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The Conversion of Europe. Richard Fletcher
Читать онлайн.Название The Conversion of Europe
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007502967
Автор произведения Richard Fletcher
Издательство HarperCollins
After the imperial adhesion to Christianity under Constantine, never to be reversed except during the brief reign of Julian, the Christian community within the empire underwent phenomenal growth – which changed its character. Imperial patronage colossally increased the wealth and status of the churches. Privileges and exemptions granted to Christian clergy precipitated a stampede into the priesthood. Devout aristocratic ladies acquired followings of clerical groupies, experimented with fashionable forms of devotion. Christian moralists were apprehensive that conversions were occurring for the wrong reasons – to gain favour, to obtain a job, promotion, a pension. As far as the historian can tell, their anxieties do not appear to have been misplaced. Fashion is a great force in human affairs. The adherence of the establishment to Christianity in the course of the fourth century made more urgent than ever the task of converting the outsiders on whose labours the establishment rested: the huge majority who toiled in the countryside.
The process by which the empire became officially Christian may be said to have been completed in the course of the reign of Theodosius I (379–95). A cluster of events and decisions mark this: the defeat of an avowedly pagan military coup, the issue of legislation formally banning pagan worship, the removal of the Altar of Victory from the senate house in Rome, the destruction of the temple of the god Serapis at Alexandria. Some of the markers are uncomfortable portents: the first execution of a heretic (the Spaniard, Priscillian, in 385), and a rising tide of Christian anti-Semitism. It is surely not coincidental that it is from this period that influential voices can be heard urging landowners to make their peasantry Christian. Here is John Chrysostom, John ‘the golden-mouthed’, the most fashionable preacher of his day, patriarch of Constantinople between 398 and 404, preaching in the capital in the year 400 to an upper-class audience living, we presume, in their town houses, about their responsibilities to those on their landed estates.
Many people have villages and estates and pay no attention to them and do not communicate with them, but do give close attention to how the baths are working, and how halls and palaces are constructed – not to the harvest of souls … Should not everyone build a church? Should he not get a teacher to instruct the congregation? Should he not above all else see to it that all are Christians?3
And here is Augustine, congratulating Pammachius in 401 on ‘the zeal with which you have chased up those peasants of yours in Numidia’, and brought them back to Catholic unity. (Pammachius had converted them, not indeed from paganism to Christianity, but from deviancy in schism back to orthodoxy, but that does not weaken the point.) And here, finally, is Maximus, bishop of Turin from c. 398 to c. 412, and another famous preacher, in one of his sermons.
You should remove all pollution of idols from your properties and cast out the whole error of paganism from your fields. For it is not right that you, who have Christ in your hearts, should have Antichrist in your houses, that your men should honour the devil in his shrines while you pray to God in church. And let no one think he is excused by saying: ‘I did not order this, I did not command it.’ Whoever knows that sacrilege takes place on his estate and does not forbid it, in a sense orders it. By keeping silence and not reproving the man who sacrifices, he lends his consent. For the blessed apostle states that not only those who do sinful acts are guilty, but also those who consent to the act [Romans i.32]. You therefore, brother, when you observe your peasant sacrificing and do not forbid the offering, sin, because even if you did not assist the sacrifice yourself you gave permission for it.4
Constantinople, Africa, Italy – and other places too: wherever we look, bishops were encouraging the landed elites, the people who commanded local influence, to take firm and if necessary coercive action to make the peasantry Christian – in some sense. Other bishops took matters into their own hands, choosing to take direct and personal action rather than confining themselves to exhortation. The most famous example of such an activist is Martin, bishop of Tours from about 371 until his death in 397.
Martin is a man of whom we can know a fair amount, principally owing to the survival of a body of writings about him by his disciple Sulpicius Severus. Sulpicius was just the sort of man whom Augustine, John Chrysostom and Maximus of Turin were trying to reach and influence. He was a rich, devout landowner with estates in southern Gaul. Inspired by Martin’s ideals Sulpicius founded a Christian community at one of his estates, Primuliacum (unidentified; possibly in the Agenais), and it was there that he composed his Martinian writings. These comprise the Vita Sancti Martini (Life of the Holy Martin), composed during its subject’s lifetime, probably in 394–5; three Epistulae (Letters) from 397–8; and two Dialogi (Dialogues) from 404–6 also devoted to Martin.5 The Vita was the first work of Latin hagiography to be composed in western Christendom: it displays literary debts to the Vita Antonii by Athanasius and it was in its turn to be enormously influential during the coming centuries as a model of Christian biography. Sulpicius presented Martin as a vir Deo plenus, ‘a man filled with God’. Sulpicius’ Martin was first and last a spiritual force – a man who walked with God, a man set apart by his austerity and asceticism, a monk who was also active in the world as a bishop, fearless in his encounters with evil, endowed with powers beyond the natural and the normal, worthy to be ranked with prophets, apostles, martyrs: a powerhouse of holy energy which crackled across the countryside of Touraine.
One of the features of Sulpicius’ writings about Martin which strikes the reader is their defensive and apologetic tone (to be distinguished from the didacticism common to all hagiography). Martin was a figure of controversy during his lifetime and continued to be controversial after his death. This was in large part because he was in more ways than one an outsider. In the first place he was not a native of Gaul. He was born, probably in 336, at Sabaria in the province of Pannonia (now Szombathely in Hungary, not far from the Austro-Hungarian border) and he was brought up in Italy, at Pavia. He was of undistinguished birth, the child of a soldier. As the son of a veteran Martin was drafted into the army as a young man (351?) and served in it for five years. A convert to Christianity as a child, he was baptized in 354. After obtaining a discharge from the army in 356 he returned to Italy, where he lived for a period as a hermit with a priest for companion on the island of Gallinara off the Ligurian coast to the west of Genoa. Making his way back to Gaul he attached himself to Bishop Hilary of Poitiers, a churchman whose enforced residence in the east between 356 and 360 – exile during the Arian controversy (for which see Chapter 3) – had borne fruit in acquainting him with eastern monastic practices. Martin settled down as a hermit at Ligugé outside Poitiers. His fame as a holy man spread widely in the course of the next decade and in 371 (probably) he was chosen by the Christian community of Tours as their bishop.
2. To illustrate the activities of Martin, Emilian and Samson, from the fourth to the sixth centuries.
Martin’s pre-episcopal career was extremely unconventional. Of obscure origin and mean education, tainted by a career as a common soldier, ill-dressed, unkempt, practising unfamiliar forms of devotion under the patronage of a bishop himself somewhat turbulent and unconventional, the while occupying no regular position in the functioning hierarchy of the church – at every point he contrasted with the average Gallic bishop of his day, who tended to be well heeled, well connected, well read and well groomed. No wonder that the bishops summoned to consecrate Martin to the see of Tours were reluctant to do so. No wonder that Martin did not care to associate with his episcopal colleagues.
This was not the only way in which Martin’s behaviour continued unconventional after he had become a bishop. He refused to sit on an episcopal throne. He rode a donkey, rather than the horse which would