One recent conciliating book seeks to shed light on the religious situation in late antiquity by drawing parallels between Christians of that time and the LGBT movement of today.11 An impressive achievement is that from the book’s title to its dedication to the text itself, the author manages to work allusions to the LGBT movement into virtually every page. And how does this relentlessly executed parallel illuminate the historical developments? The gist of the argument, it seems, is that although people then and now have often been mistrustful of perceived differences, once they get to know the supposedly different folks (“The New Neighbors Who Moved in Next Door,” as one chapter title puts it), they come to realize that the differences are not of great importance and need not impede a cordial human fellowship. Thus, by quietly getting to know their neighbors, and getting to be known by them, Christians “made a place [for themselves] in Caesar’s Empire.”
For this story line to work, the author has to emphasize and elevate those mostly inconspicuous Christians—“The Quieter Ones”12—who were content to mingle unobtrusively, to join in the Roman religious festivities, and (in disregard of the minimal essential prohibitions declared by the Christian council of Jerusalem)13 congenially to eat the meat sacrificed to pagan deities. In other words, the author elevates the Christians who, then and now, would be regarded by more rigorous Christians as lax or lapsed or “lukewarm.”14 Conversely, the author disapproves and attempts to marginalize, as unreasonable or “antisocial,”15 those more fervent Christians—including nontrivial figures like Saint Paul, Saint John, Tertullian, Cyprian, Perpetua, Athanasius, Ambrose, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, and John Chrysostom16—who stood out as leaders and exemplars of the Christian movement, who wrote and expounded its sacred texts, who defined its doctrines, and who sometimes persisted in professing it even though this meant going to the cross or the pyre or the lions. Other adjustments are also needed; we need not detail here the ways in which the historical record must be clipped and contorted to fit the conciliating story line.17 Even with these adjustments of the historical record, moreover, the story runs amok after Christianity achieves political dominance in the fourth century. Once Christians had earned the acceptance of their neighbors in the empire, it seems, the faction of more militant and unsociable Christians then seized control, to the considerable detriment both of the pagans and of the more congenial and reasonable Christians.18
For anyone who finds the book’s attempted parallel between ancient Christianity and the modern LGBT movement at all instructive, this outcome presumably ought to be ominous. In any case, both in the book’s overall treatment and in its grim culmination, the real lesson seems directly contrary to the author’s conciliatory intentions. It turns out that between Roman pagans and the more committed (or, if you prefer, more unsociable or unreasonable) Christians, there were real and profoundly consequential incompatibilities.
A different and more compelling qualification is noted by the historian Wayne Meeks, who points out that in early Christianity “the daily practice of most church members was doubtless indistinguishable in most respects from that of their unconverted neighbors.”19 But then, how could it have been otherwise? A person who heard and believed the message about Jesus naturally continued to speak the same language as before—Greek or Latin or whatever—and to work and dress and eat in much the same ways as she had always done. For similar reasons, Christians continued to talk about good and bad, virtue and vice, mostly in the same vocabulary that they had previously used, and that their non-Christian neighbors used.20 Consequently, “it is curiously difficult to say exactly what was new about Christian morality, or to draw firm boundaries around it.”21 “The Christian language of virtue and vice is ordinary, so much so that it is sometimes hard to see what all the fuss was about on the part of its attackers or its defenders.”22
And yet, beneath these surface similarities and continuities, Meeks shows, fundamental and transformative differences are discernible. The result was that “a tectonic shift of cultural values was set in motion by those small and obscure beginnings.”23
So it seems that we may pursue the chapter’s inquiry after all: In what fundamental if subtle ways did Christian religiosity differ from pagan religiosity?
While not precluding our inquiry, however, the acknowledgment of diversity within both paganism and Christianity, as well as of similarities between pagans and Christians, should warn us against expecting to find clean and simple categories. Different scholars suggest a variety of distinctions. Roman religion, it is said, was polytheistic; Judaism and Christianity were monotheistic.24 Roman religion focused on ritual, not on creed; Christianity cared about truth, doctrine, and belief—and heresy.25 Roman religion was a piety of outward performances; Judaism and especially Christianity were concerned with the inner person—with what was in the mind and the heart.26 Roman religion was a thing of this world; Christianity in particular emphasized the next world.27 The Roman gods demanded proper sacrifice but were otherwise mostly indifferent to (and far from exemplary of) morality; the God of Judaism and Christianity was intensely committed to the moral life.28 Although these distinctions are not without a basis in the historical evidence, it may turn out that they do not hold categorically. To borrow a familiar contrast articulated by Wittgenstein, what we find may not be unvarying and immutable essences of two utterly different religiosities, but rather partially overlapping but nonetheless distinct and distinguishable “family resemblances.”
We can begin to appreciate the important family differences, nonetheless, if we recall the discussion in chapter 2 suggesting that religion can be understood as a sense of and a relation to the sacred. We can then ask, both for pagan and for Jewish and Christian religion: What and where (so to speak) is the sacred?
