In my junior year of college I took a course in English literature that made me understand for the first time how painful it can be to question your faith. The course introduced me to poets of the nineteenth century who were struggling with religion. Even though I was a deeply committed Christian at the time, I became obsessed with the work of the great Victorian poet of doubt, Matthew Arnold. Nowhere is Arnold’s struggle expressed more succinctly and movingly than in that most famous of nineteenth-century poems, “Dover Beach.” The poem recalls a brief moment from Arnold’s honeymoon in 1851. While standing by an open window, overlooking the cliffs of Dover, Arnold takes in the shoreline below, mesmerized by the sights and sounds of the sea as the tide goes out:
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
He asks his bride to join him at the window to enjoy the sweet night air and to look down where the waves break upon the beach:
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
This is the sound, he notes, that Sophocles described many centuries before, in his play Antigone—a sound that made the Greek dramatist think of the “turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery.” The sound gives Arnold a thought as well, but one quite different and particularly attuned to his age. For Arnold the retreating sea is a sad metaphor for the Christian faith, ebbing from his world and leaving a naked shoreline in its wake.
There was a time, he wistfully recalls, when the world was comfortably filled to the full with faith:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But that sea too is now retreating, and one can hear the sucking sound as it pulls back from the shore:
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
For Arnold, the modern, educated person no longer has the comforts of religion, the presence of an all-powerful and loving divinity, or the redemption provided by a Son of God who has come into the world to save those who are lost. In the void left by the withdrawal of the Christian faith, all that remains is a confusing and chaotic emptiness, filled only in part by the presence of others, the people we love and cherish who can join us through the uncertainties, pains, and anxieties of life. And so he concludes his poem:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Here is a world of profound and disastrous mayhem and confusion— a struggle of armies fighting to the death, in the dark, with no joy, peace, or certainty. In this void we have only are our friends, companions, and loves: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.”
“Dover Beach,” and other poems of its era, resonated with me as a young college student because I was beginning to move through my own nineteenth century. In my liberal arts education I had begun learning about the geological and biological sciences, philosophy, critical thinking, and intellectual history—all of which posed problems for my faith, much as they had for the intellectuals of Arnold’s era. And I too found my emerging doubts deeply disturbing.
Now, forty years later, I have a different perspective on these nineteenth-century struggles. Rather than experiencing them personally as a Christian, I look on them as a historian specializing in the study of religion. Even though I myself am no long at sea, I can empathize with those who have been racked with doubt and uncertainty, forced to reconsider and even abandon their faith, not simply since the rise of modernity but throughout history.
In the first four Christian centuries, the religions of the Roman Empire came under assault by those proposing a new faith, declaring that only the worship of the god of Jesus could be considered true religion. As Christianity spread, it destroyed the other religions in its wake, religions that had been practiced for millennia and that were simply assumed, everywhere and by everyone, to be good and true. But Christians insisted they were evil and false. For those reluctant to accept these claims—or even those unsure of what to believe—this transition was no less agonizing than that of Victorians living centuries later.
The Christian revolution proved far more massive and its triumph far more enduring than the skepticism that emerged as a counterforce in the nineteenth century. Even though many Victorians experienced radical doubt, or left the faith altogether, the Christian tradition did not disappear. There are still two billion Christians in the world. By way of contrast, in antiquity, when Christianity succeeded in taking over the Roman Empire, any pagan religions left in its wake were merely isolated and scattered vestiges of ancient “superstition.”
The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen. Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did. We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it. There could never have been a Matthew Arnold. Or any of the Victorian poets. Or any of the other authors of our canon: no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Chaucer. We would have had none of our revered artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, or Rembrandt. And none of our brilliant composers: Mozart, Handel, or Bach. To be sure, we would have had other Miltons, Michelangelos, and Mozarts in their places, and it is impossible to know whether these would have been better or worse. But they would have been incalculably different.
