Marcus Aurelius

This alerts us to the incontestable fact that the superficial similarities between men like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius on the one hand and the Christian apologists Justin and Tertullian on the other conceal enormous differences. While it is true that the Christian apologists liked to defend themselves in terms taken from Greek philosophy and the Second Sophistic – indeed, Tertullian himself was once a Stoic – on all important points of doctrine the two creeds were poles apart. Stoicism had no time for a transcendent deity, was tougher and harsher (Nietzsche would never have described it as a religion for cowards) and would have found almost viscerally offensive the notions of the incarnation and of human imperfectibility and sin. Christianity, by contrast, rejected the immanent notion of God (except for some puzzling passages in St Paul), elevated faith over reason and spurned the Stoics’ belief in mechanism, determinism, materialism and anti-individualism. Psychologically, Christians had the upper hand, as theirs was a belief more geared to fallible human nature: they linked cosmic love with the person of Jesus, giving the idea a stronger emotional appeal, and, like the devotees of Isis, introduced the concept of miracles to go alongside the notion of design and providential order that they shared with the Stoics.⁵

The Great Fire of Rome, which undoubtedly took place, has been encrusted with powerful anti-Nero propaganda down the centuries, so that it is hard to get at the truth. One is tempted to think that arch-scepticism might have attended this event, just as much as early Christianity, but for a throwaway remark by Pliny the Elder.⁹ Suetonius and Cassius Dio started the rumour that Nero gloatingly played a stringed instrument while Rome went up in flames, but even Tacitus – no friend to Nero – concedes that the emperor was at his country retreat at Anzio.¹⁰ Until recently the combined weight of Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio has been enough to convince most historians that Nero really was the villain of the piece. Recent pyrotechnical and meteorological experiments, as well as archaeological data, open up the possibility that the conflagration was just as much an accident as the infernos in the reign of Vespasian and Titus. The most spectacular piece of revisionism is to the effect that Nero was right after all: the Christians really were the incendiarists. The theory is that a millenarian Christian sect, anticipating the imminent Second Coming, was over-impressed by a prophecy that Rome would fall on the day the dog-star Sirius rose in the sky; and since it rose on 19 July 64, they chose that day to usher in the kingdom of God by fire.¹¹ There are, then, at least four main hypotheses in the field: that Nero sent his men to burn down Rome secretly, instructing them to pretend to be drunkards who started fires accidentally; that he really did behave as in the traditional accounts and openly gutted the city; that the entire conflagration was an accident, and that in firestorm conditions the stone buildings of the aristocrats would not have afforded much more protection than the wooden hovels of the poor; and that the Christians were the true arsonists.12 Of course, a mixed verdict is still possible: it is plausible that Nero got his henchmen to start the blaze, but that the Christians then joined in with gusto, thinking that the Second Coming was at hand.

Apart from a few enigmatic references in Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud,¹³ the Christians then fade from pagan history until the reign of Trajan, although there were executions of individual members of the sect in the reign of Domitian. It would be incorrect to refer to ‘persecution’, since no general pogrom was instituted; what happened was that the emperor targeted a number of influential Christians whom he personally disliked.¹⁴ Matters become clearer in the reign of Trajan, though even here the sceptics tend to deny the authenticity of key documents. Pliny the Younger, appointed in 110 at the age of forty-eight as governor of the troubled province of Bithynia and Pontus (in present-day modern Turkey), found himself deluged with complaints from the local Greek population and wrote to Trajan for guidance, explaining the actions he had already taken. Pleading ignorance of the general rules for punishing Christians, Pliny reported that he had instituted a rough rule-of-thumb. He asked the accused individuals if they were Christians, giving them a chance to recant and warning them that capital punishment lay ahead; if they persisted in their ‘contumacity’ and continued to assert that they were Christians, he ordered them led away to execution. In the case of Christians who were also Roman citizens, he ordered them gazetted for trial in Rome. Those who denied being Christians, whether through wrongful accusation or fear of the consequences, were given a simple test: they were asked to invoke the Olympian gods and make a sacrifice of wine and incense before a statue of Trajan; finally they were asked to revile the name of Christ. Some of the accused claimed that they had once been Christians, but were no longer believers. They reported that the ‘unspeakable acts’ of which they stood accused amounted to no more than meeting regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses to Christ as if to a god, and to pledge themselves to avoid theft, robbery, adultery and the repudiation of honest debt. Pliny ended his letter by asking for further guidance on how to proceed with this ‘wretched cult’.15

