7 PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN

You must have no part in such doings. Taking the auspices, divination, omens, amulets, writing on leaves, the use of charms and other spells—such things are the devil’s worship.

CYRIL OF JERUSALEM, MYSTAGOGICAL CATECHESIS 1.8

O God of our patron St. Philoxenus, if you command us to bring Anoup to your hospital … let the message come forth.

CHRISTIAN ORACULAR TICKET, PAPYRUS OXYRINCHUS 1150

“Pagan” was an invention of the fourth century, distinguishing Christian gentiles from non-Christian others. “Paganism” is the abstraction that refers to Mediterranean culture in general. In what ways, then, is “paganism” contiguous with Christian culture, in what ways contrasting? What distinguishes pagan “magic” from Christian sacrament? How did the pagan Rome of Nero become the Christian Rome of Peter and Paul? How do pagan meals for the dead differ from the Christian cult of the saints? As Christianity emerged and developed within Mediterranean culture, what did it retain, what did it alter, and what did it leave behind?

The Mediterranean Matrix

Mediterranean culture was the matrix that nourished all forms of religiousness in Roman antiquity. To call that culture “pagan” is to capitulate to the process of Christian identity formation that roars into its own in the course of the fourth century. That was when the word “pagan” in the sense of “non-Christian” came into use in the Latin West.

The word paganus predates this usage. It relates to the word pagus, meaning a locality or region, or sometimes the community inhabiting that region. Pagani were people who lived in a particular place. Contrasted with military personnel stationed there, a “pagan” might mean a civilian. Often, the term indicated a “country dweller.” It might have had the connotation, originally, of “outsider” or of “nonparticipant.” (The East already had such a term, “Hellene,” meaning “Greek,” to signal a non-Christian.) Perhaps fourth-century Latin Christians mobilized the term with specifically religious connotations because Christianity was itself such an urban movement: the “countryside” remained more traditional. Perhaps, in light of the urban and urbane fourth-century pagan intelligentsia that resisted the newer religion, “pagan” was usefully insulting. However obscure its origin, “pagan,” in imperial law, came to stand for superstitio in contrast to “Roman religion,” by which the emperors intended (Nicene) Christianity.

“Paganism” as a concept denoting religious allegiance produced difference and created boundaries. Conceptually and practically, it was necessary not least for legal reasons, a verbal technique of “othering” to identify and create a social category of persons who were neither Jews nor communicants of the correct sect of Christianity. “Pagan” as a discursive term, in other words—that is, as a linguistic strategy—facilitated the later fourth-century development of an institutionalized imperial Christianity promoted by the Roman state.

Unsurprisingly, real life eludes the clarity of classificatory systems, both antiquity’s and (leaning on these) our own: “paganism,” “Judaism,” and “Christianity.” Even speaking in terms of the porousness of boundaries implies that such boundaries exist. They do, but as secondary categories—that is, as our own analytical devices. Moschos Ioudaios, in the third century BCE, placed a votive inscription in the temple of the healing gods Amphiaraus and Hygeia. They had commanded him to do so in a dream. Did Moschos think of himself as “assimilating to paganism”? He lived in the Peloponnese, where these gods lived as well. His obedience to their command simply showed a commonsense piety, respect for the gods—powers bigger than he was. His act tells us nothing about how he worshiped his own god, but his self-designation as “Ioudaios,” meaning “Judean” or “Jew,” shows that his affiliation with the god of Judea mattered to him as well. Centuries later, in Phrygia, another Jew, Glykon, lived according to two liturgical calendars, both Jewish and Roman: his endowment was to mark the holidays of Passover and Shavuot/Pentecost, as well as the Roman new year. We identify him as living in both worlds, “pagan” and “Jewish.” Surely, he experienced them as one. An inscription honoring a local North African grandee and imperial priest, in the year 347 CE, bore the mark of the Christian Chi-Rho. Was the honoree “pagan” or “Christian”? The inscription is perfectly ambiguous—which is a datum in and of itself.

Syncretism—the coming together of “Christianity” with other, prior religious traditions—does not reflect a mix of two discreet and different entities. Still less does syncretism suggest a compromise or corruption of some pure and separate body of doctrine with “paganism”—though that is the image that heresiologists and later theologians rhetorically present. “Christianity” is under construction throughout Roman antiquity. “Christianization” proceeded precisely by syncretizing foregoing and ubiquitous patterns of life and thought with elements of its message: true for high theology, which depended on philosophy to proceed; true for practices, which drew on the familiar. What else was there to draw on? The expressions of Christianity that resulted not only varied locally between different communities. They also varied within the same locale between different members of the notionally same community—as the complaints of the bishops and the canons of church councils tell us.

Demons, Rituals, and “Magic”

This internal variety is nowhere more visible than in Christian discourse about mageia, “magic.” All our ancient people lived in the same social world, inhabited by superhuman powers. Everyone dealt with the problem of how to structure and to manage relations with these powers, how to solicit their advice and their protection, and—since they were more powerful than any human—how to stay on their good side. Our labels “pagan,” “Jewish,” and “Christian” inhibit us from seeing how much this superhuman world was common to all inhabitants of the empire, and how much the medium for engaging this world was ritual: a combination of performative utterances (words thought to have real effects) and choreographed motions or actions.

No one contested the existence of these beings, or their social agency. The question was always how to deal with them. Superhuman powers constantly intervened in daily life, solicited or not. Those persons who sought direct contact who could not go on pilgrimage to the great oracle sites, such as Delphi, had means closer to hand to garner advice and aid, to control events, or to divine the future. These forces spoke through visions and dreams. They manifested spontaneously. They sent signs to be interpreted, whether through the disposition of animal viscera or the flight of birds or the weather. Lot oracles, dice, numerological tables (sortes); dream interpretation (a profession, informed by handbooks); the positions of heavenly bodies (astrology); the prognostications of holy men and women: all these represented technologies of communication, whether the power sought after was a god, a demon, a spirit, or a saint.

