Jaroslav Pelikan

The Excellent Empire

The Fall of Rome and the Triumph of Christianity

San Franscisco 1987

Stron XII+133, format: 16x24 cm

Używana: stan bardzo dobry minus, bez defektów.

This remarkable account by an award-winning historian details the responses to the fall of Rome by the Church fathers, who set the pattern for interpreting this momentous event for all succeeding centuries.

"To speak about the decline and fall of the Roman empire as 'the social tri­umph of the ancient church' is to look at the events associated with that 'memo­rable revolution'... through the eyes of the victors," writes the author. "The thoroughness of the victors has often seen to it that there remains no other way for us to view those events. Not only are we, for this period as for so many others throughout most of human history, denied access to the mind of the common people as they watched this history in the making, so that we are forced to depend on the documents pro­vided by various of the elites of the fourth and fifth centuries; but among the documents of those elites, only some have been permitted to survive."

Jerome, Christian humanist and translator of the Bible into Latin, repre­sents an apocalyptic view of the crisis. Eusebius, court theologian and founder of Church history, saw the fall of Rome as the sign of a new order, the "Chris­tian empire." And Augustine, foun-tainhead for much of Western thought during the millennium that followed, used it as the basis for his City of God.

The unifying theme in this historical panorama is the final revisionist view of the fall by its greatest historian, Edward Gibbon. All of these interpretations of the fall of Rome continue to live today and deeply influence our understand­ing of Western culture.

Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, has written extensively on all periods of Christian history, Eastern as well as Western. He has received the Jefferson Award from the National Endowment for the Hu­manities, and the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America. He is the author of the bestselling Jesus Through the Centuries.

Contents

Preface xi

Introduction

1. The Fall of Rome as Historical Paradigm 3

/. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

2. The Social Triumph of the Ancient Church 15

3. The Triumph of Barbarism and Religion 29

//. The Lessons of History

4. History as Divine Apocalypse 43

5. The Register of Human Follies, Crimes, and Misfortunes 53

///. The Fate of Empire

6. The Founding of the Christian Empire 67

7. The Inevitable Effect of Immoderate Greatness 79

IV. Loss and Gain

8. The Terrestrial Glory of an Excellent Empire 93

9. The Inestimable Gifts of Roman Civilization 104

Notes 117

Index of Names 131