Section: 1A - Scholars’ testimonies.
Number of quotes: 391
1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
Roger Crowley
Book ID: 2 Page: 6
Section: 1A,3H
“The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople,” wrote George Trapezuntios, “and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the the Emperor of the whole earth,”…
They had come to conquer the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Constantinople, whom we now call the Byzantines, a word used in English in 1853, exactly four hundred years after the great siege. They were considered to be heirs to the Roman Empire and referred to themselves accordingly as Romans.
Quote ID: 3
Time Periods: 47
1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
Roger Crowley
Book ID: 2 Page: 251
Section: 1A,4B
Visitors had been emitting exactly the same gasps of astonishment since Constantine the Great founded the second Rome and the second Jerusalem in the fourth century. “It seems to me,” wrote the Frenchman Pierre Gilles in the sixteenth century, “that while other cities are mortal, this one will remain as long as there are men on earth.”
Quote ID: 14
Time Periods: 17
A History of Ecclesiastical Dress
Janet Mayo
Book ID: 6 Page: 11
Section: 1A,2E1
During the time of the persecution of Christians by Nero, distinctive clothes would have been positively dangerous. The persecution of the Christians began just as it was becoming clear that the Church would outlast the lives of the men who had known Jesus Christ in his lifetime, and the early Church had to blend into the Roman community to survive.
Quote ID: 103
Time Periods: 14
A Public Faith: From Constantine To The Medieval World AD 312-600 Vol. 2
Ivor J. Davidson
Book ID: 10 Page: 16/17
Section: 1A,2B2,3C
The story that Constantine experienced a vision of the cross in the sky prior to battle {3} is in other versions presented as a vision of the pagan Sun-god. This deity was certainly of enduring importance to him. The coins he issued in his early years as emperor included images of Sol Invictus, “the Unconquered Sun,” as well as symbols of various other pagan gods, and the still-extant triumphal arch later erected in Rome to celebrate his victory over Maxentius also depicts Sol Invictus as Constantine’s protector and refers simply to “the Divinity,” unspecified. When in 321 Constantine declared the first day of the week as a public holiday (or at least a day when nonessential labor was discouraged and public institutions such as the law-courts could be open only for the charitable purpose of freeing slaves), his stated reason was not to facilitate Christian worship or practice as such but to respect “the venerable day of the Sun.”If there is any truth in the account of Constantine’s vision of the cross, it is conceivable that he somehow associated a personal guardian deity, the Sun-god, with the God of the Christians.
….
Christian preachers had often connected the notion of Christ as the light of salvation with the nature of the sun as the source of human light, and there had long been popular rumors that Christians were involved in a version of sun-worship because they met together on Sundays. A mosaic from the late-third- or early-fourth-century tomb found under St. Peter’s in Rome expressly depicts Christ as Apollo the Sun-god in his chariot, and Constantine utilized an image of Apollo in a public statue of himself in his new city of Constantinople on the Bosphorus. For Constantine, the amalgamation of the conventional symbolism of his preferred deity with the doctrine of the Christian God may have been quite easy.
….
Did Constantine genuinely become Christian or not? Some interpreters believe he never became a true disciple of Christ but simply chose to exploit the significance of Christianity within the Roman world for his own ends. The consequences of his actions, it is said, were disastrous for the spiritual integrity of the church and rendered its doctrine and practice liable to political pressures and cultural fads in ways that have never been entirely undone, even in the 20-first century.
Quote ID: 127
Time Periods: 4
A.D. 381 Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 11 Page: 19
Section: 1A
One of the great strengths of the Roman empire was its ability to reinvent itself to meet the new demands.
Quote ID: 174
Time Periods: 0
Aelius Aristides, Orations, LCL 533: Aelius Aristides I
Edited by Michael Trapp
Book ID: 402 Page: 271/273
Section: 1A
For it strikes me as a kind of sacrilege for someone praising Athenian achievements in a speech to omit any mention of the topic of speech itself. You alone of all mankind really did raise the “bloodless trophy”…….
…over the whole of the human race; the victory you won, and won for all time [Rome or Athens?], was a great and honorable one…
….
For it is to you and your way of life and your dialect that all cities and all races of men have bowed.{231} It is not by garrisons stationed in them that the power of Athens is sustained, but by the fact that all have consciously chosen your ways and made themselves as far as possible your city’s adopted sons, praying that both they and their children may share in the good that you possess.
….
…a god-sent good fortune has ensured that a desire to imitate your learning and your customs has pervaded the whole earth, and all have come to think of yours as the one universal dialect of the race; through you the whole inhabited world has come to speak the same language….
Quote ID: 8514
Time Periods: 1
Aelius Aristides, Orations, LCL 533: Aelius Aristides I
Edited by Michael Trapp
Book ID: 402 Page: 283
Section: 1A
Under the best and Greatest of them all, the empire that now holds sway, she has precedence over the whole of the Greek world, and her fortunes are such that one would not likely pray for her to enjoy her former circumstances rather than her present ones.
Quote ID: 8517
Time Periods: 1
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Newman
Book ID: 324 Page: 56
Section: 1A
In the physical world whatever has life is characterized by growth…….
Two things cannot become one, except there be a power of assimilation in one or the other.
….
Thus, a power of development is proof of a life, not only in its essay, but in its success; for a mere formula either does not expand or is shattered in expanding. A living idea becomes many, yet remains one.
Quote ID: 7764
Time Periods: 2
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Newman
Book ID: 324 Page: 65
Section: 1A
A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of development which went before it, which is that development and something besides: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption.
Quote ID: 7765
Time Periods: 4
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Newman
Book ID: 324 Page: 115
Section: 1A
The question is this, whether there was not from the first a certain element at work, or in existence, which, for some reason or other, did not at once show itself upon the surface of ecclesiastical affairs, and of which events in the fourth century are the development….
Quote ID: 7766
Time Periods: 4
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Newman
Book ID: 324 Page: 186
Section: 1A
The Arians seem never to have claimed the Catholic name. It is more remarkable that the Catholics during this period were denoted by the additional title of “Romans.” Of this there are many proofs in the histories of St. Gregory of Tours, Victor of Vite, and the Spanish Councils. Thus St. Gregory speaks of Theodegisid, a king of Portugal, expressing his incredulity at a miracle, by saying, “It is the temper of the Romans, (for,” interposes the author, “they call men of our religion Romans,) and not the power of God.”
Quote ID: 7771
Time Periods: 4
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Newman
Book ID: 324 Page: 187
Section: 1A
In this sense, the Emperor Theodosius, in his letter to Acacius of Berrhoea, contrasts it with Nestorianism, which was within the Empire as well as Catholicism; during the controversy raised by that heresy, he exhorts him and others to show themselves “approved priests of he Roman religion.”
Quote ID: 7772
Time Periods: 4
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Newman
Book ID: 324 Page: 230
Section: 1A
Such was the conflict of Christianity with the old established Paganism, which was almost dead before Christianity appeared….
Quote ID: 7773
Time Periods: 4
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
John Henry Newman
Book ID: 324 Page: 238
Section: 1A
the rulers of the Church from early times were prepared, should the occasion arise, to adopt, or imitate, or sanction the existing rites and customs of the populace, as well as the philosophy of the educated class.
Quote ID: 7774
Time Periods: 234
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: xi
Section: 1A
Through another of the principles in which its growth was rooted - adaptability. The Romans never claimed to be original. They borrowed nearly everything from others and amalgamated their borrowings into their system.
Quote ID: 255
Time Periods: 0
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 260
Section: 1A,4B
After Odoacer [PJ: 433–493], invading chieftains fought for power and looted and burned the city; Italy began to split into its many principalities, which were not to be reunited until the nineteenth century. But the civilizing mission of Rome did continue through the agency of the Church - especially through the monasteries, which grew in usefulness and importance during the years of the barbaric invasions when men turned in relief from war to contemplation. These monasteries preserved the manuscripts of ancient Rome and Greece, many of which have come down to us only because the monks copied them.What caused this breakdown of Roman power - a power that had held the world in thrall for centuries? It is tempting to search for an answer, but of course no one really knows. The great eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon claimed that one of the reasons was that Christianity had sapped the vigor of the Roman people.
Quote ID: 327
Time Periods: 135
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 261
Section: 1A
Today’s scholars are less inclined than those of the past were to explain away such a complex historical process as the empire’s fall with a glib generalization. They admit quite frankly that they do not know the reasons and that they can only guess at them; and they go on to study the age’s history in terms of continuity as well as in terms of change.. . . in many ways society was not vastly different from the way it had been when imperial power was still unchallenged.
For the barbarians who hammered at its gates, the city of Rome itself presented problems that almost defied solution. It could be conquered easily; it could be destroyed as the Gauls had destroyed it long ago. But what were the advantages of conquering it or putting it to flames? Powerless, it was still powerful - with power of legends and of traditions and of the knowledge of government. The ruined city was still teaching law to the world, and with law went civilization, order, the quiet pursuit of trade, the flourishing of arts.Eventually the barbarians were to one degree or another to come under the spell of Rome.
Book not found
Quote ID: 328
Time Periods: 15
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 263
Section: 1A
The Roman empire perished and went on living. Long after the capital had become a small town outside the frontiers of the Byzantine empire and long after the last Roman legionary marched down the Flaminian Way, its civilization held sway in the West. The legacy of this most worldly of empires was to lie largely in the realm of ideas - in law, language, literature, government, attitudes, and styles. In innumerable ways, as century followed century, men’s minds were to respond to a presence that was shorn of all the panoply of power while gradually becoming transfigured into a dominion of the spirit and of thought.The legacy was a mixed one, inextricably compounded of Greek influence on Rome and Rome’s original contributions. What we call Roman civilization was very largely a Greco-Roman Civilization; but it was Rome that gave it the endurance that enabled it to survive down through the centuries. The Romans were great borrowers, great adapters, and great transmitters . . . Even in decline and defeat, Rome had the remarkable power of assimilating other peoples. Its barbarian invaders at first thought to stay aloof from the fallen conquerors, but they soon fell under the spell of a culture so much richer than their own.
Quote ID: 329
Time Periods: 14
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 264
Section: 1A
The Roman scheme of universality was shattered by the breakup of the empire; yet the concept was to survive in a new form - that of a Christian commonwealth in which state and Church were united.Pastor John’s note - The west, seemingly low at this time, taught the east how to survive, or at least demonstrated for the eastern empire how it would live.
Quote ID: 330
Time Periods: 16
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 267
Section: 1A
To the West, Rome left a legacy of quite another order; it was passed in the first instance through the Church, which inherited much of Rome’s talent, character, and learning. The early Church had been the foe of the pagan Roman state; gradually it was to become the preserver and adapter of much of what had been best in it.
Quote ID: 332
Time Periods: 1
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 268
Section: 1A,3F
Not until the time of Napoleon was the dream of the divine Roman empire ultimately abandoned.
Quote ID: 336
Time Periods: 147
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 268
Section: 1A
What happened was that the Church had gradually acquired many qualities of the old imperial order. The Roman genius for organization, along with the Roman sense of hierarchy, had given shape to Church institutions. The Roman political imagination, which had once brought so many peoples into one orbit, had lent strength to the idea of a Church universal. Roman jurisprudence had become the basis of canon law. The Church, which had begun by being an enemy of Rome, became the chief stronghold and preserver of the ancient Roman traditions.
Quote ID: 337
Time Periods: 147
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 271
Section: 1A
The cult of antiquity never died out.
Quote ID: 339
Time Periods: 147
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 277
Section: 1A
The states of western Europe, all formed between A.D. 500 and 1200 under the tutelage of the Roman presence, picked and chose from it, but all remained indebted to the Roman idea of law as supreme over men and as penetrating into the remotest corners of their lives. When the framers of the United States Constitution erected what they termed “a government of laws, not men,” they were in effect reasserting Rome’s better self.
Quote ID: 342
Time Periods: 6
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 278
Section: 1A
Roman genius for logic and order is with us yet. The architect poring over his drawing board, the bridgebuilder studying stress, the attorney invoking high principles, all hark back to Roman ways; in countless ways we still live under the sign of the spacious mind of Rome.
Quote ID: 343
Time Periods: 1
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: viii
Section: 1A
Or, looked at in another way, the Roman empire, which started from Romulus and fell before the barbarians in the fifth century of the Christian dispensation, did not die, but continued to exist for another thousand years in the Holy Roman Empire, and still exists, transformed and spiritualized, in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, whose language is Latin and whose central seat is Rome.Rome’s power sprang from some spiritual source. What that source was, the Romans themselves did not surely know. Nor do we.
The dominion of Rome, he said, was willed by almighty God in order to bring peace to the warring world. Christian interpreters have often thought that, although born a pagan, Vergil was a “naturally Christian soul,” and foresaw something of God’s purpose in making Rome the capital of the Prince of Peace.
Quote ID: 254
Time Periods: 1
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: xiii
Section: 1A
. . . surely it [Rome] can scarcely be called a civilization except in the external sense, wealth and vulgar pleasure, a titanic body without a heart. That would be true indeed, except for the fact that the body as it grew acquired a heart and a soul.but this, from p. 212:
“The Greeks ... had expressly forbidden games involving weapons.... But the Romans ... enjoyed the fight to the death.“
Quote ID: 256
Time Periods: 1
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: xiii
Section: 1A
At first little more than the power of the sword carried Rome forward; but as it grew, it acquired the power of thought, the power of the law, and the power of religious and poetic vision. These are spiritual powers, which it bequeathed to its heirs, the modern nations of the western world.
Quote ID: 257
Time Periods: 14
Ancilla To the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A complete translation of the Fragments in Diels
Kathleen Freeman
Book ID: 19 Page: 133
Section: 4B,1A
(14) The power of speech over the constitution of the soul can be compared with the effect of drugs on the bodily state: just as drugs by driving out different humours from the body can put an end either to the disease or to life, so with speech: ...….
…drugs can drug and bewitch the soul.
Quote ID: 9190
Time Periods: 047
Ante-Pacem Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
Graydon F. Snyder
Book ID: 25 Page: 295
Section: 1A
. . .a Christian culture began to appear at approximately the end of the second century.. . . .
We need not worry about such individual manifestations. To be sure there may be a few crosses in a private tomb in Palestine, or there may be Christian evidences in Pompeii or Herculaneum. The presence of these unique items cannot greatly alter the general impression that the so-called Christian culture became visible about 180.
Quote ID: 476
Time Periods: 2
Ante-Pacem Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
Graydon F. Snyder
Book ID: 25 Page: 296
Section: 1A
. . .but it was the rapid accommodation to and alteration of the Roman culture that enabled Christianity to become a universally practiced religion.
Quote ID: 477
Time Periods: 2
Ante-Pacem Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
Graydon F. Snyder
Book ID: 25 Page: 297
Section: 1A
Because of our methodological orientation, we can see that both assimilation and differentiation occurred at the same time. A.D. 180 was the date at which the Christian subculture was willing to say to the majority culture that it existed and had a right to exist. Because of that courage, we now may see how the early Christians assimilated symbols and practices from the Roman world to create its own discreet cultural characteristics. From about A.D. 180 to A.D. 313 the early Christian Church gave to the Mediterranean world a religious alternative of considerable depth—an alternative expressed in activities and symbols that were readily understood by the Roman culture. This, then, was the period of greatest growth for the early Church.
Quote ID: 478
Time Periods: 23
Ante-Pacem Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
Graydon F. Snyder
Book ID: 25 Page: 305
Section: 1A
Ante pacem one looks nearly in vain for the type of language one finds in the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers, and the Apologists.
Quote ID: 483
Time Periods: 4
Ante-Pacem Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
Graydon F. Snyder
Book ID: 25 Page: 305/306
Section: 1A
Constantine catapulted this new faith community into a larger public role. It was the Church of the late fourth century that tried to compromise, and therefore alter, the Christianity of the ante pacem period.
Quote ID: 484
Time Periods: 4
Apostasy that Wasn’t, The: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church
Rod Bennett
Book ID: 561 Page: 38
Section: 1A
Yes, the third-century Church had found a way to make peace withpaganism—and it was proving deadly.
Quote ID: 9230
Time Periods: 3
Apostasy that Wasn’t, The: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church
Rod Bennett
Book ID: 561 Page: 49
Section: 1A
Though the Romans often end up wearing the black hats in dramas about the early Church, the empire itself was not and evil institution. It was simply inadequate, running, for lack of God’s revelation, on a tank half empty.
Quote ID: 9233
Time Periods: 0147
Apostasy that Wasn’t, The: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church
Rod Bennett
Book ID: 561 Page: 50
Section: 1A
What the Romans needed, and in the worst way, was a religion worthy of them—something they had always had to do without.
Quote ID: 9235
Time Periods: 234
Apostasy that Wasn’t, The: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church
Rod Bennett
Book ID: 561 Page: 61
Section: 1A
The fall of the Roman Empire (which had begun more than a hundred years earlier under the idealistic but ineffectual Marcus Aurelius) had already progressed a long way by 303.
Quote ID: 9237
Time Periods: 2
Aristides, Panathenaic Oration, LCL 458
Translated by C. A. Behr, 1973
Book ID: 353 Page: 237/239
Section: 1A,4B
The present empire of both land and sea ͨ--and may it be immortal—is not unwilling to adorn Athens as a teacher and foster-father, but so great are its honours that now the only difference in the city’s condition is that it does not engage in serious affairs.
Quote ID: 8129
Time Periods: 1
Art in the Roman Empire
Michael Grant
Book ID: 30 Page: 82
Section: 1A
It is a commonplace that Rome created Christianity, but the debt of early Christian architecture to the architecture of the Roman empire deserves more exact definition.
Quote ID: 521
Time Periods: 1
Art in the Roman Empire
Michael Grant
Book ID: 30 Page: 121
Section: 1A
Medieval art is not the subject of this book, but it is worth while, all the same, to quote, in conclusion, this observation by E. Kjellberg and G. Saflund:Without any real break the art of the ancient world still lives . . . especially where ancient culture had the opportunity of establishing firm roots. There is no gulf between the art of late antiquity and that of the Middle Ages. The tasks and conditions of artists changed with the changing state of society, but in all the wide region which had once been watered by Greek and Roman culture, both the ancient language of form and ancient ideas and symbols live on as an undying source of inspiration.
Quote ID: 524
Time Periods: 6
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: xi
Section: 1A,3A4A,4A
3A4AAs early as 150 a Roman apologist found the cross typified in the standards of the Roman legions, and a generation later several bishops in Asia Minor explicitly asserted the compatibility of Christianity with the Roman state.
. . . .
4A
At the same time, in spite of official church objections, Christian theologians continued a vigorous effort to interpret Christianity in terms derived from the leading philosophies of the day.
. . . .
1A
In spite of various vicissitudes and individual deviations from the general pattern, it is clear that during the third century Christians were making ready for the time when the church would be recognized by the state and there would be an empire at least nominally Christian.
Quote ID: 578
Time Periods: 23
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: 247
Section: 1A
A certain measure of adjustment or even compromise was inevitable.
Quote ID: 658
Time Periods: 1
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
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
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
Book ID: 36 Page: 19
Section: 1A
Recently the idea of the ‘Fall of Rome’ and to some extent that of ‘the barbarian migrations’ have lost in importance as historians have developed the paradigm of the ‘transformation of the Roman world’.….
This development espouses a move away from traditional ideas of the end of the Roman Empire to look at slower processes of transformation and, especially, the ways in which elements of the Roman world survived beyond the traditional date of 476 to be taken up and modified in post-imperial Europe.
Quote ID: 728
Time Periods: 1
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
Book ID: 36 Page: 20
Section: 1A
In some ways this continues a long-standing historiographical tradition. While historians had tended to agree that barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire but to disagree about whether this was a ‘Good’ or ‘Bad Thing’, a great nineteenth-century French historian, N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, argued that the invasions or migrations had actually had very little effect on the society and institutions of Gaul. {53}
Quote ID: 729
Time Periods: 1
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
Book ID: 36 Page: 20
Section: 1A
Pirenne’s famous ‘thesis’ was that the Roman world was an economic unity around the Mediterranean that survived the barbarian invasions with little change and only collapsed when the seventh-century Arab conquests ruptured the coherence of the Mediterranean, dividing Christian north from Islamic south.
Quote ID: 730
Time Periods: 16
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
Book ID: 36 Page: 22
Section: 1A
The power of the Western Rome Empire declined and, as a political institution, it fell. This is as close as one can get to a matter of neutral reportage in fifth-century history, and implies no moral judgement on the process. This volume presents the end of the Roman Empire and the barbarian migrations as a dramatic, bewildering, massively important and comparatively short-term sequence of events, whose results were all the more dramatic and bewildering for being unintended.
