Paid Post: Book Review--"Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion: 300-1300"
Peter Heather offers a sweeping and detailed account of how Christianity became one of the most dominant and powerful forces of the medieval world.
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Peter Heather’s Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion: 300-1300, is one of those books that’s been sitting on my TBR list for a long time. As I’ve slowly eased myself back into the faith in which I was raised, I’ve also been reading a lot about the history of Christianity and how it has changed and grown over the centuries. Peter Heather has written a truly magisterial volume that sheds some much-needed light on the various forces that allowed the faith to become ever more dominant in Europe until, by 1300, it could truly be said to be one of the dominant forces on the continent.
Heather argues that the key to Christianity’s survival over its first millennium of true dominance was its adaptability. From the moment that Constantine took the faith under his wing and began to take a more active role in its doctrinal controversies, it managed to change to take advantage of the various apparatuses of the Roman state. In that sense, Heather reverses the typical understanding, which tends to see the Roman Empire becoming Christian when, in fact, it might be more accurate to say that Christianity became Roman. This allowed it to become more theologically, institutionally, and doctrinally coherent which, in turn, made it much easier to convert others to the faith.