OUP (2017) h/b 328pp £22.99 (ISBN 9780199367412)
D. is a 4th century AD specialist and author of Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (2002). He is Research Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. In his latest book, D. picked out a golden century of miracles and miracle story-telling to demonstrate the profound importance that miracles and the narration thereof held for Christians, Jews and pagans alike. The book divides into eleven chapters, supported by twenty-seven illustrations, an impressive thirty-six page bibliography, just over four grudging pages of index, and thirty pages of end notes.
D.’s central thesis is that the powerful and persuasive miracles and miracle stories recounted and circulated in these hundred or so years ultimately allowed the reassurance to believe that their Christian god wished his creation to be a Christian creation. The miracles had additional importance, D. asserts, because they also permitted believers to deal with the exponential rise and rise of their religion and the ‘dizzying changes’ this brought. Most crucially, though, they enabled Christians to cope with their god’s failure to save Rome from the 410 sacking handed down by pagan Alaric; there were claims that their god was ‘not up to the job’ and that, as figurehead of what was now the state religion, he should have kept the empire safe, not asleep at the wheel.
The book revolves around two pivotal miracles: one at the beginning of the century: Constantine’s life-changing Vision of the Cross at the Milvian Bridge in 312; the other at the end of the century in the form of Theodosius I’s battle-changing, and state religion-changing, windstorm in 394 at the battle of Frigidus. The former, D. says, ‘opened the door for Christianity’ while the latter conclusively ‘slammed it shut again on everybody else’, namely Jews and pagans. The author states that his ‘aim is to demonstrate that more than coincidence is involved in the timing of the miracles’ and, because for the Christians it was win-win, to confirm that the Christian god wanted to lord it over a Christian empire.
Other miraculous events are recounted in between, adding credibility to the belief that the Christian god wanted to be god of a Christian world. The most famous, recounted in chapter five, is the miracle involving Helena, Constantine’s mother, and the discovery of the True or Holy Cross—Christianity’s most revered relic. We have Ambrose of Milan ( c. 340–397 CE) to thank for the detail, how she was led by the Holy Spirit to discover the cross on which Jesus died and then used the nails from the cross to fashion a bridle and crown for her son. Her purpose? ‘To ensure persecution should end and true religion take its place.’
Chapter four examines how two prominent Christian thinkers, Lactantius and Eusebius, deal with the dichotomy of Constantine as Roman emperor and a Christian ruler simultaneously. Eusebius it was, of course, who recounted for us the Vision of the Cross miracle. Jews and Christian miracles are covered in chapter six while chapter seven deals with St Antony and his choice of an ascetic monk’s life. The ‘war of words’ waged by Julian the Apostate (emperor 361-363) who stoked ‘Christian anxieties and accelerated religion polarization’ makes up chapter eight. Chapter nine is all about the failure and impotence of the old Olympian gods, as pedalled by the Christian miracle makers with as much zeal as their own miracles.
All in all, this is an entertaining and interesting journey through a century of miracles which sheds a new perspective on their individual significance and on the role they played in the spread of Christianity and in its endurance through later centuries.
Paul Chrystal