CHRISTIANISATION

Summary

Faced by a topic as labyrinthine as the problem of Christianisation, it is a relief to begin with a person for whom the problem apparently caused little trouble. Some time in fourthcentury Britain, Annianus, son of Matutina, had a purse of six silver pieces stolen from him. He placed a leaden curse in the sacred spring of Sulis Minerva at Bath, in order to bring the miscreant to the attention of the goddess. On this tablet, the traditional list of antithetical categories, that would constitute an exhaustive description of all possible suspects – ‘whether man or woman, boy or girl, slave or free’ – begins with a new antithesis: seu gentilis seu christianus quaecumque, ‘whether a gentile or a Christian, whomsoever’. As Roger Tomlin, the alert editor of the tablets, has observed: ‘it is tempting to think that a novel gentilis/christianus pair was added as a tribute to the universal power of Sulis’. Christianisation, at the shrine of Sulis Minerva at Bath, means knowledge of yet another world-wide category of persons whose deeds were open to the eye of an effective goddess of the post-Constantinian age.

Annianus, and many other fourth-century persons, lived in a universe rustling with the presence of many divine beings. In that universe, Christians, even the power of Christ and of his servants, the martyrs, had come to stay. But they appear in a perspective to which our modern eyes take some time to adjust – they are set in an ancient, pre-Christian spiritual landscape.