Edward Gibbon saw the rise of Christianity as a prime cause for what he dubbed, in the classic 18th-century work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He remains one of the most devastating critics of Christianity in the English language. Gibbon never for a moment relaxes his ironical view that there was something inherently risible about the new creed. But it is a more recent work, Pagans and Christians (1986) – by the classicist Robin Lane Fox – that proffers the best analysis I have ever read on the rise of Christianity. “In cities of growing social divisions, Christianity offered unworldly equality,” Lane Fox writes. “It preached, and at its best practised, love in a world of widespread brutality.”
In the old empire, there were bins on street corners, analogous to our recycling bins, where you could dump unwanted babies. When Emperor Constantine became a Christian, orphanages opened in Rome and in the other great cities. As Lane Fox reminds us, Constantine gave corn dole – state-funded grain or bread – to Christians. By the later fourth century, the Romans built hostels and charitable centres for the poor.
Domination, Alice Roberts’ new study of the rise of Christianity, takes a much longer view than Lane Fox, incorporating the Middle Ages in northern Europe, the foundation of the monasteries, and other aspects of the Christian story that do not, as such, have anything to do with the origins of the faith, or how it first spread. Her book is interested in what she deems to be “secrets that have been hidden in plain sight” – namely, that the Christians were often from rich or powerful families, or could make capital out of their seniority in the incipient church to gain power in the secular sphere. Not for nothing did bishops assume the purple of the senators.
There were many reasons why the Roman empire declined, and why the barbarians of east and west triumphed. Again, as Gibbon puts it, “The progress of Christianity has been marked by two glorious and decisive victories: over the learned and luxurious citizens of the Roman empire; and over the warlike barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the empire, and embraced the religion, of the Romans.”
The point that Roberts makes is rather different from Gibbon’s simple and devastating belief that it was a sad day for humanity when the “pale Galilean” triumphed over the urbane world of Pliny and Horace. Her range is wide: from medieval South Wales to first-century Asia Minor, from Roman Britain to the Greece and Italy of antiquity. She visits the remains of these civilisations, and many of her observations and perceptions are of interest. Roberts shows that, from earliest times, this new religion, which Gibbon deemed to be of prime attraction to slaves, in fact attracted many rich and powerful people. When the time came for Emperor Constantine to switch allegiance and become a Christian, these people were in a strong position to take every advantage of the imperial change of heart.
I wonder how many readers familiar with the material will actually be surprised by her supposed revelation that, far from being invariably humble, poverty-stricken or pacifist, the Christians from the third century onwards often came from the powerful classes. Or that this was a key factor in the eventual triumph of the monotheistic and puritanical new creed over the varieties of polytheism and ritualistic mumbo-jumbo of the Mediterranean temples.
Roberts writes from the position of an anti-Christian. Perhaps inevitably, she does not ask the question: what is it about this new religion that made it any different from the creeds which had previously beguiled or fascinated the human soul? Lane Fox pointed out that there were many beliefs which seem arcane or nonsensical to us – beliefs in angelic or unseen powers, or in demonic possession – which both pagans and early Christians had in common. So, what was new?
In 1949, the celebrated literary critic Northrop Frye wrote that “the difference between Christianity and other religions is not the difference between truth and falsehood, for the gods of the Christian pantheon are, to the imaginative eye, the same white-whiskered tyrant, the same tortured dying god, the same remote and ineffable Queen of Heaven, that we find in all religions”. But, Frye also adds, “The central form of Christianity is its vision of the humanity of God and the divinity of risen Man and this, in varying ways, is what all great Christian artists have attempted to recreate.”