Quote ID: 731
Time Periods: 15
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
Book ID: 36 Page: 99
Section: 1A
Two further Roman institutions require attention as both played crucial roles in helping people of the west to negotiate the change to the post-imperial world: the church and army. The Christian church in western Europe was a comparatively recent introduction.Pastor John’s Note: 2 pages on church, 9 pages on army
Quote ID: 735
Time Periods: 5
Barbarians Speak, The
Peter S. Wells
Book ID: 198 Page: 148
Section: 1A
After the conquests of the different landscapes, and often after a period during which provincial administrations were organized, the archaeology shows the gradual introduction of Roman-style material culture – military camps, urban centers, public buildings, baths, villas, pottery, metalwork, and so forth. But at the same time, much of traditional material culture and behavior continued to be expressed, created, and used.
Quote ID: 4479
Time Periods: 047
Barbarians within the Gates of Rome
Thomas S. Burns
Book ID: 37 Page: 83
Section: 1A,4B
The destiny of Rome cast so clearly by Vergil at the very dawn of the Empire was broadened and “humanized” in Themistius’ [317–390 - jdc] vision. The haughty would still submit, but now Rome would triumph as a cultural force by virtue of its intellectual powers; its Reason would transform the barbarians into civilized men. The emperor’s task was to create the conditions necessary for Reason’s conquests. Be the emperor Julian, Valens, or Theodosius, Themistius always strove to enlist him in the challenge by praising his personal manifestations of imperial virtue and cajoling him to use the carefully prepared moment to plant the seeds of Reason and Roman culture among the barbarians. In so doing the emperor became not merely the acknowledged leader of a political force, the Empire, but truly the guardian, almost the “tutor”, of Mankind. The barbarians would, of course, accept the abundant wisdom of their own submission to a higher purpose.
Quote ID: 749
Time Periods: 3
Barbarians within the Gates of Rome
Thomas S. Burns
Book ID: 37 Page: 207
Section: 1A
It is just one more indication of the contemporary make-believe that consistently blamed “barbarians” for all of Rome’s troubles....
Quote ID: 766
Time Periods: 45
Barbarians within the Gates of Rome
Thomas S. Burns
Book ID: 37 Page: 281
Section: 1A
That Roman policy changed at all was because those in authority changed it, not because someone else “forced” them to. Sometimes changes were so gradual as to escape notice by contemporaries. What decreased rapidly after 418 was the range of options available to the Roman command.
Quote ID: 794
Time Periods: 15
Basil, NPNF2 Vol. 8, Basil: Letters and Select Works
Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace
Book ID: 526 Page: 22
Section: 1A
“There have been some who in their championship of true religion have undergone the death for Christ’s sake, not in mere similitude, but in actual fact, and so have needed none of the outward signs of water for their salvation because they were baptized in their own blood.”PJ: Basil (329/30–379).
Quote ID: 9146
Time Periods: 4
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 16
Section: 1A
As the Church became the dominant force in Europe, the simple message of faith grew more complicated, buried under the weight of excuses, exceptions, exemptions, clarifications, and amendments. An entire discipline, canon law, was formed to interpret them. The straight line to God to man became a circuitous road, obscure and obfuscated. The plot thickened, the main story line darkened.
Quote ID: 824
Time Periods: 6
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 27
Section: 1A
When Constantine picked up the shovel in the Vatican field to build his shrine to Peter, he blurred the distinction between Caesar and God. In architecture, in art, even in liturgical ceremonies and spiritual symbols, pagan and Christian became jumbled. Classical myths and Christian themes became chapters in the same unending story. On the bronze doors of Constantine’s basilica, Filarete’s nymphs played while Christian saints prayed.The secular and the sacred borrowed so freely from each other that by the time the Renaissance reached Rome, the two were as inseparable as body and soul. Christ’s dictum “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” was moot. Caesar and God—or his human proxy, the Vicar of Christ—were now one and the same.
The Renaissance papacy became a government more than a religion, led by statesmen and sometimes warriors who could rarely afford to be saints. More princes than pastors, they played one covetous state against another to maintain a balance of power.
Quote ID: 829
Time Periods: 46
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 95
Section: 1A
Raphael’s easy genius flowed within the parameters of the Renaissance. He was the quintessential artist of an age that wanted to return to a classical world, not invent modern times.
Quote ID: 837
Time Periods: 6
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 105
Section: 1A
Pope Julius Secondo, the Christian Caesar and pontefice terrible—died on February 21, 1513, after asking his closest aides to pray for his immortal soul. What regrets did he have at death? What sins did he confess? Bribery? Misuse of power? Warmongering?According to Paris de Grassis, the pope’s conscience was heavy in his last hours, “for he had sinned greatly and had not bestirred himself for the good of the Church as he should have done.”
Quote ID: 838
Time Periods: 6
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 115
Section: 1A
The cardinals who administered the religious and political affairs of the Church were not always ordained. The office did not require them to be. They were diplomats and administrators—the Roman Senate of the Roman Church.
Quote ID: 839
Time Periods: 6
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 154
Section: 1A
Intent on immediate gratification and with little apparent concern for the future, Leo X presided over what would be both the apogee and the final act of the Renaissance. The history of Rome was repeating itself. Renaissance Rome had not only rediscovered classical culture, it embraced the licentiousness that precipitated the fall of the imperial city.
Quote ID: 845
Time Periods: 6
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 246
Section: 1A,2A
Religion is illusion. No institution understands that more profoundly than the Church of Rome. More than tenets and ethics, religion is mystery and magic, the ultimate conjuring act, body and blood from bread and wine. And the gleam of gold, the clouds of incense, the remote elevated person of the pope, the sacred art and evocative music, create that illusion.
Quote ID: 849
Time Periods: 47
Bede – Ecclesiastical History of the English People
History translated by Leo Sherley-Price; Revised by R. E. Latham; Translation of the minor works, ne
Book ID: 80 Page: 91
Section: 1A,2A4
Book I.30: A copy of the letter sent by Pope Gregory to Abbot Mellitus on his departure for Britain [A.D. 601]
Quote ID: 9170
Time Periods: 7
Bede – Ecclesiastical History of the English People
History translated by Leo Sherley-Price; Revised by R. E. Latham; Translation of the minor works, ne
Book ID: 80 Page: 92
Section: 1A,2A4
…the temples of the idols among that people should on no account be destroyed. The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there.….
And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are enshrined there.
Quote ID: 9171
Time Periods: 7
Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World
Patrick J. Geary
Book ID: 40 Page: 93
Section: 3D2,1A
As deeply Romanized as Franks were in terms of military discipline...they were, except for a small elite, as untouched by Roman social and cultural traditions as the Gallo-Roman aristocracy was by military tradition. The unique achievement of Clovis and his successors was that, through his conquest and conversion, he was able to begin to reunite these two splintered halves of the Roman heritage. The process was a long one and not without difficulty, but in time it created a new world.3D2
Quote ID: 864
Time Periods: 46
Birth of Europe, The
Jacques Le Goff
Book ID: 199 Page: 5
Section: 1A
It is true that in Charlemagne’s time, people did speak of a Christian empire. However, it was only with the aggressive Christianity of the eleventh century, what is known as the Gregorian reform, introduced by the great religious order of Cluny, and with the ideology of the crusades that the term Christendom came to designate the territory that was to become the core of Europe.. . . .
However, Christendom was but one long and very important episode in a history that began before Christianity and still continued after it began to wane.
3G
Quote ID: 4487
Time Periods: 6
Birth of Europe, The
Jacques Le Goff
Book ID: 199 Page: 10
Section: 1A
(2) The Roman heritage This was richer by far, for medieval Europe emerged directly from the Roman Empire.
Quote ID: 4489
Time Periods: 6
Birth of Europe, The
Jacques Le Goff
Book ID: 199 Page: 14/15
Section: 1A
This happened in the course of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, which, as is well known, came about between the so-called Edict of Milan of 313, in which Emperor Constantine recognized the Christian religion, and the adoption of Christianity as the official religion by Theodosius I, who died in 395.
Quote ID: 4492
Time Periods: 4
Breviary of Alaric
Wikipedia
Book ID: 42 Page: 1
Section: 1A,3D2
The chief value of the Visigothic code consists in the fact that it is the only collection of Roman Law in which the five first books of the Theodosian code and five books of the Sententiae Receptae of Julius Paulus have been preserved, and until the discovery of a manuscript in the chapter library in Verona, which contained the greater part of the Institutes of Gaius, it was the only work in which any portion of the institutional writings of that great jurist had come down to us.The Breviary had the effect of preserving the traditions of Roman law in Aquitania and Gallia Narbonensis, which became both Provence and Septimania, thus reinforcing their sense of enduring continuity, broken in the Frankish north.
Quote ID: 900
Time Periods: 456
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 595
Section: 1A
[Bold Used]Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass.
Quote ID: 8072
Time Periods: 2
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 652
Section: 1A
There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.
Quote ID: 938
Time Periods: 4
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 657
Section: 1A
While Christianity converted the world, the world converted Christianity, and displayed the natural paganism of mankind.
Quote ID: 946
Time Periods: 4
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 665
Section: 1A
“The two greatest problems in history,” says a brilliant scholar of our time, are “how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.” {1}
Quote ID: 955
Time Periods: 0
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 667/668
Section: 1A,4B
The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall. {11} For this religion, he and his followers {12} argued, had destroyed the old faith that had given moral character to the Roman soul and stability to the Roman state. It had declared war upon the classic culture—upon science, philosophy, literature, and art. It had brought an enfeebling Oriental mysticism into the realistic stoicism of Roman life; it had turned men’s thoughts from the tasks of this world to an enervating preparation for some cosmic catastrophe, and had lured them into seeking individual salvation through asceticism and prayer, rather than collective salvation through devotion to the state. It had disrupted the unity of the Empire while soldier emperors were struggling to preserve it; it had discouraged its adherents from holding office, or rendering military service; it had preached an ethic of nonresistance and peace when the survival of the Empire had demanded a will to war. Christ’s victory had been Rome’s death.. . . .
PJ Note:
Contrast the following to Robert Paynes opinion. Durant says Greek influence weakened the Empire; this man says it undermined it, allowing for proto-Xty to grow:
The breakup of the old religion had begun long before Christ; there were more vigorous attacks upon it in Ennius and Lucretius than in any pagan author after them. Moral disintegration had begun with the Roman conquest of Greece, and had culminated under Nero; thereafter Roman morals improved and the ethical influence of Christianity upon Roman life was largely a wholesome one. It was because Rome was already dying that Christianity grew so rapidly. Men lost faith in the state not because Christianity held them aloof, but because the state defended wealth against poverty, fought to capture slaves, taxed toil to support luxury, and failed to protect its people from famine, pestilence, invasion, and destitution; forgivably they turned from Caesar preaching war to Christ preaching peace, from incredible brutality to unprecedented charity, from a life without hope or dignity to a faith that consoled their poverty and honored their humanity. Rome was not destroyed by Christianity, any more than by barbarian invasion; it was an empty shell when Christianity rose to influence and invasion came.
Quote ID: 957
Time Periods: 124
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 670/671
Section: 1A,4B
It is easier to explain Rome’s fall than to account for her long survival. This is the essential accomplishment of Rome—that having won the Mediterranean world she adopted its culture, gave it order, prosperity, and peace for 200 years, held back the tide of barbarism for two centuries more, and transmitted the classic heritage to the West before she died.. . . .
Here and there, in East and West, it created a desert and called it peace. But amid all this evil it formed a majestic system of law which through nearly all Europe gave security to life and property, incentive and continuity to industry, from Decemvirs to Napoleon.
. . . .
It administered its Empire at first with greed and cruelty, then with such tolerance and essential justice that the great realm has never again known a like content. It made the desert blossom with civilization, and atoned for its sins with the miracle of a lasting peace. Today our highest labors seek to revive the Pax Romana for a disordered world.
Within that unsurpassed framework Rome built a culture Greek in origin, Roman in application and result.
Quote ID: 958
Time Periods: 127
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 671/672
Section: 1A
When Christianity conquered Rome the ecclesiastical structure of the pagan church, the title and vestments of the pontifex maximus, the worship of the Great Mother and a multitude of comforting divinities, the sense of supersensible presences everywhere, the joy or solemnity of old festivals, and the pageantry of immemorial ceremony, passed like maternal blood into the new religion, and captive Rome captured her conqueror. The reins and skills of government were handed down by a dying empire to a virile papacy; the lost power of the broken sword was rewon by the magic of the consoling word; the armies of the state were replaced by the missionaries of the Church moving in all directions along the Roman roads; and the revolted provinces, accepting Christianity, again acknowledged the sovereignty of Rome. Through the long struggles of the Age of Faith the authority of the ancient capital persisted and grew, until in the Renaissance the classic culture seemed to rise from the grave, and the immortal city became once more the center and summit of the world’s life and wealth and art. When, in 1936, Rome celebrated the 2689th anniversary of her foundation, she could look back upon the most impressive continuity of government and civilization in the history of mankind. May she rise again.Pastor John notes: This man’s Christianity blurs his vision. His judgments are not to be trusted without being corroborated.
Quote ID: 960
Time Periods: 4
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 13
Section: 1A
“How did a pagan monarchy centered in Rome become transmuted into a Christian theocracy directed from Constantinople?”
Quote ID: 961
Time Periods: 4
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 31
Section: 1A
[This is my paraphrase of Perowne!!]
In what is possibly the finest and most famous oration of its kind, Aristides, in 145, arrived on the 898th birthday of Rome to praise the city. Excerpts are given. Rome, he said, was a partnership, not a despotism. No geographic boundaries limited or defined its citizenship. “A civil community of the world has been established as a free republic under one man, the best, the ruler and teacher of order.”
Rome, he intimated, was an eternal city.
PJ: See also Cicero, On the Republic, LCL 213: Cicero XVI. Page: 213
Quote ID: 967
Time Periods: 12
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 56
Section: 1A
In its final form, therefore, Roman religion was a good deal farther removed from the old pieties . . . than it was from Christianity.PJ Note: Connects with Quote ID 979.
Quote ID: 981
Time Periods: 4
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 58
Section: 1A
“Nothing approaching the administrative unity of the Catholic Church had ever existed before--except in the Roman state. Today, when the Roman empire is but ‘the shadow of a great name’, the Roman Catholic Church stands as the most efficient administrative machine in the world.”
Quote ID: 982
Time Periods: 4
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 59
Section: 1A
“When it comes to defining just what happened inside a soul which resulted in that soul’s becoming a Christian, we have no knowledge.”
Quote ID: 983
Time Periods: 1
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 64
Section: 1A,3A,3A2
“for a society which depends for its existence on obedience, nothing can be more wicked than choice.”
Quote ID: 986
Time Periods: 14567
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 83
Section: 1A,3B
“By the time of Septimius, not only were catholic belief and practice defined and established, but the church was formed and braced for the inevitable struggle with the pagan state. The most crucial period in the whole life of the church was to be the third century . . . because only in this century were efforts made not merely to punish Christians, but to root out Christianity altogether.”
Quote ID: 990
Time Periods: 3
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 165
Section: 1A,3B
Diocletian. 283 Last emperor of the old Roman, pagan, empire.PJ: Read earlier that Die Cassius said M. Aurelius was rthe end of old Rome. Everybody guessing.
Quote ID: 1028
Time Periods: 134
Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit: Evidence from the First Eight Centuries
Kilian McDonnell and George T. Montague
Book ID: 53 Page: 87
Section: 1A
Barrett adds: “No more certain statement can be made about the Christians of the first generation than this: they believed themselves to be living under the immediate government of the Spirit.”
Quote ID: 1161
Time Periods: 1
Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical
Frank C. Senn
Book ID: 54 Page: 173/174
Section: 1A
Moreover, the “barbarians” were not pagans; they had been converted by Arian missionaries from Constantinople. So the successive waves of peoples – Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, and Lombards – were not enemies of Christianity. Most likely, the Roman Empire never “fell” in the conventional sense of the word.
Quote ID: 1215
Time Periods: 45
Christian Symbol and Ritual
Bernard Cooke
Book ID: 56 Page: 21
Section: 1A,2A
Rituals not only celebrate the deepest values of a culture, they also create, maintain, and legitimize that culture. Part of the process of legitimization necessarily entails the negotiation of power within a society, so that important rituals and symbols in every society are essential for maintaining the power structures of that society.
Quote ID: 1246
Time Periods: 7
Christian Symbol and Ritual
Bernard Cooke
Book ID: 56 Page: 21/22
Section: 1A,2A
Rituals and symbols constantly create and re-create power structures within a society by continuously negotiating the legitimizing of power within the group or society. On the one hand, leaders of the rituals certainly lead because they have power, and the rituals constantly remind others of their power. On the other hand, participants in rituals by their continued participation grant that power to the leaders. If and when participants no longer participate in the ritual or acquiesce to the leadership in the ritual, then the leadership simply ceases being leaders.. . . .
Christian rituals are no exception to this dynamic.
Quote ID: 1247
Time Periods: 7
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 1
Section: 1A,4B
Looked at from a sufficient distance, if indeed any distance is sufficient for a clear view, what seems to confront the observer of the religious scene in the period of my chosen title is a transition from one Establishment to another.
Quote ID: 1252
Time Periods: 147
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 1
Section: 1A
In that knowledge we focus our attention on the winner (and it is an old saying that history doesn’t like losers). We write off the losing Establishment, we pay it no mind; we look closely only at the rising Church, in which all significance seems to lie.
Quote ID: 1253
Time Periods: 45
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 2
Section: 1A,3C
Whatever might have been said back in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, by the twentieth it had become clear and agreed on all hands that nothing counted after Constantine save the newly triumphant faith. From that point on the “Roman” had become “the Christian Empire.”
Quote ID: 1254
Time Periods: 4
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 2
Section: 1A
It is now possible to see that there might well be a story to tell of a good deal of significance, involving the two systems as both alive and interacting to a much later point in time than anyone would have said until recently. A part of the interest in their interaction lies in their quite different structures.
Quote ID: 1255
Time Periods: 17
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 5
Section: 1A
As the rich and influential became increasingly Christian, or we may say, as the upper ranks of the church themselves became more rich and influential, so the chances improved of their version of things being written down and circulated.
Quote ID: 1261
Time Periods: 1
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 99
Section: 1A
[Bold used]People do not like to be told their faith is utter nonsense. Witness in a very different age the reactions to Gibbon’s famous twenty-eighth chapter, shot through as it was with contempt for “ignorant rustics,” the “vulgar,” “the prostrate crowd,” and the transfer to the church of “the superstition of paganism.”{73}
Quote ID: 1309
Time Periods: 1
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 144
Section: 1A
Inflow of novelties into the church was perpetual. And why should this not be so since the period post-Constantine brought about the baptism of so many persons raised in another religious faith?
Quote ID: 1376
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 145
Section: 1A
Just what might result can be seen in a fourth scene, also on the edge, near the Euphrates among farmers and shepherds. An anchorite who happened among them found them never meeting for worship and ignorant of the most basic parts of the liturgy. He asked them, “ ‘Tell me, my sons, are you Christians or Jews?’ But they were indignant at these words, and they say, ‘O! indeed, blessed man, we are Christians.’ ” They explained that they had not laid eyes on a priest for as long as anyone could remember, and in the interval they had forgotten whatever they or their ancestors had once known of Christianity.{147}
Quote ID: 1377
Time Periods: 345
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 145
Section: 1A
Likewise those Christians that Isaac of Antioch (d. ca. 460) encountered in Syria; yet they continued in the rites and celebrations of the old gods and goddesses.
Quote ID: 1378
Time Periods: 4
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 147
Section: 1A,4B
To begin with the world of letters: it was ruled by patrons. If patrons were Christians, who would remain a nonbeliever? There were conversions, of Nonnus, Kyros, Synesius;{156} converts became bishops; yet we might look for some retrospection—some hint of Persephone (or Lot’s wife) in, for example, the verses of Ausonius.
Quote ID: 1380
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 147
Section: 1A,4B
Christian literature in either learned language was permeated by the allusions, thought, symbolism, mythology, and esthetic of the pagan past, inevitably.{157} Inevitably, too, the pagan classics permeated the life and thought of the highly educated. Tags of Vergil or Homer could not be kept out of their very epitaphs, however Christian the deceased had been; they intruded on the dreams of ascetics in the desert, so we know from the famous confession of Jerome in the 370s.{158} In fear of such contamination of the mind, the bishops tried, without much success, to displace the older canon with truly Christian equivalents, to banish nonbelievers from the school- and lecture room, and to forbid at least the clergy to read outside their faith.{159}4B
Quote ID: 1381
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 148
Section: 1A,4B
For depictions of Jesus, as for those of pagan gods, much imperial symbolism was borrowed, explaining the ball (orb, globus) held in the hand, the throne (for bishops as well), the little tent (baldachin) above the throne—except that the baldachin may have come to the emperors from the gods, and only thereafter to Christian art and ceremony.{161} There were symbolic gestures borrowed, too: proskynesis, for example.{162}Finally, an illustration of the flow of art from pagan to Christian settings: a well-known horde of silver objects found on the Esquiline hill in Rome, dating to the later fourth century, with various dishes and various reliefs showing the ancestral deities of the city; also, a bridal casket showing on one of its panels Venus at her toilet surrounded by her Nereids, and in a conspicuous place the dedication to the nuptial pair, “Secundus and Projecta, may you live in Christ!”{163}
4B
Quote ID: 1382
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 151
Section: 1A,4B
Conversions were made, because they could only be made, through intimidation and physical force. So the authorities evidently judged.
