A highly privileged area of human behavior and of human relations was demarcated. The locus of the supernatural, where this unique power was operative, came to stand for a zone in human life where decisions, obligations, experiences, and information were deemed to come from outside the human community. In this period, divine power came to be defined with increasing clarity as the opposite of all other forms of power. Indeed, if judged simply in terms of religious ferment, Late Antiquity is a singularly sober and serious-minded period in European history. Many of the religious histories of the Late Antique period have tended to place their main emphasis on emotional and subjective qualities and have spoken of the emergence of Late Antique civilization in terms of a rise of superstition, of a failure of nerve, or of a decline of rationalism. In so doing, they seem to miss the point.
Q&N: The Making of Late Antiquity (Peter Brown) fromĬopyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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