Divinity came in many registers, spanning heaven and earth. Different peoples categorized these powers differently. Hellenistic Jews in particular regarded gentile gods as gods subordinate to their own, highest god. “The gods of the nations are daimonia” pronounced Psalm 95.5 in Greek—“godlings,” lesser gods; “daimons” and not only, in the sense of our word now, “demons.” Paul likewise held that there were “many gods and many lords.” His god and his god’s messiah, Christ, he insisted, were more powerful than these other supernumeraries and should be the sole objects of his hearers’ devotions (1 Corinthians 8.5–6).

Paul named many other, lower divine entities throughout his letters: cosmic rulers, authorities, and powers; “the god of this age” (2 Corinthians 4.4); hostile angels; Satan; cosmic “elements”; spirits (whether good or evil: the community in Corinth was supposed to be able to discern between them; 1 Corinthians 12.10); beings “above the earth and upon the earth and below the earth” (Philippians 2.10). He attributed agency to them. These powers were real. By eating meat sacrificed to them, he taught, his people risked partnering with them—an unthinkable thought, since they had the spirit of Christ or of Paul’s god “in” them already (1 Corinthians 10.20–21). All these cosmic forces, Paul proclaimed, were about to be subdued by the returning Christ. At that point, they too would acknowledge the sovereignty of Israel’s god through the victory of God’s messiah (Philippians 2.11).

Paul’s apocalyptic mentality, in other words, textually frozen in later Christian collections of his writings, polarized the graduated cosmos of Roman antiquity: these powers, for him, all rested on the negative side of his cosmic ledger. Hostile daimones and spirits—our “demons”—could inflict madness, deception, disease. Worse, in the view of some bishops, they could also prophesy and heal. They might manifest spontaneously, framing much of the struggle that engaged desert ascetics, the demons especially of fornication and of pride. For (some) Christians, demons demarcated a front line in the cosmic battle between good and evil.

Other contemporaries, of all religious persuasions, including many Christians, took a different view. A daimon or spirit was a lesser divine force. It could inhabit the thick atmosphere between the earth and the moon, or haunt given earthly locales, or emerge from the world below. It could mediate between higher gods (or the highest god) and humans. In this sense, a daimon could also be regarded as a “messenger,” an angelos. Solicited properly, daimones could serve as sources of healing, and of information about the future.

One way to activate communication was through sacrifice: the smoke and smell arising from the altar attracted daimonic attention. Pagan philosophers might dispute the probity of blood sacrifices—some held that offerings of cereals, incense, or wine were more fitting—but offerings (especially before divine images) were a normal way to achieve divine/human interaction. Later church fathers, following Paul, condemned this as the worship of false gods—false not because these gods did not exist, but because they were lower than, and rightly subordinate to, the high god. That high god, when invoked by magicians, was himself the force behind the most powerful spells, opined Origen. Magic/mageia—ritual efficacy enacted by spoken or written formulas, by gestures (such as signing the cross), or transmitted through material objects—provided an ecumenical opportunity:

“The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God or Jacob” is used not only by those of the Jewish nation in their prayers to God and when they exorcise daimons, but also by almost all those who deal in magic and spells. For in magical treatises it is often to be found that God is invoked by this formula, and that in spells against daimons his name is used in close connection with the names of these men. (Against Celsus 4.33)

God or gods or angels were often called on, but the daimon was the work horse of magical spells, summoned to get things done, whether cures or curses. Often, if malicious (thus, “demons” in our sense), they needed to be exorcised by a superior superhuman force, summoned by the “proper” ritual expert. This was a serious business: a roster of church offices from Rome for the mid-third century lists fifty-two exorcists among readers and doorkeepers. By comparison, this same list gives forty-six presbyters and seven deacons (Eusebius, Church History 6.43). Exorcism was a Christian specialty.

The etiquette for dealing with divine powers, whether hostile or benign, was also ecumenical. In Egypt, by the fourth century, a brisk trade in oracular “tickets” had sprung up around martyr shrines. These were provided by scribes and by shrine attendants. The devotee could then take the ticket home, for use as a protective amulet. The saint, not a god or a daimon, would be invoked, but the technology was identical to that of “pagan” oracles.

The operative category, here, is not “pagan” versus “Christian.” Both ritual acts (whether soliciting a saint or a spirit) are equally “Egyptian.” The telling difference, in Christian eyes, is that non-Christian adepts called on a different numinous workforce. By insisting that demons were pagan gods or local spirits, these Christian adepts, whether monks or scribes, could likewise insist on distinguishing themselves from local pagan priests, magicians, and healers, who both looked and functioned exactly as they did.

The Christian demotion of Mediterranean gods or local divine forces to the negative status of demons set their moral valence: demons were always bad. Their source was the angelic rebellion against God (an interpretation of Genesis 6.1–4, when the sons of God mated with human females). They hovered around traditional altars and frequented whatever civic venues held their images. They stood leagued with any imagined enemy: heretics, Jews, non-Christian gentiles. They inspired persecutions. They accounted for similarities between Christian prophecies, stories, and rituals and pagan ones: once well placed in heaven, these fallen angels had knowledge of what would one day be Christianity and so inspired demonic imitations of them within pagan cults, to confuse and confound the unconverted. According to Justin, demons were the root reason in the first place why God’s Logos became incarnate as Jesus: “for the sake of believing men and women, and for the destruction of the demons” (2 Apology 6). The final victory would occur only at Christ’s Second Coming; but meanwhile his power was manifest in Christian exorcists whose skills, Justin claimed, were superior to those of their pagan competitors. What we do is religion, said church fathers; what they do—Jews, heretics, pagans, astrologers, healers, interpreters of dreams—is “magic.” Their rituals worked, too: again, this was not disputed. But their very efficacy, said their Christian critics, was proof that these competitors dealt with demons.