By conquering the Roman world, and then the entire West, Christianity not only gave rise to a vast and awe-inspiring set of cultural artifacts; it also changed the way people look at the world and choose to live in it. Modern sensitivities, values, and ethics have all been radically affected by the Christian tradition. This is true for almost all who live in the West, whether they claim allegiance to Christianity, to some other religious tradition, or to none at all. Before the triumph of Christianity, the Roman Empire was phenomenally diverse, but its inhabitants shared a number of cultural and ethical assumptions. If one word could encapsulate the common social, political, and personal ethic of the time, it would be “dominance.”
In a culture of dominance, those with power are expected to assert their will over those who are weaker. Rulers are to dominate their subjects, patrons their clients, masters their slaves, men their women. This ideology was not merely a cynical grab for power or a conscious mode of oppression. It was the commonsense, millennia-old view that virtually everyone accepted and shared, including the weak and marginalized.
This ideology affected both social relations and governmental policy. It made slavery a virtually unquestioned institution promoting the good of society; it made the male head of the household a sovereign despot over all those under him; it made wars of conquest, and the slaughter they entailed, natural and sensible for the well-being of the valued part of the human race (that is, those invested with power).
With such an ideology one would not expect to find governmental welfare programs to assist weaker members of society: the poor, homeless, hungry, or oppressed. One would not expect to find hospitals to assist the sick, injured, or dying. One would not expect to find private institutions of charity designed to help those in need.
The Roman world did not have such things. Christians, however, advocated a different ideology. Leaders of the Christian church preached and urged an ethic of love and service. One person was not more important than another. All were on the same footing before God: the master was no more significant than the slave, the patron than the client, the husband than the wife, the powerful than the weak, or the robust than the diseased. Whether those Christian ideals worked themselves out in practice is another question. Christians sometimes—indeed, many times—spectacularly failed to match their pious sentiments with concrete actions, or, even more, acted in ways contrary to their stated ideals. But the ideals were nonetheless ensconced in their tradition—widely and publicly proclaimed by the leaders of the movement—in ways not extensively found elsewhere in Roman society.
As Christians came to occupy positions of power, these ideals made their way into people’s social lives, into private institutions meant to encapsulate them, and into governmental policy. The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized became a distinctively Christian concern. Without the conquest of Christianity, we may well never have had institutionalized welfare for the poor or organized health care for the sick. Billions of people may never have embraced the idea that society should serve the marginalized or be concerned with the well-being of the needy, values that most of us in the West have simply assumed are “human” values.
This is not to say that Judaism, the religion from which Christianity emerged, was any less concerned with the obligations to “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But neither Judaism nor, needless to say, any of the other great religions of the world took over the empire and became the dominant religion of the West. It was Christianity that became dominant and, once dominant, advocated an ideology not of dominance but of love and service. This affected the history of the West in ways that simply cannot be calculated.
But there was no reason this cultural shift had to happen, no historical necessity that Christianity would, in effect, destroy the pagan religions of the Roman Empire and establish itself as the supreme religion and ascendant political and cultural power of its world. That is why the question I address in this book is so important. Why did this new faith take over the Roman world, leading to the Christianization of the West? It is obviously not a matter of purely antiquarian interest, relevant only to academic historians. What question could be more important for anyone interested in history, culture, or society?
To be more specific: How did a small handful of the followers of Jesus come to convert an unwilling empire? According to the New Testament, some days after Jesus’s crucifixion, eleven of his male followers and several women came to believe he had been raised from the dead. Before four centuries had passed, these twenty or so lower-class, illiterate Jews from rural Galilee had become a church of some thirty million. How does a religion gain thirty million adherents in three hundred years?
As I give lectures around the country on a variety of topics related to early Christianity, this is the question I hear more than any other. The answers people suggest are wide-ranging. Many committed Christians appeal directly to divine providence. God did it. God guided history so the world would become Christian. I respect those who have this opinion, but I have one very big problem with it. If God wanted the world to become Christian, why hasn’t the world become Christian? If God wanted the masses to convert, why are most of the masses still not converted? Moreover, just in historical terms, if God made the Roman Empire Christian, why did it take so long? And why was the job never completed? Why did non-Christian religions continue to exist at all? Why are they still in the majority today?
