Christening the Romans

Abstract

Europe was christened in the waters of Roman Christianity. Creeds, liturgies, hierarchies, saints, and ascetic practices favored in later imperial Rome washed over the European peoples in successive centuries and marked their Christianity indelibly. The splendor of that imperial era, rescued from facile notions of a declining Rome, has come to historical life in a distinct epoch called “late antiquity” (300–650). Its monuments testify to an ethos at once classical and spiritual. Late antique Christians instinctively took from Roman surroundings all that suited their new religious ends, from the architectural form given churches to the rhetoric and philosophy that mediated sermons and theologies. This Roman imprint passed to European Christians as a sacred legacy: the basilica as a church rather than a civic hall, the metropolitan as a clerical rather than a civic official, Rome as the city of Saint Peter rather than the emperor, the Empire as destined for Christ's birth as much as Augustus's triumphs. Medieval believers, seeking to re-create the church of first-century Jerusalem, fixed repeatedly upon exemplars from late antique Rome: the teachings of Augustine, the Bible of Jerome, the philosophical theology of Boethius, the laws of Leo, the Rule of Benedict, the prayers ascribed to Gregory. Even the story of Rome's religious transformation entered into the self-understanding of medieval and modern Europeans, the conversion narrative joined to biblical history with its outcome treated as providential and decisive.