Quote ID: 1383
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 152
Section: 1A
So much for my first chapter—and its conclusion I make no attempt to determine when the thorn was finally removed, or when paganism had disappeared for good and the Grand Event which I set out to describe was over. In fact the event in some sense, I would say, never ended, at least not if the disappearance of paganism is what’s in question.
Quote ID: 1385
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 153
Section: 1A,4B
It must not be forgotten, since both pagan and Christian spokesmen drew attention to the fact, that conversion under pressure was unlikely to reach very far down into the mind. Prudential considerations, to curry favor or gain a rich wife, or not to lose one’s job or one’s life, diminished the meaning of conversion. True, post-Constantine, everything encouraged a sense of triumph and conviction among the crowds attending church; but everything also encouraged hypocrisy.{2} In the nature of the case no one today can make any good guess at the depth or prevalence of the converts’ inner feelings.
Quote ID: 1388
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 154
Section: 1A,4B
The results of the surge of recruitment, as they are described in the fourth chapter, were not destructive of the church. Quite the reverse: a wonderfully dynamic phase in church history commenced in which the deficiencies outlined in the opening paragraphs above were largely made good. The initial and lifetime appeal of the new faith was enormously enhanced. Christianity became (as a salesman would say today) a “full-service” religion. Converts could find in it, because they brought in to it, a great variety of psychological reward that had been important to them before, when they had addressed the divine within the pagan tradition.
Quote ID: 1389
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 154/155
Section: 1A
The creed that was the true heart of the Christian community in the first century or two of its existence was retained untouched by the inflow of new members after Constantine. Church organization, too, showed no effects.{4} But in the ideas and rites just described a large area of new loyalties opened up. Augustine called the sum total of imported paganism among his congregation their “mother,” while what he himself would teach them was “the father.”{5} They must choose; or he hoped they would. But he could not make them do so. He conceded that they must be allowed some latitude in their manner of worship.
Quote ID: 1392
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 159
Section: 1A
Yet it serves to support once more my chief point: that the grand event which I have tried to describe did not and could not conclude in any sort of a total eclipse or displacement of the past. The triumph of the church was one not of obliteration but of widening embrace and assimilation.
Quote ID: 1404
Time Periods: 124
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 10
Section: 1A
The religious views most easily recoverable from the non-Christian Roman world do not, at any rate in some respects, strike a modern reader as alien or outlandish.
Quote ID: 1408
Time Periods: 16
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 22
Section: 1A,2D3B,4B
. . . the Apostles’ success in winning recruits arose from their deeds, above all, in healing.
Quote ID: 1426
Time Periods: 456
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 35
Section: 1A,4B
Granted, because rich and distinguished Christians “nowadays offer welcome to them on account of the word,” some are drawn into the work by hopes of social climbing.
Quote ID: 1431
Time Periods: 456
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 52
Section: 1A,4B
. . .we have the campaign between two North African congregations to secure for themselves their share of the good things in life. In the town of Tagaste, where the very rich Albina Martyred
Quote ID: 1449
Time Periods: 456
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 65
Section: 1A,4B
“Many people,” says John Chrysostom [PJ:349–407] in Antioch, “have villages and estates and pay no mind to them nor communicate with them, but do give great attention to how the baths are working, and how the rates are set, and how halls and houses are constructed - not to the harvest of souls...Should not everyone build a church, should he not get a teacher and make a congregation and, above all things, see to it that all are Christians?” Reference - Hamily on the book of ActsJust as the emperor’s servants followed his lead (though not always), so the slaves and tenant farmers and dependents of one of those counts or senators, or any rich man, were open to both pressure and persuasion from him.
Consider the convert who was a slave in a non-Christian household. Insubordination! All sorts of problems! So, before Constantine, the church in Rome, and presumably elsewhere, sharply rejected such additions unless they had their master’s support. Later it still insisted, through the arm of the state, that he should determine the religion of his slaves - that is (at this quite different juncture), the master should enforce their religious conformity by means of a good beating, or, if one weren’t enough, “by progressively heavier beatings.” Here once more is the question: In what sense do you have a convert when he yields to mere force? We have confronted the problem before. So long as one got the semblance of results, Augustine, for one, saw no difficulties. Neither did Saint Gregory somewhat later. It is reasonable to take their views as representative of the religious Establishment overall as it had by then developed throughout the empire, because the same views are embodied in imperial legislation and accord entirely with that faith in violence that will be described in a later chapter.
Quote ID: 1466
Time Periods: 456
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 75
Section: 1A,2A
In other words, ritual gives authority to belief; and Christianity must not be seen to need anything of the sort from the pagan past.
Quote ID: 1469
Time Periods: 7
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 85
Section: 1A,4B
As conversion progresses, the new religion becomes in its social dimension increasingly like the old . . . In the long run, conversion gave rise to strong pressures that affected the course of development of the new religion.”[Footnote]: Note also Geffcken (1978) 325, referring to a “vast mass of cultural forms passed from paganism into Christianity. . . a huge stream of tradition.”
Quote ID: 1475
Time Periods: 456
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 89
Section: 1A,4B
All Gaza’s temples are torn down and burned and the city is cleansed of every belief but the Christian. The most stubborn opponents, faute de mieux For lack of something better, are tied up, marched away to the provincial capital, severely tortured, and all killed mala morte, “a great number”. Less stubborn folk repair to Porphyry’s [PJ: "of Gaza" 347–420] grand new church. There a question is raised about those “who had not left their mistaken ways of their free will but in fear and terror of the emperors”, to which Porphyry answers as the Apostle had: "Whether falsely or truly, Christ is preached, and I rejoice in that.’” (Phil. 1:18). His views fit naturally in a tradition already well established (see above, p. 12, 57, & 65).
Quote ID: 1477
Time Periods: 45
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 37
Section: 1A
Also, the church accommodated itself, to some extent, to existing circumstances – that is, to the institutions of the Roman Empire. Its own organization developed along the territorial and institutional lines of the empire, and cultural and philosophical strains appeared within Christianity that were neither Hebraic nor apostolic. From one point of view, then, the church thus developed away from pure, apostolic Christianity. On the other hand, it may be claimed that only thus could the church progress, adapting itself to a changing world, to new people and new ideas.
Quote ID: 4650
Time Periods: 456
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 39
Section: 1A
Under the Roman Empire, Christianity developed a distinct and complex culture that was heavily classical, with elements of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and classical rhetoric. Christians did not develop their own language, philosophy, law, or even organization; they adapted what they found.
Quote ID: 4654
Time Periods: 23456
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 39
Section: 1A
Even Tertullian, however, used an oratorical style based on classical rhetoric. Some of the Christians denounced elements of classical culture, but almost all of them made use of it: They absorbed classicism in speech and thought.
Quote ID: 4655
Time Periods: 23456
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 39
Section: 1A
These men made an underground religion into a successful, universal institution - an achievement requiring astute, tough, and determined leadership. One may question how well these early priests and bishops served Christianity by making the church a viable imperial institution - did they betray the ideals of Jesus when they created a conservative social organization?- but it is impossible to question their effectiveness.
Quote ID: 4656
Time Periods: 23456
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 40/41
Section: 1A
The causes and consequences of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West have been inexhaustible subjects of speculation and argument. Historians have even questioned whether there was such a phenomenon as a fall - perhaps the empire just gradually disappeared. However, it is obvious that in the political-military context at least, something happened in the fifth century. For the first time, the Romans were unable to drive German invaders out of the western part of the Empire.
Quote ID: 4657
Time Periods: 1
Civilizations of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, The
Norman F. Cantor
Book ID: 203 Page: 41
Section: 1A
Despite revolutionary political change, however, it is fairly clear that the social and political institutions and the culture of the late empire did not vanish, but were replaced only gradually (and never completely) over the next two centuries. Modern historians, by and large, regard the fall of Rome not as a single military disaster, but as the consequence of long-range internal processes.
Quote ID: 4658
Time Periods: 456
Claudian, On Stilicho’s Consulship, LCL 136: Claudian 2, Books 2-3
Translated by Maurice Platnauer
Book ID: 538 Page: 49
Section: 1A
Nothing of her ancient dignity hath she lost, no regret has she for the age of republican freedom….
Quote ID: 9180
Time Periods: 45
Claudian, On Stilicho’s Consulship, LCL 136: Claudian 2, Books 2-3
Translated by Maurice Platnauer
Book ID: 538 Page: 53
Section: 1A
…a city greater than any that upon earth the air ecompasseth…
Quote ID: 9181
Time Periods: 45
Claudian, On Stilicho’s Consulship, LCL 136: Claudian 2, Books 2-3
Translated by Maurice Platnauer
Book ID: 538 Page: 53/55
Section: 1A
“Tis she alone who has received the conquered into her bosom and like a mother, not an empress, protected the human race with a common name, summoning those whom she has defeated to share her citizenship and drawing together distant races with bonds of affection. To her rule of peace we owe it that the world is our home, that we can live where we please, and that to visit Thule and explore its once dreaded wilds is but a sport; thanks to her all and sundry may drink the waters of the Rhone and quaff Orontes’ stream, thanks to her we are all one people. Nor will there ever be a limit to the empire of Rome….”.
Quote ID: 9182
Time Periods: 57
Clement of Alexandria, LCL 092
Loeb Classical Library
Book ID: 140 Page: 251
Section: 1A
Exhortation to the Greeks - Chpt. XIILet us then shun custom; let us shun it as some dangerous headland, or threatening Charybdis, or the Sirens of legend. Custom strangles man; it turns him away from truth; it leads him away from life; it is a snare, an abyss, a pit, a devouring evil.
Quote ID: 3032
Time Periods: 2
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 164
Section: 3B,1A
Clearly the most Roman and patriotic of all cults was the worship of Rome itself. As the city began to lose its political and economic importance (p. 97), the emotional inspiration of its name remained as great as ever; the heavily charged slogan Roma Aeterna preserved and intensified its power.PJ: eternal city (used for searching tbis subject)
Quote ID: 4717
Time Periods: 1456
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 164/165
Section: 1A,1B,3B
….Diocletian gave even more massive and widespread publicity to the idea of Rome than any other ruler. For he and his fellow-emperors expressed this idea, without variation, on millions of the silvered bronze coins of their universally circulating reformed currency. These enormous and uniform issues, issued at many mints from c. 294 onwards for more than two decades, represent one of the largest outbursts of numismatic propaganda in the whole of Roman history. By such means, every household in the empire was repeatedly reminded of eternal Rome for many years.But the slogan of Diocletian and his colleagues was not simply concerned with Rome itself; instead it celebrated the Genius of the Roman People – GENIVS POPVLI ROMANI. The Genius was represented by a youthful male figure, carrying a cornucopia and wearing the turreted (mural) crown which was characteristic of the Fortune (Tyche) of cities.
Quote ID: 4718
Time Periods: 34
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 237
Section: 1A,3C,3C2
Church and state were to be run in double harness. But as the emperor increasingly became aware of his personal mission, the successive Councils of Arelate (314) and Nicaea (325) – the former attended by western, and the latter mainly by eastern bishops—showed that the master was Constantine, to whom the celestial will had committed the government of all things on earth. Consequently membership of the church now meant resignation to the claims of the state, and an extremely oppressive state it was (pp. 63 ff). Since, however, there was going to be an official church, nothing but this enforced subordination could produce the power-structure needed to guarantee that state and church, and the empire with them, would not fall apart. Eusebius, whose Life of Constantine framed the new theory of Christian sovereignty in terms comparing the relationship of the emperor to Jesus with that of Jesus to God the Father, {101} felt so anxious not to return to the relative ineffectiveness of earlier Christian institutions, whose persecution by Diocletian even seemed to him deserved and merciful, that he applauded the capitulation of the church to Constantine.
Quote ID: 4773
Time Periods: 14
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 55
Section: 1A,4B
With Augustus, Rome came of age as a city where the predominant culture, in architecture and literature in particular, was Greek, albeit used towards Roman ends and for the celebration of the glory of Augustus’ regime.
Quote ID: 4794
Time Periods: 0
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 216
Section: 1A
the original message of Christianity, proclaimed as it was by a spiritual leader who had suffered the most humiliating punishments the empire could administer, could be seen as a threat to that empire.
Quote ID: 4922
Time Periods: 1
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 75
Section: 1A,4B
We are entitled, and rightly so, to speak of a single Greco-Roman civilisation, . . .
Quote ID: 5048
Time Periods: 123456
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 76
Section: 1A
To forget the value of the inheritance which Rome preserved for us....is merely a passing phase of feeling: it is really quite inconsistent with the character of an age which recognises the doctrine of evolution as its great discovery.
Quote ID: 5050
Time Periods: 6
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 77
Section: 1A
Our modern world is in many ways a continuation of the world of Greece and Rome. Not in all ways – particularly not in medicine, music, industry and applied science. But in most of our intellectual and spiritual activities we are the great-grandsons of the Romans, and the great-grandsons of the Greeks. Other influences joined to make us what we are; but Greco-Roman strain was one of the strongest and richest.
Quote ID: 5051
Time Periods: 6
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 77
Section: 1A
In other words, everything goes back to the Greeks.
Quote ID: 5052
Time Periods: 6
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 78
Section: 1A
We ourselves, whether we like it or not, are the heirs of the Greeks and Romans . . . Without that massive contribution we should not be what we are.
Quote ID: 5054
Time Periods: 6
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 79
Section: 1A
As regards the law, most of us are not solicitors or barristers. Yet even if we are not, it is worth remembering that the entire world of order, in which we live, is the creation of the ancients, and in particular of the Romans. It is true that the law of our land, as we know it today, is not Roman law. Nevertheless, it was the Romans, after various more or less localised Greek efforts, who concluded that we ought to live within a legal framework. And that is what we do. In other words, we live our lives through the grace of Roman Law. So we owe it to the Roman lawyers – and to Cicero who interpreted so much of what they said – that we live in comparative peace and orderliness. Without Roman Law, we should merely be in a jungle.
Quote ID: 5055
Time Periods: 6
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 81
Section: 1A
And now, as we know, there is a great move to establish a united Europe. It will not have quite the same boundaries as the ancient Roman empire, but it is impossible not to see that empire as a sort of forerunner.
Quote ID: 5056
Time Periods: 6
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and the Complete Poetry of William Blake, The
John Donne; William Blake
Book ID: 309 Page: 599
Section: 1A
The Strongest Poison ever known Came from Caesar’s Laurel Crown.
Quote ID: 7545
Time Periods: 16
Complete Sermons of Martin Luther Volume 5, The
Edited by Eugene F. A. Klug
Book ID: 338 Page: 247
Section: 1A,4B
But the Roman emperor set himself and his empire against Christ, persecuted the gospel, crucified some Christians, killed others with the sword, and sought to destroy Christ and his followers. As a result, his government and empire fell, and Rome lay crumbled in the dust.
Quote ID: 7857
Time Periods: 57
Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance
H.A. Drake
Book ID: 65 Page: 21
Section: 1A,3C
Given the legacy of religious strife and bigotry that had divided Europe since the Reformation and the resistance of the church to their call for looser controls, it is understandable that they saw intolerance as a quality inherent to Christian belief, a conclusion that seemed proven by the history of the church in the Roman Empire. Gibbon shared these view, and they clearly influenced his conclusion that the fall of Rome was caused by “barbarism and religion.” {24} That intolerance was inherent to Christianity seemed beyond dispute. Not only were converts obliged to renounce belief in all other gods—an immediate contrast to the inclusive spirit of polytheism, as Gibbon so aptly noted—but also within decades of Constantine’s conversion Christian emperors began a violent suppression of variant beliefs that had continued seemingly unabated to his own day.This correlation gave the hypothesis of inherent Christian intolerance a semblance of scientific objectivity, making it a powerful paradigm that continues to be used right down to the present—so powerful, in fact, that it masks what should be an obvious flaw: for three centuries prior to Constantine, the only persecutions known to the Roman world were those that Christians suffered and pagans sponsored. Enlightenment ideology was predisposed to discount this situation...
Quote ID: 1675
Time Periods: 456
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 18
Section: 1A
Roman Catholicism remains the central institution of Christianity, not only because of the vast numbers of people -- more than a billion -- who identify themselves as Catholics, but because its dominant institutions -- universal governance, uniform cult -- give it an influence, especially in the West, that no other form of Christianity can approach.3C
Quote ID: 1809
Time Periods: ?
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 171
Section: 1A
When the power of the empire became joined to the ideology of the Church, the empire was immediately recast and reenergized, and the Church became an entity so different from what had preceded it as to be almost unrecognizable.
Quote ID: 1815
Time Periods: 4
Continuity and Change in Roman Religion
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Book ID: 313 Page: 298/299
Section: 1A,3C,3A1
Constantine, in various ways, some more successful than others, tried to Christianize the Roman empire. At the same time Christianity, as a result of being the religion of the emperor, was being Romanized and the Church became something like an image of the empire. As more members of the ruling classes were converted the social status of bishops and that of secular dignitaries began to converge.{1} The ecclesiastical administration based on city, province,{2} and patriarchate{3} began to mirror the imperial administration based on cities, provinces, and dioceses.
Quote ID: 7630
Time Periods: 14
Conversion
A.D. Nock
Book ID: 70 Page: 210/211
Section: 1A,4B
The success of Christianity is the success of an institution which united the sacramentalism and the philosophy of the time. It satisfied the inquiring turn of mind, the desire for escape from Fate, the desire for security in the hereafter; like Stoicism, it gave a way of life and made man at home in the universe, but unlike Stoicism it did this for the ignorant as well as for the lettered. It satisfied also social needs and it secured men against loneliness. Its way was not easy; it made uncompromising demands on those who would enter and would continue to live in the brotherhood, but to those who did not fail, it offered an equally uncompromising assurance.
Quote ID: 1985
Time Periods: 14
Councils: First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology, The
Leo Donald Davis
Book ID: 224 Page: 25
Section: 1A,3C
For the conversion of a Roman emperor to Christianity, of Constantine in 312, might not have happened—or, if it had, it would have taken on a totally different meaning—if it had not been preceded for two generations by the conversion of Christianity to the culture and ideals of the Roman world.
Quote ID: 5629
Time Periods: 4
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 124/125
Section: 1A,2A3
It is a sad prospect: Christian reverentia created a situation which the elites of the Greco-Roman world had never envisaged in so sharp a form, {101} the population was now divided between those who could if they wished be full participants in the grooming of a universal religion, and large areas and classes condemned, by physical distance and the lack of “socialization,” to a substandard version of the same religion.{102} The death of paganism in western society, and the rise of the cult of saints, with its explicitly aristocratic and urban forms, ensured that, from late antiquity onwards, the upper-class culture of Europe would always measure itself against the wilderness of a rusticitas which it had itself played no small part in creating. {103}It seems to me that the most marked feature of the rise of the Christian church in western Europe was the imposition of human administrative structures and of an ideal potentia linked to invisible human beings and to their visible human representatives, the bishops of the towns, at the expense of traditions that had seemed to belong to the structure of the landscape itself.{104} Saint Martin attacked those points at which the natural and the divine were held to meet:{105} he cut down the sacred trees,{106} and he broke up the processions that followed the immemorial lines between the arable and the nonarable.{107} His successors fulminated against trees and fountains, and against forms of divination that gained access to the future through the close observation of the vagaries of animal and vegetable life.{108} They imposed rhythms of work and leisure that ignored the slow turning of the sun, the moon, and the planets through the heavens, and that reflected, instead, a purely human time, linked to the deaths of outstanding individuals.{109}
Quote ID: 5108
Time Periods: 34
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 1, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 320 Page: 50
Section: 1A
The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay even the wish, of resuming their independence, and scarcely considered their own existence as distinct from the existence of Rome.
Quote ID: 8185
Time Periods: 12
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 1, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 320 Page: 416
Section: 1A,3B
In the eyes of posterity, this triumph is remarkable by a distinction of a less honourable kind. It was the last that Rome ever beheld. Soon after this period the emperors ceased to vanquish, and Rome ceased to be the capital of the empire.John’s note: A.D. 302.
Ppl still guessing about the end.