Unwittingly, perhaps, Pliny had escalated Pagan–Christian conflict and set a dangerous precedent. The idea of making those accused of Christianity sacrifice to the Roman gods was something seemingly plucked from the air and their refusal was made the core offence. This meant that the penalty for Christianity was almost always death and was inflicted for the name alone. Neither the status of the accused in the Christian community nor any specific action committed by Christians was deemed relevant. Trajan either did not think the issue through or was bored with it, since he did not construe the new creed as a threat to the empire. He therefore endorsed and rubber-stamped Pliny’s actions in the case of those hauled before him, but stressed that Christians were not to be sought out and persecuted.¹⁶ But there were at least two major illogicalities in his judgement. If Christians were accused of specific crimes, the mere fact of their apostasy, which in itself should not have justified exemption for past criminal behaviour, was enough to see them freed. On the other hand, mere abstract advocacy or private belief was being punished by death, simply because Christians would not abjure the name of Christ and were thus deemed ‘contumacious’. Even more spectacular was the second illogicality, as Tertullian pointed out. On the one hand, Christians were to be punished, implying guilt; on the other, they were not to be sought out, implying innocence.¹⁷

Romans notoriously feared political clubs, cabals, any kind of secret society or esoteric group (hetaira) that could serve as a focus for opposition to the regime, which is why Trajan – at first sight oddly – turned down what looks like an innocent request from Pliny as governor of Pontus and Bithynia to form a fire brigade there.²¹ Yet as a reason for hostility to the Christians, this alleged factor fails to convince. Pliny, who dealt with both pressure groups (collegia) and the Christians, never connected the two; moreover, the Christian apologist Tertullian expressly rejected the idea that this was the root cause of Roman persecution.²² Indeed, Tertullian tried to turn this argument on its head by pushing the point that Christianity was not essentially different from other associations with an everyday familiarity in the Roman world: burial societies, cults of Mithras, temples of Isis, and so on.²³ We are on firmer ground in stressing the concept of superstitio: any religious belief that was alien or strange to the Romans. Before Christianity became a major issue, Tacitus had identified Judaism as the salient example of ‘superstition’ with which Rome had to contend, but Suetonius quickly added the new creed to the list.²⁴ Christianity seemed to strike at the very core of both pagan belief and Romanness itself, whether one looked at its contempt for the Olympian gods and for oracles or at its disdain for martial honour and renown. The Romans believed that social control and authority rested ultimately on religion – hence Pliny the Younger’s campaign to encourage greater attendance at the pagan temples in Bithynia. For the Roman elite, regardless of the reality of their private beliefs (which may not have been quite as sceptical as has sometimes been thought, as we have seen in the case of Marcus),²⁵ denial of the traditional gods opened up the possibility of a chaos world and the dissolution of all norms, values and bonds, and hence the disappearance of all forms of social cement and control except force. Hence the fear of ‘superstition’.26 The issue of contumacy is also controversial. Some say that contumacia – disobedience, defiance of authority or contempt of court – is not the issue, but rather obstinatio – the pig-headed obstinacy of the Christians to make any concessions in their dogmatic beliefs and their refusal to bend to the prevailing wind.²⁷

Yet if the alleged legal basis for Roman persecution of the Christians is sketchy or unclear, there can be no doubt about the general reasons why the Romans loathed and detested them. As the bonds of official religion loosened in the late second century, and men and women turned increasingly to magic, astrology and the mystery cults, so a backlash from Roman officialdom manifested itself, stressing the dangers of abandoning the Olympian deities. As long ago as Augustus’s reign, his adviser Maecenas had said that new gods should always be resisted as they both offended the real (that is, Olympian) gods and seduced men and women into the alien habits of conspiracy, faction and secret society.²⁸ The Romans hated the new in any form, and in matters of religion they were particularly conservative, suspicious of innovation and mistrustful of all new religious ideas and practices.²⁹ Many considered that even pagan private cults weakened social cohesion and made people more selfish.³⁰ That is why the Roman authorities made it a point of policy that religion should permeate all levels of social life, and why even a drinking party had to be ‘legitimated’ by reference to Bacchus. It was not surprising, then, that a group that refused to have anything to do with the old gods was regarded as misanthropic and ‘atheistic’.³¹ The oriental religions did not deny the existence of other gods, even when they used formulae like ‘There is but one God, Mithras.’ What they meant was that Mithras was the most important deity and had assimilated the others; Christianity, by contrast, literally meant there were no others. This was perhaps the most important reason why the Romans perceived the Christians as a unique problem, uniquely contumacious and dangerous, and why the mere name of the religion was enough to consign its practitioner to the executioner’s block.³²

