The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown

onwards men came to behave and to think in a manner different from modern Europeans, and from the manner we would like to believe that Greeks and Romans of more classical ages had behaved and thought, advances our understanding of what actually happened in Late Antiquity not an inch. Merely to observe, as many scholars have done, that from the second century A.D. Whatever took place in relation to this locus and, more particularly, whatever claims to obedience were made within its territory were thought of as being removed to a quite exceptional degreeideally, removed totallyfrom the ambiguity, the criticism, the envy, and the resentment that were observed to attend the impingement on fellow human beings of mere human skill, human force, and human powers of persuasion. A highly privileged area of human behavior and of human relations was demarcated. The locus of the supernatural, where this unique power was operative, came to stand for a zone in human life where decisions, obligations, experiences, and information were deemed to come from outside the human community. In this period, divine power came to be defined with increasing clarity as the opposite of all other forms of power. Indeed, if judged simply in terms of religious ferment, Late Antiquity is a singularly sober and serious-minded period in European history.

Many of the religious histories of the Late Antique period have tended to place their main emphasis on emotional and subjective qualities and have spoken of the emergence of Late Antique civilization in terms of a rise of superstition, of a failure of nerve, or of a decline of rationalism. In so doing, they seem to miss the point.

The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown