Daily Reading for January 22 • Vincent, Deacon of Saragossa and Martyr, 304
Some of the basic tensions that existed in Christianity before Constantine’s conversion still remained, now recast into new contexts. Issues of cultural marginalization and internal division persisted as Christians came to terms with their increasingly prominent place in society. Whereas Christians of the second and third century had struggled to achieve intellectual and social legitimacy in the face of their non-Christian neighbors, they now strove to delineate with more care the precise boundaries between Christian and “pagan” culture. The incorporation of classical literatures and philosophies into the elaboration of Christian theology and interpretation caused, for some, a crisis of cultural identity. When was ancient Greek philosophy “pagan,” and when could it be appropriately Christianized? When were classical ideals of family, society, and politics to be rejected as suspect, irreligious remnants of a bygone era, and when might they be fruitfully employed to articulate a new vision of imperial Christianity? The conceptual transition from “Church of the Martyrs” to “Church Triumphant” required reimagining historical and social categories from new vantage points. Cultural and political distinction was increasingly expressed along religious lines. Although the fourth-century non-Christian Roman politician Symmachus tried to argue for religious plurality, famously remarking that “we cannot arrive at so great a mystery by only one road,” Christians in Late Antiquity insisted more and more on creating and policing sharp external boundaries.
Likewise, the manner in which internal religious difference was theorized continued to trouble many Christians as the perils of deviance were projected onto a wider, imperial stage. Christians in the second and third centuries had already introduced the categories of orthodoxy (“right thinking”) and heresy (“deviance”) in ways that drew absolute boundaries among various Christian communities. But as Christian networks of community now overlapped directly with the political concerns of Roman emperors, these intolerant discourses of orthodoxy and heresy took on a new absolutist character. Debates over correct belief and practice were now always intertwined with questions of political loyalty and social deviance. Pre-Constantinian concerns for uniformity within the Roman Empire and within Christian communities now dovetailed, producing new forms of authority and new anxieties about difference. Bishops, charged with enforcing orthodoxy, now operated with the backing of Roman law and imperial troops, and theological debates could now erupt into wide-scale violence.
From the introduction to Christianity in Late Antiquity: 300-450 C. E.: A Reader by Bart D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs (New York: Oxford, 2004).