End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Number of quotes: 49
Book ID: 219 Page: 24
Section: 2E1
If the saint’s tomb is the place where Heaven and Earth meet, it is also the place where the Church’s past and its present meet.
Quote ID: 5403
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 219 Page: 24
Section: 2E1
the historical consciousness of post-Constantinian Christians
Quote ID: 5404
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 24
Section: 2A3
For them the age of the martyrs retained something of the flavour of a heroic age; but it was growing daily harder to recognise it as the heroic age of their own Church, increasingly wealthy, prestigious and privileged. Somehow they needed to reassure themselves that their Church was the heir of the persecuted Church of the martyrs. In this ‘annexation of the past’ the cult of the martyrs, as I shall show, played a crucial part.
Quote ID: 5405
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 219 Page: 27
Section: 1A
From the later second century Christians had been moving fast - and not only in Alexandria - towards an assimilation of secular culture.
Quote ID: 5406
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 219 Page: 27
Section: 1A
In the later third century they were beginning to penetrate every level of Roman society and to assimilate the culture, life-styles and education of Roman townsmen. The conversion of Constantine and the ensuing flow of imperial favour did nothing to reverse this, but brought growing respectability, prestige and wealth. Around 350 very little separated a Christian from his pagan counterpart in Roman society.
Quote ID: 5407
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 219 Page: 28
Section: 4B
This accommodation to a received culture was not confined to ‘popular religion’. Christianity was no longer a low-class religion. The conversion of the upper classes had begun; the growth in social mobility and the vast expansion of the civil service brought the conditions for the advancement of many Christians; pagan men of learning were showing increasing interest in Christianity.
Quote ID: 5408
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 219 Page: 28
Section: 1A
The image of a society neatly divided into ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ is the creation of late fourth-century Christians, and has been too readily taken at its face value by modern historians.
Quote ID: 5409
Time Periods: 24
Book ID: 219 Page: 29
Section: 1A
A generation after Victorinus’ conversion the position had changed. It now made sense to speak of ‘paganism’ and ‘Christianity’ as a division running through at least one section of Roman society.
Quote ID: 5410
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 30
Section: 4B
When Augustine was writing, nearly half a century after Victorinus’ conversion, Christian and pagan were more sharply polarised in Western society. The conflicts of the age of Julian, and in the West in the 380s and 390s between the pagan aristocratic reaction and the Christian court, had put a question mark against the easy symbiosis of Christianity and pagan culture.
Quote ID: 5411
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 219 Page: 30/31
Section: 4B
About the time of Jerome’s death in 420 and Augustine’s ten years later, the confrontations of the late fourth century between Christians and pagans were receding into the mists. In reality, the struggle was over, the battle lines breaking up. Paganism was dying out fast in the senatorial families, and the Church’s view of mixed marriages was softening. From the 430s the popes were making common cause with Roman aristocrats in a revival of classical architectural traditions, and the Christian descendants of Symmachus and Nicomachus Flavianus were carrying on their ancestors’ literary activities, securing the continuity of their secular interests. Mass-christianization of Roman society from the highest level down was depriving Christians of a clearly felt and easily discernible identity in their society.Christianization
Quote ID: 5412
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 219 Page: 32
Section: 3C
As early as in the time of Constantine we hear complaints about people who conformed to the emperor’s religion from no profounder motives than opportunism.
Quote ID: 5413
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 32
Section: 2C,4B
The question of what it was that defined a Christian had never been easy to answer; but it had become especially troubling in an age when Christianity seemed to have become so easy. How much of the old life could be carried over into the new? To this question there was no clear answer, or there were too many.
Quote ID: 5414
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 219 Page: 34
Section: 2E2
Ausonius is a good example of a poet whose Christianity the prejudices of modern readers have made questionable; but it is not likely that either he or his friends would have entertained any doubts about it. As a man of letters and a teacher of distinguished pupils in Gaul in the 360s and 370s, he had not been exposed to the malaise about secular culture which was to afflict so many of his younger contemporaries.
Quote ID: 5415
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 34/35
Section: 2E2
But nowhere in his writings can the slightest opposition be discovered between the two components of his mind: his Christian beliefs and his classical culture, heavy with the weight of pagan imagery as it was.{16} He would have been baffled by Jerome’s view that the conversion of a Roman senator demanded a revolution - such as Jerome’s friend Pammachius had wrought - in his life-style and the conversion of a man of letters in his style of writing.{17}If no such thought disturbed Ausonius, it did disturb his pupil, the Christian poet Paulinus.
