Constantine and the making of Christian unity
CHRISTIANITY, PHILOSOPHY, AND ROMAN POWER Constantine, Julian, and the bishops on exegesis and empire
LEA NICCOLAI 348pp. Cambridge University Press. £100 (US $130).
THE CHRISTIANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE IN LATE ANTIQUITY Intellectual and material transformations
MARK LETTENEY 350pp. Cambridge University Press. £85 (US $110).
THE LATE ROMAN EMPIRE was an argumentative age. Debates were publicly staged and stenographers transcribed them. Audiences reacted with acclamation or mutterings, and those too went on the record. Furious disputes erupted in letters sent from one grandee to another, or directed to a general audience to make a public stand. Christianity gave a new energy to the art of rhetoric, whether in courts or churches, across the whole culturally embattled extent of the empire. Heresies and schisms arose, and needed to be beaten down or defended. Either way, it took a prodigious number of words.
The emperor Constantine cannot have foreseen this outcome when, in 325, he ordered the bishops of the now officially recognized Christian church to meet in Nicaea (modern İznik) in northwest Turkey. He wanted them to develop a statement of faith that would bridge their increasingly vocal differences and to which they could all subscribe. They had been arguing in particular about the nature of Christ: was he God, man, or some combination of the two? What emerged was the Nicene Creed, still central to many denominations of Christianity across the world – and repudiated by others. Constantine and his bishops had inadvertently accomplished two things. They had taken doctrinal authority out of the Bible and placed it in what was essentially biblical paratext and commentary. And they had given the Christians something newly specific to argue about.
These two books give different accounts of what was going on with the Nicene Creed. For Lea Niccolai, in Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power, Constantine was a philosopher, embracing Christianity as a new philosophy. Every philosophy needed its statement of basic tenets: hence the impetus to agree on a creed. For Mark Letteney, in The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, the emergence of the creed was far more circumstantial and contingent. Constantine associated imperial stability with religious unity. He wanted the creed as a statement of unity, and a means to enforce it. Letteney observes that it was the first time that the practice of theology had been backed by an army.
Both authors both grapple with the extraordinary changes over the course of the fourth century in how knowledge was constructed and promulgated. Niccolai shows how deeply indebted Constantine was to the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, importing its presuppositions into his support for the church. Not surprisingly, the (anti-)hero of her book
