Pagans and Christians in the City
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Other Romans likely followed Cotta’s example, deliberately or intuitively. (By the nature of the position, it would be difficult to identify such fideists with confidence; they would be estopped by their philosophy from telling us who they were.) This was a different way of sustaining the faith necessary to support the city.
But although philosophical paganism and civic fideism could complement each other, they could also contradict each other, imperiling both. The way in which Cotta might undermine Balbus is obvious on the face of the dialogue. As noted, Cotta disparages and systematically deconstructs Balbus’s philosophical arguments for the gods. If Cotta’s refutations persuade (and in Cicero’s presentation the refutations seem almost overwhelming, Cicero’s own closing disclaimer notwithstanding), then Romans who might have depended on such philosophical bulwarks would find themselves unable to affirm the presuppositions and implicit tenets of pagan religion.
Because Cicero gives Cotta the last word, we do not know just what Balbus might have said in rebuttal. But we can imagine. Cotta’s fideism, as we have seen, depended on the strategy of dividing truth and belief into discrete domains, so that the epistemic rules proper to one domain would have no jurisdiction in another domain. Thus, belief in the gods might be unjustified for philosophy but wholly warranted in the civic domain. Balbus might well object, though, that the approach is untenable. Truth is the accurate representation of what is real. If the gods exist, they exist; if not, not. The gods cannot be real in one epistemic domain but not in another. And if there is reason to believe the gods are real, that is what we should believe; if not, not.
Once it is conceded, in short, that the gods do not exist in general, or for philosophy, they are doomed to disappear altogether. To put the point differently, just as Augustine would later argue that the civic religion could not be severed from the mythic one, so Balbus would likely have contended that the civic religion could not be separated from the philosophical one.
This is a powerful objection. As we have seen, Cotta’s two-truth approach has been common enough as a historical matter. It can provide a convenient strategy, for a time, to protect some necessary body of beliefs against corrosive objections. But the approach has also had its powerful critics. Thomas Aquinas energetically attacked the “two truth” strategies of the Latin Averroists.57 And the philosopher John Hick argued persuasively that the neo-Wittgensteinian “different language games” approach employed by thinkers like Norman Malcom in fact “cuts the heart out of religious belief and practice.”58
On the level of common sense, the critics surely have the more appealing argument. To most people, truth means the accurate representation of the world. And the world is what it is, and is not what it is not. A statement or a belief cannot be true in one domain but false in another.
In sum, the implausibility of the mythic religion to more educated Romans—of the religion of stories about lustful, vengeful, whimsical gods—created a challenge to believing in the civic religion. But the civic religion was what sustained and consecrated the city—the city of “shining beauty and grace” that Romans revered, and that gave their lives meaning and purpose and sublimity. So thoughtful and sophisticated Romans rose to the challenge, devising “modalities of belief,” as Veyne puts it, that served for decades and centuries to provide the necessary support.
The resulting intellectual achievement was intricate and impressive. And yet the modalities of belief remained fragile. And they were in turn stoutly challenged not just by the kind of internal examination evident in Cicero’s treatise but also, later, by a radically different form of religiosity—Christianity. To which we turn in the next chapter.
1. Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 50.
2. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 109.
3. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xi.
4. J. A. North, Roman Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84.
5. Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 58. See also Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), 31 (“[Romans] did pay detailed acts of cult, especially by offering animal victims to their gods, but they were not committed to revealed beliefs in the strong Christian sense of the term”). See also John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion, trans. Janet Lloyd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 173 (“The religious system of the Romans was founded on ritual, not on dogma. Their religious tradition prescribed rituals, not what they should believe. So each individual remained free to understand and think of the gods and the world-system just as he or she pleased”).
6. See, e.g., Jeffrey Stout, “Truth, Natural Law, and Ethical Theory,” in Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays, ed. Robert P. George (New York: Clarendon, 1992), 71.
7. See Fox, Pagans and Christians, 31.
8. Cf. Fox, Pagans and Christians, 89 (“Naturally, a person had to believe that the gods existed”).
9. See above, 69
10. Of one friend and frequent correspondent, he wrote, “I much suspect that he never showed me the true colours of his secret skepticism,” and he surmised that “the more learned ecclesiastics will indeed have the secret satisfaction of reprobating in the closet what they read in the church.” Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1984), 102, 183.
11. Gibbon, Memoirs, 90.
12. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:56.
13. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:59.
14. See, e.g., James J. O’Donnell, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 98; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 79.
