The End of Ancient Christianity

by R.A. Markus

This book is concerned with one central historical problem: the nature of the changes that transformed the intellectual and spiritual horizons of the Christian world from its establishment in the fourth century to the end of the sixth. The End of Ancient Christianity examines how Christians, who had formerly constituted a threatened and beleaguered minority, came to define their identity in a changed context of religious respectability in which their faith had become a source of privilege and power.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Church History, Christianity

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Robert Austin Markus was a distinguished medieval and ecclesiastical historian known principally for his writings on St Augustine and the history of the early Church.

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Markus traces the historic shifts which marked a transformation of the Christian movement, from the popular primitive church of the first centuries, into a great bulwark of the medieval social order. He shows how the Christian community slowly divided into three orders -- of lay people, the all-male clergy, and the celibate monastics. And then the question emerged as to which order ranked highest. At first, the lay people were most important, since they chose and supported all church leaders from among themselves. Later, professional clergymen established themselves as state-backed supervisors over the laity. But by early medieval times it was the celibate monks who emerged as the Christians of highest rank. With their isolation from the world and from sex, the monastics seemed holier than either the local clergy (who were still mainly married), or lay families. In both the West and East, bishops, patriarchs, and popes were increasingly drawn from the ranks of male monks. It was a momentous trend. Markus claims, "The ascetic take-over [roughly in the time of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604)] signals the end of ancient Christianity" (p. 17).

I think Markus does the church a service, helping us distinguish layers of Christian tradition as they were added, and to see how these differed from the original Jesus movement.

[Hannah Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slay- I liked this book a lot. Tracing the shifting boundaries between the sacred and the secular as caused by the growing church is a really fascinating concept. I only wish that he had explained some of his examples more. I feel like he just mentioned people and I didn't know who they were and I wish that he elaborated more on that rather than just talking about people like I knew who they were. I don't necessarily think this book is written for super knowledgable audiences since it feels more like a general history of the time rather than a really specific, super super high academic book is the only reason I feel like this worked against the book's favor. But also I'm just not the target audience here lol

[Jade ི♡࿐]

“To be a Christian meant being a member of a group that extended across the gulf which divided heaven and earth. Augustine was echoing faithfully this universal conviction when he said that 'this Church which is now travelling on its journey, is joined to that heavenly Church where we have the angels as our fellow-citizens', for 'we are all members of one Body, whether we are here or anywhere else on earth, now or at any other time from Abel the just to the end of the world'. When it celebrated the eucharist, the Christian group celebrated, and at the same time made actual, its own presence in the heavenly community. Angels hovered around the eucharistic altar and carried the congregation's self-offering to the throne of God, bringing back his blessing.”

“It expresses the fact that in the Church's early centuries, the holy was not a distant, remote world which had to be made accessible through the agency of intermediaries. Rather, it formed the permanent context of life, always and everywhere present, animating a community larger than the little group gathered around the altar, ready at any moment to manifest blessing or power. The divine was always there, like a huge electric charge waiting to break through the cloud, to be earthed by the Church's lightning-conductors - worship and the means provided for carrying it on: the altar, the church building, the community, or one or other of its members. Access to the holy was by means of the ordinary routines of worship”

“Augustine's belief that the final goal of human striving was attainable by human effort through rational resources was shattered. Salvation was now no longer an ordered progression towards a distant goal, but a sustained miracle of divine initiative. Human exper-tise, far from being a means of achieving it, was the chief among the obstacles man can place in its way. What had earlier seemed a short step from the universe of the 'Platonists' to that of Saint Paul, was now revealed to Augustine as a step across an abyss that had opened at his feet”

“As Christian discourse shrank to scriptural, so the world of which it spoke shrank to the sacred.”


Cassiodorus’s last words made me lol

“Farewell, brethren, and please remember me in your prayers. I have taught you, among other things, in a summary manner, the importance of correct spelling and punctuation, universally acknowledged to be a precious thing;”

[Rowland Pasaribu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The End of Ancient Christianity is a study of changes in Western Christianity in the fourth through sixth centuries, when it ceased to be the religion of a persecuted minority and became "official". The introduction, titled "secularity", is a general, anthropological overview of issues of conversion and the boundaries between the secular and the sacred, between "culture" and "religion". The rest of the volume, however, is more literary and theological in orientation, with a pronounced focus on prominent writers (indeed it could almost be described as an essay on Augustine).

Part one looks at how Christianity was forced to find new ways of distinguishing itself and at the uncertainties in defining "Christian" raised by the "conversion" of figures such as the rhetorician Victorinus and the poet Ausonius. "The image of a society neatly divided into 'Christian' and 'pagan' is the creation of late fourth-century Christians... . [Paganism:] existed only in the minds, and, increasingly, the speech-habits, of Christians." Markus presents some of the arguments and debates, between protagonists such as Pelagius, Jerome, Jovinian, and Augustine around the end of the fourth century, over the nature of Christian perfection (the merits of virginity and asceticism against those of marriage and sexuality) and the role of monasteries and monks.

Part two describes how the cult of the martyrs formed a critical link between the present and the past, and how Christianity appropriated existing elements in forming its own sacred calendar. It also looks at different Christian attitudes to secular festivals and banquets and civic games and ceremonies, at Augustine's changing position and at Pope Leo's contribution to the destruction of a neutral "secular" category between Christian and pagan.

In part three Markus turns to concepts of place, both literal and metaphorical. Christianity overcame early fears of pagan holy places to create a new religious topography, centred on Christian history and on churches and relics and pilgrimage routes. In Gaul the influence of Cassian and Salvian and Lerins-trained clergy blurred the boundaries between the monastic and pastoral and spread ascetic ideology into broader society; but things were different in Africa, under Vandal domination, and Italy, where secular high culture survived till the end of the sixth century. Markus concludes: "the massive secularity of John Chrysotom's and of Augustine's world had drained out of Gregory's. There was little room for the secular in it".

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Markus attempts with this book to document the migration of Western Christianity from antiquity into the medieval mind. The beginning of the book involves a scholarly survey of the contributions of major thinkers who provided the theological underpinnings of this shift in thought. A good example would be Markus’s treatment of the Augustine’s Against Jerome: “This work was accompanied by another, ‘as was to be expected’, entitled On holy virginity. The two treatises between them amount to a re-statement of a central, moderate and traditional view on the two callings: marriage is good, virginity is better, let the continent and the virgin not give themselves airs and despise the married; but let nobody place the two states on the same level.” (46) This restatement was part of Augustine’s reassessment of his own intellectual understanding, and left its mark on all of Western civilization. He discusses Manichaeism, Pelagius, Jerome, and of course Augustine as the major thinkers in this section.

Part two of the book describes the formation of the cult of martyrs. This appropriation of the past and pagan rituals extended Christian culture in interesting ways. Markus talks at length about the holiness of places. Rejecting the view that Christians substituted Christian holiness for pagan holy places, he traces the emergence of a respect for holiness attributed to spots with a history. In his words, “it was the history that mattered.” I’m not totally convinced, but it is a compelling argument nonetheless.

By far the best discussion in the book is the “blurring of frontiers” between Desert and City. As monks went out to the desert, they brought with them asceticism and holiness. They also brought with them the underpinnings of western civilization. These monks then were recruited back into urban Christianity, infusing the urban Christians with a form of “spiritual health.” (181) This migration, from places such as Lerins, had a massive impact on late antiquity. At this point, the conversion from an antiquity that had room for secularism to a medieval world completely focused on Christianity was complete.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good.

[z]

- i don't think there's a single page in here that isn't somehow tied to either Augustine, Ambrose or Jerome.