77. See also Wilken, The Christians, 124–25 (explaining Celsus’s criticism that Christians “undermined the foundations of the societies in which they lived”).
78. See above, 86.
79. See Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 175.
80. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:537.
81. See, e.g., Josh. 7.
82. See Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 10. See also Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 45.
83. See above, 108.
84. Fox, Pagans and Christians, 31.
85. See above, 108.
86. See above, 118–21.
87. John 8:32.
88. Augustine, City of God 2.29, p. 92.
89. Augustine, City of God 4.4, p. 147. See also 14.11, p. 605: “The choice of the will, then, is truly free only when it is not the slave of vices and sins. God gave to the will such freedom, and, now that it has been lost through its own fault, it cannot be restored save by Him Who could bestow it. Hence, the Truth says, ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.’ ”
90. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 3.5, p. 34.
91. Plato, Theatetus, trans. Harold North Fowler (London: W. Heinemann, 1921).
92. Cf. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 55 (“Only in the context of a religion in which god appears as both lawgiver and judge does the thought first become thinkable that man’s judgment and god’s can diverge significantly”).
93. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 88.
94. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” in Ante-Nicene Church Fathers, Fathers of the Third Century, trans. Philip Schaff (London: Aeterna Press, 2014), vol. 8, chap. 2, p. 3.
95. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chap. 3, pp. 3–4.
96. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chap. 4, pp. 4–5.
97. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chap. 10, p. 12.
98. Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” chaps. 40–41, pp. 48–49.
99. For discussions of the increasing significance on the idea of “dignity” in contemporary law and advocacy, see Mark L. Movsesian, “Of Human Dignities,” Notre Dame Law Review 91 (2016): 1517; Jeremy Waldron, “Dignity, Rights, and Responsibilities,” Arizona State Law Journal 43 (2012): 1107; James Q. Whitman, “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,” Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 1191.
100. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:560.
101. See above, 2.
102. See Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 82–83.
103. To be sure, as noted already, subjects were expected to make a small gesture of respect to the divine emperor and to “the gods.” But, seriously, how much of a burden was this? How hard was it to recite a short, pro forma loyalty oath, or to sprinkle a splash of wine or flick a pinch of incense on an altar? Wilken, The Christians, 25–27.
104. Eusebius, The Church History, 59–60.
105. See, e.g., Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:550.
106. These episodes are recounted in Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:553–54.
107. See Wilken, The Christians, 148–53.
108. It is true that Pliny required accused Christians not only to worship the Roman gods but also to “revile the name of Christ.” See above, 2. Other Roman rulers may have done the same. But the latter requirement quite likely was imposed on the (correct) assumption that Christians insisted on viewing their God as the exclusive deity. Had Christians been willing to treat Christ as one god among many, the Roman response would likely have been different.
109. See Boin, Coming Out Christian, 29–31. See also Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:549 (“In every persecution there were great numbers of unworthy Christians who publicly disowned or renounced the faith that they had professed”).
110. See generally Boin, Coming Out Christian.
111. For a discussion of this tendency in contemporary political thought, see Jody S. Kraus, “Political Liberalism and Truth,” Legal Theory 5 (1999): 45.
112. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:537–38. See also Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 548 (noting that “they were not being asked to do much, only to offer the gods a pinch of incense, but if they refused they should be killed”).
113. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 210.
114. See Wilken, The Christians, 63. See also Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:536–37 (“The Christians alone abhorred the gods of mankind, and by their absence and melancholy on these solemn festivals, seemed to insult or to lament the public felicity”).
115. See Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 19 (“For the Jews, Yahweh could not be translated into ‘Assur’ ‘Amun’ or ‘Zeus.’ This was something the ‘pagans’ never understood”).
116. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 1.19, p. 46.
117. Cf. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 94 (observing that “Christ and Iaveh were drawn into polytheism on the latter’s terms, simply as new members in an old assembly”).
118. For a description of this “balanced treatment” position, see Edward J. Larson, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (New York: Random House, 2004), 257–59.
119. See generally Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians.
120. Augustine, City of God 19.17, pp. 945–46.
121. See above, 4.
122. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, 5.
123. J. A. North, Roman Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63.
124. Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 288. See generally Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
125. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 18. See also H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 453 (“If pagans did not preach compulsion, that was only because there was nothing to compel—the belief system shared by all peoples of their empire was polytheistic, with local variations only in the names of particular deities and the specifics of particular practices”).
126. Stark, The Triumph of Christianity, 10.
127. See below, chaps. 10 and 11. See also Steven D. Smith, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Steven D. Smith, “Discourse in the Dusk: The Twilight of Religious Freedom” (review essay), Harvard Law Review 122 (2009): 1869.