Quote ID: 5416
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 35
Section: 2E2
Ausonius and Paulinus shared a literary culture, a way of life based on landed wealth, and high status in Roman provincial society. They also shared their religion, and a form of Christian spirituality in which images of the Gospel blended with an ancient Latin tradition reaching back to Virgil and beyond. They both saw the life of the great senatorial estate in terms of a withdrawal from the busy distractions of town life, as a secessus in villam, the life of recollection and return to rural simplicity, close to the soil and the rhythms of God’s nature.{20} ‘Your wilderness’, Paulinus once wrote to a correspondent, ‘is not a desert, but a place set apart non deserta sed secreta, untouched by the world’s darkness and avoided by the waiting demons’.{21} In the seclusion of domestic tranquillity Paulinus found a refuge from the turmoil of public life in ‘rural repose’ (ruris otium).{22} This ‘spirituality of the great landowner’ is a distinct undercurrent in the ascetic literature of the fifth century.
Quote ID: 5417
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 36
Section: 2E2
The step from Christianity to renunciation of wealth, prestige and the enjoyment of material goods, which seemed such a long one to Ausonius, was a short one for Paulinus.
Quote ID: 5418
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 36/37
Section: 2E2
They seem to actually echo the words used by Jerome in a letter to Paulinus in praise of the ascetic life.{26} For all the ascetic colouring in which Paulinus presents Christianity in this letter, however, what is striking is that in the end he refuses to identify the two, and goes out of his way to assure Jovius that God does not ask him and his family to renounce their wealth, but rather to acknowledge that it is He who bestowed it on them.{27}
Quote ID: 5419
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 219 Page: 38/39
Section: 2E2
Opposition to asceticism had an ancestry almost as ancient as did asceticism. Differences of opinion on continence erupted as early as the second century.{34} At the Council of Nicaea the aged Paphnutius, who had himself suffered for his faith, defended the ideal of Christian marriage with the assertion that a married man’s intercourse with his wife deserved the name of chastity.{35} It was in Jerome’s time that this opposition swelled into protest against the growing gap between the religion of the ordinary Christian and that of the ascetic elite. Asceticism and virginity came under repeated attack, not least by some of Jerome’s enemies. In 383 one Helvidius affirmed the equal value of marriage and chastity. In 403 another target of Jerome’s invective, Vigilantius, turned in revulsion from asceticism.Pastor John’s Note: If the Church drove them out, then they would have opposed them.
Quote ID: 5420
Time Periods: 2345
Book ID: 219 Page: 41
Section: 2E2
The ramifications of these groups and their conflicts spread as far afield as the monastic establishments of the Holy Land,{42} into Gaul and Spain, and, especially after the Gothic sack of Rome in 410, into Sicily and North Africa, where many of the Roman nobility flocked for safety. Links of friendship, patronage, the giving and receiving of spiritual guidance, as well as, sometimes, suspicion and conflict, created a web of complex threads constituting what a recent scholar has called this international ‘ascetic brotherhood’.{43}
Quote ID: 5421
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 219 Page: 99
Section: 2A3
Hardly a day can be found in the circle of the year on which martyrs were not somewhere crowned’, said Augustine; we only space out the celebrations to avoid the tedium of habit. {7} By the end of the sixth century the Christian year was almost swamped by the new festivals. On a large number of the year’s days, a Christian who attended a church service would be liturgically thrust back into the age of the martyrs. At mass, he was united with them, caught up in the perpetual liturgy which embraced him within the society of the angels and the saints. Here, supremely, he was at one with the martyrs and shared in their glory. The martyrs were assured of survival in the post-Constantinian world, and Christians of living in their continued presence; of living, as it were, in the age of the martyrs.
Quote ID: 5422
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 219 Page: 99
Section: 2A3
The emphasis was subtly shifted in the fourth century: to honour the dead, especially the martyr, remained a duty, but its discharge was now the satisfaction of a new need. This was the need to be able to see the post-Constantinian Church as the heir of the Church of the martyrs (see ch. 6, above). It accounts for the greatest novelty in the fourth-century cult of the martyrs, the quantitative leap in the scale and speed of its expansion.
