Rome

by Woolf, Greg

  XVI

  A CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

  You asked me to write an answer to the lying distortions spouted by those people who are strangers to the City of God. They are called pagans after the rustic crossroads and villages (pagi) they inhabit and foreigners (gentiles) because all they know about are earthly matters. They have no interest in things to come: as for the past they have either forgotten it or are simply ignorant. Nevertheless they still claim that the present day is unusually beset with disasters for this one reason alone, that men believe in Christ and worship God, while idols received less and less cult.

  (Orosius, History against the Pagans Preface 9)

  The Rise of Religions

  Once upon a time, the Romans felt they enjoyed the special favour of their gods. Those gods were in a sense their fellow citizens. Their worship in the public rituals—the sacra publica —of Rome was the organizing centre of the religious lives and identities of the Romans. How this cohered with the public cults of the other communities of the empire was, as I have explained already, a little unclear. Yet the many polytheistic religious systems of the classical Mediterranean were not so different, and the worship of the emperors figured in them all, one way or another. Across the empire, the wealthy built temples, took on priesthoods, and celebrated festivals: all seemed to prosper.

  Abandoning this pact with heaven was, in the eyes of many, an act of lunacy that had brought about the collapse of Rome’s fortunes. Augustine, writing The City of God after the first sack of Rome in 410, felt he had to answer these charges. Roman success owed nothing to the cult of the gods, he argued, since there were disasters even in the period of pagan worship. Religious piety brought rewards in the next world, not this one. Earthly disasters like the sack of Rome were irrelevant. Can Augustine have really thought this? He wrote The City of God as Bishop of the African city of Hippo Regius, but in his earlier career he had been a professor at Carthage, had then been head-hunted by the senatorial prefect of Rome for a more prestigious position there, then finally went to the western imperial capital at Milan. Only in Milan had God claimed him, and brought him back via communities of contemplative scholars to lead the Christians of this small town in North Africa, not so far from the even smaller town where he had been brought up. Even so he cannot have failed to be shocked by the events of the early fifth century. Africa was far from the collapsing northern frontier, and the world Augustine had been born into, where he had studied and taught, had been thoroughly Roman. The move to Rome had attracted him because of the reputed quiet of the students compared to those of Carthage. At Milan he must have become more aware of the deteriorating situation, but the fall of Rome shocked everyone. The Vandals were already in Spain as he wrote: before his death they would cross the Straits of Gibraltar and begin the short war that would result in their capture of Carthage. Among the refugees from Spain who fled to Africa was Orosius, who became a pupil of Augustine and in 417 wrote at his suggestion another response, a seven-volume History against the Pagans. The preface states that pagans in their ignorance had claimed that there were now more calamities and disasters because men believed in Christ and worshipped God and increasingly neglected the worship of idols. Orosius set out to demonstrate the many disasters of earlier days. The result is a horrible history of the world, six books relating events up to the birth of Christ, the last offering a fascinating narration of Roman history, in which acts of imperial tyranny and military disasters are ameliorated by the power of God as the number of Christians in the empire grows.

  The gap between traditional world views and Christian history is obvious enough. But it is symptomatic of a much wider phenomenon. Christians did not only disagree with others about the reason for the current crisis; they also disagreed about the relationship of the cosmological with the political and social order of things. Traditionally ritual action had been mostly constrained within existing social entities, such as the family, the city, the army unit, or the empire itself. Christian communities were composed of believers who might have little in common except their belief, and who might be separated by that belief from other members of their families, cities, and so on. Nor were Christians alone in this. Manichaeans, Jews, and several other groups had also come to think of their religious identities as something separable from other aspects of society. Augustine expressed this more clearly than most in his distinction between the temporal Earthly City and the City of God, but the idea had become widespread. It is this idea from which has grown our notion of ‘religions’ as separate entities, rather than of religious action as just one dimension of broader social life. The reason the Christians were able to withstand the disaster of the sack of Rome was that this idea of religion had become deeply entrenched. The great history of the Roman Empire, in other words, had been taken over by another even grander narrative, the rise of religions.

  The development of religions, in the plural, as bounded entities with their own institutions and membership, as things that can be contrasted to citizenship, class, or kinship, is relatively new in world history. Humans have had ritual much longer: it probably originated with homo sapiens sapiens between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, and is one of the few things that genuinely separates us from all other animal species, some of which use tools, have some kind of language, and live in complex societies. Humans alone bury their dead, make art and music and dance, and perform rituals.1 Until recently all this ritual was closely woven into everyday life. It is more or less impossible to separate Athenian or Roman religious identity from their wider senses of belonging. It follows that conversion is more or less meaningless in antiquity, unless as one component of changing one’s citizenship.2 No Greek or Roman words correspond to our notion of religion. Indeed specialists in the history of religion see that concept as evolving only gradually. Our modern concept of a religion as an organized body with members, norms, specific beliefs and practices, and a sense of exclusive adherence—that one must choose which one religion to belong to— perhaps only became generalized in the nineteenth century.3

  The first signs of the separating out of religion as a distinct sphere occur during classical antiquity. Euripides’ Bacchae, written at the very end of the fifth century BC, dramatizes the disruptive power of a religious movement that challenged the religious authority of leading members of the city and might divide families and communities down the middle. This Dionysiac cult represents one of several origins of religious pluralism. Rome experienced its own panic about Bacchanales in 186 BC. Rumours circulated, as they later did in the case of Christianity, about strange nocturnal rituals. But it is clear that what really shocked was the lack of respect for social boundaries, and the implicit challenge to existing religious authority, which in most places was concentrated in the hands of the elite.