Quote ID: 7724
Time Periods: 14
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 3, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 319 Page: 169
Section: 1A,3C
…the ministers of the catholic church imitated the profane model which they were impatient to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superstitions of Paganism, if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman empire: but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.{2}
Quote ID: 7722
Time Periods: 14
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 3, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 319 Page: 169
Section: 1A
The genius of Rome expired with Theodosius….PJ reference: XXIX
Quote ID: 7723
Time Periods: 14
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: 46
Section: 1A
The first Christians did not think of the Church primarily as an organized society; . . .It was a divine-human organism, established by the direct action of God in history, and those who belonged to it were unconcerned about questions of constitutional order. Nevertheless, from the second century the Church possessed an ordained ministry, consisting of bishops, priests and deacons, the origins of which must be sought in the period under review. Unfortunately the evidence at the disposal of the historian is fragmentary and ambiguous; any and every account therefore partakes of that uncertainty which is inseparable from conjecture on the basis of insufficient material, and the facts to be gleaned from the relevant documents have been differently related.
Quote ID: 5262
Time Periods: 12
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: 162
Section: 1A,3B
Indeed the main threat to the pax Romana came from the Church itself, which was rent by schisms and doctrinal strife.
Quote ID: 5313
Time Periods: 1234
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: 250
Section: 1A
It has been said with some cynicism but with some truth that the Roman Church was the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting on the grave thereof; and indeed much of the prestige of the old civil power passed, at its defeat, to the bishop of Rome as the head of the western Church throughout what are usually called the Dark and the Middle Ages.
Quote ID: 5358
Time Periods: 16
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: vii
Section: 1A
It has been held that the early history of the Church represents a perversion of the simple primitive gospel preached by Jesus; the story of the Church then becomes an account of the obscuring of Christian truth.
Quote ID: 5253
Time Periods: 12
Early Christian Doctrines
J. N. D. Kelly
Book ID: 428 Page: 3
Section: 1A
…the difference of atmosphere becomes immediately apparent as one crosses from the apostolic to the post-apostolic age.
Quote ID: 8694
Time Periods: 2
Early Christian Doctrines
J. N. D. Kelly
Book ID: 428 Page: 3
Section: 1A
But, so far as the central stream of Christendom was concerned, the brilliant upsurge of fresh ideas which had distinguished the earlier centuries had spent itself. By the sixth century, both in East and West, the reign of formalism and scholasticism was well under way.….
Being still at the formative stage, the theology of the early centuries exhibits the extremes of immaturity and sophistication.
Quote ID: 8695
Time Periods: 25
Early Christian Doctrines
J. N. D. Kelly
Book ID: 428 Page: 4
Section: 1A,2D
Further, conditions were favourable to the coexistence of a wide variety of opinions even on issues of prime importance.
Quote ID: 8696
Time Periods: 2345
Early Christian Doctrines
J. N. D. Kelly
Book ID: 428 Page: 87/88
Section: 1A,3C
No steps had been taken so far, however, to work all these complex elements into a coherent whole. The Church had to wait for more than three hundred years for a final synthesis, for not until the council of Constantinople (381) was the formula of one God existing in three co-equal Persons formally ratified. Tentative theories, however, some more and some less satisfactory, were propounded in the preceding centuries.
Quote ID: 8701
Time Periods: 234
Early Christianity - Origins and Evolution to AD 600
Ian Hazlett (Editor)
Book ID: 77 Page: 185
Section: 1A
In conclusion: Christianity developed out of a Jewish sect into a world religion through the use of its Greek inheritance, by moulding its beliefs into a coherent system which could appeal to thoughtful men and leaders of society, without losing the element of faith and personal commitment exhibited by simpler believers.
Quote ID: 2129
Time Periods: 456
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 27
Section: 1A
From the later second century Christians had been moving fast - and not only in Alexandria - towards an assimilation of secular culture.
Quote ID: 5406
Time Periods: 2
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 27
Section: 1A
In the later third century they were beginning to penetrate every level of Roman society and to assimilate the culture, life-styles and education of Roman townsmen. The conversion of Constantine and the ensuing flow of imperial favour did nothing to reverse this, but brought growing respectability, prestige and wealth. Around 350 very little separated a Christian from his pagan counterpart in Roman society.
Quote ID: 5407
Time Periods: 34
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 28
Section: 1A
The image of a society neatly divided into ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ is the creation of late fourth-century Christians, and has been too readily taken at its face value by modern historians.
Quote ID: 5409
Time Periods: 24
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 29
Section: 1A
A generation after Victorinus’ conversion the position had changed. It now made sense to speak of ‘paganism’ and ‘Christianity’ as a division running through at least one section of Roman society.
Quote ID: 5410
Time Periods: 4
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 102
Section: 1A,3B
Christians had already gone a long way in appropriating the culture and life-styles of their pagan contemporaries before the time of Constantine.
Quote ID: 5425
Time Periods: 23
Epiphanius, The Panarion, Vol. 2
Translated by Frank Williams
Book ID: 448 Page: 25
Section: 1A
50.2.3 Shame on the people who get themselves into all kinds of quarrels!
Quote ID: 9153
Time Periods: 4
Essay on Man and Other Poems
Alexander Pope
Book ID: 481 Page: 65
Section: 1A
Mark what unvaried laws preserve each state,Laws wise as Nature, and as fix’d as fate,
In vain thy reason finer webs shall draw,
Entangle Justice in her net of law,
And right, too rigid, harden into wrong;
Still for the strong too weak, the weak too strong.
Quote ID: 9070
Time Periods: 147
Essay on Man and Other Poems
Alexander Pope
Book ID: 481 Page: 68
Section: 1A
For forms of government let fools contest:Whate’er is best administer’d is best:
For modes of faith, let graceless zealots fight;
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right….
PJ Note: “Essay on Man”
Epistle iii. Line 305
Quote ID: 9071
Time Periods: 147
Essays: Ancient and Modern
Bernard Knox
Book ID: 681 Page: 161
Section: 1A
“We are all Greeks. We are the inheritors of their virtues and vices, their fierce competitive spirit, their intellectual curiosity, their will to action. It is this heritage which defines us….”*PJ footnote reference: Bernard Knox, Essays: Ancient and Modern, 161.*
Quote ID: 9746
Time Periods: 47
Etruscans: How Did the Etruscans Shape Roman History and Society?
Daily History https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_the_Etruscans_shape_Roman_history_and_socoety3F
Book ID: 444 Page: 4
Section: 1A
It seems that the Romans did adopt some Etruscan deities and demons. These demons were eventually transmitted to the Christians.{14} The Etruscans were renowned for their oracles and prophecies. One of the Tarquin kings purchased the Syballine books, that became the prophetic literature of Rome from an Etruscan temple.
Quote ID: 8817
Time Periods: 014
Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000
Julia M. H. Smith
Book ID: 83 Page: 33
Section: 1A
Its abandonment in eighth-century Ireland and replacement by Latin as the language for the display of secular status became possible only once Latin itself was no longer associated with powerful neighbours just across the Irish Sea. By then, Latin had acquired a completely different significance as a mark of Christianity.
Quote ID: 2172
Time Periods: 56
Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000
Julia M. H. Smith
Book ID: 83 Page: 255/256
Section: 1A,4B
Even so, Rome’s hold over the imagination of all the inhabitants of Christian Europe was long since assured. Northern writers dreamed on, without mundane reality interrupting their idealized visions of the ‘queen of cities’.{8} Famed throughout the triple world by Franks, ‘faithful Christians and emperors’, it was secure in its reputation as ‘mother of kings and glory of Italians’,{9} ‘the mother of martyrs, the domicile of the apostles’,{10} ‘the capital of the world . . . mother of all churches’.{11}
Quote ID: 2197
Time Periods: 67
Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000
Julia M. H. Smith
Book ID: 83 Page: 296/297
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
….the role of Christianity as a transmitter of many other aspects of Roman culture besides its normative creed. All of these are subsidiary, however, to its critical diagnostic: a cluster of dominant ideologies in which Rome held a central, inspirational place but no ascendant political role as it once had in Antiquity and would again, differently conceived, under papal guidance. To that extent, Europe after Rome is also Europe before Rome—after the crumbling of the political hegemony of the western Roman Empire but before the ecclesiastical hegemony of the international Roman Church.
Quote ID: 2218
Time Periods: 67
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 2
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.{*}”[Footnote *] Far from denying the universality of the Roman Catholic Church, the author is rather showing that the Church was, by God’s will and Providence, “incarnated” in and shaped by European civilization, centered in Rome (see page 19), and that on its human side the Catholic Church is Roman and European.
Quote ID: 2220
Time Periods: 7
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 18
Section: 1A
To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization …. . . .
…to pretend that the Empire or its religion have at any time ceased to be—that is, to pretend that there has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the present of Europe—all these pretensions are parts of one historical falsehood.
Quote ID: 2224
Time Periods: 147
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 19
Section: 1A,4B
The divisions and the sub-divisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the emplacement of the great European cities, the routes of communication between them, the universities, the Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence, all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.
Quote ID: 2225
Time Periods: 6
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 38
Section: 1A,4B
The conception which the Catholic Church had of itself in the early third century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if we use the word “Christianity” we are unhistorical. “Christianity” is a term in the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it connotes an opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The Christians of the time of which I speak had no such conception.
Quote ID: 2235
Time Periods: 13
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 39
Section: 1A,4B
One can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoicism, or epicureanism, or neoplatonism; but one cannot talk of “Christianism” or “Christism.” Indeed, no one has been so ignorant or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase “Christianity,” used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of “Christianism” or “Christism”; and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea; it connotes something historically false; something that never existed.
Quote ID: 2236
Time Periods: 13
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 46/47
Section: 1A,4B
Well, there comes after this considerable body of contemporary documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very spring and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first founders), a gap which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a man.This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast mass of its documentary evidence has, of course, perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient writing. The little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and fragments. But after this gap, from somewhat before the year 200, we come to the beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing in volume, of documentary evidence.
Quote ID: 2239
Time Periods: 12
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 52/53
Section: 1A,4B
Now it has been the singular fortune of our European civilization that an end did not come. Dissolution was in some strange way checked. Death was averted. And the more closely one looks into the unique history of that salvation—the salvation of all that could be saved in a most ancient and fatigued society—the more one sees that this salvation was effected by no agency save that of the Catholic Church.. . . .
Every other great civilization has, after many centuries of development, either fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or died and disappeared. There is nothing left of Egypt, there is nothing left of Assyria.
Quote ID: 2241
Time Periods: 146
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 94
Section: 1A
The transformation of the Roman Empire, then, in the fourth century and the fifth, was eventually its preservation, in peril of full decay, by its acceptation of the Faith.
Quote ID: 2265
Time Periods: 14
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 191
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
In such a crux, there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.
The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.
Quote ID: 2279
Time Periods: 47
Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Book ID: 222 Page: 1
Section: 1A,4B
In Gibbon’s day, and until very recently, few people questioned age-old certainties about the passing of the ancient world—namely, that a high point of human achievement, the civilization of Greece and Rome, was destroyed in the West by hostile invasions during the fifth century.
Quote ID: 5467
Time Periods: 156
Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Book ID: 222 Page: 3/4
Section: 1A,4B
It has therefore come as a surprise to me to find a much more comfortable vision of the end of empire spreading in recent years through the English-speaking world. {3} The intellectual guru of this movement is a brilliant historian and stylist, Peter Brown, who published in 1971 The World of Late Antiquity. In it he defined a new period, ‘Late Antiquity’, beginning in around AD 200 and lasting right up to the eighth century, characterized, not by the dissolution of half the Roman empire, but by vibrant religious and cultural debate. {4}As Brown himself subsequently wrote, he was able in his book to narrate the history of these centuries ‘without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay’. ‘Decay’ was banished, and replaced by a ‘religious and cultural revolution’, beginning under the late empire and continuing long after it. {5} This view has had a remarkable effect, particularly in the United States, where Brown now lives and works.
3D2
Pastor John’s note: but the decay is obvious. This author disagrees with this assessment, that nothing happened at all.
Quote ID: 5468
Time Periods: 3456
Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Book ID: 222 Page: 4
Section: 1A,4B
There has been a sea change in the language used to describe post-Roman times. Words like ‘decline’ and ‘crisis’, which suggest problems at the end of the empire and which were quite usual into the 1970s, have largely disappeared from historians’ vocabularies, to be replaced by neutral terms, like ‘transition’, ‘change’, and ‘transformation’. {8} For instance, a massive European-funded project of research into the period 300-800 chose as its title ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’. {9} There is no hint here of ‘decline’, ‘fall’, or ‘crisis’, nor even of any kind of ‘end’ to the Roman world. ‘Transformation’ suggests that Rome lived on, though gradually metamorphosed into a different, but not necessarily inferior, form.3D2
Quote ID: 5469
Time Periods: 346
Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Book ID: 222 Page: 9
Section: 1A
Goffart was very well aware that sometimes Romans and Germanic newcomers were straightforwardly at war, but he argues that ‘the fifth century was less momentous for invasions than for the incorporation of barbarian protectors into the fabric of the West’. In a memorable sound bite, he summed up his argument: ‘what we call the Fall of the Western Roman empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand’. {18} Rome did fall, but only because it had voluntarily delegated away its own power, not because it had been successfully invaded.PJ note: If we define “fall” as “to become something it was not before”, then yes, Rome fell.
Quote ID: 5470
Time Periods: 156
Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Book ID: 222 Page: 9
Section: 1A,3D2
For instance, a recent European volume about the first post-Roman states is entitled Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity. {19}There is no hint here of invasion or force, nor even that the Roman empire came to an end; instead there is a strong suggestion that the incomers fitted easily into a continuing and evolving Roman world.
Quote ID: 5471
Time Periods: 156
Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Book ID: 222 Page: 80
Section: 1A,3D2
Faith in the superiority of Roman culture was, to some extent, shared by the Germanic peoples themselves. Their presentation of their rule in a very Roman guise was partly aimed at their Roman subjects, but it almost certainly also pleased the rulers themselves. In Ostrogothic Italy, as we have seen, Theoderic and his successors were happy to present themselves as the upholders of Roman culture, and to see this as a vital difference between themselves and the true barbarians beyond.
Quote ID: 5497
Time Periods: 156
Fall of Rome: And The End of Civilization, The
Bryan Ward-Perkins
Book ID: 222 Page: 80
Section: 1A,3D2
If we look at the two large Germanic kingdoms that survived to the end of the sixth century, those of the Visigoths and of the Franks, what seems to have happened is that the indigenous Roman population eventually adopted the identity of their masters, and became ‘Visigoths’ or ‘Franks’ (from which ‘Français’ and ‘French’ derive); but at the same time these masters adopted the culture of their subjects—in particular dropping their native language and religion in favour of those of their subjects. The explanation, I think, is that both groups moved ‘upwards’: the Romans into the political identity of their Germanic masters; the Germanic peoples into the more sophisticated cultural framework of their Roman subjects. {32}
Quote ID: 5498
Time Periods: 156
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 32
Section: 1A
Rome Is Where the Heart Is
Quote ID: 5531
Time Periods: 156
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 108
Section: 1A
Keep Roman central government happy, and life could often be lived as the locals wanted. This is a key to understanding much of the internal history of the Roman Empire.
Quote ID: 5556
Time Periods: 1
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 123
Section: 1A
Roman imperialism had claimed, since the time of Augustus, that the presiding divinities had destined Rome to conquer and civilize the world. The gods had supported the Empire in a mission to bring the whole world of humankind to the best achievable state, and had intervened directly to choose and inspire Roman emperors. After Constantine’s public adoption of Christianity, the longstanding claims about the relation of the state to the deity were quickly, and surprisingly easily, reworked. The presiding divinity was recast as the Christian God, and the highest possible state for humankind was declared to be Christian conversion and salvation. Literary education and the focus on self-government were shifted for a while to the back burner, but by no means thrown out. And that was the sum total of the adjustment required. The claim that the Empire was God’s vehicle, enacting His will in the world, changed, little: only the nomenclature was different. Likewise, while emperors could no longer be deified, their divine status was retained in Christian-Roman propaganda’s portrayal of God as hand-picking individual emperors to rule with Him, and partly in His place, over human sphere of His cosmos. Thus, the emperor and everything about him, from his bedchamber to his treasury, could continue to be styled as ‘sacred’. {30}
Quote ID: 5570
Time Periods: 145
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 125
Section: 1A,4B
By 438, the Senate of Rome was a thoroughly Christian body. At the top end of Roman society, the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world.
Quote ID: 5571
Time Periods: 5
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 125
Section: 1A,3C2
Many Christian bishops, as well as secular commentators, were happy to restate the old claim of Roman imperialism in its new clothing. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea was already arguing, as early as the reign of Constantine, that it was no accident that Christ had been incarnated during the lifetime of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Despite the earlier history of persecutions, went his argument, this showed that Christianity and the Empire were destined for each other, with God making Rome all-powerful so that, through it, all mankind might eventually be saved.
Quote ID: 5572
Time Periods: 1456
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 126
Section: 1A,3A1
With the Church now so much a part of the state - bishops had even been given administrative roles within it, such as running small-claims courts – to become a Christian bishop was not to drop out of public life but to find a new avenue into it.
Quote ID: 5575
Time Periods: 456
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 126
Section: 1A
If the Christianization of Roman society is a massively important topic, an equally important, and somewhat less studied one, is the Romanization of Christianity. The adoption of the new religion was no one-way street, but a process of mutual adaptation that reinforced the ideological claims of emperor and state. {34}
Quote ID: 7376
Time Periods: 1456
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 126
Section: 1A,3A1
But rejection of the Empire was little more than undertone among fourth-century Christian thinkers.
Quote ID: 8469
Time Periods: 14
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 132
Section: 1A,3C
Its unchallenged ideological monopoly made the Empire enormously successful at extracting conformity from its subjects, but it was hardly a process engaged involuntarily. The spread of Roman culture and the adoption of Roman citizenship in its conquered lands resulted from the fact that the Empire was the only avenue open to individuals of ambition. You had to play by its rules, and acquire its citizenship, if you were to get anywhere.3A
Quote ID: 5580
Time Periods: 1456
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 141
Section: 1A,4B
It has been a long journey of discovery, but the evolution of the Roman Empire up to about AD 300 is finally coming into focus. On the one hand, we are dealing with an historical phenomenon of extraordinary power. Built originally on military might, the Empire deployed, across the vastness separating Hadrian’s Wall from the Euphrates, an all-encompassing ideology of superiority. By the fourth century, subjected peoples had so internalized the Roman way of life that the original conquest state had evolved into a commonwealth of thoroughly Roman provincial communities.
Quote ID: 5586
Time Periods: 1234
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 431
Section: 1A
Even though the rulers of Constantinople continued to call themselves ‘Emperors of the Romans’ long after the year 700, they were actually ruling an entity best understood as another successor state rather than a proper continuation of the Roman Empire. {1}
Quote ID: 5606
Time Periods: 6
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 431
Section: 1A,4B
During the same period there were many living in western Europe and North Africa who continued to think of themselves, and were thought of by others, as Romans.
Quote ID: 5607
Time Periods: 56
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 432
Section: 1A
After 476, then, we have ‘proper’ Romans still in both east and west, so what was it exactly that fell?-----------------------------
Quote ID: 5608
Time Periods: 156
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 432
Section: 1A,4B
The Destruction of Central Romanness
What did come to an end in 476 was any attempt to maintain the western Roman Empire as an overarching, supra-regional political structure.
------------------------------
After 476, all this came to an end. While substantial numbers of the old Roman landowning class still survived in the west with their distinctive culture more or less intact, the key centralizing structures of Empire had gone.
------------------------------
Provincial Romanness survived in parts of the west after 476, but central Romanness was a thing of the past.
Quote ID: 5609
Time Periods: 156
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 434/435
Section: 1A
As the Roman state lost power, and was perceived to be doing so, provincial Roman landowning elites, at different times in different places, faced an uncomfortable new reality. The sapping of the state’s vitality threatened everything that made them what they were. Defined by the land they stood on, even the dimmest, or most loyal, could not help but realize eventually that their interests would be best served by making an accommodation with the new dominant force in their locality.
Quote ID: 5610
Time Periods: 56
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 441
Section: 1A
As we saw in Chapter 3, the Romanization of Christianity was as important an historical phenomenon as the Christianization of the Empire.... Nor did Christian Roman emperors step back one iota from the claim made by their pagan predecessors that they had been appointed by the Divinity – they simply re-identified that Divinity as the Christian God.
Quote ID: 5616
Time Periods: 1456
Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, The
Peter Heather
Book ID: 223 Page: 442
Section: 1A,3A2,3C
Christianity as it evolved within the structures of the Empire was thus very different from what it had been before Constantine’s conversion, and the disappearance of the Roman state profoundly changed it yet again.
Quote ID: 5617
Time Periods: 234
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 79
Section: 1A,4B
. . . author speaks of a “complex synthesis of pagan and Christian elements” in the educational system of the sixth century. Only the most “dangerous” elements of paganism were cast aside outright. Clement and Origen argued from a philosophical point of view that was a mixture of Platonic and Christian thought, and in doing so “protected the teaching of pagan thought, mythology, and literature to a degree. But by the sixth century, Christians were much less receptive to ancient philosophy . . . .”
