Shopping for gods

THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE by Richard Fletcher HarperCollins, 25, pp.550

'Professional historians today', Richard Fletcher writes, `are expected to know more and more about less and less, and to communicate their findings to other professionals in those uniquely disagreeable gatherings known as academic conferences.' With specialisation they have lost that contact with the intelligent public that their predecessors enjoyed. Fletcher has served his time as an accomplished specialist but in this book he roams free to present to the general reader an absorbing account of the most important event in the history of Europe: its conversion to Christianity. No enthusiasm for multi-culturalism, no erosion of Christian belief in an increasingly secularised world of mindless consumerism - I write as an atheist who shops at Safeways -- should lead us to forget that we are what we are as the consequence of the implantation of the beliefs of a heterodox Jewish sect on the world of late antiquity and the barbarian kingdoms of the West that grew up on its ruins to form the nations of Europe.

Fletcher establishes contact with his reader by taking him into his confidence as he wrestles with his sources, often meagre and consistently the work of Christian apologists. Chief among these are the lives of the great charismatic missionaries. Apart from the 'farrago' of pious posthumous legends - that St Patrick in his chariot ran over his unchaste sister was first recorded 400 years after his death - we are confronted by what Fletcher calls `the quagmire of the topos'. Topoi are those conventional themes that supply the hagiographer with 'a bank of stock tales' on which he can draw at will. For Gibbon, miracles were `repeatedly alleged by the ancient apologists as the most convincing evidence of the truth of Christianity'. Miracles, as the most effective instrument of evangelisation, crop up repeatedly in the lives of the great missionaries. They are expected to perform them and hagiographers supply them in abundance.

St Martin of Tours (d. 397), in the process of dismantling a pagan sanctuary, deflects the fall of the sacred tree that was about to kill him by the sign of the cross: `then indeed a shout went up to heaven as the pagans gasped at the miracle and with one accord acclaimed the name of Christ'. Fletcher warns us against dismissing our ancestors' belief in miracles as instances of `infantile credulity' when all accepted that `the miraculous could weave like a shuttle in and out of everyday life'. But the modern sceptic must wonder what happened when we are told that St Samson, preaching in sixth-century Wales, raised from the dead a boy killed by a nasty fall from a horse, a feat, according to his biographer, that so impressed the local chieftain that he converted to Christianity, taking his people with him.

It should come as no surprise that, as in the case of Samson, the great missionaries to the barbarians worked from the top down, whereas modern evangelists, like the early Christians, have tended to work from the bottom up. The great missionaries had before them the example of Constantine (d. 337) whose conversion had put at the disposal of the Christian church the immense resources of his empire. Their targets were barbarian rulers as prospective Constantines. The capacity of a king to subvert the religious observances of his subjects should be familiar to members of the Anglican church. Barbarian leaders Clovis, the leader of the Salian Franks, and the kings of Kent and Northumberland all had Christian wives, and dynastic marriages to Christian wives brought Poland, Lithuania and Hungary into the Christian orbit.

Rather than on the off chance of there being a pious consort, missionaries relied on exploiting what historians call the `empirical religiosity' of the barbarian kings. Their primary activity was warfare and it was the plunder of war that secured the loyalty of their followers. Loyalty was a matter of tangible rewards and it was tangible rewards - `victory, wide dominion, fame and riches' - that missionaries held out to barbarian kings in return for their loyalty to Christ; Clovis got his tangible reward when he appealed, as a last resort, to his wife's God to grant him victory in his great battle with the Alemanni. He, and several thousand of his followers, were baptised by Bishop Remigius on Christmas day. When their leader turned, all turned with him.

That the landed aristocracy should follow their leader was crucial to missionary strategy. For Fletcher, the `full-hearted commitment of the aristocracy' was probably decisive in the long and arduous task of bringing the pagans of the countryside to Christ. They built churches on their estates, they lavishly endowed monasteries, both of which they regarded as family possessions. The monastery of Whitby was impeccably aristocratic, filled, Fletcher surmises, with nice girls of `good family' waiting for a suitable marriage to escape to the world outside the convent. Gregory the Great (d. 604) admonished Sardinian landlords to stamp out heathenism on their estates; if their tenants proved reluctant to come to God it might be expedient to jack up their rents. Father Caraman, the scholar priest of Dulverton, provides a modern instance in his history of The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 when the peasantry of the South West rose in rebellion to defend the old faith. Within a couple of generations, under the power and influence of the great Protestant landlords - the Grevilles, the Godolphins, the Carews, the Russells and the Fortescues - they had become solidly Puritan, establishing the dissenting tradition that gives the Liberal Democrats their cluster of seats in the West.