What is “Christianization”?

Peter Brown asks this question in the first essay in Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Canto original series) and sensibly, following the lead of RA Markus, tries to let early Christians themselves answer.

There isn’t a single answer. Early in the fourth century, for cosmological and other reasons, Christians were content to keep away from their pagan neighbors. As long as they didn’t participate in pagan rites, they were content to let the pagans participate. This attitude is evident in a couple of anecdotes:

” it comes as surprise to learn that, in the West, in the 440s, in an anxious age, overshadowed by the empire of Attila, the most Catholic princes of Ravenna would still take part in the great New Year’s festival of the Kalends of January. on that occasion, the glory of the saeculum was made manifest in the procession that accompanied the nomination of the consuls fo the year . . . Men dressed as the mighty planets (in fact, as the gods of Rome) swirled solemnly through the Hippodrome of Ravenna, bringing to earth the promise of renewal, in yet another effulgence of the eternal energy of Rome.”

And, from the East: “the statues of Livia and Augustus outside the Prytaneion of Ephesus would continue to stand throughout this period. With the sign of the cross neatly carved on their foreheads, they gazed down serenely on the prelates assembled by the emperor Augustus’ orthodox successor, Theodosius II, to the great Council of 431.”

This relaxed attitude toward pre-Constantinian culture came with its own account of Christianization: “Greek writers of the fifth century, such as the historian and apologist Theodoret of Cyrrhus, lingered, by preference, on the excitements of a great metabole . They chose to celebrate a mighty transmutation, by which the non-Christian past flowed into a triumphant Christian present. It amounted to a declaration of total victory, that left much of the past untouched.”

By contrast, Brown finds in some of Augustine’s sermons, especially the recently-discovered ones from the years 397-404, a much more anxious stance. It was not enough to avoid direct participation in pagan rites. Civic life in Carthage was infused with paganism: “The songs, dances and banquets associated with civic life were condemned. Their solemn, public character was denied . . . . Public ceremonies were caricatured by being spoken of, exclusively, in moral terms, as if they were no more than occasions for debauchery.” Christians were discouraged from using the traditional names for the days fo the week, since they included the names of idols. In short, “the wayward soul could sacrifice to the demonic powers in innumerable ways, without ever approaching a pagan altar.”

Christianization from this viewpoint had barely begun, and was a long, slogging process, rather than a “stunning, supernatural victory over the gods.” To the extent that it had begun at all, it had slipped back, for Augustine contributed to the formation of the “myth of the ‘decline of the church,’” according to which the very success of the church had “‘cooled’ the zeal of the original Christian communities.”

If Brown is right, then there are a couple of ironies here, particularly for those who follow Yoder’s account of the effects of Constantine and Constantinianism on the church. First, as I’ve noted before, Yoder’s story of a “decline of the church” after Constantine is itself a post-Constantinian narrative. Second, and more fundamentally, Brown is arguing that a sharp church-v.-world perspective also arises in the wake of Constantine. Of course, the pre-Constantinian church was often sharply antithetical; but Brown isolates a post-Constantinian form of the same thing: For Augustine, “the believer was poised . . . between two cultures, even between two historical epochs – between the growing Christian culture of the Catholic Church, with its own theology and its own distinctive habits of speech and worship, and a profane world.”

This second point is significant in two respects with regard to Yoder: It shows, first, that the truly “Constantinian” error was receding by the end of the fourth century. The “Constantinian” accommodation that Yoder claims lasts from the second or third century to the present was, in its pure form, fairly short-lived. It shows, second, that it is possible for the church to assert herself as church, as the sign of the kingdom, over-against the world, within a post-Constantinian situation. Brown suggests, in fact, that this over-against has been a dominant stance of the church since the fourth century.