9 IV 2026: John Merrington (Austrian Academy of Sciences/University of Oxford), Rationality after Rome

Edward Gibbon believed that the Fall of Rome had meant the triumph of the irrational. Persistent though it may be in the public imagination, this line of argument finds little support among historians today, many of whom would consider ‘reason’ a concept too contaminated by cultural prejudice to be of any analytical value. And yet, notions of rationality and irrationality persisted in the post-Roman centuries as a language for assessing moral and intellectual status. Why was that? And how were notions of rationality reconfigured to meet the demands of the post-Roman age? To address these questions, I consider how Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, Bede, and Alcuin projected notions of the irrational into the biblical past. Finally, I demonstrate through two case studies that Christian thinkers mobilised these histories of rationality in their discussions of how to convert ‘pagan’ peoples at the periphery of Latin Europe.