By Michæl Gaddis
Gaddis pursues case reports and issues together with martyrdom and persecution, the Donatist controversy and different sectarian conflicts, zealous clergymen' attacks on pagan temples, the tyrannical habit of strong bishops, and the intrigues of church councils. as well as illuminating a center factor of past due antiquity, this ebook additionally sheds mild on thematic and comparative dimensions of non secular violence in different occasions, together with our own.
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Additional info for There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire
Sample text
This oppositional mentality, grounded in Christianity’s early experience as a marginalized and often persecuted cult, derived legitimacy, authority, and authenticity from the actual or perceived suffering of its spiritual role models. Persecution, which loomed so large in Christian historical imagination, need not always have been literal. 13 Christianity, in some ways, retained the habits of thought of a persecuted minority even into the era of its dominance. Extremist attitudes could manifest in individuals who by any reasonable criteria might seem to be at the very center of power—emperors, bishops, or others in positions of established authority, whose zeal could override the inherent conservatism of their institutional offices.
Take up the great shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 75 Although most Christians have not normally interpreted these formulations to refer to literal violence, the possibility has always existed for them to be understood in more than a figurative sense. 76 The impulse to turn one’s back on a corrupt and idolatrous world did not limit itself to explicitly ascetic circles. For Tertullian, living in pagan society was a struggle against “idolatry,” which for him referred not just to the worship of pagan gods but also to the everyday pleasures of secular life—games, the theater, fine clothes.
Roman audiences revelled in the spectacle of bloodshed, even as their moralists feared its corrupting effects. 61 Just because violence pervaded Roman society should not be taken to mean that Romans were jaded by it, or failed to worry about the rights and wrongs of it. An empire based on military power feared that same power as the greatest threat to its political stability. The system depended upon and glorified hierarchical authority, while remaining intensely aware of the dangers of its abuse by the all-too-fallible men to whom that authority was entrusted—as it was with the emperor, so too it would become with the bishop.