The Barbarian Conversion: from Paganism to Christianity
by Richard Fletcher - published by Henry Holt & Co., l997
A Book Review by Father John McCloskey
Jesus Christ, being the Lord of History, the Teacher, Christians have lessons to learn from the history of any epoch...However, the historical period described by Richard Fletcher in his magisterial The Barbarian Conversion: from Paganism to Christianity, (Henry Holt & Co., New York, l997), is particularly fascinating, as we prepare to celebrate the Jubilee year 2000, which commemorates not only the millennial anniversary of the birth of Jesus, but also two thousand years of Christian history. During that time Christianity has grow from 12 apostles to well over a billion and one-half of the globe's inhabitants. Pope John Paul II has repeatedly called for the re-evangelization of the West, precisely in those areas whose evangelization is studied in this book. The Pope has also spoken in his Apostolic letter Tertio Adveniente Millenio about the Church in the first millennium possibly serving as a model for the reunion of all Christians, a leading goal of his Pontificate.
In an earlier review published in these pages, I examined Rodney Stark's best seller The Rise of Christianity, which took the reader on a conjectural sociological survey of primitive Christianity from Pentecost to the Edict of Milan. The author came up with some startling and controversial conclusions underlining the primary importance of personal example, in family life, and friendship or, to use a term of Cardinal Newman, the "power of personal influence," of the early Christian laymen and families, guided by the Holy Spirit, to fuel the growth, of the infant Church until its toleration by the Roman empire. Fletcher's book takes us to the next stage, which is dramatically different and in some ways of even greater importance, to us in the WeSaint "This book is about the process by which a religion which had grown up inside the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire was diffused among the outsiders whom the Romans referred to as barbarians." We, almost without exception, are the descendants of those "barbarians." As academic history the book is thorough but often wordy and repetitive. A condensed version would have more readable, but then again might not serve as well as a resource for other specialists.
Fletcher does an excellent job in the early chapters of setting up the scene of the barbarian invasions and conversion which began with two developments that shattered the cultural unity of the Mediterranean world. One of these was the withdrawal into herself of the eastern Byzantine, Orthodox half of the former Roman Empire. The other was the eruption of Islam into the Mediterranean and the resultant drawing off of its eastern and southern shores into an alien culture.
The period of barbarian conversion spans the time from the early fourth century, with the Edict of Milan, when Christianity was basically tolerated in the Empire, and the first signs appeared of the barbarian incursions into the Roman empire, to 387, with the final conversion of an European state, Lithuania.
The author asks a series of questions which he attempts to answer in detail throughout the book as he examines the evangelizations of various barbarian tribes to Christianity over the course of close to 1000 years. The questions are the following:
- "The problem of the apostolic impulse. Why, for example, did Saint Gregory I decide to send a mission to convert the English to Christianity?"
- "Who were these activists who engaged themselves in the work–the toilsome, often unrewarding, sometimes dangerous work–of missionary preaching?"
- "Who were identified as the potential converts, individuals or groups, central people or marginal people, kings, nobleman?"
- "What were the expectations of the potential converts, founded in their experience of the traditional religion in whose observances they were brought up? What did they expect of it?"
- "How did evangelists set about the business of putting over the faith and its associated standard of conduct to potential converts?"
- And this is a question apropos of current day evangelization in Asia and Africa, the question of "enculturation." "What compromises or adjustments did missionary Christianity have in a early medieval context? How and what were the limits drawn between what was tolerable in traditional belief and practice and what was not? Take, for example, 'marriage, penal practice, the disposal of the dead, warfare, bloodfeuds, slave trading.'"
- "What did the new converts make of the new faith and its demands? What models of Christian living were presented to them?"
- "How did a structure of ecclesiastical government come into being in the mission field, and how did it differ from the Mediterranean model whence it derived?"
- And perhaps most importantly, "What makes a Christian? At what point may one say of an individual, or a society, ‘He has become, is now a Christian?'"
