Through the Eye of a Needle - how Christianity swallowed antiquity and birthed the West

One of my resolutions for the New Year was to read two books on approximately the same period and place in sequence, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, and Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Despite a very general similarity of topicality it would be misleading to characterize these two books as complementary, or with one as a sequel to the other. Rather, they use explicitly different methods and espouse implicitly alternative norms in generating a map of the past. As I have explored in depth Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome is to a great extent a materialist reading which reasserts the contention that civilization as we understand it did truly collapse in a precipitous and discontinuous manner with the fall of Rome. In other words, in all things that matter the year 400 was much closer to the year 300 than it was to the year 500. But it is critical to qualify what "matters." As an archaeologist with a penchant for economic history Ward-Perkins' materialist narrative might be reduced down to a metric, such as productivity per person as a function of time. In such a frame the preponderance of evidence does suggest that there was collapse in the Western Roman Empire in the years between 400 and 500. But specific frame is not something that we can take for granted. Peter Brown, the author of Through the Eye of a Needle might object that there is more to man than matter alone. A major distinction between the years 400 and 500, as opposed to 300, is that in the first quarter of the 4th century the Roman Emperors starting with Constantine began to show special favor to the Christian religion, which by 400 was on the way to being the exclusive official faith of the Empire, a process which was complete by 500. The Rome of 300 was indisputably a pagan one. That of 400 arguably Christian, and 500 most definitely Christian.