Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire, The

Trinity Journal, Spring 2005 by Schnabel, Eckhard

Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. xiv + 354 pp. $55.00 hardcover; $19.95 paper.

The expansion of the Christian faith that led to the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the centuries that followed the acceptance of Christianity by Emperor Constantine I in A. D. 312 arguably represents the most radical and longest lasting social and religious change that history has seen. What many observers have called "the triumph of Christianity" is of particular interest to two groups of people: to historians who seek to understand and explain events and developments, and to Christians who seek to understand how non-Christians are converted to Christianity and how churches grow. Michele Salzman, Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, writes as a historian who finds "the possibility of such large-scale social and religious change as the Christianization of the Roman aristocracy and the drama of dying and rising religions" meaningful, since "we live with the consequences of those events" (p. xiv). She attempts, as other scholars have tried before her, to answer the question, "What did it take to make the Roman aristocracy in the later western empire change its ancient religious traditions, turning from paganism to Christianity, in the century of Constantine?" (p. ix). Aware of the various traditional theological, religious, political, social, and cultural explanations for the phenomenal acceptance of Christianity in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, Salzman suggests that a discussion that focuses consistently on religious change from the perspective of the senatorial aristocracy may help us to better understand how the Roman aristocracy became Christian (pp. xiii, 3). Using existing databases - The Prosography of the Later Roman Empire I-II, ed. A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, Cambridge 1971/1980; Prosographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire I-II, ed. A. Mandouze/C. Pietri and L. Pietri, Paris/Rome, 1982/1999-2000-Salzman establishes a database of 414 aristocratic men and women who lived or held office in the western part of the Roman empire between A.D. 284-423 for whom we have explicit evidence for religious affiliation (cf. Appendix 2: 315 men and 99 women, 166 pagan and 230 Christian, 14 converts from paganism to Christianity, and 4 converts from Christianity to paganism; as regards the sources, the criteria, and the variables for the database, see the summary in Appendix 1).

In ch. 1 (Approaches to a Paradox, pp. 1-18), Salzman insists that "there could hardly have been a more unlikely candidate for Christianity" than the senatorial aristocracy whose traditional religious and social values were "fundamentally at odds with Christianity" (p. 2). An elite that relies on the affirmation of status and privilege does not naturally tend to a religion that teaches love for one's neighbor, humility, and equality. A conservative and proud aristocracy whose polytheistic spirituality has not lost any of its vitality is not "ready" to join the Christian churches. Salzman examines the lives of over four hundred aristocrats (of a total of at least 36,000 members of the aristocracy) against the available literary, archaeological, prosopographical, and epigraphical evidence concerning their religious choices in order to understand religious change in the fourth and early fifth centuries (p. 6). She emphasizes, however, that "the weight of the argument" in her book does not rest on the evidence drawn from the lives of these 414 senatorial aristocrats but rather, primarily, on her "many years of study of Roman history and institutions and on a close reading of the literary and archaeological record" (p. 7).

Chapter 2 (Defining the Senatorial Aristocracy, pp. 19-68) surveys the criteria for membership in the senatorial aristocracy; their economic, political, and social resources; the imperial reforms of Roman society in the third and fourth centuries that led to an increased administrative role; the vitality of the aristocracy in terms of their political and social influence, and the increasing differentiation in terms of composition and orientation; the status culture of the aristocrats as seen in their leisure activities, in their work habits in public office and in private business, in their relationships with friends and family, in the values of lineage, holding public office, cultural achievement, friendship, and in the religious activity of officiating in the ceremonial celebrations of the state cults or patronizing specific cults. Salzman argues that aristocrats who were deeply involved in pagan cults as a source of honor would have been more resistant to conversion than people whose religious affiliation did not confer prestige, and that the likelihood of aristocrats becoming Christians increased when "Christianity" addressed the status concerns of the aristocracy, e.g., by encouraging aristocrats to take on prestigious roles in Christian institutions (pp. 66-67).