STIFT ST PETER, SALZBURG: HOW CHRISTIANITY SWEPT THE ROMAN EMPIRE

In this three-part video series, we visit Stift St Peter in Salzburg, which is a multi-faceted monastic complex dating originally from the end of the seventh century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and founded by St Rupert. What a good place, then, to talk about how and why Christianity swept through the Roman Empire, replacing the various forms of Pagan worship. In the first video, we talk a little about the edifice itself, before examining a text by the Roman historian Sallust, writing before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, whose De coniuratione Catilinae presents a good picture of the moral vacuum in Rome, which Christianity would come to fill, and the reasons for it. Strangely, or perhaps not so, Sallust also seems to be describing the present day....

 

 

In the second video, wander through the cemetary as we turn to the eighteenth century Whig liberal historian Edward Gibbon for a critical look at his version of why Christianity was so successful in taking over Rome, as told in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

 

 

In the last part of the trilogy, we enter the catacombs to draw our conclusions and offer a critique of both Christianisation and Edward Gibbon's classical liberal philosophy in order to draw lessons for our own time, both for Rightists and Western societies at large.

 

 

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