CHAPTER 10

Epilogue

(FIFTH TO SIXTH CENTURIES)

In 451 the Council of Chalcedon defined the way in which Jesus Christ was believed to be ‘truly God and truly a human being’; one person existing ‘unconfusedly, unalterably, undividedly, inseparably in two natures’. Their pronouncement incorporated Bishop Leo of Rome’s Tome on the doctrines of salvation and Christ, thus acknowledging it as an authoritative text. The following year, according to a sixth-century chronicle, ‘for the sake of the Roman name [Leo] undertook an embassy and travelled to the king of the Huns, Attila by name, and he delivered the whole of Italy from the peril of the enemy’.¹

Does the history of the early Church thus come to a neat end with Leo securing the theological unity of Christianity within the Empire and demonstrating his political power in defending Rome against the Huns? As with the Council of Nicaea, theological and historical accounts have tended to differ on this question. Theologians have invested the Christological definition of 451 with the same kind of conceptual finality as the 325 declaration that the Son is consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father. Catholic accounts of the rise of the papacy have also often seen Leo’s tenure as a crucial period. Historians, however, have pointed out that the ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire came only 25 years after Chalcedon. Furthermore, the development of the Church in both west and east grew very complex and was not clearly marked by the rise of centralizing authorities like the Roman papacy. This was not least because the Chalcedon council, which was aimed at unity, only succeeded in precipitating the most serious schism the Church had yet seen. What, then, was the state of the Church in the following century?

It is now a commonplace to agree that in fact there was no sudden, cataclysmic ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire – even in the west. It is true that, although Attila was dissuaded in 452, Rome was sacked three years later by the Vandals, who attacked from their secure base in North Africa. For the next quarter of a century various interest groups vied with each other for power in Italy and southern Gaul, until the German Odoacer proclaimed himself ‘King of Italy’. It is to this event in 476 that the ‘fall’ has traditionally been dated. But the picture of this ‘fall’ of Rome to the barbarians is complicated by various factors. First, Roman power in the west had for decades alternately been threatened by, and reliant on, varying combinations of ‘barbarian’ forces. For example, the Huns had been defeated in Gaul in 451 by an alliance between the Roman general Aetius and the Germanic groups who already had territory in Gaul – including the Arian Visigoths. After the fall of Rome, the eastern Emperor Zeno dispatched Theoderic to depose Odoacer: the Ostrogoth Theoderic defeated the ‘barbarian’ King Odoacer with a coalition of Ostrogoths and the Visigoths of Gaul. (From Zeno’s perspective, the tactic backfired when Theoderic assumed an increasingly independent role in Italy, but the point remains that he gained power while acting on behalf of the emperor in Constantinople.) Secondly, the new kings of Italy brought a comparative stability: Odoacer ruled for ten years, and Theoderic for over 40. The fact that both chose Ravenna for their capital did not signify a change in itself, for the capital of the western part of the Empire had been officially moved from Rome to Ravenna a century earlier and in fact the imperial court had spent much time in Milan prior to that. Thirdly, the term ‘barbarian’ masks the similarities between ‘Romans’ and their neighbours.² There were differences, of course, but these were complex. A nomadic culture, combined with intermarriage and the hire of soldiers between tribes and across imperial borders had meant a great deal of blurring of ethnic boundaries. Some ‘barbarians’ who wanted influence assumed un-barbarian habits: Theoderic, for example, apparently dressed in a manner reminiscent of a classical client-king, and the beautiful and opulent mosaics which he commissioned for the Arian Baptistry and the Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna unmistakably follow the style of late antique Roman art.³ Indeed, although some of the supposedly more ‘Arian’ mosaics in these churches were later destroyed, their depiction of the baptism of Christ, for example, shows no easily discernible difference from ‘orthodox’ Christian art of the time. So even the religious boundaries were blurred: not all barbarians were pagans; those who were Christian were not all Arian, and even Arian Christianity was not so different as one might expect. Nevertheless, the term ‘Arian’, which had been more or less invented by Athanasius to demonize his opponents, continued to be used to reinforce the otherness of the Goths and Vandals – much as the term ‘barbarian’ was used.

