The Conversion of the Pagan Mind
In the course of the Hellenistic period, even Jewish culture had been penetrated by Hellenic influences. The broad geographical dispersion of Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean empire had accelerated this influence, reflected in later Jewish religious literature such as the Wisdom books, in the Septuagint and the biblical scholarship of Alexandria, and in the Platonic religious philosophy of Philo. But with Christianity, and particularly with Paul’s mission to expand its gospel beyond the confines of Judaism, the Judaic impulse in turn began a countervailing movement that radically transformed the Hellenic contribution to the Christian world view emerging in the later centuries of the classical era. The powerful currents of Greek metaphysics, epistemology, and science, the characteristic Greek attitudes toward myth, religion, philosophy, and personal fulfillment—all were transfigured in the light of the Judaeo-Christian revelation.
The status of the transcendent Ideas, so central to the Platonic tradition and widely recognized by the pagan intelligentsia, was now significantly altered. Augustine agreed with Plato that the Ideas constituted the stable and unchangeable forms of all things and provided a solid epistemological basis for human knowledge. But he pointed out that Plato lacked an adequate doctrine of creation to explain the participation of particulars in the Ideas. (Plato’s Creator, the Demiurge of the Timaeus, was not an omnipotent supreme being, since the chaotic world of becoming upon which he imposed the Ideas already existed, as did the Ideas themselves; nor was he omnipotent vis-à-vis anankē, the errant cause.) Augustine therefore argued that Plato’s metaphysical conception could be fulfilled by the Judaeo-Christian revelation of the supreme Creator, who freely wills the creation into existence ex nihilo, yet who does so in accordance with the seminal ordering patterns established by the primordial Ideas residing in the divine mind. Augustine identified the Ideas as the collective expression of God’s Word, the Logos, and viewed all archetypes as contained within and expressive of the being of Christ. Here the emphasis was placed more on God and his creation, rather than on the Ideas and their concrete imitation, with the former framework employing and subsuming the latter much as Christianity in general employed and subsumed Platonism.
To this metaphysical correction of Plato, Augustine added an epistemological modification. Plato had based all human knowledge on two possible sources, the first derived from sense experience, which is unreliable, and the second derived from direct perception of the eternal Ideas, knowledge of which is innate but forgotten and requires recollection, and which provide the only source of certain knowledge. Augustine agreed with this formulation, asserting that man can have no intellectual ideas arise in his mind that are not illuminated there by God, as by an inner spiritual Sun. Thus the soul’s only genuine teacher is an inner one, and is God. But Augustine added one more source for human knowledge—Christian revelation—a source necessitated by man’s fall from grace and bestowed on man with the coming of Christ. This truth, revealed in the biblical testaments and taught by Church tradition, fulfilled Platonic philosophy just as it fulfilled the Judaic Law, both preparations for the new order.
Although in theory Augustine’s Platonism was definite, in practice Christianity’s emphatic monotheism reduced the metaphysical significance of the Platonic Ideas. A direct relationship to God based on love and faith was more important than an intellectual encounter with the Ideas. Any reality possessed by the Ideas was contingent on God and thus less significant in the Christian scheme of things. The Christian Logos, the active Word—creating, ordering, revealing, redeeming—ruled all. The fact of the archetypes’ plurality argued further against their playing a major role in Christianity’s generally monistic spiritual reality. Moreover, the Neoplatonic doctrine of a hierarchy of being, with reality stratified into successively diminishing levels of divinity, was countered by certain aspects of the primitive Christian revelation (from the first century A.D.), which stressed a fundamental unification and divinization of all creation, a democratic explosion of all former categories and hierarchies. Conversely, other elements of the Judaeo-Christian tradition emphasized the absolute dichotomy between God and his creation, a dichotomy that Neoplatonism attenuated in favor of the One’s emanation of divinity through intermediate levels—such as the Ideas—to the entire cosmos. But perhaps most important, the biblical revelation provided a more accessible and readily grasped truth for the body of the Christian faithful than did any subtle philosophical arguments regarding the Platonic Ideas.
Yet Christian theologians employed archetypal thinking in many of the most important doctrines of the Christian religion: the participation of all mankind in the sin of Adam, who was thus the primal archetype of unredeemed man; Christ’s passion as encompassing the totality of human suffering, with his redemptive act, as the second Adam, effecting redemption for all; Christ as the archetype of perfect humanity, with every human soul potentially participating in the universal being of Christ; the invisible universal Church as fully existing in all the individual churches; the single supreme God as fully existing in each of the three persons of the Trinity; Christ as the universal Logos, constituting the entirety and essence of the creation. And biblical archetypes such as the Exodus, the Chosen People, and the Promised Land never ceased to play a significant role in the cultural imagination. Although the Platonic Ideas per se were not central to the Christian belief system, the ancient and medieval mind was generally predisposed toward thinking in terms of types, symbols, and universals, and Platonism offered the most philosophically sophisticated framework for comprehending that mode of thought. Indeed the existence of the Ideas and the issue of their independent reality would become matters of intense debate in later Scholastic philosophy—a debate whose outcome would have lasting repercussions beyond philosophy proper.
