Figure 3.1 S. Maria Maggiore, Rome. A fifth-century basilica with typical apse, long nave, windows and coffered ceiling. Many churches were built in this style, derived from Roman public buildings.
3
Christianization and its Challenges
In the eighty or so years that elapsed between the so-called Edict of Milan (AD 313) and the legislation of Theodosius I, culminating in 391–2 (Introduction), the Christian church and its bishops had gained a strong position within the Roman state. Most historians would also agree that Christianity itself was by now a powerful factor in society at large, even though it was still very far from universally embraced. An emphasis on religion, and on Christianization in all its forms – belief, practice, art and architecture, social organization – is a key part of the modern concept of ‘late antiquity’. But the ways in which this development is viewed by modern historians differ widely. The range of views has included, on the one hand, endorsement of the hostile attitude of Gibbon and, on the other, a triumphalist Christian perspective still apparent in some contemporary works. Other scholars play down the degree of religious change and emphasize the longevity and vitality of polytheism.1 In much current writing on late antiquity, a cultural studies approach prevails; this can be seen in many contributions to the important Journal of Early Christian Studies. This agenda has also led to attempts to downplay the stress on religion and look for the secular, and for signs of religious indifference.2 Emphasis on the importance of discourse, and on a rhetorical analysis of Christian texts, are increasingly prominent elements in the secondary literature,3 and it remains a major challenge to reconcile these approaches with theological ones, and do justice to the enormous amount of Christian writing from the period.4 In an earlier generation A.H.M. Jones and many others also made the growth of the church an important factor in explaining the end of the Roman empire.5 Appearing only one year after Jones’s Later Roman Empire, E.R. Dodds’s classic Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety6 set a different agenda, asking whether and why the period from the third century onwards was more ‘spiritual’ than what had gone before. Dodds himself approached the issues in rationalizing and psychological terms, but his simple question has lain behind much of the flood of writing in recent years about holy men and ascetics, as well as the assumptions of a generation of leading art historians.7 Much current writing is concerned to show that such preconceptions fail to do justice to the complexities of religion or religious change in late antiquity; indeed, other scholars prefer to concentrate on material culture or quantitative evidence.
Even when the power of religious beliefs to exercise a dynamic force in history is recognized, the amount of surviving evidence is such, and the level of bias in many of the sources also so great that it is still extremely challenging to understand the real nature of late antique religious change or the real religious contours of late antiquity. High on the list of questions now being addressed are: the date when paganism finally ceased to be a real alternative; the relations between Christians and Jews and the nature of Judaism and Jewish communities in late antiquity; the struggle to define Christian orthodoxy and condemn and eradicate heresy; the separation of the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches after the failure of imperial efforts to preserve church unity; and, at the end of our period, the emergence of Islam as a new monotheistic religion.
Several collective works have been published in recent years on Christianity in late antiquity. Volumes two and (particularly) three of the French Histoire du christianisme des origines à nos jours cover most of our period,8 and volume two of the Cambridge History of Christianity, edited by A. Casiday and F.W. Norris,9 deals with the post-Constantinian period to 600. It is true, however, as powerfully argued by J. Rüpke,10 that most of the huge amount of scholarship on religion, and especially on Christianity, in late antiquity has yet to contextualize it fully in relation to the dynamic social, political and economic developments in the period. As Rüpke writes, ‘intensive inter-action across ethnic and religious divides is evident everywhere. It is manifested in social contacts and elite formation, in philosophical thinking and in juridical procedure, in architectural style and in economic exchanges.’11 Studies of conversion manifest similar problems.12 The level of Christianization is extremely hard to judge, and is often over-estimated when the Christian sources are taken too much at face value,13 and the continuance of paganism or polytheism is misunderstood for similar reasons. The present chapter does not aim to solve these problems of methodology but rather to provide an introduction to key factors in religious development, inevitably with a focus on Christianity and starting with some basics.
The Physical Setting: Church Building
In the post-Constantinian period churches became progressively grander and more visible. Once persecution ended, the way was opened for the development of ecclesiastical architecture as such. Constantine ringed the city of Rome with new churches built at established sites of Christian worship connected with the martyrs,14 and city churches included St Peter’s, over the site traditionally associated with Peter’s death and burial, and the Lateran basilica, which became the cathedral church. He and his mother Helena each built churches in the Holy Land, including the Anastasis in Jerusalem, over the site believed to be the tomb of Christ, and the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem where Jesus was born, and Constantine began the octagonal church at Antioch. Later emperors followed his example. In Constantinople the earliest major churches were those of the Holy Apostles, the first church of St Sophia and that of St Irene, and during the fourth century other major churches were dedicated in important city centres such as Antioch, Nicomedia, Milan and Aquileia, some receiving imperial sponsorship and reflecting the new phenomenon of emperors as patrons of Christian buildings. The large numbers of bishops attested in the records of church councils are in themselves some guide to the spread of church building in the empire generally, for each bishop will have required his own. In some cases, existing buildings were turned into churches. Constantine made over a secular building for this purpose to the catholic Christians of Cirta in North Africa when theirs had been seized by the rival Donatist party. Christians used the secular architectural styles that already existed, especially the three-aisled basilica, with its long naves leading to an apse; this was to become one of the dominant forms of church architecture for many centuries. The larger and more prestigious of these churches rivalled earlier public buildings in size and splendour and were often commemorated in contemporary sermons or in rhetorical descriptions, known in Greek as ekphraseis.15 This account of the building (under the patronage of the Empress Eudoxia) of the cathedral at Gaza which replaced the Marneion, the great pagan temple, conveys something of the excitement felt by contemporaries, and also the extravagance of their claims to have rooted out all polytheist remains:
The holy bishop had engaged the architect Rufinus from Antioch, a dependable and expert man, and it was he who completed the entire construction. He took some chalk and marked the outline of the holy church according to the form of the plan that had been sent by the most pious Eudoxia. And as for the holy bishop, he made a prayer and a genuflexion, and commanded the people to dig. Straightaway all of them, in unison of spirit and zeal, began to dig, crying out, ‘Christ has won!’ … and so in a few days all the places of the foundations were dug out and cleared.
(Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry, 78, trans. Mango, Art, 31).16
Not all church building was imperial or undertaken by bishops; by the middle of the fourth century for example, a Syrian monk called Julian Saba had built a Christian chapel on the summit of Jabal Musa (Mt Sinai), a feat that was lauded by Ephraem the Syrian:
The circumcised boast of Mount Sinai
but you humiliated them down to the ground.