Quote ID: 5423
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 99/100
Section: 2E1
Until, in the course of the third century, Christians began to enter the mainstream of Roman life in sizeable numbers, their main need was for a calendar of religious observance which would set them apart from the Jews. Thus the earliest surviving Church order tells the faithful not to fast at the same times as do the ‘hypocrites’, on Mondays and Thursdays, but on Wednesdays and Fridays.{9} The Lord’s day superseded the Sabbath and Easter the Passover. The date of Easter was, eventually, to be reckoned in such a way as to make coincidence impossible.{10} Their calendar thus assured Christians of a group identity distinct from the Jews.
Quote ID: 5424
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 219 Page: 102
Section: 1A,3B
Christians had already gone a long way in appropriating the culture and life-styles of their pagan contemporaries before the time of Constantine.
Quote ID: 5425
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 219 Page: 103
Section: 2E4
The problem posed by one rival sacred calendar, the Jewish religious week and year, had long ago been dealt with. The problem posed by the traditional Roman calendar was more difficult. Its celebrations were rooted in a distant religious past; but they were also the rites which governed the rhythm of public life, and they articulated a corporate civic and municipal consensus. Many Christians were deeply involved in public life, and found it easy to persuade themselves that the religious overtones of public celebrations were faint enough not to offend their piety.
Quote ID: 5426
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 219 Page: 108/109
Section: 3C
Could religious cult, perhaps, be dissociated from purely secular celebration, in the way Constantine had in mind when he allowed the inhabitants of Hispellum to honour him with games and a temple, but without the pollution of any contagious superstition?{6} This certainly was the view taken by the Christian emperors who continued to safeguard what they saw as the traditional amusements of their subjects, even while seeking to eliminate the religious context with which they had been traditionally associated. In 399 they rounded off a series of enactments by formally prohibiting the abolition by local authorities of the festivities on the pretext of their association with the ‘profane rites’ which had accompanied them and were now prohibited:Just as we have already abolished profane rites by salutary law, so we do not allow the festal assemblies of citizens and the common pleasure of all to be abolished. Hence we decree that, according to the ancient custom, amusements shall be furnished to the people, but without any sacrifice or any accursed superstition, and they shall be allowed to attend festival banquets, whenever the public desires [vota] so demand.{7}
Quote ID: 5427
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 109
Section: 3F
Pope Gregory XIII was to echo their attitude faithfully in 1575 when he permitted bullfighting in Spain except on the Church’s holy days.
Quote ID: 5428
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 219 Page: 115
Section: 3D
The years 399 to 401 were the climax of the forcible repression of paganism in North Africa. The tensions created in Carthage were not without parallel elsewhere. At Sufes in Byzacena a Christian mob broke up a statue of Hercules. Sixty of them lost their lives in the ensuing riot.{25}
Quote ID: 5429
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 219 Page: 125
Section: 3A1
In the end, however, this diversity was smoothed out into a uniformity spreading over Christian Western Europe. What we have seen happening in some of the smaller towns of North Africa with a fairly homogeneous Christian population was to set the pattern for the future. In such places the clergy could impose their norms without much difficulty. Religion swallowed up the secular civic consensus, citizenship merged with membership of the community of the faithful, and municipal affairs came to be dominated by the Church.
Quote ID: 5430
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 219 Page: 126/127
Section: 3A1
The physical transformation of its townscape and the emergence of its bishop at the head of the local aristocracy as the City’s supreme representative and authority, combined to create the conditions for pope Leo to give moral and religious content to the ideology of Rome’s Christian renewal. Leo liked to dwell on this theme in his sermons preached annually on the occasion of the feast of Rome’s twin Apostles.One year he apostrophised {4} the City as a holy people, an elect nation, a priestly and royal city, become, through the see of St. Peter established here, the head of the world; ruling more widely now through divine religion than it ever did by worldly dominion. Though enlarged by many victories, you have spread the authority of your rule over land and sea. What your warlike labours have obtained for you is less than what the Christian peace has brought you.
*PJ Note: Used 2nd half of para first. I split it.