It is abundantly clear that the Christians were always regarded as a special problem, requiring special measures and special punishments; they were not to be classed alongside Jews, Druids or Bacchantes. Why, it may be asked, was such favour shown to the Jews, who had in common with Christianity the embrace of an alien world view? Roman tolerance in this area is odd, for two reasons. In the first place, many Romans felt that the Jews promoted the dreaded and detestable notion of superstitio, and were indeed prime movers in this regard.33 Second, there had already been, by the time of Antoninus Pius, two massive Jewish revolts, which had cost huge amounts of Roman blood and treasure to suppress. By contrast, there had never been a Christian rising, nor even so much as a Christian riot. By all laws of logic the Romans should have regarded the Jews, not the Christians, as Public Enemy Number One. Doubtless aware that they were on thin ice, the Jews often tried to distract Roman attention by foregrounding the Christian threat and instigating persecutions against them.³⁴ The Jews in any case hated the Christians as renegades who had appropriated the scripture and traditions of Judaism. Their smokescreen tactics seem to have been very successful, for many Romans confused the Christians with extremist Jewish sects like the Zealots or sicarii (dagger men). The empress Poppaea protected the Jews in Nero’s reign and encouraged him to scapegoat the Christians instead.³⁵ Yet the emperor and his officials always sharply differentiated Jews from Christians, and many emperors expressly endorsed the right of Jews to observe their ancient religious customs.³⁶ Although Jews would not sacrifice to the emperor, they were prepared to sacrifice to their god for the emperor.³⁷ Moreover, they successfully plugged the line that their monotheism had a thousand years of history behind it, in which time it had never threatened state power (amazingly, they seemed to have convinced successive emperors that their two massive revolts had not been ‘against Caesar’), so that they should be allowed to be the empire’s ‘licensed atheists’: as Edward Gibbon put it, ‘The Jews were a people who followed, the Christians a sect which detested, the religion of their fathers.’³⁸

When the gap between traditional religion and the new Eastern cults opened up, Christianity’s strength was that it both absorbed and transcended this trend, being in many ways a perfect emergent synthesis. But it was precisely this quality of overarching synthesis that drew Roman fire at so many levels simultaneously. In earlier eras superstitio had been a serious offence, not just because it encouraged the dread of the supernatural, credulous wonder and anxious credulity, but also because it opened the door to alien creeds. Even secret atheists like Cicero and Plutarch cynically thought that belief in the official religion was necessary for the masses, to promote social solidarity and ward off envy and discontent; they were in effect early believers in the ‘opium of the masses’.39 The hatred of Christian superstitio, however, had an extra edge. It was alleged to encourage groundless fear of the gods and to make people tremble with fear at the very thought of immortal deities. What was feared and hated could be rebelled against, for it was that precise emotion that Spartacus had harnessed in the great slave revolt of 73–71 BC. Since Christianity was allegedly a religion of slaves, it was thought to accentuate tensions between slaves and masters, as well as depressing the populace with gloomy thoughts about sorcery and the power of the supernatural; in all these ways, therefore, it was a threat to the social order.⁴⁰ For the Roman, Christianity was intolerable at every level: Christians refused to acknowledge other gods; they declined to sacrifice to the gods or the emperor; they worshipped a man who had been crucified as a political criminal; they refused to swear an oath by the emperor’s name; they evinced bitter hatred of Rome, gloatingly prophesied the end of the world and gleefully looked forward to the destruction of the Eternal City in a holocaust.⁴¹ The Roman public hated the exclusiveness, monotheism, truculence and arrogance of the Christians, which seemed to them to elicit the anger of the gods. There could never be any special pleading for a new dispensation, as there was for the Jews, with bogus claims that Christianity was a mere sect. It was avowedly and unapologetically a world religion, with all that implied. As has been well said, ‘It is one of the unrecognised effects of Paul’s later career that it caused Christians to be persecuted by Romans.’⁴²

Naturally the ordinary Roman had other, baser motives for hostility to the Christians. There was the natural desire to dispossess them, to seize their goods or get them dismissed from jobs. Above all, they needed a scapegoat, and Nero had already demonstrated how easy it was to frame Christians. Scapegoating has been described as the process of singling out an arbitrarily selected ‘other’ whose destruction serves to concentrate minds, decant conflict in society into a single focus and thus re-establish social solidarity.⁴³ In the case of Roman society, Christians were scapegoated for two main reasons: either to appease the mob angered by quite other causes; or to blame natural phenomena like droughts, plagues and famines on a sect that had allegedly angered the gods; ‘there is no rain because of the Christians’ was a common lament in drought-stricken areas.44 Tertullian summed up well the mindset whereby the Christians were routinely blamed for everything: ‘If the Tiber overflows, or the Nile doesn’t, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a pestilence, at once the cry goes up: “Christians to the lions!”’⁴⁵ The visceral and mindless hatred provoked by the Christians cannot be exaggerated. One study of anti-Christian propaganda in the second century uncovers these descriptions of followers of Christ: ‘scum’, ‘nothing but dung’, ‘lower-class, vulgar, ignorant’, ‘perpetrators of hypocrisy’, ‘gullible believers’, ‘babbling fools’, ‘charlatans’, ‘people who detest each other and fling abuse at each other’, ‘no better than dog or goat worshippers at their worst’, ‘people who go out of their way to insult the emperor’. As for Jesus himself, he was described as ‘arrogant’, ‘an evil-doer’, ‘a sorcerer’, ‘a conspirator’, ‘a consorter with low-lives’, ‘a coward and a liar’, ‘an author of rebellion and insurrection’.⁴⁶ It is well known that to prepare the climate for persecution, pogrom or worse, one must first convince the masses that those being persecuted are vermin and not really human.