At issue was proper ritual expertise—and what was “proper” was in the eye of the beholder. Celsus, the late second-century pagan critic of Christianity, accused Jesus of performing his miracles through “magic,” a charge that Origen, some seventy years later, would heatedly refute (Against Celsus 1.6). Christians too, Celsus said, currently worked through the manipulation of demons. Irenaeus leveled the same charge against other Christians whom he considered heretics. And Christian healers, exorcists, and other ritual experts who dealt in spells insisted that their powers were divine, not demonic. Simply the name of Jesus, perhaps combined with brief recitations about him and a performative action, the sign of the cross, was enough to control demons, said church fathers. Such simplicity, they insisted, contrasted with the more elaborate rituals of those they condemned as sorcerers who relied on lengthy incantations and various media. Simplicity suggested superior power.

Christian magical spells, however, surviving especially in Egypt, tell another story. Amulets frame Christian elements, like the name of Jesus, with series of vowels, magical words, esoteric signs, and a customary closing formula, “Now, now, quickly, quickly!”—all standard features of “magical” spells, part of the technical repertoire. We have complaints in Christian sources about monks who fashion amulets out of fox claws, crocodile teeth, and snakes’ heads. The Council of Laodicea had to forbid priests from serving as such ritual experts, enchanters and astrologers, and from making and wearing amulets (canon 36). To Augustine’s enormous irritation, the name of Christ was invoked in spells and amulets that he considered and condemned as “pagan.” The client, and the adept, would presumably not see this as a problem: for all we know, both considered themselves good Christians. Christian grave finds reveal amulets calling on God to protect against malevolent forces, along with spells and curses mobilizing angels, called down on those who might violate the grave. Buried Christian lead tablets preserve curses and binding spells. All these attest to forms of piety that were not under the control of bishops and emperors. Incantations and amulets, long indigenous to Mediterranean culture, would seem to those who used them simply to be a neutral technology of communication with the superhuman world.

Christian “professionals” like bishops and intellectuals who condemned these ritual practices as mageia, illicit ritual practices, mobilized rhetoric already available in Roman law. Roman law had distinguished between religio (proper cult enacted in public) and superstitio (excessive religious credulity, which particularly characterized foreign cults). After the fourth century, when Christianity moved into the public sphere and private pagan sacrifices were forbidden, Christianity (or the imperially recognized sect of Christianity) became religio, and private pagan sacrifice was deemed superstitio. Superstitio was rhetorically conflated with magical practices and illicit divination. Roman law had long forbidden certain activities: harmful spells and potions; divination of the future (especially if that involved questions about the sitting emperor). Eventually, legislation would name maleficia—rituals performed to harm people—as a crime only slightly lesser than treason and murder. Charges of mageia were trained not only against non-Christians but also against those Christians who were deemed heretical, such as Manichees, Priscillianists, even Nestorians. Accused of Manichaeism and magic both, Priscillian was executed on account of the latter indictment.

Like “heresy,” in other words, “magic” became a weaponized discursive category, a way of speaking that delegitimized perceived rivals. The polemical use of the word masks how much the spread of Christianities proceeded precisely by ritual expertise—exorcisms, healings, divinatory possession, and also sacraments. Baptism, already by Tertullian’s period (late second / early third century), was performed as a way to drive out demons. It was articulated through ritual gesture and performative utterance, as was the eucharist, it too a protective action and a medicine against demonic harm. The argument over rebaptism that so ripped apart Cyprian’s mid-third-century North African church was a contest over whether the status of the ritual expert—in this case, the bishop—might compromise the efficacy of the sacramental ritual. Could a compromised cleric—someone in defiance of Cyprian—truly be a conduit of holy spirit? Cyprian said no.

Sacraments—rituals that churchmen regarded as legitimate—not only protected against demons. They also (magically?) policed the faithful. Cyprian reports the case of a young woman who lapsed during the troubles under Decius and who then partook of the eucharist before having been properly reconciled to the church. No sooner had she taken the sacrament than “she began to choke and, a victim now not of the persecution but of her own crime, she collapsed in tremors and convulsions” (Concerning the Lapsed 26). Taken improperly, the sacrament itself monitored behavior. “If she had deceived man, she was made to feel the punishing hand of God.”

Eventually, bishops, acting in concert through councils, would deny sacraments to fellow Christians as a way to discipline, and thereby to control, the erring—indeed, to define what “erring” was. The Council of Elvira (early 300s, pre-Constantine) itemized such errors and penalties. Access to sacraments, for various sins, was denied for stipulated periods of time. Serious infringements, such as idol worship or participation in the imperial cult on the part of baptized men meant denial of sacraments even when death approached. (Consequences would be experienced in the afterlife.) Sacraments were denied, too, for the baptized man who kills another by sorcery—not because of the murder itself, but because that ritual act would have involved him with demons (“idolatry”). A baptized woman who “overcome with rage” beat her female slave to death was to be denied access for seven years if the act was deliberate, five if accidental. Parents who gave their daughters in marriage to Jews or to heretics were to be banned for five years. People who had Jews bless their fields, since this undermined the authority of the Christian ritual, were to be thrown out of the community entirely. Sacraments, in brief, were a controlling type of Christian mageia.