This proclamation is great
For now the church of the Son is on the Father’s mountain.17
The decoration of these new churches took time to evolve, and we have no surviving examples earlier than the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries of the striking figural mosaic decoration familiar from such churches as S. Apollinare Nuovo (c. 490) and S. Apollinare in Classe (530s–540s) at Ravenna.18 S. Maria Maggiore in Rome, built under the patronage of Pope Sixtus III (432–40), is a spectacular surviving fifth-century example of a consciously classical style of church building; the elaborate mosaics on the triumphal arch, including a representation of the Virgin Mary in the dress of a Roman empress, draw for their biblical scenes on the existing secular repertoire. Similarly, the earliest surviving Roman apse mosaic, from the church of S. Pudenziana (end of the fourth century), also uses imperial motifs, showing Christ surrounded by the apostles in the style of representations of the emperor and the Roman senate.19 The other main architectural type followed by church architects was based on the martyrium and used especially (but not only) for baptisteries, such as the octagonal Orthodox Baptistery at Ravenna (early fifth century). Many such baptisteries were attached to basilical churches, but Constantine’s ‘Golden Church’ at Antioch, for instance, which does not survive, was also octagonal.20 By the sixth century a much less classicizing architectural form had developed, with many variations ranging from the domed basilica to the so-called double-shell octagon of Sts Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople.21
Figure 3.1 S. Maria Maggiore, Rome. A fifth-century basilica with typical apse, long nave, windows and coffered ceiling. Many churches were built in this style, derived from Roman public buildings.
Justinian’s ‘Great Church’ of St Sophia still stands in Istanbul where it was dedicated in 535 to replace the earlier building on the site destroyed by fire in the Nika revolt of 532 (Chapter 5). The massive dome we now see was dedicated at Epiphany, 563, after the original had collapsed due to an earthquake in 558. St Sophia was justifiably regarded by contemporaries as a masterpiece of engineering and design, and praised in a prose description in Procopius’s Buildings and a hexameter panegyric by the poet Paul the Silentiary. Justinian’s St Sophia was paralleled on a smaller scale elsewhere, for instance at Edessa (Urfa in eastern Turkey), where the existing church was rebuilt in the sixth century and also dedicated to the Holy Wisdom.22 The more classical basilical form gradually gave way to the cross-in-square pattern familiar from Byzantine churches, whose architecture developed in step with the development of orthodox liturgy. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the public nature of these buildings and the prestige they brought to their builders, emperors or bishops alike is very apparent; another huge church, dedicated to St Polyeuktos and recently excavated, was built at Constantinople very shortly before St Sophia by Anicia Juliana, a lady from one of the very highest aristocratic families, evidently in direct rivalry with Justinian. Gregory of Tours tells how the gold ceiling of St Polyeuktos was the result of Anicia Juliana’s attempt to outwit the emperor’s designs on her fortune by using it up first on church decoration.23 Her church was sumptuously decorated, with a gold ceiling and elaborately inlaid marble columns, and adorned with a seventy-six-line verse inscription round the nave, in which she celebrated the magnificence of her donation. To judge from a later account of its construction, Justinian’s St Sophia, built so soon afterwards, was designed to outdo this church.
However, these important urban churches were only part of the story: there were also many hundreds of other, less well-known churches, not so spectacular, but just as influential locally in illustrating the impact of Christianity. A typical small sixth-century urban centre might have several, and many towns had what now seems an extraordinary number. Their construction did not follow need in terms of population size; rather, building or restoring a church was often, as in the case of the Byzantine churches restored and altered during the Vandal and Byzantine period on North African sites such as Sbeitla in Tunisia, a measure of local prestige, and might commemorate a particular saint and attract large numbers for associated festivals or liturgies. Expenditure by local well-to-do families which had gone in classical times towards the building or restoration of baths, stoas and other public buildings, was now diverted into churches and their furnishings. This is evident, for example, as late as the seventh century in parts of Syria, where even small village churches possessed elaborate collections of silver plate for liturgical use; these would consist of liturgical vessels, sometimes elaborately decorated with biblical or other scenes such as the communion of the apostles, and frequently with inscriptions giving the names of the donors, in simple formulae such as this one from a silver lampstand in the Kaper Koraon treasure, from a village east of Chalcis:
† Having vowed, they fulfilled their vow to (the church of) Sts Sergios and Bacchos. † Sergios and Symeoni(o)s and Daniel and Thomas, sons of Maximinos, village of Kaper Korao(n).24
Such items were sometimes stamped with official silver marks, which provide an accurate means of dating them. Many of the earlier Syrian churches were extremely simple in style, but here too elaborate buildings soon grew up, for instance spectacularly at the great pilgrimage centres of St Sergius at Resafa near the Euphrates, where the sixth-century cathedral again replaced an earlier building, and Qalaat Semaan, the sanctuary of St Symeon the Stylite, where a great church composed of four basilicas in a cruciform arrangement, with adjoining large cenobitic monastery and other buildings amounting to a virtual ‘pilgrim village’, grew up around the column on top of which the saint had lived for more than thirty years. Local traders soon also ensured that the pilgrims would approach the site along a road lined with shops. At Palmyra, which had generally been thought to have gone into a decline after the defeat of Zenobia in the late third century, eight churches have been identified, including a sixth-century basilica on a scale similar to that at Qalaat Semaan.25
Figure 3.2 The great church complex at Qalaat Semaan, Syria, with the remains of the pillar of St Symeon the Elder
Figure 3.3 The huge site of Palmyra, a distinctive Nabataean and Roman city built in an oasis of the Syrian desert between Damascus and the Euphates
The Rise of Bishops
As Constantine had realized, the network of bishoprics gave the Christian church a huge advantage over its rivals. Many of the new churches were the preserve of local bishops, and provided the setting for the moral, social and religious teaching which was a central part of their role.26 We know of many powerful bishops during this period. Their influence extended well beyond what in modern terms would be purely church matters: Constantine had set a precedent in giving them secular jurisdiction and guaranteeing the maintenance of bishops and clergy, as well as releasing them from tax obligations. This was an exciting development at the time for bishops such as Eusebius of Caesarea, but soon put them in a complex position vis-à-vis the emperor, in that only the orthodox (that is, those officially approved at any one time) benefited.27 In many individual areas they took on a leadership role which increased in scope in proportion to the difficulties experienced in keeping up the civil administration. In Ambrose of Milan we see an ambitious churchman keen to consolidate his own position, and who was able at times to exercise great influence over the Emperor Theodosius I.28 Another ‘political’ bishop was John Chrysostom at Constantinople (Chapter 1); however, Gregory of Nazianzus, his predecessor as bishop of Constantinople, chose to retire under pressure of complaints about his election, and John himself was forced into exile. The church historian Socrates comments on the number of enemies the latter made through his strict moral teaching and habit of excommunicating backsliders:
What contributed greatly to gain credence for these complaints was the bishop’s always eating alone and never accepting an invitation to a feast. His reasons for thus acting no one knew with any certainty, but some persons in justification of his conduct state that he had a very delicate stomach and weak digestion which obliged him to be careful in his diet, while others impute his refusal to eat in company with any one to his rigid and habitual abstinence.
