This is quite simply not true. Empires of tens of millions of people do not abandon religions that they have observed for over a millennium almost overnight without at least some disturbance. The Roman Empire was no different. Many did convert willingly and happily to Christianity (whatever “conversion” meant in this period). But many did not. At the moment when Constantine had supposedly seen that flaming cross, the vast majority of the empire was not Christian. Precise numbers are very hard to judge but Christians at that moment were very much in the minority. It has been estimated they made up as little as between seven and ten percent of the empire’s total population. That means that only about four to six million people out of a population of roughly sixty million were Christian. That left over fifty million to be converted. The idea that everyone in the empire celebrated the fact that a Christian now wore the imperial purple is nonsense.31
Were these tens of millions of people singing and dancing in the streets and looking at each other with smiling faces and shining eyes as their temples were smashed? It seems unlikely. Yet historians have shown a magnificent indifference to their reactions. History is written by the winners and the Christian victory was absolute. The Church dominated European thought for more than a millennium. Until 1871 the University of Oxford required that all students were members of the Church of England, while in most cases to be given a fellowship in an Oxford college one had to be ordained.32 Cambridge was a little freer—but not much. This was not an atmosphere conducive to criticism of Christianity and indeed, in English histories, there was little. For centuries, the vast majority of historians unquestioningly took up the Christian cause and routinely and derogatorily referred to non-Christians as “pagans,” “heathens” and “idolaters.” The practices and sufferings of these “pagans” were routinely belittled, trivialized or—more often—entirely ignored. As one modern scholar has observed: “The story of early Christian history has been told almost wholly on the basis of Christian sources.”33
But look for a moment at the spread of Christianity from the other side and what emerges is a far less easy picture. It is neither triumphant, nor joyful. It is a story of forced conversion and government persecution. It is a story in which great works of art are destroyed, buildings are defaced and liberties are removed. It is a story in which those who refused to convert were outlawed and, as the persecution deepened, were hounded and even executed by zealous authorities. The brief and sporadic Roman persecutions of Christians would pale in comparison to what the Christians inflicted on others—not to mention on their own heretics. If this seems implausible, then consider one simple fact. In the world today, there are over two billion Christians. There is not one single, true “pagan.” Roman persecutions left a Christianity vigorous enough not only to survive but to thrive and to take control of an empire. By contrast, by the time the Christian persecutions had finally finished, an entire religious system had been all but wiped from the face of the earth.34
Chapter Eight
* * *
How to Destroy a Demon
He completely demolished the temple belonging to the false religion and reduced all the altars and statues to dust.
—Life of St. Martin, 14.6
THE PAGES OF HISTORY might overlook this destruction, but stone is less forgetful. Go to Room 18 in the British Museum in London and you will find yourself in front of the Parthenon Marbles, taken from Greece by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century. The astonishingly lifelike statues are, today, in a sorry state: many are mutilated or missing limbs. This, it is often assumed, was the fault of Lord Elgin’s clumsy workmen or fighting during the Ottoman occupation. And indeed some of this was—but not all. Much was the work of zealous Christians who set about the temple with blunt instruments, attacking the “demonic” gods, mutilating some of the finest statuary Greece had ever produced.1
The East Pediment fared particularly badly. Hands, feet, even whole limbs have gone—almost certainly smashed off by Christians trying to incapacitate the demons within. The vast majority of the gods have been decapitated—again, almost certainly the work of Christians. The great central figures of the Pediment, that would have shown the birth of Athena, were the most sacred—and thus to the Christians the most demonic. They therefore suffered most: it is likely that they were pushed off the Pediment and smashed on the ground below, their fragmented remains ground down and used for mortar for a Christian church.
The same tale is told by objects in museums and archaeological sites across the world. Near the Marbles in the same museum is a basalt bust of Germanicus. Two blows have hacked off his nose and a cross has been cut in his forehead. In Athens, a larger-than-life statue of Aphrodite has been disfigured by a crude cross carved on her brow; her eyes have been defaced and her nose is missing.2 In Cyrene, the eyes have been gouged out of a life-sized bust in a sanctuary of Demeter, and the nose removed; in Tuscany a slender statue of Bacchus has been decapitated. In the Sparta Archaeological Museum, a colossal statue of the goddess Hera looks blindly out, her eyes disfigured by crosses. A beautiful statue of Apollo from Salamis has been castrated and then struck, hard, in the face, shearing off the god’s nose. Across his neck are scars indicating that Christians attempted to decapitate him but failed. In Palmyra Museum there stood, at least until the city’s recent occupation by the Islamic State, the mutilated and reconstructed figure of the once-great Athena that had dominated a temple there. A huge dent in her once-handsome face was all that remained when her nose was smashed off. A recent book on the Christian destruction of statues focusing just on Egypt and the Near East runs to almost three hundred pages, dense with pictures of mutilation.3
But while some evidence remains, much has gone entirely. The point of destruction is, after all, that it destroys. If effective, it more than merely defaces something. It obliterates all evidence that the object ever existed. We will never know quite how much was wiped out. Many statues were pulverized, shattered, scattered, burned and melted into absence. Tiny piles of charred ivory and gold are all that remain of some. Others were so well disposed of that they will probably not be found: they were thrown into rivers, sewers and wells, never to be seen again. The destruction of other sacred objects is, because of the nature of the object, all but impossible to detect. The sacred groves of the old gods for example, those tranquil natural shrines like the one Pliny had so admired, were set about with axes and their ancient trees hacked down. Pictures, books, ribbons even, could be seen as the work of the devil and thus removed and destroyed. Certain sorts of musical instruments were censured and stopped: as one Christian preacher boasted, the Christians smashed the flutes of the “musicians of the demons” to pieces. Some of the demolition, such as that of the temple of Serapis, was so terrible that several authors recorded it. Other moments of vandalism were immortalized in glowing terms in Christian hagiographies. Though these are the exceptions. Far more violence was buried by silence.