These questions are painstakingly but not always satisfactorily answered throughout the course of the book. The limitations are obvious. There is relatively scarce historical documentation about the barbarian tribes' morals, customs, and religious practices. They were generally nomadic tribes from an oral tradition who left basically no written documents behind and relatively few artifacts. The wonderful stories of the conversions are, although generally historically accurate, told only from one side, by chroniclers such as the Venerable Bede in England or in the historical records of the monasteries and dioceses as they begin their process of formation and growth. The author's lack of appreciation for the motives of the evangelizing missionaries is another problem.
Fletcher's own religious viewpoint is unclear. He speaks of having attended Church in his youth, and I suspect he is an Anglican of some sort. His perspective is in general favorable to Christianity, yet occasionally somewhat cynical and humorous as regards the sincerity of both the evangelizers and of the evangelized in accepting Christianity. He simply does not speculate on what kept these pagans permanently converted to Christ over the centuries. Could the answer be that the sacramental graces and the power of Holy Scripture gradually transformed the moral behavior of these rude barbarians into the people who built Christendom? To answer "Yes" would require faith. But what other answer could there be?
In addition to asking these questions these questions, Fletcher goes on and sketches the situation of the post-Edict-of-Milan Church and identifies two tendencies which tend to repeat themselves throughout the history of the Church. One is an attitude of wariness towards the secular world, of distrust, even of hatred for it. "This attitude may not be unrelated to the increasing tendency to see the then flourishing new monasticism as the ideal of the Christian life." Fletcher does not consider that at the same time, the dissolution of morals and power of the declining Roman empire, the decline in fervor of Christians as they became the "establishment" and the serious and disturbing inroads of the heresies, Arianism and Manicheanism, with their doubts about the divinity of Jesus and the goodness of the material world all no doubt contributed to this first tendency.
The second tendency was "the quest for some form of accommodation with the secular world and empire." I believe that this quest is not at all surprising for a variety of reasons. The Christian of those times knew of no other polity than the Roman empire which had appearances of immortality and after two and one half centuries of Christian persecution had instantaneously become tolerant and then gradually fully approving.
As if dissecting a process, Fletcher goes on to say, that "the next move was to suggest that the Roman empire was in some sense itself related to God's scheme for the world." We, of course, believing in God's providence, can say that it was. This is not saying that the Church could only survive inside of the context of the Roman Empire or in dependence on it. Nonetheless, such thinking did exist and may have contributed to what appeared to be for a time a lack of missionary interest in the barbarians. This is a statement from a leading modern historian quoted by Fletcher: "Throughout the whole period of a Roman empire not a single example is known of a man who was appointed bishop with the specific task of going beyond the frontier to a wholly pagan region in order to convert the barbarians living there." Fletcher does not seem to understand, however, is that there was an ongoing work of evangelization within the Roman Empire itself that soaked up considerable energies. As both Fletcher and Stark acknowledge, Christianity was largely an urban phenomenon and indeed the word "pagan" derives from the name of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire countryside, who were largely unevangelized for centuries. At the time of the Edict of Milan, it is estimated that only 10% of the populace was Christian. The barbarian tribes were nomadic and until their migrations south and eastward were barely in the consciousness of the early Christian hierarchy and faithful. The Roman system of rapid communication by its extensive road system ended at its borders. It is thus an unfair and false conclusion to believe that early Christians' eagerness for souls was limited simply to Roman citizens. Saint Augustine was not as novel as Fletcher would have him in his vision of a Christian community not confined to a Roman Empire which he saw rapidly declining. Augustine argued in response to a controversy regarding the end of the world and the preaching of the gospel to all nations that this had not yet happened because "there are among us, that is in Africa, innumerable barbarian tribes among whom the Gospel has not yet been preached. Yet it cannot be rightly said that the promise of God does not concern them because the Lord did not promise the Romans but all nations the seed of Abraham."