Given these complexities, various narratives have been proposed as an alternative to the story of the fall of Rome.⁴ One has suggested that the fall of the Empire was compensated for by the rise of the Church, and in particular the rise of the papacy in Rome. But not only does this deal merely with the fall of the western Empire and the development of the western Church, it does not even seem to do justice to the situation in the west. In Gaul, Spain and North Africa, for example, churches had long showed themselves to have a strong sense of local identity; while they might have appealed to the Bishop of Rome for adjudication on difficult issues, this was not tantamount to recognizing his authority as a bishop above all (western) bishops. Although particular bishops of Rome, such as Leo and Gregory the Great, were successful in expanding their influence and in undertaking certain institutional reforms, their success depended on whether they were accepted as an authority by their fellows. Much as the authority of an umpire in sport depends on a combination of the players’ acceptance of the rules of the game and the personal qualities of the umpire himself, so the Bishop of Rome’s authority depended on a mixture of the common recognition of the traditional claims of Rome and each pope’s personal and charismatic qualities.⁵ It is not even clear that Catholic Christianity was growing in influence. Admittedly, Clovis I, King of the Franks, was baptized a Catholic Christian at the end of the fifth century, but the conversion of the Visigoths and the Lombards to Catholic Christianity did not occur until the end of the sixth.⁶

An alternative thesis is that the fall of Rome was compensated for by the continued importance of the Mediterranean as a centre of trade.⁷ But archaeological evidence strongly suggests the weakening of the cities of the western Mediterranean coast: the population of Rome, for example decreased from 500,000 to 50,000 in the century after 450.⁸ All the evidence points to a period of de-urbanization in the west.

Still another interpretation is to stress that as Rome sank so Constantinople rose in importance.⁹ This was particularly so under a strong emperor like Justinian (ruled 527–65), who in the first 15 years of his reign was successful in recapturing North Africa and Italy for the Empire.¹⁰ However, even here, the story is not quite so simple as ‘the fall of the western Empire, the rise of the eastern Empire’. Justinian’s reign was marked by various events which were destabilizing. In Constantinople there was an horrific echo of the riots of Thessaloniki in 390 when Theodosius’ murder of 7,000 people earned him Ambrose’s sharp disapproval. The grievances and the purpose of the Constantinople rioters is not clear. Popular riots were not uncommon in this period, but in 532 the crowd’s fury led to more than usual destruction and a large part of central Constantinople, including Constantine’s Hagia Sophia, was burnt to the ground. Justinian’s response was violent, killing between 30,000 and 35,000 people (out of a city population of about 750,000).¹¹ In the latter half of Justinian’s reign the threat on the Persian borders grew stronger and the region was shaken by a series of natural disasters: a virulent outbreak of the bubonic plague in 541–42 which may have killed as many as a quarter of a million people in Constantinople; a widespread famine in 535–36; and earthquakes in Constantinople in 542 and 557. (The second earthquake caused the collapse of the dome of the newly rebuilt Hagia Sophia: Justinian and his architects set to work again and the result still stands today.)¹² The eastern Roman Empire was shaken by these awe-inspiring occurrences, and they probably contributed to a certain amount of de-urbanization in the east as well as the west; but the events were probably not so cataclysmic as they have sometimes been portrayed.¹³

The depopulation of many towns across the Empire, east and west, did not mean the end of civilization, but rather a reconfiguring of communications and relations. In the west in particular, instead of imagining an empire with a clear centre, it is perhaps best to think of a network of towns, monasteries and small settlements. Throughout the Empire, the Christian Church continued, much as it had always done, to rely on networks established through personal friendship, education, family ties or recommendation. Trade did not cease (Alexandria was still sending goods as far afield as Cornwall), but Rome was no longer so obviously at the centre. Commodities, both physical and intellectual or spiritual, passed along the networks of contacts across the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa and Northern Europe.¹⁴

One of these commodities, one might say, was the Gospel. There had been Christians in Britain at least since the fourth century; Christianity presumably arrived both with the Roman legions and through trade links. Britain sent at least three delegates to the Council of Arles in 314 (the bishops of York, Lincoln and London) and Pelagius the theologian came from Britain.¹⁵ But British Christian communities were very small and probably suffered when the Romans gradually withdrew from Britain over the course of the late fourth century. In the fifth and sixth centuries there seems to have been a new period of mission. Celestine, the Bishop of Rome during the Pelagian controversy, probably sent a certain Palladius to rid Britain of Pelagianism. Palladius settled in Wicklow in Ireland and may also have travelled to Scotland.

