It was precisely this public sponsorship that Ambrose, feisty bishop of Milan and perhaps the most powerful figure in the church at the time, found most objectionable. Responding to the pagan senator Symmachus’s argument that monies for the temples had originally been bequeathed for that purpose by “dying persons,”85 Ambrose argued to the emperor that even if the funds technically came from past donations by private parties, they had long been deemed part of the public treasury; hence, if the emperor were to restore the monies for pagan worship, “you will seem to give rather from your own funds,” and thus to be giving imperial approval to pagan worship.86 The optics, as modern pundits say, were crucial.
Other symbolic changes were more purely visual, and perhaps even more salient to average Roman subjects. Pagan temples served, Edward Watts explains, “to visually overwhelm people.”87 So when these temples were converted into Christian churches, the symbolism of displacement was starkly on display—as it was when Christian mobs, sometimes with imperial approval or at least acquiescence, destroyed those same temples.88 No wonder that the emperor Julian, in his short-lived pagan revival, required that the churches be taken down and the pagan temples rebuilt in their place.
Similarly, the magnificent new Christian churches and basilicas dominated city skyscapes89 (as they still do in places like Rome and Florence). These edifices and the ceremonies conducted in them “left visitors amazed,” Peter Brown reports. One traveler of late antiquity reported back to his correspondent: “You simply cannot imagine the number and the sheer weight of the candles, tapers, lamps and everything else they use for the services. . . . They are beyond description.” Brown observes that “the churches spoke far more loudly and more continuously of the providential alliance of Church and empire than did any imperial edict.”90 Understanding the importance of this visual and tangible message, Milan’s powerful bishop Ambrose built, and fought tenaciously to retain, impressive basilicas—sometimes against imperial edicts and imperial troops—as part of his campaign not only against paganism but also against the Arian heresy that for a period dominated the imperial family.91
Perhaps the most sustained struggle over a public symbol concerned the so-called Altar of Victory—a shrine to the goddess Victory that had been placed next to the door of the Senate House by the first emperor, Augustus. Gibbon explains that the altar “was adorned by . . . a majestic female standing on a globe, with flowing garments, expanded wings, and a crown of laurel in her outstretched hand. The senators were sworn on the altar of the goddess to observe the laws of the emperor and of the empire: and a solemn offering of wine and incense was the ordinary prelude of their public deliberations.”92 In 357, Constantius ordered the altar removed. The pagan emperor Julian had it restored. Then, in 382, the Christian emperor Gratian again had the altar taken down. Whereupon the pagan senator and Roman prefect Symmachus wrote an eloquent plea to Emperor Valentinian II requesting restoration of the altar—a plea that was in turn stoutly opposed by Ambrose the bishop.
All the disputants in this controversy recognized the symbolic importance of the shrine. While arguing that removal of the altar had led to “misfortunes,” including a poor harvest,93 Symmachus primarily emphasized that the maintenance of the shrine was a way of preserving a continuity of identity with Rome’s pagan past. “We ought to keep faith with so many centuries, and to follow our ancestors, as they happily followed theirs.”94 For his part, Ambrose acknowledged the existence of “altars in all the temples, and an altar also in the temple of Victories.” In fact, the pagans “celebrate their sacrifices everywhere.”95 But Symmachus’s proposal was different: the senator and his allies were demanding a pagan shrine “in the Senate House of the city of Rome,”96 where Christian senators as well as pagans met to deliberate, and where “an altar is so placed for this purpose, that every assembly should deliberate under its sanction.”97 To place a pagan altar in that centrally important public spot would be to “insult the Faith.”98 Such a symbolic gesture would be intolerable: Ambrose thus threatened that if the emperor were to approve the restoration of the altar, he would betray the faith and would be denied worship privileges. “You indeed may come to the church, but will find either no priest there, or one who will resist you.”99
In this fierce polemical struggle over a central symbolic manifestation of the empire, Ambrose prevailed: Symmachus’s plea was rejected. As all sides recognized, a symbolic victory was significant in defining the empire as Christian or pagan. And in winning the fight over this and other symbols, Christians managed to create a conception of the city—of the “imagined community”100—as Christian, not pagan.
The Cultural-Spiritual Struggle. But was the eventual triumph of Christianity a purely top-down development, the result of the emperors’ halfhearted coercive and somewhat more consistent symbolic support of the new religion? At least some historians have suggested that the emperors were not so much causing and guiding cultural developments as responding to and reflecting them.
Thus, the seminal work of the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont discerned a kind of corruption and a waning of credibility in the classical paganism of the second through fourth centuries; this decline was reflected in the increasing popularity of imported Oriental cults like those dedicated to Isis, Serapis, and Mithra.101 “The gods and heroes of mythology had no longer any but a purely literary existence,” Cumont argues. “The old national religion of Rome was dead.”102 Other scholars have agreed. Norman Cantor declares that “by 150 AD whatever vitality had once existed in ancient polytheism had mostly declined, and the gods played little or no role in individual lives. The state temples to the old gods became civic centers rather than religious entities.”103 Antonia Tripolitis contends that “confidence in the traditional cults and their gods that served as the basis of the political, social, and intellectual life was waning. The general populace no longer placed its hope or faith on the ancient gods.”104
As noted, however, other historians dispute this interpretation.105 Even with vastly more evidence, it would likely be difficult to resolve this disagreement; given the paucity of data, resolution seems impossible. We can nonetheless consider the paganism of late antiquity relative to the emerging Christianity to appreciate the intellectual and spiritual strengths and limitations of each. Our consideration can take note of three dimensions on which the advantages of paganism and Christianity might be compared: the communal, the creedal, and the spiritual or existential.