The Location of the Sacred
In this respect, the work of the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann provides valuable illumination. Like Stroumsa, quoted at the outset of this chapter, Assmann argues that the shift from the pagan religiosity of Egypt, Greece, and Rome to the monotheistic faiths of later Judaism and Christianity represented a radical and portentous transformation—one that “has had a more profound impact on the world we live in today than any political upheaval.”29 This shift brought “with it a new mentality and a new spirituality, which have decisively shaped the Western image of man.”30
So, what exactly was the radical, transformative difference? Assmann does not make it easy for readers to ascertain his answer to that question. His most characteristic and frequent claim is that there was a fundamental and enormously consequential difference between the polytheism of paganism and the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity. Or so it seems. But then Assmann qualifies that position, and then qualifies it again.
As a descriptive matter, the assertion that paganism was polytheistic and Christianity was monotheistic is at best an oversimplification. Scholars find strains of monotheism in paganism: the various gods are understood by some pagans as different faces of a single divinity.31 The fourth-century Christian apologist Lactantius listed and quoted an assortment of pagan poets and thinkers who had understood the various pagan deities essentially as different masks or manifestations of one divine being.32 We saw one expression of this view already in the religious articulation of Balbus, the Stoic character in Cicero’s dialogue on the gods. Balbus, recall, defended the gods, plural, in a metaphorical sense but also asserted at one point that “the universe is god,”33 with the various deities representing different aspects of that divinity. Noting such expressions, Assmann observes that “God’s oneness is not an invention of monotheism, but the central theme of polytheistic religions as well.”34
Conversely, the monotheism of Christianity was at least complicated, and contestable. Christians believed in one God, yes, but that one God was somehow constituted as three persons.35 Christians also came to believe in angels, and in a host of saints that in some ways replaced the functions of paganism’s subordinate deities.36 Thus, Assmann asserts that �
��as an instrument for describing and classifying ancient religions, the opposition of unity and plurality is practically worthless.”37
So if the portentous difference was not actually between polytheism and monotheism, as much of Assmann’s writing on its face seems to suggest, what then was the vital distinction? “What seems crucial,” Assmann first explains, “is not the distinction between One God and many gods but the distinction between truth and falsehood in religion, between the true god and false gods, true doctrine and false doctrine, knowledge and ignorance, belief and unbelief.”38 In this respect, Assmann suggests, “biblical religion” (including “ancient Israelite, Jewish, and Christian religions”) contrasted with “all the alien and earlier cultures that knew nothing of the distinction between true and false religion.”39 The concern of biblical religion with truth and falsity was “a revolutionary innovation in the history of religion.”40
Perhaps. Still, if the real transformation was from pagan indifference to Jewish and Christian obsession with truth, why make so much of the distinction between polytheism and monotheism? The contrasts seem quite independent of each other. Why couldn’t a polytheistic religion be concerned with questions of truth? (The discussion in the previous chapter of Cicero’s dialogue on the gods shows that at least some pagans were interested in such questions.) Conversely, couldn’t a religion devoted to a single deity nonetheless take a tolerant or relaxed stance toward propositional truth? We might think of modern instances—Unitarianism, perhaps, or the familiar irenic invocations of the story of the six blind men of Indostan and the elephant.
So Assmann complicates the matter still further—but also clarifies it—by offering a second qualification: the really important distinction, he now says, is not so much either in the number of deities or in the concern about truth per se, but more in the character or location of divinity. More specifically, and crucially, the pagan gods were actors (albeit powerful and immortal actors) of and within this world. The God of Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, is “the creator of the world, which he guides in its course and maintains in its existence—an invisible, hidden, spiritual god who dwells beyond time and space.”41
In short, the ultimately crucial difference is not so much that the Jewish and Christian God is solitary while the pagan gods are plural. What matters, rather, is the relation of those deities to the world and even, we might say, their metaphysical status.42 Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and company are part of the world; they are creatures of time and space. As James O’Donnell explains: “The gods . . . were mainly the mightiest part of the world itself, not beings that somehow stood outside it all. When Olympus came to feel too earthen, then the planets were thought to be the homes of the gods, and the domains of space beyond were thought to be the highest and most perfect places in the world—but emphatically in the world.”43
Conversely, the God of later Judaism and of Christianity can create and maintain the world because he is not merely part of the world, and is not contained within time and space.
So if we understand religion as a relation to the sacred, as suggested in chapter 2, then pagan religion differs from Judaism and Christianity in its placement of the sacred. Pagan religion locates the sacred within this world. In that way, paganism can consecrate the world from within: it is religiosity relative to an immanent sacred. Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, reflect a transcendent religiosity; they place the sacred, ultimately, outside the world—“beyond time and space.” To be sure, a simple and stark distinction between “immanent” and “transcendent” cuts a bit too cleanly (as theoretical distinctions on this level of generality inevitably do), in part because the Christian deity is both transcendent and immanent, even incarnate. Acknowledging the simplification inevitable in any such distinction, however, we can appreciate along with Assmann, Heschel,44 and others the distinction’s value in illuminating a fundamental difference between pagan and Christian (or, more generally, biblical) religiosities.
