‘Through the Eye of A Needle’ by Peter Brown

Western Europe developed civilisation within the cultural ethos of Christianity.  Why? How did a small, persecuted sect of former Jews and some gentiles take over the Roman empire?  How did Christianity wipe out the hundreds of instantiations of pagan cultic practices?  Peter Brown researches an essential element of history.  We take for granted that Western Europe was Christian.  We rarely ask why and how?

Christianity was not promoted through Jihad, war, violence and rapine, as with the cult of Muhammad.  It was not promulgated and made popular through official diktat and imperial decrees (quite the opposite for 300 years), though Constantine’s conversion around 312 A.D. certainly helped.  As Peter Brown relates in this excellent book, Christianity spread because of its morality, its functionality and exclusiveness, its miracles, its evangelising especially with Paul, its mouth-to-mouth marketing and person to person conversion; and its civilising mission which was an organised, rational approach to the immaterial and God.  Christianity was by the 3^rd century simply viewed as superior and pagans converted to the Christian church in such numbers that eventually the Roman empire, with or without Constantine’s conversion, would have been Christianised.  This is the central argument Peter Brown puts forward.

It is a long book, in small print, over 500 pages in length and with 200 pages of sources, footnotes and an index.  It is worth every minute to read and ponder.  Peter Brown is an excellent writer, organiser of facts and themes, and he connects disparate personalities including Paulinus of Nola and St. Augustine of Hippo, along with many other characters and real-world socio-economic events, along with ideas of ‘wealth’ and its relationship to power to map out his main ideas, which include inter-alia:

1-The political, social, and economic changes which took place from 500-650 A.D. were absolutely decisive for the dominance by Christianity, of Western European culture and society.

2-Gradually over about 500 years (from the time of Christ to 500 A.D.), notions about wealth, its generation, its usage to expiate sin and help the poor, and the utility of money to guarantee the salvation of the soul, transformed much of the West and its moral outlook.

3-The process of European Christianisation was gradual and quite at risk, there never was until the 4^th century, a certainty that the followers of Christ would survive as a group, let alone dominate an empire.

4-By 312 and the conversion of Constantine, the Church had grown to encompass perhaps 10% of the 60-100 million population within the Roman empire, but it had not become ‘wealthy’.  It was the new entry of wealth and talent into the Church after 370 A.D. that made such a profound impact on society, including church building, monasteries, the merging of political power with Bishopric responsibility, literacy and even the provision of hospital care. 

5-Many sects of Roman pagans had long believed in one ‘Great God’ as well many lesser Gods or demiurges.  The Christian ideal of monotheism was not new for many.  The use of angels and archangels within the Christian ecclesiastical doctrine would also have seemed familiar.  It was thus not a great leap for a pagan to become a Christian. 

6-A significant benefit of becoming Christian was the complete eradication of cultic practices to various gods which took up time and money and which included sacrifices, divination and public displays of pagan piety.  Christianity and its organised, exclusive approach, simplified the worship of God and ended all sacrifices, including human as well as (eventually) human enslavement. 

7-The demise of Rome during the 5^th century, led to some fairly radical reappraisals of wealth and its usage, along with the power and political structures used to generate and manage such wealth, outside and inside the Church.  There was in effect a reordering of society as Roman central governance, collapsed.  The Church picked up the pieces and married Roman secular law and customs with that of Christianity. 

8-As the aristocracy in the 5^th century collapsed, the transfer of wealth, power and embedded literacy shifted to the Church, presaging a shift in social and economic structuring.  During the 6^th century this new pattern of social organisation and use of wealth, from both the elite and the laity to fund Church projects, poor relief, monasteries and cultural demands and morality, became solidified and provided the basis for the rise of the medieval Church.

The rise of Christianity in Western Europe and its complete subjugation of pagan rivals was never a foreordained conclusion and seemed rather improbable around 100 A.D. when maybe 2-3% of the Roman population was Christian.  Christianity was moral and stringently ethical, miraculous, powerful, elegant, rational, open, and able to subsume many pagan practices within Church dogma, to facilitate an exclusive but remarkably dynamic socio-cultural traditions, within a unified and organised institution.  The pagans had nothing to rival this determined and pragmatic approach to religion.