From the outset, caveats are in order. Not everyone has the same need for community, or for the same kind of community. Then, as now, some people will find association in a closely knit congregation of like-minded people to be comforting or fulfilling; others will experience it as stifling. Similarly, evaluations both of the believability of creeds and of spiritual efficacy will differ from person to person, just as religiosity itself varies greatly among people. What strikes one person as a self-evident and ennobling truth will appear to another as a demeaning absurdity.
So although partisans of each orientation did confidently and aggressively proclaim paganism or Christianity spiritually superior, and although modern scholars occasionally offer similar assessments,106 we will refrain here from pretending to render any final judgment. For our purposes, it will be enough to observe how both paganism and Christianity had their profound and discernible strengths. One pertinent consequence of this more tentative assessment will be that although particular aspects or features of paganism might fade or be repressed, it was unlikely that paganism did or could simply disappear; and in fact, it didn’t.
So, let us start with community. Norman Cantor argues that “the [Christian] Church provided a sense of community and institutions of friendship and caring within the largely joyless, anomic world of the Roman Empire.”107 In a similar vein, Peter Brown contends that the “appeal of Christianity lay in its radical sense of community: it absorbed people because the individual could drop from a wide impersonal world into a miniature community, whose demands and r
elations were explicit.”108 A distinctive feature of this new community was its egalitarian quality: “the Church included a powerful freedman chamberlain of the emperor; its bishop was the former slave of that freedman; it was protected by the emperor’s mistress, and patronized by noble ladies.”109 And the community was notable for caring for its poor and sick; even the pagans, Gibbon points out, admired this feature of the Christian community.110
Then, as now, of course, the more close-knit a community may aspire to be, the more distressing internal dissensions and jealousies can become. This problem is already painfully evident in New Testament epistles chastising the various churches for their internal divisions and for their tendency to favor richer over humbler members.111 Making an exception to his usual policy of discounting the testimony of Eusebius, Gibbon comments in a jaundiced tone that during Diocletian’s reign, “fraud, envy, and malice, prevailed in every [Christian] congregation.”112 Moreover, admission into the Christian community might seem to be a sacrifice of full participation in the convivial pagan associations, entertainments, and festivities that devout Christians were taught to shun as idolatrous: in gaining one community, a person might be losing another.
In addition, even insofar as Christian communities approximated their ideals, and even for those who might yearn for the community that the church could offer, entrance might still be deterred by the fact that admission was conditional on the affirmation of a creed—one that pagans often regarded as, well, offensive and preposterous. Which brings us to the question of believability—a concern that could be an issue both for pagans and for Christians.
We have already seen how even in the pre-Christian era, many educated Romans found the myths about the gods incredible, and this difficulty likely increased in ensuing centuries as cults proliferated and new deities swelled the pantheon.113 Paul Veyne contends that by the time Christianity arrived, “for six or seven centuries already, paganism had been in crisis. It was crammed with too many fables and naiveties; a pious and educated pagan no longer knew what he should believe.”114
One remedy for this embarrassment among traditional but educated pagans was to interpret the myths more metaphorically. We have already seen this allegorical-philosophical approach employed by Balbus, the Stoic character in Cicero’s dialogue on the gods;115 later thinkers developed the method with dedicated ingenuity.116 So the story of Saturn eating his children might be taken as a sort of allegory representing the fact that seeds return to the earth from which they grew, or perhaps as a poignant poetic expression of the existential truth that Time (i.e., Saturn, aka Cronos) inexorably destroys all that it begets.117 In a more philosophical vein, Jupiter might represent heaven, Juno earth, and Minerva the Platonic ideas: “heaven being that by which anything is made; earth being that of which it is made; and the ideas being the form according to which it is made.”118 Gibbon commented scornfully: “As the traditions of Pagan mythology were variously related, the sacred interpreters . . . could extract from any fable any sense which was adapted to their favorite system of religion and philosophy. The lascivious form of a naked Venus was tortured into the discovery of some moral precept . . . ; and the castration of Atys explained the revolution of the sun between the tropics, or the separation of the human soul from vice and error.”119
To critics (like the proto-Humean character Cotta of Cicero’s dialogue), this philosophizing strategy might seem a futile maneuver. Indeed, Cotta said as much.120 In their attacks on paganism, Christian thinkers like Athenagoras, Lactantius, and Augustine pressed the point. If the divine reality is one, and is spiritual rather than corporeal, why not forthrightly acknowledge and worship that divine reality or Being? What is the point of fragmenting divinity into a thousand tiny anthropomorphized subdeities, each of which is deemed not exactly real but only a metaphor, or an analogy?121