It is the humanism of Christianity that made it revolutionary, and that allows its theology to be continuously dynamic. Belief in the divinity of Christ, or the afterlife, has been diluted. Some hate later Tolstoy, preaching peace and vegetarianism, others love him, but the power of all those later writings from the great Russian novelist derive from the Gospels. Their urgent sense of the need for pacifism, and a form of anarchism, derive from the revolutionary God-man portrayed by the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Roberts writes that, since the conversion of Constantine (and perhaps even earlier), Christianity has been a quasi-political movement. The first converts, as may be discerned in the letters of St Paul, were trading people like himself (he was in the lucrative business of supplying the Roman army with tents). The families to whom he wrote in Corinth were clearly not merely literate but also well-heeled. Some 400 years later, we find Christians serving as administrators of the territories of the now dispersed and ruined empire.
The instinct of a secularist like Roberts – who is a patron of Humanists UK – is to think that some con was performed by the Christians when they became the dominant religion of the Roman empire and eventually the extremely powerful institutional church. This mindset fails to look at what might have attracted men and women to the Christian faith in its earliest days.
One ingredient is undoubtedly the appeal of monotheism. We do not live in a pagan world, so it is easy to sentimentalise “paganism”. Pagan temples were not merely the beautiful classical buildings depicted in the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Actual paganism is better evoked by novelists such as Ursula K Le Guin or CS Lewis: it was bloody, repressive and intolerant. Roberts accuses Paul the Apostle – who said “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ” – of being a misogynist. But consider what it might have been like to be a Vestal Virgin in ancient Rome, who could, in some circumstances, be buried alive. Le Guin depicts a similar experience in The Tombs of Atuan (1971), a novel in which an all-female community of vestals preserves a repressive religion they all, in a way, know to be bogus.
Christianity came to prominence not in the great days of Socrates, whose religion was endlessly questioning, but in the tail-end of the stoic and Epicurean philosophical schools, which had reduced religion to good behaviour. The exception, of course, was Judaism, followed by a tenth of the Mediterranean population in late classical times. Compare the sheer incoherence of the pagan creeds in this period, and the learned piety of the Jews, and you understand the huge popularity of synagogues until, in the post-AD 70 world, the Roman emperors became anti-Semitic as a matter of policy. (Constantine enacted laws to forbid Christians from marrying Jews.)
If you wanted to embrace a religion, or a way of life, in which the lofty and uncluttered monotheism of the Jews replaced the nonsensical polytheistic rigmarole of Roman popular religion, it is not difficult to see why Christianity became a popular alternative – even if Roberts does not. Central to it all, wherever the Gospels were read (and they are the most widely copied and popular of all papyri in late classical antiquity), is the figure of Christ himself. He believed in private rather than liturgical prayer, at a time when all religions, including Judaism, had anathematised it. He believed that the good news was for the poor, for women as well as for men, and for society’s outcasts – the sex workers and the tax collectors.
The religion that grew up around him, and in his name, was no doubt a mixed bag of glory and nonsense. By the time 500 years had passed, the Desert Fathers – haunted by visions of demons – were wowing crowds with exhibitionistic displays of piety, such as those of Simeon, who lived atop a pillar, and with extravagantly anti-carnal renunciations of sex. No wonder Gibbon could make his famous and destructive remarks on St Simeon Stylites: “If it is possible to measure the interval between the philosophic writings of Cicero and the sacred legend of Theodoret, between the character of Cato and that of Simeon, we may appreciate the memorable revolution which was accomplished in the Roman empire within a period of 500 years.”
But whereas the philosophic writings of Cicero might enlighten the minds of the few, it is questionable whether they will ever have the effect on the collective imagination that has been produced by the story of the Good Samaritan or by the image of the “woman of the town” pouring unguents over the God-man’s hair and feet. The work of Médecins Sans Frontières across the world, or of the Salvation Army among the homeless of our cities, was not inspired by Cicero but by Christ. It was a Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr, who led the civil rights movement. These stories are overlooked in Domination. The humanity of God and the divinity of risen Man, however interpreted, remain matters of enormous power.
Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity
Alice Roberts
Simon & Schuster, 432pp, £22
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[See also: Jean-François Millet and the drudgery of rural life]
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This article appears in the 03 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Deportation