269 - The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries

The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries
By Wayne A. Meeks
New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993. 275 pp. $30.00.

The author is a gifted writer who springs no surprises as he covers well-worn ground in the traditional historical way. He tells of community, conversion, city households, the world, obligation, general behavior, evil, the body, pleasing God, eschatology, and "the moral story" in eleven chapters, originally forming various lectures. He invites his readers to "try to imagine ourselves into the position of some ordinary person in a Roman provincial city who is converting to Christianity in the first or second century." Yet, he leaves the readers only with their own twentieth century Euro-American scenarios for this imaginative enterprise. While the goal is "to discover how the world was subjectively experienced" by various early Christians, the author offers no tools for such a discovery, nor does he reveal to us the tools he uses apart from intuition.

By the author's admission, this investigation "is not very systematic. It is intended to emulate the negotiations, the trials and errors, of the ethnographer just coming to know the natives in their own place." Yet, previously we are told, "An ethnographic approach treats the texts that are our primary sources for the history of Christian beginnings as an anthropologist today might treat information gleaned from natives in a tribe among whom the anthropologist is living for a time.... [T]he perspectives of anthropologists, if not their specific methods, can help the historian of morals and of religion to develop a fuller picture of the past." Unfortunately, we find neither the perspectives of anthropologists, always comparative, nor their specific methods. Readers learn precious little about how early Christians experienced their own world or, at the least, how they report this experience. Only rarely does one gain a sense that the author is describing people whose behavior is sufficiently strange and impenetrable so as to qualify as ancient Mediterranean. Instead the author sees the components of a culture as consisting of "its ideas, myths, its rules, its logical structures, its material supports," and these often seem rather timeless, like those of contemporary Christian Bible readers. Reading this book to discover ancient Christian morality is like visiting modern Israel, a central European enclave, to experience Mediterranean culture. Meek's ancient Mediterranean world looks too circum-Baltic.

270 - The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries

This book is a retelling of what is generally known about ancient Christian morality as envisioned by the "Received View," a philosophy of science label for the way of understanding things in vogue among a large number of practitioners and in the popular mind. The advice Meeks offers in terms of the seven theses that conclude the work intimate that the book is not so much about the origins of Christian morality but the morality available in documents that trace back to Christian origins. Thus, the social situation described in the sources looks amazingly relevant for the social situation of the adherents of the Received View. The directives at the close of the book point to this. This is intuitive history, based on the insights and genius of this individual historian, rooted in untestable generalizations: implicit, arbitrary, and unsystematic.

Never once does the author discuss the patterns and principles he brings to his reading. Rather, he is against the articulation of principles! "Nor do I attempt to discover the central principles on which a system of early Christian ethics is based. If there was a system, it was an enormously complex one that defies reduction to basic rules or underlying principles." In face of his claims, such an apologia pro incompetentia sua will not do. For an ethnographic, anthropological approach to early Christian morality not based on some explicit theory of how societies operate is bound to have many implausible scenarios. As Michael Mann has observed, "If historians eschew theory of how societies operate, they imprison themselves in the commonsense notions of their own society.... A strong sense of theory enables us to decide what might be the key facts, what might be central and what marginal to an understanding of how a particular society works." Morality is rooted in how society works.

Bruce J. Malina
Creighton University
Omaha, NE