CHRISTIANIZATION AND ITS CHALLENGESfoundation 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 religionEmperors 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 prac-
tice rather than belief,^51 and indeed we have a great deal of the sort of evi-
dence (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 Chris-
tian 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 Christian-
ity, 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 fl oors of basilicas – do seem to allow us to perceive the