The friction point of Christian eschatology, and of Christian pastoral care, was the fate of the non valdes—of the non valde mali and the non valde boni: the not altogether bad and the not altogether...
A great scholar of Gaul and of the barbarian side of the Rhine frontier – John Drinkwater – has recently provided a cogent answer. He argues that emperor, military, and civilian populations alike need...
Bardaisan’s treatise was appropriately named The Book of the Laws of Countries.
This view of Tertullian should not be confused with the tradition of Christian mortalism that has survived in some circles up to today. In Christian mortalism, the soul of the dead person is believed...
Without the tenacity of its gnarled, pre-Christian roots, modern Europe would have lacked the imaginative and intellectual roughage provided by an unresolved tension between the sacred and the profane...
Up to 700 A.D., it was assumed that the Christian family cared for their own dead. The clergy played little role in burial and none whatsoever in the arrangement and decoration of tombs.
At the same time, radical Pelagian tracts, such as the de divitiis—the relentlessly argued Treatise on Riches—had advocated the total renunciation of property by the rich.27 The author of this tract e...
Before your eyes human bodies … battered with a scourge of lead or broken with cudgels or torn apart with claws or branded in the flames … and you, the upholder of riches and of the sale of offices, r...
Thus, more than ever before, society was divided into two classes: those who became steadily poorer and more destitute, and those who built up their prosperity on the spoils of the ruined Empire—real...
To be licensed to exist was not necessarily a license to be loved in an increasingly Christian world.
We find the same rituals, if with slightly different names: the giving of alms (the mñtnae), the giving of a Eucharistic oblation (the prosphora), the celebration of a love feast (the agapé: the Greek...
Of the many Christianities of this time. For the entire period from 200 to 1000, Christianity remained predominantly a religion of Asia and of northern Africa. Though well established in parts of the...