What we see here is evidence not only of a wide range of behaviors on the part of Christians notionally within the same community, but also of efforts on the part of the bishops to exercise control over that community. That means of control involved ritual expertise at every level. Legitimate ritual (“what we do”) was sacramental; illegitimate ritual (“what they do”) was “magic.” The high intellectual discourse of theology that so dominates our literary sources cannot afford us a glimpse at this other social world. Some intellectuals—by definition, a small elite—may have joined various Christian communions because they were persuaded by philosophically informed arguments about the nature of the Trinity or the meaning of the Incarnation. Christianization on a large scale, post-Constantine, was encouraged by a multitude of factors: political (like the legal and financial advantages to clergy); social (like the strong webbing of ecclesiastical patronage, thus access to charity, enabled initially by imperial largesse); and what we might label “religious.” Not least of these was the promise held out that, in Christ, the faithful could be released, both in this life and in the next, from the press of the power of demons.

Neutralizing Pagan Tradition

High Christian culture was accomplished by repurposing “pagan” ideas. It owed its success in no small part to the prior work of Hellenistic Jewish intellectuals in the period following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Hellenistic Jews, especially in Alexandria, had been the first to drive an ideological wedge between pagan religious culture and pagan paideia, intellectual culture: rhetoric, grammar, philology; philosophy; and techniques of textual interpretation such as allegory (the art of reading a text as saying one thing but as meaning another). The one (cultic practices directed to the gods) could be eschewed; the other (philosophical thought) could be embraced—indeed, said Philo, philosophy was already what the biblical texts declared, if one knew how to read them correctly, with true understanding. Paideia was thereby rendered culturally neutral, usable without qualm. Jews further claimed that what the Greeks got right, they got from the Jews anyway, a position later entirely adopted by Christian apologists. Plato owed his wisdom to Moses, who was older. It was Moses, according to Philo, who was rightly deemed “the philosopher.”

Christian intellectuals who wanted to think philosophically about their convictions had only pagan philosophy to draw on: that was the culture that was. They were aided in their endeavors by the work of Philo, whose allegorizing commentaries on the Greek text of Jewish scriptures paved the way for later Christian thinkers like Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and, especially, Origen. Eusebius regarded Philo as all but Christian. In Philo’s work, the biblical texts opened up in new ways to be appreciated in the categories of Greek paideia. He made biblical narrative rational, that is, interpretable as philosophically meaningful. Especially through his thinking on God’s engagement with creation through his divine word, the Logos, Philo paved the way for later Christologies, which identified Christ, variously, as God’s Word.

The categories of Christian anthropology drew from the same well. Humans were imagined as composed of three aspects: mind or spirit, soul, and fleshly body, which was bound to spirit through the intermediation of soul. Philo had argued that the human mind was made in the image of the Logos, the image of God: this template was taken over entirely by later Christian thinkers. To control the body by the mind was to exercise virtue, the pursuit of moral excellence. Later Christians, such as Augustine and Pelagius, might quarrel over the mechanisms of this control—for Augustine, it was most fundamentally a gift granted by God; for Pelagius, an act of free will aided by God—but their ultimate goal, apprehension of God through the mind, would have been entirely recognizable to Philo and, before him, to Plato. For all their strenuous insistence on newness and revelation (when they were not emphasizing continuity and antiquity!), Christian theologians can be regarded as expressing another phase in the development of classical thought.

Ideas about God were another area of convergence. Both at a popular cultic level and at a rarified intellectual one, some late Roman pagans were also “monotheists,” believing in the supremacy of a single highest god behind the manifestations of divine many-ness at lower cosmic levels. Their universe was the same as the one occupied by their Christian counterparts: heaven was hierarchically organized, with one god highest on top. Local gods, the pagan author Celsus opined, were really like regional governors, all subordinate to the single divine ruler (Against Celsus 8.35). “Born of itself, untaught, without a mother, unshakeable, not contained in a name, known by many names, dwelling in fire, this is god,” sang Apollo in hexameters in a fourth-century inscription in Oenoanda in Asia Minor. “We, his messengers [angeloi], are a small part of god.” Preserving a known oracular passage (quoted by Lactantius in the 320s), the inscription seems linked to the worship of “the highest god,” theos hypsistos, whose popular cult, expanded through Asia Minor, involved bloodless worship, prayer, and the lighting of lamps, receptacles of fire. The father of Gregory of Nazianzus, himself a bishop, had elided from hypsistarian worship to Christianity.

Christian rhetoric constructed “paganism” as a way to put distance between the church and this shared way of thinking. Sometimes, however, the closeness was acknowledged.

If the Platonists prefer to call these “gods” rather than “demons” and to count them among those of whom their founder and master Plato writes that they are gods created by the highest God, let them say what they want. For one should not engage with them in a controversy about words. For if they say that they are not blessed by themselves, but by being attached to his who has created them, then they say precisely what we say, whichever word they may use for them.

Thus wrote Augustine, in City of God (9.23). The argument, he seems to admit here, is not over cosmology or theology per se. It is over vocabulary and, thus, over the status of these lower beings, especially on the question of whether they should receive cult. Some bishops said “no” and argued that invoking these powers for cures, or for learning of the future, was tantamount to worshiping them. Christian exorcists, healers, and those who consulted astrologers and ported amulets and availed themselves of “magic”—ritual practices deemed illegitimate by the bishops—were unpersuaded, hence the bishops’ condemnation of these Christian practices as “pagan.” But these repudiated Christians were simply doing in a lower register what the intellectuals were doing in a higher register: drawing on the cultural material that lay at hand in order to make sense of their world, and to exercise some control over it.

