CHRISTIANITY AND EARLY ROME

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27796, 22 October 1955, Page 5

CHRISTIANITY AND EARLY ROME

I Reviewed by L.G.W.I Christianity In The Roman Empire. Six Lectures delivered by Harold Mattingly. University of Otago. 96 pp. . Dr. Mattingly’s book was delivered as a course of Open Lectures in the University of Otago. The first lecture explains the origin and development of the Roman Empire and the last deals with the Christian Empire established by Constantine the Great. The intervening lectures are concerned with the relationship of the Church to the pagan Roman State, -with the exception of the second which is concerned with the religions of the Empire. Lecture 111 traces the history of the Church from the beginning to the time of Trojan, whose correspondence with Pliny is quoted. These letters deal with legal standing of Christians. The received explanations of why the Church was persecuted do not satisfy Dr. Mattingly and he thinks that the beginnings of persecution under Nero were due to something other than that tyrant’s “brutal vagaries.” The next period, outlined in lecture IV, is from 117-259 A.D. During this time persecution of Christians was sporadic, due either to mob violence or official connivance or both. The fifth lecture begins withe the reign of Gallienus and ends with Constantine’s recognition of the Church. Before Christianity became the State religion, Constantine’s immediate predecessors, strove in vain to stamp it out by torture and death. Dr. Mattingly tells the story of this reign of terror and its effects in a few lucid pages. He concludes, in his last lecture, with a sketch of the history of the Church with its internal struggles over dogma, the effect of the contact of Greek thought with Bible doctrines, and the debasing of ecclesiastical life by pagan infiltrations. He raises the question as to whether Gibbon’s verdict that the Christian religion was fatal to the Roman Empire is true. His answer is “No.” Even after the Western Empire fell, the Eastern Empire, centred at Constantinople, i lived on for centuries. i These lectures are a vivid and • balanced account of a long period of i history. There are four plates of > ancient coins printed, with notes and passages in illustration, at the end of the book. A matter of particulai interest is the use the lecturer ha c made of the coins to light up obscure events. It is to be hoped we shall have more such lectures from visiting scholars in our University Colleges. . THE FOURTH REPUBLIC

Liberated France. By Catherine Gavin. Jonathan Cape. 292 pp. This is a highly informed, shrewd and often penetrating study of the Fourth Republic. The author has lived in France since 1944, first as war correspondent and then as the accredited correspondent of several British newspapers. Her study of post-war France is the fullest yet to appear in English, and it is remarkable for its considered assertion of faith in France’s present and future. Catherine Gavin is an ardent admirer of “the constant self-renewal, selfexamination and ferment by which France produced ideas where others built machines.” But her thorough and well arranged analysis succeeds in demonstrating that France’s strenuous efforts to recover from the effects of the German occupation have also produced magnificent material results. She is particularly good in her discussions of France’s relations with other countries, especially with America. “No two white peoples,” she remarks with justice, “were less well equipped to understand one another.” And her accounts of France’s colonial policy and the Indo-Chinese war, as well as of the reasons for her frequent governmental crises and changes are as illuminating as they are well documented. The care with which she has treated her sources is obvious in the list of . references, which together with a bibliography and full index, complete , a brilliant and painstaking work.