Christendom by Peter Heather

Christendom, then, is a response to what seems to me the pressing intellectual challenge of reassessing Christianity's rise to pre-eminence in the light of its modern eclipse, by re-examining the historical processes that first generated the defining coincidence between Europe and the cultural dominance of the Christian religion. It aims to give full weight to contingency, to Christianity's almost limitless capacity for self-reinvention, and to the potential of past populations to have made alternative choices. My aim here is not to produce another total history of Christianity, but to explore afresh exactly how Europe became Christendom: that part of the planet dominated by Christian rulers and overwhelmingly Christian populations.

Peter Heather takes two points in European history as the beginning and end of Christendom, his massive history of the growth of the Christian religion throughout Europe: first, the 4th century conversion of Constantine, which brought official Christianity to the Roman Empire for the first time, and then the 14th century conversion of the Lithuanians, the last major polity in Europe to be Christianized. It took about a thousand years, then, for Christianity to conquer the continent, which seems like a long time, but maybe isn't so much when you consider what historical undertakings must have taken place for a single continent to become so religiously homogenous. What happened in between is the subject of Heather's book.

One of the main theses of Christendom is that Christianity's rise was not foreordained. Before Christianity began to wane as a social force in Europe, Heather explains, it was easy to look at the religion's success and determine that it was simply built different. Now, in a post-Christian era, it's easier to appreciate how things might have been otherwise, and Heather shows us meticulously how this was true: Constantine's conversion, for example, eventually drew in much of the landowning Roman elite, but left the pagan public untouched, requiring an early medieval campaign of temple-busting to spread throughout the Eastern empire. The orthodox Nicene Christianity that we take for granted today was closer, Heather argues, to being defeated by its rivals than we really appreciate; the Gothic successor states of the Roman Empire were split between different forms of Christianity that might easily have led to vastly historical paths. And of course, Heather reminds us, Christianity's traditional strongholds in the Near East and North Africa were swallowed wholesale by Islam in a process of elite capture that remarkably resembled the rise of Christianity among the same groups; if Islam could capture the places where Christianity was born, why not the rest of Europe? Heather calls this contingency, and an awareness of the way things might have been different alerts us to the fact that history is made up of positive actors, not merely those swept up in inevitable tides of change.

Christianity thrived, Heather argues, because of its adaptability. The Christianity adopted by Constantine and the Roman elite was not much like the rusticism of the Desert Fathers and the Jesus Movement of early Palestine. Roman intellectual and literary traditions helped provide an infrastructure for a Christian empire, which all but fell apart after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, giving way to a collection of largely autonomous communities held loosely together by missionary and monastic traditions. In the middle of the middle ages--say, 600 to 1100--most Europeans would not have gone to church regularly, and only a few would have been exposed to regular preaching. Religious authority lay not in the pope but in divinely appointed kings--especially the Carolingians, whose strong hand and interest in religious control did much to resurrect Christianity as an institutional practice--who used it as a tool to build alliances and cement their own legitimacy. The end of Heather's story begins with the "Twelfth Century Renaissance" and the gradual assertion of the papacy as a singular Christian authority, which mutually reinforced a set of social institutions that renewed a particular orthodoxy. It's interesting to reflect on how young the idea of papal supremacy is, and certain associated theological positions, like notions of sin, penitence, and purgatory, which only come into their own alongside the rise of the Holy See. When the Lithuanians completed the puzzle of European Christianity, Heather argues, they did so in the context of an institutional Christianity that was much stronger than it had been since the days of Constantine, and which looked much different even from the Christianity of a century or two before.

I really enjoyed reading this. Even as a relatively curious and knowledgeable person (I hope), the long middle ages really seem like a single mashed up period to me. It's hard to conceptualize a period in which, say, Charlemagne and St. Francis are as far apart as me and George Washington, and even this is is only a fraction of the long history of Christianity's growth to the ends of the continent. It confirmed for me something I long suspected: that today's "trads" are largely bullshit artists who have no idea, or perhaps simply no interest, in whether or not the traditions they seem to value actually represent unbroken strands of Christian practice at all. Christianity's adaptability, we see, is its great strength, but it also means that there is and was an immense diversity as to what the religion meant in both concept and practice.