If the terms of biblical exegesis, constructive theology, and ritual practice leaned heavily on pre-Christian culture, so too did the rhythms of the urban calendar, punctuated as it was by sponsored festivals celebrated through theatrical performances, horse races, gladiatorial combats, wild animal spectacles, and public feasting—pompa diaboli, ceremonies of Satan, some churchmen lamented. Mediterranean cities had always been religious institutions: such activities were seen as honoring presiding deities, thus safeguarding the city. Traditional cult was deeply embedded in urban life. The conversion of Christianity into an arm of the late Roman state did little, initially, to change this, so interwoven was religious and civic life at every level.

Tertullian in the early third century had urged Carthaginian Christians to avoid these festivals, to stop attending the shows and the races and the competitions, to avoid public feasts: all such, he insisted, smacked of idolatry. Again, his polemic reveals the wide range of behaviors that other Christians within his community thought entirely permissible (up to and including the manufacture of cult images! See On Idolatry 6,2). Such civic activities, they pointed out, were nowhere prohibited in scripture. Still others held that false gods were in the eye of the beholder. “It isn’t a god, it’s the Genius of Carthage,” protested another Christian, reproached for attending the public feast celebrating the presiding spirit of the city (so Augustine, Sermon 62.10). Augustine complained that “the demons delight … in the manifold indecencies of the theater, in the mad frenzy of chariot races, in the cruelty of the amphitheater,” evidently to little avail (Sermon 198 Dolbeau). Ecclesiastical objections notwithstanding, Christians continued to observe (and continue to observe) the Roman New Year, January 1, celebrating, drinking, and exchanging gifts with neighbors. “But someone says, ‘These are not practices of sacrilegious rites. These are vows of entertainment,’ ” preached Peter Chrysologus, giving voice to a layman’s position. “And this merriment is for the new, not an error of the old. This is the beginning of the new year, not a pagan transgression’ ” (Sermon 155.5).

Top-down discouragement of traditional Mediterranean worship waxed muscular in the late fourth century—the withdrawal of public funding for these cults; the final removal of the Roman senate’s altar to the goddess of victory in 382; the forbidding of public sacrifices for the city of Rome in the same year; the imperial order mandating the closing of Carthage’s temple of Juno in 399. Imperial initiatives enforced Christianization, but only up to a point. The feasts and games, the emperors ruled, should continue, now that they had been stripped of the “paganism” of blood sacrifices. “According to ancient custom, amusements shall be furnished to the people, but without any sacrifice or any accursed superstition; and they shall be allowed to attend festival banquets, whenever public desire so demands” (Theodosian Code 16.10.17, in 399). Theater was also to continue, “lest sadness be produced” (15.6.2, also 399).

A similar accommodation of pre-Christian and Christian celebration is visible in an elaborate deluxe calendar, made for a Roman Christian aristocrat, for the year 354. This famously displays not only pagan feast days and games, celebrations of the imperial cult (for Constantine’s dynasty), along with astrological signs, but also an Easter cycle, along with a list of the bishops of Rome, beginning with Peter. In this period, too, the birthday of Jesus (thus, the celebration of the Incarnation) was associated with the Roman celebration of the winter solstice, the birthday of the Sun, December 25. Time was arguably ecumenical—again, to the dislike of many bishops. Eventually, the feast days of the saints would reshape the civic year: in the fourth century, for the month of August alone, Carthage celebrated no fewer than nine saints. The old feasts nevertheless also continued to be observed for centuries, and some (again, like January 1) seem not to have ceased at all, or (like December 25) have continued in Christian guise.

Prying these festivals loose of their pagan matrix was a social feat analogous to the earlier intellectual one of prying paideia loose from the traditional gods. Their native resonance was in effect neutralized. And not all bishops were so particular. Bishop Pegasius of Troy, in the 360s, whether out of local patriotism or enthusiasm for paideia, revealed to Julian that he countenanced the performance of sacrifices at the shrines of the heroes of the Trojan War (Julian, Letter 19). Confronting a monk determined to shut down the local celebration of the Olympic Games in 434–35, the bishop of Chalcedon simply told him to go away: “As you are a monk, go and sit in your cell and let the matter rest. This is my affair” (Life of Hypatius 33).

The Christian Capital

Rome was sui generis. It was the eternal city of the empire, the traditional heart of imperial government, home to the storied senate. Yet Christians there claimed Rome for themselves as the Christian city par excellence: site of the martyrdoms and, thus, home to the relics of the two preeminent, foundational saints, Peter and Paul; site of Peter’s “episcopacy,” per reading of Matthew 16.18: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church.” Rome’s traditional imperial hegemony ultimately combined with this Petrine tradition to add—at least in the eyes of Rome’s bishops—to the prestige and authority of the Roman see. When amenable to their own purposes, other bishops would appeal to Rome’s authority to bolster their own (as did Cyprian against his local competitors, following the events initiated by Decius in 250). When not amenable, Rome could be safely challenged or ignored (as did Cyprian, when he fell out over rebaptism with Rome’s bishop, Stephen). But the idea of Rome as the premier see persisted, negotiated variously once imperial power (and a lot of hectic theological wrangling) gathered around Constantine’s new Rome, Constantinople. Rome’s cultural capital was nonpareil.

