James J. O'Donnell (1)Critiques

Given to Matthew Hayes - 05/03/2023

Did not review when first read

We all know that the Roman Empire “fell” some time around 476 A.D., the date of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, traditionally seen as the "last" Roman emperor. But maybe not, at least according to James J. O’Donnell, a distinguished classicist and provost of Georgetown University. In O’Donnell’s view, set forth in The Ruin of the Roman Empire (2008), the “fall” or end of the Roman Empire is exceedingly difficult to pinpoint. One reason is that the Empire persisted in the east (headquartered in Constantinople) until at least 1453 when it fell to the Ottoman turks. [That’s when Edward Gibbon identified the “fall” in his magisterial History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.] And even then, the Ottomans continued to refer to their empire as “Rum” [Rome] until it was formally disbanded in 1924 with the establishment of the modern Turkish state.

O’Donnell’s book focuses on the part of the empire governed from the city of Rome, particularly in the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries. And even there, the “fall” was not at all obvious. The Empire in the third century had been especially chaotic, with emperors typically lasting only a year or two before being assassinated and replaced by some ambitious general or warlord. The chaos ended in the late 3d century with the ascendency of Diocletian, who moved his base of operations eastward to what is now the Croatian city of Split. His successor, Constantine, moved the capital even farther east to Byzantium, which he modestly renamed Constantinople.

As the capital migrated eastward, the empire’s control over the western provinces (Gaul, Spain, and Italy) lessened, but that did not mean they became more barbaric. O’Donnell argues that the western provinces interacted a great deal with their “barbarian” neighbors to the north and east. Indeed, most of the consuls of Rome during the 4th through 6th centuries were born outside the titular boundaries of the “Empire.”

The Rhine and Danube rivers marked the official boundaries of the empire. But O’Donnell points out that rivers make very ineffective boundaries between civilizations (mountains and deserts are much more effective) because they attract people. Hence, citizens of the empire and their ostensibly barbaric neighbors had plenty of intercourse (double entendre intended) across those waterways. Tribes close to the empire adopted many of the customs, dress, institutions, and habits of the people within the empire.

O’Donnell portrays the movement of people and tribes around and across the empire’s boundaries as a bit chaotic, but more peaceful than generally described in most western literature. He appraises Attila the Hun as the most overrated villain in western history. In his view, the Huns were not so much repelled in battle as simply assimilated by a mutually recognized superior culture.

Rome may have been sacked by the Vandals in 455, but it quickly reorganized. Odoacer, son of Edoco (a Hun) became leader of the western empire and assumed the title of “king” rather than emperor, but provided wise leadership and stability from 476 to 493. His successor, Theoderic (sometime called “the Great”), ruled from 493 to 526 upheld a Roman legal administration and scholarly culture and promoted a major building program across Italy. In 505 he expanded into the Balkans, and by 511 he had brought the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain under his direct control and established hegemony over the Burgundian and Vandal kingdoms.

So in O’Donnell’s view, Rome had not fallen in the mid 5th century, but was well governed until at least 526, admittedly by Visigoths and descendants of Huns. The bete noire in his telling is Justinian, who ruled in Constantinople from 527 to 565. The split of the empire into two halves, the Latin speaking west and the Greek speaking east, was not something he could abide. He was driven to unite the entire empire by a need to unify Christian beliefs. The western rulers tended to be tolerant of various forms of Christianity, whereas he was a devoted follower and believer in the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon.

O’Donnell does a nice job of explaining the various forms of early Christianity. As he says:

“Jesus and his first followers…offered a variety of assertions about Jesus’s relationship with the supreme divine being….There is simply too much scripture for it all to make sense.”

Arian theology, a belief held by the majority of the people in the West, but not by the bishops of Rome, insisted on distinguishing Jesus from God. The Nicenes, on the other hand, said that Jesus and God were of “identical substance,” homo-ousios in Greek. The Council of Chalcedon attempted to solve the issue with a doctrine O’Donnell characterizes as “both-and,” asserting both the godhead and manhood of Jesus at the same time. O’Donnell opines:

“…the Chalcedonians put forth a logical construct, yet still quite difficult to grasp and comprehend, and they made this incomprehensibility into a virtue, at least far as they could. If scriptures were contradictory and confusing, they represented not conflict, but rather a lofty, divine logic that mortals could not grasp, and became evidence of the truth of a logically paradoxical doctrine.”

So Justinian set out to unify the empire, both politically and religiously. His armies set out from Constantinople to conquer Italy, north Africa, and Spain. They also picked fights with the Persian Empire to their east. Although they were often successful in battle, they pretty much ruined the economies of the western provinces. Moreover, not only were they ultimately unsuccessful in subduing the western provinces, they may have weakened their own empire as a whole as well as the Persian Empire so much that neither they nor the Persians were able to withstand the onslaught of Islam, wich began shortly thereafter.

O’Donnell’s book provides a welcome insight into an historical period not well known or understood today.

