Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD > Status Update

"It was the entry of new wealth and talent into the churches from around the year of 370 onward, rather than the conversion of Constantine in 312 which marks the turning point in the Christianization of Europe."

"For [wealthy] donors [to the church], wealth did not stand in the way of heaven. Rather, when given to the church, wealth opened a high road to the future and a prospect of properties and institutions that might enjoy an indefinite future on earth because they were bathed in the soft glow of perpetual treasure in heaven."

"For this was the time when Christianity ceased to be confined to the cities and spread throughout the country and spread throughout the countryside" - peasants found it easier to understand the news goals of Christianity?

"With this shift from the poor to the monks as the primary intercessors for the sins of all Christians, an ancient Christianity died"

"We also have to reckon with a significant change of goals within Christianity itself....In Matt. 25:41-46 Christ showed no mercy to the goats...In the sixth century, by contrast, it was precisely the potential goats who expected Christ's mercy...They expected to gain that mercy through the intercessions of the saints."

"Any attempt to appropriate the wealth of the church or to misuse church funds was immediately presented as an attack on the helpless poor."

"By insisting on their perpetual rights over freedman and over other forms of tied labour, the administrators of the estates of the church pointed the way toward a general movement to reassert and tighten control over those who worked the land" - i.e. serfdom

"Long after the empire had vanished, fiscal privileges inherited from imperial times and renewed by local kings remained crucial to the social position of the churches. Landed wealth, in and of itself was not enough."

"The conflict between Symmachus and Laurentius... leading clergymen were killed as rival factions clashed in the streets of the city."

"The common sense of an entire society still bathed in Roman law made [bishops] domini whether they liked it or not."