Aspects populaires et aspects aristocratiques de l’être-chrétien aux IIIe et IVe siècles

Abstract

The author unfolds the semantic richness that Mazzarino, at various moments of his reflection, has given to the notion of democratization, taken in the social and cultural sense; he seems to have borrowed the concept from Adolf von Harnack, associating it with a conception of Christian expansion as a « rivoluzione spirituale » (not political), an echo of the « geistige Revolution » of Ernst Troeltsch. In Mazzarino’s concept of « democratizzazione della cultura » we should read a double movement: on one side, a descending democratization, analysed here as a downward transfer and universalization, by the Fathers of the Church and/or by the senators, of the aristocrats’own values : metaphoric ennobling, “dignity” of the poor, who through the credit which they have with God, become the « protectors (patroni) of the souls of the rich » (Paulinus of Nola); on the other side, an ascending democratization, which rehabilitates certain concrete forms of social inferiority (receiving a salary etc.), by presenting th...