(JAB)

This is an in your face witty account of the decline of the Roman Empire. The political intrigue and the characters portrayed makes the United States White House appear like some chaotic nursery school. Our politicians could learn a lot by reading History. O”Donnell is a first class Latin scholar who deftly weaves and sometimes spins his players based on an intimate knowledge of resources and brings to bear a more modern approach to classical Roman studies. A good read and worth the effort.

O'Donnell takes a hard look at the usual narrative which ascribes the fall of Rome to barbarian invasions and cultural and military decline. He argues strongly that Rome survived and successfully incorporated a number of "barbarian" invasions through a process of acculturation among border peoples who successively infiltrated themselves into the Empire and became Roman. O'Donnell proposes that a series of poor choices by Eastern emperors actually set in motion the disintegration of the Roman world beginning in the sixth century, quite a bit later than the conventional date of 476 AD. I found his thesis and his evidence fascinating.

I enjoyed reading this book and found it thought-provoking, but I can't quite muster that final star. It took a while to figure out where O'Donnell was going. I decided to read Pagans because of the book summary that talked about how this was a history of the rise of Christianity as told from the viewpoints of the non-Christians whose religion(s) were destroyed by it. That's not entirely off-base, but having read the book, I'd say O'Donnell is arguing that "paganism" was created by Christianity as something it was differentiating itself from. It's not an entirely new argument—I've heard it over the years from modern Pagan writers—but I thought it would be interesting to hear it from what was more likely a modern Christian viewpoint.

For me, the main fault of the book was a lack of focus. As I said above, the publisher's description didn't match the book. This happens, but the problem continued into the book itself. I went through the first half of the book enjoying each chapter, but wondering why some of them had been included. Often, a chapter didn't seem related to the ones before and after it, so the first half of the book felt more like a collection of essays on pre-Christian Roman religious practices. Later, the author began referring back to these earlier chapters. and I appreciate how he brought all this together, but yes, I wish it had been clearer at the beginning. The book was more focused by the second half, but that covered the period in which Christianity was triumphing, and that part of history simply doesn't interest me as much. And this is a lot of history to cover in 241 pages (not counting the notes or the index). I found it helpful that I'd already done some reading on ancient Roman history, although O'Donnell is concentrating on the 4th century CE which is later than I'm familiar with. I get that the book is meant for non-specialists, but it would've been nice to slow down some more and get more in-depth with some of the points covered.

Still, yes, I recommend it if this is a topic that interests you. O'Donnell's tone is conversational. He likens the book to a tour of Rome, comparing what a tour guide might tell you to what he argues was closer to the truth. As a lover of linguistics, I liked when he'd take a word like "paganism" or "church" and talk about how it came to be used in this context. If you're willing to read a history you're unlikely to completely agree with, this may be worth your time.

5320. Pagans The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity, by James J. O'Donnell (read 3 Dec 2015) This is the third book by O'Donnell I have read. He is a very learned man, but tends to downplay the role of Faith. He appreciates the significance of Constantine's victory in 311, but rightly points out that Constantine did not become a Christian till on his deathbed. His account of Julian downplays the role customarily assigned him in the Church History I studied in past years, but he agrees that after Julian's death paganism came to an end and Christianity triumphed. An erudite and interesting book, but the author's views are not appealing to me.

I picked this up because I was impressed with the author's Ruin of the Roman Empire and was hoping that this book could enlighten me in similar ways about Roman North Africa. While it did help with that, there was much more about Augustine and his place in modern Christianity and modern Western thought than there was about the contemporary (to Augustine) situation in North Africa. The author got me interested enough to read the book all the way through, though I ended up with some quibbles. Before I get to those, I'll try to tell you whether you'd be interested in this book.

Do You Want to Read It?

This is a revisionist biography of Augustine. The author wants you to see Augustine from a 4th century view, not from the views of him that have been handed down over the course of the last 1600 years. He also assumes that you already know quite a bit about Augustine and have read at least The Confessions. So, if you know Augustine well, like him, and don't want your views revised, you can skip this, unless you want to argue with it. If you know Augustine well, but are unsure what you think about him, you'll find food for thought in this book. If you know some things about Augustine, but are not vitally interested in him, like me, you may find yourself drawn into the book, but wondering why much of this matters in this day and age, a question the author himself asks at the end of the book. If you're not interested in Augustine, or are only just starting to find out about him, this is not the place to start. Finally folks interested in writing alternate histories should see my section on North African history below.

My Quibbles

- There is a lot of redundancy in this book. I found the same thing in Ruin of the Roman Empire and assumed O'Donnell had introduced it so that people could read separate chapters without needing to read the whole book. However, he clearly intends that people read all of Augustine. I have decided the repetition is due to the author not writing in a linear way. He probably writes up chapters out of order and puts whatever he thinks of in that chapter. Then he doesn't go back and weed out the redundancies and decide where the information should best be placed. Nor, evidently, does he have an editor to do it for him.

- His bibliography consists only of the major books by and on Augustine. Other books are listed in the end notes. Since my main interest was really a side issue in the book, I had to follow the notes very closely to pick out books that might be more germane to my area of interest.

