If you resolved this year to read a good book, I have a great one for you. Peter Heather’s Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300–1300 is a page tuner, all 587 pages, plus endnotes!!! Heather, chair of medieval history at King’s College, London, has written extensively on the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions. In this book he provides exciting and provocative insights in every chapter in his magisterial analysis of Christendom’s rise from Constantine in the fourth century to the conversion in 1250 ce of the last pagan ruler in western Europe, Grand Duke Mindaugas of Lithuania. I know this sounds boring but stay with me. Heather’s book is an important and exciting read. Why should you read it? Because it tells the real story after the New Testament.
Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, invented the discipline of Church History. In writing his Ecclesiastical History (about 326 CE) he faced a nearly impossible task. No one had expected the Roman emperor to legalize, then favor, Christianity, much less declare himself a Christian. The emperor and his empire were the enemy. Yet Eusebius did the impossible. He made Christianity’s triumph appear inevitable. God had a plan. Christianity’s inevitable triumph became the plot of every Church History book to this day. The genre and discipline of Church History has a fixed plot: the inevitable triumph of Christianity. But that plot derives not from historical principles but theological ones—God’s plan.
Peter Brown moved in a different direction by creating the discipline of Late Antiquity, which focused on the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, which involved the shift from the East (Constantinople) to Europe. He produced numerous studies on the relation between religion and society, exploring social and cultural history, even at times exploring psychological elements. The social sciences are prominent in his work. All this was summarized in his magisterial The Rise of Western Christianity: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200–1000 (first edition 1995, latest revision 2013). While Brown portrays the triumph of Christianity, as his subtitle indicates, he exposes the diversity and difference within various forms of Christianity. His work is driven by social historical methods, not theological plot.
As a scholar of Late Antiquity, while Heather follows in Brown’s methodical tradition, he explicitly repudiates the inevitable triumph of Christianity. He notes that he is in the first generation of European historians who have come of age during Christianity’s evident decline. Therefore, he operates without the methodological assumption that Christianity will inevitably triumph. He knows existentially that it can fail.
He also points out that it has failed. Islam very quickly overran and converted the Christian motherlands. Augustine’s North Africa quickly became Muslim and remains so. Christianity triumphed in the West because Islam evicted it from the East where it originated. While those defeats destroyed the credibility of the emperor in Constantinople, they allowed power to shift to Europe. Christianity became a European religion. After the Crusades, Western Christianity conveniently forgot that it had failed in its homeland and concentrated on its successes in the West.
Since Heather claims, “Any account of the origins and evolution of European Christianity is necessarily a story of conversion” (xiii), he begins with THE conversion: the emperor Constantine. But here he poses a paradox by arguing for the minority opinion that Constantine did not convert. He was already a Christian! There are four different versions of Constantine’s conversion. While the most famous is that of Eusebius, the earliest is about his conversion to sun god Apollo. Reconciling these different narratives has always been difficult, if not impossible.
The third century was a crisis for the Roman Empire with political instability, economic decline, and fighting on the borders. When Diocletian defeated his enemies and was proclaimed emperor, he brought order to the crisis of the third century. He reorganized the empire under the administration of the rule of four emperors (the Tetrarchy). One of these emperors was Constantine’s father. Diocletian launched a rabid persecution of Christianity, the most severe yet, which historians have had a hard time explaining.
Upon Diocletian’s death in 305, the Tetrarchy proved unstable, despite the emperors swearing undying loyalty and mutual love. Upon his father’s death, when Constantine was proclaimed Emperor in 305/6, he faced five other fellow co-emperors. Eventually in 324 he came out on top as sole emperor
For Heather the key to reconciling the four different stories is “to underscore the significance of this sustained correlation between Constantine’s military victories [over his opponents] and the different phases in his religious self-presentation” (12). In the ideology of imperial power, a military victory proves that the gods or God are on an emperor’s side. This had been true since the time of Augustus.
After each victory against a fellow emperor, Constantine shifted his religious narrative. Upon being proclaimed emperor by his father’s troops, he identified with Hercules, his father’s patron. His first victory over a fellow emperor he attributed to Apollo, the sun god. When he defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in Rome in 312 CE, he did so in the sign of the cross, revealed to him in a vision and dream as reported by Eusebius. Finally in 324 when he defeated his last rival, Licinius, he proclaimed unambiguously his Christianity and gave the Christian God full credit for his triumphs uniting the Roman Empire under one emperor.
Heather argues these stories should be read with suspicion. Emperors needed stories of divine approval. They support the ideology of empire. “Both the convenience and variety of the stories the first Christian emperor told about his personal encounter with the God of the New Testament suggest that we’re again some way from factual reportage” (8). Heather argues that these stories, all of which had Constantine’s approval, represent Constantine “coming out” in stages as a Christian. He had been a Christian all along. He revealed his Christianity in stages as he became more secure in his power.