By far the most common secular answer I hear is that the Roman Empire became Christian because the emperor Constantine converted to the faith. Constantine was the sole ruler of the empire in the first part of the fourth century. Early in his reign he turned from traditional “pagan” religions to become a follower of Christ. After that, masses of people began to convert as Christianity went from being a persecuted minority to being the religion of most-favored status, and eventually the religion of Rome. So it was all about Constantine, right?
Until recently, that is what I myself thought. But I no longer think so. On the contrary: I think Christianity may well have succeeded even if Constantine had not converted. That will be one of the theses of this book.
Still, it cannot be disputed that, after Constantine’s conversion, masses of people came to embrace the Christian faith. Not absolutely everyone. And not immediately after Constantine did so. Indeed, not even a century after Constantine’s death. But eventually Christianity became the religion of the multitudes, and the Roman pagan religions they had formerly practiced more or less disappeared or, in a few instances, went underground. For those supporting the Christian cause, this has always been considered a real triumph.
I will not, however, be writing this book in a triumphalist vein. That is to say, I will not be celebrating the rise and eventual domination of Christianity, claiming it was inherently superior or even necessarily a very good thing. On the other hand, I do not want to claim it was bad either. Ultimately good or ultimately bad: as a historian I will remain neutral on these kinds of value judgments—in part, this is because the triumph of Christianity also entailed losses, especially for the devoted followers of other religious practices. Whenever one group wins a struggle, others lose. Those of us with historical interests need to consider both winners and losers.
And so, before detailing the remarkable events that led to the triumph of Christianity, I want to pause to reflect on loss.
Nowhere in modern times have the losses occasioned by clashes of religions and cultures crystallized more dramatically than in the city of Palmyra, Syria, where, in 2015, representatives of ISIS captured the city, executed a number of its inhabitants, destroyed archaeological remains, and ravaged its antiquities, torturing and beheading their chief conservator. Nothing of equal savagery has ever affected the site. But this is not the first time Palmyra endured an assault by religious fanatics who found its sacred temples and the holy objects they contained objectionable. For that we need to turn the clock back seventeen hundred years.
The ancient city of Palmyra lay to the northeast of Damascus, almost exactly midway between the Mediterranean in the west and the Euphrates in the east. Originally a caravan oasis, it became a center of transport and commerce, an obvious stopping point at the crossroads between Rome and Persia.
As it grew in size and economic importance, Palmyra attracted the attention of Mediterranean powers from the Greeks in the fourth century BCE to the Romans later on. Assaulted by Mark Antony in 41 BCE, it was eventually incorporated into the empire under Tiberius (emperor 14–37 CE). Two and half centuries later it established its independence as a breakaway state, ruled most famously by Queen Zenobia until its reconquest by the Roman emperor Aurelian in 272 CE. Taking Zenobia captive for his triumph back in Rome, Aurelian eventually ordered the city’s destruction. Although partially rebuilt, it was never again to return to its former glory. Its magnificent private and public structures stood for centuries, isolated in the Syrian desert.