This contrast in the conceptions of deity may help to explain what otherwise seems the puzzling and accidental connection with monotheism and polytheism. A transcendent God of the kind professed by Jews and Christians would necessarily be singular, for reasons articulated by Greek thinkers and later by Christian theologians.45 Aristotle had taught that it is matter that individuates things otherwise similar in form;46 my pen is not the same thing as your pen, even though they have the same shape, color, and function, because my pen is made of different matter or, if you like, of different atoms. But on this logic, it would make no sense to talk in the plural of immaterial beings possessing the same form or divine features; there would be nothing to individuate one god from another. Such reasoning had already persuaded a thinker like Xenophanes in the fifth century BC of the necessary unity of god.47
In addition, we can appreciate how questions of truth would come to assume greater importance in Judaism and especially in Christianity. If there are many gods, all with a good claim to some sort of divinity, then it probably doesn’t make much difference which or what sort of deity you choose to worship. Most likely, these are really just the same family of gods, going by different names in different places48—or maybe even just different names for different manifestations or aspects of the same divine Reality. Why would that Reality care under which of its names you choose to address it? Conversely, if there is only one supreme deity, who is the ruler of the universe, and if all the other supposed deities are either fictions or (as the early Christians believed) imposters and devils,49 then it becomes much more urgent that you know the truth about what—or Whom—you are worshiping. Who wants to be caught worshiping and sacrificing to something or someone who doesn’t exist or, worse, who is actually demonic and malevolent?
No Longer at Home in the World?
These distinctions in the conceptions of the metaphysical status of the divine and the location of the sacred may seem rarefied and academic, accessible mostly to theologians and philosophers, and of no conceivable interest to ordinary folk. If we were to stop the average religious devotee on his way to a pagan temple or a Christian service and ask, “Do you place your faith in a transcendent or a merely immanent sacred?,” we might expect to receive an uncomprehending “Sorry, but I don’t understand the question.” Suppose we follow up by asking, “Do you believe that God or the gods created the world out of nothing, or rather that God or the gods are themselves part of the natural world?” Perhaps this question would lead to a meaningful and confident response—but probably not. And should that be a decisive question anyway? Would the answer make any real difference in the way people actually feel and live and worship?
We can press the doubt further. Christians might say that God is an entity beyond time and space, even beyond “being” (whatever that means). God is transcendent. But, the Christians would say, he is also immanent—and thoroughly involved in this world. Moreover, as humans in this world, Christians will necessarily and inevitably picture God in human images and terms50—as a muscular, majestic, white-haired figure, perhaps (as in countless medieval and early modern sculptures and paintings including, most famously, the depiction of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling). What else could they do? Could we do? We humans are, well, human; so we will inevitably engage with the world in human terms and images.
In the end, in short, do abstract theological claims about God’s transcendence of the natural world—which is, after all, the world we inhabit and the only one we can really conceive of in any concrete way—have any practical significance?
Well, yes, actually. Perhaps not immediately and directly; it is not as if the typical farmer or cobbler learns one day that God is transcendent and promptly revises his opinions and his way of life. And yet, what may seem like abstract differences in the location of the sacred support fundamentally different orientations or attitudes toward the world—different orientations with effects and profound implications for even the most mundane aspects of life. First let us consider the difference in orientations
; later we will look at a few of the divergent practical implications of these different orientations.
The function of paganism, once again, is to consecrate or sacralize nature and the world. As we saw in chapter 2, Abraham Heschel argued that the Greeks “regarded the elemental powers of nature as holy” and treated “nature” as an “object of ultimate adoration.”51 In a similar vein, Jan Assmann explains that “a world of gods does not stand opposed to the world made up of the cosmos, humankind, and society, but endows them with meaning as a structuring and ordering principle.” In this way, “a world of gods constitutes the world of human destiny, which in its joys and sorrows, its crises and resolutions, its epochs and transitions, presents itself as a meaningful whole only in relation to the destinies of the gods.”52
By locating the sacred within the world, in short, pagan religion gave life in the world shape and meaning, and sublimity. It helped to consecrate the world—to make the world a fit, orderly, even beautiful home for human habitation (assuming, of course, that the gods were rendered cooperative through proper propitiation). The polytheistic religion of antiquity, says Assmann, “seeks to make its votaries at home in the world.”53 Insofar as the city is part of that world, and indeed is a sort of “second nature” or image of the world (as Balbus argued),54 paganism served to sacralize the city as well. And as we saw in chapter 3, this sacralization was no mere academic hypothesis; it was embodied, rather, in a host of buildings, rituals, performances, processions, and holidays.
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 16