Why Didn't Christianity Fall With Rome?

One of the most interesting and most important facts about the history of western
Europe and the culture it produced is that its imperial faith, Christianity, did not fall with the Roman Empire.  Why not?  It should have.  After all, by the time Rome fell in the fifth century CE Christianity was its official, established religion.  In the ancient world, imperial religions didn’t outlive the empires with which they were associated.  The religious systems of ancient Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt (which was, with minor modifications, the pre-Christian religious system of Rome as well), no longer exist.  Those empires collapsed, were conquered, and disappeared from history.  Their religious systems went with them.  The Roman Empire too collapsed, was conquered, and disappeared from history; but its imperial faith, Christianity, did not.  Why not?

(Before we continue a brief word of clarification.  In the east Orthodox Christianity survived the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1454, but most people in the regions the Muslim Turks conquered became Muslim.  Orthodox Christianity survived mostly (if not exclusively—see Greece) in places like Russia that were never completely conquered by any Muslim power.  Yes, I know.  I do have a PhD in Russian history after all.  Russia went through a period known as the Tatar Yoke, and the Tatars were Muslims; but the Tatars, that is, the Mongols, never occupied and ruled Russia directly the way the Turks conquered and ruled Byzantium.  They never tried to displace Christianity with Islam, so I think my statement stands.  The dynamic in the east is, however, quite different from that in the west if only because the Roman Empire in the east, that is, Byzantium, lasted a full one thousand years longer than the Roman Empire did in the west.  My observations here are limited to the west, to the parts of Europe that became what we call Catholic.  All references to Christianity from here on in this piece refer to Christianity in the Roman west.)

There are, I think, three elements to the answer of the question of why Christianity didn’t fall with Rome.  First, Christianity arose apart from Rome.  The faith predates its adoption as the official religion of empire.  Second, by the time Rome fell Christianity had adopted the political structure of the Roman Empire.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Christianity, more so than other ancient imperial religious systems, was a living faith, one that functioned the way religion is supposed to function, that is, to connect people with God. 

Secular historians are probably comfortable with the first two of these three elements to an answer of why Rome fell.  Many Christians, on the other hand, would give an entirely different answer to our question.  They would say that the faith of Jesus Christ survived the fall of Rome because of the work of the Holy Spirit.  They would say that Christianity didn’t die with Rome because God the Holy Spirit determined that the true faith should not die and kept it alive.  That may be a satisfying answer to many Christians, but it not an answer that a real historian can accept.  A real historian cannot accept that answer because it appeals to something beyond this world, something that cannot be seen, described, or captured in scholarly discourse. 

The answer “the Holy Spirit” to the question of why Christianity survived Rome is one with which, on the one hand, I can sympathize.  I am a person of faith.  I believe in the reality of the Holy Spirit, although probably not in exactly the same way as most Christians.  In particular, as I have written elsewhere, I do not believe that God controls events on earth.  Rather, God is present with us in those events but not in a way that amounts to control.  That’s why the faith side of me has a problem with the Holy Spirit answer.

Beyond that, I am not only a person of faith.  I am also a professionally trained historian.  I hold a PhD in history from a secular university—the University of Washington.  (Go Dawgs!  Except against the Ducks of course.)  I haven’t worked much as a professional historian, but I am trained as one; and that training hasn’t gone away just because my work became something else.  So I do not here advance the Holy Spirit answer to our question.  It is not an historian’s answer.  For me it is also a problematic spiritual answer.  So I will put that answer aside and proceed to consider the three elements I have identified as part of the answer to the question of why Christianity didn’t fall with Rome.

Christianity Predates Establishment

Christianity existed before it became the established religion of the Roman Empire.  In fact, as Crossan points out so powerfully every chance he gets these days (and he gets lots of them), in its inception and spread throughout the Empire Christianity was fundamentally anti-imperial.  Its view of the world was different.  Both Rome and Christianity may have had peace as a goal, but their vision of peace and of how to achieve it were radically different.  Beginning with imperial ideology (that had theological elements in it) Rome waged war to achieve victory and thus bring about peace.  Christianity began with a theology, Christians advocated nonviolence as a way to achieve justice that would then lead to peace.  For Rome the emperor was a god or at least a son or descendant of a god.  For Christians that claim was blasphemy and idolatry.  For Christians Jesus was God’s anointed one, God’s Christ (from the Greek) or Messiah (from the Hebrew).  To Rome that claim was utter nonsense.  Christianity laid bare the violence and oppression of empire.  That is what the much misunderstood book of Revelation is about.  Rome reacted the way empire always reacts to threats, with violence, with persecution. 

The point for our purposes is only that Christianity originally did not depend on Rome for its existence.  It arose apart from Rome.  It criticized the political and spiritual dynamics of Rome.  Christianity’s anti-imperial edge was lost when the faith became the official religion of the Roman Empire, but Christianity’s history as an autonomous movement was still real.  The anti-imperial teaching of Jesus and Paul was still there for anyone to see who wanted to and who could look at the New Testament with clear eyes and critical insight.  I don’t think that Christianity’s extra-imperial foundations and its original anti-imperial teachings played a very large role in the survival of Christianity; but those things are facts, and they may have played some part in the faith’s survival.

