Churches in the fourth century AD suddenly became “evangelists of stone and brick: converting unbelievers, framing the encounter between Christ and community members, and inflaming faith”, Oxford historian and priest Teresa Morgan will argue tonight.
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“This change not only reveals much about evolving Christianity, but raises new questions about the role of religious buildings elsewhere in the Graeco-Roman world, and sheds new light on some of Christianity’s major competitors,” Professor Morgan said.
Professor Morgan – Professor of Graeco-Roman History in the Faculty of Classics, Oxford University, and an ordained minister in the Church of England – will give the keynote address of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies at UNE, at 6.30pm in Arts Lecture Theatre 1.
Her books include Roman Faith and Christian Faith (2015); Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (1998); and a forthcoming work on the evolution of Christian faith in the later Roman empire.
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Professor Morgan will look at the moment when people began to think of religious buildings as powerful, numinous, and able to transform worshippers in their own right.
“We expect religious buildings to be powerful; to find a distinctive atmosphere of the spiritual. We expect to encounter something unusual, and to be changed.”
The church building, early Christians believed, preached to people in the street, stopping them in their tracks, and almost forcing them to come inside – and created a space where faith was deepened and changed.
“The space creates a sense of awe and fear, and prepares you to encounter God, and to be changed by God,” Professor Morgan said. “The building is doing something in itself – and that’s a completely new idea.”
For worshippers in the Mediterranean world and the Near East, the temple had no power in its own right; it was where the god came when visiting their people. It might express a god’s mood –Neptune’s anger might shake a temple, statues of Apollo might sweat – but that was the power of the god, not the building.
Holy spaces, though, were less important for the early Christians; they had to meet in catacombs or private homes. They started building publicly visible churches in the late second century but they were burnt down, looted, and vandalised.
“Not much was invested in them, either materially or theologically,” Professor Morgan said. “They were plain, and weren’t talked about as special.”
Constantine’s edict of toleration in 312 ended the persecution of the Christians; two years later, the faith was legal throughout the Roman Empire. Christians were able to build large, permanent structures, and decorate them lavishly.
“That brings a whole new way of thinking about the buildings,” Professor Morgan said. “They start connecting the buildings with the idea of faith.”
Faith, Professor Morgan argues, was central to Christians as to no other group in the ancient world. How early Christians understood it, though, is very different from what it became.
The Greek and Latin terms that we translate as “faith” – pistis (Πίστις) and fides – actually mean “trust”.
“It’s not just an idea and a relationship, but a practice,” Professor Morgan said.
“When very early Christians talk about what we call ‘faith’, what they mean is above all trust in God, the trustworthiness of God and Christ, the faithfulness God has towards people, and that people have to have towards God.”
Over four centuries, the meaning of faith rapidly changed from trust in faithfulness into belief – belief that certain things are true, even though they can’t be proved.
“It comes to mean signing up to a set of truth-claims, and it’s a feeling and a sense in your heart and mind,” Professor Morgan said. “But, of course, when you say that, the idea of trust and the relationship with God has really fallen out of the equation.”
The early Christian approach to faith, Professor Morgan argues, may hold more appeal for modern worshippers.
Many people, she said, struggle with belief, with its requirements that people sign up to a set of unprovable truth-claims about the world.
“It’s a strange idea. People find it odd; Christians find it odd.”
The early Christians’ approach is easier, Professor Morgan said, to understand: to put trust in a God – and accepting that if He exists, we will know very little about the deity in this lifetime – and in the witness of people who have gone before.
“This very early Christian idea makes a lot of sense intuitively to people, and it fits the way a lot of people are practising their faith even today, even though we don't talk about it.”
The orthodox Christian adherence to truth-claims has also, Professor Morgan said, caused a great deal of conflict. Christians assume that other religions or world-views – humanism, science, atheism – work like Christianity; because their truth-claims are different, then they must be at war.
“That’s a very unhelpful way to think about different ways people view the world,” Professor Morgan said.
Today, people increasingly think that science and religion aren’t incompatible; they ask different questions about the world. Religions emphasise different aspects of the human condition, and ways to deal with it.
“If you stop thinking about religion as a set of truth-claims, then actually you are on the way to dismantling quite a lot of unhelpful polarities in our world.”
Professor Morgan has been hooked on classics since she was a child. She started to read her parents' copies of Homer, Plato, and Euripides, then studied Latin and Greek at school.
"They were taught in a way that was so much more interesting than many subjects. This is one of the great strengths of the subject; it's taught by people who are really passionate about it.”
They learnt all their grammar in about two terms, and then started reading Horace, Cicero, Plato, and Sophocles.
"We were allowed to sit around in class, and argue about who was the best historian, or whether Antigone was right to bury her brother. In French lessons, we were learning to order a cup of coffee at a cafe, learning to do basic level German conversation. It's just not that intellectually stimulating, and the subject matter in classics is just so incredibly interesting!"