Why had he not confessed his Christianity sooner? Heather argues that by “converting,” Constantine avoids that problem of being a lapsed Christian during the Tetrarchy. Constantine’s mother was Christian, and Heather suspects his father was one too. Perhaps, he suggests, Diocletian suspected that one of his co-emperors was a Christian and launched a major persecution of Christians to smoke out Constantine's father.
My summary hardly does Heather’s presentation justice. His treatment of Constantine’s coming out reads like a detective story, assembling the evidence like Sherlock Holmes. Is it convincing? I think his explanation of how to make sense of the four surviving stories makes the best sense of the evidence we have. Constantine came out. Constantine was surely a Christian before he became emperor. Was he a Christian from birth or did he convert? There I think Heather’s argument is less compelling. The evidence is unclear.
When Constantine came out in favor of Christianity, less than 10 percent of the empire’s population was Christian, maybe considerably less in Heather’s view. How did it take over the whole empire? Not very quickly and not as you suspected. In the ancient world, religion followed the ruler, and Heather maintains that Christianity was no exception. Prior to Constantine, Jesus’ followers formed small, isolated communities, mostly in urban areas, concentrated in the eastern part of the empire. But as Christianity emerged in the wake of Constantine, it moved up market. Emperors had many rewards to offer. Thus, most conversions initially were among the educated elites, city councillors, and the empire’s bureaucracy. Both Ambrose and Augustine are examples of such conversions since both were imperial bureaucrats. The rural areas resisted Christianity, hence the name “pagan” (meaning rural dweller or farmer).
Conversion is a major theme of Heather’s book, which he handles in a sophisticated fashion. He recognizes that people convert for a variety of reasons. Many people follow the emperor’s lead because he has many benefits to distribute. Agreeing with the emperor is a great way to get ahead. See, for example, the tech moguls flocking to Mar-a-Lago. Others experience a genuine religious conversion, for example Augustine, while others do what their neighbors do. Still others try to keep a foot in both the traditional camp as well as the new Christian religion. Finally, some just came for the beer.
Since Eusebius, historians have told a story in which the Roman Empire was Christianized, but Heather argues that actually Christianity was Romanized, becoming an imperial religion. And it has claimed those imperial prerogatives ever since. The emperor and later the rulers of Europe were the head of the church. They called the Councils, prepared the agenda, presided over the meetings, published and enforced the results. This situation remained in place until Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome in 1215. Heather concludes: “Nothing could better illustrate the complete transfer from emperors to popes of the overall religious authority over the Latin Church” (507). From this perspective, Henry VIII was claiming the traditional prerogative of a ruler to be the head of the church.
In the New York Review of Books, Peter Brown began his review with, “Peter Heather’s Christendom is a colossal book written by a colossus in the field.” The book is long, the evidence is massive. Heather profits not only from his own research, but the extensive research that has followed in the wake of Brown’s creation of the discipline of Late Antiquity. Heather has escaped Eusebius’ stranglehold on Church History. His book is truly a history, not a theological apology. He traces not the internal logic of orthodoxy, but the conflicts of politics, economics, religion, population shifts, even climate change—the whole panoply of interactions that make up history. This is a book full of interesting arguments and tidbits.
Given the complexity and length of Heather’s Christendom, I have concentrated in this review on Constantine since this gives a good view of Heather’s method and conclusions. After all Constantine is pivotal in Heather’s treatment. He is the founder of Christianity.
I have spent my life studying the Roman Empire and its relation to the New Testament. In this regard, I especially appreciated Heather’s treatment of how the empire worked, how classical education trained the Roman elite, and the strengths and weaknesses of the empire. I’ve never seen a better treatment.
For me, since I was raised a Roman Catholic, his analysis of the rise of the papacy and its consolidation of power in the late Middle Ages is eye opening. He brings the evidence together in a revealing and convincing fashion.
Like Brown, Heather accents the diversity of Christianity and its ability to constantly adapt and reinvent itself. Things are hardly as fixed as the tradition would like to suppose. An interesting example of the flexibility and diversity is present in this example from Germany. Boniface, the Benedictine monk leading the Anglo-Saxon missionary effort in the eighth century, discovered a Bavarian priest baptizing folks “In the name of the Fatherland (Patria) and the daughter (filia),” as Heather notes, “confusing not just case and gender but pretty much everything else besides” (354). When Boniface asked the pope for a ruling, the pope replied that it was valid.
Page after page, Heather shows us that Christendom’s history is stranger than we suppose. Not only must the New Testament be demythologized, so must the history of Christianity.
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