One of the things that worried thinking Romans was that the new religion provided a complete ideology with which rebels and dissidents could challenge the status quo: many risings in Rome’s past had failed because of a sense of hopelessness among the rebels that things could ever really be otherwise. This was just one of many aspects of Christianity that made it superior to its rivals in the struggle for cultural hegemony in the second and third centuries. Although belief in astrology and magic was widespread and growing as the appeal of the Olympian deities faded, all such sects and religions were fundamentally pessimistic and death-obsessed.⁴⁷ The mystery cults, which particularly appealed to the elite, were backward-looking and stressed conservatism and conformity; unlike Christianity, they did not look forward to a messianic age in which the world would be transformed. The cult of Cybele was strong in the cities and among the upper classes, while that of Isis (originally regarded with suspicion by the authorities) appealed to freedmen and slaves; it had been free of persecution since the time of Tiberius.48 Roman soldiers, who because of their pay and income did not slot easily into any formal class system, had their own religion, Mithraism, the easiest of the mystery religions to syncretise with the traditional Roman gods, less concerned with death than the Isis and Cybele cults – a genuine soldier’s religion, but suffering from the ultimately fatal flaw that it excluded women. Christianity soon found ways to take the sting out of all three rivals. By the time of Marcus Aurelius’s death, it was making considerable inroads into the ranks of the free soldiery.⁴⁹ Slaves and freedmen were deserting Isis to embrace Christ. It has even been speculated that in Apuleius’s famous work The Golden Ass, written during Marcus’s reign, the hero is converted to Isis as a propaganda ploy to assert the claims of the goddess against the increasing influence of Christianity.⁵⁰ Finally, in the third century Christianity would achieve its greatest ideological coup by transmogrifying the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, into the worship of the Virgin Mary.

Christianity’s promise of salvation and an afterlife made a particular appeal to two key groups: women and the have-nots. Even before Mariolatry became established as a pillar of the Church, women played a role in the Christian Church that went far beyond anything they could aspire to in any of the rival religions. The Gospel of Luke mentions several important female followers of Jesus, including Joanna, the wife of King Herod’s steward, Susanna, Mary Magdalene and Salome, the mother of the two Zebedees. The Acts of the Apostles mentions the crucial back-up role played by women such as Tabitha (Dorcas), Lydia, Phoebe, Priscilla, Claudia and a Mary who is said to have done so much for St Paul. On their missionary travels Paul and Barnabas were accompanied by women who played the part of apostolic auxiliaries.⁵¹ It seems that the domestic arena was a vital transmission belt for the spread of Christianity from the lower to the upper classes. Slaves told their aristocratic mistresses about the new doctrine, and it is significant that so many early Christians were aristocratic women – something that further enraged the mob, who relished the quasi-sadistic sexual thrill of seeing high-born ladies tortured and killed in the arena.⁵² The importance of the conversion of oligarchic women can hardly be exaggerated. While a Roman matron usually had minimal influence on her husband, it was a different matter with their sons; women could inculcate Christianity in the nursery and thus produce believers in the next generation. It has been well said that the triumph of Christianity was also the greatest triumph of feminism in history.53 The doctrine of love was clearly attractive, as was the contempt and disparagement of machismo and the martial ethos. Christian teaching was particularly critical of the notion of philotimia or love of honour, which it construed as mere vainglory. Women were drawn to the super ior morality of the new creed: an early Church council in Spain decided that if any woman put her maidservant to death, she would be denied communion for years until she had purged her sin.⁵⁴ Also attractive to women was the Christian attitude to sexuality, which offered a relief from the rampant priapism of Roman society, amply evident from Artemidorus’s dream studies.⁵⁵ The new Church emphasised that sex was primarily for procreation and frowned on fornication, adultery and all forms of sexual permissiveness. Although Christian leaders grudgingly accepted marriage, there was an increasing idealisation of virginity.⁵⁶ Sadly, the cult of virginity became the launch pad for an increasingly virulent misogyny among the early Church Fathers – an attitude that was already there in embryo in the teaching of St Paul.⁵⁷ It is one of history’s great ironies that women, who enabled the early Christian Church to survive, were subsequently downgraded as second-class citizens. Real women tended to be regarded as actual or potential whores, while the feminine principle was hypostasised and decanted into the ideal personage of the Virgin Mary.⁵⁸