Quote ID: 5431
Time Periods: 457
Book ID: 219 Page: 127
Section: 4B
Much recent study has taught us to see this substitution of almsgiving - preferably anonymous! - for the ancient competitive and conspicuous works of public munificence as one of the profoundest aspects of a new conception of society
Quote ID: 5432
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 219 Page: 128
Section: 2E4
And, similarly, charitable almsgiving, too, though a permanent duty, was especially and solemnly binding on the days set aside for the ‘collections’, when the offerings of the more affluent were to be brought to the churches for redistribution among the poor. So it was a wise institution of the Fathers, Leo preached on one such occasion,{15} to have laid down that there should be special days set aside in each season which would act as a call to the faithful people to the public collection. And because those in need of assistance flock, mainly, to the church, provision should be made through the care of the clergy to dispense what is needed from what has been provided out of the wealth of the many, contributed by them willingly to the holy collection.One of these ‘collection’ days occurred at the time that the ancient Apollinarian games had traditionally been celebrated each July to commemorate Rome’s deliverance from calamity after the battle of Cannae.
Quote ID: 5434
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 219 Page: 129
Section: 2E4
We are invited to celebrate this day by apostolic institution, this day on which the fathers have prudently and profitably ordained the first of these holy collections; because at one time the pagan people used to render superstitious cult to their demons at this time, the fathers intended that our most holy offering of alms should be celebrated against contra the profane sacrifices of the impious.Pastor John’s note: Leo I, 440-61
Quote ID: 5435
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 219 Page: 129
Section: 2B
This is all of a piece with Leo’s worries about people who turned towards the East to greet the sun before entering Saint Peter’s for mass.{17} It may be that this practice, which had been common in the cult of the Unconquered Sun as well as among Manichees, was being adopted by Christians in perfectly good faith, guilty of no more than trying to give a sound Christian meaning to a traditional pagan gesture. The pope’s objection may in fact have been not so much to what these Christians were doing as to the private nature of their action. The church’s answer was to turn the private ritual gesture into public worship: liturgical turning to the East for prayer, or the rapidly spreading practice of orienting churches, were more effective than attempts to suppress private orientalism.{18}Pastor John’s note: Leo I (c. 400 – 461). Pope from 440 – 461.
Quote ID: 5436
Time Periods: 2345
Book ID: 219 Page: 130
Section: 2E4
The middle of the fifth century, that is to say the time of Leo’s pontificate in Rome, of Peter Chrysologus in Ravenna, and of Maximus, perhaps a little earlier, in Turin, seems to mark the climax of the century-old effort to create a cycle of Christian sacred time.{26}
Quote ID: 5437
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 219 Page: 141
Section: 2E3
The Christians’ God was wholly present everywhere at once, allowing no site, no building or space any privileged share of holiness. True worship had no relation to any particular place. Until the fourth century Christians inhabited a spatial universe spiritually largely undifferentiated.By contrast, the world in which Christianity established itself was full of holy places. The Roman town, which is where Christianity first took root, was itself a sacred enclosure, marked off from its environment by a foundation-rite which made the space enclosed by the town walls sacred, inviolable to defilement,equipped with gates for commerce with the outside world and for the elimination of pollution by the corpses of its dead. The urban space as such was sacred: its site determined by sacred ritual.
Quote ID: 5438
Time Periods: 14
Book ID: 219 Page: 141
Section: 2E3
All public and much private life was channelled through a system of sacred spaces in the Roman town. Walls, temples, circuses, palaces defined the Late Antique town as a network of holy places.A wealth of learning had been deployed by Christian chronographers and chroniclers to establish synchronisms between their own history and the history of the various nations or kingdoms of Antiquity. In that way they could relate their own sacred time-scheme to the chronologies of the world around. An analogous task had to be carried out for geography;
Quote ID: 5439
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 219 Page: 142
Section: 2E3
the territory of the empire had to be colonised like a foreign land not long conquered.
Quote ID: 5440
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 219 Page: 142
Section: 2E3
By the end of the fourth century, however, the Christians had acquired their own sacred topography. It was a spatial projection of their sacred history. A place could become holy through some historical event, real or invented, the memory of a work of God done at a site at some particular moment of time. The primary holy sites were thus necessarily the places referred to in the scriptural narratives; a small region on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean had a monopoly of these. Another category of sites that plainly qualified for holiness was that of the more ubiquitously distributed holy burials (it was these, rather than the actual sites of martyrdom that were venerated), the memorials of those who had borne faithful witness to the Lord and triumphed over death and the persecuting world. The martyrs’ burials had the great further advantage of being capable - once the custom of transferring, and of dividing, relics had taken root - of being multiplied.