Great emphasis has been placed on the traditional ‘fathers’ of Celtic Christianity, who – in contrast to Palladius – came from the British Isles. However, much less is known about them than the legends would seem to convey. Patrick did not convert Ireland single-handedly: he arrived from Scotland after Palladius’ arrival in Ireland, but settled a long way north, in Armagh, and seems to have had little contact with the Christian communities in the south. He encouraged monasticism in the region, although it is not clear whether he was a monk himself. Roughly a century later, an Irish monk, Columba, made the opposite journey: having founded some monasteries in Ireland,¹⁶ he founded another on the island of Iona off the southwest coast of Scotland. Even more scarce is information on Ninian, the supposed missionary to the Picts and (by mythical extension) to the whole of Scotland. Although his story became widely known and the church he was believed to have founded at Whithorn became an important pilgrimage centre, scholars now disagree even about which century he was active in.¹⁷

One very striking aspect of the spread of Christianity was the influence of Christian asceticism and specifically of monastic communities, both eremitic and cenobitic.¹⁸ Celtic Christianity was often noted for the very harsh disciplines practised by its monks – although from what is known of Columba’s community on Iona, for example, he seems to have followed in the tradition of those monastic organizers who sought to curb excessive mortification.¹⁹ Indeed, Columba’s biographers said that he was influenced by Basil of Caesarea’s moderating rule and also by that of John Cassian. Cassian himself is a useful illustration of the possibilities of movement around the Empire, along church and especially monastic networks. He was born in Dacia (roughly equivalent to modern Romania), but joined a monastery in Bethlehem in the 380s, at around the same time as Rufinus and Jerome began their Palestinian communities.²⁰ The interest in Palestine in various other monastic traditions is illustrated by the fact that Rufinus translated Basil’s Rule into Latin at the end of the fourth century; Jerome followed a few years later with a translation of Pachomius’ Rule.²¹ After making two trips to Egypt (to experience the ascetic life there), to Constantinople and Rome, Cassian settled in Marseilles at the beginning of the fifth century, where he founded two monasteries and wrote the Institutes – a guide to monastic life. Another very influential work on the ascetic life was the Rule which emerged from Augustine’s formation of a small community on his return to North Africa, also in the 380s. Some 250 years later, a man called Benedict and his sister, Scholastica, founded some ascetic communities in central Italy. Benedict’s Rule was dependent on Basil’s, Cassian’s and Augustine’s reflections on the monastic life. His Rule became the most influential set of guidelines for ascetic living in western Europe, not least because of its moderate attitude to discipline and its flexibility, which allowed for its application in multiple contexts. In 1203 the influence of Cassian and Basil returned to Iona, when the monastery was reformed according to the Benedictine Rule.

Although often described as Rules, the texts by Basil, Augustine and Cassian take different forms: Basil’s is a series of questions and answers; Augustine describes his as a ‘pamphlet’ rather than a formal rule, and Cassian’s appears to have been codified into a more rule-like form only in the sixth century.²² Another form, which became significant in the eastern Church, were letters written to those asking for spiritual guidance. A very influential collection was attributed to Barsanuphius and John, a pair of ascetics living near Gaza in Palestine in the first half of the sixth century, who were much influenced by Evagrius of Pontus. A Syriac set of rules was attributed to Bishop Rabbula of Edessa (bishop 412–35).²³ Notably, there are rules both for male monks and for the ‘sons and daughters of the covenant’, the distinctively Syrian community of ascetics which was discussed in Chapter 7. Whereas in the days of Ephrem of Edessa, this type of ascetic or hermit was the norm, by the mid-fifth century monasteries were more prominent and there was a great deal of interchange between Syrian and Egyptian monasteries.²⁴ The ascetic communities played a particularly important role in Syria, preserving the religious texts of the famous school of Edessa when it was closed down in 489. They also proved to be the source of most of the theological writing in the sixth century, although Boethius is one important exception to this rule.