It was a common slur in Roman propaganda that Christianity appealed to the stupid and moronic. ‘For hysterical women, children and idiots’ was the mantra of the vehement anti-Christian Celsus, who added the refinement that the doctrine was perfectly designed to appeal to females with just enough education and culture to be attracted to it, yet not enough to be able to see through it; thus did he anticipate Alexander Pope’s diatribe on ‘a little learning’ by 1,500 years.⁵⁹ The ‘religion of slaves’ tag has encouraged the idea that early Christianity was entirely a religion of the have-nots, attracted by the Gospel message that the first shall be last and the last first in the kingdom of heaven. Undoubtedly it had an appeal for slaves, working men and the so-called canaille that no other creed could match, but there were converts in all the social strata, and it is probably more accurate to see the lure of Christianity in the realm of ‘relative deprivation’ than among the outright poor and needy; in other words, it attracted those disgusted by the conspicuous consumption of the rich and powerful, their venality and corruption, cruelty and harshness – the very people likely to be alienated as class divisions became more rigid towards the end of the second century and social mobility appreciably lessened.60 As for slaves, the Christians were not against the idea in principle and tended to keep slaves in their station; theirs was certainly not a doctrine of liberation from quotidian bondage.⁶¹ That Christianity had a powerful proletarian profile and was persecuted has led some historians to draw analogies with those modern communist parties in a tiny minority in Western societies; the idea was particularly popular with the early Marxists.⁶² Leftist theologians too have been fascinated that the early Christians practised a form of primitive communism; the idea is that socialism must be ‘right’ since that is what the disciples turned to immediately after receiving the grace of the Holy Spirit. Certainly one can see vague parallels with Christianity under Marcus Aurelius and communists in the United States in the 1950s (with the obvious difference that no one was executed in the latter case for the mere name). And there are other interesting similarities. Both creeds believed in the Second Coming, the Christians literally, the communists figuratively – their parousia would be the communist society achieved after the interim of the dictatorship of the proletariat, when absolute equality and nil division of labour would hold sway. Yet revolutionary as communism was in the twentieth century, it could hardly match early Christianity for originality. Marxism was firmly and clearly rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment, whereas Christianity seemed to come from nowhere, with no precedents or counterparts in pre-existing religion or philosophy.⁶³

After Trajan, Christians continued to be harassed intermittently for the mere name. All that was required to sustain a charge of Christianity was an informer (delator) and a sympathetic governor who would demand admission of the name and recantation; those refusing in open court would be executed, either by beheading if the accused was of superior social class, or by being crucified or exposed to the wild beasts in the case of an artisan or proletarian.⁶⁴ Pliny’s entirely adventitious system of ‘proof’ – sacrificing to the pagan gods – became the gold standard by which successive provincial governors operated. Naturally the system was abused in more ways than one. Not all Christians relished a martyr’s death, and some got round the necessity of sacrificing to Jupiter or the emperor by sending their slaves to do it for them (and presumably risking the obvious danger of blackmail). Others simply fled the territory, became outlaws or went to live in the desert. But most simply bribed their way out, suborning court officials, the informer or even the governor himself, much to Tertullian’s disgust.65 Bringing trumped-up charges was an obvious racket, and the scapegoating of Christians for matters with which they had not the slightest connection was routine; Apuleius was brought to trial in Sabratha in North Africa in 158–9 and immediately entered the defence that his accusers were Christians.⁶⁶ The emperor Hadrian became severely irritated with this knee-jerk ploy by malefactors. He issued a rescript stressing that all accusations against Christians must be watertight. If it was proved that they had performed criminal or unlawful acts, well and good; but he was not prepared to entertain mere clamour, outcry or hearsay, and woe betide the informer who was found to have brought a gratuitous and slanderous accusation; in that case the full force of the law would be visited on the person bearing false witness. Hadrian was thus a net protector of the Christians, since he not only protected them against slander and wrongful arrest (insisting that the law, not the mob, must decide the issue), but also demanded that there must be cast-iron proof, even when someone accused a Christian of the name. Thereafter a governor would not normally take action until the delator was prepared to prosecute personally and thus run the risk of malicious prosecution.⁶⁷

