Twelve cities and the story of early Christian evangelization

Many of the most important figures from centuries and millennia past are distinguished by the cities in which they lived: Clement of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Irenaeus of Lyons, Cyril of Jerusalem, and John of Damascus, just to name a few. We hear the names of these cities time and again, but their history—and the story of how they were influenced by Christianity—are often much less familiar to us.

Mike Aquilina is the author of Rabbles, Riots, and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized (Ignatius Press, 2024), which delves deeply into the history of how twelve of the most important cities of the ancient world were influenced by the emerging Christian faith. This is just the most recent of Aquilina’s several dozen books, most of which focus on the patristic era in one way or another. He is the executive vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, a contributing editor of Angelus News, and general editor of the Reclaiming Catholic History series. He has hosted eleven EWTN series, and is currently the host of The Way of the Fathers podcast.

Aquilina recently spoke with The Catholic World Report about his new book, the era of the Fathers, and how their own insights might give us a fresh perspective on issues faced by the Church today.

Catholic World Report: How did the book come about?

Mike Aquilina: I’ve actually been thinking about this book for twenty-five years. I travel a lot for my work, and I notice that cities, like people, have different personalities. You’ll never mistake Manhattan for Bismarck, or LA for Des Moines. Yet I love them all.

Well, the same is true when you read history. Each ancient city had a distinctive character. Alexandria was a city of profound culture and scholarship—and riots. In Antioch, the people loved lively preaching and good comedy. Rome was power personified in the genius of the emperors, who were often certifiably crazy.

I wanted readers to share that lively, edifying, and sometimes hilarious experience of travel in the ancient world.

CWR: Why focus on cities? What can we learn from this approach, rather than looking at the Fathers, or a standard Church history looking at events chronologically?

Aquilina: I find the Fathers fascinating. Most of my books are about the Fathers. But I believe that the work of the Church in every age—the work of evangelization—is done mostly by people whose names we’ll never know, the family living on a side street and just scraping by. Many of them live in cities. In any event, cities are where the writing got done in the ancient world, and it’s the urban records that have survived.

A few years ago, Thomas A. Robinson wrote a book titled Who Were the First Christians? And I think he demonstrated that the faith spread just as far and just as quickly in the countryside. But, again, it’s the cities that left us abundant records of everyday life, and that’s what I wanted to capture. I wanted to show how Christianity changed the lives of these cities while preserving the best qualities of their character.

CWR: Some of these cities (e.g. Lugdunum, Ejmiatsin, Edessa) may be unfamiliar to your readers. If they were so important in early Christianity, why are they not more well known today?

Aquilina: I’ll venture to make a prediction: Many of the cities that are important today will dwindle or vanish in the next thousand years. This is what happens to cities. They grow because of a need, and they disappear when the need is no longer there. Think of Ostia, which was Rome’s port city. If you read about it in Augustine or Minucius Felix, you see it as a bustling resort. Well, now it’s a national park filled with ruins—baths, an amphitheater, row houses, a fish market, a tavern, a cemetery. No one lives there. Hardly anyone goes there. It’s a ghost town. The paths are strewn with fragments of pottery and mosaic tesserae. After the fifth century, Rome declined in status. It didn’t need a port city.

Ephesus is in the same condition. Today it’s a reconstructed ghost town open for tourists during posted hours.

In other cases, the cities just change names. Lugdunum is Lyon, and it’s alive and well. Edessa is Urfa, in Turkey.

But cities do vanish, one way or another, and others spring up to take their place and equal their prestige.

CWR: Are there other prominent cities that didn’t make the cut for the book? If so, why did they get left on the cutting room floor?

Aquilina: Oh yeah. It broke my heart to skip Damascus, Caesarea in Palestine, and Caesarea in Cappadocia. It seemed criminal to eliminate Corinth and all the cities of Spain. So sue me. But books are finite, and I know no other way to get them done than to commit these injustices. It’s a hazard of the narrative trade.

CWR: In many of these places, the number of Christians has dwindled, or there is a greater presence of Orthodox Christians than Catholics. Can understanding the history of Christianity in these cities help ecumenical efforts in some way?

Aquilina: Yes, history helps us to see what’s essential and what’s accidental. It gives us a vision of the faith we held in common in a relatively undivided Church.

CWR: Is there an example here of the “Old Evangelization” that can help inform us who are pursuing the “New Evangelization”?

Aquilina: All of it. And none of it. Every city is different, and so its conversion story will be unique. But every conversion story is dependent, in some sense, on conversions that happened before. One common theme you’ll find in the book is friendship. That’s how I believe cities are evangelized, one friendship at a time. Of course, that rarely ends up in the chronicles, where we read mostly about kings and bishops and other chess pieces from the back row. But it’s the companionship of us pawns that changes the game and changes the city.

CWR: You’ve written extensively on the era of the Church Fathers. Why does this era, in particular, appeal to you?

Aquilina: When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist. But that’s hard, dirty work. Digging in books is more appealing to me.

Von Balthasar saw in the Fathers “greatness, depth, boldness, flexibility, certainty, and a flaming love—the virtues of youth.” These qualities make them wonderful to read. The Fathers are sometimes unhinged, but rarely boring.

CWR: After studying and writing about the patristic era for all these years, was there anything new or even surprising that you learned writing Rabbles, Riots, and Ruins?

Aquilina: Writing is always a process of discovery. This time, the discoveries came when I was examining street plans and topography and noticing how they shaped local culture and events. It was true in my research for every city.

CWR: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Aquilina: First, a desire to learn more about the Fathers and Christian antiquity—a desire to make pilgrimage to Rome or Ephesus or Jerusalem and know more about their ancestors.

Second, hope for the future. The early Church’s program of evangelization seemed an absurd wish of addled minds. Everything was ranged against Christianity. The practice of the faith was a capital crime. The elites scoffed at the faith as an Oriental superstition. Yet we prevailed. We changed the world, one friendship at a time, one city after another. And with us came some important civilizational ideas, like human dignity, human equality, battlefield morality … and institutions like the hospital and the university. Not bad for half a millennium’s work.