Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe c. 350-700

Marilyn Dunn

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441123824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This ground-breaking study offers a new paradigm for understanding the beliefs and religions of the Goths, Burgundians, Sueves, Franks and Lombards as they converted from paganism to Christianity between c.350 and c.700 CE. Combining history and theology with approaches drawn from the cognitive science of religion, Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe uses both written and archaeological evidence to challenge many older ideas. Beginning with a re-examination of our knowledge about the deities and rituals of their original religions, it goes on to question the assumption that the Germanic peoples were merely passive recipients of Christian doctrine, arguing that so-called 'Arianism' was first developed as an 'entry-level' Christianity for the Goths. Focusing on individual ethnic groupings in turn, it presents a fresh view of the relationship between religion and politics as their rulers attempted to opt for Catholicism. In place of familiar debates about post-conversion 'pagan survivals', contemporary texts and legislation are analysed to create an innovative cognitive perspective on the ways in which the Church endeavoured to bring the Christian God into people's thoughts and actions. The work also includes a survey of a wide range of written and archaeological evidence, contrasting traditional conceptions of death, afterlife and funerary ritual with Christian doctrine and practice in these areas and exploring some of the techniques developed by the Church for assuaging popular anxieties about Christian burial and the Christian afterlife.

1

Introduction

From the late fourth century onwards, Germanic peoples entered the Roman Empire in large numbers. The first to do so were groups of Tervingi and Greuthungi, who were permitted to cross the Danube in 376, followed by further groups of Greuthungi in 386 and 405/6. All were fleeing Hunnic attack and hoped to find greater security inside the imperial frontiers.1 In December 405, a ‘huge body’ of peoples from the interior of Germania crossed the Rhine: Sueves, Vandals and Alans.2 The Sueves moved south, settling ultimately in north-western Iberia, while the Alans and Vandals who reached Iberia about the same time would cross over into Africa in the 420s. Beyond the Rhine, the Burgundes were also subject to Hunnic pressure: victorious against a Hunnic army in 429, they were then defeated by the Roman general Aëtius and his Hunnic allies in the 430s and were resettled within imperial frontiers.3 Salian Franks, who unsuccessfully helped defend the Empire against some of these incursions would themselves move within its frontiers where a Frankish state would begin to emerge in north-eastern Gaul later in the fifth century.4 In the 450s, Gothic groups escaping Hunnic hegemony entered imperial territories: first the Balkans and then Italy. And in the late 560s, not long after the Gothic state created in Italy in the 490s had been destroyed by the armies of the East Roman Empire, the Lombards began to move into Italy.

This book is concerned with belief and religion among the ‘barbarians’ who settled and created states in Western Europe: Tervingi and Greuthungi, who eventually became the Visigoths of southern Gaul and Spain; Sueves, Burgundians and Franks; the Balkan groups who became Italian Ostrogoths; and the Lombards. Who the ‘barbarians’ were, where they originally came from and the manner in which they settled in Western Europe has been much discussed.5 Historians have increasingly focused in recent years on questions of ethnicity. This is no longer regarded as a simple matter of belonging to a particular descent group.6 We are now told – rather as we are told of gender – that ethnicity is multi-layered, performative, situational and dynamic.7 The process by which Visigoths and Ostrogoths emerged in the fifth century is complex, controversial and still unclear: Peter Heather writes of the emergence of these Gothic ‘supergroups’ as a result of military activity; ‘proper’ migration; the adhesion at different times of minorities of Huns, Alans and Taifali (recruits were not refused); social status, both claimed and recognized; and ‘the overriding press of circumstance’.8 Such observations are confirmed by the discovery of individuals in Germanic cemeteries with dental traits characteristic of Hunnic populations: in one Burgundian cemetery excavated in the 1970s, one-third of the skeletons exhibited such enamel formations. This seems to indicate a mixture of Hunnic and Burgundian populations before the Burgundes were settled in the Empire.9 If this is the case, it seems that the written sources afford only very limited indications of the way major population groups were formed (or dissolved) in this period.