Fletcher does point out that the bishops were encouraging the landed elites to "take firm and if necessary coercive action to make the peasantry Christian–in some sense." He points to Saint Martin of Tours, a mid-Fourth Century bishop and saint as a man who was particularly effective in this way. Along with exhortation, he did not hesitate to be confrontational: disruption of pagan cults, demolition of pagan edifices. This action is similar to the later conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortes. We must remember that what is being dealt with here is not some organized civilized denomination, but raw paganism with its, by Christian standards, shocking violence and immorality. "Miracles, wonders, exorcisms, temple-torching and shrine-smashing were in themselves acts of evangelization."
Other local tribes were more easily persuaded by the transference of ritual from one religious loyalty to another for the simple reason that the Christian God and his saints answered their prayers while the pagan deities did not. "Episcopal initiatives in spiritual and social welfare, preaching, legislation, the example of ascetic renunciation, the demonstrably superior power of Christian over other sorts of magic, miraculous cures worked by holy men: all have something to hint to us about how it was thought that rural conversion might best be effected." One of the most effective means was simply to get the landowners to build the Churches. If you build them, they will come?
The work of John of Ephesus illustrates the point. In the middle years of the sixth Century he conducted an evangelizing campaign in what is today's western Turkey. We are told that "in the course of several year's work he and his helpers demolished temples and shrines, felled sacred trees, baptized 80,000 persons, built ninety-eight churches and founded twelve monasteries." And this was in the heart of the empire, an area where there had been a Christian presence since the time of Saint Paul! It is hardly surprising that the Church could not reach out immediately or effectively to the barbarians when such evangelization work remained within the border of the empire." Conversion and Christianization was a very slow business."
With the invasion of the Roman Empire by the various Gothic peoples, most particularly the Huns in the late Fourth Century, the work of conversion of the barbarians properly begins. Fletcher spends hundreds of pages detailing the wonderful and heroic stories of the work of the missionaries, the role that monasticism played particularly as it came from Ireland and England, and the evangelization in the heart of Europe and into the land of the Slavs. He speaks about the conversions of the rulers, the establishment of hierarchy, and the eventual conversion of the subjects of these tribe and kingdoms. He speaks of Ufila, of Patrick, of Willibrord, of Cyril and Methodius, of Columbanus and Columcille, and of Boniface, among many others unfamiliar and even unknown to us. These men are high in heaven because they did not count the cost and they knew the prize that awaited them. As we draw near to the Jubilee year, we salute them. Without their work, the great majority of us would not be here to celebrate.
In his last chapter, "Slouching towards Bethlehem," Fletcher makes a crucial point. Evangelization is never complete, at least not before the Second Coming. As late, or early, as 1608 the archbishop of Salzburg in Catholic Bavaria writes to the elector Maximilian I, "The common man cannot even say the Lord's Prayer or the Ave Maria, and does not know the Apostles' Creed, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments." After all, as the author points out, "Standards do slide." If all had been thoroughly evangelized, we trust that there would not have been a Great Schism, nor a Reformation, nor an Enlightenment, nor the death of hundreds of thousands in this century as a result of the apparent triumph of Godless ideologies and ugly and unchristian ethnic rivalries. The Church is always in need of an authentic renewal and faithful reform because it exists in time and its members on earth are sinners. Even now John Paul II is working toward unity of the Catholic and Orthodox "lungs" of the Church. And the resurgent demographic and at times violent growth of Islamic fundamentalism is making deep inroads in Europe, where Christianity once thrived and where it now threatens to disappear. We are at a particularly important juncture in the Church's history as the Gospel is being preached to all nations. There are new and exotic forms of high tech barbarism which threaten the existence of the human race. The Holy Father foresees a new "springtime for the Church" and a "civilization of love and truth" for the next millennium. As he celebrates the twentieth anniversary of his pontificate, we call to mind the words of his greeting at his installation, "Be not afraid."
First appeared in L'Osservatore Romano (English Edition) in the February 17, 1999, issue.