Antoninus Pius had little to do with the Christians, apart from considering the question of the responsibility of this new sect for the plethora of natural disasters that hit the empire during his reign.⁶⁸ By the time Marcus Aurelius came to the throne, the battle-lines between the ideologies of paganism and Christianity were drawn up so tightly that no compromise seemed possible. We shall consider first the ferocity of the pagan propaganda onslaught and then the Christian reply. The most noteworthy anti-Christian ideologists were, in descending order of hostility, Celsus, Porphyry and Galen. Celsus wrote his diatribe The True Word sometime between 170 and 180, so that his arguments would have been very well known to Marcus. He starts with the proposition that tradition is sovereign, that old-time religions are always superior and that the very oddness and newness of Christianity represent a strike against it. The new creed is a break with all the antique cultural and religious traditions of the human race, stretching back to the Golden Age. Celsus makes it clear he is ‘relativistic’ in the sense that he recognises that all cannot worship the Olympians, that each nation and culture has its own peculiar ancient laws; all this is fine as long as we are still in the area of the traditional, which means polytheism.69 It is true that the Jews introduced monotheism with Moses, but theirs is still an ancient belief, hallowed by custom and habit. Celsus has no time for the Jews – ‘runaway slaves who have never done anything worth mentioning’ – but at least Judaism is legitimated by antiquity. The Christians claim that they are the proper realisation of Judaism while rejecting core Jewish customs and laws on circumcision, diet, festivals and keeping the Sabbath.⁷⁰ They cannot have it both ways: either they are a new sect with no relation to Judaism, or they are a cousin of the Jewish faith, in which case they are not entitled to take a pick-and-mix approach to its doctrines. Even some Christians acknowledged that this was a telling point.⁷¹ Judaism was a nationalistic sect, with no claims to universifiability, but Christianity claimed to be a world religion; it was thus both implicitly and explicitly a threat to the Roman empire and to social stability in general: implicitly because of its dogmas, and explicitly because it proselytised. Judaism was compatible with paganism since both practised sacrifice; Christianity emphatically was not.⁷²

Having, as it were, demonstrated to his own satisfaction the a priori absurdity of Christianity, Celsus then attacked the personality of the Christians themselves, condemning them as morons, purveying a lowest-common-denominator creed that appealed to slaves and the lower classes, while thumbing its nose at Rome by refusing public office and military service.⁷⁸ He appealed to a deep Roman snobbery by asking rhetorically how the thoughts of cobblers and weavers could be put in the same class as the ideas of learned philosophers. This aligned with the deprecating comments of Epictetus, who said that Christians could face death fearlessly because they emphasised the irrational over reason and were childishly ignorant.⁷⁹ Christians were both natural rebels (not surprisingly, since their leader was executed as a political criminal) and a natural prey to charlatanry, to say nothing of their consorting with demons and practising black magic, which made them no better than the begging priests of Cybele, the bone-headed followers of Mithras, the Bacchantes or the purveyors of Egyptian superstitions.⁸⁰ Their adherents, workers in wool and leather, fullers and tanners and the like, made a point of getting contracts to work in private houses and then corrupting the young of the absent aristocrats while they were there.⁸¹ Celsus made the same criticism of Christians as the middle classes made of hippies in the twentieth century: they were people who wanted all the advantages and privileges of civilisation, but none of the burdens and duties.⁸² Their doctrine of salvation carried the detestable consequence that the thief, the robber, the burglar, the poisoner and the blasphemer would all be saved along with the virtuous. The stupidity of Christians was evident from a number of pointers, quite apart from their verifiable lack of higher education. They claimed that their superior intellect made them contemptuous of idolatry, but such a claim simply demonstrated their abysmal ignorance; the merest child in Rome knew that idols were symbols, not the gods themselves; the Christians were too stupid to be able to differentiate the naturalistic and symbolic worlds.83 Their ‘atheism’ consisted in setting up a ‘church’ that diverted allegiances that should properly be the state’s, and in worshipping a man (Jesus) instead of a god, thus building up a mere man at the expense of the gods.⁸⁴ Despite the contrary proposition maintained by the Christian evangelists,⁸⁵ one could not differentiate the realm of God from that of Caesar for that meant serving two masters – a house divided against itself must fall – quite apart from the absurdity of worshipping both God and his servant. Not only were Christians building up a man (Jesus) at the expense of God, but since he was dead, they were committing the ultimate blasphemy of worshipping a corpse.⁸⁶

