But then, from a Christian perspective, that proposition only aggravated the problem. Let us suppose that sexual passion reflects the “indwelling presence of the gods”; we must then ask, Which gods? And the pagan answer, it seems, would be Eros, or perhaps Venus,98 or (if sexual passion is supplemented with wine) maybe Dionysus, or perhaps Priapus of the prodigious phallus. Foreign or false gods, in other words.
The observation helps to explain why early Christians commonly equated fornication with idolatry.99 The confinement of sex to one partner within the sanctified bonds of matrimony was correlated with monotheism; conversely, the Roman practice of a more wide-ranging sexual prodigality was the manifestation of a kind of polytheism. Consequently, “for Paul the sexual disorder of Roman society was the single most powerful symbol of the world’s alienation from God.”100
In this way, sexual morality “came to mark the great divide between Christians and the world.”101 That divide did not become operative immediately upon the political acceptance of Christianity under Constantine. Harper reports, rather, that the implementation of the new sexual morality was not effectively implemented until the reign of the emperor Justinian in the mid-sixth century. Still, looked at from afar, the change was dramatic, amounting to “a revolution” not only in rules of behavior but also in conceptions of the human person and his or her relations to the state and the cosmos.102 And “sex was at the center of it all.”103
Harper seems unhappy, or at least ambivalent, about the transformation. Although he is harsh in his descriptions of the brutal exploitation of prostitutes and slaves in the Roman system, his account of the new Christian morality is censorious as well. The change was recklessly effected, he suggests: “Christian norms simply ate through the fabric of late classical antiquity like an acid, without the least consideration for the well-worn contours of the old ways.”104 And he strikes a wistful tone about what was lost. “The tradition of frank eroticism withers, and the visual depictions of lovemaking slowly recede. Gone is the warm eroticism of the Pompeian fresco, vanished is the charmed sensuality of the Greek romance.”105 Justinian’s implementation of the new Christian morality reflected “the haze of ruin and violent puritanism.”106
As we will see, a similar censoriousness toward the new Christian regime, and a similar wistfulness at the loss of the pagan world, are themes that have resonated through the centuries and continue to influence attitudes and agendas even today.
One City or Two?
Though pagan and Christian sexual morality were starkly different, they were not necessarily incompatible as a practical matter,107 at least so long as Christians remained a powerless minority. If Christians chose to refrain from sex with prostitutes and slaves, and to confine sex to marriage, such restraint did nothing to impede pagan sexual expression. But in another area the differences were more likely to lead to conflict—namely, in what we might think of as their civic sensibilities, or their attitudes toward the city.
As we saw in chapter 3, Roman government and Roman religion were intimately intertwined. In Rome and elsewhere, paganism generally was at its core a religion of the city—of the earthly city: the Greek polis, the city of Rome, later the empire.108 John Scheid observes that the founders of Rome or of other cities of antiquity also founded the religions of those cities and dictated the rules of those religions.109 Consequently, “in trying to understand the religious behaviour of the ancient Romans, we should never forget the fundamental importance of city ideology. . . . That ideal of collective life determined most aspects of religious practice.”110
More specifically, we have already seen in chapter 3 how Roman religion was thoroughly integrated into Roman political and civic life. Through a melding of religion, politics, and civic culture, the full majesty of the gods was deployed in support of the political community and its rulers—and vice versa. The community was religious; religion was communal.111 And that religious life served to enlist the subjects’ full loyalty to the city and its rulers. Patriotism and paganism were coextensive.
By contrast, although most Christians likewise believed that they could and should pay allegiance to the political community and its rulers, that belief was grounded in an entirely different and more complicated set of premises. Pagan Romans paid their devotions and performed their propitiating rituals to immanent gods who were in and of this world. Christians, by contrast, worshiped a transcendent God. Although actively concerned with and involved in mundane affairs (to the point that he had actually—and from the pagan perspective shamefully112—condescended to become a mortal human being, subject to pain and death), the Christian God was ultimately beyond time and space. This theological difference generated different attitudes toward the world: whereas pagans were fully at home in the world, Christians aspired to live for eternity—to be in but not of the world.
