ABSTRACT
FOR a long time past and for good reason Christianity, and its representative, the Church, have been credited with an important part in the reconstruction of European culture. The Church appears in the first place as intermediary between ancient civilization and the new Germanic states. Recent scholarship has, however, revealed a picture somewhat different in its essentials from the one presented formerly. At one time the foreground was overshadowed by the great work of conversion accomplished in the new Germanic states, the basis of the political power of Catholicism and the Roman Church. With the growing conviction of the existence of a great cultural chasm between "Antiquity" and the "Middle Ages ", and the conception of the latter as a fundamentally new creation, the Church acquired a vital importance as mediator between the old and destroyed past and the new, primitive present. Such hypotheses naturally caused social historians to pay little attention to the earliest period of the diffusion of Christianity, occurring as it did during the decay of antiquity and before the foundation of the Germanic states.