Nevertheless, where written sources are silent, archaeology can speak volumes. In Egypt, countless chisel blows neatly defaced (in the most literal sense of the term) the images of the gods in the Dendera temple complex on the left bank of the Nile. Divine figures were attacked with tiny hack marks—usually several hundred for each figure. The archaeologist Eberhard Sauer, a specialist in the archaeology of religious hatred, has observed that the closeness of these cuts, and their regularity, hints at blows made with almost frantic rapidity. In Rome, he explains that the axe that mutilated a fresco of the god Mithras was swung with what must have been considerable force. The marks of the hammers, chisels and iron bars on these ancient statues can—a mute Morse—tell archaeologists a great deal. In Palmyra, what remains of the statue of Athena shows that one single, furious sword-blow had been enough to decapitate her. Though often one blow was not felt to be sufficient. In Germany, a statue of the goddess Minerva was smashed into six pieces. Her head has never been found. In France, a relief of Mithras was smashed into more than three hundred pieces.
; Christian writers applauded such destruction—and egged their rulers on to greater acts of violence. One gleefully observed that the Christian emperors now “spit in the faces of dead idols, trample on the lawless rites of demons, and laugh at the old lies.”4 An infamous early text instructed emperors to wash away this “filth” and “take away, yes, calmly take away . . . the adornments of the temples. Let the fire of the mint or the blaze of the smelters melt them down.”5 This was nothing to be ashamed of. The first Commandment could not have been clearer. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” it said. “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them,” it continued, “nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”6 The Greek and Roman temples, no matter how ancient or beautiful, were the homes of false gods and they had to be destroyed. This was not vandalism: it was God’s will. The good Christian had a duty to do nothing less.
The speed with which toleration slipped into intolerance and then downright suppression shocked non-Christian observers. Not long after Constantine had gained control of the whole empire in AD 324, it is said that he forbade any governors who were still pagan from sacrificing or from worshipping idols, thus disbarring non-Christians from moving into the plum positions in the imperial government. Then he went still further, and passed two new laws against what he called these “sanctuaries of falsehood.”7 One law “restricted the pollutions of idolatry . . . so that no one should presume to set up cult-objects, or practise divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all.” The second law, assuming the success of the first, ordered mass building and extension of churches: “as if almost everybody would in future belong to God, once the obstacle of polytheistic madness had been removed.”8
Over the course of the fourth century, in language that was at times hostile to the point of hysterical, legal pressure against the “pagans” increased. In AD 341, Constantine’s son, Emperor Constantius, banned sacrifices. “Superstition,” the law announced, “shall cease; the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished.” Anyone who dared to disobey could look forward to an ominously vague “suitable punishment.” A little later it was ordered that the temples were to be closed. It started to feel dangerous to even visit them. The emperor Julian later acerbically observed that while Constantine robbed the temples his sons overthrew them. In AD 356, it became illegal—on pain of death—to worship images.9 The law adopted a tone of hitherto unseen aggression. “Pagans” began to be described as “madmen” whose beliefs must be “completely eradicated,” while sacrifice was a “sin” and anyone who performed such an evil would be “struck down with the avenging sword.”10
This is not to say that, in the century that followed Constantine’s conversion, there were not periods of quiet; there were. There were pauses, even reversals, in the persecution. Under the reigns of Valentinian I and his brother Valens in the middle of the century, state interference lessened. The reign of the emperor Julian—“the Apostate” as later Christian generations would disparagingly call this non-Christian ruler—was of course another. But Julian’s reign was brief and, just half a century after Constantine, it was already too late to reverse the attrition that had begun. Julian, one Christian would tell his flock, was “but a cloud which will speedily be dispersed.”11 He was right.