But then Jewish and Christian Scripture sometimes provoked comparable embarrassments, which Christian thinkers sometimes tried to escape through the same philosophizing or analogizing strategy. Christians were after all committed to a sacred Scripture that contained many ancient stories that challenged devotees’ credulity or assaulted their moral sensibilities in the same way the pagan myths did. And sophisticated Christians like Origen and Augustine sometimes responded to this difficulty by adopting analogical or metaphorical interpretations.122 In this spirit, Adam’s sons Abel and Seth and his descendant Enos could be taken as symbols of Christ, and of the church,123 as could Noah’s ark.124 Abel’s murderous brother Cain (who was said in Scripture to have founded a city), Abraham’s concubine Hagar, and Hagar’s son Ishmael were all symbols of the earthly city. Conversely, Abraham’s wife Sarah and the city of Jerusalem were symbols of the heavenly city.125
The symbolism could become intricate and multilayered, one symbol serving to symbolize another.126 Indeed, it was his discovery of this hermeneutical possibility that allowed Augustine to embrace the Bible and Christianity after years of incredulity;127 he later wrote a treatise expounding in detail the rich assortment of methods by which Scripture should be interpreted.128
For Christians, to be sure, there were limits to this strategy. Pagan critics attacked the most central historical-theological claims of the Gospels—that God had condescended to become incarnate in the man Jesus, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that after his crucifixion he was resurrected—but on these essential claims Christian apologists needed to, and did, stand firm. The debate over such historical and hermeneutical issues between learned apologists like Origen or Augustine and astute pagan critics like Celsus or Porphyry was as vigorous and sophisticated as more modern debates on the same subjects with which contemporary believers and skeptics are familiar.129 Still, many of the less theologically central biblical stories could be, and were, reinterpreted in more spiritual or metaphorical terms.130
But although both pagans and Christians might offer spiritual or philosophical readings to domesticate stories that would otherwise seem offensive or far-fetched, this philosophizing turn favored Christianity over the long run. That is because philosophy tended to push the sacred in a transcendent direction. Plato’s idea of the Good, unlike the pagan deities but like the God of the Hebrews and the Christians, was not in and of this corruptible and corrupted world. So there was an implicit incongruity in the efforts of Stoics and Neoplatonists to use philosophy to shore up a pantheon of gods who definitely were in and of this world. It was as if enfeebled gods were being treated with a regimen that was in fact slowly lethal to them. With respect to the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and the later Athenian School, R. T. Wallis observes that “among [the school’s] unintended results was the draining of the traditional gods of such personality as they still retained; hence in seeking to establish traditional worship on a philosophical basis the post-Iamblicheans ironically ensured the triumph of Christianity.”131
Augustine mocked without mercy the incongruities and the arbitrariness in thinkers like Varro who tried through allegorical interpretations to reconcile pagan deities with the loftier teachings of the philosophers.132 And while praising Plato effusively and at length133—by his own account, after all, Platonic books had played a major role in his own transition to Christianity134—Augustine hammered on the implausibilities and inconsistencies in later philosophies that attempted to use Plato to justify worship of the pagan gods.135
We will return to the question of believability, but let us first consider the matter of spiritual or existential efficacy. Which form of religiosity—pagan or Christian—was better able to give meaning to people’s lives, and sublimity to the world in which they passed their days?
Each position had its manifest advantages. We have already seen, in chapter 3, how paganism served to consecrate and beatify the world and the polity. Robin Lane Fox observes that the gods endowed the world with a “shining beauty and grace.”136 In the philosophical renderings of paganism, E. R. Dodds explains, “the whole vast structure [of the cosmos] was seen as the expression of a divine order; as such i
t was felt to be beautiful and worshipful.”137 In a similar vein, Fox observes that “everywhere, the gods were involved in life’s basic patterns, in birth, copulation, and death[, in] adolescence, marriage and childbirth.”138 The beatification was not limited to the philosophically trained; it was extended to the multitudes in vivid forms—in the sights and smells of the sacrifices, the music and swirl of the pagan theater, the pomp and rhythm of the processions, the press and roar and tumult of the games and the races. And also, of course, in the ecstasy of sexual intimacy, experienced and understood as the “mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods.”139
In short, paganism sacralized the world and rendered it beautiful—for some, hauntingly beautiful. Noting “the echo of divine beauty which had been rendered visible and so mysteriously potent, by the material image of a pagan god,” Peter Brown suggests that “it was the sense of the intimate and intangible presence of the unseen that consoled the last pagans.”140 There were, however, limitations to this pagan beatification of life and the world, among which two stand out.
First, and most starkly, for every actual man and woman, it would all precipitously end with, as Homer had put it, “the dark mist of death.”141 What came after death was murky, but there was no general expectation that it would be happy. Homer had spoken of the “hateful darkness,” and of “the houses of the dead—the dank, moldering horrors that fill the deathless gods themselves with loathing.”142 Virgil observed mournfully:
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 25