(Socrates, HE VI.4)
In contrast to Ambrose and John, Augustine, their greatest contemporary, who had been strongly influenced by Ambrose in his conversion, about which he wrote in his unforgettable Confessions, spent the whole of his bishopric in the obscure town of Hippo on the North African coast, writing, preaching and living under a quasi-monastic rule.29 Christian bishops were highly aware of the importance of communication, and Augustine was a master of the art of preaching and teaching; he wrote treatises about the best techniques of reaching every individual in the congregation, from the educated to the ignorant. We cannot unfortunately assess the impact on his local congregation of his extraordinarily modern understanding of the psychology of audiences, and one might be tempted to conclude that his genius was wasted in such a setting. However, among certain ecclesiastical circles and their upper-class followers the level of travel and letter-writing was such that ideas and influences could spread very quickly, and Augustine was in communication not only with such figures as Ambrose and Jerome but also with Christian aristocrats in Rome, some of whom fled to his side when Rome was sacked in 410; new letters and sermons by Augustine identified in recent years have vividly demonstrated many of the pastoral concerns with which he grappled. A very different figure was Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in northern Syria in the mid-fifth century, another voluminous writer, theologian and controversialist, who also led a busy life dealing with the practical problems of his see. Theodoret wrote in Greek, but his see included a majority of Syriac speakers and some exotic ascetics.30 Theodoret’s theology was condemned at the Second Council of Ephesus and by the Council of 553, and he became a highly controversial figure from Ephesus I onwards, banned by the emperor from travel beyond his own see in 448 for disturbing the peace. Yet energetic though Theodoret was in fighting for his doctrinal beliefs, his many surviving letters demonstrate the care and attention which he also gave to pastoral matters, and while he was a particularly voluminous writer, this broad-ranging view of his role was not untypical.
As time went on, bishops became more, not less, important. They were usually drawn from the educated upper classes and had often had a thorough training in the classical rhetoric that still formed the main content of higher education. In the confused conditions of the fifth-century west they often saw themselves as the upholders of civilized values; some bishops, such as Martin of Tours, became the objects of cult themselves soon after their deaths.31 By the sixth century many were adapting successfully to the needs of the new rulers, such as Venantius Fortunatus, panegyrist of the Merovingian dynasty and friend of Queen (later St) Radegund, who had retired to a convent at Poitiers, and to whom Venantius wrote courtly poems, like this one on her return from a journey:
Whence has this countenance returned to me with its radiant light? What delay held you, too long absent? You had taken away my happiness with you, with your return you restore it, and you make Easter doubly a day for celebration. Though the seed just now begins to rise in the furrows, I, in seeing you this day, already reap the harvest.
(Poem 8.10, trans. George, Venantius Fortunatus, 197)32
Paulinus, bishop of Nola, is an early fifth-century example of someone from an upper-class background who renounced much of his wealth to settle down at Nola in Campania, where he adopted the role of religious patron and built an ecclesiastical complex celebrating his patron St Felix, just as his friend Sulpicius Severus did in honour of St Martin at Primuliacum in Gaul.33
The enhanced importance of the papacy, which is especially apparent under Gregory the Great (590–604), was another product not only of the contemporary fragmentation of Italy in the late sixth century but also of the kind of personal ability and energy which a good many other bishops also showed. Clearly the see of Rome was likely to occupy a special position, in terms of both secular authority and religious prestige; similarly, the patriarch of Constantinople, though not technically superior to the other eastern patriarchs (of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem) despite being declared second in precedence to that of Rome in 381, was liable to be both more personally involved in state politics, and more closely connected with the emperor. Emperors indeed might often intervene in appointing or exiling the patriarch. In 553, when the existing patriarch died just as the Fifth Ecumenical Council was beginning, the Emperor Justinian took care to promote a monk called Eutychius, a candidate whom he rightly believed would help to get the imperial view accepted. Having changed his own doctrinal views in 565, however, he deposed the same man when this time he refused to go along with them. Eutychius spent years in exile but was restored when his successor died, late in the reign of Justinian’s successor Justin II (565–78). However, the relation between church and state was not so black and white as this might suggest; high-handed actions such as these were not in practice the norm, and theories of so-called ‘Caesaropapism’, i.e., the supposed control of the church by the ruler, go much too far.34
Religious affairs could frequently be turbulent. In 391 Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, took the opportunity offered by anti-pagan legislation by Theodosius I to encourage Christians to fight with pagans at the hill where the great temple of Serapis was located, and they were further encouraged by a letter from the emperor which, in resolving the situation, named as martyrs the Christians who had been killed; this led to an attack on the temple itself, as well as destruction of busts of Serapis throughout the city, and assaults on other temples at Canopus (Chapter 1).35 The situation at Alexandria was particularly explosive. It was the home of a strong pagan intellectual tradition and also of very forceful Christian leaders and their followers; the lynching of Hypatia was an exception which arose from local conditions. Christians often claimed in building inscriptions to have abolished pagan cult and converted temples into churches, and while it is necessary to read their claims with a degree of scepticism, such conversions can indeed be seen during the next two centuries all over the empire as part of the changing urban topography in late antiquity.36 There were also many incidents involving violence between rival groups of Christians; for instance, the clashes between Arians and orthodox in Constantinople in the early fifth century.37 Monks could be a disruptive influence, like the so-called ‘Sleepless Ones’ from Antioch who caused such trouble in Constantinople that they were attacked in 426 by rival mobs and had to be expelled in order to preserve the peace. Both the Council of Ephesus in 431 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 were preceded by violent scenes between partisans. So great was the furore surrounding the rivalry between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople in 431 that the bishops themselves nearly came to blows, and the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 also concluded amid scenes of violence.
As we have seen, two important church councils, later to be remembered as ‘ecumenical’, took place during the fifth century – Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451) – and they were followed under Justinian by a second council of Constantinople (also known as the Fifth Ecumenical Council, 553–4). The sense of a universal faith defined by general councils had grown gradually from the time of the first Council of Nicaea (325), and many different issues remained matters of contention – from the central questions about christology (the definition of the status of Christ) to that of the authority of the major churches and the rank of the see of Constantinople in relation to Rome. Besides the records of their proceedings (‘acts’), councils also issued rulings (‘canons’) on matters of doctrine, ecclesiastical authority and countless details of Christian behaviour, especially in matters to do with the clergy, such as clerical continence and celibacy, on which the west insisted more strictly than the east. The disputes were passionately argued and often resulted in bitter struggles between individual bishops and their supporters. It was the emperor’s role to call ecumenical councils, and he could exert strong influence on their outcome, as Constantine had done in 325 and as Justinian did in 553–4. In the latter case, the proceedings lasted for many months, for most of which Pope Vigilius, who had been earlier summoned to Constantinople and unceremoniously treated by the emperor, refused to attend. After much harassment, a decree of excommunication, and vacillation on his own part, he was prevailed upon to recant his position, but he still did not attend the council, and Justinian’s railroading of the council’s decisions failed to convince the western church or to satisfy the east (Chapter 5).38 After the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Emperor Marcian issued an edict in which he hoped to persuade people that the controversies were finally settled:
At last that which he wished, with earnest prayer and desire, had come to pass. Controversy about the orthodox religion of Christians has been put away; remedies at length have been found for culpable error, and diversity of opinion among the peoples has issued in common consent and concord.
(Stevenson, Creeds, 341)
Later emperors including Zeno (474–91) tried to quell disputes and bring reconciliation, or by the seventh century even legislated to stop further discussion; Marcian’s words were a statement of hope for the future rather than a description of what had actually happened.