The most fundamental theological problem overshadowing the Christian Church in the fifth and sixth centuries was that of the continuing disruption following the Council of Chalcedon. The Church in Egypt never accepted the council, because of its condemnation of Eutyches and Dioscoros – despite the fact that it also validated Cyril of Alexandria’s theology through the inclusion of his Second Letter to Nestorius as an authoritative document. The council’s approval of certain terminology which had been used by Nestorius and other Antiochene theologians and, perhaps, its use of Leo’s Tome which was capable of being misunderstood in a Nestorian direction, was taken by many to be an unorthodox departure. Opposition to Chalcedon often crystallized around the use of Cyril’s formula ‘one incarnate nature of the Word’ (one nature – mia physis). They became known by their opponents as ‘monophysites’, a somewhat perjorative term which implicitly criticizes their acknowledgment of only one nature (monē physis) in Christ, as opposed to the Chalcedonian formula’s recognition of two. For this reason, many scholars today prefer to refer to them as ‘miaphysites’, which reflects Cyril’s formula more accurately.²⁵ Even miaphysite, however, does not do justice to the variety of views which came to fall under the umbrella of opposition to Chalcedon. Because of a long history of tension with, and often oppression by, Chalcedonian churches, modern churches in the broadly Cyrilline tradition do not refer to themselves as either mono-physite or miaphysite.

Opposition to Chalcedon was not just apparent in Egypt: it grew throughout the fifth and sixth centuries and was particularly strong in monastic communities in Palestine and Syria. Emperors in Constantinople, who had the stability of the Empire in mind, became increasingly anxious to heal the rift. In 482 Emperor Zeno issued a document known as the Henotikon (‘the unifying act’) which side-stepped the question of Chalcedon and instead invited acceptance of: the Nicene Creed, the councils of Constantinople and Ephesus and Cyril of Alexandria’s 12 anathemas.²⁶ It condemned Nestorius and Eutyches. The statement was probably the work of the Chalcedonian Bishop Acacius of Constantinople and may also have been influenced by the miaphysite Bishop Peter Mongos of Alexandria. With this pedigree it gained some degree of acceptance in the east. The immediate problem, however, was Rome. Simplicius, Bishop of Rome, had not been consulted and he and his successor, Felix, refused to accept the Henotikon, which they felt undermined Chalcedon – a council in which Rome felt it had an important stake because of its inclusion of Leo’s Tome. Shortly afterwards, Bishop Acacius was excommunicated by a Roman synod. The resulting ‘Acacian’ schism between east and west lasted until 518.

The most important theological exponent of miaphysite theology at the time was Severus, Bishop of Antioch. He had great influence and had enjoyed a certain degree of support from Emperor Anastasius who succeeded Zeno in 491.²⁷ Anastasius’ own successor, however, was Justin I, who turned out to be an unwavering supporter of the Chalcedonian formula. In 518, with Justin’s accession, the Romans were appeased and Severus’ fortunes changed. He and other notable miaphysite bishops were deposed and several subsequent bishops of Antioch became involved in the persecution of miaphysite Christians.

When Justinian came to the throne, there was a period of comparative calm. He was essentially in favour of the settlement at Chalcedon, whilst seeming to retain a particular personal admiration for the writings of Cyril of Alexandria. His wife Theodora was even more sympathetic to Cyril-line theology and became a kind of patron to miaphysite exiles, providing support for them in Constantinople, a tactic which, of course, kept them conveniently away from their home congregations.²⁸ In 534 even Severus was invited to the capital, but the tide of favour soon retreated from him again and he returned to Alexandria where he had been sheltering.