- At one point (pp. 207-208), he contends that one of Augustine's major contributions to modern Western thought is the idea of a supervening narrative, a story about why we're right and everyone else is wrong. He says, that while many would no longer agree with Augustine's narrative, "the most rigorous historians of human history, the most objective and dispassionate scientists, the most versatile wizards of the truth of what has actually happened in history" continue to have some kind of supervening narrative.

I would argue that at least scientists do not have "a" supervening narrative. They have methodologies for accumulating facts and placing those facts in a narrative that explains the facts. These narratives are supervening only by being the best explanations of as many facts as possible. When another narrative is proposed that explains the facts better, the old narrative is replaced. So all narratives are temporary until replaced by others that explain the facts better. This is not at all how Augustine viewed his narrative. It was supervening for all time. There is a big difference between a narrative that cannot be changed and one that is acknowledged to be only temporary.

So What about North African History?

I suspect that this book did as good a job as it could in contextualizing Augustine within the 4th century Roman North African setting. Unfortunately, the largest body of documents we have about North Africa at that time are Augustine's own writings. So what he's not interested in simply isn't well documented. The author really tried to fill in the gaps, but I really wished there was more information to be had.

However, if you are interested in alternate histories of North Africa or alternate Christianities, this book provides a lot of excellent ideas. O'Donnell constantly speculates on what would have happened if Augustine had made a different decision at various points in his life. His importance is such that it often results in a fairly big change in history.

The title of this book caught my eye while I was browsing through my public library catalog, so I borrowed it on a whim, interested in the subject no doubt but knowing nothing about the author, James J. O’Donnell. I found it fantastic – a sweeping saga of late Roman/early Byzantine history massive in scope, with flashes of insight and wit to match Gibbon (yes, that Gibbon).

The Ruin of the Roman Empire covers a lot of topics, but is structured and well-written so that the segue ways between Roman senatorial villa economics and early Christian debates about the exact composition of Jesus’ divinity appear seamless. The careers of King Theoderic and Emperor Justinian are covered in detail. O’Donnell work is a revisionist look at the question of a) when exactly did the thing called the “Roman Empire” fall and b) (to a lesser extent) what sort of lessons does that empire’s demise have for 21th century western civilization in general and the USA in particular.

My only criticism would be that about three-quarters through the book there’s just so much information and historic detail the overall effect is a bit ponderous. But all in all, a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the Roman Empire, Byzantium, or Early Christian history.

This was good, but not great. It really is carried by the fact that Augustine himeself was a fascinating figure. It tends to really repeat itself in some aspects and doesn't quite have a clear line of development. If you can stick with it though, you will learn alot about not only the man himself but the evolution of Christianity.

This is an erudite and well-written book about the declining daysof the Roman Empire, which is full of insight but was not of overly-great interest to me. The author is obviously a master of the subject, though a skeptic as to religion. His words on Theodoric, Justinian, and St Gregory the Great are deserving of more attention than I suppose I gave them.

1963 Augustine, by James J. O'Donnell (read 1 Dec 1985) Augustine was born in what is now Souk Abras, Algeria, and died in Hippo (modern Annaba) in 430. Five million of his words survive. Jansen claimed he read the entire body of his works ten times and his works on grace and freedom thirty times. I should read Jaroslav J. Pelikan's The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, which is a multi-volume work published by the University of Chicago Press. [But I never have.] The "lucid, universally acclaimed biography of Augustine" is Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown (1967). [I haven't read that, either.] This was a good book, but I read it too hurriedly.

I'll need to read it again to do a longer review. But for now, this was such a disappointment. O'Donnell comes off as a scholar who knows more than anyone else about Augustine and his story is replete with "I told you so" moments usually designed to shock the modern Augustine audience. He can't get away from his assertion that Augustine was more motivated by sex throughout his life than previously examined so he likes to end paragraphs with something about Augustine's sexual hangups. Its Freudian nonsense at its worst. And most damning he seems totally unwilling to grant Augustine any theological depth. He doesn't wrestle with Augustine's theology at all. Rather he dismisses it as surface level clutter while attempting to "get behind the man."

This was academic dribble dressed up like a needed revist to Augustine. Not recommended at all.½

The summer before beginning my studies at the University of Michigan's School of Information, enrolled students received an e-mail suggesting we get a head start on our reading, since it was expected that there would be quite a bit. So, Avatars of the Word (which I think is a marvelous title) made it onto my summer reading list as was recommended.

While I find the subjects of the book extraordinarily interesting, the text is fairly erratic and requires wading through to really appreciate the author's arguments. O'Donnell investigates changing technology through the eyes of a classical studies historian. The book is still, somewhat surprisingly, relevant even for having been written in 1998.

The author focuses on how changing technology affects the ways information is preserved and passed on from person to person and generation to generation. Particularly interesting are his arguments that these various technologies affect how people interact with, think about, and approach information.

O'Donnell manages to pack quite a bit of information and history into this relatively small volume. Unfortunately, the text wanders from concept to concept without much linearity which makes a coherent reading more difficult. Regardless, some of his ideas are quite fascinating even if the reader must search for them.

(A companion website can be found at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/avatars/)

Experiments in Reading½

One of the worst pieces of trash I have ever read. High UNrecommended!