Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries.(Review)

By Ramsay MacMullen. Pp. vi+ 282 incl. 3 figs. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1997. [pounds]21. 0 300 07148 5

MacMullen's aim is to attack what he sees - quite astonishingly - as a consensus among twentieth-century historians 'rarely called in question before the 1980s'. The substance of this alleged consensus is that 'nothing counted after Constantine save the newly triumphant faith'; a Christian empire eclipsed the rival religious 'system', paganism. This is the 'Grand Event' MacMullen sets out to debunk. This consensus ignored, we are told, the fact that the 'national religion [sic] [remained] stubbornly alive' for centuries to come. Despite the …