Essentially, Justininian did not waver from his basic aim, which was to try to bring miaphysites back into the orthodox fold. In the latter part of his reign his chosen tactic was to appease those who felt aggrieved that Chalcedon, whilst endorsing Cyril’s theology and upholding the condemnation of Nestorius, illogically also seemed to stop short of ruling out other Antiochene theology. In particular, the Alexandrian miaphysites were implacably opposed to three writers – Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Ibas of Edessa – not least because of these men’s personal opposition to Cyril and his theology. Justin’s hope was that a condemnation of the writings of these three (known as the ‘three chapters’) would reconcile them and convince them that Chalcedon was not letting Nestorianism back in through the back door. Thus in 544 Justinian issued his condemnation of the three chapters, and 553 this condemnation was approved by the second Council of Constantinople.

There were possibilities for a rapprochement in Justinian’s reign, but neither the condemnation of the three chapters, nor a subsequent effort by his successor, succeeded. The west was very much divided about Justinian’s policy and the east was perhaps already too fractured to come to agreement. (One of the problems from the fifth century onwards was the variety of opinions and depth of disagreements between different groups of miaphysites.) The practical results of this failure were painful and permanent. A Chalcedonian bishop was forced on Alexandria by Constantinople, but was never really accepted. The local church remained fundamentally miaphysite and loyal to the tradition of Cyril and after a while established their own parallel clergy and bishop. It was this, but not the Chalcedonian Church in Alexandria, that survived the Arab invasions in 641–42 and became what is now known as the Coptic Church.

A similar pattern of parallel lines of clergy emerged throughout the eastern Empire, greatly helped by the efforts of Jacob Baradeus – another one of Empress Theodora’s former protégés, who, with her contrivance, had been consecrated bishop. Strictly, he was Bishop of Edessa, but he had a roving brief to help the miaphysite communities of the east. Legend in the miaphysite churches attributes thousands of priestly ordinations and many episcopal ordinations to him (and for this reason, some miaphysite communities became known as ‘Jacobite’).

The school of Edessa had traditionally been very influenced by Antiochene theology, particularly that of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Gradually, however, the dominant loyalty in Edessa was miaphysitism: two noted miaphysite theologians, Jacob of Serugh and Philoxenus of Mabbug, were educated at the school and in the late 470s several successive bishops were miaphysite. In 489 Philoxenus persuaded Zeno to close the school at Edessa because of its supposed Nestorianism. Many clergy from the Christian communities in the Persian Empire had trained in Edessa and as a result Christianity in that region was strongly Antiochene. When the school of Edessa closed, a school in Persian Nisibis carried on theological training in that tradition.

From these roots emerged another church, which has been described in the west as the ‘Nestorian’ Church, but is more correctly known as the (Assyrian) Church of the East. As mentioned, its theology is more properly Theodore’s than Nestorius’ and it supported Chalcedon; nevertheless it has remained out of communion with other churches, both the Chalcedonian churches further west and with the miaphysite churches.²⁹ It was however, extremely influential in the region and was involved in far-reaching missionary activity. It had, for example, strong links with several communities of Christians in south India: the sixth-century Christian traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes stated in his chronicles that the churches in Ceylon and Malabar had clergy trained in Persia.³⁰ In 638 the Church of the East established a monastery in the capital of imperial China.³¹ It is worth reflecting on Cosmas’ list of the people and places to which Christianity had spread by the mid-sixth century: India, Bactrians, Huns, Persians (of various groups), Ethiopia, Arabia, Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, Nubia, across a large swathe of North Africa from Egypt in the east to Mauretania in the west, Cilicia, Asia, Cappadocia, Lazica and Pontus, and the countries occupied by the Scythians, Hyrcanians, Heruli (the people of Odoacer), Bulgarians, Greeks and Illyrians, Dalmatians, Goths, Spaniards, Romans and Franks. The areas with which Cosmas was familiar were all on trade routes: Chris-tianity continued to spread, as it had done from the beginning, with trade. Moreover, the Middle East looked east as much as it looked west, and the peoples of north-west Europe are added almost as an after-thought.