Christ-following assemblies, presumably a mix of Jews and gentiles, had existed in Rome in the mid-first century, on the evidence of Paul’s letter to the community there. Tacitus, in the early second century, had famously described Nero as scapegoating Christians for the fire in 64. Nero’s lurid reputation in later Christian circles made him into a premier persecutor, responsible for the executions of Peter and Paul, and thus for the legend that the city contained the relics of both. The author of the book of Revelation, sometime in the first century, had reviled the city as the Whore of Babylon—sitting on seven hills, fornicating with the kingdoms of the earth, drunk on the blood of the saints. Yet the status of the two apostles ultimately outweighed any ambivalence that Christians might have felt: at the end of the day, Rome was the city not of Nero, but of Peter and Paul.

Mid-second century, teachers of many stripes—Valentinus, Marcion, Justin, Ptolemy, Marcellina—had been drawn to the capital. Christians organized as various house churches and reading groups, and no central authority prevailed: certain teachers and groups, like those around Valentinus, seemed comfortable floating between these different assemblies. By the end of the century, partly to repudiate and exclude all this “heretical” variety, Irenaeus, in Lyon, generated a list of “apostolic succession,” tracing Rome’s bishopric backward from his own day to the heroic period under the two premier apostles (Against Heresy 3.3.2–3).

Roman ecclesiastical leadership, even once notionally centralized, could still be a source of division. In the early third century, the episcopacy of the proto-orthodox church was claimed by two contestants, Callistus and Hippolytus, their mutual antagonism expressed both doctrinally and personally. The community, rancorously divided, split. After the experience under Decius, Rome, like many cities, had multiple communities and bishops, divided along lines of church discipline, that is, on what to do with those who had lapsed. The quarrels between episcopal candidates with their respective partisans were so contentious that the pagan imperial authority, Maxentius, had to exile the three main contestants. Even after 312, when imperial patronage should have clarified such contestations, papal politics could be roiled, factions formed. A sharp rivalry between Ursinus and Damasus in 366 crested in a riot in a basilica, leaving 137 people dead. Damasus ultimately prevailed, though his efforts to brand local schismatics as heretics in order to prosecute them in a court of law failed. Later, when Ursinus continued to defy the authority of Damasus, a pagan urban prefect, Praetextatus, had to intervene.

Unable to unify Rome’s Christians, Damasus ingratiated himself with the city’s ruling elite, which was at this time a mix of pagan and Christian (sometimes within the same marriage). Constantine’s patronage of the “universal” church had served to promote interest in Christianity among Roman aristocrats. This imperial patronage also elevated the status of Rome’s bishops, likening them to the governing elite. They “are assured of rich gifts from ladies of quality,” observed the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus. “They can ride in carriages, dress splendidly, and outdo kings in the lavishness of their table” (Histories 27.3.14). Damasus certainly played his role with aplomb, building Christian holy sites around the city, thereby changing its liturgical topography; writing Virgilian verses for the (proliferating) tombs of martyrs; collecting around himself an impressive retinue; garnering the support of wealthy Christian women. His public profile was noted by others. “Make me the bishop of Rome,” Praetextatus quipped to Damasus, “and I will immediately become Christian” (Jerome, Letter to Pammachius against John, 8).

If the Roman aristocracy slowly became Christian, Roman Christianity in its upper social strata likewise became aristocratic. Already by the 350s, Christianity had made inroads among Rome’s elite. Expensive Christian sarcophagi begin to appear as, also, the fine calendar of 354. Great ladies, some vowed to ascetic celibacy, began to sponsor and to patronize the local (and competitive) Christian intelligentsia. Jerome, for a time in the 380s resident in the city, benefited significantly from such patronage, though he lambasted others who sought the same. Wealthy Christian widows, he acerbically complained, have houses “filled with flatterers and guests. The clergy … kiss these ladies on the forehead and, putting forth their hands (so that, if you knew no better, you might suppose them in the act of blessing), take wages for their visits” (Letter 22.16). This flow of wealth was enough of a problem that, already in 370, an imperial edict forbade such clerical solicitations, interdicting bequests as well as outright gifts. No cleric should accept anything from “women to whom they have attached themselves privately under the pretext of religion” (Theodosian Code 16.2.20). On the evidence, the edict had little effect. These women of independent means continued exercising traditional patronage, transposed to a new key.

Classical culture bound Christian and pagan aristocrats together. Classical literature’s assimilation to a Christian framework is nowhere better illustrated than by the poem of Faltonia Betitia Proba. Taking each line of her cento from Virgil, Proba rearranged their sequence so that Virgil seemed to speak “in praise of Christ.” Proba was the wife of a pagan husband who only belatedly joined her in the church. Her literary efforts, like those of Damasus himself, both effected and displayed the ways in which Christianity was rendered culturally respectable in the eyes of Roman elites. That respectability, combined with the imperial sponsorship of the church and the disestablishment of traditional Roman cults, added to the momentum of aristocratic conversion. The social profile and civic importance of the city’s bishop accordingly increased as well.

Though the Greek East continued to be troubled by ancient intercity competitions, and though both Milan and Ravenna, seats of the imperial court, were nodes of political power, Rome had no real local rival for spiritual authority. Its apostolic foundation by Paul and especially by Peter put it in a class by itself. So too did Bishop Damasus, whose tasking Jerome to retranslate the Gospels from the Greek finally gained for the West a single definitive Latin version of Christian scripture. Though often politely (if tacitly) ignored by the eastern churches, Rome—and, thus, its bishop—held an unimpeachable primacy in the West.

In the course of the fifth century, some things changed drastically, but others remained the same. One by one, Goths and Vandals peeled away the provinces of the West. Aristocratic Roman Christians and pagans (not least, those of Rome’s senate) became absorbed in adjusting to the new realities of a ruling Arian military class. Rome’s bishop played an ever increasing role in urban politics. Leo I, bishop from 440 to 461, even successfully deflected the attentions of Attila the Hun when the latter threatened the city in 452. Later tradition claimed that he assumed the old imperial title of pontifex maximus. By the end of the fifth century, emperors had disappeared from the western empire. But the city, the senate, the monarchical bishop, and even some of the old traditional (“pagan”) spectacles perdured.

