Heather, Peter. Christendom: Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
Any historian worth their salt knows that primary sources, the foundation of everything our discipline does, require a two-fold level of comprehension. One must naturally understand literally what is being said, whether that is an issue of older vocabulary, usage, or even foreign language. Beyond that, however, one must understand the wider social, cultural, and historical context of what is being said in order to analyze its import properly. The best historians do this with a third key ingredient: a healthy dose of practical logic. Often, when this approach works well, revised, even visionary, new interpretations of staid subject matter can result, and one scholar that I have come to admire for repeated such works is the ancient/late antique/early medieval historian Peter Heather (whose books have been reviewed here and here on Concerning History). From the fall of Rome to its eastern resurgence, I’ve immensely enjoyed and respected Heather’s eminently practical approach to history, and now he’s done it again with perhaps his most ambitious project yet: a history of the first millennium of Christianity as a mainstream religion.
With such a massive scope, Christendom must naturally confine itself to fairly big-picture history and deal largely in themes, but Heather’s chosen bookends provide for a remarkably clear–and striking–evolution to work through. The year AD 300 would see Christianity just beginning to move from a disorganized collection of Jesus movements to the official religion of the Roman Emperors and a faith newly concerned with clarifying major points of its theology. One thousand years later, with the Empire a distant memory, a different Roman authority would command Christian spiritual and, increasingly, political allegiance in the form of the papacy as medieval Europe became more devout and moralistic. In the course of conducting readers through this millennium of change, Heather explicitly discards the triumphalist bias of contemporary sources (written almost exclusively by Christian clergy) and later 19th century Christian imperialist historians, instead painting a picture of a religion that has been much more conditional and malleable than is traditionally portrayed. The conversion of elites–the classic model of early medieval Germanic conversion–is persuasively shown to be not only the bedrock of conversion in the earlier Roman period (and later Muslim conquests), but governed by remarkably similar considerations of social pressure and personal advancement. Many so-called heresies are conclusively shown more accurately to be simply alternative forms of Christianity that could easily have won their associated doctrinal disputes, and the pope as supreme authority over a Catholic church that regulated every detail of its lay congregation’s daily lives was one of many possible contingent outcomes–and one that occurred rather late in the period Heather covers.
The implications of all this for our understanding of one of the world’s major religions is tremendous, and one that will revolutionize how I approach the subject with future students of any age. Far from a fossilized, infallible edifice from the time of its founding that only occasionally compromised when it wanted to convert others, the Christianity Heather portrays is one that has been constantly evolving in discussion with itself and peoples outside its communion. Indeed, if Heather is to be believed (and I think he should be), the Roman Catholic church as we know it really only came into being two or three centuries before the upheaval of Luther’s Reformation; I wish Heather’s narrative could have continued through Reformation, Counter-Reformation, the Great Awakenings, and even up to the present day to show how this process of Christian reinvention has never stopped–even though all that lies even further outside his own specialization than the later parts of Christendom.
Even without that, however, Heather’s work remains an outstandingly informative account of the foundational centuries of Christianity as it came into its own as a mass religion. Anyone who enjoys critical reading of our available sources to come up with a revised, more practical understanding of the ancient and medieval worlds will be well satisfied.