  Groups whose members were united primarily by religion became more widespread in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.4 Dionysus/Bacchus was an ancient god whose name appears in texts from the Greek Bronze Age, and who had a central role in Athenian public religion signified by the festival of the Greater Dionysia, the major occasion for dramatic performances. It was not the god himself, but the form of worship and association represented by Bacchism that shocked. Other groups began as the cults of migrant populations and then attracted worshippers from their host communities. The Egyptian goddess Isis, in a Hellenized form, became popular around the Mediterranean in this way. So did the Baalim of various Syrian cities, the Great Mother of the Gods from Pessinus in Asia Minor, and the god of the Jews. Populations moved about within the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires for all sorts of reasons: traders, slaves, soldiers, colonists, and missionaries moved around the urban system, bringing their gods with them.5 Some, like Magna Mater, were given public cult in some cities. Others were always marginal. Religion also had roots in Greek society. Mystery cults proliferated, many imitating the original Mysteries of Demeter and the Maiden at Eleusis, once the main cult of an independent city but swallowed up into Athenian religi
on in the archaic age. Pilgrims came to be initiated here, and in Samothrace and in a series of other centres, and some more mobile groups, including worshippers of Cybele and Mithras, developed their own Mysteries.6 Philosophical sects provided yet another model of a group with a single name—Epicureans, Stoics, Cyrenaics—often a charismatic founder, and authoritative texts, a group one could join or leave as one chose. From the first century AD Jews too were identifying different traditions, and at least one, the Qumran community known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, looks very much like a religion. Sanctuaries attracted pilgrims from across the world.7 Yet often we see cults that had originated in specific places being transformed into a more mobile form. Examples of this move from ‘locative’ to ‘utopian’ forms include the creation of Hellenized versions of Egyptian deities like Isis and Serapis, the growth of rabbinical traditions within Judaism, and of course Christianity. Almost all these groups were periodically focuses of intra-communal tension: at various points the authorities in Rome turned their fire on Bacchanales, Isis worshippers, Jews, astrologers, and Christians. Other cities often did the same. Yet religious groups of this kind continued to thrive. Mithraism and Manichaeanism both represent religions created from scratch, drawing on symbols, rituals, and divine names from older traditions but brought together into a completely new combination, well suited to the social environments within which they sought recruits. We can see some signs of competition for worshippers, or at least for the gifts they might bring. Perhaps the clearest indication is the way a successful feature of one cult would be taken up by another. The ancient Mysteries of Eleusis were copied at Samothrace, by the worshippers of Cybele, Mithras, and other groups; standard Greek anthropomorphic imagery was adopted by cult after cult; astrology was incorporated by almost every religious tradition from Judaism and Mithraism to the worship of Egyptian and German deities; and male gods were equated everywhere with Jupiter the Greatest and Best. Another sign of competition was the efforts clearly made to retain the attention of worshippers. Mithraists were invited to proceed through a series of grades; initiates at Eleusis had to return for a second initiation in a subsequent year; the ritual of the Taurobolium, a bull sacrifice associated with Cybele, had to be repeated every twenty years; while priests at healing sanctuaries and oracles advertised their successes and encouraged return visits.

  Perhaps claims to a monopoly on salvation emerged from this context. The idea that a person might focus in a personal way on one god within a polytheist pantheon was an old one, and one exploited by Romans from the Republican period on.8 Sulla cultivated the idea he was a special favourite of Venus, Augustus claimed the favour of Apollo, Vespasian was assisted in his coup by Isis, and so on. Many gods were hailed in dedicatory inscriptions as ‘The Greatest and Best’ or ‘The Most High’.9 Giving one deity a special place is sometimes called henotheism. Some Isaic revelatory texts claim Isis is the ‘true’ name of a goddess also worshipped under other names, including Cybele, Artemis, Venus, and Hecate.

  Early Christianity emerged into this complex religious environment. The exclusive claim, despite its origins in Judaism, was maybe most important as a unique selling point relative to other emergent proto-religions. The Gospels represented the choice to follow Christ as something that might divide families in the most radical way. Luke tells the story of the man who says he will follow Christ once he has buried his father. ‘Let the dead bury their own dead,’ replies Christ.10 There are several stories of this kind. Even earlier Paul had declared that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.11 What we are observing in these texts is the assertion of a new social identity based solely on religious membership, and one that cuts across the most fundamental social boundaries of antiquity. Christians were not the only ones to assert that sort of identity. Augustine was raised a Christian, but for a while joined the Manichaeans, whose founder created a new religion by drawing on Christian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and other traditions. Manichaean missionaries were sent to North Africa, India, and ultimately central Asia and China too. Then there are the rather mysterious Mandaeans of Mesopotamia, whose rituals and texts have been formed in the course of a long dialogue with Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam. Inevitably traditional religious practice came to be reinterpreted as the practice of a rival—and false—religion, which was sometimes termed Hellenism and sometimes paganism.