Thence Celsus proceeds to a dithyrambic attack on the personality of Jesus – and it is interesting that at no point in his catalogue of crimes does Celsus suggest that Jesus was anything other than an historical personality. He sought to explain him mainly by an extrapolation from the notorious personality of Alexander of Abonoteichos. Interestingly, Celsus does not deny that Jesus performed miracles, but he wants to know: by what power? The answer is predictable: Jesus was a master magician and illusionist, trained in Egypt in the black arts.⁸⁷ This novel slant on the flight into Egypt gives Celsus the chance to launch a major attack on Jesus’s mother Mary. It is plain, says Celsus, that the story of the Virgin Birth is nonsense; what actually happened was that Mary was a poor spinner who committed adultery with a soldier called Panthera and was then kicked out by her carpenter husband.⁸⁸ When she gave birth to her illegitimate son, he went to Egypt and learned magic and prestidigitation. This is the basis for all the exorcisms and miracles related in the Gospels, especially that of Mark.⁸⁹ But other people can do similar tricks, so what exactly entitles Jesus to claim the accolade of Son of God?⁹⁰ The whole story of Jesus thereafter is a mishmash of different traditions. Jesus was essentially an intellectual scavenger who got the best of his eclectic ideas from Plato and the Greeks. However you look at it, the Christian version of Jesus makes no sense. God seems to have given two contradictory sets of laws, one to Moses and the other to Jesus. Which is right? If Jesus is right, then God must be an incompetent bungler, for what could he have been thinking of when he handed Moses the tablets on Mount Sinai some thousand years earlier? It is no use saying that he might have changed his mind; we are supposedly talking about an omniscient being.91 Meanwhile Jesus is supposed to be the true heir of the Judaic tradition, yet the Jews do not accept him as a Messiah.⁹² The worship of Jesus not only works against the supposed monotheism of Christianity, but is in every sense an unworthy devotion, as Jesus did nothing that made him worthy of worship as a divine being: Jonah and Daniel had better claims as objects of worship.⁹³ Celsus’s best point here is the one about monotheism; this worried his great critic Origen, who replied that it was obvious that Jesus was subordinate to God.⁹⁴ Origen of course wrote before the famous council of Nicaea in 325, which announced the dogma of the Trinity and condemned Origen’s views as heresy. That Celsus had touched a raw theological nerve here is clear from the famous disputes at the Council of Nicaea about homoousia and homoiousia.⁹⁵

Finally Celsus prepares for his tour de force: a no-holds-barred attack on the Christian doctrines of creation, original sin, redemption and the Incarnation, as well as the Crucifixion and Resurrection, all of which he sees as obvious anthropomorphic nonsense. Most of his remarks about the Crucifixion rise no higher than knockabout farce; for him, it is simply against the law of nature that someone both poor (a carpenter) and a victim of crucifixion (the type of death-penalty reserved by the Romans for the ‘lowest of the low’) could be divine. A typical passage showing Celsus in action uses ridicule and irony to pour scorn on the Crucifixion, suggesting that the whole idea of death on a wooden cross arose in the first place only because Jesus was a worker in wood. ‘So that if he had happened to be thrown off a cliff, or pushed into a pit, or suffocated by strangling, or if he had been a cobbler or stonemason or blacksmith, there would have been a cliff of life above the heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed stone, or an iron of love, or a holy hide of leather. Would not an old woman who sings a song to lull a little child to sleep have been ashamed to whisper such tales as these.’⁹⁶ The Resurrection story is a staple of all myths, yet the Christians have the audacity to expect us to believe that on this one occasion it actually happened. But why is it a narrative at any higher level of reliability than the stories about the Greeks and the Trojans, Oedipus and Iocasta and all the other myths? The chief witness turns out to have been a hysterical female (Mary Magdalene), ‘half crazy from fear and grief, and possibly one other of the same band of charlatans who dreamed it all up or saw what they wanted to see – or more likely simply wanted to astonish their friends in the tavern with a good tale’.97 Besides, the story is a philosophical impossibility. The Christians like to parrot that with God all things are possible, but even God cannot subvert reason and Nature and, if he were able to do so, would in any case not be a suitable object of veneration.⁹⁸ If God was not bound by the laws of nature, he would not really be God, but a demon or demiurge, since the entire universe would be governed by principles of chaos.⁹⁹

But Celsus saves his supreme Platonic contempt for the doctrine of the Incarnation. What was the point of this? The Christians say that God needed to know what was going on among humans. But if he was omniscient, why did he not know? The Incarnation for the purposes of redemption is likewise gobbledegook. If an omnipotent God wanted to achieve the moral reformation of humanity, why did he not do so by a simple exercise of willpower?¹⁰⁰ As for redemption, what about all the innumerable people who lived before he was incarnated? Don’t they count, or did God simply not care before the Christian era?¹⁰¹ Whichever answer we give, it will not satisfy Christian doctrine. Maybe God is not omnipotent, omniscient or benevolent, or maybe he possesses at most two out of the three attributes? Whatever the case, he emerges as the kind of arbitrary and capricious deity that only morons could believe in.¹⁰² And how exactly can an immortal being – by definition immutable and eternal – enter space and time, and undergo change and alteration to live as a human being? Yet Celsus’s most powerful argument derives from his own Platonism. The Platonic system involves progression from perception through mathematics to a realm of perfection, from particulars to universals, from substances to Forms, from matter and the physical world to the spiritual and the world of Ideas, from imperfection to perfection. The doctrine of the Incarnation, by contrast, is literally preposterous, since it envisages a descent from perfection to imperfection, a breach of the Law of Nature as fundamental as postulating that Time could flow backwards.103 To descend from a realm of perfection to one of quotidian imperfection flies in the face of all known philosophy, not just Platonism, but Buddhism and the wisdom of the East, which similarly stresses the ascent to higher and higher levels of Being. It would be an especially impossible progression for an immortal entity.¹⁰⁴

