The Conversion of Europe - Richard Fletcher

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      Eusebius’ handling of Constantine requires to be considered in the context of early Christian thinking about the relationship between the church and the world. For simplicity’s sake one may distinguish two contrasting tendencies. The first was an attitude of wariness towards the secular world, of distrust, even of hatred for it. The Christian church was a society set apart, a ‘gathered’ community of the elect salvaged from the polluting grasp of the world, though still menaced by it in the form of the secular state, the Roman empire. The most violent expression of these views in early Christian writings is to be found in the book of Revelation, composed towards the end of the first century. The Roman empire is the beast, the harlot, ‘drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus’. Keeping the world at arm’s length long remained an urgent concern among some Christian groups. We shall return shortly to some of its manifestations in the late antique period.

      The second tendency was the quest for some form of accommodation with the secular world and the empire. This search was muted and hesitant at first but gained in confidence and assertiveness as time went on. The earliest sign of it may be glimpsed in the two New Testament books attributed to Luke. It is significant that both were dedicated to Theophilus, a patron of social or official eminence in that very world, secular, gentile and Romano-Hellenistic, which other Christians regarded with misgiving. A next step was to ponder the implications of the coincidence in time between the establishment of the Roman peace and the growth of the Christian church within the empire. Bishop Mellitus of Sardis, addressing an Apologia to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius about the year 170, could claim that the Christian faith was ‘a blessing of auspicious omen to your empire’ because ‘having sprung up among the nations under your rule during the great reign of your ancestor Augustus … from that time the power of the Romans has grown in greatness and splendour’. The next move was to suggest that the Roman empire was in some sense itself related to God’s scheme for the world. The first who dared to think such a thought was the great Alexandrian scholar Origen. In his work Contra Celsum, composed between 230 and 240 to refute the attacks on Christianity by the pagan philosopher Celsus, Origen had occasion to comment upon the following words in Psalm lxxii.7: ‘In his [the just king’s] days righteousness shall flourish, prosperity abound until the moon is no more.’ Origen observed that ‘God was preparing the nations for His teaching, that they might be under one Roman emperor, so that the unfriendly attitude of the nations to one another caused by the existence of a large number of kingdoms, might not make it more difficult for Jesus’ apostles to do what He commanded them when He said “Go and teach all nations” …’ Augustus therefore, who first ‘reduced to uniformity the many kingdoms on earth so that he had a single empire’, could be presented as the instrument of God’s providence.3

      These accommodating tendencies were carried to extreme lengths after Constantine’s adhesion to Christianity early in the fourth century. Faced for the first time with an entirely novel situation, churchmen had to come to grips with the question, How is a Christian emperor to be fitted into the scheme of things? The most comprehensive answer was provided by Eusebius, explicitly in his Oration, implicitly in the work to which the Oration was a pendent, the Ecclesiastical History – the earliest work of its kind, the most important single source for our knowledge of the first three centuries of Christian history, and a potent literary influence upon the work of Bede. Eusebius brought the Roman empire within the divine providential scheme for the world. It was an astonishing feat of intellectual acrobatics, here summarized in the words of a modern scholar:

      Eusebius sees the achievement of a unified Christian empire as the goal of all history. He insists on the mutual support of Christianity and Rome, of the monarchy of Christ and the monarchy of Augustus. For him, Roman empire and Christian church are not only essentially connected; they move towards identity … Eusebius can say that the city of earth has become the city of God, and that the monarchy of Constantine brings the kingdom of God to men.4

      This Eusebian accommodation between church and empire became and long remained a cornerstone of the ‘political theology’ of the eastern empire and its successors. For the historian of conversion it has two significant implications. If empire and church are moving towards identity, if they are (in the words of another scholar) but ‘two facets of a single reality’, then one of the questions from which we started – Who is Christianity for? – acquires at once a sharper urgency and an answer. If Romanitas and Christianitas are co-terminous, then the faith is for all dwellers within the ring-fence of the empire but not for those outside. All dwellers within means the ‘internal outsiders’, the huge rural majority, whose evangelization will occupy us in the next chapter. Those outside means the barbarians.

      Barbarians could be as effectively de-humanized by the educated minority as were the peasantry. ‘Roman and barbarian are as distinct one from the other as are four-footed beasts from humans,’ wrote the Spanish Christian poet Prudentius in about 390. His contemporary St Jerome was sure that some of the Germans were cannibals. ‘The holy priesthood, chastity and virginity do not exist among barbarian peoples; and if they were to do so, they would not be safe,’ wrote Bishop Optatus of Milevis in north Africa in the 360s. Ingrained habits of thought are revealed in the turn of a phrase. The Spanish historian Orosius, writing in about 417, could begin a sentence with the words ‘As a Christian and as a Roman …’ Quite so.5 The identities were conflated. In such a climate of opinion there could be no question of taking the faith to the heathen barbarian. In the words of a leading modern authority, ‘Throughout the whole period of the Roman empire not a single example is known of a man who was appointed bishop with the specific task of going beyond the frontier to a wholly pagan region in order to convert the barbarians living there.’6

      One qualification needs to be made. If Christian communities came into existence outside the imperial frontiers they might request the church authorities within the empire to send them a bishop to minister to their needs. There was a variety of ways in which such communities might come into existence, by means of trading settlements, diplomatic contacts, veterans returning from service in the Roman army in the course of which they had been converted, cross-frontier marriage, the settlement of prisoners carried away from their homelands by barbarian raids, and so on. Here is an example. At the end of the fourth century Rufinus of Aquileia translated Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History from Greek into Latin to render it accessible to the Latin-speaking west. He also brought it up to date, continuing it from where Eusebius had left off in Constantine’s day down to the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in 395. Rufinus had met the king of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, who told him that his predecessor King Miriam, who reigned in the time of Constantine, had acquired a Christian slave-girl who had converted her master to Christianity. Rufinus did not know her name, though later sources were to name her as Nounè or Nino. Whatever may lie behind this story – perhaps a jumbled memory of diplomatic relations between Constantinople and Tiflis – we may be certain that Christian communities did exist in Georgia in Constantine’s reign, because reliable sources reveal that a certain Patrophilus, bishop of Pithyonta (Pitsunda), attended the ecclesiastical council of Nicaea in 325. The site of his bishopric on the Black Sea coast at the foot of the Caucasus suggests that maritime contacts with the Roman empire had given rise to the Christian community over which he presided. We shall examine some further instances of these extra-imperial communities in Chapter 3.

      However, the Eusebian accommodation would not commend itself in all quarters. It would be looked upon with disfavour by those of the ‘gathered’ tradition. It was persons of this persuasion, largely if not exclusively, who were responsible for perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of late-antique Christianity – the growth of monasticism. Withdrawal from the world by an individual to a life of ascetic renunciation and self-denial in a desert solitude had an obvious biblical precedent in John the Baptist. The gospel stories of the temptation of Jesus reinforced the notion that the desert, the wilderness, was the place where the truly committed might test their faith and overcome the wiles of the Devil. It was in the valley of

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