Christianity Adopted the Structure of Empire

The institutional structure of the Christian church in the west is obviously borrowed from Rome.  The basic political structure of the Roman Empire was the emperor as absolute ruler on top, the Senate as a body that played a role in creating law, that the Emperor could consult, and that could on occasion oppose or even assassinate the emperor, and regional administrators who were responsible not to the people over whom they ruled but to the emperor back at the center of the empire.  The western church had an emperor-like ruler, the Pope, at the top.  It had an advisory body that played a role in the administration of the church, the Curia, which on occasion could and did oppose the Pope.  And it had regional administrators, the bishops, who were responsible not to the people whose spiritual leader they supposedly were but ultimately to the Pope in Rome.  The Roman Catholic Church was an institutional clone of the Roman Empire.  (It still is, by the way.)  When the various tribes from the north attacked, sacked, and conquered Rome they put an end to the Roman Empire as a political entity.  They did not, however, put an end to the Church as a political entity.  The empire fell and disappeared.  The Church stood and remained in place, in Rome and throughout the former Roman Empire. 

That continued autonomous existence of the political structure of Rome in the Roman Catholic Church played a major role in the survival of Christianity after the fall of Rome.  The church may be, in theory at least, a spiritual institution whose concern is faith, but the collapse of Rome created a power vacuum that only the Church could fill.  The Church became the one institution that could provide even a modicum of order amidst the chaos of imperial collapse.  The Church’s institutions, especially the monasteries, became centers of life in what had been the provinces of the Roman Empire.  They provided food and shelter for people in need.  Their priests and monks functioned as local political officials, resolving local disputes for example.  The monasteries preserved the culture of Rome, or at least its Christian parts.  The only literate people in most places were priests and monks, so people came to them with any matter that required literacy.  The church’s local institutions survived, I suspect, precisely because they answered not to the people living in chaos but to their ecclesial superiors in Rome.  They weren’t swallowed up by the chaos and anarchy of most of western Europe after Rome’s collapse.  They had central institutional backing in a way no other institution did.  For all these reasons the Church did not collapse when the Empire did.  The Church’s faith, Christianity, therefore survived the collapse of the empire whose official religion it was.

Christianity Was, and Is, a Living Faith

I am quite sure that the two considerations that I discussed above played roles, minor or major, in the survival of the Christian faith when Rome fell.  Yet I don’t think they provide the entire answer to the question of why Christianity outlived Rome.  After all, the political, economic, and cultural circumstances that made the Church’s institutional copying of the Roman Empire didn’t last forever.  It took a long time, but the so-called Dark Ages gave way new political and economic structures beginning no later than the late eighth century CE and gaining strength by the High Middle Ages of the eleventh through 14^th centuries.  Beyond that, people were perfectly capable of taking the things that the institutional church had to offer without ever holding onto the faith the church professed.  They didn’t.  Yes a great many people who called themselves Christians and who attended church more or less regularly were probably just going through the motions without the faith ever actually connecting them with God, but that is always true.  We know from the growth of the monasteries, for example, that Christianity really was powerfully attractive to many, offering them an alternative to the poverty from which everyone suffered and from the meaningless chaos and violence with which most people lived.  Through many difficult centuries Christianity gave people something permanent, something to hold on to, something that could give them hope in this life or at least beyond this life and that could give their life meaning. 

Christianity was very different from other imperial religions in this regard.  In the mythic system of Babylon creation came from an act of matricide, and people were created not in the image of God but to be the slaves of the gods.  The purpose of worship in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome was primarily to placate the gods and keep them out of your life, not to connect with God and get God into your life.  During the Dark Ages a mythic system that gave people no hope, no comfort, no meaning simply wouldn’t have survived.  Christianity did.  It had been doing so from before the Roman Empire fell, and it continued to do so after the Roman Empire fell.  The spiritual power of Christianity is, I believe, a major reason why Christianity survived the fall of its imperial sponsor.

Two of the factors I have identified continue to be powerful forces in the world today.  One of them is an anachronism that we could discard with very little loss.  The other is what makes Christianity alive and vital today despite the literalist straightjacket into which most Christians try to force it.  The political structure of the Roman Catholic Church is the anachronism.  That structure played a major role in the survival of the faith in the fifth century and beyond.  Then people needed that structure.  Today we don’t.  The imperial polity of the Roman Catholic Church today is a great barrier to creativity and spiritual freedom.  It causes the Roman hierarchy to be concerned above all else with the survival of that hierarchy and the monopolistic power that it claims in the lives of the faithful.  The world of the Dark Ages needed the church to have an imperial structure.  The world of the twenty-first century does not.

The same is not true of the spiritual power of Christianity, the other factor we have identified that continues in the world today.  The people of the time of the fall of Rome and the bleak centuries that followed needed the spiritual power of the faith to get them through very difficult times.  So do we.  Our world is very different from theirs, but all people have spiritual needs.  All people need a religion, that is, a system of symbols and myths, that connects them with something beyond themselves and that gives their lives meaning.  Christianity continues to do that for a great many people.  Christians have a bizarre tendency to try over and over again to strangle the faith, to choke all of the life out of it.  The Roman Catholic hierarchy is doing that today.  So is religious literalism or, as I would prefer to call it, factualism, whether in its extreme Fundamentalist form or in the slightly less restrictive form found in all conservative Christian circles.  Yet the spiritual power of Christianity survived the collapse of the faith’s imperial sponsor and the hard times that followed.  It is surviving the attempts to choke it to death that are so widespread today.  I pray that the spiritual power that I know inheres in Christianity will see our sacred faith through this time of institutional and theological barrenness just as it saw people through the cultural, economic, and political barrenness of the Dark Ages.