Popular Preaching and Christianization in Theodosian-Era Constantinople

在狄奥多西皇帝统治时期（公元379-457年），君士坦丁堡，罗马帝国的东部首都，经历了一段激烈的基督教化时期。虽然这座城市在其他皇帝的统治下经历了基督教化，但正是在这个时候，基督教开始接管首都的公共和私人生活：帝国由受过洗礼，有时是禁欲主义的皇帝和皇后统治，城市修道主义扎根，城市的主教开始为这样一个年轻的城市掌握前所未有的权力。在城市的机构被基督教化的同时，它也吸引了一些当时最令人印象深刻的传教士。其中一些是君士坦丁堡的主教（格雷戈里的Nazianzus，约翰金口，聂斯脱里，Proclus），和一些参观了皇帝和他的家人（格雷戈里的尼萨，塞维里亚的加巴拉）的乐趣。这个项目远没有把这些历史事实视为巧合，而是认为君士坦丁堡不仅通过机构，而且还通过密集的传教计划彻底基督教化。 这个项目的主要目标是探索传教士如何寻求基督教化君士坦丁堡的民众。虽然它将研究传教士试图带来的实质性的仪式和道德变革，但它侧重于传教士如何在君士坦丁堡听众中培养基督教想象力。因为尽管许多机构已经被“去异教化”，但仍有许多工作要做，以基督教化君士坦丁堡民众的文化和宗教想象。该项目突出了五个方面的变化：（1）空间的基督教化，君士坦丁堡的地方被划分为神圣或恶魔;（2）时间的基督教化，其中日，周和年都是围绕基督教的盛宴，禁食和祈祷而安排的;（3）城市政治的基督教化，其中异端和正统成为政治问题;（4）罗马习俗的基督教化，精英阶层接受了新的文化规范，这些规范不是由异教徒祖先继承的，而是由基督教祖先继承的。（5）关于基督和圣徒的新故事在培养新的想象力方面所起的作用，而这些想象力是与仍在成为基督徒的城市中占主导地位的传统故事相对立的。通过关注这个特定的地点和时间框架，我们可以更好地理解基督教是如何在罗马帝国内主导城市生活的。

During the reign of the Theodosian emperors (AD 379–457), Constantinople, the eastern capital of the Roman empire, underwent a period of intense Christianization. Although the city experienced Christianization under other emperors, it is at this time that Christianity began to take over both public and private life of the capital: the empire was governed from the city by baptized and sometimes ascetic emperors and empresses, urban monasticism took root, and the city’s bishop came to hold unprecedented power for such a young city. At the same time that the city’s institutions were being Christianized, it also attracted some of the most impressive preachers of the age. Some of these were Constantinople’s bishops (Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Nestorius, Proclus), and some visited at the pleasure of the emperor and his family (Gregory of Nyssa, Severian of Gabala). Far from treating these historical facts as coincidental, this project contends that Constantinople was thoroughly Christianized not only through institutions, but also through an intensive program of preaching. The key objective of this project is to explore how preachers sought to Christianize Constantinople’s populace. While it will examine the substantial ritual and ethical changes that preachers sought to bring about, it focuses on how preachers cultivated a Christian imagination among their Constantinopolitan audiences. For although many institutions had already been ‘de-paganized,’ much work remained to Christianize the cultural and thus religious imaginations of Constantinople’s populace. This project highlights five areas of change: (1) the Christianization of space, with Constantinople’s places being demarcated as either sacred or demonic; (2) the Christianization of time, in which the day, the week, and the year were ordered around Christian feasting, fasting, and prayer; (3) the Christianization of urban politics, in which heresy and orthodoxy became political matters; (4) the Christianization of Roman mores, in which the elite assumed new cultural norms inherited not by pagan forebears, but by Christian ones, (5) the role that the new narratives of Christ and the saints played in the cultivation of a new imagination, over and against the traditional stories that dominated a city still in the process of becoming Christian. By focusing on this specific location and timeframe, for which there is a significant amount of evidence, we can come to a better understanding of how Christianity came to dominate urban life within the Roman empire.