15. North continues: “[The hypothesis] also seems to rest on a profound mistake: the underlying idea has to be that, as Roman nobles became more educated and sophisticated, they easily turned away from belief in the gods and towards some form of scientific materialism, believing that the universe could be explained without recourse to the gods. But this assumption is an anachronistic one: easy scientific rationalism may be available in our time but it was not in theirs. There were some philosophical systems that disposed of the gods or marginalized them, and some of the Roman elite certainly understood or followed such systems; but to jump from that to the assumption that the elite were all scientific rationalists exploiting the ignorant masses is quite without any justification.” North, Roman Religion, 31.
16. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 79.
17. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 1.6, p. 21.
18. Varro’s books on this subject are not extant; his writings come to us through the report of Augustine. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.27, p. 176; 6.5, p. 246.
19. Augustine, City of God 4.27, p. 176; 6.5, p. 247.
20. Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 8.
21. Augustine, City of God 6.6, pp. 249–54.
22. Augustine, City of God 6.10, pp. 261–64.
23. See North, Roman Religion, 82.
24. Augustine, City of God 4.31, pp. 182–84.
25. Augustine, City of God 6.10, p. 263.
26. Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.1, p. 3. Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
27. For a critical review of the argument, see Peter van Inwagen, “Necessary Being: The O
ntological Argument,” in Arguing about Religion, ed. Kevin Timpe (New York: Routledge, 2009), 101.
28. See Elliott Sober, “The Design Argument,” in Timpe, Arguing about Religion, 161.
29. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.20–22, pp. 54–55.
30. See Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 571.
31. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.17, p. 53 (“Supposing your eyes lit upon a large and beautiful house. Even if you could not descry its owner, no one could force you to believe that it was built by mice and weasels”).
32. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.15, p. 52.
33. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.70, p. 72; 2.4, p. 48.
34. See William Paley, “The Argument from Design,” excerpted and reprinted in Faith and Reason, ed. Paul Helm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 189.
35. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.64, p. 69. See generally 2.60–71, pp. 68–72.
36. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.71, p. 72.
37. See R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 130–37, 147–51.
38. See Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 2000).
39. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.15, p. 52 (“the individuality, usefulness, beauty, and order to the sun and moon and stars”); 2.17, p. 53 (“the highly adorned universe, with its huge variety and beauty of heavenly bodies”); 2.19, p. 54 (“harmony,” “harmonious activity”); 2.58, p. 67 (“above all, that its beauty is outstanding in its universal adornment”); 2.75, p. 74 (noting “the argument inspired by wonder at the things of heaven and earth”). Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
40. See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (London: University of Chicago Press, 1952). For a succinct summary of Strauss’s approach to interpretation, see Ian Ward, “Helping the Dead Speak: Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, and the Arts of Interpretation in Political Thought,” Polity 41 (2009): 239–41.
41. See Frederick Copleston, SJ, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, [1962] 1993), 436–37.
42. Norman Malcolm, “The Groundlessness of Belief,” in Faith, ed. Terence Penelhum (London: Macmillan, 1989), 193, 203.
43. Steven Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16, http://www.science.fau.edu/sharklab/courses/evolution/pdfs/non-overlapping%20magisteria.pdf.
44. See Philip Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
45. See Dennis Patterson, Law and Truth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
46. See generally Steven D. Smith, Law’s Quandary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
47. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 41. See also 90 (“Truth is Balkanized . . .”).
48. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 21, 48, 128.
49. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 18.
50. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 87.
51. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 1.11, p. 6.
52. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 3.95, p. 146.
53. See Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.93–95, pp. 116–17.
54. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 1.4, p. 4.
55. O’Donnell, Pagans, 46.
56. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:561.
57. For a highly dramatic account of this confrontation, see G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox” (New York: Doubleday, [1933] 1974), 70–74.
58. Hick concedes that religious talk is a special kind of language, and that religionists often use terms in distinctive ways—“as pointers rather than as literal descriptions.” Even so, “the pointers are undoubtedly intended to point to realities transcending metaphors and myths; and to suppress this intention is to do violence to religious speech and to empty the religious ‘form of life’ of its central and motivating conviction.” John Hick, “Seeing-as and Religious Experience,” in Penelhum, Faith, 183, 184.
CHAPTER 5
Looking beyond the World: The Christian Revolution
As we saw in previous chapters, Roman religion was diverse and capacious, both in the deities and cults that it recognized and in the different “modalities of belief” that it supported. But it did not encompass all faiths. Most importantly, it could not absorb or contain Judaism or Christianity. With Judaism, Rome maintained a fragile peace broken by periodic bouts of revolt and unsparing repression.1 With Christianity, relations were even less congenial; the Romans sometimes grudgingly tolerated Christians and sometimes subjected them to ferocious persecutions. (We will look more closely at these persecutions in the following chapter.)