The “Second” Church

Imperial Christianity was a movement played out in many registers. The products of literate elites loom over our reconstructions but should not be allowed to dominate them. More than theologians, bishops, and emperors contributed to Christian formation. Few people had the education—or the leisure time—to acquaint themselves with the soaring theological speculations and bitter controversies that characterize these centuries of Christian development. What of the vast bulk of that population whose religious loyalties, by the fifth century, had aligned meaningfully around the idea of “Christian”? What—and how—can we know about them?

We are hampered first of all by a near complete absence of demographical data. We do not know how many people, in any given century, lived in the empire. We do not know, therefore, what percentage of the population, at any given time, identified as “Christian.” We can chart neither a pattern of growth, nor a rate (though some have tried). One often sees cited the figure of 10 percent of the total population as Christian (of all stripes?) for the period of Constantine, and that population would be represented especially in the cities. But, again, this is a guess sanctioned chiefly by repetition. In fact, we do not know.

Archaeological data—the foundations of buildings; grave finds; inscriptions—can begin to fill this evidentiary void, though they complicate the picture as well. While there were public Christian buildings, such as the basilica near to Diocletian’s palace, in the period before Constantine, small structures predominate. Remains of a house church in the frontier town of Dura-Europos in Syria for example, mid-third century, suggest a repurposed building that could accommodate no more than about seventy people. Scholars estimate that the city held perhaps between six thousand and eight thousand souls. Assuming that the total Christian population was larger than seventy persons (which would represent less than 1 percent of the town’s inhabitants), where else and how else could they have gathered?

One answer is, out of doors. And the most likely outdoor meeting place would have been a cemetery. Cemeteries, usually built outside of and adjacent to settlements, were active social spaces in antiquity: families would gather periodically throughout the year to celebrate a commemorative meal (refrigerium in Latin: “refreshment”) around and over the tomb of their dead. Often, cemeteries were outfitted with dining rooms, or tables on which to dine. The dead were included in these meals: libations were poured through a tube or hole through the coffin to the deceased. The dead were another generation of the family, somehow still sentient, present at their tombs. Such cemetery rituals effected a mode of continuing contact. This pre-Christian custom continued unabated, kept by Christians as well.

What happened after the Constantinian inflection point, when infusions of wealth led to a building boom of monumental basilicas? These could and did hold larger numbers than their earlier, more modest forerunners, though many structures continued to be moderate, capable of holding at the most a few hundred worshipers. These would have been that part of the community who would gather to receive the eucharist, and to hear the bishop’s preaching. Again, this small number cannot reflect the actual size of the total local Christian community, nor in big cities like Carthage or Alexandria or Antioch would it represent a broad economic cross section. More of the faithful could gather out of doors, in celebrations that would not require the presence of clergy, though sometimes clergy participated, too. Again, the prime gathering place was the cemetery.

The cult of the saints with its convivia, the festal celebration of food and drink around the martyr’s tomb, developed out of the family cult of the dead. Martyrs, though already ascended to heaven upon their death, were powerfully present at their burial site as well. Vows were taken there, in exchange for benefactions. The saint’s charismatic presence worked cures and miracles, drove away demonic infestations, aided in knowing the future—all forms of divine assistance that, with the partitioning of the saint’s body, were transferred to their relics as well.

Some bishops complained repeatedly of the unseemliness and the overenthusiasm of these celebrations and sought to manage them. There was, first of all, the danger of fraternizing with non-Christians. Death brought no distinctions: pagans, Jews, and Christians were all interred in the same locations. Families held grave banquets in the same places. People would visit with each other during their meals. Celebrations always brought with them a dangerous mixing—hence the complaints of the literate about Christians participating in the festivities of the city, in the convivialities of the January new year, in the celebration of urban spectacles, in the dancing with Jews in public spaces on their holidays (much lamented by Chrysostom). Mixing undermined efforts to construct an articulated, controlled and controllable, externally bounded community.

Worse yet, perhaps, because internal to the community, was the issue of behavior. At the festival of the saint’s death day, people would gather the night before for the vigil. There, in mixed company, they sang, they danced, they drank, they ate, enjoying themselves too much and too indecorously for the tastes of some in the ecclesiastical establishment. The enthusiastic devotions of the laity were condemned by the learned as “pagan” and as flirting with improper ritual—dancing at martyrs’ shrines, Augustine insisted, delighted demons. (Dancing had long been integrated into religious celebrations, pagan, Jewish, and Christian.) Such celebrations were something that Donatists did, he said, thus something that catholics should not do. Ambrose forbade even symbolic eating and drinking within his churches. Councils issued canons forbidding parties within churches, attempting to get at least the clergy to cease such celebrations. “No bishops or clergy should have banquets in churches,” ruled the Council of Carthage in 397—churches were built over graves; graves were eventually housed in churches—“and, so far as it is possible, the people should be barred from such convivia” (canon 42). The people’s celebrations—evidently abetted, on occasion, by clergy themselves—nevertheless continued.

Church structures could contain only a fraction of a community, even allowing for the construction boom that followed in the wake of Constantine’s conversion. By the late fourth century, further, in urban settings, those inside frequently constituted for the most part the better-off economic stratum of the community: casual mentions of wealth, of quality clothing, cosmetics, and jewelry, of the management of slaves and of other property crop up easily in the sermons of an Augustine or of a Chrysostom. The Christianity of those inter muros was (at least theoretically) shaped by the bishops: orderly liturgy, regular sacraments, strict separation of sexes within the church, acquaintance with disputed theological issues of the day and with the interpretation of the approved texts of the church’s writings.

