Der christliche Identitätsdiskurs im spätantiken Römischen Reich: Griechischer Osten und lateinischer Westen in komparatistischer Perspektive

The paper examines the Christian identity discourse of Late Antiquity in the Greek East and the Latin West in a comparative perspective. It shows structural parallels as well as differences and interprets them in their historical context. Besides, it critically scrutinizes possible interdependencies between the identity discourse, which strongly operates with a fundamental antagonism of ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’, and real conflicts between the adherents of Christian religion and the so-called pagans in both parts of the Roman Empire. In contrast to former research approaches the paper demonstrates that the real confrontations were more massive as well as complex in the Greek East than in the Latin West, paradoxically because there were more similarities between Christians and non-Christians here, especially among the members of the social elites. On account of this it was more difficult for eastern Christians to cope with a Christian-pagan-antagonism to form their own religious identity than for western Christians. At last the paper shows that the discrepancies between the eastern and the western part of the empire concerning our phenomenon even increased in the course of time: In the West, it lost its significance during the conflicts with the Germanic ethnic groups, when the ‘barbarian’ began to form the counterpart of the ‘Christian’. In the East, Christians operated even more intensively with the antagonistic paradigm as soon as the real conflicts decreased in the fifth and sixth centuries, as it became easier to draw sharp religious borders.