The pagan deities were more explicitly antithetical to biblical monotheism, and thus more forcefully dispensed with. First viewed as real forces, though as lesser demon-like beings, they were eventually rejected altogether and regarded as false gods, multiple idols of pagan fantasy, the active belief in which was not only foolishly superstitious but dangerously heretical. The old rituals and mysteries constituted a widespread impediment to the propagation of the Christian faith and were therefore combated by Christian apologists in terms not unlike those of the skeptical philosophers of classical Athens, but in a new context and with different intent. As Clement reasoned with the pagan intellectuals of Alexandria, the world was not a mythological phenomenon full of gods and daimones, but was rather a natural world providentially governed by the one supreme self-subsistent God. In truth, the pagan statues of deities were no more than stone idols, the myths merely primitive anthropomorphic fictions. Only the one invisible God and the one biblical revelation were authentic. The Presocratic philosophies, like those of Thales or Empedocles with their deification of the material elements, were no better than the primitive myths. Matter should not be worshiped, but rather the Maker of matter. The heavenly bodies were not divine, but rather the Creator of those bodies. Now man could be liberated from the old superstitions and illuminated by the true divine light of Christ. The myriad sacred objects of the primitive imagination could now be recognized as nothing more than natural things naively endowed with nonexistent supernatural powers. Men—not animals or birds, trees or planets—were the true messengers of divine communication, chosen as God’s prophets. The supremely just Judaeo-Christian God, not the fickle Hellenic Zeus, was the true universal ruler. The historical Christ, not the mythological Dionysus or Orpheus or Demeter, was the true saving deity. The darkness of paganism was now dispelled by the Christian dawn. Clement described the late pagan Greco-Roman world as being like the seer Tiresias—old, wise, but blind and dying—and exhorted him to shed his decaying life and ways, cast off the old revels and divinations of paganism, and be initiated into the new mystery of Christ. If he would now discipline himself for God, he could see again, see heaven itself, and become the ever-
new child of Christianity.
And so the old gods died and the one true Christian God was revealed and glorified. Yet a more subtle and differentiated process of assimilation occurred in the conversion of paganism, for in the process of the Hellenistic world’s adoption of Christianity, many essential features of the pagan mystery religions now found successful expression in the Christian religion: the belief in a savior deity whose death and rebirth brought immortality to man, the themes of illumination and regeneration, the ritual initiation with a community of worshipers into the salvational knowledge of cosmic truths, the preparatory period before initiation, demands for cultic purity, fasting, vigils, early morning ceremonies, sacred banquets, ritual processions, pilgrimages, the giving of new names to initiates. But while some of the mystery religions emphasized the evil imprisonment of matter, which only initiates could transcend, early Christianity heralded Christ as inaugurating the redemption of even the material world. Christianity further introduced an essential public and historical element into the mythological framework: Jesus Christ was not a mythical figure but an actual historical person who fulfilled the Judaic messianic prophecies and brought the new revelation to a universal audience, with potentially all of mankind as the new initiates rather than a select few. What was to the pagan mysteries an esoteric mythological process—the death-rebirth mystery—had in Christ become concrete historical reality, enacted for all humanity to witness and openly participate in, with a consequent transformation of the entire movement of history. From this viewpoint, the pagan mysteries were not so much an impediment to the growth of Christianity as they were the soil from which it could more readily spring.
But unlike the mystery religions, Christianity was proclaimed and recognized as the exclusively authentic source of salvation, superseding all previous mysteries and religions, alone bestowing the true knowledge of the universe and a true basis for ethics. Such a claim was decisive in the triumph of Christianity in the late classical world. Only thus were the anxieties of the Hellenistic era, with its conflicting religious and philosophical pluralism, and with its large amorphous cities filled with the rootless and dispossessed, resolved in the new certitudes. Christianity offered mankind a universal home, an enduring community, and a clearly defined way of life, all of which possessed a scriptural and institutional guarantee of cosmic validity.
