5 - Introduction: the West

Summary

The world of the Christian fathers from Ambrose to Isidore of Seville had come to differ profoundly from the world of the early Apologists, of Origen and Tertullian. The transformations which produced these differences came in two great waves: the first, sweeping across the whole of the Roman world, is the crisis of the third century from which Roman society was to emerge into a new stability in the fourth, a stability won through extensive re-organisation and accompanied by far-reaching changes not only in the administrative and social structure of the Empire, but also in its traditional culture and religion. These changes, though their incidence differed from region to region, affected the Empire everywhere. The second wave rolled mainly over the Western provinces: the Germanic invaders who settled within imperial frontiers came to create their own, eventually independent, kingdoms on what had been Roman soil. Both waves radically altered the social and political structures of Western Europe, and also the cultural conditions in which reflection on those structures could take place.

The later Roman Empire

The reforms of the emperors at the end of the third century, continued by Constantine in the fourth, secured the Empire from anarchy, from military, economic and social collapse. The means employed, emergency measures which gradually turned into a system, created a novel kind of political reality: a centralised, bureaucratic state very different from the Empire as it had been in the time of the Antonine or even the Severan dynasty.