These conceptual and attitudinal differences in turn manifested themselves in radically different conceptions of the relation of persons to the political community and its rulers. Paganism sacralized the city, while Christianity did the opposite. And although Christians lived in and felt loyalty to the city, they could not be citizens of it in the same full and exclusive sense that pagans could. On the contrary, to invoke a metaphor often used by Augustine (significantly, used even after the empire had embraced Christianity), Christians were more like “pilgrims” in the world, and in the city.
This attitude was firmly rooted in Christian Scripture. The epistle to the Hebrews, ascribed to the apostle Paul, reminded Christians that the patriarch Abraham had left the city of his birth and had “made his home in the promised land [of Palestine] like a stranger in a foreign country. . . . For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”113 In this he had been joined by his wife and progeny. These venerated ancestors had “admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”114
The conclusion of this reasoning was that “here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.”115
Later Christian writers reiterated and elaborated on the theme. In a metaphor enthusiastically taken up by some twentieth-century theologians,116 one anonymous early Christian expressed the basic stance in a letter to someone named Diognetus by affirming that Christians were “resident aliens” in the earthly cities they temporarily inhabited. “Yet while they dwell in both Greek and non-Greek cities . . . and conform to the customs of the country in dress, food, and mode of life in general, the whole tenor of their way of living stamps it as . . . extraordinary. They reside in their respective countries, but only as aliens. They take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their home, and every home a foreign land. . . . They spend their days on earth, but hold citizenship in heaven.”117
In a different and even more influential metaphor, Augustine famously conveyed a similar idea with the image of the two cities.118 We Christians, Augustine taught, are pilgrims in the earthly city, which performs a necessary and valuable function and hence deserves our support. But our ultimate connection and our deepest loyalties must be to the heavenly city, or the city of God.119
We might express the fundamental difference by saying that, perhaps paradoxically, pagan religious polytheism was consistent with a sort of political monism; Christian monotheism, conversely, led to a kind of political polytheism—or at least to political dualism. Pagan religion thus served to support and consecrate the earthly city: the polis, or Rome, or the Roman Republic, or, later, the empire. Under the auspices of the diversity of gods, human beings were subjects of one city—the only city that mattered, the city served by a carefully integrated blend of politics and priestho
ods. Christians, by contrast, though they worshiped one God, were subjects of two cities—an earthly city and a heavenly city. Both cities were real; both were valuable; both were ordained of God. But the Christians’ true home was in—and thus their ultimate loyalty was to—the heavenly city. To the city of God, which provided the title for Augustine’s magnum opus.
The fact that Christians considered themselves residents of two cities, not one, with their primary loyalty to the heavenly city, had important though complicated practical implications. The position could support a kind of quietism, or resignation. Our life in this city and this world is only for a brief moment in the span of eternity, so why fret overmuch about conditions here? Though it seems particularly prominent in the early years when Christians expected Christ’s second coming to bring a quick end to the temporal city, this quietistic theme would resonate through the centuries.120
Conversely, the belief in a heavenly city—and, more generally, in a transcendent reality or truth against which this world might be judged—gave Christians a critical perspective and standard that pagans whose reality was limited to this world did not have. That transcendent standard could be used to criticize—and, in time, to reform—practices that were taken for granted in the pagan world: infanticide, slavery, inequality, the neglect of the poor and the diseased. It is not by accident that the idea that history and society should be progressing toward some sort of ideal condition comes with the emergence of transcendent religion and, in particular, Christianity.121
More immediately, though, and more problematically, their commitment to two cities meant that Christians did not and could not give the same total, undivided allegiance to the earthly city that pagans could offer—and that pagan authorities sometimes demanded. In the first Christian centuries, this division in allegiance would prove to be a source of serious, sometimes ferocious, conflict and persecution.
In sum, Christianity amounted, as scholars like Guy Stroumsa and Pierre Chuvin and Jan Assmann have explained, to a “religious revolution.” And regimes in place typically do not treat revolutionaries kindly. The Romans were no exception. As we will see in the next chapter.
1. See generally Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
2. Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2.
3. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 101. Cf. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–394, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 19 (describing “the chasm that separated Christianity from paganism”).
4. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 76.
5. See Pierre Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Revealing Antiquity), trans. B. A. Archer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 11 (describing the emergence of Christianity as “a political, intellectual, and religious revolution”).
