ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
The Conversion of Europe. Richard Fletcher
Читать онлайн.Название The Conversion of Europe
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007502967
Автор произведения Richard Fletcher
Издательство HarperCollins
Very early on in my reflections on this topic I became convinced that it would be imprudent to attempt to explain this process of the acceptance of Christianity. Efforts to do so tend to be superficial and glib. My book proceeds by way of suggestion rather than explicit argument; my preferred method is to dispose the raw building blocks of evidence in such a manner as to move suggestions forward. Implicit argument may, I hope, be detected, to use an architectural analogy, in the disposition of mass and shape. The building is rambling, but I hope it coheres.
There are a few practical points of which the reader needs to be aware. The scope of the book is confined for the most part to western, Latin or Roman Christendom. The history of eastern, Greek or Orthodox Christendom is not my concern, let alone the history of those exotic Christian communities, Ethiopic, Indian and Nestorian, which lay beyond the eastern Mediterranean hinterland. Orthodox Christendom will loom on the horizon from time to time, notably in Chapters 10, 11 and 14, but for most of the time my concern is with Christianity in the west and the north of Europe. An exception to this rule is furnished by Chapter 9, which deals with the rival monotheisms of Judaism and Islam, with particular reference to early medieval Spain, offered as a kind of counterpoint to the main thrust of the book. Wherever possible I have allowed the original sources to speak for themselves by quoting them in the text, sometimes at length. The endnotes supply references to identify quotations, whether from original sources or from modern authorities, and to indicate reliable published translations where they exist. In a work of this character a formal bibliography would be out of place. Instead I have provided each chapter with brief notes on further reading, almost invariably in English, which will enable the enquirer to pursue matters further.
I wrote this book between September 1993 and June 1996, principally in the course of the two academic years 1993–5. I am grateful to the Research Committee of the History Department at the University of York, and to Alan Forrest, the then Head of the Department, for allowing me to take an accumulated entitlement to leave of absence during the academic year 1993–4; also to the British Academy for the award of a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship in the year 1994–5. It was thus my rare good fortune to be relieved of all academic duties for two singularly happy years during which I was enabled to concentrate single-mindedly upon research and writing. I record here my gratitude to the two institutions concerned for releasing me from employment and thereby making work possible.
In the course of preparing this book I have incurred many debts to colleagues and friends who have been unfailingly generous with books, articles, information, advice and criticism. I register here my grateful thanks to Lesley Abrams, Peter Biller, James Campbell, Eric Christiansen, Roger Collins, Katy Cubitt, James Howard-Johnston, Edward James, Henry Mayr-Harting, Judith McClure, Peter Sawyer and Charles Thomas. To six persons in particular I owe irredeemable debts. First, to Peter Rycraft, il miglior fabbro, under whose always patient if sometimes exacting guidance I first encountered the challenges and opportunities presented by the comparative historical study of Christian missions. Second, to Ian Wood, who with great generosity read the first half of the book in draft and saved me from many errors of fact and interpretation, especially as regards Frankish matters. Third, to Graham Shaw, who selflessly read the entire typescript and made a large number of extremely acute and perceptive suggestions, on matters both structural and detailed, for its improvement in the course of final revision. Fourth, to Stuart Proffitt, whose courtesy, diligence and sensitivity as an editor know no bounds. I should also like to put on record my heartfelt gratitude to Arabella Quin whose taste, enthusiasm and expertise have been a tower of strength to me during the process of seeing this book through the press. Fifth, to my son Humphrey, who repeatedly showed me that rage and despair were inappropriate (as well as ignoble) reactions to the bewilderments of an unfamiliar technology, and that calm, patience and humility were better means to acquire the necessary skills. Sixth and finally, to my wife Rachel: to her my gratitude is beyond words.
Nunnington, York
June 1997
To spread abroad among barbarians and heathen natives the knowledge of the Gospel seems to be highly preposterous, in so far as it anticipates, nay even reverses, the order of Nature.
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1796
WHO IS Christianity for? It may seem an odd question. The plainest of answers is furnished by the so-called ‘great commission’ which concludes St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’ What could be more explicit than that? But it needs only a slight acquaintance with the history of the past 2,000 years to show that Christians have not always heeded even the least ambiguous of instructions. Consider the withering rebuke delivered by a gathering of Baptist ministers to the young William Carey, later to be so famous in the Indian mission field, when in 1786 he first voiced his wish to become a missionary: ‘Sit down, young man. When it pleases the Lord to convert the heathen He will do it without your help or mine.’
This book is about the process by which a religion which had grown up in the Mediterranean world of the Roman empire was diffused among the outsiders whom the Romans referred to as barbarians; with far-reaching consequences for humankind. The eighteenth-century sentiments already quoted might have been uttered by many a civilized Christian of the first few centuries A.D. There was nothing inevitable about the proffer of the faith to barbarians. But it started to occur in the obscure period which followed the decline and fall of the western half of the empire, and thereafter continued with apparently unstoppable momentum throughout the Old World. By the year 1000 Christian communities had been planted from Greenland to China. The acceptance of Christianity by these outsiders was not simply a matter of confessional change, of dogma, of religious belief and observance in a narrow sense. It involved, or brought in its wake, a much wider process of cultural change. The conversion of ‘barbarian’ Europe to Christianity brought Roman and Mediterranean customs and values and habits of thought to the newcomers who were the legatees of the Roman empire. These included, for example, literacy and books and the Latin language with all that it opened up; Roman notions about law, authority, property and government; the habits of living in towns and using coin for exchange; Mediterranean tastes in food, drink and costume; new architectural and artistic conventions. The Germanic successor-states which emerged from the wreckage of the empire – for these are the outsiders with whom we shall be initially concerned – accepted Christianity and in so doing embraced a cultural totality which was Romanitas, ‘Roman-ness’. It was particularly significant that this occurred at a time when two other processes were shattering the cultural unity of the Mediterranean world. One of these was the withdrawal into herself of the eastern, Byzantine, Orthodox half of the former Roman empire. The other was the irruption of Islam into the Mediterranean and the resultant hiving off of its eastern and southern shores into an alien culture. The cultural unity of the Mediterranean disappeared for ever. But what had been harvested from the classical world and transplanted with Christianity into a northern seedbed germinated there, sprouted and grew into a new civilization, one which indeed owed much to the Mediterranean but was distinctively its own: western European Christendom. The growth of Christendom decisively affected the character of European culture and thereby, because of European dominance in human affairs for several centuries before the twentieth, the civilization of our world. That is why the coming of Christianity to north-western Europe is worth examining, and why this book has been written.
It