Similar Neoplatonist contempt for Christianity was voiced by the third-century thinker Porphyry in the course of ploughing his own furrow, which was essentially to move Neoplatonism away from the abstract form in which it was couched by his teacher and mentor Plotinus – in which guise it attracted many Christians – to a more mystical, supernaturalist species of metamathematics essentially going back to Pythagoras.¹⁰⁵ For such a man, Christianity was a particularly deadly enemy, and he added to the arsenal of anti-Galilean propaganda so loathingly assembled by Celsus. Like Celsus, Porphyry spent a lot of time jeering at the career and perceived failure of Jesus himself. He shares Celsus’s disgust with the idea of making a convicted criminal a god – in itself proof that the Christians are traitors and a fifth column in the empire’s midst.¹⁰⁶ He adds to Celsus’s slanders against Mary the Mother of God by claiming that Jesus was the son of an insignificant woman named Miriam who was raped and impregnated by a Roman soldier, whom he too identifies as one Panthera; Jesus’s illegitimacy, he claims, is obvious even from the work of Mark the Evangelist.¹⁰⁷ Yet Porphyry’s main target is not Jesus himself. He dissents from the Celsus view that Jesus was a magus, wizard or sorcerer; he really was a great, good and wise man, though naturally not God. It is St Paul, the evangelists and especially St John who are Porphyry’s main targets, as these are the people who tried to incorporate Neoplatonic ideas as an adjunct to Christianity.¹⁰⁸ Jesus, he says, was no fanatic since he accepted the syncretism of the Roman and Jewish religions with local gods, saw some virtue in the Roman view of religion as a social activity and generally took a ‘laid-back’ attitude to the Romans.¹⁰⁹ He even showed himself very human, both in his despair in the Garden of Gethsemane and in his meekness towards his accusers. The real problem is not Jesus, but the zealotry of his followers.

Even granting Judaism and its offshoot Christianity every latitude, it is impossible not to fault their simple-minded Mosaic cosmogony (the biblical story of the creation) on the basis of Aristotle’s Four Causes.¹¹⁴ The long and the short of it is that Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus are immensely superior intellectually to anything produced by Judaism or its bastard offspring Christianity. The idea that God could create out of nothing was a doctrine that particularly irked Galen for its naivety. This was unscientific and ignorant, and the only home for progress in human knowledge lay with science and logic: ‘Could we live a life three times as long as our present one, even then we would not know everything accurately, so obscure are the facts.’115 The idea that ‘faith’ could reveal the truth was stunningly obtuse, no more advanced than the mentality of a child believing in fairy tales. The critics loathed the Christian mantra ‘with God all things are possible’¹¹⁶ – regarded as already a hoary old cliché in the second century. The impossible is a logical category – you cannot have a round square – and the impossible remains so in spite of God’s alleged omnipotence. The Christians cling to the idea of a God who can reverse the laws he has imposed on his own creation, since this is the only way they can smuggle in the absurd doctrine of the Resurrection, which certainly deserves all the abuse it has received: ‘What sort of human soul would still crave for a rotten body?’¹¹⁷ Nonetheless, Galen does not find Christianity totally negligible, as Celsus does. Three things impress him: the Christian contempt for death, their concern for the broad mass of humanity, as against the elitism of the Stoics, and their morality, especially in the sexual sphere. Galen did not share Celsus’s contempt for the unwise, foolish and wretched of the Earth, pointing out that all the main currents in Greek philosophy emphasised the importance of the moral education of the average man. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics had made this the central concern, while even Plato, sometimes regarded as the ideal-type of elitism, moved away from concern with the Brahmin-style class of Guardians in the Republic to the concerns of the common man in The Laws.¹¹⁸ Christianity was to be admired for taking a similar line. Moreover, Christians were to be commended for having so successfully invented tales of an afterlife which, together with a belief in miracles, raised their moral standards to a higher level: ‘For their contempt of death and of its sequel is obvious to us every day, and likewise their restraint in cohabitation. For they include not only men but also women who refrain from cohabiting all their lives; and they also number individuals who in self-discipline and self-control in matters of food and drink and in their keen pursuit of justice have attained a pitch not inferior to that of general philosophers.’¹¹⁹ Galen praised the Christians for possessing the three cardinal virtues of valour, temperance and justice – which meant they had attained moral virtue – but their weakness was that they had not achieved self-realisation based on philosophical knowledge.

first and foremost that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly embrace it – most of them at least. Furthermore their first lawgiver (Christ) persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another after they have transgressed once . . . Therefore they despise all things indiscriminately and consider them private property, receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence, so if any conman or trickster, able to profit by this, comes among them, he quickly acquires sudden wealth by imposing upon these simple folk.¹²¹