Quote ID: 5665
Time Periods: 347
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 126
Section: 1A,3C
“As the political unity of the empire became a thing of the past, Christian unity took its place. In the same way, it replaced the obnoxious aspects of Greco-Roman scholarship with its own brand of theological learning. Because it had developed in a manner designed to preserve so many features of the imperial heritage, it appeared as its natural extension. There is a sense in which the Christian faith, rather than the barbarian kingdoms, constituted the successor to the Roman Empire in the West.”
Quote ID: 5679
Time Periods: 156
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 134
Section: 1A
“Although the Christian faith provided a common bond, spiritual unity could not compensate for the disappearance of empire; it was too fragile, and subject to local pressures and secular manipulation.”PJ: This author is ignorant of the power of the internal consciousness of the Empire.
Quote ID: 5682
Time Periods: 456
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 144
Section: 1A,2E2,4B
Gibbon lamented that “Soldier’s pay was lavished on a useless multitude of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.”Decline and Fall, 4:175.
Pastor John’s Note: What Gibbon failed to acknowledge is the powerful effect that such claims had on the minds of people; it proved to be more effective in permanently subduing the masses to the will of those who would rule over them than any army of soldiers could have.
Quote ID: 5688
Time Periods: 45
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 144
Section: 1A,2E2,4B
Footnote “The huge army of clergy and monks were for the most part idle mouths, living upon offerings, endowments and state subsidies.”from a “Jones”, a quoted scholar.
Quote ID: 5689
Time Periods: 45
George Washington’s Rules of Civility Traced to Their Sources and Restored
Moncure D. Conway
Book ID: 95 Page: 19
Section: 1A
The failure of what was called Religion to promote moral culture is now explicable: its scheme of terror and hope appealed to and powerfully stimulated selfishness, and was also fundamentally anti-social, cultivating alienation of all who did not hold certain dogmas. The terrors and hopes having faded away, the selfishness they developed remains, and is only unchained by the decay of superstition.
Quote ID: 2450
Time Periods: 7
George Washington’s Rules of Civility Traced to Their Sources and Restored
Moncure D. Conway
Book ID: 95 Page: 75
Section: 1A
Conscience to an evil man is a never dying worm, but unto a good man it’s a perpetual feast.
Quote ID: 2452
Time Periods: 7
God’s Bestseller
Brian Moynahan
Book ID: 98 Page: xxi
Section: 1A
The Church was ‘nothing but a synagogue of Satan’; none should be baptized by priests, and purgatory was an invention.3H
Quote ID: 2510
Time Periods: 456
God’s Bestseller
Brian Moynahan
Book ID: 98 Page: xiii
Section: 1A
Religion had come to mean the Church itself, and its traditions.Wycliffe stood this on its head.
Quote ID: 2505
Time Periods: 456
Greek Folk Religion
Martin P. Nilsson
Book ID: 101 Page: 41
Section: 1A
Similar beliefs and customs occur everywhere in European folklore, and while the old gods and their cults were so completely ousted by a new religion that hardly a trace of them remains, the old rural customs and beliefs survived the change of religion through the Middle Ages to our own day.
Quote ID: 2548
Time Periods: 167
Hadrian
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 103 Page: 58
Section: 1A,2C,3A1
The great organization which is in so many ways the successor of the Caesars, the Roman Catholic Church, insists that complete obedience is the natural condition of the Christian soul, and in this view of human destiny millions throughout the world ardently concur. They submit to a pontiff as sovereign, and they, like their secular predecessors, address that sovereign as father, he them as his children.
Quote ID: 2570
Time Periods: 47
Harlot Church System: “Come out of her, My people”, The
Charles Elliott Newbold, Jr.
Book ID: 231 Page: 9
Section: 1A
This is the lie: We have been made to believe that this Thing we call church is of God and that our membership and participation in it is essential to our Christian walk when in fact it is an idolatrous substitute for Jesus and quite often a hindrance to our walk with Him.This Thing we call church, as we have come to experience it, is an idolatrous extension of our own Selves.
. . . .
We proclaim that this Thing we call church is the Kingdom of God when in fact it has nothing to do with the Kingdom of God. Rather, it is the modern-day Babylonian captivity of the elect of God.
Quote ID: 5810
Time Periods: 246
Harlot Church System: “Come out of her, My people”, The
Charles Elliott Newbold, Jr.
Book ID: 231 Page: 63
Section: 1A,4B
Bob Hughey says, “What began as a movement in Israel became a philosophy in Greece, became an institution in Rome, became a culture in Europe, and became a big rich enterprise in America.”
Quote ID: 5818
Time Periods: 246
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 45/46
Section: 1A,2A5,2C
Instead of enthusiastic independent Christians, we find a new literature of revelation, the New Testament, and Christian priests. When did these formations begin? How and by what influence was the living faith transformed into the creed to be believed, the surrender of Christ into a philosophic Christology, the Holy Church into the corpus permixtum, the glowing hope of the Kingdom of heaven into a doctrine of immortality and deification, prophecy into a learned exegesis and theological science, the bearers of the spirit into clerics, the brethren into laity held in tutelage, miracles and healings into nothing, or into priestcraft, fervent prayers into a solemn ritual, renunciation of the world into a jealous dominion over the world, the “spirit” into constraint and law?There can be no doubt about the answer: these formations are as old in their origin as….[John’s note: "as the rejection of Paul’s gospel"] (see PJ Note below)
Quote ID: 8723
Time Periods: 234
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 46
Section: 1A,2A5
The Christian Church and its doctrine were developed within the Roman world and Greek culture in opposition to the Jewish Church.
Quote ID: 8724
Time Periods: 234
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 46/47
Section: 1A
No man can serve two masters; but in setting up a spiritual power in this world one must serve an earthly master, even when he desires to naturalise the spiritual in the world. As a consequence of the complete break with the Jewish Church [PJ: should have said Pauls gospel] there followed not only the strict necessity of quarrying the stones for the building of the Church from the Grӕco-Roman world, but also the idea that Christianity has a more positive relation to that world than to the synagogue.
Quote ID: 8725
Time Periods: 234
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 48/49
Section: 1A
… to the most important premises of the Catholic doctrine of faith belongs an element which we cannot recognize as dominant in the New Testament,{1} viz., the Hellenic spirit.{1} As far backwards as we can trace the history of the propagation of the Church’s doctrine of faith, from the middle of the third century to the end of the first, we nowhere perceive a leap, or the sudden influx of an entirely new element. What we perceive is rather the gradual disappearance of an original element, the Enthusiastic and Apocalyptic, that is, of the sure consciousness of an immediate possession of the Divine Spirit….PJ: YES! It was already there!!
Quote ID: 8726
Time Periods: 13
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 50
Section: 1A
We nowhere find a yawning gulf in the great development which lies between the first Epistle of Clement and the work of Origen.….
The most decisive division, therefore, falls before the end of the first century….
PJ: YES! It was already there.
Quote ID: 8727
Time Periods: 23
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 57
Section: 1A
…the knowledge of Christ crucified, to which he subordinated all other knowledge as only of preparatory value, had nothing in common with Greek philosophy, while the idea of justification and the doctrine of the Spirit (Rom. VIII.), which together formed the peculiar contents of his Christianity, were irreconcilable with the moralism and the religious ideals of Hellenism.
Quote ID: 8729
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 72
Section: 1A
“The historical Christ” that, to be sure, is not the powerless Christ of contemporary history….
Quote ID: 8730
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 75
Section: 1A
It is therefore the duty of the historian of the first century of the Church, as well as that of those which follow, not to be content with fixing the changes of the Christian religion, but to examine how far the new forms were capable of defending, propagating and impressing the Gospel itself. It would probably have perished if the forms of primitive Christianity had been scrupulously maintained in the Church; but now primitive Christianity has perished in order that the Gospel might be preserved. To study this progress of the development, and fix the significance of the newly received forms for the kernel of the matter, is the last and highest task of the historian who himself lives in his subject.
Quote ID: 8731
Time Periods: 12
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 88
Section: 1A
The establishment of the universal character of the Gospel, that is, of Christianity as a religion of the world, became now, however, a problem, the solution of which, as given by Paul, but few were able to understand or make their own.
Quote ID: 8732
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 89/90
Section: 1A
Marcion was the only Gentile Christian who understood Paul, and even he misunderstood him: the rest never got beyond the appropriation of particular Pauline sayings, and exhibited no comprehension especially of the theology of the Apostle….PJ: YES! It was already bad.
Quote ID: 8733
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 98
Section: 1A
In the manifold gifts of the spirit was given a fluid element indefinable in its range and scope, an element which guaranteed freedom of development, but which also threatened to lead the enthusiastic communities to extravagance.
Quote ID: 8734
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 99
Section: 1A,2A5
Instead of the frequently very fruitless investigations about “Jewish-Christian”, and “Gentile-Christian”, it should be asked, What Jewish elements have been naturalised in the Christian Church, which were in no way demanded by the contents of the Gospel?PJ: Amen!
Quote ID: 8735
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 127
Section: 1A,2A5
But, besides the Greek, there is no mistaking the special influence of Romish ideas and customs upon the Christian Church. The following points specially claim attention…
Quote ID: 8741
Time Periods: 234
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 127
Section: 1A
Rome a second time, step by step, conquered the world, but this time the Christian world.
Quote ID: 8743
Time Periods: 24
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 128
Section: 1A,4A
Greek philosophy exercised the greatest influence not only on the Christian mode of thought, but also through that, on the institution of the Church. The Church never indeed became a philosophic school: but yet in her was realised in a peculiar way, that which the Stoics and the Cynics had aimed at. The Stoic (Cynic) Philosopher also belonged to the factors from which the Christian Priests or Bishops were formed.
Quote ID: 8744
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 128
Section: 1A
That the old bearers of the Spirit—Apostles, Prophets, Teachers—have been changed into a class of professional moralists and preachers, who bridle the people by counsel and reproof….
Quote ID: 8745
Time Periods: 234
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 135/136
Section: 1A,2C
Paulinism is a religious and Christocentric doctrine, more inward and more powerful than any other which has ever appeared in the Church. It stands in the clearest opposition to all merely natural moralism, all righteousness of works, all religious ceremonialism, all Christianity without Christ.
Quote ID: 8748
Time Periods: 2
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 216
Section: 1A
…the essential premises for the development of Catholicism were already in existence before the middle of the second century….PJ: YES! Already there!
Quote ID: 8751
Time Periods: 234
History of Rome
Michael Grant
Book ID: 109 Page: 471
Section: 1A
It is a story that has extended from the establishment of diminutive Tiber villages to the creation and maintenance of an enormous multiracial society, followed by its fragmentation into units foreshadowing the nations of the modern world.With modifications, much of Rome continued to live on within these successor states; its language, government, law, church, literature, art , and habits of thinking and living were all far from dead.
Quote ID: 2639
Time Periods: 1
History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770
Frederic Kidder and John Adams
Book ID: 300 Page: 258
Section: 1A
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence;….
Quote ID: 7531
Time Periods: 1
How the Irish Saved Civilization
Thomas Cahill
Book ID: 111 Page: 21
Section: 1A
Though Ausonius is a Christian convert, as his “Oratio” shows, his Christianity is a cloak to be donned and removed, as needed. It was, no doubt, what everyone else was doing. His real worldview glimmers through all his work---a sort of agnostic paganism that enabled him to evoke the silent shades of the pagan underworld without ever giving the reader the sense that he believes in any world but this one.3C
Quote ID: 2651
Time Periods: 4
How the Irish Saved Civilization
Thomas Cahill
Book ID: 111 Page: 30
Section: 1A,3D2
As Theodoric, the homely king of the Ostrogoths, was fond of saying: “An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor roman would want to be like a Goth.”
Quote ID: 2655
Time Periods: 56
How the Irish Saved Civilization
Thomas Cahill
Book ID: 111 Page: 58
Section: 1A
We did lose, at any rate, the spirit of classical civilization.
Quote ID: 2657
Time Periods: 146
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 10
Section: 1A
1. The one is the tendency to overrate the value of the evidence that has survived.
Quote ID: 7876
Time Periods: 12
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 10
Section: 1A
2. The other is the tendency to under-estimate the importance of the opinions that have disappeared from sight, or which we know only in the form and to the extent of their quotation by their opponents.
Quote ID: 7877
Time Periods: 12
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 132
Section: 1A
The old-fashioned Christians, who would admit of no compromise, and maintained the old usages unchanged, were gradually detached as Ebionites, or Nazarӕans. The old orthodoxy became a new heresy.
Quote ID: 7885
Time Periods: 234
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 133
Section: 1A,4B
It was in reality a victory in which the victors were the vanquished. There was so large an absorption by the original communities of the principles of their opponents as to destroy the main reason for a separate existence.
Quote ID: 7886
Time Periods: 234
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 295
Section: 1A,2A1
These were the simple elements of early Christian baptism. When it emerges after a period of obscurity—like a river which flows under the sand—the enormous changes of later times have already begun.
Quote ID: 7890
Time Periods: 2
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 309
Section: 1A
In the splendid ceremonial of Eastern and Western worship, in the blaze of lights, in the separation of the central point of the rite from common view, in the procession of torch-bearers chanting their sacred hymns—there is the survival, and in some cases the galvanized survival, of what I cannot find it in my heart to call a pagan ceremonial; because though it was the expression of a less enlightened faith, yet it was offered to God from a heart that was not less earnest in its search for God and in its effort after holiness than our own.PJ: Xns of the early centuries felt the same way, and welcomed those demons into their hearts.
Quote ID: 7894
Time Periods: 2
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 350
Section: 1A
I venture to claim to have shown that a large part of what are sometimes called Christian doctrines, and many usages which have prevailed and continue to prevail in the Christian Church, are in reality Greek theories and Greek usages changed in form and colour by the influence of primitive Christianity, but in their essence Greek still.
Quote ID: 7900
Time Periods: 234
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 350
Section: 1A
It is an argument for the divine life of Christianity that it has been able to assimilate so much that was at first alien to it.PJ: He approves of the Synthesis.
Quote ID: 7901
Time Periods: 234
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 351
Section: 1A
It is possible to urge, on the other hand, that the tree of life, which was planted by the hand of God Himself in the soil of human society, was intended from the first to grow by assimilating to itself whatever elements it found there. It is possible to maintain that Christianity was intended to be a development….PJ: He approves of the Synthesis.
Quote ID: 7902
Time Periods: 234
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 341 Page: 353
Section: 1A
For though you may believe that I am but a dreamer of dreams, I seem to see, though it be on the far horizon—the horizon beyond the fields which either we or our children will tread—a Christianity which is not new but old, which is not old, but new….PJ: He approves of the Synthesis continuing. Sounds like the Trinity.
Quote ID: 7903
Time Periods: 247
Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 321 Page: 1
Section: 1A,4A
It is impossible for anyone, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers.
Quote ID: 7734
Time Periods: 4
Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 321 Page: 5
Section: 1A
...and it is only by examining the sources and the volume of the previous flow that we shall understand how it is that the Nicene Creed rather than the Sermon on the Mount has formed the dominant element in Aryan Christianity.*Pastor Johns Note: not “rather than the Sermon on the Mount” but rather than God’s power, is the real issue
Quote ID: 7735
Time Periods: 4
Inheritance of Rome, The
Chris Wickham
Book ID: 236 Page: 52
Section: 1A,4B
Christian vocabulary, imagery and public practice were thus politically dominant in the empire by 400, a dominance which would only increase thereafter; and in cities, which were the foci for almost all political activity, Christians were for the most part numerically dominant as well. But we must ask what sort of Christianity this was, what effective content it had: how much it absorbed traditional Roman values (and even religious practices), how far it changed them, and what its own fault-lines were, for there were many of these.
Quote ID: 5905
Time Periods: 456
Inheritance of Rome, The
Chris Wickham
Book ID: 236 Page: 53
Section: 1A
Between the comfortable assimilation of traditional hierarchies and values into Christianity by a secular-minded aristocracy…
Quote ID: 5906
Time Periods: 2345
Inquisition
Edward Peters
Book ID: 116 Page: 32
Section: 1A
The conversion of the Empire had transformed the Church, and the absorption of the Church had transformed the Empire. When the Roman Empire ceased to exist in the west after the fifth century, a number of its institutions, practices, and values survived in the Latin Christian Church, including the disciplinary practices that had emerged over two centuries of cooperation.
Quote ID: 2742
Time Periods: 1456
Inquisition
Edward Peters
Book ID: 116 Page: 36
Section: 1A
When an individual entered the Church as a cleric, however, most early medieval laws recognized him as having, in a sense, come under another personal law, and one of the early legal codes phrased this difference in clerical status nicely: ecclesia vivit lege romana “the church man lives according to Roman personal law” meant that clergy were expected to abide by whatever Roman law had survived in their particular community, ...
Quote ID: 2743
Time Periods: 6
Inquisition: Spanish Inquisition, The
Jean Plaidy
Book ID: 273 Page: 15
Section: 1A,3A2A,3A4C
It is important, I submit, to remember that Christianity and the Church do not always walk in step. In fact the simple doctrines, founded on the teachings of Jesus Christ have too rarely been followed. They are too simple to appeal to men who love power and wealth—but mostly power—and how can men acquire power by following the doctrines of Christ?….
Where in such a life were to be found the pomp and splendour, the ceremonial robes, the swaying censer, the fat incomes and the splendid palaces? Yet these were the signs of rank and importance necessary to induce that hypnotic state in which men might worship themselves whilst feigning to worship God.
….
What was wanted by these seekers after power was a way of life difficult to teach and easy to live. Such a doctrine must therefore be attended by legends to make men’s flesh creep; fear was necessary to a religion which was to bring power to its leaders, for fear is the complement of power. Men seek power to gain their objectives and to overawe their fellows; and simplicity must be disguised by mysticism for the glorification of the high priests of power.
Thus, the simple doctrine was wrapped round and round with dogma so involved that the seed which had been planted by Jesus Christ was hidden and forgotten.
Quote ID: 6860
Time Periods: 47
Inquisition: Spanish Inquisition, The
Jean Plaidy
Book ID: 273 Page: 16
Section: 1A,3A4C
But the men of the Church could not agree, and since the dogmas and doctrines were of greater importance to them than the words of Jesus Christ, they fought among themselves, seeking to enforce their rule upon each other. Yet they did not altogether forget their Master for constantly they involved His Name.….
Every means of dealing pain and indignity to the human body was explored; and all this was done in the name of One who had commanded his followers to love one another.
There must have been many—Jews and Moslems—who fervently wished that Jesus Christ had never made His appearance on Earth, when contemplating all the misery which would have been spared them, their families and friends.
Quote ID: 6861
Time Periods: 147
Inquisition: Spanish Inquisition, The
Jean Plaidy
Book ID: 273 Page: 39
Section: 1A,3A4C
The monster was about to grow to maturity; in the previous centuries he had been but a sickly infant compared with what he was now to become.Excommunication was threatened to those who concealed, defended or in any way abetted heretics; and the threat lay over all those lands under Papal jurisdiction like a threatening cloud which would, at the smallest false step or through ill-luck, break about the heads of its victims.
It might be wondered why people should have so feared excommunication; but when the meaning of the Ban of the Church is understood it is easy to see why it should have been so dreaded. Those who were excommunicated from the Church could hold no office; they had no rights as citizens; if they were ill or in any trouble no one was allowed to help them. They were completely shut off from human charity. Perhaps one of the most evil aspects of the ban was that anyone who showed charity to an excommunicated person became himself a candidate for excommunication.
….
“… faith, hope and charity, these three, and the greatest of these is charity.”
What did these men think when they read words such as those? The fact is that they ignored them. They had rejected the simple faith, and had set up their own in its place. The only resemblance to Christianity it appeared to have was in the name.
Quote ID: 6876
Time Periods: 7
Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians, The
J. B. Bury
Book ID: 310 Page: 110/111
Section: 1A
Thus the process of the dismemberment of the Empire was eased; the transition to an entirely new order of things was masked; a system of federate states within the Empire prepared the way for the system of independent states which was to replace the Empire. The change was not accomplished without much violence and even continuous warfare; but it was not cataclysmic.
Quote ID: 7551
Time Periods: 156
Irenaeus, ANF Vol. 1, The Apostolic Fathers
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 671 Page: 315
Section: 1A
“Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as by its outward form to make it appear to the inexperienced [to be] more true than the truth itself.”
PJ footnote: Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Preface, 2.
Quote ID: 9625
Time Periods: 2
Jesus Papyrus, The
Carsten Peter Thiede & Matthew D’Ancona
Book ID: 348 Page: 105
Section: 1A,3D2
In other words, even before the first actual codex or codex fragment was rediscovered by archaeologists, there existed clear evidence for the existence of the codex in the eighties of the first century—New Testament times, in other words.