If this chapter reads like the verbal equivalent of a kaleidoscope, it is because that is very much what Christianity at the end of the sixth century was – a kaleidoscopic variety of beliefs, practices, languages, traditions, texts and locations which, despite the bewildering succession of shifting patterns and alliances, nevertheless can be viewed through the same lens. Christianity right from the start was structured around a fascinating series of apparent paradoxes. It focused on the life of one who was both human and divine – indeed, fully human and fully divine – whose birth and death were at the same time both unique and normal. It strove for a kingdom ‘not of this world’ (John 8.23), while always being acutely and actively occupied with the conditions of this world, whether they concerned the poverty of widows and orphans, the feeding of the starving, the discipline of the body and soul in ascetic community, or the realm of politics (both ecclesiastical and secular). It disciplined the body, even to the point of death, while fervently arguing against those who dismissed the body as evil or a hindrance. It valued marriage and depended on the children of converts for the continuation of the Church, while being increasingly more favourable to the celibate life. It depended on men with a good pagan education to propagate, defend and explain the Gospel. From the beginning, it seems to have had the sense of being one, although divided by geography, different interpretations of the Scriptures and different regional loyalties.

It is clear from the preceding chapters what divided the Church. What, then, kept it together? One suggestion is that once the followers of Jesus believed that they had a mission to the Gentiles, once Christianity became a (potentially) universal religion, rather than an ethnic or local group, then it was possible for it not only to spread but to become diverse. (Indeed, diversity might be thought of as necessary for growth.) Once Christians realized that their transcendent God was above all geography, that God could be worshipped wherever and by whomever willed to worship, then Christianity became universal – but not uniform.³² The crucial point seems to have been that although there were real, painful and destructive divisions between Christian groups, each of them thought that Christianity could and should be above that kind of division. It was precisely the mutually contradictory claims to be the ‘universal’ or Catholic Church that lay behind many of the most violent disputes.

A second, connected idea is Christianity’s belief that through the Incarnation God took on and died for all humanity. God, for early Christians, was the transcendent ruler of all; but God had also, in a mysterious way, assumed not the body and soul of one individual but the human soul and human bodilyness as a whole. Thus from the beginning, Jesus Christ became a kind of figure to whom all could relate, regardless of their language, culture or ethnicity. The catacomb paintings which portrayed Jesus beardless in the toga of a philosopher, or as an Italian shepherd, were not naive misrepresentations of a Palestinian teacher but rather attempts to convey how Jesus was God for them in that particular place and time.

Thirdly, the fundamental rites of the Church had proved themselves remarkably steady focal points of community worship. Despite the frequent arguments about precisely what the rites meant and (even more often) who was permitted to administer or receive them, baptism and Eucharist were in one form or another central to all the Christian communities studied in this book. Furthermore, these rites were nearly always understood in a broadly Trinitarian way: baptism was nearly always in the names of Father, Son and Spirit; Eucharist was an offering to the Father of the bread and wine, which were the body and blood of Christ, through the action of the Holy Spirit whose presence was invited in prayer by the priest and congregation.

Fourthly, the Scriptures were another equally important focus for the Christians in this period. The earliest writers regard the Hebrew writings alone as ‘Scripture’ (and cite mainly the Pentateuch and the Prophets); later writers like Irenaeus argued with those who wanted to add or subtract from a rather larger canon of both Hebrew Bible and New Testament texts. Other arguments focused around the legitimacy of literal and or allegorical interpretation. Yet there was no Christian who suggested that none of these texts mattered and, in fact, few who rejected the basic set of Law, Prophets, Gospels and Pauline epistles.³³ In the theology of Origen, the Scriptures themselves came to embody the same kind of potentially universal reach that Christ had achieved in the Incarnation: the four Gospels might contain apparent contradictions, but in their variety they allowed Christians (at least) four different approaches to the one Christ.

