In this meticulously argued book, Mark Letteney asks how structures of knowledge-making came to be ‘Christianised’ in the fourth and fifth centuries ce: ‘I want to know’, he writes, ‘what difference Christianity made’ (p. 3). The question of ‘Christianisation’ (as he outlines in his opening pages) is not a new one, but Letteney’s answer is novel, bold and persuasive. He argues that the theological debates of Christians in the Constantinian era ushered in a new way of making and disseminating truth claims that escaped the laboratory of creedal debate and proliferated in the Theodosian Age. These innovative epistemologies, as well as their potential pitfalls, are visible in the methods of scholars (outlined in part i, ‘New Readers’) and in their material productions, particularly the codex (explored in part ii, ‘New Texts’). Letteney identifies a ‘new order of books in the Theodosian Age’ (p. 203): ‘books’ referring both their (intellectual) contents and their (material) forms.
Letteney’s argument is straightforward: ‘the failure of scriptural interpretation’ to secure theological truth following the Council of Nicaea led to a ‘remarkable new manner of scholastic argumentation among Christians on the eve of the Theodosian Age’. This ‘new manner of argumentation’ operated in two stages: ‘aggregation of a patrimony and then distillation of a universal statement of truth’ (p. 90). This aggregated and distilled ‘truth’ was then codified (literally and metaphorically) and promulgated widely. ‘The assumption of aggregation, distillation and promulgation as central scholarly tools spread from the wake of the Council of Nicaea, first among Christians and eventually across the entire spectrum of Theodosian Age scholarly production’ (p. 122). Letteney’s signal example is the Theodosian Code, examined closely in several chapters and a ‘case study’ appendix. This ‘proliferation of a scholastic regime that began as a theological tool through “secular” domains’, he concludes, ‘is an aspect of Christianization’ worthy of our time and attention (p. 227).
Letteney’s argument is straightforward but not simplistic. After distinguishing between ‘epistemic’ and ‘preceptual’ knowledge (‘To study “perceptual” knowledge is to study doctrines. To study “epistemic” knowledge, on the other hand, is to study scholarly practices themselves’ [p. 29]), he situates us in chapter ii in the second and third centuries with close readings of Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian and the Gospel of truth. In these thinkers we find an insistence on the priority of ‘perceptual’ knowledge arrived at by a variety of ‘epistemic’ processes with diverse and even contradictory relationships with texts, textuality and Scripture.
‘Constantine was obsessed with unity’, he notes at the beginning of chapter iii (p. 64). For Letteney, Constantine’s highly Roman insistence on divine unity (pax deorum secures pax Romana) led him and his successors to prioritise doctrinal unity over content: ‘he didn’t much care what it was that the theologians agreed upon, at least in principle – unity is necessary in the first instance because it is unity that guarantees the general prosperity of the empire’ (p. 69). Athanasius, the pugnacious bishop of Alexandria who ‘always punched above his weight’ (p. 71), gave imperial Christianity the unity it demanded. Letteney does not, however, focus on Athanasius’ specific theology (‘preceptual’ truth) which, as many scholars have shown, is quite flexible over his long career. Instead he isolates Athanasius’ innovative method (‘epistemic’ truth) as the heart of this ‘methodological revolution’. Athanasius defends the Nicene Creed by aggregating statements and interpretations from earlier ‘fathers’ and their ‘heretical’ opponents, supplemented by (but not deriving from) key scriptural texts. He then shows how the Creed ‘distills’ these earlier aggregated sources into a universal and unifying statement of truth. Athanasius’ innovative method would become the ‘standard for the production of valid theological knowledge’ (p. 82).
Chapter iv witnesses this ‘new order of books’ and its tools of ‘aggregation, distillation and promulgation’ leaving the narrow confines of creedal debate. Aggregation especially becomes ‘foundational to the adequate demonstration of truth’ in the fourth and fifth centuries (p. 88), authorising such diverse areas as commentary (Jerome), history (Socrates of Constantinople and Sozomen) and church manual (Ambrose). Letteney then turns to ‘aggregation outside of theology’: Macrobius, Martianus Capella and the Theodosian Code show clear reliance on aggregation to produce truth. That this innovative aggregative method is closely associated with ‘Christianisation’ becomes clear from three texts which ‘reject aggregate scholarly method’: Ammianus Marcellinus’s Res gestae, the Historia Augusta and Proclus’ Ten questions concerning providence. For Letteney it is significant that ‘explicit rejection of aggregation as a valid scholarly method is most often found in the writing of Roman Traditionalists’ (p. 117).
