Robert McEachnie: Envisioning the Utopian Community and State: The Sermons of Chromatius of Aquileia

It [the Church] is believed among the Persians, it is believed in India, it is believed in the entire world. It is neither the fear of sword, nor the fear of the emperor which has brought all these nations to adore Christ; rather faith in Christ has rendered them peaceful.…Under this king, there is no enmity between peoples; all of a common accord honor, adore and venerate Him.  –   Chromatius of Aquileia, Sermon 30:3.

The end of the fourth century was perhaps the high point of Ecclesial dreams. Having seen the Roman Empire become officially Christian, Christian leaders’ ‘horizons of the possible’ (a concept of Peter Brown’s) must have seemed broader than ever before imaginable. Chromatius of Aquileia’s affirmation demonstrates his hopefulness in the perfectibility of the social and political order. His words about the Christian conquest of the world suggest that the process of Christianization in Aquileia had progressed to the point that the idea of a fully Christianized world was no longer a mere fantasy but a possible conclusion to the formation of a Christian community based on the Roman Empire.

My paper will examine the construction of the ideal Christian community and its relationship to the state as presented by Chromatius in his sermons. Bishop of one of the largest Roman cities from 388-407, Chromatius has been portrayed in the scholarship as striving to spread and grow the nascent ascetic movement (See Lemarié, Corsato, Jenal). However, I think this approach tends to oversimplify the message of his sermons. While part of a Christian sub-culture which did embrace asceticism, Chromatius was concerned with more than ascetic practice. He envisioned what an entirely Christian world would be like. The Christian community of Chromatius was to be all-encompassing and assumed no division between sacred and secular, not unlike the later idea of Umma in the Muslim tradition. While modern utopian writings normally contrast the impersonal power of the state with a community of individuals, I will argue that Chromatius presents the two as fused and even merged.  His vision of the future, as presented in his sermons, reveals much about late fourth-century ideas of empire, political order and the state’s role in the Christianizing process.  Specifically, I will consider what the Christian empire looks like in Chromatius’s sermons, both on the ground in Aquileia, in the wider world and in his utopia.