It would be a mistake to see these doctrinal conflicts as mere surrogates for underlying ‘real’ issues of power and individual or ecclesiastical authority. Not only was religion – pagan/polytheist, Jewish or Christian – at the centre of the stage, but the Christian church was increasingly claiming a leading role in political, economic and social life, and its organization and beliefs mattered.39 Christian doctrines and the many permutations according to which Christians could disagree, aroused the passionate feelings of contemporaries. Some of the matters of disagreement were practical ones, as, for instance, when to celebrate Easter, a matter on which local traditions differed, but strictly theological issues, such as the question of the divine and human natures of Christ and the status of the Virgin Mary, were seen as being even more important. In the early part of the period, Arianism, focusing on the relation of the Son to the Father, was still a major issue, particularly in relation to the contemporary barbarian problems, since nearly all the barbarian groups who converted adopted an Arian form of Christianity. By the middle of the fifth century the key issues centred on the divine and human natures of Christ. Nestorius was condemned by the Council of Ephesus (431), but his teachings lived on after Chalcedon in the insistence on Christ’s humanity, which characterized the church in east Syria and Sasanian Persia (the Church of the East).
The opposite extreme was Monophysitism, or as many prefer, Miaphysitism (referring to those who believed that Christ had one wholly divine physis, or ‘nature’), and it was this belief which, though condemned at Chalcedon, was to constitute the main obstacle to Christian unity in the next century and a half. When Justinian tried to reconcile the eastern churches by proposing a modification of the decrees of Chalcedon, he succeeded only in offending the west. Some indication of the strength of opinion can be judged from the fact that before Chalcedon, Eutyches, a priest of Constantinople taken to be an extreme ‘one-nature’ advocate, had been condemned by a local synod (448) and immediately reinstated by a rival council (the Second Council of Ephesus or ‘Robber Council’, 449) (Chapter 1). The new emperor Marcian and his pious wife Pulcheria were instrumental in bringing it about that the full Council of Chalcedon issued on 25 October 451 a decree affirming the two natures of Christ.40 Discussion of the so-called ‘Tome’ (letter) of Pope Leo I, which laid emphasis on two natures (substantiae) (Chapter 1), occupied a great deal of the council’s time. The Tome was regarded with suspicion by the followers of Cyril of Alexandria, and many easterners regarded the outcome of Chalcedon as a betrayal of the latter’s principles. The difference was finally to crystallize into outright schism when, under Justinian the Miaphysite, Jacob Bar’adai, was ordained bishop of Edessa and proceeded to ordain non-Chalcedonian clergy throughout Syria, thus paving the way for a separatist church (known as ‘Jacobite’, after Jacob, or as ‘Syrian Orthodox’) which was to survive the Arab conquest, and which still exists today (Chapters 5 and 8).41
Thus despite the enormous effort and intense feelings which went into the councils, religious divisions were not healed; both the church of Rome and the catholic church of North Africa, which survived persecution during the Vandal period to re-emerge as a strong force after the Byzantine reconquest in 534, were strongly Chalcedonian, whereas the council met with opposition by many in the east. The emperors of the late fifth and sixth centuries found it increasingly difficult to achieve the ecclesiastical unity which was politically so necessary. Zeno (474–91) attempted to calm down the reaction to Chalcedon with a letter known as the Henotikon, and this held for a while, with the Emperor Anastasius (491–518) leaning towards the Miaphysites, but Justinian’s uncle and predecessor Justin I (518–27) turned instead to the persecution of non-Chalcedonians, thus ending a breach between Constantinople and the strongly Chalcedonian papacy known as the ‘Acacian schism’ (484–518). Justinian’s attempted reconquest of the west, conducted in the name of the restoration of orthodoxy, made these problems even more acute. In the seventh century the papacy was again set on collision course with the new religious policies of mononergism (‘one energy’) and monotheletism (‘one will’) promoted under Heraclius (610–41) and opposed both in Rome and in the east (Chapter 9).
Emperors and the Church
The emperors who followed Constantine were all Christian except for Julian (361–3) and all followed Constantine’s example of active participation in church affairs. However, the actual situation was much less clear-cut. Eusebius of Caesarea developed a political theory which saw Constantine as God’s representative on earth, and this idea was to become the basis of Byzantine political theory.42 Emperors could make and depose patriarchs and summon and influence ecumenical councils. They could also engage in theological discussion themselves, and publish works on doctrinal issues, as Justinian did, and emperors legislated throughout the period on matters concerning the church, attempting, for example, to control access to ordination (which carried tax privileges), and regulating the powers of bishops.43 But while emperors might also receive relics in formal processions and take part in the increasingly elaborate rituals of the liturgy in St Sophia, where they were accorded special privileges and entrance to the sanctuary, they were not themselves yet crowned or anointed in a religious ceremony. Bishops could on occasion humble emperors, and the church often resisted the imperial will. Direct conflict between emperors and patriarchs was to become a regular feature of Byzantine life in later centuries. In practice, the emperor and the church, or churches, stood in an uneasy relationship towards each other, a balance rendered still more delicate once imperial rule in the west ended.
The religious involvement of members of the imperial house did not show itself only in the political sphere. Constantine’s mother, Helena, had set a precedent by visiting the Holy Land and founding churches there.44 This did much to establish the idea of Christian pilgrimage, and travellers of all kinds made their way to Jerusalem and the Holy Land during the later fourth century. Some rich Christian ladies founded religious houses there which they ran on the model of their own aristocratic households:45 Paula, Fabiola, Marcella, Melania all made the pious journey to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Later in the fifth century the pattern was continued by Eudocia, the Athenian wife of Theodosius II, who left for the Holy Land in 438 after Melania’s encouragement, delivering an elegant speech at Antioch on the way, which she concluded with a quotation from Homer.46 She had Cyril of Alexandria with her, and was received at Sidon by Melania herself, whom she described as her spiritual mother.47 However, Eudocia was a disruptive figure, and her rivalry with her deeply religious sister-in-law Pulcheria showed itself on her return; she found herself again in the Holy Land in virtual exile a few years later, and, once there, her estranged husband forced her to reduce the magnificence of her household. All the same, Eudocia’s patronage in the Holy Land in general was extensive and included churches, monasteries and hospices, some of which she recorded in her own epigrams.48 A later empress, Theodora, the wife of Justinian (died 548), was remembered by eastern Miaphysites for her protection in Constantinople of their clergy and the monks driven to take refuge there by her husband’s policies. We are even told that Justinian as well as Theodora would visit the non-Chalcedonians in the Palace of Horm-isdas, talk with them and seek their blessing,49 and this was continued by their imperial successors, Justin II and his wife Sophia, who is also said to have inclined towards Miaphysitism. Theodora is notorious for beginning adult life as a variety performer in shows of dubious morality; after her elevation to pious respectability as empress she included among her charitable acts the foundation of a convent for reformed prostitutes known as ‘Repentance’,50 and she was revered in the eastern church as a symbol of repentance in her own life. In the seventh century, Heraclius was one of the most energetic emperors in attempting to resolve the divisions in the eastern church, even after the split in the sixth century (Chapter 9), but he outraged the church by marrying his niece Martina as his second wife.
