by Moshe Kerr

Created on: June 15, 2008

How Christianity Spread in the Roman Empire

Kari Withington opens her thesis with: "Constantine was a hugely influential emperor who changed the course of history and greatly affected the spread and development of Christianity". This thesis examines the icing on the cake, but fails to weigh the merits of the cake itself. Prior unto Constantine's conversion Christianity had successfully competed with Roman/Greek mythologies and mystery religions, and had also prevailed over the Torah spirituality as lived by the Jews.

Shyla Martin, in a similar vein writes of Constantine, how he established a stable rule, conquered Italy and promoted religious tolerance. Like Kari Withington's thesis, Shyla examines a particular seminal personality. But fails to examine how this new religion established it's new "ethical containment force" upon the Roman peoples of Europe. It fails to weigh how this new religion established a medium by which the Christian soul lived independently with a unique identity and equally important possessing the power to break off from the dominant pagan religions popularly accepted and practiced in Roman society.
Attempting to grapple with the spiritual and abstract notions of the human soul, and what makes the human soul to socialize and form a group or brotherhood of peoples - perhaps forging a unique nation or allied nations - this abstract term I refer to as "ethical containment force". Understanding the title question, by the way I learn, requires wrestling with the spiritual and abstract beliefs concerning the human soul.
Rambam, an early Egyptian Jewish philosopher wrote in his famous Guide for the Perplexed, the more a person can understand what is not the thing, the better a person can actively define what qualifies as the questioned subject. Understanding the success of Christianity in Roman society requires searching beyond simplistic cults of personality.
What caused the peoples on a mass scale to abandon and reject polytheism and once popular Greek philosophy? When the Greek writings Christians re-discovered 700 years later, it resulted in the Renaissance and uprooted the Dark Ages of Catholic spiritual dominance. Conversely what in this new religion fed the hungry souls of the European peoples during and after the barbarian invasion that destroyed the Roman Empire.
The conquest of Christianity upon the peoples and societies of Europe, considering the changes it wrought upon those societies, makes it nothing less than a revolutionary

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