A.D. 381 - A well-written but fundamentally biased look at the formation of Christendom.
An Amazon book review.
Charles Freeman’s “A.D.381” is an interesting and engaging historical examination of the relatively over-looked period during which Christianity consolidated its hold over the Roman Empire. It is unfortunately marked by an ideological debt to Gibbons’ thesis that the Fall of Rome was the triumph of barbarism and Christianity.
“A.D. 381” is quite excellent in looking at the players and events that often remain obscure in most histories of the late Roman Empire, namely, how Christianity went from a tolerated religion under Constantine to the only lawful religion within a century. Most people with a basic familiarity of the subject can identify Constantine, the Council of Nicea and 325, but probably don’t know that Council of Nicea under Constantine was only the beginning of Christian influence over the Roman Empire. But it was not until the last decades of the Fourth Century that both paganism and heretical – i.e., non-Nicene Christianity – were outlawed and one form of Christianity, which defined the persons of the Trinity as being “consubstantial,” emerged as the only legal religion in the Empire. Hence, the date 381 marks the date of the Council of Constantinople which was called by the Emperor Theodosius to confirm the Nicene Creed and put an end to the dispute between followers of the Nicene Creed and those Christians who viewed Jesus Christ as a lesser, created, divinity, including the Arians and other “adoptionists.”
Freeman’s valid thesis – which he proves in detail – is that theological developments can not be removed from the brute social facts in which the theology developed. So, as he remarks in the close of “381,” while some theologians want to treat the development of Christian doctrine as the bloodless, intellectual development of conclusions from core Christian premises, the historical fact is that the development of Christian doctrine involved politicking, trickery, bullying and just plain chance.
A key example of chance is found in the life of Theodosius himself. Prior to Theodosius, Roman Emperors had been generally content not to take a too pious view of their jobs as Christian emperors and to hold off on baptism, which might require that they become pious carrying out their duties as Christian emperors, until they were facing death itself, the “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins” clause being the ultimate “get out of jail” card. Theodosius seemed to be following this script until 38 AD, when after being baptized in the face of a life-threatening illness, something messed up the script – he lived. At that point, he had a problem; he was a baptized Roman emperor who could not turn a pragmatically blind eye to the problem of heresy.
Because of this historical accident, Nicene Christianity became hegemonic as Theodosius outlawed paganism and called the Council of Constantinople in 381 to ratify the Nicene Creed. Once the Nicene Creed was ratified by the Council, Theodosius then put an end to the long Nicene-Arian controversy that had divided Christianity in the Roman Empire by removing Arian bishops from the seats of power.
What followed, according to Freeman, was the “closing of the Western Mind,” which is the title of Freeman’s better-known, earlier book. This was the result, according to Freeman, of the repudiation of the ancient Greek ideal of free speech, something which Freeman drops in periodically as a chorale note throughout the book, at which point, presumably, the reader is supposed to nod his head in agreement, knowing that Christianity was a victory for the forces of “faith” against that of “reason.”
Unfortunately, those Gibbons-like notes are where Freeman’s book went off track for me. I had to wonder where the discussion of the ascendancy of the Arian emperors during the period between 325 and 381 was to be found. I wondered what Freeman’s explanation was for Theodosius’ ability to so thoroughly win the day for the Nicene Creeds, when earlier emperors were not able to put their Arian Creed into a hegemonic position in Christianity. I also wondered what Freeman’s explanation would be for the inability of Imperial power to deal with the Monophysite schism in the same way that it had dealt with the Arian schism.
In short, I formed the impression that Freeman was cherry-picking his facts and arguments to favor his thesis that Christian theology was dictated and enforced from the top down. It seems to me that this other perspective on history suggests that the “grass roots” did have a lot of influence over how history played out. For example, in his discussion of Augustine, Freeman reveals the thesis of his book as the proposition that the Nicene doctrine became orthodox only because it was enforced by the state. But in order to prove that thesis, then a discussion of why the Arian emperors were unable to impose Arianism, or the Chalcedonian emperors were unable to Chalcedonianism on the Monophysite areas of the Empire seems required. Freeman doesn’t discuss these counter-examples, which seem to allow the conclusion that the Nicene doctrine may have been successfully enforced by the state because it was orthodox.
In short, it seemed that Freeman was adopting a strategy I see in a good number of books where someone has an antipathy for history as it turned out – they don’t deal with inconvenient counter-facts. When an author fails to deal with such counter-examples, it leaves the impression that he is engaged in polemics and propaganda aimed at taking advantage of readers who don’t already know all the facts.
Likewise, although I’m sure that Freeman has developed the theme of how the “Western Mind” became “closed” in his prior book, I have to wonder what he meant by that term in the context of this book. He quotes pagan panegyrics to emperors which had spoken out in favor of free speech as an example of how there was a tradition of free speech and free debate in the ancient world. However, does he really expect us to believe that there were not some issues that were off limits in the ancient world, such as whether emperors were really divine, or whether emperors were really the font of all grace and wisdom? One rather doubts it.
Also, are we supposed to believe that free speech and debate came to a complete close after the Council of Constantinople decided in re-affirmed the Nicene position? If so, why were there all those controversies in the following centuries over Monophystism, Nestorianism, Monergism, etc., etc.? Did those controversies not involve a high order of logic and reason?
But Freeman doesn’t discuss those issues from that perspective, choosing instead to leave the reader to believe a caricature of the intellectual life of late antiquity that could have been picked out of a book on the war of religion against science. Again, that approach does the reader a disservice.
My sense was that by emphasizing the facts of politics and personalities, Freeman was able to play up the discontinuity and contingency of history. However, while Freeman was very good with the details of the politics and personalities – albeit with a generally hostile interpretation of historical characters such as Ambrose and Augustine – he ignored his own prescription that the actual facts of history be examined in their historical context. Among those facts are certainly the principles and logic that the historical characters believed that they were applying to the theological disputes that they were involved with. Freeman rarely discussed why the historical figures that he analyzed believed what they believed. By ignoring the elements of the theological principles and logic, Freeman seems to have inappropriately underemphasized the element of theological continuity and the deep roots of the theological doctrines at issue in the theological disputes of late antiquity.
I do recommend “381.” It is an engaging read and does provide the reader with an excellent overview of, and insight into, a bit of history that we often overlook and may not understand as well as we should. For example, I knew about the story of Ambrose's confrontation with Theodosius over the slaughter of citizens of Thessalonica, but Freeman's book is the first time I ever learned about the details surrounding that historical event, even if Freeman manages to "tee up" this historic moment when a Roman Emperor was forced to acknowledge a power greater than himself as an example of Ambrose's megalomania.
I would, however, recommend
Robert Louis Wilken’s “The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God” to see the elements of continuity and reason that informed early Christian theology.
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