. In this period, violence against pagan sites was widespread. It was purposive and vindictive.
Quote ID: 706
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 50
Section: 3A2
Spasmodic, largely unpredictable violence of this kind was inconsistent with the perpetual, controlled violence of a heavily governed society. If violence was to happen, it was essential that the traditional elites should not lose the monopoly of such violence. They did not want it to slip into the hands of erratic outsiders.
Quote ID: 707
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 51
Section: 3A2A
When the monk Hypatius and his companions arrived at Chalcedon (Kadikoy), a fashionable suburb across the water from Constantinople, to protest against the Olympic Games instituted by the Prefect of the City in 434-5, the bishop of Chalcedon simply told him to mind his own business. ‘Are you determined to die, even if no one wishes to make a martyr of you? As you are a monk, go and sit in your cell and keep quiet. This is my affair.’46Though placed in the mouth of a Christian bishop, it is the voice of the governing class of the eastern empire as a whole, a class with which bishops had become identified, by birth, culture and autocratic temperament.
Quote ID: 708
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 35 Page: 52
Section: 3A2B
After the violent public humiliation of the gods who had dwelt in them, temples and statues could be allowed to survive intact as ‘ornaments’ of their city. No longer associated with the ‘contagion’ of sacrifice, the shining marble of classical statues was held to have regained a pristine innocence. The idols became what they have remained for us – works of art. It was a situation whose humour was not lost on the wry pagan, Palladas of Alexandria, as he viewed the splendid art gallery set up in the palace of a Christian lady, Marina: ‘The inhabitants of Olympus, having become Christians, live here undisturbed: for here, at least, they will escape the cauldron that melts them down for petty change.’ 47
Quote ID: 709
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 53
Section: 3A2
All over the Mediterranean world, profound religious changes, heavy with potential for violence, were channelled into the more predictable, but no less overbearing ‘gentle violence’ of a stable social order.
Quote ID: 710
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 53
Section: 1B
This in turn, may bring us a little way to explaining a millennium-long change. In the first century AD, a Phrygian gentleman declared, in his last will and testament, that his bequests should stand ‘for as long as the eternal dominion of the Romans should last’. At the end of the ninth century AD, an Anglo-Saxon landowner in Kent declared that his will should stand, ‘as long as baptism lasts, and money can be raised from the land’.49 Vastly different from each other as those two gentlemen must have been, they are part of the same continuum.
Quote ID: 711
Time Periods: 17
Book ID: 35 Page: 53
Section: 1A,3C
What we call the ‘process of Christianization’ can never be divorced from the wider debate on the nature and modes of authority, by which a universal Christian Church insensibly came to replace a universal empire. First the Roman empire, then the Christian Church came to stand for a reassuringly immovable horizon beyond which privileged and settled persons . . . were frankly disinclined to look.
Quote ID: 712
Time Periods: 14
Book ID: 35 Page: 61
Section: 2E6
The further step, to a demand for a show of spiritual power, was a short one. Faced by a nest of angry wasps, the harvesters of Besne, near Nantes, turned to Friardus, a devout peasant, half in jest and half in earnest: ‘Let the religious fellow come, the one who is always praying, who makes the sign of the Cross on his eyes and ears, who crosses himself whenever he goes out of the house.’ 7
Quote ID: 713
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 35 Page: 64
Section: 2E2
I would, rather, spend the remainder of the chapter looking at him less in terms of the clear, beneficial role allotted to him by his late antique biographers, but, rather, from a greater distance, as a figure who, in many regions, acted as a facilitator in the transition from paganism to Christianity.
Quote ID: 714
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 35 Page: 66
Section: 2E6
A polytheist village in the mountains of Lebanon was told that if they followed his commands, by placing stones carved with the sign of the cross, or blessed by portions of his holy dust, on the four corners of their fields, and if they destroyed their shrines and household idols, they would enjoy protection from creatures of the wild – from werewolves and from ravenous field mice. 21
Quote ID: 715
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 67
Section: 3C,3D
Unlike the European missionaries of a later age, the Christian holy men and women of late antiquity and the early middle ages, to use the words of Kaplan’s study of the holy men of medieval Ethiopia, ‘appeared as representatives of a power superior to that of traditional faiths, but not as purveyors of a dramatically different world view or type of religion’.23
Quote ID: 716
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 67
Section: 1A
Far from being locked into an inert system of traditional beliefs, that continued largely unchanged in thinly disguised Christian form, late antique pagans were active persons.
Quote ID: 717
Time Periods: 14
Book ID: 35 Page: 69
Section: 2B2,4B
Potentially exclusive explanatory systems coexisted in their minds. The host of the monk, Peter the Iberian [c. 417-491], an eminent Egyptian, was a good Christian; but he was also ‘caught in the error of pagan philosophers, whose ideas he loved greatly’.28
Quote ID: 718
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 69
Section: 2B2,4B
A notable of Alexandria went to the healing shrine of Saints Cyrus and John, to receive a cure from their hands. But he claimed to have done so ‘in order that his horoscope should be fulfilled’.29
Quote ID: 719
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: 71
Section: 2E6
The demons were the lords of illusion. In dreams the demons might even take the form of holy figures, Barsanuphius [a Christian hermit and writer of the sixth century] told a worried layman: only the sign of the cross was reliable; for the demons could not bring themselves to imitate it.34
Quote ID: 720
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 35 Page: 71
Section: 2A3
It was barely possible to discriminate between holiness and illusion. In the 430s, a monk appeared in Carthage. He applied to the sick, oil poured over the bone of a martyr.
Quote ID: 721
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 35 Page: 72
Section: 2E1
A massive public catastrophe, such as the onslaught of the plague, swamped the ministrations of the holy man. It was reassuring to believe that the cloth from the tomb of Saint Remigius, carried in a litter around Rheims, had created a sacred circuit that kept the bubonic plague away from the city.37 But Rheims was fortunate.
Quote ID: 722
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 35 Page: 74
Section: 2E6
Many Egyptian Christians seem to have assumed that the martyrs, as ‘unconquered’ heroes who had overcome the demons of the lower air by their heroic deaths, could now by prevailed upon, by the prayers of believers, to torture the demons yet further (in a long Egyptian tradition, by which higher gods bullied and threatened their subordinates) to reveal their own, unearthly knowledge of the future.
Quote ID: 724
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 35 Page: 76
Section: 2E6
The clutter of stuffed deer, lions and snakes, that lay as ex-votos at the foot of Symeon’s column, spoke of notable breaches in the boundary between the animal and the human world healed in the name of the saint.47
Quote ID: 725
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 35 Page: 77
Section: 1A
Christian holy persons had been shot into prominence, at this time, by an exceptionally stern and world-denying streak in late antique Christianity. Those who approached them, and those who remembered their activities, habitually assumed that they would act upon the spiritual world largely in terms of expectations that echoed all that was most abrasively up-to-date in the hierarchical and patronage-ridden social structure of the later Roman empire.
Quote ID: 726
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: xi
Section: 1A
It examines the social circumstances and the slow changes of mentality by which this dominant narrative came to be flanked, in the Latin world, by a considerably less euphoric attitude – by a view of Christianization that was prepared to linger less on the supernatural triumph of Christ and more on the weight of the pagan past within the Christian present.
Quote ID: 671
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 35 Page: xii
Section: 1A
We still have to ask what were the vectors of the change, that caused a whole society from Europe to the Middle East to identify the stability of its social order with the spread of a novel and exclusive religion.
Quote ID: 672
Time Periods: 6
End of quotes