Quote ID: 8041
Time Periods: 1
Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse
Kate Cumming and edited by: Richard Barksdale Harwell
Book ID: 124 Page: 35
Section: 1A,4B
As there is much noise and confusion constantly here, it is almost impossible to collect one’s thoughts. I miss the calm of the holy Sabbath more than anything. I have read and talked to the men, and it astonishes me to see how few are members of the Church. They all seem to think and know that it is their duty to belong to it, but still they remain out of it. How much more will they have to answer for than those who have never known God, and have not enjoyed the privileges of the gospel. “He that confesses me before men, him will I confess before my Father which is I heaven.”
Quote ID: 2855
Time Periods: 17
Lactantius, ANF Vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 675 Page: 132
Section: 1A
“Truly religion is the cultivation of the truth, but superstition of that which is false.”
PJ footnote: Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, II.xxviii.
Quote ID: 9700
Time Periods: 2
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: XX
Section: 1A
“It might seem that much of the argument of this book has been negative. There was no pagan revival in the West, no pagan party, no pagan literary circles, no pagan patronage of the classics, no pagan propaganda in art or literature, no pagans editing classical texts, above all, no pagan last stand. But all these apparent negatives actually add up to a resounding positive. So many of the activities, artifacts, and enthusiasms that have been identified as hallmarks of an elaborate, concerted campaign to combat Christianity turn out to have been central elements in the life of cultivated Christians. This is the one area in which paganism (defined as the Roman tradition, Rome’s glorious past) continued to exercise real power and influence on men’s minds. Despite the best attempts of Augustine and other rigorists, the Roman literary tradition played a vital and continuing role in shaping the thought-world of Christians, both at the time and in the centuries to come.”
Quote ID: 9888
Time Periods: 47
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 173
Section: 1A
Ever since Gibbon enumerated the “secondary” causes for the spread of Christianity (the primary cause, naturally, being “the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself”), historians have sought to trace, date, and account for the Christianization of the Roman world.PJ note: He held that there were 5 secondary causes. They were such things as the unity and zeal of Xty - and miracles.
Quote ID: 6062
Time Periods: 34
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 175
Section: 1A,3C,4B
For those brought up in the world of civic cults and private initiations, it cannot have been easy to comprehend the exclusive, absolute commitment Christianity demanded. During much of the fourth century, there must have been many who took a genuine interest in Christianity and presented or considered themselves as Christians but, while rejecting sacrifice to what they were willing to accept were false gods, still followed (say) pagan burial customs, continued to watch a favorite festival, or occasionally consulted a haruspex. Rigorist would have dismissed such folk as not better than outright pagans.. . . .
Take Bacurius, an Iberian chieftain who rose to the rank of magister militum in Theodosius’s army at the Frigidus. Rufinus was in no doubt that he was a sincere Christian, but Libanius seems to have thought of him as a pagan (PLREi. 144). Both men actually knew him, and, by itself, the opinion of either would have been considered decisive by any modern scholar. But what do we do with both?
4B
Quote ID: 6066
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 176
Section: 1A
The classic illustration is Domitius Modestus, who professed Christianity under Constantius, came out as a pagan under Julian, and returned to (Arian) Christianity again under Valens.3C
Quote ID: 6067
Time Periods: ?
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 176
Section: 1A
And when Faustus the Manichee called Christians semi-Christians, Augustine responded that “something that is ‘semi’ is imperfect in some respect, but still not false in any respect,” adding that all Christians were striving to make their faith more perfect. {15}3C
Quote ID: 6068
Time Periods: ?
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 177
Section: 1A
I would not suppose that there was ever more than a relatively small proportion of the entire population in either of the “committed” groups. The major shift, as I see it, would be from the center-pagan to the center-Christian category. From about 340 to (say) 430 I would guess that some three-quarters of the one passed into the other.3C
Quote ID: 6069
Time Periods: ?
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 179
Section: 1A
Barnes laid much weight on a passage in the second book of Prudentius’s Contra Symmachum that list converts to Christianity among the aristocracy of Rome .. . . .
...the context of this passage is the immediate aftermath of the Frigidus at Rome, and there are grounds for believing that the core of Bk I was originally written soon after the Frigidus, as a panegyric on Theodosius (Ch. 9. 4).
. . .
However diligent his inquiries, it would not have been easy to obtain reliable information about the earliest noble converts. Their Christian grandchildren in the very different world of the 390s had every reason to exaggerate. All Prudentius needed was a few prominent Christian family names.
3C
Quote ID: 6070
Time Periods: ?
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 183
Section: 1A
The closing of the temples in the first half of the 390s marked the end of public paganism, but that tells us nothing about hearts and minds.. . . .
The Bassus sarcophagus is justly celebrated as a masterpiece of classicizing high relief sculpture. There are also dozens of other high-quality Christian sarcophagi lacking exact dates but judged even earlier, to cite only one, the so-called Two Brothers Sacrophagus, generally placed between 330 and 350. {49}.
. . . .
The high-end art market of Rome was clearly targeting rich Christians of noble birth as early as the 350s.
2A1
Quote ID: 6072
Time Periods: ?
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 209
Section: 1A,4B
But where did he read them? Seneca’s prose writings were not fashionable in the pagan circles of the later empire. His style was severely criticized by Fronto and Gellius, and he is seldom quoted by the grammarians.. . . .
As early as the second century close parallels to New Testament ideas and phrases were noted in his writings, and to Tertullian he was Seneca saepe noster. By the fourth century it was even believed that he had known St. Paul, and a correspondence between them (in bad Latin) was duly produced to prove it.
PJ note: Seneca saepe noster means “almost one of us”.
. . . .
Jerome went so far as to include Seneca in his catalogue of Christian writers. Of all his works, De Superstitione was the one most likely to be read by Christians rather than pagans. For the attack it contains on the Roman state religion was, according to Augustine, “fuller and sharper” than even Varro’s (CD iv. 10)
Quote ID: 6084
Time Periods: 145
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 231
Section: 1A
Macrobius’s Saturnalia is a key text for any evaluation of the intellectual interests of the elite of late fourth- and fifth-century Rome. Some of the most distinguished “nobles and other learned men” of the age gather to devote the holiday from which the dialogue takes its name to literary conversation.
Quote ID: 6092
Time Periods: 45
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 801
Section: 1A
“There was no pagan revival in the West, no pagan party, no pagan literary circles, no pagan patronage of the classics, no pagan propaganda in art or literature, no pagans editing classical texts, above all, no pagan last stand. All these apparent negatives actually add up to a resounding positive. So many of the activities, artifacts, and enthusiasms that have been identified as hallmarks of an elaborate, concerted campaign to combat Christianity turn out to have been central elements in the life of cultivated Christians. This is the one area in which paganism (defined as the Roman tradition, Rome’s glorious past) continued to exercise real power and influence on men’s minds.”
Quote ID: 9889
Time Periods: 2347
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World
Ed. G.W. Bowerrsock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar
Book ID: 126 Page: 83
Section: 1A,2C
The unselfconsciousness of traditional religion in the Roman empire--what we call “paganism” or “polytheism”-- is manifest especially in its lack of a distinctive name for itself. Threskeia, eusebeia, and nomos; hieros, hosios, and hagios; religio and pietas; sacer and santus: all these words lack specific historical reference contained in such terms as “Jew” or “Christian”.
Quote ID: 2879
Time Periods: 0123
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World
Ed. G.W. Bowerrsock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar
Book ID: 126 Page: 90
Section: 1A,4B
A romantic and of course very political school of thought used to hold that ancient polytheism-- that of the temples rather than the schools-- “survived” under a decent yet not suffocating veiling of Christianity. In the extreme case of crypto-polytheism one might indeed literally turn around an icon of Christ and find Apollo painted on the back. But what more usually happened was that late polytheism went on evolving, often--as in the case of Iamblichus and Julian-- under the direct or indirect influence of Christianity, but also itself influencing the practices of ordinary Christians, so that in the resultant local fusions there was much, on both sides, that was passed to posterity, although impure and thoroughly alloyed.
Quote ID: 2881
Time Periods: 247
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World
Ed. G.W. Bowerrsock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar
Book ID: 126 Page: 172
Section: 1A
A shared language of power based on a coalition between Christianity and classical culture allowed emperors to emphasize their distant, godlike status while at the same time making possible the effective voicing of praise or disagreement by those whose cooperation and participation remained essential for the collection of taxes and the maintenance of good order in the provinces.
Quote ID: 2887
Time Periods: 456
Later Roman Empire, The
Averil Cameron
Book ID: 243 Page: 1/2
Section: 1A
This was the century of Constantine, the first emperor to embrace and support Christianity, and the founder of Constantinople, the city that was to become the capital of the Byzantine empire and to remain such until it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in AD 1453. Edward Gibbon’s work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carries the narrative to the latter date, regarding this, not AD 476, when the last Roman emperor in the west was deposed, as the real end of the Roman empire. Few would agree with Gibbon now, but historians are still quarrelling about when Rome ended and Byzantium began....
Quote ID: 6104
Time Periods: 14
Later Roman Empire, The
Averil Cameron
Book ID: 243 Page: 193a
Section: 1A
Wherever we place it chronologically, the fall of the Roman empire was not a single, dramatic event which changed the shape of Europe or the Mediterranean.
Quote ID: 6180
Time Periods: 17
Later Roman Empire: An Archaeology AD 150-600, The
Richard Reece
Book ID: 244 Page: 9
Section: 1A
In the same way it is impossible to put an exact date on the end of the Roman Empire with which everyone will agree. This is partly because we cannot agree on what the end of the Roman Empire means.
Quote ID: 6183
Time Periods: 17
Legacy of Greece, The
Edited by R. W. Livingstone
Book ID: 469 Page: 30/31
Section: 1A
The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of the classical culture.….
"Nor is there anything specifically mediaeval about Catholicism. It preserved the idea of Roman imperialism, after the secular empire of the West had disappeared, and even kept the tradition of the secular empire alive. It modeled all its machinery on the Roman Empire, and consecrated the Roman claim to universal dominion, with the Roman law of maiestas against all who disputed its authority. Even its favourite penalty of the ‘avenging flames’ is borrowed from the later Roman codes. It maintained the official language of antiquity, and the imperial title of the autocrat who reigned on the Seven Hills
[PJ note: pontifax maximus]."
Quote ID: 9032
Time Periods: 2347
Legacy of Greece, The
Edited by R. W. Livingstone
Book ID: 469 Page: 32
Section: 1A
Catholic Christianity is historically continuous with the old civilization…….
Outwardly, the continuity with Judaism seems to be unbroken, that with paganism to be broken. In reality, the opposite is the fact.
Quote ID: 9034
Time Periods: 347
Legacy of Greece, The
Edited by R. W. Livingstone
Book ID: 469 Page: 32
Section: 1A
And our histories of the early Church are too often warped by an unfortunate bias.
Quote ID: 9035
Time Periods: 2347
Legacy of Greece, The
Edited by R. W. Livingstone
Book ID: 469 Page: 32/33
Section: 1A
The truth is that the Church was half Greek from the first, though, as I shall say presently, the original Gospel was not.
Quote ID: 9036
Time Periods: 2347
Legacy of Greece, The
Edited by R. W. Livingstone
Book ID: 469 Page: 33
Section: 1A
Judaic Christianity was a local affair, and had a very short life.
Quote ID: 9037
Time Periods: 2347
Legacy of Greece, The
Edited by R. W. Livingstone
Book ID: 469 Page: 33
Section: 1A
It is forgotten how completely, in Hellenistic times, religion and philosophy were fused.….
It is in this region that the continuity of Catholicism with Hellenism is mainly to be found. The philosophers at this time were preachers, confessors, chaplains, and missionaries. The clerical profession, in nearly all its activities, is directly descended from the Hellenistic philosophers.
Quote ID: 9038
Time Periods: 02347
Legacy of Greece, The
Edited by R. W. Livingstone
Book ID: 469 Page: 35
Section: 1A
‘The real influx of Greek thought and life’ began about 130. …After 130, he says, ‘the philosophy of Greece went straight to the core of the new religion’.
Quote ID: 9128
Time Periods: 2
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbs
Book ID: 301 Page: 529
Section: 1A
…the Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof:…
Quote ID: 7532
Time Periods: 1
Lives of the Twelve Caesars, The
Suetonius
Book ID: 246 Page: vii
Section: 1A
To our Roman authors the Christians of the 1st Century were a pitiable lot. And they give us never a clue as to whether a man Christ actually lived and was crucified, or whether he was a fiction Rome herself pieced together in an effort to create a religious tool by which further to unite the diverse peoples under her dominion.Page 250 In a list of Neros positive accomplishments, Suetonius remarks, rather casually, "Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition."
Footnote 2 Tacitus, in Annals XIII, 32, calls the Christian religion "a foreign and deadly superstition." Pliny in Letter 97 of Book 10 calls it "a depraved, wicked, and outrageous superstition." PJ NOTE: Not there.
Quote ID: 6200
Time Periods: 1
Livy - The Early History of Rome, Penguin Classics Books 1-5
Aubrey De Selincourt (translated), R. M. Ogilvie (Introduction)
Book ID: 314 Page: 22
Section: 1A
In 507 B.C. the form of government at Rome changed. The kings were expelled and replaced by a college of two annual magistrates….
Quote ID: 9118
Time Periods: 1
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Bart D. Ehrman
Book ID: 420 Page: 254
Section: 1A,3A2A
Other examples could well be chosen, in which the early proponents of the faith, attempting to uncover its mysteries in ways that laid the foundation for later reflection, were themselves condemned by their own successors, who refined their understanding to such a point that the partially developed, imprecise, or allegedly wrongheaded claims of their predecessors were necessarily seen not simply as inadequate but as heretical and so not to be tolerated.
Quote ID: 8613
Time Periods: 24
Making of Late Antiquity, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 251 Page: 49/50
Section: 1A,4B
By assuming that paganism withered away, and that it was immediately replaced by Christianity, we ignore a large, and fascinating, tract of Late Roman religious life: paganism was transformed by being linked to a new ceremonial of power.
Quote ID: 6305
Time Periods: 245
Making of Late Antiquity, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 251 Page: 66
Section: 1A,2D3B
In the late second century, the philosopher was jostled by the sorcerer, and the Christian bishop by the Montanist prophetess.
Quote ID: 6321
Time Periods: 2
Material Evidence for Early Christian Groups during the First Two Centuries C.E.
William Tabbernee
Book ID: 455 Page: 301
Section: 1A
“In the meantime we need to recognize that very few likely Christian artifacts able to be dated prior to 180 have survived and that the Christian nature of anything earlier than the beginning of the Antonine period (ca. 138) remains highly controversial….
Quote ID: 9884
Time Periods: 12
Medieval Latin Lyrics
Helen Waddell
Book ID: 149 Page: 296
Section: 1A
In 524, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, ex-consul and Roman senator, died by order of Theodoric under torture in the dungeon of Pavia in his forty-fifth year. He had been Theodoric’s most trusted counselor; Theodoric had looked up to him with the admiration of the great barbarians for the Romans who were politically their servants and spiritually their lords.
Quote ID: 3243
Time Periods: 6
Mohammed and Charlemagne
Henry Pirenne
Book ID: 373 Page: 28
Section: 1A,4B
In 417 Rutilius Namatianus was still boasting of the eternal nature of Rome.{1}
Quote ID: 8215
Time Periods: 15
Mysteries of Mithras: The History and Legacy of Ancient Rome’s most Mysterious Religious Cult, The
Charles River Editors
Book ID: 385 Page: 18/19
Section: 1A
In this battle, just on the outskirts of the Greek city of Pydna, the Romans had displayed the trait which would allow them to dominate the world for centuries to come: adaptability. Unlike Greece, ancient Rome was perfectly comfortable with embracing the ideas, inventions and practices of others. Romans were the undeniable masters in the art of incorporating foreign customs and technology into their own culture and society. Not only did the Romans openly embrace these innovations, they were completely comfortable with adopting the ideas of others as well.
Quote ID: 8330
Time Periods: 0
Mysteries of Mithras: The History and Legacy of Ancient Rome’s most Mysterious Religious Cult, The
Charles River Editors
Book ID: 385 Page: 19
Section: 1A
By obtaining a Carthaginian warship, the Romans were able to reverse engineer the captured vessel, and with the Carthaginian ship fully disassembled, the Roman craftsmen and shipbuilders were able to copy the design. Within an extremely short period of time, The Romans were literally stripping the Italian peninsula bare of trees in order to build their own fleet so that they could challenge Carthaginians on the Mediterranean. By the time the Romans had finished with the first Punic War, they had become master shipbuilders in their own right and had wrested control of the Mediterranean from the hands of a nation which had operated with near impunity across the Mediterranean Sea for centuries.
Quote ID: 8331
Time Periods: 0
New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, Vol. 7
S.R. Llewelyn
Book ID: 525 Page: 106
Section: 1A
The church of the Pauline epistles
(a) Eschatological community or people of God
The church of 1 Clement
Sacramental institution mediating salvation
The church of the Pauline epistles
(b) Authority vested in the charisma of the Spirit and those endowed with it
The church of 1 Clement
Authority vested in ecclesiastical offices and those who hold them by ordination. A concept of apostolic tradition and succession (apostleship viewed as office and limited to the twelve)
The church of the Pauline epistles
(c) Apostles, prophets, teachers
(i) proclaimers of the word
(ii) no cult
(iii) called to minister to believers everywhere
The church of 1 Clement
Elders or bishops
(a) sermon
(b) sacramental cult
(c) ministry restricted to one congregation
The church of the Pauline epistles
(d) Every believer a member of the ‘body of Christ’ but possessing a different charisma
The church of 1 Clement
Distinction between priests and layman (hierarchy in the community, subordination)
Quote ID: 9145
Time Periods: 1247
Organization of the Early Christian Churches, The
Edwin Hatch, M. A.
Book ID: 255 Page: 177/178
Section: 1A,2C,3A1,3C
Lecture VII: Councils and the Unity of the Church.In this way it was that, by the help of the State, the Christian Churches were consolidated into a great confederation. Whatever weakness there was in the bond of a common faith was compensated for by the strength of civil coercion. But that civil coercion was not long needed. For the Church outlived the power which had welded it together. As the forces of the Empire became less and less, the forces of the Church became more and more. The Churches preserved that which had been from the first the secret of Imperial strength. For underneath the Empire which changed and passed, beneath the shifting pageantry of Emperors who moved across the stage and were seen no more, was the abiding empire of law and administration, – which changed only as the deep sea changes beneath the wind-swept waves. That inner empire was continued in the Christian Churches. In the years of transition from the ancient to the modern world, when all civilized society seemed to be disintegrated, the confederation of the Christian Churches, by the very fact of its existence upon the old imperial lines, was not only the most powerful, but the only powerful organization in the civilized world.
. . . .
This confederation, and no other, was the ‘city of God;’ this, and no other, was the ‘body of Christ;’ this, and no other, was the ‘Holy Catholic Church.’
Quote ID: 6447
Time Periods: 147
Organization of the Early Christian Churches, The
Edwin Hatch, M. A.
Book ID: 255 Page: 187
Section: 1A,2D3B,2A6
Lecture VIIThere are some who will look back with lingering eyes at that earlier time in which there was no formal association of Churches, but only what Tertullian calls the ‘communication of peace, the appellation of brotherhood, the token of hospitality, and the tradition of a single creed’ {50}. There are some who will think that the effect of the enormous power which the Roman Empire in the first instance, and the fall of the Roman Empire in the second instance, gave to the association has been to exaggerate its importance, and to make men forget that there is a deeper unity than that of external form.
For the true communion of Christian men – the ‘communion of saints’ upon which all Churches are built – is not the common performance of external acts, but a communion of soul with soul and of the soul with Christ. It is a consequence of the nature which God has given us that an external organization should help our communion with one another: it is a consequence both of our twofold nature, and of Christ’s appointment that external acts should help our communion with Him.
Pastor John’s note: Wow
Quote ID: 6450
Time Periods: 12
Organization of the Early Christian Churches, The
Edwin Hatch, M. A.
Book ID: 255 Page: 208
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
Lecture VIIIAnd here the examination which I proposed at starting comes to an end.
The main propositions in which the results of that examination may be summed up are two-
(1) That the development of the organization of the Christian Churches was gradual:
(2) That the elements of which that organization were composed were already existing in human society.
These propositions are not new: they are so old as to have been, in greater or less degree, accepted by all ecclesiastical historians.
. . . .
But in dealing with them I have arrived at and set forth the view, in regard to the first of them, that the development was slower than has sometimes been supposed, and, in regard to the second, that not only some but all the elements of the organization can be traced to external sources. The difference between this view and the common view is one of degree and not of kind.
Quote ID: 6453
Time Periods: 4567
Organization of the Early Christian Churches, The
Edwin Hatch, M. A.
