Angelo Di Berardino is professor emeritus of the Augustinian Patristic Institute in Rome. He will be known to many readers of this review as the General Editor of the many editions in Italian and English of The Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity and The Historical Atlas of Ancient Christianity. According to the foreword, ‘This book is a summation of his lectures over the past thirty-five years … You will hear the lecturer's voice on any number of occasions’ (p. ix). Indeed, the give-and-take of a lecture hall permeates De Berardino's book, as the professor clarifies and expands on the subject matter in response to students’ questions and concerns. In numerous places, the book exceeds dry academic rhetoric to offer what one may call ‘pastoral wisdom’.
In his brief introduction, Di Berardino states that the goal of the book is ‘to offer a panorama of their [Christian institutions and practices] birth and development in both their variety and complexity’ (p. xvi). Notably, he rejects the tendency of some church historians to ‘cite a few texts and generalize them, offering a homogeneous but false vision’ of the churches’ practices and institutions. Throughout its entire history, he states, Christianity has ‘always been multi-faceted’ (p. xii). In chapter 1, ‘Problems, Methodology and Sources’, he illustrates the difficulty of this approach, remarking: ‘Because of the significant diversity in the first three centuries, many speak of “Christianities.” But then we must ask: If only some people or groups have different opinions, is it really another Christianity? How great must the differences be to constitute another Christianity?’ (p. 3). Over fourteen chapters that explore the development of various Christian institutions and practices from roughly the New Testament period through the sixth century, Di Benaradino navigates between the Scylla and Charybdis of historical complexity and interpretive coherence.
Chapter 2 (‘Space and Time’) examines the geographical spread of Christianity in the first roughly five centuries. Chapter 3 covers the development of Christian initiation, followed by three chapters on ministry and the structures of ecclesial authority. Chapter 7 examines monasticism, and chapter 8, widows, deaconesses, virginity and celibacy. Chapter 9 covers penance and ministry with the sick, followed by a chapter on marriage and family. Chapter 11 surveys the development of the liturgy, specifically the eucharistic liturgy (including furnishings, book, gestures and architecture; in connection with the latter he uses the term ‘liturgical space’, as opposed to the geographical space discussed in chapter 2). Chapter 12, titled ‘The Origins of the Calendar and Christian Feasts’, goes much beyond ‘origins’ of Christian practices of time and calendar. This reader especially appreciated Di Berardino's attention to the Christian practice and understandings of the week, which set the churches apart from both Jewish and Graeco-Roman approaches to the organisation of days. Chapter 13 considers Christian practices of burial and the rise of the cult of the saints, as the latter topic is not covered in the chapter on the calendar. Chapter 14 examines social and economic class issues, grouping together such topics as private property, slavery, usury and ecclesial finances. The final chapter, ‘Charitable and Social Work’, concludes with a discussion of ‘Clergy Support’, which might have fit better with the topic of ‘Church Finance’, a subheading in the previous chapter.
As this overview of the contents may suggest there is considerable overlap of thematic and source material across the chapters. This is especially evident in chapters 4–7, which discuss the orders of ministry and authority from different angles. However, this redundancy may be due to the way each chapter is constructed as a complete treatment of its topic. A strength of this approach is that any chapter could be assigned for a course without the need to read other chapters. A weakness is that reading the book from start to finish can feel very repetitive.
Copious notes appear at the end of each chapter, and the bibliography (pp. 662–701) is divided up according to chapters. However, not all of the referenced works are listed in each chapter's bibliography, and this made it difficult to use the many footnotes that did not contain complete bibliographic information.
In more than a few instances Di Berardino is repetitive within chapters. For example, on p. 95 of his chapter on initiation, he quotes a lengthy passage from Augustine's Sermon 227, only to repeat most of the passage later in the same chapter on p. 107. Likewise, in his chapter on the eucharistic liturgy, he quotes paragraph of Justin Martyr's description of a Sunday worship gathering (First Apology 67) on p. 429, and then gives an even longer quotation of the same passage on p. 439 (where it is misidentified as First Apology 68). These unhelpful repetitions could have been fixed with more careful editing.
Frankly, attentive editing would also have caught many instances of inconsistent italicisation, capitalisation, punctuation and spelling. The Greek word, τελετή (initiation) is transliterated three different ways on pp. 72 and 77 (telete, telete and teleté). In too many places, typographical errors or omissions of a word make sentences unintelligible. For example, Di Berardino writes, ‘Ambrose in Milan explains that it [footwashing] can be considered a simple rite of hospitality. It purifies the neophyte from original sin…’ (p. 117, referencing De myst. 6:32). But surely, given his reference, he meant to write ‘cannot be considered a simple rite of hospitality’. On page 421, the text reads, ‘the mystery religions which were all off [sic] a soteriological character’. One hopes that a future edition will be able to correct such errors.
Finally, it must be said that the physical book itself is beautifully rendered. ICCS Press is to be congratulated for the production of this magnum opus of a highly respected scholar. The problems noted, notwithstanding, Ancient Christianity: The Development of its Institutions and Practices, is an important addition to early Christian studies and especially to the subfield of early Christian liturgical practice and theology.