Why did these religions in particular resist absorption into the Roman cornucopia of cults, rituals, and devotions? The answer, it seems, is that the Jerusalem-centered faiths represented a radically different form of religiosity—indeed, a fundamentally different orientation to the world—that was unassimilable into the Romans’ thoroughly worldly civic piety. In this vein, and with reference to Judaism and Christianity, the Israeli historian Guy Stroumsa argues that “the religious transformations of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world in the first centuries of the Roman Empire are so radical” that they are properly described as “a ‘paradigm shift’ in the domain of the religious.”2 And he observes that “the conflict between paganism and Christianity is so fascinating” because it had “decisive consequences for the future of Western culture.”3 Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins explains that “it is difficult for us now to recapture how very strange and offensive [Christianity] must have seemed to pagans in the Roman world.”4
In this chapter, we will attempt to discern the nature of the “revolution”5 that divided Judaism and Christianity from Roman religion. We will see how Judaism and Christianity represented a fundamentally different kind of religiosity from paganism, so that the empire’s eventual acceptance of Christianity would amount to a transformation—in aspiration and ideal if never fully in practice—not merely of “religion” (as if that were some discrete and severable compartment of life) but of the basic orientation of human beings toward the world, and toward the city.
Were Pagans and Christians Really So Different?
Recently, however, a few revisionist historians, whom we might think of as historical deconstructionists or perhaps as retrospective conciliators, have suggested that the supposed differences between pagans and Christians were not so fundamental after all, and that the conflicts were mostly constructed by sectarian Christians who needed a fearsome opponent to define themselves against.6 If the deconstructionists-conciliators are right, the inquiry proposed for this chapter might seem misdirected. So before proceeding, we should pause to notice the principal arguments for doubting that the supposed conflict between paganism and Christianity was as significant as scholars like Stroumsa and Hopkins—and many, many others—have supposed.
Two main and interrelated arguments run through the deconstructionist-conciliating interpretations. First, as we have seen already, what others call “paganism” was not a monolithic religious system; rather, the term is used to cover a sprawling panorama of deities, rituals, stories, and practices. Nor for that matter was Christianity, in the beginning (or ever), a monolithic, tightly defined and organized movement.7 So there could not have been a genuine conflict between “paganism” and “Christianity”—or so it might seem—because neither term refers to any unitary or organized movement or form of religion at all. Second, and relatedly, the so-called pagans never thought of themselves as “pagans”; Christians invented if not the word then the category, mostly as a way of classifying, dismissively,8 those who did not join up with their own movement.9
As a purely descriptive matter, these observations seem mostly accurate, and hardly novel. Indeed, even as he argues that the differences between Roman religion and Christianity as well as later Judaism were so “radical” as to constitute a “paradigm shif
t,” Guy Stroumsa points out that “neither ‘paganism’ nor even ‘Christianity’ can be reduced to a factitious unity that represents anything. The forms of Christian existence in the first centuries are numerous—and the concept of ‘paganism’ is of course only the creation of Christian thinkers and does not correspond to any concrete reality.”10
As a logical matter, however, the inference from these descriptive observations to the conclusion that there was no inherent and fundamental conflict between paganism and Christianity, or that the ostensible differences between them were artificial or constructed, seems a non sequitur. One can imagine an analogous argument maintaining that although pet lovers have from time immemorial contrasted and debated the relative merits of “dogs” as opposed to “cats,” in reality the various and sundry organisms placed under the label of “dog” are enormously diverse in size, color, and behavior. Moreover, no animal ever identified itself as a “dog”: the term and the category have been imposed entirely from the outside—by humans. Same for cats. Consequently, the supposed contrast between “dogs” and “cats” is profoundly misconceived.
But this conclusion would be merely silly. Let us concede (although a philosophical realist might dispute the point) that “dog” and “cat,” like most or all other general terms and categories by which we understand and engage with the world—germs, planets, rivers, islands, cities, animals, plants, etc.—are devised by humans for the purpose of describing diverse particulars that usually would not and could not claim the terms for purposes of self-description (often because such entities—dogs, cats, germs, plants, rivers, etc.—do not and could not engage in self-description to begin with). The question is whether such terms and categories usefully help us to address real similarities and differences in the world. Similarly, although the point can always be debated, the widespread use of the categories “pagan” and “Christian” from late antiquity to the present at least suggests that the terms have proven useful in this way.