Book ID: 255 Page: 209
Section: 1A
Lecture VIIIWhat the theologian says to the man of science in regard to that Creation is, ‘Nothing that you have proved, or can prove, about the mode in which God made the world, interferes with the truth that He did make it:’ and what the theologian says also to the historian is, ‘Nothing that you have shown, or can show, about the mode in which the organization of the Church was developed interferes with the truth that God did organize it.’
Quote ID: 6454
Time Periods: 47
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 3
Section: 1A,4B
Western civilization is derived from Western Europe which was Latin Christendom, and this begins in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. with the amalgamation and the fusion of the classical culture of the declining Roman Empire, the Germanic customs, habits and attitudes of the invading ‘barbarian’ races, and Christianity, subsequently Latin Christianity. These are literally the elements, . . .
Quote ID: 6456
Time Periods: 56
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 4
Section: 1A,3D2
As for the classical inheritance of Greece and Rome, the barbarians, it has been well said, came not to destroy the Roman Empire but to enjoy it: the learning of the ancients was not in the event lost but was first preserved.
Quote ID: 6457
Time Periods: 456
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 9
Section: 1A,3A1
Then again, if there is to be a medieval period, when does it begin and at what point does it end? The year 476 marks no clean break: it is easy enough to see the Roman Empire declining, but difficult if not impossible to say when it ends. A recent writer has suggested that from one point of view ‘the Roman Empire achieved its fullest development in the thirteenth century’,{1} and what are we to do with that Holy Roman Empire which survived until 1806?[Footnote 1] R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, Pelican History of the Church, vol. 2 1970), p. 25.
This is the quote:
Quote ID: 6460
Time Periods: 157
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 15
Section: 1A
In the beginning was the Word, but in the beginning also was the Roman Empire. We must begin with that since the origins of the medieval world, and therefore the modern West, are found in the fusion of Roman and Germanic, classical and barbarian elements, while the third element, Christianity, was also inherited from Rome.
Quote ID: 6461
Time Periods: 047
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 22
Section: 1A,3C
But meanwhile in getting so far we have gone too fast, and there are two important factors yet to be inserted among the causes of the slow decline of Rome. The first is the Emperor Constantine, and the second, closely related, is Christianity.
Quote ID: 6465
Time Periods: 14
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 40
Section: 1A,2A4
He writes, “The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass.” {16}2A
Quote ID: 3523
Time Periods: 147
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 70
Section: 1A,2A4
Face it. The Protestant order of worship is unscriptural, impractical, and unspiritual. It has no analog in the NT. Rather, it finds its roots in the culture of fallen man. {178} It rips at the heart of primitive Christianity which was informal and free of ritual. Five centuries after the Reformation, the Protestant order of worship still varies little from the Catholic Mass—a religious ritual which is a fusion of pagan and Judaistic elements.
Quote ID: 3537
Time Periods: 7
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 83/84
Section: 1A,2A4
In a word, the Greco-Roman sermon replaced prophesying, open sharing, and Spirit-inspired teaching. {58} The sermon became the elitist privilege of church officials, particularly the bishops. {59} Such people had to be educated in the schools of rhetoric to learn how to speak. {60} Without such education, a Christian was not permitted to speak to God’s people.As early as the third century, Christians called their sermons by the same name that Greek orators called their discourses. They called them homilies. {61} Today, one can take a seminary course called homiletics to learn how to preach. Homiletics is considered a “science, applying rules of rhetoric, which go back to Greece and Rome.” {62}
Put another way, neither homilies (sermons) nor homiletics (the art of sermonizing) have a Christian origin. They were stolen from the pagans.
Quote ID: 3540
Time Periods: 3
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 88
Section: 1A,2A4
As one Catholic scholar readily admits, with the coming of Constantine “various customs of ancient Roman culture flowed into the Christian liturgy . . . even the ceremonies involved in the ancient worship of the Emperor as a deity found their way into the church’s worship, only in their secularized form.” {141}
Quote ID: 3542
Time Periods: 24
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 92
Section: 1A,4A
The sermon is a sacred cow that was conceived in the womb of Greek rhetoric. It was born into the Christian community when ex-pagans-now-turned-Christians began to bring their oratorical styles of speaking into the church. By the third century, it became common for Christian leaders to deliver a sermon. By the fourth century it became the norm. {115}Christianity has absorbed its surrounding culture. {116} When your pastor mounts his pulpit wearing his clerical costume and delivers his sacred sermon, he is playing out the role of the ancient Greek orator.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that the sermon does not have a shred of Biblical merit to support its existence, it continues to be uncritically admired in the eyes of most modern Christians. It has become so entrenched in the Christian mind that most Bible-believing pastors and “laymen” fail to see that they are affirming and perpetuating an unscriptural practice out of sheer tradition.
Quote ID: 3543
Time Periods: 234
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 117
Section: 1A,4B
For these reasons, the Christians saw Constantine’s rise to Emperor as an act of God. Here was God’s instrument that had come to their rescue. Christianity and Roman culture were now melded together. {144}The Christian building demonstrates that the church, whether she wanted it or not, had entered into a close alliance with pagan culture. {145}
Quote ID: 3570
Time Periods: 14
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 253
Section: 1A,4B
Martin Luther had it right when he said, “What else are the universities than places for training youth in Greek glory.” {38}
Quote ID: 3599
Time Periods: 7
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 134
Section: 1A
First, as Peter Brown has said, “the historian of the later Roman church is in constant danger of taking the end of paganism for granted.”{13}
Quote ID: 3778
Time Periods: 456
Paganism to Christianity in the Roman Empire
Walter Woodburn Hyde
Book ID: 172 Page: 185
Section: 1A,3C,4B
The Spanish Christian poet Prudentius in the second half of the fourth century said:"God willed peoples of discord and tongues, kingdoms of conflicting laws, to be brought together under an empire, because concord alone knows God. Hence He taught all nations to bow their necks under the same laws and to become Romans. Common rights made all men equal and bound the vanquished with the bonds of fraternity. The City is the fatherland of all humanity, our very blood is mingled, and one stock is woven out of many races. This is the fruit of the triumphs of Rome; they opened the doors for Christ to enter." {82}
Quote ID: 3782
Time Periods: 4
Paganism to Christianity in the Roman Empire
Walter Woodburn Hyde
Book ID: 172 Page: 197
Section: 1A
Footnote 21 E.g. Dean Farrar of Canterbury (1895-1903) has said: “The apparent triumph of Christianity was in some sense and for a time a real defeat, the corruption of its simplicity, the defacement of its purest and loftiest beauty.”
Quote ID: 3789
Time Periods: 4
Paganism to Christianity in the Roman Empire
Walter Woodburn Hyde
Book ID: 172 Page: 223
Section: 1A
…the causes of Rome’s fall form the greatest puzzle of history….
Quote ID: 8401
Time Periods: 1
Paganism to Christianity in the Roman Empire
Walter Woodburn Hyde
Book ID: 172 Page: 224
Section: 1A
And Christianity must take its place as one of the major causes of Rome’s decline. Religion was always the basis of the Roman State....
Quote ID: 3805
Time Periods: 14
Paganism to Christianity in the Roman Empire
Walter Woodburn Hyde
Book ID: 172 Page: 225
Section: 1A
But Christianity played a more subtle role as a factor in the dissolution of Rome. As prosperity waned and national vigor declined men naturally turned to religion for solace and paid greater attention to the vision of another world of peace than to the turbulent affairs of this, which many believed was doomed. Thus an unconscious change from political allegiance to the State to spiritual allegiance to the Church with its promise of future happiness was gradually wrought. In this way Christianity first weakened and then undermined the Roman State.A recent writer has remarked: “As the Church never saw the value of paganism and the greatness of Rome was due to the belief in polytheism, it could easily destroy it and Rome with it.” {147} If then, as Dean Inge has said, “the Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of classical culture,”{148} it unfortunately proved to be one of the contributing causes to the latter’s downfall.
That Christianity was already the conqueror at the close of the fourth century is shown by Theodosius yielding to the rebuke of a churchman. It was left only for Justinian to close the pagan schools of philosophy and rhetoric in Athens and, in the words of Salomon Reinach, “the world was ripe for the Middle Ages.”
Pastor John’s note: footnote 147 = Edward Lucas White, Why Rome Fell but no page #.
footnote 148 = W. R. Inge, essay in Legacy of Greece, ed. by Sir R. W. Livingstone (Oxford, 1921). p. 30.
Quote ID: 3806
Time Periods: 4
Pagans and Christians: Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to Fourth Century A.D.
Robin Lane Fox
Book ID: 173 Page: 21
Section: 1A,4B
Christianity had never preached an outright social revolution. There was no “liberation theology,” no sanction for a direct assault on the forms of social dependence and slavery. In the Christian empire, the army still fought, and the soldiery did not intervene for one religion against the other. Distinctions of rank and degree multiplied and the inequalities of property widened.
Quote ID: 3828
Time Periods: 1234
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 3
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
When we speak of the Middle Ages we mean this second, spiritual and Christian Rome…the mother of civilisation, the source to Western peoples of religion, law, and order, of learning, art, and civic institutions. It became to them what Delphi had been to the Greeks…PJ: Look for a quote on Delphi to show what the last part of this quote is saying. Ordered the book on Delphi.
Quote ID: 7906
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 4
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
It is in this way that the medieval Popes take their place in the Story of the Nations; they continue the Roman history….
Quote ID: 7907
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 8
Section: 1A,3A4A
And the bishop of Constantinople was but the Emperor’s chaplain, incapable of pursuing a course for himself—the nominee, the puppet, and sometimes the prisoner of one who claimed in his own person to be most sacred, a Divine delegate, and a god on earth. In Rome, the Bishop had no rival or second. He tended more and more to become what Caesar had been of old…..
Quote ID: 7908
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 12
Section: 1A,3A1
This was no sudden creation, but a slow and imperceptible growth of time, extending over five or six hundred years, so complete at length that as in Pope Leo I, we may contemplate the Romulus, so in Gregory the Great we discern the not unkingly Numa, of a city more sacred than the antique Rome, yet hardly less imperial.
Quote ID: 7910
Time Periods: 1567
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 21
Section: 1A,3A1
…as the Christian system moulded itself on the Imperial, and Bishops fell into their places, according to the importance of the cities over which they ruled.
Quote ID: 7920
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 25
Section: 1A,3A4A,3A4B,4B
But the Pontifex Maximus was a Roman and a statesman. He left to others the wrangling over terms of Greek art; for him it was enough to insist upon what had been handed down. These gladiatorial displays of logic went on for a well-nigh a hundred and seventy years, during which time the only Pope who furnished a statement of any length to the combatants was Leo I; and his manner is the Roman, sententious and judicial, not argumentative. The Latin language, copious in legal phrase, abounding in the technicalities of ritual, was neither delicate not flexible enough to express the finer shades of heresy. It was the language of command: strong, plain, and matter of fact.
Quote ID: 7921
Time Periods: 1567
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 28
Section: 1A,3A1
For Rome, as Dӧllinger says, “took the world ready-made.” It would not vex itself with philosophic inquiries, whether in its former heathen or its present Christian stage.
Quote ID: 7923
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 32
Section: 1A,3A1
The primitive Church was the Empire taken a second time, but for spiritual and heavenly purposes.
Quote ID: 7925
Time Periods: 17
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 33
Section: 1A,3A1
It is the old Roman vision of a world-empire expanding and realising itself as a Catholic Church….
Quote ID: 7926
Time Periods: 17
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 37/38
Section: 1A,3A1,3A4
It was the duty of the Pontiff, as it had formerly been of the Emperor, to feed the people in seasons of famine; to make good the losses occasioned by earthquakes, conflagrations, risings of the Tiber, invasions of Goths or Vandals; to preside at the crowded Church festivals, which took the place of gladiatorial sports, abolished at this time; and to do what in them lay as mediators between the people and their conquerors.
Quote ID: 7928
Time Periods: 17
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 41
Section: 1A,3A1
Rome had now “become, through the sacred Chair of Peter, head of the world;” its religious empire stretched far beyond its earthly dominion; and this was the work of Providence.
Quote ID: 7929
Time Periods: 17
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 43
Section: 1A,4B
But it is doubtless true that the wildest of Barbarian chiefs felt a superstitious reverence for the name of Rome.
Quote ID: 7930
Time Periods: 1
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 45/46
Section: 1A,3A1
But wherever a Bishop holds his court, religion protects all that is left of the ancient order. A new Rome ascends slowly above the horizon.….
…it is even the heir of the religion which it has overthrown….
….
The Emperor is no more; the Consul has laid down the fasces; the golden Capitol has seen its gods and heroes carried into captivity…
….
But the Pontifex Maximus abides; he is now the Vicar of Christ, offering the old civilisation to the tribes of the North.
Quote ID: 7931
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 49
Section: 1A,3A1,3G,4B
At this hour of deepest eclipse, Gregory ascended the Papal Chair, and the Middle Ages began.In this noble and attractive person we may affirm that all which the ancient world could now bequeath to the modern was to be found. He sprang from the most conspicuous of late Roman Houses, the Anicii, who had long been Christian. The grandson of Pope Felix and son of Gordianus, at one time he was Prӕtor, if not Perfect, of the City. Then, in obedience to the strongest current of his age, he had become a monk. He turned his fine mansion on the Cӕlian into a monastery.
Quote ID: 7932
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 50
Section: 1A,3A3B,3G
It was a custom as early as Pope Soter (180) for the Roman Church to send assistance wherever Christians found themselves in distress. Now as then the Church fed the Roman people; to such elementary human offices had it come; but in thus stooping it laid foundations deep for the Pope’s temporal power. Gregory acted as lieutenant of the Empire though not by designation.
Quote ID: 7934
Time Periods: 267
Perspectives on History
(The News magazine of the American Historical Association 2001/115th Annual Meeting Awards and Honors) Sharon K. Tune
Book ID: 387 Page: 2
Section: 1A
Ramsay MacMullen is the greatest historian of the Roman Empire alive today.
Quote ID: 8337
Time Periods: 1
Perth Assembly
David Calderwood Edited by Greg Fox
Book ID: 177 Page: 116
Section: 1A,2A
Of the ancient Kirks I have spoken before. Some excuse the Ancients with good intention, because to win the Gentiles they converted their days into Christian holy days.
Quote ID: 9077
Time Periods: 2347
Perth Assembly
David Calderwood Edited by Greg Fox
Book ID: 177 Page: 116
Section: 1A
For Papistry hath been in the Kirk ever since the days of the Apostles: yea the mystery of iniquity was working in their times. The errors of the Orthodox Kirk were the beginnings of Papistry, at length they grew to a great mass.
Quote ID: 9078
Time Periods: 147
Perth Assembly
David Calderwood Edited by Greg Fox
Book ID: 177 Page: 123/124
Section: 1A,2A
The grace received in confirmation, is called strength, and defense against all temptations to sin, and the assaults of the world and the devil. In baptism the grace received is for the forgiveness of sins. Do not the papists distinguish after the same manner betwixt baptism and confirmation that the Holy Ghost is given in baptism, to remission of sins, life and Sanctification and in confirmation for force, strength, and corroboration to fight against all our spiritual enemies, and to stand constantly in confession of our faith even to death, in times of persecution, either of the heathen or of heretics, with great increase{2} of grace. Hooker saith,{3} that in baptism infants are admitted to live in God’s family, but in confirmation they are enabled to fight in the army of God, and bring forth the fruits of the Holy Ghost. Doctor Hackwell{1} saith that as in baptism they believe remission of sins unto justification, so in confirmation, they are emboldened to make open profession of this belief unto salvation.
Quote ID: 9080
Time Periods: 7
Philosopher and the Druids (A Journey Among The Ancient Celts), The
Philip Freeman
Book ID: 263 Page: 190
Section: 1A,2B2,4B
2B2Although human sacrifice ended with the conquests, the religion taught by the Druids flourished in Gaul for centuries. Celtic sanctuaries continued to be used and often incorporated Roman deities into their worship. The Gauls still prayed to Lugus, Epona, and all the other gods of the Celtic pantheon—and in their own language.
4B
The Romans never tried to impose Latin on any of their conquered lands. If the inhabitants wanted to speak their native tongue—be it Aramaic, Punic, Greek, or Gaulish—the Romans couldn’t care less, as long as they paid their taxes on time.
Quote ID: 6680
Time Periods: 01
Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire, The
Arjan Zuiderhoek
Book ID: 264 Page: xvii
Section: 1A
Insert MapPastor John’s note: refer to map. Record which book this is in.
Quote ID: 6681
Time Periods: 1
Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire
Peter Brown
Book ID: 183 Page: 33
Section: 1A,3A1
Nor did it represent an old-world idyll, at odds with reality. Despite the more drastic assertion of state power that characterized the fourth century, a system of government based upon collusion with the upper classes had continued to idle under a centuries-old momentum. Nor was such “concord” invariably artificial. In the words of Edward Thompson: “Once a social system has become ‘set,’ it does not need to be endorsed daily by exhibitions of power. . . . What matters more is a continuing theatrical style.” {124}
Quote ID: 4021
Time Periods: 14
Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire
Peter Brown
Book ID: 183 Page: 119
Section: 1A
Even developments that could be presented, with good reason, as novel features of the rise of Christianity came to be expressed in a language that had not broken with the past.
Quote ID: 4073
Time Periods: 45
Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire
Peter Brown
Book ID: 183 Page: 128
Section: 1A
Altogether, the impression conveyed by many modern scholars, that the fourth century A.D. was characterized by a widespread and fully conscious conflict between Christianity and paganism, derives, in large part, from a skillful construct first presented to the Roman world by the Christian historians of the fifth century.
Quote ID: 4080
Time Periods: 45
Prince, The
Nicolo Machiavelli
Book ID: 361 Page: 39
Section: 1A,3A1
IT ONLY REMAINS NOW TO SPEAK OF ECCLESIASTICAL PRINCIPALITIES, TOUCHING which all difficulties are prior to getting possession, because they are acquired either by capacity or good fortune, and they can be held without either; for they are sustained by the ancient ordinances of religion, which are so all-powerful, and of such a character that the principalities may be held no matter how their princes behave and live. These princes alone have states and do not defend them; and they have subjects and do not rule them; and the states, although unguarded, are not taken from them, and the subjects, although not ruled, do not care, and they have neither the desire nor the ability to alienate themselves. Such principalities only are secure and happy. But being upheld by powers, to which the human mind cannot reach, I shall speak no more of them, because, being exalted and maintained by God, it would be the act of a presumptuous and rash man to discuss them.
Quote ID: 8183
Time Periods: 14567
Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, The
Edited by J. A. North and S. R. F. Price
Book ID: 166 Page: 9/10
Section: 1A
‘Greek religion’ --and nowadays this is a commonplace-- includes more than just the religion of Athens. It is a system of religious cults that includes a great number of locally variable elements.
Quote ID: 3488
Time Periods: ?
Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, The
Edited by J. A. North and S. R. F. Price
Book ID: 166 Page: 11
Section: 1A,2B2,4B
conquered nations were allowed to keep their gods in the same way as they were allowed to keep their institutions and constitutions, as long as they did not impede Roman dominance.....(Hartung 1836: i. 231).
Quote ID: 3491
Time Periods: 047
Rise of Western Christendom, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 265 Page: 14
Section: 1A
Such inter-connectivity marked the arrival in Western Europe of a cultural and religious force which had not existed in the time of the many gods.….
The basic modules of Christianity, also, were remarkably stable and easy to transfer - a bishop, a clergy, a congregation (called in Greek a laos, a “people”; our word for “laity”) and a place in which to worship. Such a basic structure could be subjected to many local variations, but, in one form or another, it traveled well. It formed a basic “cell”, which could be transferred to any region of the known world.
Quote ID: 6694
Time Periods: 47
Roman Empire, The
Colin Wells
Book ID: 266 Page: 271
Section: 1A,4B
Paradoxically, it was the once persecuted Christians who absorbed, preserved and transmitted what remained of Rome’s heritage in the West.It was the Church that continued to teach the classics, and but for the Church, to quote Helen Waddell again, ‘the memory of them would have vanished from Europe’.
Quote ID: 6737
Time Periods: 47
Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus, The
R. M. Ogilvie
Book ID: 390 Page: 4
Section: 1A
Under the Roman Empire all the different peoples continued to speak their own languages, as the events at Pentecost show so clearly (Acts II), and to worship their own gods in their own way. Yet, at the same time, Rome managed to impose on them certain common features. Latin was the common official language. The Roman form of government was the same everywhere and the Romans tended to perpetuate their own religious beliefs and customs throughout the Empire.*John’s note: the genius of Rome*
Quote ID: 8361
Time Periods: 1
Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus, The
R. M. Ogilvie
Book ID: 390 Page: 8
Section: 1A
‘To understand the success of the Romans.’ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Greek historian who came to Rome in 30 B.C., wrote, ‘you must understand their piety.’