  The Rise of Christianity

  Modern estimates of the growth of Christianity stress the very small scale of its beginnings. It is difficult to imagine what life was like for the first generation of Christians: they had no scriptures, most had been born Jews, and perhaps many still thought of themselves as Jews. They numbered in the low thousands and were widely scattered, mostly among the larger cities of the eastern Mediterranean world.12 Paul’s Letters and the account of his travels in Acts give some sense of how these groups kept in touch and maintained some sort of cohesion. But there are huge gaps in our knowledge. By late antiquity there were major Christian communities in North Africa and Egypt, but we know nothing of their origins. The emergence of a greater concern with orthodoxy and discipline in later centuries produced highly edited accounts of the early Church.

  Christianity emerged from these shadows during the second century AD. Christian writers and Jewish leaders, for different motives and certainly not in collusion, created a sharper divide between Christianity and Judaism, one that would be entrenched in the fourth century with the aid of imperial muscle.13 House churches were drawn together in each city under the leadership of one bishop. The number of Christians grew exponentially. Many must have felt themselves surrounded by converts and part of a mushrooming movement. Yet absolute numbers remained small: non-Christian texts hardly remark on the existence of Christians before the year 200. From the later second century, we have the first evidence for Christian communities in North Africa and in Gaul. Most seem to have used Greek, suggesting their closest connections remained with the eastern Mediterranean. Something close to our notion of the New Testament had emerged by this period too, although the inclusion of some books, such as Revelation, remained controversial. Latin translations of Christian scripture began to circulate by the middle of the second century, along with apologetic works and the first attempts to police the boundaries of the Church. Heretics were those who held false beliefs, like the Marcionites who rejected the Jewish scriptures in their entirety. Schismatics had the right beliefs but rejected the authority of the proper authorities.

  The rise of episcopal authority was intimately connected with the rise of orthodoxy. The life and work of Irenaeus of Lyon offers an early example. Eusebius, in his History of the Church written shortly after Constantine’s conversion, states that he was a pupil of the martyred Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, himself believed to be a disciple of the apostle John. But that kind of genealogy was a conventional way of establishing authority. At some point Irenaeus appears as a priest in the Greek-speaking Christian community of Lyon, around the time of a local persecution recorded by Eusebius and dated to the reign of Marcus Aurelius. That community sent Irenaeus as an envoy to the Bishop of Rome prompted by their concerns about the news that Montanus, a priest in central Anatolia, claimed to have received a New Prophecy from God. Montanism was just the first heresy Irenaeus set out to refute. As Bishop of Lyon, he wrote copious works in Greek, among them a defence of the canonical status of the four Gospels, and one of the earliest heresiologies, or catalogues of heresies. The immediate inspiration for that work was the arrival in Lyon of a group of Greek merchants spreading the ideas of Valentinus, whose blend of Christian thought and mystical revelation produced an early form of what is now termed Gnosticism. But for Irenaeus the error could be traced all the way back to the magician Simon Magus, who appears in Acts, thus creating a genealogy of error that could be set against the genealogy of orthodox teaching. Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome, also opposed Valentinianism, using some of Irenaeus’ writings to do so. Both the campaign against Montanism
and that against the teachings of Valentinus illustrate the interconnectedness of early Christian communities across the Mediterranean. Within that network new ideas circulated rapidly, carried by both missionaries and texts. From late antiquity several large bodies of episcopal letters survive concerned above all to maintain a united front against schism and heresy. The organization of the Church was generated from below, its institutions and higher-level authorities a creation of those obsessed by unity. Bishops closed ranks around scripture, and opposed the threats to their authority posed by new revelations and charismatic prophets.14

  Christian communities devoted enormous energy to this activity, but it was largely esoteric. Non-Christians probably knew relatively little about their actual beliefs or concerns, just as many were ignorant about the Jews in their midst. A small number of local persecutions are recorded. Most are known through the writings of Eusebius and his early fourth-century contemporaries, who were keen to gather accounts of the deeds and deaths of martyrs. Roman governors and emperors did not extend to Christians the protection they sometimes gave Jewish communities in similar circumstances. Letters between Pliny while governor of Bithynia-Pontus and Trajan indicate that some kind of ban existed—the origins are obscure—but emperors were not keen to enforce it. Persecution was probably less common than simple unpopularity. Until the early third century Christians were perhaps a rather introverted group, if a growing one. Few scholars believe more than 10 per cent of the empire’s subjects were Christians in Constantine’s day and the figures could easily be even smaller. Very few Christians of high social status are known before the third century AD.