Simplicity and Humility in Late Antique Christian Thought: Elites and the Challenges of Apostolic Life by Jaclyn L. Maxwell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Simplicity and Humility in Late Antique Christian Thought: Elites and the Challenges of Apostolic Life by Jaclyn L. Maxwell David Brakke Jaclyn L. Maxwell Simplicity and Humility in Late Antique Christian Thought: Elites and the Challenges of Apostolic Life Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021 Pp. xii + 193. $99.99. In the contemporary United States wealthy politicians who come from privileged backgrounds and have earned Ivy League degrees often present themselves as champions of "ordinary" Americans and rail against the very elite classes to [End Page 650] which they belong. In this way they hope to deflect attention from their high status and gain authority in a culture that valorizes "self-made men" (sic) who have achieved success solely by their own merits. Those of us who belong to the educated elite often regard such persons as hypocrites, but it is difficult to deny the frequent success of their efforts to legitimate their status in the face of strong values that push against the credentials and social forces that got them where they are. They are not the first elites to navigate such difficult waters, as Jacklyn Max-well demonstrates in this subtle and innovative book. How did wealthy, highly educated Christian leaders like John Chrysostom and the Cappadocian fathers negotiate the apparent contradiction between their upper-class privilege and the lower-class simplicity of the original apostles, who were known to have been tentmakers and fishermen? Very carefully, it seems, sometimes disparaging their theological opponents for the lack of education that presumably characterized the apostles and at other times attributing to themselves and their peers the virtuous humility that those apostles exemplified. As tempting as it may be to accuse these Christians of the hypocrisy that characterizes the politicians who follow consultants and focus groups, Maxwell instead draws on social psychology's concepts of "confirmation bias" and "motivated reasoning" to describe the ways in which elites deal with the cognitive dissonance between competing worldviews (8–9). In other words, the men whom she studies provide evidence not for the duplicitous ways that leaders attempt to manipulate differing cultural values to their advantage, but for the diverse ways in which the traditional Roman values of hierarchy and privilege and the socially disruptive Christian values of simplicity and humility interacted as a new imperial Roman Christian culture was developing, that is, "a period when thinkers were incorporating new strands of thought into their understandings of social and economic divisions" (162). After an Introduction, Maxwell unfolds her analysis over five chapters. Chapter One surveys non-Christian Roman attitudes toward the poor, manual labor, social inequality, and the like and then the new perspectives that Christians of the first three centuries brought to these issues. Maxwell is careful to explain that Christian social attitudes neither replaced nor were subsumed by existing views as the number and diversity of Christians grew; rather, "social teachings of the Bible added new dimensions to how Roman Christians understood themselves and their world" (33). Chapter Two turns to Christian social attitude in late antiquity (that is, the fourth and fifth centuries) and finds that Christian teachings about "almsgiving, the moral problem of excess wealth, and the virtue of physical labor" complicated the ways in which especially elite Christians "increasingly aligned with mainstream Roman society" (54). Maxwell draws on a wide range of evidence for these chapters, but in the remaining three chapters she focuses more narrowly on her chosen database of the Cappadocian fathers and Chrysostom, supplemented by other works. Chapter Three examines the diverse ways in which these authors addressed the social status of the apostles ("tentmakers and fishermen"), revealing that "educated, upper-class leaders were gaining (sometimes grudging) respect for their social inferiors as fellow Christians" (83). Chapter Four studies how Christian authors invoked the simplicity of the apostles or the [End Page 651] value of elite education in theological controversies; they wavered between, on the one hand, contrasting the simplicity of orthodox faith with the obfuscation of heretical philosophizing (e.g., Epiphanius) and, on the other, adducing the expertise of traditional education as a qualification for reliably orthodox bishops. Chapter Five studies the virtue of humility, with close attention to how ascetic and monastic...