In the Fiction of a Thinkable World, Steinberg has a rather lovely little passage about attempts to explain the Christianization of the ancient world. Variously, scholars have proposed some or another generalized crisis in the geist of the ancient zeit: paganism had lost its weight, the gods could not compete with God, etc. But what if such crises were non-existent? What if the answer to why the Roman Empire turned toward the Christian god is one of simple, banal, political maneuverings?

The conversion of the Empire can be explained by more mundane factors. When Constantine legalized Christianity no more than 10 percent of the population was Christian. After Constantine only one pagan emperor took the throne; imperial funds flowed into church treasuries, pagan temples were cut off from state support and bequests to them made illegal, non-Christian schools were closed and pagan teachers barred from teaching, jobs were given preferentially to Christians, and in more than an insignificant number of cases mob violence was employed to root out obdurate pagan elements. The sum of these incentives — and there were many more — seems like an adequate explanation for the conversion of most of the Empire’s population. Instead of assuming a general social malaise to which Christianity offered a cure, it is better to see Christianitization as a process that exploited tensions in mainstream antique culture, seized the institutional opportunities implicit in the new political order of the post-Diocletion empire, and built a successful alternative upon elements of the minority philosophical traditions as well as the novel idea of a deity who was the author of history at every level.

One could make a similar argument about the rise of the neoliberal elite (and I will summarize David Harvey’s in a bit): there is nothing in it tied to a particular involution of Spirit, or condition particular to the postmodern. It isn’t a decline in the efficacy or efficiency of the symbolic order (of the entire population of the world as psychoanalyzed patient). It is banal, material exploitation of the tensions within social arrangments and the flux of history. Of course to say so is boring, passé, banal, will not win one awards, will make him rigorous, obtuse, blah. But: pyrotechnics are for children.

1 Comment

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  By Clint, 9 April, 2010 @ 3:12 pm

  “a general social malaise to which Christianity offered a cure”

  Rather, an institution of power, by which people are controlled.

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