II - Kairoi: Christian times and the past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The central problem for fourth-century Christians was their own past. A continuous biography is the core of our sense of personal identity. This is true no less of a group's sense of identity. It needs to be able to recognise itself as one and the same group enduring through time, the heir of its own past.
This, however, was difficult for the larger part of the Christians in the fourth century. Dissident groups like that of the Donatists in North Africa, or the Nicene opposition under arianising emperors, were more exposed to pressure from the government, denied the privileges and the prestige of its support, sometimes exposed to persecution by the authorities. On the face of it, it was such groups rather than the ‘Catholics’ who had the most direct and obvious claim to be the heirs of the martyrs. They made the best of that claim, and in the conditions of the post- Constantinian Empire it was not easy to dispute it. The past seemed, clearly, to belong to them. (See below, pp. 92–3.) The future belonged to the Great Church; but it could hardly remain content with only the future. To be universal, ‘catholic’, it had to annex the past, too. It had to wrest the legacy of the persecuted Church from more plausible claimants.
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- Information
- The End of Ancient Christianity , pp. 85 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991