The Rise of Christianity and the Rise of the Universal Code

Mark Letteney (Princeton/Rome)

My proposal is to give a 45 minute talk covering the “rise of the code” in the fourth and fifth centuries as a central node of scholastic production. One way of talking about what it means for Christians to come into power as a ruling elite in the fourth century is to talk about how they influence not what is true, but how it is that something can be true. My talk will trace first, briefly, a change in how Christians make arguments in the early fourth century, and then demonstrate that a newly Christianized structure of knowledge can be seen proliferating through other technical disciplines like law, military history, and miscellany in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. I will conclude with a case study on the Theodosian Code, arguing that this central achievement of post-classical law is not only inflected by Christian ways of knowing, but would have been inconceivable outside of a Christianized intellectual environment.

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