The Catholic Church is an institution of remarkable longevity. The year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, a summit meeting of representatives from every Christian community called by the Emperor Constantine to confirm his Christian affiliation and the religion’s new place in the Roman Empire.
From then on, the Church in various denominations has been part of the structure of societies across Europe and beyond. It has survived not just changes of regimes but changes of modes of production. This appearance of essential continuity for the Church can make it appear to be a phenomenon that stands outside a historical materialist understanding of these societies.
Thus, Perry Anderson described it in his book Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism as a “strange historical object par excellence, whose peculiar temporality has never coincided with that of a simple sequence from one economy or polity to another, but has overlapped and outlived several in a rhythm of its own.” The implication here was that the Church’s individual rhythm explained why it had “never received theorization within historical materialism.” Such a theorization is, however, possible.
For nineteenth-century historians, the question of how Christianity went from being an obscure cult to becoming the official religion across Europe was answerable simply by pointing to what they saw as its innate superiority, whether in organization, doctrine, or both. Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, for example, argued that Constantine had chosen Christianity because he saw…
Auteur: Elaine Graham-Leigh
