Spreading, defining, the faith

When Our World Became Christian 312-394
Paul Veyne
Polity £17.99
(978-0-7456-4499-8)
Church Times Bookshop £16.20

Early Christian Doctrine and the Creeds
Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski
SCM Press £18.99
(978-0-334-04200-6)
Church Times Bookshop £17.10

HERE are two books written in radically different ways, on overlap­ping subjects. A self-professed unbe­liever, Paul Veyne provides a dis­jointed, digressive essay on the triumph of Christianity in the first four centuries AD. In contrast, the Anglican priest Ashwin-Siejkowski has written a tightly organised Study­guide on the formation of Chris­tian belief in roughly the same period.

Veyne’s book is stuffed with generalisations. The writing is often sententious, and the thread connect­ing his materials is sometimes so fine as to escape the reader’s notice altogether. He opines that religious feeling is aboriginal rather than learned (what does “religious feel­ing” mean?); that believers see hell as a distant rather than an immed­i-ate concern (all believers at all times and in all places?); that Chris­tianity is all about morality (not for all of us it isn’t). He blithely attri­butes motivations to Constantine — I enjoyed a list of options intro­duced with the words, “Constantine may well have had the following thoughts”.

The book has its useful moments, putting Constantine’s Christianity in the context of “pagan” religion as a social phenomenon: not all pagan deities are the same, and the imper­ial cult should be understood in the context of a world of gradations of divinity rather than an absolute divine-human distinction.

When Veyne describes how Con­stantine replaced the pagan calendar with a Jewish/Christian pattern, it is easy to imagine parallels with the secularisation of time in modern Britain: the calendar is a powerful instrument for changing belief, even when such change has to be dis­guised.

An odd appendix on ancient Israel and her God states that the best term to describe their relation­ship is “monolatry” (worship of one divinity) rather than “monotheism” (belief in one divinity); this ter­minol­ogy is attributed to an un­named “great expert” (presumably Schleiermacher).

Ashwin-Siejkowski has produced a genuinely useful Studyguide, structured around faith statements in a credal sequence, beginning with God and ending with eternal life. Each chapter contains some ima-ginative homework for the reader, illustrations based on ancient arte­facts and devotional images (pre­sum­ably by the author; they are signed PAS), and questions for dis­cussion. As well as the traditional “suggestions for further reading”, he gives the reader helpful internet links to online images and articles.

The author is frank about the difficulties of doing justice, in so brief a span, to the diversity of early Christian beliefs (especially those that fell from favour and have thus left scant traces in the historical record). He also makes clear how in this period teachings cluster around locations as well as people: the first Christian intellectuals were more dependent upon geographically defined sources of scholarly special­ism than we are today.

He provides two kinds of text box (one defining key terminology such as “Christology” and “dogma”, the other giving chunks of text from original writers), a time-line, sug­gestions for further reading, and a glossary. The latter consists mainly of biographies of ancient writers, together with a few technical terms. “Monarchianism”, e.g., makes it in; but “economy” (a key ancient term for the “dispensation” or “arrange­ment” by which a transcendent God can be operative in the created order) does not.

This is no substitute for a proper index: to find out the meaning of, say, “Theotokos” or “impassibility” (or “economy” for that matter) one must remember where they were highlighted, guess where they are likely to have appeared — or Google them.

The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

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