Private and Public Religion
Emperors involved themselves in religious matters for reasons of state, but they were as committed as anyone else to the issues involved, and often, of course, personal interest and political advantage went side by side. As we saw, an apparent general increase in religious sensibility has been seen as one of the salient features of the age. This assumption might be tested through an approach in terms of private versus public religiosity, or of practice rather than belief,51 and indeed we have a great deal of the sort of evidence (saints’ lives, monastic anecdotes, ascetic literature) which seems to allow us glimpses of the lives of ordinary people. In the 1960s E.R. Dodds turned to psychology in order to explain what he saw as a turn to religious faith in the third century. Others have seen the change in terms of a growing irrationality and belief in the miraculous. But while there was certainly a great deal of attention devoted to religion in late antiquity, and while Christians produced large amounts of writing about it, it is another matter to deduce that individuals themselves had drastically changed. Much of the surviving literature is normative, explicitly designed to promote certain ideals of Christian life, and suggests a much greater conformity to these Christian ideals than was probably the case, when compared with more casual remarks made in passing in the same and other sources. Moreover, saints’ lives are of their nature apologetic, designed to praise the saint and emphasize his or her role in converting pagans, Jews and backsliders; they often have other agendas too – for instance, to do with promoting one particular version of Christianity, or providing a foundation story for a local cult or pilgrim site. It was in the interest of the church and of individual bishops to emphasize the process of Christianization, play down the evidence for continuing pagan cults and claim that pagan temples had been totally destroyed. When assessing matters of belief and individual feelings in this ‘age of spirituality’, therefore, we must try to remember that much of the evidence we now have is designed of its very nature to lead to one conclusion only. The sermons preached by John Chrysostom in the late fourth century suggest that many among his regular congregation continued happily with practices he regarded as immoral and unchristian. As late as 691–2, the Council in Trullo, held in Constantinople, was still condemning pagan practices and trying to regulate the lives of those who seemed to be only nominal Christians. So while some kinds of evidence – for instance, letters and the Christian funerary inscriptions which began to appear on the mosaic floors of basilicas – do seem to allow us to perceive the change in personal faith, even here individual belief is often hard to detect beneath standard formulae.
Pagans and Christians
It is nevertheless obvious that Christianity became increasingly important during late antiquity, both in terms of practice and – especially through preaching, personal contact and the regulation of membership of Christian congregations – in the personal lives of many people. This was certainly more evident in the cities, where the church was, as we have seen, highly organized, and it seems likely that pagan practices continued in the countryside much longer than in the towns; if we are to believe his own account, John, bishop of Ephesus under Justinian, converted 70,000 pagans in Asia Minor in the mid-sixth century.52 ‘Conversion’ is perhaps not quite the right word; a Greek inscription from Sardis, for instance, records the internment of ‘unholy and abominable pagans’ there by the referendarius Hyperechios.53 The persistence of pagan cult antagonized aggressive Christians and worried the authorities sufficiently for them to resort at times to violent measures, such as orders for the forcible closure of certain temples. Much of the polytheism of intellectuals centred on the philosophical schools of Athens and Alexandria (Chapter 6), and it is extremely hard to judge the broader extent of pagan survival when so much of the evidence is highly biased; however, it seems clear that pagan cult continued in many places long after it was officially outlawed.54 Many reasons, of course, combined to make people adopt Christianity, including personal advantage for those hoping for preferment from a Christian government, simple convenience and avoidance of the strong anti-pagan measures taken by successive emperors. Conversion was not always whole-hearted or exclusive, and many, as always, continued with habitual practices and held a variety of conflicting beliefs at the same time; they would probably have been surprised to have this pointed out to them, though Christian writers and bishops did their best. There were still pagans among well-to-do families in early sixth-century Aphrodisias, and the student body at Alexandria in the same period contained both pagans and Christians; the two groups sometimes clashed (Chapter 6). Trials of pagans were still being held in Constantinople in the late sixth century after a scandalous series of events at Heliopolis (see below);55 Justinian also conducted purges of pagan intellectuals in high places at Constantinople which led to death and confiscation of property, as well as the effective closure of the Neoplatonic Academy at Athens (Chapter 5):
This caused great fear. The emperor decreed that those who held Hellenic [i.e. pagan] beliefs should not hold any state office, whilst those who belonged to the other heresies were to disappear from the Roman state, after they had been given a period of three months in order to embrace the orthodox faith.
(Malalas, Chronicle, trans. Jeffreys, 263)
In considering the secular literature (and indeed art) of the period it is hard to draw the line between what is classical and what is actually pagan; indeed, ‘Hellene’ itself became the regular Greek word for ‘pagan’.56 The distinction was also seen as a problem by Christians themselves, some of whom attacked Greek classical literature and ‘Hellenes’ in no uncertain terms. The modern controversy about the secular Latin literature and classicizing art produced in Rome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries is also in part about a matter of definition: the appearance of classical or mythological themes is not in itself evidence that its owners or patrons were not themselves Christian, and patrons were as often Christian themselves as pagan; there was in any case considerable similarity between Christian and secular luxury artefacts such as silver plate and ivories and the modern distinction between Christian and ‘pagan’ objects is misleading.57 However, religious allegiances among the Roman aristocracy of the late fourth and early fifth centuries were complex; despite the apparent attitude of the state to pagan cult, members of the senatorial aristocracy in Rome went on holding multiple priesthoods, and this was no empty formality, while emperors themselves continued to exercised some pontifical functions even while legislating about Christianity.58 Cyril Mango is right to emphasize that the Byzantine thought-world owed more to ‘a construct of the Christian and Jewish apologists built up in the first five or six centuries A.D.’ than to any real conception of classical culture,59 but he probably underestimates the persistence of pagan habit and practice – not necessarily to be identified with ‘classical’ ideas.
As for the actual process of Christianization within late antique society, it took place slowly. It is hard to judge the reality of religious conviction in a society from sources which are often polemical or exaggerated. It was a regular feature in Christian literature to compile catalogues of pagan cults and heresies, each with its Christian counter-argument, and this has led to a general caricature of paganism in the Christian sources. The trend started at least as early as the second century, and was a major theme in Christian writing thereafter; the ‘Medicine chest’ of ‘remedies’ against heresy written by the bishop Epiphanius of Salamis in Cyprus in the 370s quickly became a classic and was a model for Augustine and for many Greek writers including John of Damascus in the eighth century. As we have seen, the state officially claimed to be imposing Christianity from the reign of Theodosius I onwards; Christians took advantage of imperial legislation to attack pagan temples and statues, and occasionally the violence was carried out by soldiers at imperial command. However, attempts to carry out the orders were often greeted with resistance by the local population, and clashes could also arise from personal grievances and rivalries, as they did among the students at Alexandria.60 The main temple at Aphrodisias, for instance, was not converted into a church until the sixth century, and well over a century after Theodosius, Justinian was still legislating against pagans and issuing laws against dissidents including heretics, Manichaeans and homosexuals, particularly those who were teachers.61 But while Justinian certainly pursued a strongly pro-Christian policy, this legislation should also be seen in relation to the traditions of previous imperial legislation and the generally repressive attitude of the state in this period towards all minority groups, including, for instance, Jews and Samaritans, and it is difficult to know what the charges really meant. The number of attested trials is rather few, and while the situation of those who thought of opposing the government may perhaps be gauged from the fact that Procopius says at the beginning of his violently critical Secret History that he could only have published his work during Justinian’s lifetime on pain of death, one must also make allowances for the literary trope of secrecy. In the high-profile trials which took place in the 580s no less a person than the patriarch Gregory of Antioch was summoned to Constantinople and charged with paganism. His close friend, Anatolius, the provincial governor, was suspected of involvement with pagan cult in Edessa, and the affair developed to include suicide, murder and an icon concealing an image of Apollo. The trials eventually took place in Constantinople to the accompaniment of popular rioting against the leniency of the Emperor Tiberius and the patriarch Eutychius, after which Anatolius, the former governor, was thrown to the beasts in the Hippodrome, then impaled and finally his body was torn apart by wolves.62 The reign of Justinian had also seen a hardening of Byzantine attitudes towards Jews and Samaritans, especially after major Samaritan revolts in 529 and 555; in the latter the proconsul of Palestine was killed. Predictably, during the affair in the late sixth century, the hunt was extended to include Jews, Samaritans and Montanists.