In these debates over the issues of ethnogenesis, ethnicity, identity and state formation in ‘barbarian’ Europe we can find some discussion of aspects of religious history of the ‘barbarians’ and their conversion to Christianity; and religion is examined in a number of recent volumes devoted to the study of individual peoples.10 Scholars have also produced a few brief studies of conversion; and we are still indebted to older classic works such as that of E. A. Thompson on the Goths in the time of Ulfila, which examines both the pre-Christian religion and the conversion of this people.11 The conversion of the Germanic peoples has also featured in several major books in English covering the religious history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Richard Fletcher and Peter Brown have treated it as part of their broader canvases – the conversion of Europe up to the fourteenth century and the ‘triumph and diversity’ of the ‘rise of western Christendom’.12 Non-Christian Germanic religion is also examined in Ken Dowden’s study of European paganism and ‘the realities of cult’, a survey ranging from the early Greeks to fifteenth-century Lithuania. Carole Cusack has provided a major region-by-region treatment of European conversion in the period 300–1000 CE.13 But since the 1990s, there has been no attempt to propose any broad interpretative framework that might help us achieve a greater understanding of the way in which Germanic pagan peoples on the continent gradually became Catholic Christians in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. The two major works in the 1990s which attempted a fundamental examination of religious change have both proved controversial. The first was Valerie Flint’s study of the ‘rise of magic’, a concept defined very broadly, in the Early Middle Ages. In setting out the scope of her study, Flint acknowledged the risks of her approach, which involved claiming that non-Christian ‘magic’ – auguria and auspicia (soothsaying), incantatio (incantation) and astrologia (astrology) – would be rehabilitated in Christian terminology as miracles (miracula), wonders (mirabilia), mystery (mysterium) and even grace (gratia). Predictably this attracted much criticism, though recently it appears to have found some followers.14 James C. Russell’s ‘socio-historical approach’, suggesting the ‘inculturation’ or ‘Germanization’ of Christianity by ‘barbarians’ was also contested: his ideas of ‘Christianity’ and ‘Germanization’ were attacked as static and his use of medieval sources, as opposed to modern theory, thin.15

This book offers something new. It focuses on the beliefs of continental Germanic peoples – Goths, Sueves, Burgundes, Franks and Lombards – in the period between c. 350 and c. 700, in which they settled in the territories – or former territories – of the Western Roman Empire and gradually accepted Catholic Christianity. It presents a study of belief based on the cognitive turn in the study of religion of recent years, expanding and developing the approaches pioneered in The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons c. 597–c. 700.16 It offers fresh insights into familiar texts; ways out of apparent conceptual impasses; and new understandings of the beliefs and religions of these groups.17

The starting point for this study, in Chapter 2, ‘Intuitions of Divinity’, is the pagan beliefs of the Germanic peoples. This is an area which poses considerable problems for the historian as these were religions with no written doctrines and what evidence we have for them is not only very limited, but was produced by a variety of outsiders. The restricted and problematic nature of evidence relating to rituals, sacred places and deities has made this a no-go area for some historians, though philologists continue diligently to sift the evidence of language and literature in an attempt to identify gods.18 However, a cognitive approach offers viable alternatives. As long ago as 1994, one of the leading exponents of the cognitive science of religion, Pascal Boyer, suggested that there are some universal characteristics of human cognition and that these account for the recurrence throughout history of certain religious features transcending ideas of ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’.19 Rather than thinking in terms of ‘cultures’, the cognitive study of religion looks for the ‘underlying templates that underwrite our variable concepts’.20 This enables a supra-cultural approach allowing us to compare, contextualize and extrapolate from limited information.

