Brown, Peter
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about thirty-seven minutes; YouTube auto-captions, mostly accurate, with some garbled Greek and Latin terms and a few unclear names)
Core ideas
What did they think the future would be? Brown opens by cutting the "overcharged image" of Constantine, blamed for everything modern Christians dislike in late antiquity, down to human size. His question: what were the "horizons of the possible" for Constantine and the Christians of his age? Scholars take the Christianity of Constantine for granted without asking what was thinkable then, and risk projecting later expectations back onto him. He turns to Eusebius of Caesarea (bishop 313-339/340), who ran the think tank around Origen's library and so speaks for many Greek-speaking bishops.
Thin universalism. For Eusebius, Christianity was universal ("to all nations and to all peoples") in the sense that anyone anywhere could become a Christian, not that everyone in any place would: "What we're looking at is what we might call a thin universalism", like a map of Starbucks branches. "They could think of Christianity as a universal religion but not necessarily as a majority religion." Brown traces this to an old argument against astrology, set out in Bardaisan's Book of the Laws of Countries (c. 220): the diversity of national customs shows that they are not caused by the stars but freely chosen, so a group can freely choose to live by the laws of Christ. Origen and Celsus shared the view that nations were allotted to angelic overseers (Deuteronomy 32:8), which Origen treated as fallen demons; Christ's coming (Eusebius reads the angels who "ministered to him" as the angels of the nations paying homage) put them to flight. The gods had begun to die (the death of Pan; a demon dying near the Orkneys under Tiberius), so the church's progress is an "aftershock" of a victory already won in heaven, a "doubling of visible and invisible". The persecution under Diocletian (destroying churches) and the rebuilding in Tyre (c. 315) are a conflict between devisibilization and visibilization, and parrhesia, freedom to be seen and heard, is the key word, also in a Manichaean sermon on the Great War.
Constantine as representative. Brown says Constantine did not take his view from Eusebius, but shared a world view found throughout the Greek East (and in Lactantius): pride in universality, belief that paganism was an empty shell already defeated, and a passion for the exaltation of the church, with codes of avoidance of pollution (Eusebius's earth dumped from the temple of Venus). That explains the "dog that barked but did not bite": harsh words for paganism, yet permission to sacrifice in the open, a temple at Hispellum without sacrifice, "surgical" strikes (Baalbek) as signs of an already fallen demonic empire. Brown warns against reading Constantine's tolerance or intolerance anachronistically (Hal Drake, Mark Edwards). "The exaltation of Christianity, not the end of paganism, not the Christianization of the entire Roman Empire, was what deeply concerned both men." That changed by the end of the long fourth century, with Ambrose, Theodosius and Augustine, who could speak of a majority religion; Christianity "came of age" then, not in 312-313.
Excerpts
“« What we're looking at is what we might call a thin universalism. »”
“« They could think of Christianity as a universal religion but not necessarily as a majority religion. »”
“« The exaltation of Christianity, not the end of paganism, not the Christianization of the entire Roman Empire, was what deeply concerned both men. »”