How genuine these charges were is hard to establish. Paganism certainly offered a convenient handle for a political or personal attack, but the sources generally suggest that in the east until a late date many people of all ranks did retain beliefs and practices of pagan origin alongside their Christianity. By no means every temple had been converted into a church when John of Ephesus, the future church historian, was sent in 542 on his evangelizing mission to western Asia Minor. It seems that in the west, with its different history, paganism was less persistent except in the countryside; this underlines its connection in the east with the as yet unbroken tradition of classical education and culture. But even in the countryside, the fact that western bishops such as Caesarius of Arles in the early sixth century placed a very high priority on evangelization, suggests that the battle was by no means won.63 Towards the end of our period, mission in the northern provinces also came from outside, especially with the rise of the Celtic church and travels of missionary monks.64
In attempting to trace the extent of the continuation of paganism in our period, the concern of preachers and government alike for the eradication of pagan practice is a striking feature, from John Chrysostom in Constantinople at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries to the acts of the late seventh-century Council in Trullo. On one level it was important for Christian writers both symbolically and tactically to assert their superiority over paganism, but this can also be taken together with evidence drawn from a wide variety of sources to indicate that pagan practice still continued. This will have been more the case in rural or remote areas – such as the Negev, where despite the building of churches in the towns most inscriptions were still pagan until the sixth century65 – but was by no means confined to them. As Alan Cameron argues,66 there was no single and clearly identifiable ‘paganism’, and pagan practice and belief took many different forms. One persistent theme which recurs in many different kinds of Christian texts of the period is the tendency to believe in fate and especially in astrology, and the stories of cures by healing saints and the many surviving amulets from this period show a wide range of continuing beliefs, just as Christian healing shrines sometimes continued earlier pagan practices. While Robert Markus has suggested that by the sixth century Christianization in the west involved a ‘closing in of horizons’,67 it would be a mistake to imagine that Christianization was ever total, either in the west or in the east.
Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity
A key development in recent scholarship has been a greater emphasis on the role played by Jews and Judaism in late antiquity; this has gone alongside a renewed debate about when it can be said with confidence that Christianity and Judaism were truly separate religions and with a tendency to set this process much later than previously assumed.68 A particularly striking piece of evidence is provided by inscriptional evidence from Aphrodisias in Asia Minor which commemorates a ‘memorial’ set up by sixty-eight Jews, three proselytes and fifty-four theosebeis (‘godfearers’, that is, persons who attended the synagogue but had not yet fully converted to Judaism). Previously thought to date from the early third century, the two inscriptions which together give the names of all these people are now dated to the fourth and fifth centuries, and indicate a large and thriving Jewish community, which has also left its trace in numerous Jewish graffiti.69 Late antique synagogues and Jewish communities have also been identified elsewhere – for instance, at Sardis (sixth-century) and at Hierapolis in Phrygia, Gerasa (Jerash) in modern Jordan, and recently Saranda in modern Albania – and we know from Christian complaints, among which those of John Chrysostom are particularly shrill, that Christians were often attracted enough to Judaism to attend the synagogues; this seems to have continued until a late date. Late antique Judaism was fragmented, and varied greatly from place to place, but it is clear from recent research that diaspora Judaism flourished and was well integrated into Roman society. It was also late antiquity that saw the flourishing of the great rabbinic schools of Palestine and Babylonia which produced the Mishnah and the Talmud. But from the reign of Theodosius I imperial legislation was increasingly negative towards the Jews, and while Judaism was never declared illegal, imperial legislation often classed Jews together with heretics and pagans; the Jewish patriarchate came to an end c. 425 and during his reign Justinian suppressed two Samaritan revolts with great severity. A string of literary dialogues, supposedly between Christians and Jews, had as their dramatic aim the discomfiture of the latter and their conversion to Christianity. But in Palestine itself the Jewish population grew during late antiquity and was able to build impressive synagogues with elaborate mosaic decoration.70 Such was their strength as an element in the population that they were popularly believed by Christians to have assisted both the Persian army and the Arabs in the seventh century (Chapter 9).
Monks, Ascetics and Holy Men
This was the age of the holy man and the ascetic. It was now that the monastic movement spread throughout the Mediterranean, first with those who, such as Antony and Pachomius in the late third and early fourth centuries, retired to the Egyptian desert, then with a multitude of formal and informal religious communities of all types. Some monasteries followed the eastern rule of St Basil or, in the west, that of John Cassian, on which Cassiodorus’ monastery at Squillace was based.71 The numbers of monks could be very large, allegedly amounting to many thousands in Egypt alone: to take a few examples from the literary sources, in the early fifth century Palladius tells us in his Lausiac History that there were 2,000 monks at Alexandria, 5,600 male ascetics and hermits at Nitria, and 1,200 monks and twelve women’s convents at Antinoe, while at Tabennisi there were 7,000 monks, including 1,300 in the monastery of Pachomius alone, as well as a women’s monastery of 400 nuns. The great fifth-century abbot Shenoute, one of the most important early writers in Coptic, presided over several thousand monks and nuns at the White Monastery in Upper Egypt. However, it is important to emphasize the actual variety of the religious life at this period, which did not by any means always involve living in communities like these. Many dedicated religious, especially women, still lived in small groups or even in their own homes, while in the desert many communities adopted the form of the laura, where individual monks lived in their own cells around the central church, to which they typically returned weekly for common worship.72 By the fifth century many who did not adopt the religious life themselves were also deeply influenced both by the ideals of asceticism and by the example of individual ascetics, or that they had taken some of these ideals into their own lives and their own faith. Ascetic aims were not limited to organized religious communities, nor indeed to Christianity; they were preached with equal fervour by the Neoplatonic philosophers of the fourth and fifth centuries, who advocated abstinence from sex, rich food and luxury of all kinds (Chapter 6). There were many similarities between pagan and Christian asceticism, especially at more intellectual levels, and Neoplatonic teaching advocated a bodily regime based on prudent restraint (askesis – ‘training’), including sexual continence, following the precepts of the early Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who had been revived as a model, for instance, by the early fourth-century philosopher Iamblichus in his treatise On the Pythagorean Life.73 But some Christians went much further, following the pattern laid down in the narrative of the temptations of Antony, directing more of their attention to the avoidance of sexual lust and adopting exotic forms of self-mortification.74
Monasticism has been seen as a kind of ‘protest’ movement against the institutionalized church, but this ignores the fact that the ascetic ideal in general (renunciation of bodily comfort, including warm clothes, adequate diet, cleanliness and especially sexual relations) had become prominent in early Christianity from an extremely very early date. For our understanding of the particular ways in which it was taken up in late antiquity the late-fourth century Life of Antony, attributed to Athanasius, is extremely important. It set the pattern for the classic ascetic life, with its opposition between the world and true spirituality, its lurid scenario of temptation overcome and its desert setting, where lions are tamed by the spiritual power of the holy man. In addition, it became required reading for educated Christians. Augustine heard of the powerful effect it could exert shortly before his own conversion to the ascetic Christian life in Milan in 387: he and his friend Alypius were visited by a Christian called Ponticianus, who
told the story of Antony, the Egyptian monk, a name held in high honour among your servants [Augustine is addressing God], though up to that time Alypius and I had never heard of him. When he [Ponticianus] discovered this, he dwelt on the story, instilling in us who were ignorant an awareness of the man’s greatness, and expressing astonishment that we did not know of him. … From there his conversation moved on to speak of the flocks in the monasteries and their manner of life well pleasing to you and the fertile deserts of the wilderness.