The main languages of Christianity in the fifth and sixth centuries continued to be Greek and Latin, simply because they had been the languages of imperial administration and Greco-Roman literary culture. Latin had been a lingua franca in Gaul for many years and continued to be a Christian lingua franca as far north as the British Isles. However, some language groups in this period developed their own writing systems and began to translate the Bible: for example, by 600 the Bible (or parts of it) had been translated into Armenian, Ethiopic, Gothic and Georgian. Syriac became an increasingly important ecclesiastical language, with its influence ranging through Syria, Palestine and Persia, to Christian communities in the Arab peninsula and India. From the fifth century onwards, there was a move away from the use of the traditional single Gospel, the Syriac Diatessaron, to the use of the four Gospels in Syriac. Although promoted vigorously by men such as Rabbula of Edessa and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, the transition was probably rather more gradual in some areas, as the Diatessaron had become such an important part of Syrian Christian culture.³⁴

The example of Scripture shows with particular clarity that the very things which can be held to unite Christians in this period were in themselves diverse and capable of being interpreted in many different ways in different contexts. Precisely this adaptability is a feature of other aspects of Christian culture in this period. In addition to the different languages of the biblical text, Christianity invented a startling variety of literary forms in which to explain, defend, celebrate and remember its faith. In the Greco-Roman world it adapted forms from both scholarship and rhetoric. So from the schools of philosophy and medicine it adapted the treatise and the commentary;³⁵ from rhetoric it adapted various types of formal speech into sermons, Christian funeral orations and the hagiographies of saints. Like scholars, politicians and men of business around the Empire, early Christians relied hugely on communication by letter. Some of the earliest Christian writings (both in the New Testament and outside it) were letters, and increasingly collections of letters from authoritative writers began to be circulated (either by their authors or their followers), much as the letters of Cicero and Pliny the Younger circulated.

The basic elements of Christian liturgy were similar across linguistic and cultural boundaries: water in baptism, bread and wine in the Eucharist, the imposition of hands for ordination. There were, however, a great number of regional variations. By the fifth century different communities had developed their own distinctive liturgies in different languages, including many forms and prayers which are still in use today. The study of the development and variations in these has become an important field of inquiry within the study of the early Church. From an early stage it seems that Christian communities used sung or chanted psalms in their worship. Young children were taught psalms as part of their Christian formation, usually, it seems, by their mothers or a female relative or guardian. The singing of other songs or hymns, however, took longer to become widely established. In the fourth century Ephrem of Edessa composed hymns in Syriac which were designed to explain and defend the Christian faith in a vivid and memorable form. They were specifically designed to be sung by choirs of women.³⁶ Clearly, however, this practice was not regarded well elsewhere: in 270 Paul of Samosata, the then Bishop of Antioch, was accused (besides the more usual complaints of embezzlement, vanity and womanizing) of banning the ‘traditional’ hymns to Christ but arranging ‘for women to sing hymns to himself in the middle of the church on the feast day of the Easter Festival’.³⁷ Indeed, there seems to have been a common suspicion of the hymn or religious song in the Greek-speaking churches for much of the period covered by this book. Arius, for example, was satirized for expressing his theology in a popular song and he was not the only alleged heretic who was accused of dumbing-down precisely by using music. The west was seemingly more tolerant. Ambrose of Milan was an enthusiastic and skilful composer of hymns, and Augustine credits him with bringing the practice to the west:

It was then that the practice of singing hymns and psalms was introduced, in keeping with the usage of the Eastern churches, to revive the flagging spirits of the people during their long and cheerless watch. Ever since then the custom has been retained, and the example of Milan has been followed in many other places, in fact in almost every church throughout the world.³⁸

In an interesting echo of the anti-Arian context of Ambrose’s hymns, the historian Sozomen claims that John Chrysostom introduced hymn singing to Constantinople in order to counter the antiphonal hymns sung by Arians. Chrysostom was worried that his flock would be led astray by the Arians’ words, but afterwards, as Sozomen comments, ‘having commenced the custom of singing hymns … the members of the Catholic Church did not discontinue the practice, but have retained it to the present day’.³⁹ Another ancient historian gives a similar account, but traces the origin of the hymns back to Ignatius of Antioch:

Ignatius third bishop of Antioch in Syria from the apostle Peter, who also had held intercourse with the apostles themselves, saw a vision of angels hymning in alternate chants the Holy Trinity. Accordingly he introduced the mode of singing he had observed in the vision into the Antiochian church; whence it was transmitted by tradition to all the other churches.⁴⁰