6. See Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place for Themselves in Caesar’s Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015). Similar themes are discernible in James J. O’Donnell’s Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). In a generally similar vein is Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
7. Cf. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xxxvii (noting “the infinite variety of Christianity throughout this period”). The diversity of early Christianity is stressed in James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
8. Although it is often suggested that the term was one of abuse, meaning something like “country bumpkin,” a recent careful analysis casts doubt on this interpretation. See Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–32.
9. See, e.g., O’Donnell, Pagans, 5–6, 159–64, 214; Boin, Coming Out Christian, 112–18.
10. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 2–3.
11. See Boin, Coming Out Christian.
12. Boin, Coming Out Christian, 15–35.
13. Acts 15.
14. Cf. Rev. 3:15–16 (“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth” [KJV]).
15. Boin, Coming Out Christian, 37.
16. Boin, Coming Out Christian; see, for Saint Paul, 38–40; for Saint John, 40; for Tertullian, 21; for Cyprian, 31; for Perpetua, 29; for Athanasius, 128; for Ambrose, 121–24; for Gregory of Nazianzus, 118–20; for Augustine, 128; for John Chrysostom, 128.
17. Here is one example that may suffice. In 362, the emperor Julian, in a campaign to restore paganism to dominance, issued decrees that effectively prohibited Christians from teaching in the schools. Oxford historian Averil Cameron explains that “this measure effectively debarred Christians from teaching altogether, since rhetoric and grammar constituted most of the education syllabus.” Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 94. Historians have recognized that this was a drastic and unprecedented step in excluding people whose Christian beliefs the pagan ruler disapproved of, and in attempting to exercise control over the formation of the culture. See, e.g., Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 113–15. The projected effect of this ban, Princeton historian G. W. Bowersock observes, was that “within little more than a generation the educated elite of the empire would be pagan.” G. W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 84. Even Julian’s great admirer, the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, found these decrees “intolerable.” See Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire (A.D. 354–378), ed. and trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1986), 298 (“The laws which [Julian] enacted were not oppressive, . . . but there were a few exceptions, among them the harsh decree forbidding Christians to teach rhetoric or grammar unless they went over to the worship of the pagan gods”). When Boin narrates the episode, however, he first converts the prohibition into a bland conditional—Christians “shouldn’t be employed as teachers if they refused to educate children about the Greek and Roman gods”; Boin, Coming Out Christian, 119 (emphasis added). This makes it sound as if Christians were excluded from teaching only if they refused to teach the subject matter. Boin then blithely describes Christian resentment over the debilitating exclusion as much ado about nothing: “a debate over educational policy had turned into spiritual battle” (120).
18. Boin, Coming Out Christian, 110–37.
19. Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2.
20. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 15.
21. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 2.
22. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 66 (emphasis omitted).
23. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 1.
24. See, e.g., Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2004).
25. See, e.g., Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 19, 173. See also Chuvin, Chronicle of the Last Pagans, 10; Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 33–36; Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 80. Cf. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 90 (describing “the definition of religion in Rome as the observance of rites, without belief really playing an independent role”). Robin Lane Fox remarks that “there was . . . no pagan concept of heresy” (Pagans and Christians, 31).
26. In this vein, Stroumsa observes that “the idea of the transformation of the internal life remained unknown to the official religion of the ancient city, as well as to the mystery cults.” And he sugges
ts that “if one has to specify in a single word the nature of this change [from paganism to Christianity], I would accept the Hegelian analysis that stresses the interiorization of religion” (The End of Sacrifice, 15, 2). See also Wilken, The Christians, 63–65; O’Donnell, Pagans, 69.
27. See, e.g., Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 19.
28. See, e.g., O’Donnell, Pagans, 66 (“[The gods] mostly didn’t care whether or not human beings did the right thing. Ethical precepts, living the good life, avoiding sin: that was your business, not the gods’ ”).
29. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1.
30. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 2.
31. See, e.g., Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 103 (noting “the existence of a pagan monotheism”), and 5 (“For example, the Platonist Celsus seems to be more strictly monotheistic than the Christian Origen”). See generally Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
32. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 1.5, pp. 18–20.
33. See above, 91.
34. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 31.
35. Paul Veyne remarks (with less than complete theological precision, to be sure) that “given that it presents two or even three supernatural objects to be worshipped, namely God, Christ and—later—the Virgin, the Christian religion was, quite literally, polytheistic” (When Our World Became Christian, 20).
36. See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, rev. ed. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 161–65.
37. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 31.
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