CHAPTER 7
The Struggle for the City
Pagans and Christians struggled for mastery in Rome during the first centuries of what is often called (spoiling the suspense) the Christian era. Initially subdued and utterly one-sided, the struggle became a genuine contest in the fourth century, as the emperor Constantine’s conversion tipped the balance in favor of the previously impotent Christians. Even so, the struggle persisted, with both sides experiencing unanticipated triumphs and reversals in their respective fortunes. By century’s end, though, the contest was effectively over: Christianity had prevailed.
Or at least so it may appear in hindsight. Contemporaries would have had a different perception.1 Few discerned any struggle in the early centuries; paganism enjoyed an overwhelming preeminence, while a marginal and virtually powerless Christianity was intermittently persecuted and suppressed (as we saw in the preceding chapter). Even after Constantine’s historic conversion gave Christianity a new importance, and even after Constantine and his imperial successors began issuing decrees constricting the practices of paganism, what Edward Watts has called “the final pagan generation,” including prominent pagans like the orator Libanius and the Roman prefect Praetextatus, failed to disc
ern any actual struggle for dominance. Mostly overlooking a few irksome but largely unenforced religious restrictions, “the elite of the final pagan generation had better things to worry about. There was money to be made, honors to be gained, and fun to be had by those who could cooperate openly with the regime, even if they chose to criticize it privately.”2 These leading pagans lived in a world, as they saw it, “that was full of gods, had always been full of gods, and always would be full of gods.”3 They could not imagine that the world could ever be essentially different in that respect.
By century’s end, though, the world was different. Christianity was now officially in control; paganism was officially (if not in practice) banished.
How did this unimaginable transformation—unimaginable to the pagans—come to pass? And, most important for our purposes, what did the official triumph of Christianity and the official defeat of paganism mean for the future of these two religiosities, and of the orientations (toward transcendence, and toward a merely immanent sacredness) that they represented?
The first of these questions—how Christianity came to prevail over paganism—has commanded the attention of numerous able historians, among them our Enlightened friend Edward Gibbon (who described the question as “an important, though perhaps tedious, inquiry”);4 but the historians have disagreed about the answers. We revisit the question here, in comparatively summary fashion, not to offer answers that are either novel or definitive—in fact, we will see that definitive answers are almost surely unavailable—but because the question and its possible answers are directly relevant to the second question, and to our assessment of the modern condition. More specifically, the questions of whether and how and in what sense Christianity prevailed over paganism will be closely relevant to our assessment of T. S. Eliot’s proposition that modern Western societies face a choice between Christianity and “modern paganism.”
Two Accounts (and a Third That We Cannot Consider)
Leading accounts of the political triumph of Christianity have fallen into two main families. One family of interpretations stresses what we might call the “displacement” theme; the other emphasizes what could be called the “suppression” theme. The first kind of interpretation emphasizes cultural or intellectual or spiritual factors; the second focuses more on the political, and the coercive.
According to the first kind of interpretation (which was more or less Gibbon’s view),5 Christianity naturally came to displace paganism because the newer religion was more responsive to the needs of the empire’s peoples. By the fourth century, the Oxford historian E. R. Dodds asserts, “paganism appears as a sort of living corpse, which begins to collapse from the moment when the supporting hand of the State is withdrawn from it.”6 And so paganism came to be challenged by a diverse array of new or imported cults and faiths. Christianity ultimately turned out to be the winner among those challengers; it thereby displaced paganism because of some intrinsic quality that made it more appealing or efficacious.
Displacement interpretations can emphasize different features of pagan and Christian religions; these different emphases may reflect different assumptions about human psychology and motivation. A communitarian or cultural version suggests that Christianity provided a more satisfying and inclusive sense of community than paganism did.7 What we might call the creedal version suggests that Christian doctrines and teachings came to seem more believable than pagan stories and themes.8 A spiritual version suggests that Christianity did a better job than paganism did in satisfying people’s spiritual needs9—needs for meaning, for example, of the kind we discussed in chapter 2. These different interpretations are of course not mutually exclusive; it is conceivable that Christianity did better in more than one of these dimensions.
Or perhaps not. The other major family of interpretations, more political in its emphases, emphatically denies that paganism was dying out of its own force in the later empire, or that Christianity displaced paganism because of any cultural or creedal or spiritual superiority.10 Far from a steady decline into senility, Ramsay MacMullen asserts, “a general refreshing [in paganism] can be seen over the course of the second and third centuries.”11 So what happened, rather, is that the convert Constantine and his imperial successors were true believers; in a demonstration of what MacMullen calls “the murderous intolerance of the now dominant religion,”12 they used their authority and might to crush paganism.
