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 Gib-
bon 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 cur-
rent 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 Anxiety^6 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
fl ood 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 writ-
ing 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.