Another useful conceptual tool provided by the cognitive study of religion is the idea of ‘abductive’ reasoning. Boyer coined this expression in the 1990s to explain the way in which people ‘make surprising data unsurprising’. It is a variety of post hoc, propter hoc reasoning used to ‘explain’ the healing powers of natural features or the intervention of supernatural beings.21 As Chapter 2 shows, ‘abductive’ reasoning underlies the idea of sacrifices and offerings to supernatural beings or to natural features believed to have special powers. It is a particularly useful template that helps us understand not only sacrifices and offerings in Germanic paganism (see pp. 23–9 below) but also ex-voto offerings amongst Christians (Chapter 5). Elsewhere, Boyer has provided another useful template for the study of the rituals of the pagan Germanic peoples. He suggests that, contrary to what we might expect, gods and other supernatural beings are ‘add-ons’, in the sense that the ritual is intended to do something else in the first place, thus shedding some light on the meagre descriptions that have come down to us of pagan rites.22

The cognitive study of religion also highlights the importance of intuitions of supernatural beings. This arises from what theorists regard as the human propensity to detect agency: that is, for individuals to seek reasons or forces behind events that affect them. Our mental architecture is ‘geared up’ for the detection of agency in general.23 Justin Barrett has even coined the term ‘hypersensitive agency detection device’ to describe this predisposition,24 which means, in terms of religion, that people intuit the presence or actions of gods, spirits and ancestors. In belief-systems with no written doctrine, intuitions of divinity are paramount and central. A common intuition is that of a supremely powerful god who has created the world – but has no regular cult or worship. This may seem surprising or paradoxical to those familiar only with religion as doctrine: but it is likely that people form the intuition that he is simply too important to concern himself with human concerns and frailties: these are the business of a range of lesser gods and spirits. Using this template, Chapter 2 offers new ways of interpreting the diverse and scanty evidence for the supernatural beings venerated by the Germanic peoples.

Chapter 3 takes a fresh look at ‘Arianism’. There is general consensus that Goths, Sueves, Burgundes, Franks and Lombards as they all arrived and settled in western Europe followed a trajectory from paganism, through ‘Arianism’ to Catholicism – though the Franks missed out the ‘Arian’ stage. Scholarship in English seems gradually to be coming to terms with the fact that ‘Arianism’ should really be described as Homoian Christianity, as it was only indirectly related to the theology of Arius, the Alexandrian presbyter whose views on the Trinity threw the fourth-century Church into theological turmoil.25 Whether it is called ‘Arianism’ or Homoianism, it is still viewed as an aberrant theology adopted by the Goths only because it happened to be the creed of the reigning emperor when they began to enter the Empire in large numbers – a view of the Goths which portrays them as mere passive recipients of Christian doctrine. But a close look at the development of Homoian doctrine, combined with an understanding of the Germanic intuition of supernatural beings suggests something quite different: that Homoianism was a version of Christianity constructed by ecclesiastics on the Danube frontier to appeal to Gothic intuitions of divinity, thus creating an ‘entry-level’ Christianity. The evidence suggests that it was originally conceived of as dynamic and that Ulfila, the famous ‘apostle of the Goths’, intended to move his people beyond an understanding of the Christian God founded on intuition to doctrinal orthodoxy.26 Chapter 3 also looks at the way in which the abandonment of the Homoian creed by the Empire in 381 effectively condemned Gothic Christianity to the margins and stifled its doctrinal development. Although it would prove a viable means of introducing other Germanic groups, such as the Sueves and Burgundians to Christianity, Homoianism would gradually become static and conservative, remaining an ‘entry-level Christianity’ when ‘barbarian’ rulers wanted to become full members of the Catholic club.

Chapter 4 turns the spotlight on the interaction between religion and politics as the Germanic peoples one by one accepted Catholicism. It draws on an interpretative framework first suggested by the Africanist Robin Horton in the 1970s. Examining religious change in West Africa, Horton characterized rulers as occupying a pivotal position between the microcosm of their native beliefs and polities on one hand and the world religions of Islam and Christianity, with the fresh political and econom...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents 
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Intuitions of Divinity
• 3 Constructing ‘Arianism’
• 4 Approaching the Macrocosm
• 5 Bringing God to Mind
• 6 Rest In Peace
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright