Vers La Pensee Unique: La Montee de L'Intolerance Dans L'Antiquite Tardive

The rise of intolerance in the Roman Empire of the 3rd to 6th centuries is not a surprising phenomenon. It was the consequence of a series of long-term and interdependent developments. This work incorporates and examines, within a narrative framework, the various aspects of proselytism and persecution, the centralization of secular power and its increasingly intimate ties with religion, doctrinal orthodoxy and heresy, the internal and external polemic of scriptuary communities, subtle or brutal censorship, and, lastly, “the new history” – namely the rewriting of universal history in religious terms. As a result of being interlinked, these developments had a dialectic, if not causal, relationship with what was at first an incidental, and later an endemic, spread of intolerance (accompanied by its more concrete manifestation, violence) in the Roman Empire.All of these phenomena, triggered in a pluralist society by the advent of an ever-growing number of men and women claiming to have a monopoly on theological truth and determined to spread this truth through a missionary approach, are closely correlated and formed the basis of a new societal model – that of the religious community. Within the isolated era recently dubbed “Late Antiquity,” a society which had been orchestrated to revolve around Man was replaced by one dedicated to the greatest glory of God.