Christendom (2022) by Peter Heather

 Book Review

Christendom (2022)

by Peter Heather

  British historian Peter Heather is the leading popular voice in the area of the history of late antiquity (Europe).  I've been enjoying his books for years. Heather is part of a generation of historians- he's actually part of the second generation of scholars in this area- who have rewritten the history of Rome by applying advances in historiography which have occurred since the late 19th century, when Edward Gibbons published his monumentally influential The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Gibbons was a fan of the idea that the Roman Empire was felled via the decadence of its own people- many of our received cultural ideas about the insanity of late Rome can be traced directly to people who read The History of the  Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during the century and a half when it was the only such history. 

  Anyway- times have changed, as Heather has repeatedly noted over the past two decades.  In Christendoom he hones in on the changes that occurred after the conversion of the Roman Emperor.  The conventional wisdom- largely put forward by the Catholic church in the early Middle Ages to justify the outsize role they wished to play in Europe- was that the Roman conversion was thorough and involved the vast majority of Roman citizens converting with a generation or so.   This explanation was largely accepted by secular historians in the modern period, and only recently have scholars begun to question this received wisdom.

   As it turns out, the conversion of the Roman country-side to Christianity was nothing like a thorough-going conversion of the entire countryside, rather it resembled an adoption by local elites of a new "Cult of the Emperor" that was very much in their self interest as citizens of the Roman Empire. Those who had less interest in the empire as a whole had almost no reason to convert for centuries.

   Another strand of Heather's analysis concerns the idea that Roman Catholicism and its medieval power structure was somehow present in the time after the conversion of the Roman Emperor.  Heather points to non-controversial scholarship that firmly demonstrates the absurdity of this idea.  Rome was originally only one of four patriarchs and there was no idea of a supreme Rome (outside of Rome) until after the Islamic conquest decimated the patriarchates of the Near East. 

    After a shaky section on the Islamic world made difficult by the lack of medieval Islamic scholars in pre-Islamic local history or early Islamic history (this being a controversial subject inside Islam), Heather gets to the real heart of the book, a tour of recent scholarship on the conversion experience in Northern Europe from Ireland through the Baltics.  This has been a fertile area for scholarship and Heather has absorbed it all and regurgitated it in easily consumable form.

  I listened to the Audiobook- 24 hours in length- because I've got his other hits in hardback and didn't want another on the shelf.  I didn't find it as difficult as the New York Times reviewer- but perhaps listening to it rather than reading it saved me some problems in reading comprehension.