Both this tradition, then, and the Ambrose story connect hymn singing with Syria (assuming that by ‘eastern churches’ Augustine meant those in the Syriac, not Greek-speaking east). It is notable that one of the earliest and most influential hymnodists in Greek was Romanos the Melodist, who was from Emesa in Syria and that his chosen form of hymn, the kontakion, was related to a Syriac form.⁴¹

Christian poetry was another form of literature used widely but in many different ways across the Empire. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote various kinds, ranging from the long, autobiographical and, on occasions, bitterly scathing On My Own Life, to beautiful poetic expressions of the theology of the Trinity ⁴² and brief lyrical reflections on the poignancy of life:

A morning prayer

At dawn, I raise my hand in oath to God:

I shall not do or praise the deeds of darkness.
Rather, this day shall be my sacrifice;

I shall remain unshaken, rule my passions.
My age would shame me, if I were to sin,

As would this altar over which I stand.

Thus my desire, my Christ: you bring it home!

A prayer to Christ the next morning

Yesterday, Christ, turned out a total loss!

Rage came upon me, all at once and took me.
Let me live this day as a day of light.

Gregory, look – be mindful, think of God!

You swore you would; remember your salvation! ⁴³

Throughout the Empire and beyond poets seized on the traditional metres, forms and images of their language and culture and adapted them to Christian themes: so Ephrem used (amongst other things) the Middle East tradition of dialogue poems, and Latin poets experimented with epic, epigrammatic or bucolic verse. Prudentius even adapted elements of the classical drinking song:

Give me my plectrum, boy, that I may sing in faithful verse
A sweet and melodious song, of the glorious deeds of Christ.
Him alone may my Muse sing of, Him alone may my lyre praise.⁴⁴

A similar process of adaptation and creativity occurred in the visual arts. Very early Christian art is notoriously hard to interpret or even sometimes to identify, precisely because it used the techniques, genres and themes of contemporary pagan art. As we have mentioned, in the earliest wall paintings in the catacombs, Jesus Christ is portrayed as a toga-clad philosopher and an Italian shepherd; in an early Roman mosaic he is depicted as Apollo; even in Ravenna in a much later mosaic he appears as a classical hero, Cross over one shoulder almost like a lance.⁴⁵

The example of art and literature also allows one to understand a deeply contested aspect of early Christianity in the Roman Empire, which is its use of ‘pagan philosophy’. This volume has focused on the results of Christian use of earlier philosophy, in order to explain what it was that Christians believed and why. An account of which philosophers or philosophical texts and traditions were being employed to express those doctrines would have become very technical – precisely because it was so complex. It is not enough to say that Alexandrian theologians, or even Origenistic theologians, were ‘Platonic’, for example, because a closer examination reveals that the theologians in question were often using Stoic and Aristotelian ideas as well, and that they were clearly opposing various other Platonic, Stoic and Aristote-lian ideas. Just as a Christian artist or writer who depicted Christ in ways reminiscent of a Greek hero was not implying that Jesus fought monsters or was a demi-god, but was trying to say something about his defeat of evil and his divine status, so Christian theologians’ use of Greek philosophy was subtle and complicated. Christians regarded Greco-Roman art, literature and philosophy alike as a rich source of ideas which they then adapted to their own distinctive forms.

The conclusions that should be drawn from this brief survey of Christian culture are both theological and historical. The theological idea of the divine ‘condescension’ – that God came down to earth in human form – could have bound Christianity to one particular place and time. Remarkably, it had exactly the opposite effect, as Christians expressed their belief that the God who was God for them, in their particular context, was the same God incarnate in Palestine and could also be God for others in very different circumstances. Historically the immense flexibility of Christianity with regard to art and literature is a useful illustration of its adaptability in more general ways. Many individual groups were of course extremely conservative and rigid about their own particular customs and had deep-seated objections to other Christians’ practice. Nevertheless, when early Christianity is viewed as a whole across five centuries and across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, what strikes one is its immense variety and adaptability.