Quote ID: 5441
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 143
Section: 2A3
Early in the fifth century a bishop of Turin preached to his congregation:{10}Though we should celebrate, brothers, the anniversaries of all the martyrs with great devotion, yet we ought to put our whole veneration into observing the festivals especially of those who poured out their blood in our own home town [domiciliis]. Though all the saints are everywhere present and aid every one, those who suffered for us intervene for us especially. For when a martyr suffers, he suffers not only for himself, but for his fellow-citizens . . . So all the martyrs should be most devoutly honoured, yet specially those whose relics we possess here. For the former assist us with their prayer, but the latter also with their suffering. With these we have a sort of familiarity: they are always with us, they live among us.
Quote ID: 5442
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 219 Page: 143
Section: 2A3
Another author, writing in Gaul at much the same time about a group of martyrs, observed, almost in passing, that ‘it is for the particular martyrs that they possess that particular places and particular towns are reputed illustrious’{11}Pastor John notes: John’s note: (400’s)
Quote ID: 5443
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 219 Page: 144
Section: 2A3
This was not the first time relics had been used in dedicating a church. Ambrose himself had used relics of the Apostles - presumably objects that had been in contact with the bodies - when dedicating the Roman basilica.
Quote ID: 5444
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 219 Page: 145
Section: 2A3
Ambrose’s action was for more revolutionary. Its novelty lay in the use he made of the relics. He placed them beneath the altar where he had intended to have himself buried, ‘for it is fitting that the bishop should rest where he had been used to offer sacrifice; but’, he said, ‘I yield the . . . position to the sacred victims...He who suffered for all shall be upon the altar, those redeemed by His passion beneath it’ {13}. The relics of the saints were this brought into association with the regular public worship of their own Church.
Quote ID: 5445
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 145
Section: 2A3
This was the crucial step in the martyrs’ entry into the mainstream of the Church’s public, everyday, life. Hitherto their relics had been lying in the suburban cemeteries, in Milan as in Rome and elsewhere. The army of martyrs surrounded Rome - and other cities fortunate enough to have them - like a besieging force. From the second half of the fourth century sumptuous churches rose over their tombs and their refurbished burial chambers came to be adorned with finely chiseled inscriptions.
Quote ID: 5446
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 145/146
Section: 2A3
But before long, everywhere the martyrs were coming into the urban churches. Rightly has this been described as breaking the ‘barriers that had existed in the back of the minds of Mediterranean men for a thousand years, and to join categories and places that had been usually meticulously contrasted’.{16} Early in the fifth century, the sight of a Christian body being brought into the city, thought to be a corpse, could still raise fears of pollution and rouse a pagan mob to fury.{17}Bringing the martyrs into the city, Christianity brought the dead back among the living.
Quote ID: 5447
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 219 Page: 148
Section: 2A3
The relics of the first martyr, St. Stephen, miraculously discovered in 415, spread over the Mediterranean world with astonishing speed. ‘His body has brought light to the whole world’, Augustine said in a sermon preached on one of his anniversaries.{27}
Quote ID: 5449
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 219 Page: 149/150
Section: 2A3,2E3
‘Here’, the actual spot, was ‘the place’ of the martyr’s concrete immediacy in space as in time. Every church was a direct gateway to heaven; no longer, as it had been from the beginning, only a building to house the worshipping community, it became a shrine housing the holy relic.
Quote ID: 5450
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 219 Page: 150
Section: 4B
With the decline of public authority, public places were encroached on and privatised. Diminished and re-directed civic munificence created churches, chapels and monasteries instead of the traditional civic buildings.
Quote ID: 5451
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 219 Page: 163/164
Section: 2E2
In his Institutes Cassian gave examples of heroic obedience: of John, who conscientiously watered the dry stick given him by his master, twice daily, ‘not mindful of the impossibility of the command’, bringing water from two miles away, through wind and weather, through illness and health, and would have continued when, at the end of a year, his master tore up the stick to see if it had begun to sprout; or the monk who obediently steeled himself to feel no emotion at the sight of his little son neglected and maltreated: such examples, Cassian wrote, could not be passed over in silence, as ‘the good of obedience...holds the primacy among the other virtues’.{23}Pastor John notes: John’s note: stupid
Quote ID: 5452
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 219 Page: 166
Section: 2E2
Like Jerome before him, and like many other ascetics, Cassian saw Christian history in terms of a decline from Apostolic perfection to corruption brought by wealth and respectability. It was only a short step to a vision of the monastic life as institutionalised protest.
Quote ID: 5453
Time Periods: 4
End of quotes