By the time Theophilus attacked Serapis the laws were on his side. But many other Christians were so keen to attack the demonic temples that they didn’t wait for legal approval. Decades before the laws of the land permitted them to, zealous Christians began to indulge in acts of violent vandalism against their “pagan” neighbors. The destruction in Syria was particularly savage. Syrian monks—fearless, rootless, fanatical—became infamous both for their intensity and for the violence with which they attacked temples, statues and monuments—and even, it was said, any priests who opposed them. Libanius, the Greek orator from Antioch, was revolted by the destruction that he witnessed. “These people,” he wrote, “hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues, and the overthrow of altars, and the priests must either keep quiet or die . . . So they sweep across the countryside like rivers in spate.”12 Libanius spoke elegiacally of a huge temple on the frontier with Persia, a magnificent building with a beautiful ceiling, in whose cool shadows had stood numerous statues. Now, he said, “it is vanished and gone, to the grief of those who had seen it”—and the grief of those who now never would.13 This temple had been so striking, he said, that there were even those who argued that it was as great as the temple of Serapis—which, he added with an irony not lost on later historians, “I pray may never suffer the same fate.”14
Not only were the monks vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent; they were also, said their critics, phonies. They pretended to adopt lives of austere self-denial but actually they were no better than drunken thugs, a black-robed tribe “who eat more than elephants and, by the quantities of drink they consume, weary those that accompany their drinking with the singing of hymns.” After going on their rampage these men would then, he said, “hide these excesses under an artificially contrived pallor” and pretend to be holy, self-denying monks once again.15 Drunks they might have been but, as Libanius saw, they were ferociously effective. “After demolishing one [temple], they scurry to another, and to a third, and trophy is piled on trophy”—and all this “in contravention of the law.”16
As the century drew to its close, the period of leniency ended. In the 380s and 390s rulings started to be issued with increasing rapidity and ferocity against all non-Christian ritual. In AD 391, the fervently Christian emperor Theodosius passed a formidable law. “No person shall be granted the right to perform sacrifices; no person shall go around the temples; no person shall revere the shrines.” Nor could anyone “with secret wickedness” venerate his household gods, or burn lights to them, or put up wreaths to them, or burn incense to them.17 Then, in 399, a new and more terrible law came. It was announced that “if there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.”18
It has been argued that the laws issued against “pagans” were mere noise: no imperial troops followed the words into the provinces and the sheer number of laws hints at their ineffectiveness. Like a teacher who has to repeatedly tell a class to be quiet, their frequency indicates their impotence—as indeed one law petulantly admits. “We have been impelled,” it huffs, by the “madness of the pagans . . . to repeat the regulations which we have ordered.” But repetition need not necessarily mean that a law was ineffectual; it might also mean that it required clarification.19 These edicts were far more than just words and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. They gave carte blanche to Christians to cleanse the demons from the sinful pagans.
Many were ready and waiting for the chance to do just that. Not always as mindful of Mark 12:31 as they might have been, many Christians declined to love their polytheist neighbors and instead agitated to reduce their temples to rubble. Bishops badgered their rulers for new laws then used their congregations as de facto troops to carry out demolitions.
As the laws became increasingly shrill, the extent of the destruction increased, as too did the openness with which it was done. At some point, probably just before the attack on the temple of Serapis, a bishop named Marcellus became “the first of the bishops to put the edict in force and destroy the shrines in the city committed to his care.”20 Then, in 392, Serapis fell. Almost no event, with the exception of the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410, would resound more loudly through literature of the time.21 Its collapse would not be heard by later centuries: in the newly Christian world this was one tale, one of many, that would be quietly
forgotten.
The attacks were hymned by hagiographies and histories. In fourth-century France, St. Martin, or so the Life of St. Martin proudly records, “set fire to a most ancient and famous shrine” before moving on to a different village and a different temple. Here, he “completely demolished the temple belonging to the false religion and reduced all the altars and statues to dust.”22 Martin was no anomaly. Flushed by his success at the temple of Serapis, Bishop Theophilus went on to demolish numerous shrines in Egypt. Hagiography records such attacks not as dismal or even embarrassing acts of vandalism but as proof of a saint’s virtue. Some of the most famous saints in Western Christianity kicked off their careers—so the stories like to boast—demolishing shrines. Benedict of Nursia, the revered founder of Western monasticism, was also celebrated as a destroyer of antiquities. His first act upon arriving in Monte Cassino, just outside Rome, was to smash an ancient statue of Apollo and destroy the shrine’s altar. He didn’t stop there, but toured the area “pulling down the idols and destroying the groves on the mountain . . . and gave himself no rest until he had uprooted the last remnant of heathenism in those parts.”23 Of course hagiography is not history and one must read such accounts with, at best, caution. But even if they do not tell the whole truth, they certainly reveal a truth—namely that many Christians felt proud, even jubilant, about such destruction.
Farther south, the firebrand preacher John Chrysostom—John “Goldenmouth”—weighed in. This man was so charismatic that crowds of Christians would pack into Antioch’s Great Church to hear him speak, his eyes flashing, then leave as soon as he was finished, “as if,” he observed, with a distinct want of monkish humility, “I were a concert performance.”24 Chrysostom was nothing if not zealous. Hearing that Phoenicia was still “suffering from the madness of the demons’ rites,” he sent violent bands of monks, funded by the faithful women in his congregation, to destroy the shrines in the area. “Thus,” concludes the historian Theodoret, “the remaining shrines of the demons were utterly destroyed.”25 A papyrus fragment shows Bishop Theophilus standing triumphantly over an image of Serapis, Bible in hand, while on the right-hand side monks can be seen attacking the temple. St. Benedict, St. Martin, St. John Chrysostom: the men leading these campaigns of violence were not embarrassing eccentrics but men at the very heart of the Church.
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