The Incredible Codex

How the Bound Book Profoundly Impacted the Fall of Rome

Key Takeaways:

1. Innovations in communication technology have a history of disrupting authoritarian control over the flow of information.

2. The “codex” became a powerful weapon in a war of ideas within the dying Roman Empire.

3. St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin unified Western Christianity during the Fall of Rome.

Communication Technology

New innovations in communication technology, like the printing press or the internet, have a long history of disrupting the authorities’ control over the flow of information.

Authorities, by definition, are in the position of defining reality for those who accept them as such. All too often, they cannot resist the temptation to abuse that power. History frequently finds authorities passing off versions of reality that are more convenient to them than the truth.

In their 1957 book The Reformation, legendary historians Will & Ariel Durant provided a lurid example:

The circulation of the New Testament in print was a blow to political as well as to religious orthodoxy. It exposed the compromises that the secular clergy had made with the nature of man and the ways of the world; it revealed the communism of the Apostles, the sympathy of Christ for the poor and oppressed; in these respects the New Testament was for the radicals of this age a veritable Communist Manifesto.

The Durants were writing about the translation of the Bible into common languages that people could actually understand, as opposed to simply taking the clergy at their word. The printing press was a key factor in the chaos of the Protestant Reformation. That innovation distributed those translations far and wide, faster than the Church could confiscate them. The printing press, in other words, opened floodgates that couldn’t be closed. The intellectual monopoly of the Church was shattered forever.

Today, the internet is another innovation in communication technology that’s once again disrupting structures of power. The old one-to-many broadcasting format of mass media is being eclipsed by the many-to-many format of the internet.

For example, the events of the so-called “Arab Spring” were uprisings organized on the internet. Soon after, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks demonstrated the capability of the internet to bypass structures of power, just like the printing press did. More recently, the political career of Donald Trump has unfolded despite the best efforts of legacy media to disqualify him.

For better or for worse, people now get their news from social media platforms. Once again, power structures are being disrupted by an innovation in communication technology.

The Codex

An earlier, often overlooked example of this phenomenon is the advent of the bound book during the Roman Empire. The Romans called it a “codex”, and it directly facilitated the transition from a pagan, polytheistic conception of reality to a monotheistic, Christian one.

The first surviving mention of a “codex” comes from the Roman poet Martial during the 80s AD. The exact origin of the codex is uncertain, but the Roman practice of binding wax tablets together for note-taking very likely inspired the concept of binding animal skin parchment or papyrus sheets into a book we might recognize today.

The Romans initially used books alongside scrolls, but they quickly gained popularity because they were far more practical. Unlike scrolls, which could be extremely lengthy when unraveled, books allowed readers to easily jump to any specific place in the text. By the time the Western Roman Empire fell, the book had fully displaced the scroll as the dominant format for European writers and readers.

The rise of the codex follows the same trajectory as the rise of Christianity itself, because Christians were early adopters of that innovation in communication technology. Over the course of three centuries, Christians went from being thrown to lions in the Colosseum to running the Empire as its ruling class. Christianity won a war of ideas, and the bound book was a major reason why.

Thanks to the bound book, Christianity spread faster than any set of ideas ever had before. Christians all over the Empire could be assured that they were “on the same page.” Anyone who’s ever played a game of telephone knows that verbal transmission garbles messages after just one or two iterations. However, with reference to a common text, upstart early Christians were able to present a cohesive challenge to power.

The bound book was a powerful weapon in the war of ideas that consumed the Roman Empire during its fall. The codex provided early Christian theologians with a decisive advantage in that war, leading to the eventual adoption of Christianity as the official state religion of the dying Roman Empire.

Saint Jerome

One such early Christian theologian was Saint Jerome (the anglicized version of the Latin name “Hieronymus”). Born in 347 AD somewhere on the Dalmatian coast—likely present-day Croatia—Jerome spent his youth as a student in Rome.

In addition to discovering Christianity during the course of his studies, Jerome also discovered that he was a brilliant linguist. He went on to make his colossal contribution to history by translating the Bible into Latin. The Dutch painter Matthias Stom immortalized Jerome in 1635, inevitably with a codex open in front of him. Stom’s painting serves as the Title Card to this essay.

Rather than the stuffy, old-fashioned version of Latin that was standard among the scholars of his day, Jerome invoked a vibrant, living version. He used the “vulgar” Latin of common people. Accordingly, his translation was known as the Vulgate. And it solidified the advantage Christians enjoyed in their war of ideas.

Previous Latin translations of the Bible already existed before Jerome’s work. But these were the products of multiple copyists and varied greatly in quality. The result was a patchwork, and sometimes contradictory, body of literature. But with Jerome’s Vulgate, Christians across the Roman Empire could finally be assured they were reading from the same authoritative text, as they prosecuted their war of ideas against the establishment.

Jerome’s translation was a major factor in the eventual victory of Christianity The old pagan religions of Rome couldn’t compete with Christians who coordinated their efforts across the Mediterranean Basin with a single, definitive Vulgate text.

Jerome’s Vulgate Bible went on to standardize the vocabulary and grammar that are now baked into the modern Romance languages—like French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese—that are descended from Latin. Furthermore, through loanwords and idioms, his translation also left a lasting mark on English vocabulary.

The Vulgate was a monumental scholarly achievement that unified the Western Church, influenced language, laid the groundwork for future biblical scholarship, and solidified a textual tradition that lasted over a millennium. It went on to become the Bible of the Middle Ages, read by everybody from Saint Augustine in the 5th century to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.

Conclusion

The ability to control the flow of ideas is a critical part of the ability to project power. Indeed, control over ideas is itself a form of power. That’s why new innovations in communication technology—from the codex to the printing press to the internet—have a history of disrupting political power structures. When they expose corrupt authorities’ “compromises”, these innovations lead to new conceptions of reality itself. The bound book was a key factor in the transformation of Rome from polytheism to Christian monotheism during the twilight of the Roman Empire.

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Further Materials

Documentary | Herculaneum Scrolls