(Conf. VIII.6.14, trans. Chadwick, 192)
Monks occasionally engaged in highly political activity, and there could be sharp tensions at times between them and the civil authorities. But it is a mistake to separate ‘monasticism’, still extremely fluid at this period, from the ascetic movement in general, and there is no doubt that ascetic ideas and practice percolated through society as a whole. By the fifth century, some ascetics, especially in Syria, were practising spectacular forms of renunciation, such as the stylites, who lived for many years at a time on platforms on the top of specially erected pillars. We have already encountered Symeon the Elder, who died in 459, having lived for decades on a pillar at Qalaat Semaan in Syria. Daniel (died 493), a disciple of Symeon, lived on a pillar near Constantinople for thirty-three years, and Symeon the Younger (d. 592) had his pillar near Antioch.
All became famous in their lifetimes and their influence, prayers and advice were ought by people of all levels of society. Then there were the ‘grazers’ who lived only off grass and shoots, and some who chained themselves up and lived in cowsheds. Others so vehemently renounced worldly pretensions that they pretended to be insane. These included both men and women; one example is the sixth-century ascetic known as Symeon the Holy Fool, who according to his seventh-century Life defied conventions to such an extent that on one occasion at Emesa (Homs) he tried to take a bath in the women’s baths, only to be roundly beaten and ejected by the indignant women bathers.75 Other forms of asceticism involved practical charity, as with Euphemia and her daughter in Amida, and Euphemia’s sister Mary in Tella, recorded by John of Ephesus, who spent their lives caring for the sick and needy, but who were not afraid when they felt the need to embark on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Figure 3.4 Pottery pilgrim token (eulogia) depicting St Symeon Stylites the Younger (late sixth–seventh century) on his pillar at the Wondrous Mountain near Antioch. Together with bottles (ampullae) containing holy oil, water or earth, such tokens were regularly taken home as souvenirs from pilgrim shrines.
As with most historical phenomena, there are several convergent reasons for the popularity and prevalence of such holy men and women in this period. The classic discussion by Peter Brown, dating from 1971, suggested that they should be seen, especially in Syria, in anthropological terms, as a type of rural patron, defusing the tensions and difficulties felt by the villagers.76 Brown’s article acted as an enormous stimulus, but it was quickly pointed out that holy men were often to be found in or near cities, where they might attract the attention of the wealthy elite, or even the emperors (the stylite Daniel is such an example), and that functional explanations do not make clear how the ascetics were seen by contemporaries or necessarily how they viewed themselves, nor do they give enough attention to the rhetorical dynamics of many of the narratives on which we depend. There were in fact many different sorts of holy men and women; they were by no means an exclusively rural phenomenon, even though the ascetic idea of retirement from the world might make a rural or desert environment seem particularly appropriate. Fleeing into the farther desert is a topos in the monastic literature. When most would-be ascetics fled to the desert, however, whether in Upper Egypt, Judaea or Syria, they tended not to go very far from the settled areas on which they depended for food and sustenance. Archaeology reveals that the Judaean desert was crossed by a network of paths linking the monasteries together, and we know that in many cases the monks retained close relations with the organized church and the patriarch in Jerusalem. The staple diet of the Judaean monks seems to have been bread, for which it was necessary to buy wheat, sometimes from far afield since it could not be grown in the desert environment. Other activities of the monks, such as basket-weaving, also involved them in market transactions with the outside world, while the actual building of the monasteries implied a major investment and had a considerable effect on the local economy. The monasteries of the fifth and sixth centuries in the Judaean desert north and south of Jerusalem were themselves part of the process of settlement of population on marginal land which is a striking feature of Palestine and Syria in that period (Chapter 7).
Hospitality was seen as a central part of monastic duty. The coenobitic monastery of Martyrius not far from Jerusalem had a large hospice for visitors, with its own church and stables. Some solitaries fled to remoter places in order to escape the numbers of visitors, but it was part of the holy man’s role to interact with the rest of society, as indeed Antony had done; thus, like many others, Amoun, an early monk at Nitria in Egypt, received visitors and performed miracles. The monks needed other people on whom to practice their charity, and to demonstrate the ascetic ideal, and hospitality was an important part of their way of life. The Lives of the Desert Fathers record many such visits:
We also put in at Nitria, where we saw many great anchorites. Some of them were natives of that region, others were foreigners. They excelled each other in the virtues and engaged in rivalry over their ascetic practices, struggling to surpass each other in their manner of life. Some applied themselves to contemplation, others to the active life. When a group of them saw us approaching from a distance through the desert, some came to meet us with water, others washed our feet, and others laundered our clothes. Some of them invited us to a meal, others to learn about the virtues, and others to contemplation and the knowledge of God. Whatever ability each one had, he hastened to use it for our benefit.