Quote ID: 8365
Time Periods: 0
Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus, The
R. M. Ogilvie
Book ID: 390 Page: 9
Section: 1A,4B
Nevertheless, it will help to understand how the Romans thought if we try to recapture these feelings of anxiety, ‘alone and afraid, in a world we never made.’ For although they had made great strides in a number of practical and administrative fields, they were rarely creative thinkers. They produced no native philosophers or scientists. They were content not to ask fundamental questions about the process of nature, not to seek scientific explanations, as the Greeks had done, for natural phenomena.*John’s note: genius of Rome*
Quote ID: 8366
Time Periods: 1
Romans and Their Gods in the Age of Augustus, The
R. M. Ogilvie
Book ID: 390 Page: 11
Section: 1A
Rome clung on to the old forms of worship because they had worked but also introduced new ones as new needs, new functions and new activities began to appear in society. An economic slump in the early fifth century, associated with a corn-shortage and serious epidemics (or, possibly, the arrival of malaria) called for the institution of the cult of Mercury for the success of business transactions (495 B.C.), Ceres for the process of growth (496 B.C.) and Apollo for the power of healing (before 450 B.C.).*John’s note: genius of Rome*
Quote ID: 8368
Time Periods: 1
Rome and the Barbarians (100 B.C. – A.D. 400)
Thomas S. Burns
Book ID: 190 Page: 11
Section: 1A
In Hades, Virgil’s Aeneas, in one of the most famous passages in all Latin literature and one clearly addressed to Augustus, hears his father Anchises say of Rome’s destiny:Others will cast more tenderly in bronze
Their breathing figures, I can well believe,
And bring more lifelike portraits out of marble;
Argue more eloquently, use the pointer
To trace the paths of heavens more accurately
And more accurately foretell the rising stars.
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s people—for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. {2}
The public display of these virtues was just as incumbent upon Augustus’s successors as it had been to noble Romans long before Augustus took over the fortunes of the Julian family. The same values in their Christianized forms outlasted the empire.
Quote ID: 4205
Time Periods: 1
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 108
Section: 1A,3A4,4B
The resources of the papacy, material and moral, represented the sole hope of Rome’s survival and fashioned the shape of its future.
Quote ID: 4319
Time Periods: 567
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 314
Section: 1A,4B
But that Rome had survived through four and a half centuries was the work of the papacy.
Quote ID: 4417
Time Periods: 7
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 314
Section: 1A,4B
All Rome’s rulers, from Theodoric and Justinian to the younger Alberic and Otto, were conscious that Rome remained a capital, unique in the world, in descent from Romulus and Peter: no passive influence or inert and antiquarian reminder of the ancient world, a phantom preserving the shape without substance, but a power which had in the eight, and would again in the eleventh, reach out and refashion the world.
Quote ID: 4418
Time Periods: 17
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 319
Section: 1A,4B
I have referred to this period, to the mid-sixth century, as a ’petrine’ period, by that suggesting a Roman Church that had adapted local urban traditions to itself, and had substituted Peter (and Paul) for Romulus and Remus and the twin consulship.
Quote ID: 4419
Time Periods: 16
Rome Is Linked to the End Times, Jonathan Kahn, YouTube
Jonathan Kahn
Book ID: 544 Page: n/a
Section: 1A
“The nature of Rome is to smash, pulverize, assimilate, mix together.”“Rome in some way is linked to the end.”
“In some sense, Rome . . . must in some way be continuing to this day.”
“In other ways, the kingdom of Rome has continued.”
“Rome fell in 476, or around there, AD.”
“When Rome fell . . . all the people who destroyed it started taking on what Rome was, to form what we know today as Europe.”
[Paraphrase] Rome “devouring all things” means that it assimilates all things.
“We know that in the end times, in some way, this Roman civilization is going to manifest outright.”
“Rome Is Linked To The End Times”. YouTube video, 18:10. Aug 23, 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD-9y0NAaEM.
Quote ID: 9202
Time Periods: 0147
Rome Triumphant: How The Empire Celebrated Its Victories
Robert Payne
Book ID: 192 Page: 211
Section: 1A,2E4,2E5
After the physical empire came the ghostly empire; and the Roman gods fell before the single god incarnate in Jesus, crucified by an obscure provincial governor in the reign of Tiberius.....
A calendar published in Rome in A.D. 354 lists the birthdays of the apotheosized rulers from Augustus to Constantius, the consuls from the year 510 B.C. and the pagan festivals throughout the year, noting that on December 25 there were games in the Circus to celebrate “ the birth of the unconquerable sun” (natalis solis invicti). There followed a table of Easter Sundays, and the feast-days of the martyrs. Christianity and paganism walked side by side in apparent harmony; it seems not to have been impossible for a man to attend the feast of the Lupercalia in the morning and divine service in the evening.
Quote ID: 4432
Time Periods: 14
Rome Triumphant: How The Empire Celebrated Its Victories
Robert Payne
Book ID: 192 Page: 213
Section: 1A
Even to this day some vestiges of the triumph appear in the papal coronation. As the Pope emerges in his pontifical robes from the Chapel of St. Gregory, a master of ceremonies kneels before him, holding a golden wand tipped with burning tow, and three times he repeats the admonition: “Pater sancte, sic transit gloria mundi.” Then the tow is extinguished, and the Pope proceeds to the high altar to receive the pallium.
Quote ID: 9344
Time Periods: 47
Tertullian, ANF Vol. 3, Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian
Edited by Philip Schaff and Alan Menzies
Book ID: 678 Page: 32
Section: 1A
“God is great and good”—“Which may God give,” are the words on every lip. It bears witness too, that God is judge, exclaiming, “God sees,” and, “I commend myself to God,” and, “God will repay me.” O noble testimony of the soul by nature{1} Christian!PJ footnote reference: Tertullian, Apology, XVII.
Quote ID: 9721
Time Periods: 247
Theodosius: The Empire at Bay
Stephen Williams, Gerard Friell
Book ID: 282 Page: 26
Section: 1A,3C
By 330 the empire had been rebuilt, but in a new form. It was now more centralised, absolutist and organised on semi-military lines for an indefinite siege.
Quote ID: 7060
Time Periods: 14
Theodosius: The Empire at Bay
Stephen Williams, Gerard Friell
Book ID: 282 Page: 136
Section: 1A,3A1,2B2,3D
Apart from the ending of the state cults, the progress of Christianity among the senatorial nobility of Rome was not, and could not have been, the result of any legislation. It required gradual and subtle compromise between the spirit of Christianity and classical culture - in effect, the Gospels rendered into Virgilian hexameters. We see this compromise again and again in the monumental art of the aristocracy –– the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, or the mosaic art of Christ as a Helios figure in the Mausoleum of the Julii, or even the frescoes in the Via Latina where scenes from the Bible and from pagan mythology are mixed. Christianity was gradually accepted, provided that it was polite, polished and accommodating of the verities of Hellenic civilization.{9}….
Even so, the change took several generations. It was certainly helped by mixed marriages, which the church decided to tolerate, at least amongst the upper nobility.
Quote ID: 7165
Time Periods: 45
Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium (Kindle Edition, Loc. 473)
Ronald L. Conte Jr.
Book ID: 523 Page: ?
Section: 1A
“The Magisterium is the ability and authority to teach…. Exercised only by the Pope and the Bishops.”
Quote ID: 9140
Time Periods: 47
Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium (Kindle Edition, Loc. 487)
Ronald L. Conte Jr.
Book ID: 524 Page: ?
Section: 1A
“At no time is the Magisterium capable of teaching an error … which … would lead the faithful away from the oath of salvation.”
Quote ID: 9141
Time Periods: 47
Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium (Kindle Edition)
Ronald L. Conte Jr.
Book ID: 522 Page: ?
Section: 1A
“The teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church is termed the Magisterium, from the Latin “magister” meaning “teacher”. The Magisterium is the teaching office of the Church. Jesus Christ gave His Church both the ability and the authority to teach the Gospel message to the world.“The Pope and the Bishops exercise the authentic teaching authority of the Church. But they do not teach from their own personal ideas and experiences. They are given the ability in the Holy Spirit and the authority in Jesus Christ to teach from Divine Revelation. Everything that the Magisterium teaches is found within Divine Revelation, at least implicitly. This Sacred Deposit of Faith, as it is called, consists of Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. So the Magisterium teaches from two sources, Tradition and Scripture. The Magisterium can also teach from natural law, but all the truths of natural law are also found, at least implicitly, in Tradition and Scripture. Thus, all the truths taught by the teaching authority of the Church are found in the Sacred
Deposit of Faith given as a gift to us all by the Most Holy Trinity.
“These three sources of truth -- Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium -- are the three pillars
on which the Roman Catholic faith rests. The faithful are guided in their journey toward
Heaven by the Divine Revelation of Sacred Tradition and the Divine Revelation of Sacred Scripture, and the divinely-assisted teaching authority of the Church.
Quote ID: 9139
Time Periods: 47
Two Babylons, The
The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife by Alexander Hislop
Book ID: 391 Page: 105
Section: 1A,2E4
To conciliate the Pagans to nominal Christianity, Rome, pursuing its usual policy, took measures to get the Christian and Pagan festivals amalgamated, and, by a complicated but skillful adjustment of the calendar, it was found no difficult matter, in general, to get Paganism and Christianity—now far sunk in idolatry—in this as in so many other things, to shake hands.
Quote ID: 8388
Time Periods: 4
Tyranny Display’d
Patricius
Book ID: 397 Page: 15/16
Section: 1A
…publick Conventions are liable, liable to all the Infirmities, Follies, and Vices of private Men.
Quote ID: 8460
Time Periods: 47
Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, The
Rodney Stark
Book ID: 277 Page: 233
Section: 1A
Christianity created Western Civilization. Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.….
The modern world arose only in Christian societies. Not in Islam. Not in Asia. Not in a “secular” society – there having been none. And all the modernization that has since occurred outside Christendom was imported from the West, often brought by colonizers and missionaries. Even so, many apostles of modernization assume that, given the existing Western example, similar progress can be achieved today not only without Christianity but even without freedom or capitalism – that globalization will fully spread scientific, technical, and commercial knowledge without any need to re-create the social or cultural conditions that first produced it.
Quote ID: 6964
Time Periods: 7
Victory Of The Cross, The
Desmond O’Grady
Book ID: 278 Page: 28
Section: 1A
It would transform Rome but also be shaped by it.
Quote ID: 6975
Time Periods: 1234
Victory Of The Cross, The
Desmond O’Grady
Book ID: 278 Page: 179
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
Forceful bishops such as Julius I (337-352), Damascus I (366-384), Innocent I (401-417), and Leo the Great (440-461) managed to take advantage of the new situation and prestige which still attached to Rome, [used this part] for you could take the capital out of Rome but not Rome out of the empire it had created. Not only did the church in Rome absorb some imperial administrative practices and terminology, such as “diocese”, but also, as the civil power dissolved, it took over functions such as relief work for the poor. However, it directed aid not only to Roman citizens, as had the pagans, but to all the needy. When the empire crumbled, Rome still provided a vestige of order for the invaders through the Church, which, on the whole and with a struggle, managed to avoid Caesaropapism.
Quote ID: 6998
Time Periods: 45
Victory Of The Cross, The
Desmond O’Grady
Book ID: 278 Page: 179
Section: 1A,3A2,3C
After Constantine, Christians had only themselves to fear.
Quote ID: 6999
Time Periods: 4
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 2/3
Section: 1A
The fourth century was a period of transition, {*} between the ascendancy of heathenism, and that of Christianity, in the Roman Empire: and, in the struggle for ascendancy, a lamentable compromise between right and wrong was often made on the part of proselytizing Christians. Recruits rather than converts were obtained for the ranks of the cross; and the frailties, the passions, and the imaginations of men began, at the expense of conscience and truth, to be enlisted in the service of the Church. Objects of worship were disguised and presented under forms more consonant with heathen, than with Gospel ideas of religion; rites similar to those of ancient mythology were introduced: and a breach was opened to every corruption.
Quote ID: 7192
Time Periods: 4
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 3
Section: 1A,2D3B,4A
In fact, the close of the fourth century is the epoch from which we date the time, when, to use the words of bishop Van Mildert, ‘a system of Paganism was engrafted on Christianity;’ when the simplicity of the Gospel was sacrificed, in a fearful degree, to pious sophistries; and when the forms of the Pantheon were fatally introduced into the Christian sanctuary.{*}[Footnote *] These men, by taking the Greek philosophers to their assistance, in explaining the nature and genius of the Gospel, had unhappily turned religion into an art, and their successors the schoolmen, by framing a body of theology out of them, instead of searching for it from Scriptures, soon after turned into a trade. - Warburton
PJ note: Vigilantius, (fl. c. 400), the presbyter, celebrated as the author of a work no longer extant, against a number of Catholic practices, which called forth one of the most violent of St Jerome’s polemical treatises.
Quote ID: 7193
Time Periods: 345
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 5
Section: 1A
I. How did Christians get so grievously wrong in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? By a succession of corruptions, and by a gradual departure from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Quote ID: 7195
Time Periods: 456
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 224
Section: 1A,2E1
I beg the reader to remember the anecdote related to Epiphanius, who avowed and justified his hasty destruction of a painted curtain hanging before a shrine, because it was ornamented with a picture of Jesus Christ, or of some saint, he cared not which. ‘I tore it down, and I rent it,’ said he, ‘because it presented to view the image of a man in a Church of Christ, contrary to the authority of Scriptures.’In another passage, speaking of the same profane use of pictures, Epiphanius declared, that it was contrary to the Christian religion: ‘contra religionem nostram.’ {ᾠ} The letter, addressed to John of Jerusalem, from which this account is taken, and in which Epiphanius protested that the use of images and pictures (for he expressly calls the picture of a man an image) is contrary to Scripture, and contrary to the Christian religion, was written in the year 396. It was the epistle of one bishop of the Christian Church to another; and yet at this very period, Paulinus was setting up images and pictures in his Church at Nola, and his authority for the practice has ever since been triumphantly appealed to by the Latin Church.
[Footnote *] Hier. Op. IV. 828.
Quote ID: 7222
Time Periods: 4
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 266/267/268/269/270
Section: 1A,2D3B,3D
Page: 266Unhappily, for the Christian church, while Jerome talked of renouncing heathen literature, he taught and employed those unworthy artifices of rhetoric and disputation, which were learnt in the schools of heathen philosophy, {ᾠ} to the detriment of Christian simplicity and morality. Thus in his Epistle to Pammachius, in defence of his Treatsie against Jovinian, {‡} he appeals to the practice of Socrates, Demosthenes, Cicero, Plato, Theophrastus, Xenophon, Aristotle, and others, all of whom, as he said, at times spoke one thing while they meant another, and proposed things probable rather than true to secure a victory.
4A
. . . .
Page: 267
‘Read St. Paul’s Epistles,’ says he, ‘especially those to the Romans, the Galatians, and the Ephesians, in which he enters with all his energies into a controversy, and you will see what sort of use he makes of the contents or the Old Testament; and with what artifice, and prudence and dissimulation he wields his arguments. {*}
[Footnote *] Quam artifex, quam prudens, quam dissumulator sit ejus quod afit.’ - Hier. Op. 4. pars il. p. 236
In his Commentary {ᾠ} on the Epistle to the Galatians, the unscrupulous monk goes still farther, and argues that St. Paul did not rebuke Peter because he really thought him deserving of reprehension; but by ‘a new mode of controversy,’ {‡} to edify the Gentiles, he pretended to reprove Peter in order that ‘hypocrisy might be corrected by hypocrisy.’ {§}
4A
Pages 268-270:
This unworthy practice has been rightly called ‘Falsitas Dispensativa,’ fraudulent management, or license to conceal the truth, or to use falsehood as circumstances may require; and it has been vindicated and followed by the admirers of patristical antiquity in a manner which shews too plainly, that there is a proneness in the human mind, under fanatical excitement, to ‘believe a lie.’
It was this ‘Falsitas Dispensativa,’ which enabled Jerome and his contemporaries to build up that structure called the church of the fourth century, so unlike ‘The holy temple of the Lord fitly framed together on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.’ False miracles, {*p.268} dreams related in terms which led the hearers to suppose they were realities; scriptural verities withheld, under the pretext that they were too strong for weak brethren; church ordinance pronounced to be sacraments, when they were only of human authority; texts of scripture misapplied, wrested and perverted, to suit the occasion; allegories treated as facts; opinions expressed in terms of such ambiguity as would admit of retraction or confirmation, of blowing hot or cold, in the progress of development: these were the artifices and ‘the sleight of men,’ who had a system of their own to uphold, and who forgot that the fabric which has not truth for its basis, cannot be ‘an habitation of God through the Spirit.{*p.269}
Such were the corruptions, and the sad errors of many of the contemporaries of Vigilantius, over which good men mourn, and bad men exult. It is painful to have to record such instances of human infirmity, which are in reality so many proofs of want of faith. Had the fathers of the fourth century trusted more implicitly to the great head of the church to sustain his own cause, with his own right hand, they would not have had recourse to such miserable expedients. And if ‘churchmen’ of the present day would not take such pains to exalt ‘the church of the fathers’ above that of the existing generation, we should not be under the necessity of raking up the sins of past ages.
[Footnote *p.268] How can we rely on any of the patristical miracles, or any testimony of the Fathers as to the miracles of the fourth century, if they felt themselves at liberty to trifle with the truth for the promotion of the Gospel?
[Footnote *p.269] One of the most seductive arguments of infidelity grounds itself on the numerous passages in the works of the Christian Fathers, asserting the lawfulness of deceit for a good purpose. That the Fathers held, almost without exception, that, “Wholly without breach of duty, it is allowed to the teachers and heads of the Christian Church to employ artifices, to intermix falsehoods with truths, and especially to deceive enemies of the faith, provided only they hereby serve the interest of the truth and the advantage of mankind,” is the unwilling confession of Ribof.’ - (Program. de (Economia Partrum.) ‘St. Jerome, as is shown by the citations of this learned theologian, boldly attributes this management, ‘falsitatem dispensativam,’ even to the apostles themselves. But why speak I of the advantage given to the opponents of Christianity? Alas! to this doctrine chiefly, and to the practices derived from it, must we attribute the utter corruption of the religion itself for so many ages, and even now over so large a portion of the civilized world. By a system of accommodating truth to falsehood, the pastors of the church gradually changed the life and light of the Gospel into the very superstitions which they were commissioned to disperse, and thus paganised Christianity, in order to christen paganism. At this very hour Europe groans and bleeds in consequence.’ - Coleridge’s Fifth Essay in “The Friend,” vol.i.
4A
Quote ID: 7231
Time Periods: 45
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 456
Section: 1A
An unbroken line of clergy and doctors of the visible church avowing similar opinions, from generation to generation, has not yet been satisfactorily traced, because when power and literature were in the hands of the dominant but erring church, the voices of remonstants were silenced, and their writings suppressed.
Quote ID: 7249
Time Periods: 12
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 456/457/458
Section: 1A,2D3B,3D
Until the hidden treasures of manuscript collections are fully brought to light, we must be satisfied with such statements as the following, by a distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, with whom I have the misfortune to differ on some subjects, but whose critical investigations have directed public attention to many points, which might have escaped notice; and have made me, for one, more cautious in the examination and use of authorities than I might otherwise have been.‘I have just said that if any papist should tell me that our religion was not to be found before the time of Calvin and Luther, I should be satisfied to answer him according to his folly; but I would by no means be understood to admit the truth of this statement, for I believe it to be as false as it is foolish; and feel no doubt, that, in the darkest age, there were many true, and accepted, worshippers of God. Not formed into churches, and eminently bearing their testimony in corporate capacities as churches, against the see of Rome, (for then I think we should have heard more about them); but as the sheep of Christ dispersed abroad in the midst of this naughty world - known, perhaps, by this or that name of reproach; or, perhaps, the obscure and unknown, whose names were never written any where but in heaven. I doubt not that there were such, living a life of faith, and prayer, and communion with God; overlooked in the bustle of cities, and the solitude of cottages, and even shut up in what modern systems require us to consider as the strongholds of antichrist, - the cell, and the cloister.
. . . .
● ‘Facts and Documents relating to the Ancient Albigenses and Waldenses,’ by the Rev. S. R. Maitland, page 45. Since this passage was transcribed for the press, I find that it has been the subject of allusion in Mr. Elliott’s ‘Horoe Apocalyptica,’ a work which will deservedly command as much attention as any which has been published during the present century. ‘I fully agree,’ says Mr. Elliott, ‘with the sentiment so beautifully expressed by Mr. Maitland, in his book on the Waldeneses, as to the piety of many tonsured monk, &c., only with this difference, that he would range them among the Witnesses, I among the members of the Church hidden in the wilderness,’ vol. ii. p. 815.
Quote ID: 7250
Time Periods: 345
Why Rome Fell
Edward Lucas White
Book ID: 343 Page: 262
Section: 1A
(D) The paramount internal cause.The weakening of military and civic morale by the spread of Christianity.
Quote ID: 7963
Time Periods: 1
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