The first recorded instance of specifically religious intolerance leading to the destruction of Palmyra’s antiquities occurred at the end of the fourth century. The Roman imperial throne was occupied at the time by Theodosius I (ruled 379–95 CE), a passionately committed Christian determined to establish Christianity as the official religion of the empire. Theodosius was not the first Christian emperor. That, as I have indicated, was Constantine (ruled 306–37 CE). And Theodosius was not the first Christian emperor to order the destruction of pagan temples. That was Constantine’s son Constantius II (ruled 337–61 CE). But Theodosius was the first to legislate Christianity as the one legitimate religion and to order a general cessation of pagan practices. The enforcement of Theodosius’s policies was spotty at best, but it did affect Palmyra and at least one of its most glorious sacred shrines, the temple of Allat, the Syrian pagan goddess.1
Allat was worshiped by nomads throughout the region and eventually came to be identified as the Greek goddess Athena. An archaeological team from Poland excavated the ruins of her temple in the spring seasons of 1975 and 1976. Inscriptions discovered at the site, along with coins, pottery, and a severely mutilated statue of the divinity, allowed these experts to write the history of the sanctuary. Built in the middle of the second century CE, the sanctuary stood for over two hundred years, until being destroyed sometime in the 380s. It did not perish from natural causes, such as an earthquake or storm. That much is clear from the remains of the cult statue, whose facial figures had been intentionally mutilated. As the archaeological report notes, this kind of mutilation “suggests that it was done by a man of set purpose rather than by brute forces of nature.”2
We know of numerous other statue mutilations around the empire from about the same time. They were not perpetrated by thoughtless, godless hordes but by committed Christians with clear intentions. Statues of pagan deities often had their eyes, noses, ears, mouths, hands, and genitals removed. This was a religious statement. The gods of the pagans were nothing but stone or wood. They could not see, smell, hear, speak, or act. They were useless, lifeless, and dead. The Christians were out to prove it.3
The date established for the destruction of the temple of Allat is particularly telling. It coincides with some of the most virulent antireligious legislation the ancient world had ever seen. From 381 to 392 CE Theodosius issued laws forbidding pagan sacrifice and ordering the closing of pagan temples. This legislation—like most legislation throughout the history of the Roman Empire—was inefficiently administered. The Roman state simply had no apparatus for empire-wide enforcement of the imperial will. But the legislation that did issue forth was taken seriously in some places, leading to regional destructions of temples and pagan cult objects, including some of the great gold, bronze, and stone statuary of the empire.
The best-known acts of enforcement involved one of the highest-ranking officials in Theodosius’s administration, the praetorian prefect Maternus Cynegius. Like Theodosius, Cynegius was a deeply committed and zealous Christian. In 385 CE he undertook a tour of the eastern provinces to carry out Theodosius’s anti-pagan policies. In the words of one modern archaeologist, this tour led to an “unprecedented devastation of the most admired objects of pagan sacred architecture and art.”4 Cynegius spent considerable time in Syria, and with the backing of local Christian leaders, destroyed the important Temple of Zeus in the city of Apamea.
There is nothing to suggest that Cynegius was personally active in Palmyra. But his presence in the region motivated local Christians to send in wrecking crews of their own. That is what happened with the temple of Allat. It was a local job, inspired, rather than carried out, by imperial authorization. It is impossible to say whether the destruction was sponsored by the leaders of the Christian communities in the city or was instead the work of a marauding mob of fervent Christians. We do know that, several decades later, Christian leaders converted other pagan temples into Christian churches, including the oldest and finest pagan sanctuary of the city, the famous temple of Bel whose remains were destroyed by ISIS in 2015.
We grieve over such senseless—or, rather, highly intentional—destruction of antiquities in part because we see in remnants of ancient culture the treasured history of our own past. And so we are dismayed, or even incensed, to hear a recent archaeologist declare: “There can be no doubt on the basis of the written and archaeological evidence that the Christianization of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe involved the destruction of works of art on a scale never before seen in human history.”5
The ancient world did not share our modern passion for the material remains of earlier millennia. The agony of that era’s destruction was even more profound, since these temples and statues were still then part of a living, vibrant culture. The very core of people’s personal and spiritual lives was under assault, mocked, mutilated, and destroyed before their very eyes.
I do not want to undervalue the enormous benefits derived from the triumph of Christianity. Christians and non-Christians can surely agree that the cultural glories we have inherited from the Christian tradition—the art, music, literature, and philosophy—justify our gratitude and awe. But I begin with the temple of Allat in Palmyra to emphasize my point: every triumph is also a defeat, and the ecstasies of those who prevail are matched by the agonies of those who lose.6