A Century of Miracles: Christians, Pagans, Jews, and the Supernatural, 312–410

Abstract

BOOKREVIEWS 251 Tempest’s bookcan be readas ahistoryof the complicatedevents it narrates; it also offers a beautifully written, engagingly adventurous style of narrative that makes for compelling reading even by those who know the events so well (perhaps too well). Throughout, the author offers a remarkably fresh treatment of both sources and moments in history that continue to haunt those with even casual interest in res Romanae. By the end, if the Brutus that emerges from these pages is no more fully realized than he was before this book, at least the ancient appraisal has been revisited and redrawn in sharper relief. And with a figure as complex andeven polarizing as Brutus,that is nosmall achievement. LEE FRATANTUONO OhioWesleyan University,lmfratan@owu.edu * * * * * A Century of Miracles: Christians, Pagans, Jews, and the Supernatural, 312–410. By H. A. DRAKE. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi + 312. Hardback, $35.00.ISBN: 978-0-19-936741-2. The 4th century remains integral for understanding early Christianity’s social, epistemological and political development. Scholars traditionally credit this century with the beginnings of Christian “historiography,” monasticism and its associated hagiography, a politically powerful bishopric, Christian “hospitals,” Christian monumental architecture, the Christian biblical canon and even Christianity qua religious identity vis-à-vis Judaism (see Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines, 2004). At the same time, this century contained what Ed Watts called The Final Pagan Generation (2015), within which classical culture flourished in figures like the sophist Libanius,the soldier-historian Ammianus Marcellinus and the Emperor Julian. Drake’s work operates at the confluence of these worlds, narrating fourth-century Christianity as being “at its most basic level, a story of a change in the meaning of what it meant to be a Roman” (3). As scholars of the 252 BOOKREVIEWS period have come to expect, Drake’s treatment is a humorous, learned and delightful romp that provides for long-embattled questions within the field answers that are intelligible,coherent andenjoyable toengage. The novelty of Drake’s approach is immediately evident in its structure. He begins with a chapter on the battlefield miracle Ambrose imputed to Theodosius I in his funeral oration for him in 395. He then goes back to the “beginning,” Constantine’s famous battlefield conversion, and proceeds to follow the century through to its end, where he began. The logic of both legends—“military victory proves that the Christian God is God”—embodies this 4th century, in which Christians appropriated this Roman maxim of “might proves right.” The question Drake’s book poses is the following: how was Christianity able, given this outlook, to “survive” ideologically the barbarian sack of Rome in 410? Such an event should have shown the Christian God not to be almighty after all. But it didnot,and Christianity’s overcoming of this contradiction constitutes for Drake “the great unansweredquestion of the age” (2). Drake begins his answer with a framing chapter. His insight here is that the 4th century has been reoriented by 20th -century Cold War thinking, which insisted upon black and white, good and evil dichotomies. This modern mode of thought “defined out of existence a period when religious identity was much more fluid than it became” (22). Thus, when Drake begins his analysis with Ambrose’s 395 funeral oration (Chapter 2), he aims to examine what changed in the century preceding it. It turns out that Ambrose embodies a shift in which Christian bishops (and emperors) had come to view/use religion in ways “grounded in ancient thought” (46) by portraying deity as attendant upon pious rulers. The “miracles” Drake signals in his title are thus the miracles interpreted by Christianly in the upper echelons of the Christian body politic. Subsequent chapters deal with what are arguably the major permutations of this phenomenon through the 4th century: Constantine’s obscure vision at the Milvian Bridge (Chapter 3),the narration of miracles byLactantius andEusebius (Chapter 4), the legend of the finding of the true cross in the Holy Land (Chapter 5), “Jewish” miracle stories found in authors like Epiphanius (Chapter 6), miracles in a monastic context, e.g. the Life of Antony (Chapter 7), the use of miracles in discourse by and about the Emperor...