(Russell, Lives of the Desert Fathers, 105)
It suited the monks to complain about the visitors who disturbed their prayer, while actually encouraging them to come. Similarly, though, as we saw, ascetics did often enough live in towns, it was debated whether one could in fact practise holiness while living in the city. But it is a mistake to pose the issue too much in terms of urban versus rural life, for in the monastic discourse the ‘desert’ and the ‘city’ stood for individual spirituality and external ties respectively rather than for actual locations. And while the holy man needed other people, every community, large or small, also needed its own holy man; he might not be called upon very often, but his presence and his holiness were essential. All sections of society came to take this for granted; even the sophisticated Procopius relates how when Hephthalite archers in the Persian army of Cavadh tried to shoot at the holy man James, their arrows would not leave their bows. Jacob had taken himself to a retreat two days’ journey from Amida where he lived on seeds; the proud local people had built a rustic shelter around him, with gaps allowing him to see out and to converse. Cavadh asked him to restore the firepower of his archers. James complied, and the king offered him anything he asked for, at which the holy man asked for the safety of any who chose to take asylum with him from the present war.77
Like much of the evidence used in Peter Brown’s article, this example relates to Syria, where asceticism took a particularly striking form, in part because the ascetic ideal had been well established at an early date, and was not confined solely to Christianity – Gnostics, Marcionites and Manichaeans all preached renunciation.78
There was as yet no formal process for the recognition of a holy person as a saint, but holy men and women were soon recognized as such, and it was a function of hagiography, the writing of saints’ lives, to justify their claim to holiness. The recognition of such special figures went together with an importance attached to their relics and an increasing belief in their capacity to perform miracles.79 The possession of relics of saints or martyrs gave prestige and power to Christian sites and their bishops, and ordinary Christians began to be buried in and near their shrines. In the late sixth century the Life of Eutychius the patriarch of Constantinople devotes the section about his exile in the Pontus to a listing of the miracles he performed there. The shrine of Thekla at Seleucia with its huge church and all necessary buildings to accommodate large numbers of pilgrims was enlarged on a grand scale in the fifth century by the Emperor Zeno. Thekla, a character from a very popular work of early apocryphal literature, was an untypical saint, and the fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla is a much more literary production than most of the collections of such miracle stories. Several of these survive from the sixth and seventh centuries, associated with major shrines including those of the martyrs Sts Cosmas and Damian in Constantinople, Sts Cyrus and John at Menuthis in Egypt (composed by Sophronius the later patriarch of Jerusalem, for whom see Chapter 9) and St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and listing the miraculous cures and answers provided to pilgrims.80 Saints and their shrines specialized in particular diseases (for instance St Artemios, whose shrine was also in Constantinople, specialized in curing hernias and genital diseases), and Sts Cosmas and Damian and St Cyrus were all reputed to have practised medicine themselves. The activities of such shrines required management and were not without their tensions. In the Miracles of Sts Cyrus and John there is an evident attempt to promote the healing powers of the saints over the alternative of ‘Hellenic medicine’. The various collections of miracle stories also engaged in sectarian disputes, and during the sixth century there was evidently a rationalizing challenge to this burgeoning resort to the powers of saints, with several works written in the late sixth century to defend the idea that souls, especially the souls of saints, continued to exercise power after death. One such work was written by Pope Gregory the Great, who had spent time in Constantinople before he became pope and engaged in the debates going on there.81
Pilgrims also took home souvenirs – lamps, tokens, bottles for water from the River Jordan or earth from the Holy Land. The many surviving examples of such items are often dated to around the sixth century, and are an indication of the extent of the pilgrim trade experienced in Palestine and elsewhere at that period, including the shrine of St Menas not far from Alexandria in Egypt.82 Clay tokens from the shrine of St Symeon the Younger, south-west of Antioch, offer another sixth-century example. These tokens often carried images of the saint, and are one manifestation of what came to be a growing veneration of holy images alongside the relics that were essential to the pilgrim shrines (Chapter 9). The experience of pilgrims when they visited these centres was complex, and no doubt exciting.83 A pilgrimage centre would typically have one or more churches, with other buildings for the reception and care of pilgrims; such sites were also often the location for the major market and fair held in the area. Monasteries, too, built all round the Mediterranean, were sometimes on a big scale and included facilities for visitors, and many other hospices for travellers (xenodocheia) and hospitals for caring for the sick were founded by wealthy Christians and imperial patrons.84
The Church and Wealth
As the institutional profile of the Christian church became more and more pronounced, tensions arose between its increasing wealth and its ideals of poverty and charity. Almsgiving had been a principle of the early church, and widows and orphans had been maintained by individual congregations since the second and third centuries. This took concrete form in the foundation of buildings financed for the very purpose. Through almsgiving, and through the financing of such institutions, the church, bishops, or, as often, individual wealthy Christians were effective in redistributing wealth; at the same time, through church building and other forms of patronage, these agencies took a major part in changing the appearance and the economic basis of urban life (Chapter 4). But though there was a clear relation between classical benefactions (euergetism) and Christian patronage, the aims and motivation of the latter also drew on other roots, in particular the Scriptural injunction to renounce wealth and give to the poor (Matt. 19:21). Unlike classical benefactions, Christian charity was, at least in principle, aimed at the poor, of whom indeed the Roman elite had been barely aware. Now, ironically, the poor acquired visibility.85 Naturally, not all rich Christians were inclined to give up their luxurious lifestyles, as we learn from the sermons condemning them for continued ostentation, and a considerable literature built up which attempted to soften the Gospel saying by arguing that a rich man could indeed still be saved. But we also hear of many cases of individual renunciation of wealth, such as that of Paulinus of Nola, or the even more famous example of the Younger Melania (died AD 438), who with her husband Pinianus sold up her vast estates in order to live a life of Christian renunciation. Some acts of renunciation may have been somewhat less dramatic than they seem, in that the donors took care of their own family first, and rather than giving their wealth directly to the poor, tended to give it to the church for further distribution, thereby increasing the latter’s wealth.86 It was no small thing after all for the rich to give away substantial amounts of their family wealth, and such actions often caused ill-feeling within aristocratic families. Perhaps understandably, the monasteries which many subsequently founded were often run on somewhat aristocratic and privileged lines. A close reading of the writings advocating renunciation of wealth, which often took the form of sermons presenting an elaborate exegesis of what might seem rather clear Scriptural exhortations on the subject, indicates that the issue was not as straightforward as might appear.87 Asceticism of this kind required energetic promotion and defence.88 All the same, there is no doubt that spectacular giving did occur. Yet in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, when there were still many pagan members of the aristocracy – sometimes even in the immediate family of the giver – the practice caused them serious concern about the maintenance of family property. The tension between the demands of Christian renunciation and celibacy and the need for procreation and, in a traditional society, for the retention of wealth within families for the maintenance of society, became a real issue.89 We need not suppose that the average Christian undertook the drastic measures of renunciation of wealth, or sexual abstention, but it cannot be doubted that a large proportion of wealth did seep away from production and towards the church, not least in the form of church buildings and their endowments. The poor certainly benefited to some extent from the process, and some monasteries, for instance in Palestine, themselves contributed to the local economy; however, the main beneficiary was surely the church itself, which was now able to lay the foundations of the vast wealth which it enjoyed in the later Middle Ages. The extent of this wealth, which had flowed into the church in the form of gifts and legacies ever since Constantine gave the church the power to inherit and removed the Augustan prohibition on celibacy among the wealthy classes, can be judged from the later Liber Pontificalis (based on a sixth-century original), which lists the extraordinary riches endowed on the Roman churches, including estates whose revenues would provide for their upkeep.90
Although as we have seen there were still a number of dramatic ‘purges’ of pagans under Justinian, and as late as 579–80, it is clear that by the sixth century Christianity was very firmly established within the fabric of the state. The fragmentation of the western empire, combined with the conversion of all the various barbarian groups as they came into contact with the Roman empire also allowed the church to assume a leading role in the successor kingdoms. In the east, the church, while itself profiting from the growing prosperity of the fifth century, also played an active role in the redistribution of wealth which was changing the late Roman empire into a Christian medieval society. This process was hastened by the fact that the emperors, even if not all the leading members of society, took an active lead. We are still left with the difficulty of judging the extent to which this institutional Christianization was internalized by the average citizen, and have noted that our largely Christian sources may give a misleading impression. But it was of the nature of early Christianity not just to provide a cultic framework but also to teach, discipline and regulate the lives of its members to an exceptionally high degree. Pagan practice and pagan beliefs might continue, but the post-Constantinian church was determined to win hearts as well as minds.