The Christian assimilation of the mysteries extended to the various pagan deities as well, for as the Greco-Roman world gradually embraced Christianity, the classical gods were consciously or unconsciously absorbed into the Christian hierarchy (as later would occur with the Germanic deities and those of other cultures penetrated by the Christian West). Their characters and properties were retained but were now understood and subsumed in the Christian context, as in the figures of Christ (Apollo and Prometheus, for example, as well as Perseus, Orpheus, Dionysus, Hercules, Atlas, Adonis, Eros, Sol, Mithra, Attis, Osiris), God the Father (Zeus, Kronos, Ouranos, Sarapis), the Virgin Mary (Magna Mater, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hera, Rhea, Persephone, Demeter, Gaia, Semele, Isis), the Holy Spirit (Apollo, Dionysus, Orpheus, as well as aspects of the procreative feminine deities), Satan (Pan, Hades, Prometheus, Dionysus), and a host of angels and saints (the conflation of Mars with Michael the archangel, Atlas with Saint Christopher). As the Christian religious understanding emerged out of the classical polytheistic imagination, the different aspects of a single complex pagan deity were applied to corresponding aspects of the Trinity, or, in the case of a pagan deity’s shadow aspect, to Satan. Apollo as the divine Sun god, the luminous prince of the heavens, was now seen as a pagan precursor of Christ, while Apollo as the bringer of sudden illumination and the giver of prophecy and oracles was now recognized as the presence of the Holy Spirit. Prometheus as the suffering liberator of mankind was now subsumed by the figure of Christ, while Prometheus as the hubristic rebel against God was subsumed by the figure of Lucifer. The spirit of ecstatic possession once ascribed to Dionysus was now ascribed to the Holy Spirit, Dionysus as the self-sacrificing redemptive deity of death and rebirth was now transfigured into Christ, and Dionysus as the unleashed erotic and aggressive instincts, the demonic deity of unregenerate elemental energy and mass frenzy, was now recognized as Satan.
Thus the ancient mythic deities were transformed into the doctrinally established figures that constituted the Christian pantheon. A new conception of spiritual truth arose as well. The narratives and descriptions of divine reality and divine beings, that which had been myth in the pagan era—malleable, undogmatic, open to imaginative novelty and creative transformation, subject to conflicting versions and multiple interpretations—were now characteristically understood as absolute, historical, and literal truths, and every effort was made to clarify and systematize those truths into unchanging doctrinal formulae. In contrast to the pagan deities, whose characters tended to be intrinsically ambiguous—both good and evil, Janus-faced, variable according to context—the new Christian figures, in official doctrine at least, possessed no such ambiguity and maintained solid characters definitely aligned with good or evil. For the core drama of Christianity, like that of Judaism (and its seminal Persian relative, the prototypically dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism), centered on the historical confrontation between the primeval opposing principles of good and evil. And ultimately Christianity’s dualism of good and evil, God and Satan, was a derivation of its final monism, since Satan’s existence was finally contingent upon God, supreme Creator and Lord of all.
Compared with the pagan outlook, the Christian world view was still structured by a transcendent principle, but it was now a decisively monolithic structure, absolutely governed by one God. Among the Greeks, Plato had been one of the most monotheistic, yet even for him “God” and “the gods” were often interchangeable. For Christians, there was no such ambiguity. The transcendent was still primary, as with Plato, but no longer pluralistic. The Ideas were derivative, and the gods anathema.
Despite the influence of Platonism and Augustine’s intellectuality, the Christian approach to truth was substantially different from that of the classical philosophers. Certainly reason played a role in Christian spirituality, for, as Clement emphasized, it was by virtue of man’s reason that he was capable of receiving the revealed Logos. Human reason was itself the gift of God’s original creation, in which the Logos was agent of the creative principle. And it was Christianity’s superior welding of intellect and cult, compared with paganism’s more ambivalent dichotomy, that played such a crucial role in Christianity’s ascendance in the late classical era. Yet in contrast to the Greeks’ philosophical program of independent intellectual self-development in relation to the empirical world and to the transcendent sphere of absolute knowledge which ordered that world, the Christian approach centered on the revelation of one person, Jesus Christ, and thus the devout Christian sought enlightenment by reading Holy Scripture. Intellectuality alone was not sufficient to grasp cosmic truth, as it had been for many Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, not even if supplemented by the moral purity stressed by Plato or Plotinus. In the Christian understanding, the pivotal role was played by faith—the soul’s active, freely willed embrace of Christ’s revealed truth, with man’s commitment of belief and trust working in mysterious interaction with God’s freely bestowed grace. For Christianity proclaimed a personal relation to the transcendent. The Logos was not just an impersonal Mind, but a divinely personal Word, an act of love by God, revealing to all the numinous essence of man and cosmos. The Logos was God’s saving Word; to believe was to be saved.
Hence faith was the primary means, and reason a distant second, for comprehending the deeper meaning of things. Augustine experienced his final conversion as an overcoming of his sophisticated intellectual pretensions and a humble embrace of Christian faith. Except for Platonism, the effects of a purely philosophical development of his rational intellect had only increased Augustine’s skepticism concerning the possibility of discovering truth. For Augustine, even Neoplatonic
philosophy, the most religiously profound of pagan thought systems, had its fundamental imperfections and unfulfilling aspects, for nowhere in it could he find that personal intimacy with God he so desired, nor that miraculous revelation that the transcendent Logos had become flesh.6 It was, by contrast, reading the letters of Paul that awakened in Augustine the knowledge he experienced as spiritually liberating. From that point, he held a new strategy for acquiring truth: “I have faith in order to understand.” Here Augustine’s theory of knowledge displayed its Judaic foundation, for right knowledge utterly depended on man’s right relation to God. Without the initial commitment to God, the entire track of intellectual inquiry and comprehension could not avoid being thrown off into disastrously erroneous directions.
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