Dissertation Spotlight | Christianizing Knowledge

Mark Letteney, “Christianizing Knowledge: A New Order of Books in the Theodosian Age” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2020).

E. A. Judge, a renowned historian of late antiquity, once told his mentor A. H. M. Jones that he intended to “find out what difference it made to Rome to have been converted.” Jones had asked the question before and devised a succinct answer: “none.”[1] The answer has not proved persuasive, and the question has preoccupied historians for as long as critical history has been written.

I return to the question of Christianization in my dissertation, asking “what effect did Christianity have on inhabitants of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries? Why did it matter then, and ultimately, why should that history matter now?” My method, however, diverges from the classic treatments. Rather than investigating Sunday morning headcounts or moral renewal in late ancient Rome, my goal was to understand how imperial Christianity changed the way that scholars in the Theodosian Age (c. 380–450 CE) thought about, and went about, producing knowledge. I try to frame the beginning of late antiquity as a moment of rupture not only in society, or in politics, but in epistemology.

I approach that rupture by tracing a constellation of ideas about truth, and how a variety of late ancient scholars thought about, and went about, bringing it to light. I argue that the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire caused a revolution in meaning-making, and that as Nicene Christians came to hold positions of imperial power, their argumentative methods and aims found expression in domains of knowledge production far removed from theology.

Chapters one and two are a proof of concept. The first details the reticulated social and political networks that tied together different types of scholars in the Theodosian Age. The second chapter argues the same thing as the first: that Theodosian bishops, jurists, and other scholars used shared language and epistemic concerns in their different domains. Instead of making a social-historical argument, however, in chapter two I build a philological argument, regarding the words and concepts that jurists appropriated from Christian theological scholarship when producing the Theodosian Code.

The core of the dissertation begins with chapter three, where I argue that Christians were not always “people of the book.” Instead, I try to show that in antiquity we can see a spectrum of Christian approaches to uncovering theological truths. Some, like Irenaeus and Justin, understood truth as latent in textual traditions: in letters and “memoirs of the apostles” whose text will yield an abundance of universally binding precepts if read with the right set of assumptions and hermeneutic strategies. Others, like Tertullian, saw truth as fundamentally pretextual, while others still argued that textual interpretation is an impotent distraction; the author of the Gospel of Truth asserted that truth could not be contained in language, let alone on parchment.

Early in the fourth century, a group of Christians calling themselves katholikos (“universal”) invested themselves in the notion that scriptural texts held cosmic truths, and these same Christians were the recipients of vast measures of imperial largesse. Constantine was Rome’s first Christian emperor, but like many Roman emperors before him, Constantine was concerned with maintaining the “peace of the gods,” and he believed that doctrinal harmony guaranteed heavenly favor. In chapter four I turn to Constantine’s obsession with unity, which led him to demand a solution to a theological problem roiling the clerical elite. The problem was predicated on the idea that scriptural texts held cosmic truths, and that those truths were accessible through close scrutiny of certain parts of the bible. But, beginning already in the 320s, Constantine and his advisors found that the under-determined nature of scripture frustrated any attempt to divine universal doctrine solely through textual interpretation. Factions arose, with each claiming different interpretations of the same text, and the emperor called a council to iron out the differences and restore the doctrinal harmony that promised divine blessings.

A group of clerics debating the relationship of the Christian Father to the Son found that scriptural interpretation was incapable of answering the question with satisfactory finality, and disputants on either side of the debate invented new tools to answer the question. Beginning with the work of Athanasius in the East and Hilary in the West, theological scholars insisted that proper knowledge creation necessarily involved three, mutually reinforcing operations: aggregation, distillation, and promulgation. Any reasonable argument, they insisted, had to begin with the creation with a (notionally) dispassionate archive of the entire history of the debate, including both acceptable and unacceptable opinions; in the realm of theology, orthodoxy and heresy were to be placed side-by-side. Scholars distilled a universal statement of truth from that raw material, and finally they promulgated that universal statement as the key to any further knowledge creation. According to scholars involved in the Nicene controversy, this is the form taken by any reliably derived knowledge. Subsequent theological debate must be carried out on this playing field of Orthodox construction.

Theologians conceived these tools and refined them during a generation spanning the middle decades of the fourth century, while Nicene Christians gained stature and their numbers swelled across the empire. By the late fourth century, when emperor Theodosius I instituted a violent purge of anti-Nicene voices, the ground rules of theological discourse had fundamentally shifted; Christian scholars of the late fourth century went about producing knowledge differently from their predecessors, and it was these same Christian scholars who came to hold the reins of power across the empire under the aegis of Theodosius and his dynastic offspring.

