Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

published	July 29th 2008 by Penguin Books
binding	Paperback
isbn	014311381X (isbn13: 9780143113812)
ebook
pages	384
description	The epic story of the collision between one of natures smallest organisms and historys mightiest empire During the golden age of ...more [close] The epic story of the collision between one of natures smallest organisms and historys mightiest empire During the golden age of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian reigned over a territory that stretched from Italy to North Africa. It was the zenith of his achievements and the last of them. In 542 AD, the bubonic plague struck. In weeks, the glorious classical world of Justinian had been plunged into the medieval and modern Europe was born. At its height, five thousand people died every day in Constantinople. Cities were completely depopulated. It was the first pandemic the world had ever known and it left its indelible mark: when the plague finally ended, more than 25 million people were dead. Weaving together history, microbiology, ecology, jurisprudence, theology, and epidemiology, Justinians Flea is a unique and sweeping account of the little known event that changed the course of a continent. [close]
date added	12-10-07 edit book

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08/25/08

bookshelves: about-history

Read in July, 2008

"Justinian's Flea" is a nice achievement: a human history set within natural history. The political narrative of late Roman Empire is told with attention to the mutual impact that the natural world and human cultural, technological and economic activity have upon each other. While this involves apparent digressions to describe both historical and scientific contexts, it knits together neatly in the end. Patterns that conventional history leaves unexplained are illuminated by this metho...more "Justinian's Flea" is a nice achievement: a human history set within natural history. The political narrative of late Roman Empire is told with attention to the mutual impact that the natural world and human cultural, technological and economic activity have upon each other. While this involves apparent digressions to describe both historical and scientific contexts, it knits together neatly in the end. Patterns that conventional history leaves unexplained are illuminated by this method.

Rosen was a publishing executive, not an historian of religion, and is apparently unaware of current scholarship about the phenomenon in the late classical period that has been labeled "gnosticism." He refers to "the heresy known as Gnosticism" without appreciating that heresy is a charge, and "gnosticism" a smear. Scholars do not believe, as Rosen does, that "Gnosticism is a powerfully complicated worldview." Instead, gnosticism is understood as an array of distinct views disapproved by Church authorities for related theological reasons. It is not the heresies that hang together, but the reasons the Church had for disapproving of them. One tendency of some "gnostic" groups was "to give preeminence to Jesus's life and acts over his death." (Today we call this liberal Christianity.) Other "gnostics" preached "that the presence of evil in the world is evidence for creation by an entity other than God." These two tendencies (and many others) were opposed by the Church because it had become committed - through a political and politicized process - to a theological story it wanted to tell about Jesus: that Jesus was divine, and his triumph over death was the crucial salvific event in history. It would not do to say that Jesus was in any way less than divine (eg, a prophet or teacher) or less divine than God (eg, a created superhuman or semi-divine being), and it would not do to say that Jesus was in any way removed from the physical world (eg, an apparition without physical substance, or not the son of the God who created the physical world). "Gnosticism" as a category of heresy was created by these concerns. Rosen writes: "Christianity's unique need for explaining the nature of God is a direct consequence of the paradox intrinsic to what had been, since the demise of the heresy known as Gnosticism, the central element of Jesus's life: the ending of it on the cross." It would be more accurate to say that the trauma of Jesus's death on the cross made that event the central element of Christian concern from the beginning. What Rosen calls "the demise of ... Gnosticism" is more accurately seen as censure and censorship within the Christian community. Despite this misunderstanding, Rosen accurately explains: "Reconciling the suffering death of an omnipotent God is the distinctive challenge of Christianity, expressed in a wide array of profound questions [which:] mattered little to the power of Christ to attract believers, frequently poor people who cared less about intellectual coherence than emotional resonance. The men who ministered to those believers, however, remained obliged to generate and respond to intellectually sophisticated attempts to square the circle, to explain how ... Jesus is ... in some ways the same being as his Father." (p. 60) Readers as well-versed in science as I am in religion might have similar quibbles about his casting of the scientific context; my guess - based on my armchair understanding of science - is that Rosen similarly overcomes any ignorance he has in that arena.

What is so interesting to me about this period of European history is the cultural changes that resulted from many migrations of many peoples into the Roman world. Those "barbarians" adopted some of Roman culture and appropriated many Roman institutions, blending them into their own customs and civilized culture. They also provided safe political harbors for religious ideas that the Roman Church was busy persecuting. This dimension of the events referred to by church historians as "the Arian controversy," "the Christological controversies" and "the Pelagian controversy" does not come into focus in traditional church history; likewise the presentation of church history in conventional histories usually lacks nuance. Rosen manages to portray the political, religious, economic and scientific elements of history in refreshing balance....less

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Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

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