Peter Heather is a distinguished historian of the late Roman world who only writes big books. In this big one he boldly expands the time and space to which he has devoted decades of original scholarship. It appears that some serious curiosity launched this book. In the nineteenth century, when church history became a professional discipline, no one imagined that Christianity could fail. It had triumphed centuries before and was, anyway, superior to other imaginable religions. But in the second half of the twentieth century massive secularization stripped Christianity of its grip on people's affection, attendance, and financial support. So, how did Christianity triumph in the first place? One could quibble with Heather characterization of nineteenth-century scholarship and with his dire assessment of the current state of Christian allegiance. But his basic point has some validity and deserves consideration.
The way Heather tells his story has a more than ironic tinge. And let me say right away that he tells the story beautifully. The book's almost conversational style is a pleasure to read. What is the irony? He believes that Lateran IV (1215) created a “coherent, monolithic vision of ‘correct’ Christianity” (507) and that Europe had gone from “enormous religious diversity to Lateran uniformity” (556). I will come to Heather's Lateran. The irony arises from those powerful countervailing forces of diversity. Christianity was very different at different times and places. People had many alternative choices. Post-Roman conversion to Christianity was generally at the tip of the sword. Coherence and unity were highly unlikely.
Examples of some of the diversity Heather identifies would be the long struggle between Homoean and Nicene Christianity, the impact of installing Christianity in warrior societies, or alternative possibilities, as represented by the Waldensians and Humiliati. Heather likes to run counter-factuals and his treatment of Homoean Christianity is especially interesting. First of all, he dislikes the term Arian; it is a slur. Second, in his view, Homoean Christianity is older than the non-biblical Nicene version. Third, and here is the counter-factual, if the Franks had chosen Homoean Christianity and if Justinian had not wiped out Vandal and Ostrogothic Homoean communities, the whole history of Christianity might have been different.
Christianity was itself decisively changed by three eras of revolution. In the fourth and fifth centuries Christianity aligned itself with the Roman state thus creating the first confessional state and permitting more centralized authority structures than had existed previously. In the post-Roman world, Nicene Christianity survived by a narrow margin as the educational system of the ancient world collapsed and as Roman unity was replaced by regnal fragmentation. Then new imperial dynasties provided renewed religious leadership that resulted in geographical expansion, new educational underpinnings, and growing papal power thanks to reformers.
Emperors, and kings too, who were sometimes ardent religious reformers fomented change. Increasing religious enthusiasm played a key role. The Investiture Controversy enhanced papal authority as did the dramatic growth and proliferation of canon law. New schools, new curricula, and eventually the university contributed to centralization as did the publication of Peter Lombard's Sentences. The Crusades were the last step in the centralization, the Romanization, of Christianity. Little of this will strike readers as either new or controversial.
Innocent III (1198–1216) took advantage of his position to reconcile deviants such as the Waldensians and Humiliati while also recognizing both the genius and the utility of the new mendicants – Franciscans and Dominicans. He called the largest church council ever assembled and issued a set of seventy-one canons that regulated almost every aspect of the religious life of Christians. Preaching, especially by the new orders, sermons collections and teaching manuals, continuing legal scholarship, and perhaps above all coercive measures such as excommunication, crusades against heretics, and the inquisition all played roles in the dissemination and implementation of the Lateran program. Having made his case, however, Heather taps the brakes and cites some evidence to suggest that the program was not always and everywhere successful.
Histories of medieval Christianity have long tended either to focus on institutions or else on theology or perhaps what might be called intellectual history. Heather takes a different approach, one that is almost sociological. He seeks out big themes and then arrays his evidence under his thematic headings. The result is a satisfactory account that is, oddly, new without being really original, different without being explicitly revisionist. I enjoyed this book and can recommend it warmly.
But I do have some queries and quibbles. There are quite a few little slips, albeit no real howlers. Given that Heather devoted so many pages to such a huge subject, little lapses are not surprising. I think that Heather underestimates the significance of the papacy and exaggerates medieval emperors. The writ of Roman Emperors ran from the Scottish lowlands to Mesopotamia. Carolingian emperors ruled most of continental Europe but not Iberia, the British Isles, or southern Italy and Sicily. Germany's Salian and Staufen emperors sometimes struggled to rule Germany itself, occasionally possessed tenuous authority in parts of Italy, and had no authority anywhere else. What might be called “popular piety” lies behind Heather's “enthusiasm,” and that is fine. But he barely touches the cult of the saints or relics and I do not recall a word about, say, pilgrimage. He treats high medieval schools without ever using the word scholasticism. Monasticism contributes to his twelfth-century enthusiasm but is a weak presence otherwise. His account of coercive measures omits interdict. The title page says the book stops in 1300 but Heather does peek into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I think that if he had looked more closely at that dynamic period he would have been forced to moderate his sense of Lateran uniformity. Heather has read widely and deeply and he has understood what he has read. It would be churlish to complain about this or that article or monograph that he missed. But I was struck by the absence of some pretty big names: Caroline Bynum, Norman Cohn, Marcia Colish, Giles Constable, Herbert Grundmann, Gerhart Ladner, Robert Lerner, Gerd Tellenbach, Brian Tierney, and John Van Engen.
