Another book to read.

Well, not that it will be a time-consuming or difficult read, being an introduction to the subject, but I’m intrigued enough – especially by the fact that it is illustrated, something that few histories of the Church are, and it certainly looks to be an interesting addition to the (currently very short) suggestion list for when we’re asked, "Can you suggest a good, introductory history of the Church?"

The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History, published by The University of California Press and written by Edward Norman, who "lectured in history at the University of Cambridge and is an Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse. A former Reith Lecturer for the BBC, his most recent books include The Victorian Christian Socialists, Secularisation, and The House of God: Church Architecture, Style and History."

Here’s an excerpt from the Catholic Herald.

The point is that Christian beliefs about the nature of the teaching of Christ became expressed within Greek cultural and intellectual understanding from a very early date. There is evidence that many of the first Churches in the west were set up within Greek-speaking Jewish communities and, doubtless, within the remnants of the older Greek colonies which either co-existed with the Roman cities or were absorbed by them. Since the educated classes of the Roman world spoke Greek, and were well versed in Greek philosophical ideas, and Roman religion was identified with the Greek myths of the gods, it was unavoidable that the Christian message would encounter the pervasive Greek culture and be, to some extent, formed with reference to it, either in its Greek or its Roman versions. Thus early Christian apologists accepted concepts such as the Natural Law and the notion of fundamental human equality, derived from the Roman Stoic writers, and set them within theological interpretations whose ultimate pedigree was as much Greek as it was Judaic. It is not really possible to evaluate the formulations of doctrine arrived at by the early councils of the Church – the Nicene Creed, for example – without recognising how indebted they are to the subtleties and speculative characteristics of the Greek mind. How else could the doctrine of the Trinity have been constructed? There is nothing in Judaism to suggest it: the God who is One and yet is Three – a thoroughly Greek concept. So, come to that, is the idea of the Incarnation. It was the Greeks whose gods were always visiting the earth in human form, and who, while here, indicated by not always very creditable behaviour that they were really human for the duration of their visitation.
The Early Church decisively rejected pagan practices considered immoral, and pagan symbolism regarded as idolatrous. But the minds of the first Christians, and their immediate successors, were formed within what remained an essentially Greek understanding of the world and of the immanence of divine forces.

These considerations need to be borne in mind when seeking to assess the world in which the Catholic Church sought its mission. For the first few centuries it was the heir of the Greek world as much as the Byzantine Church of the east came to be. Here was a single religious realm, transmitting the sacred knowledge of the ancient world, transforming it into a Christian culture that was the successor to the Roman empire. The Catholic and Byzantine Churches are the last surviving institutions of Antiquity.

Hmmm…where have I heard that recently?

It should come in a couple of days. I’ll let you know what it’s like.