Christian books and books about books

The sixth century saw an explosion of Christian books and books about books. The Pseudo-Gelasian Decretal is a guide to books you should read and books you should not, and assumes that there is an audience that has access to books and expects to find its Christian experience supported there. (Pope Gelasius had nothing to do with it, but it was taken as the archetype of the much later papal Index of Forbidden Books.) At the boundary of empires in Nisibis, a flourishing school of exegetes offered their example to others. In Constantinople, one imperial quaestor, Junillus, wrote a book to report the wisdom of the Nisibis school (probably to misrepresent it in support of Justinian’s views). Even farther west, in remote Squillace, the former quaestor Cassiodorus had Junillus copied as part of his ambitious program to bring together all the important books of Christianity.

To moderns accustomed to a textual culture, such actions have a reassuringly familiar appearance, and speak to us of a Christianity that was normalizing itself. In fact, guidance of everyday experience by a written text was a very new idea. The codes of Roman law can be said to anticipate or parallel its Christian development. In very similar kinds of texts, Christian writers sought to regulate the cares of the heart and to extend the even longer arm and farther-seeing eye of a heavenly father who cared about every act and every person.

 The challenge of languages

Christianity everywhere claimed to be universal and everywhere became parochial. The challenge of languages was overcome by the implicit acceptance that Christianity could exist in any language in which its books could be read. Translation for Christianity began early, and by the fifth and sixth centuries it became the rule of the day. Earlier churchmen’s limited efforts to cling to original languages and close study of original texts faded away. Very few Christians by 6OO knew any Hebrew at all, few knew or spoke Aramaic (though at least one village in Syria speaks it still), and even those who spoke Syriac, the language closest to Hebrew, were unable to approach scriptural texts in the original. Greek churchmen and Latin churchmen settled into the comfortable cultivation of religion in their own language and made effectively no attempt to go behind the translations they received personal tours bulgaria.

This meant that the Greeks had the advantage of seeing at least the New Testament in the original, but the Syriac and Latin churches, and after them the Slavonic churches as well, were entirely cut off from original sources. The finest points of theology were regularly debated and then taught on the basis of translations that were—even when they were as good as Jerome’s versions of the Bible—hugely imperfect. Even more than scripture, this parochialism meant that the theology of the Greeks, and in particular the language in which powerful figures like Origen and Cyril had written, would be a nearly closed book to churches in the rest of the world until modern times.

Bureaucratic Christianities

And almost everywhere, official, urban, bureaucratic Christianities were matched, especially during the fifth and sixth centuries, by the rise of monasteries as alternative centers of power and homes for Christian observance and identity. The word “monasticism” hides a multitude of stories and things. Starting in the fourth century, in parts of the Roman world where barren deserts came close to urban centers—in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria—holy men fled “the world” to leave temptation and sin behind. Of course, even when they went out into the wasteland to wrestle with the devil, they were not so far from civilization as to keep at least somewhat less austere people from following along and writing down their stories.

The popularity of tales of the desert grew from the fourth century onward, when the life of Anthony, in particular, was a best seller in many countries, and when rumors of the wonders to be found in the desert drew tourists and dilettantes. Egeria, a gentlewoman of the church from Spain or, more likely, Gaul, made the grand tour of the Holy Land in the late fourth century and wrote an account of her journey for the benefit of her sisters back home.

She was thrilled to write about the tourist trap that had sprung up at Mount Sinai, where you could see, all on the same day, the burning bush and the rock where Moses received the Ten Commandments. She wrote in equally loving detail about the grand liturgies of Jerusalem. Jerome, as a young man ambitious and well connected in a traditional way, went to try out the ascetic life in the monastic communities of Syria. He came scurrying home quickly enough, but he boasted of his heroic austerities all his life. Years later he found a better way to combine influence and austerity, taking a wealthy patroness along to set him up in a monastery in Bethlehem, convenient to the prosperity and power of the church in Jerusalem, but suburbanized in a town whose name was recognized all over the world.