As Elizabeth Anderson reminds us, “our concepts do not stay put behind the neat logical fences philosophers like to erect for them. Like sly coyotes, they slip past these flimsy barriers to range far and wide, picking up consorts of all varieties, and, in astonishingly fecund acts of miscegenation shocking to conceptual purists, leave offspring who bear a disturbing resemblance to the wayward parent and inherit the impulse to roam the old territory.”[2] My work tries to demonstrate that frameworks for producing knowledge can be remarkably fecund, and that modern disciplinary boundaries between the study of classics, religion, and law has obscured a surprisingly unified epistemic shift among scholars in the Theodosian Age. I argue that Nicene Christian scholars came to power in the Theodosian empire armed with an epistemology inflected by doctrinal controversy, but that this peculiarly Christian structure of knowledge did not long remain solely the purview of theologians. In chapter five I argue that a manner of thinking about universal truth found its way from the rarified air of theological disputation into other domains of knowledge production. Across the ideological and intellectual landscape of the Theodosian empire, scholars searched for universal truths in their own areas of expertise, and they did so using a method initially conceived to settle a thorny theological debate. Christian and Traditionalist (“Pagan”) scholars alike took up this argumentative framework in works of law, history, and miscellany. Strangely enough, imperial theological procedure of the early fourth century changed the bounds of imperial civil procedure one hundred years hence.

The proliferation of an epistemic framework which began as a theological tool through “secular” domains is an aspect of Christianization, and it is this aspect of Christianization that my dissertation tries to illuminate. I try to show how dominant modes of thought can be ported from one field of inquiry to another, in the same way that, for instance, the earliest critical scholars of the bible used advances in genetic and evolutionary theory to understand the relationship between texts and the proliferation of “heresies” in the early Jesus movement.[3] I trace the inter-implication of Christian ways of knowing and Roman modes of scholastic production, and attempt to show that Christian doctrinal disputes affected ancient people even when those ancient people did not know, or care, about the theological truths under discussion.

The dissertation has an epigraph: “New readers of course make new texts, and their new meanings are a function of their new forms.”[4] Chapters four and five investigated new readers; chapters six and seven investigate their new texts. In chapter six I show how a new way of producing knowledge changed the way that the culture at large thought about the value and power of books as objects, even when thinking about and producing “secular” texts. And, even more clearly, it changed the way that arguments appear on the pages of manuscripts passed among scholars in the Theodosian Age.

In chapter seven I explore a wide variety of fifth century manuscripts in Latin and Greek, each of which were laid out to accommodate a new manner of argumentation. Marginal notes and scribal interventions into both theological and “secular” works show readers in the Theodosian age responding to new forms of knowledge production, and inventing new reading strategies and commentarial forms consummate with the new form and format of scholarly books. I detail, as well, the shifting use and signification of originally Christian scribal tools. The so-called nomina sacra, for instance, became generalized tools of scholarly practice during the Theodosian Age, as the technology was employed throughout legal and epigraphic sources without obvious ideological implication. Even spiritually and politically laden symbols like Christograms were reused in utterly banal ways, for instance as binders’ marks in legal manuscripts, or as signs of revision in fifth century grammatical treatises. None of these innovations speaks to the faith of any scribe or user of the tools, but I argue that all speak to the intellectual context in which they worked. They speak to the technological “Christianization” of late ancient scriptoria, even though they say nothing about the ideological commitments of the producers or users of these books.

The final chapter brings together threads from those which precede it. A new method of making arguments, and laying those arguments out on a page, inflected the way that readers approached books — what they thought books did, how they worked, what their promise was, and what dangers lie among their leaves. For instance, because both approved and disapproved knowledge were placed side by side (or enforceable and supervened laws, heretical and orthodox opinions), readers devised new methods of discerning truth from falsity. Across the scholarly spectrum, Theodosian Age readers devised remarkably similar strategies to deal with this problem and other problems, and some of these strategies can even be seen in the Palestinian Talmud, helping us to situate that production as particularly Roman provincial literature. If chapters four and five were about new readers and six and seven about new texts, chapter eight describes the new meanings that Theodosian age readers understood from new book forms.

There are several ways to think about the rise of Christianity. I have chosen to tell this story in this manner because I think that it helps to elucidate a number of fascinating shifts in late antiquity, and some of the shifts that I detail continue to reverberate today. The Theodosian Age reverberates most potently in modern society, I think, from the overlap between juristic and theological scholarship. The contemporary notion of law as a fundamentally textual and interpretive discourse, for instance, has part of its roots in Rome of the Theodosian Age: the moment when law codes first started to look like bibles, and when similar expectations and strategies of interpretation were brought to bear on both. This period reverberates as well in the use books as fetish items in contemporary American culture — in which, for instance, shelves of books behind lawyer’s headshots seem to lend credibility, or in which the final act of presidential investiture is accomplished with a politician’s hand on a bible. This strange feature of modern life has some of its roots in the conflation of code, codex, and codification that I explore in chapter six, and in the institutionalization of material, biblical power that spread through the Roman empire of the late fourth century. The extraordinary durability of these ideas has obscured their complex genesis in Christian Rome of the fourth and fifth centuries. But, by returning to Judge’s question, and by diving deep into both literature and manuscripts from the Theodosian Age, I argue that we may yet uncover some pearls of great price that help to understand what it means for a society itself to “become Christian.”

[1] Edwin A. Judge, The Conversion of Rome: Ancient Sources of Modern Social Tensions, The Macquarie Ancient History Association 1 (North Ryde NSW: Macquarie Ancient History Association, 1980), 10.

[2] Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense,” Hypatia 10, no. 3 (August 1995), 62.

[3] Yii-Jan Lin, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[4]McKenzie, Donald F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29.

Mark Letteney is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California.