Chapter v introduces the material bedrock of this new order of books: the codex, ‘a prestige format associated with universal statements of truth that was often used to effectuate them’ (p. 129). That is, the ‘codex revolution’ derived not from the authority of biblical canonisation but from the aggregative and distilling forms of authoritative knowledge-making described in chapters iii and iv, which was most readily promulgated in codices. Indeed, insofar as ‘the Bible’ could be viewed as a prestige object (as in ‘deluxe presentation copies’ like Sinaiticus or Vaticanus) that prestige derived from its codex form, and not vice-versa (thus the somewhat casual relationship between canon and content in such codices). Chapter vi drills down into the manuscript evidence for the proliferation of the aggregative approach to knowledge-making and for its potentially destabilising consequences. In late ancient manuscripts of theological and legal texts we see how scribes demarcated the aggregated sources but also see them struggle to mark off (with symbols and colours) which of these sources should be ‘distilled’ for truth’s sake and which are erroneous sources included for the sake of completeness.
While at the end of chapter iv Letteney attended to Traditionalist ‘resistance’ to Christian epistemic processes, in chapter vii he turns to the copying of Traditionalist texts (pre-Theodosian legal texts and the Aeneid) as ‘Christian scribal tools’. This chapter moves away from the more novel and animating argument of the book (about epistemic truth-making) and more into the weeds of abbreviation and copying that collapse a distinction between ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ manuscript production’ (p. 197); these weeds, to be sure, sprout from the central ‘shift in scholarly practices [that] caused a shift in material production’ (p. 198).
Chapter viii turns back the ‘problem of discernment’: if the ‘aggregative’ method required including all relevant sources, right or wrong, how were readers supposed to discern which sources were distilled into true knowledge and which were to be discarded (heretical viewpoints, outmoded laws and the like)? Chapter vi showed us ‘paratextual strategies’ for discernment; chapter viii introduces new reading practices: ‘rules for deciding’ and ‘institutionalized suspicion of documents’ (p. 201). For the former Letteney explores C.Th. 1.4.3, the so-called Law of citations, which not only gives concrete rules for ‘deciding’ among contradictory aggregated sources but institutionalises the need for such rules. For the latter Letteney turns first to Jerome and then to the acta of the Council of Chalcedon, a massive archive ‘shot through with a concern, from parties on all sides, that official documents have been the victim [of] forgery and editorial malfeasance’ (p. 214). In the final section of the chapter, provocatively titled ‘The Theodosian Talmud’, Letteney suggests that the Palestinian Talmud is also an aggregative compilation seeking to distill truth and that it also includes strategies for readers to discern truth from falsehood: that is, the Talmud emerging from the Roman provinces in the Theodosian Age is ‘a particularly Roman and Theodosian project’ (p. 218).
Letteney’s prose is marked by rigor as well as wit. He adduces illuminating modern parallels that range from the thoughtful (Theodosian scholarship and US judicial ‘originalism’ [p. 85]) to the amusing (the Gospel of truth and ‘The Monster Mash’ [p. 57 n. 84]) to the sobering (Theodosius’s violent reprisal at Thessalonica and ‘Hitler’s massacre at Fosse Ardeatine’ [p. 84 n. 59]). His argument is confident and convincing, leaving ample room for further exploration and discussion. For instance, is the innovative scholarly process he identifies more prone to incompleteness and instability than he suggests? After all, his signal example, the Theodosian Code, envisioned a ‘distillation’ that never happened, the production of a magisterium vitae grounded in the aggregating work of the Code itself. What was, in the end, so appealing about an epistemic system that promised unity but engendered suspicion and a fear of forgery? Finally, how far into ‘secular domains’ can a process of ‘Christianisation’ extend before we no longer recognise it as (solely) ‘Christian’? If ‘“Christianisation” exists in practices’ (p. 85), would we say the rabbis who produced a ‘Theodosian Talmud’ are ‘Christianised’? After all, Letteney writes that ‘when Christians came into a ruling elite for the first time, Christian book culture became Roman book culture’ (p. 100). None of these questions are critiques of Letteney’s fine book, but rather a testament to the way it will shift readers’ perceptions of what concepts like knowledge, ‘Christianisation’ and empire can mean.