It seems unlikely that either of these interpretations will ever finally and decisively defeat the other. After all, can we really know whether the appeal of paganism was waning in the second and third and fourth centuries? Temples were still open, perhaps. Sacrifices were still being performed. Auguries were still being taken. But what does all this activity demonstrate?
Consider an analogous contemporary question: Is traditional Christianity in decline in America today? True, people continue to attend church, to declare their affiliations with one or another denomination, to make monetary contributions to their churches. And yet, does this behavior reflect authentic Christian faith? Or is it something more superficial—mere habitual or inherited repetition perhaps? Or maybe a defensive reaction to the confounding challenges of the modern world, and thus perhaps more reflective of a desperate crisis of faith and meaning than of genuine conviction? Is Christianity alive and vibrant, or is it “a sort of living corpse,” to borrow Dodds’s phrase? In addressing such questions, pundits and social scientists and theologians today have vast amounts of evidence to work with—voluminous statistics quantifying declared faith and church attendance and financial contributions13—and yet they vary widely in what they take away from those vast and murky oceans of data.14
For the ancient world, by contrast, we have only the tiniest fraction of evidence available for measuring contemporary religiosity. How likely is it, then, that we can reliably ascertain what Romans and Greeks really felt and believed with respect to the received pagan religiosity? Ramsay MacMullen confidently declares that paganism was thriving until it was violently suppressed by Christian rulers and Christian mobs. And then he concedes that “we cannot poll the past; and adequately self-revealing moments in our sources are too few to support much generalization about what any given [religious] act meant to the participants.”15
In any case, given these disagreements among able historians, it seems improbable that any satisfactory resolution is achievable in a book like this one. Fortunately, for our purposes we need not try to decide whether the “displacement” interpretations or the “suppression” interpretations contain a greater measure of truth. We do need to consider some of the arguments and evidence associated with each family of interpretations, however, because these will bear upon the questions that are central to our inquiry. Namely, in what sense did Christianity prevail (if it did), and in what sense was paganism actually extinguished (if it was)?
Before considering this evidence, though, we note a wholly different kind of explanation of Christianity’s rise, not because scholars or students today would think to propose or ponder it, but because to the fourth-century Christians this might have seemed to be the decisive account of the crucial political and cultural developments. We could call this the providential-demonic account. From a Christian perspective, as Gibbon noted, the reason why Christianity came to prevail over paganism was because Christianity was true and paganism was not.16 But this description understates the claim. The idea was that the struggle between Christianity and paganism represented only one mundane theater in a larger, cosmic war between the forces of good and the legions of evil. Moreover, in speaking of the battle between good and evil, we are not (or rather, they were not) being merely metaphorical. The hosts of demons that beset Antony in the desert—and that he managed to fend off with, as he said, “much prayer and asceticism”17—were not poetic personifications, according to the account of Saint Athanasius; they variously appeared in the forms of wild animals—“lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions and wolves”—but also as femal
e temptresses and even devout though devious monks.18 Keith Hopkins remarks on “how pervasive demons were in the thought world of Jews, pagans, and Christians alike.”19
This war between good and evil agents occurs here on earth, but even more importantly it is being waged in the celestial sphere. And the triumph of Christianity comes about because God’s armies eventually vanquish the hosts of Satan. Peter Brown explains that
the conflict between Christianity and paganism was presented, in fourth- and fifth-century Christian sources, as having been fought out in heaven rather than on earth. The end of paganism occurred with the coming of Christ to earth. It was when He was raised on the Cross on Calvary—and not, as we more pedestrian historians tend to suppose, in the reign of Theodosius I—that heaven and earth rang with the crash of falling temples. The alliance of the Christian church with Christian emperors, to abolish sacrifice and to close and destroy the temples, was not more than a last, brisk mopping-up operation, that made manifest on earth a victory already won, centuries before, by Christ, over the shadowy empire of the demons.20
Possibly. But any assessment of such a proposition—probably, indeed, any accurate presentation of the proposition—exceeds the jurisdiction of modern academicians (like myself). Whether there is a cosmic battle between good and evil, or between God and his followers against the devil and his minions, and how that battle has fared at any particular time, are questions about which the modern academic must humbly confess abject incompetence. In declining to consider whether Christianity’s triumph was due to its truth and to providential assistance, Gibbon coyly explained that his own discussion would focus on what might be deemed “secondary causes.”21 In this respect, we have little choice, in this venue at least, but to follow Gibbon’s lead.
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