What proportion of the total community of those who identified as Christian did this group “within the walls” represent? One historian has guesstimated perhaps 5 percent. But their spirituality could overlap with that of the far greater number, the 95 percent (?) who in effect constituted a “second” church. These people congregated mostly out of doors, their venue of choice around the tombs of and memorials to the special dead. This means that the cult of the saints was no curious sideline of late Roman Christianity. It probably described the way that the far greater number of Christians were “churched.”

We hear in the bishops’ laments the differences between the religion of the literate authorities and the lived religion of people’s practices, though these could be observed by the wealthy and by some of the clergy as well. Dancing, singing, drinking, and eating, along with prayer, constituted their liturgical activity. “Martyrs represented that superhuman power which was accessible to the mass of people in a way the Triune God was not.” They managed demons through amulets, incantations, spells, and, when and where possible, through contact with the relics of the saints. Sometimes, they became possessed by spirits at these shrines, enabled thereby to divine the future. Did they also go to the church? Sometimes, yes. But the bishops began to go to them, preaching in the cemeteries at martyria where they could reach the largest numbers of the faithful, and dispensing the sacrament there. Other bishops continued to condemn the festive convivia as “pagan.”

How do we regard these people, so quiet in our literary sources, so invisible in so many histories of the growth of Christianity? They make up an important sector of that population among whom Christianity grew.

This raises the question: How do we define “Christianity”? Was it a religion of doctrines about how God became incarnate; about how three divine persons constitute a single deity; about how the soul, after Adam, manifests sin? Or was it a religion of contested interpretations over how to read sacred texts? Or was it a religion of realpolitik, chosen by an emperor concerned to ally himself with a powerful god, to protect his empire? Or was it a religion of charismatic exorcisms and the defeat or domestication of demonic powers? Or was it a religion of bishops and councils, their disputes fought out between cities whose rivalries long preceded the empire’s involvement in the church? Or was it a religion of extreme fasting and self-mortification, of heroic, even extravagant asceticism? Or was it a religion of effective ritual actions, amulets, spells, and incantations no less than of sacraments? Or a religion of dancing, feasting, and celebration over the graves of the charismatic dead?

Identities and Boundaries

The answer, of course, is that Christianity was all these things, because “Christianity” was never a single thing. All these factors must figure in our reconstructions. If the spread of Christianity had depended on the arguments of the theologians, its success really would have taken a miracle: very few people had the education to understand what all the arguing was about. Gods and demons, intellectuals and enthusiasts, sacraments and magic, interurban and intraurban politics, new disciplinary behaviors and social formations: all went into the mix.

People were won over in part because they were enabled to control the omnipresent demons. Also, the faithful could look forward to the rewards of a good afterlife, ensured in part by good relations with the very special dead. No less important, they were motivated in their loyalties by wanting to avoid the flames of hell. They were socialized into taking sides in theological disputes through sermons, liturgies, creeds, and popular songs that reduced complex theologies to talking points and slogans. To many of them, there would have been not an iota’s worth of difference between homoousia and homoiousia. What mattered was loyalty to their prime urban patron, their bishop, and to what they were told was timeless tradition.

Some scholars have referred to these people as incerti; others, echoing the bishops, as “semipagans,” people who had a foot in two different worlds. The problem with the first term, incerti, is that these people, when challenged, did not seem “uncertain” about their identities in the least. As they told criticizing clergy in no uncertain terms, they were Christian. And so they were.

The problem with the latter term, “semipagans,” is that it masks the degree to which all Christian culture, high no less than low, was made up of elements from the world that everyone lived in. What was the option? From where else could building blocks be quarried? There was no view from nowhere, above and outside of the world one lived in, from which one could construct something untouched, bounded, and entirely new. “Paganism”—not an -ism, but simply majority Mediterranean culture—framed the whole.

We see this in the behaviors associated with the saints’ cults. We see this in the evidence of Christian ritual expertise (“magic”). But dependence on majority culture is no less true of the intellectuals. Justin depended on Philo, and both depended on the good Greco-Roman education that they received. Disavowing rhetoric and philosophy, Tertullian artfully deployed both. Origen is impossible to imagine outside of the context of Roman-period Platonism. Augustine’s profoundly original thought drew deeply on that of the pagan Plotinus and Porphyry, and all these thinkers drew from the philosophies of Plato and of the Stoa. In terms of depending on their surrounding culture to express their theologies, these men were no less “semipagan” than were the celebrants around martyr memorials. If “semipagan” is an unhelpful label for these elite theologians, then it is no less unhelpful for the cemetery’s celebrants.

In dealing with the labels “pagan” and “Christian,” we are dealing with a double problem of classification: first, how we identify these ancient people; and second, how they would have identified themselves. Pagans did not know that they were “pagans” until elite Christians told them that they were. The rhetoric of these ecclesiastical elites dominates our written evidence. They were also the ones to label the cult of the saints a “pagan” residuum; they were the ones who condemned recourse to unofficial ritual expertise as indulgence in “pagan” magic; they were the ones to complain that convivia were “pagan” excrescences. They were the ones, indeed, who invented and deployed the word “pagan” as a counterpoint and contrast to “Christian.”

Their efforts paralleled and echoed the similar processes informing imperial law. Book 16 of the Theodosian Code did more than establish correct protocols for the imperial church—regulating priestly personnel, liturgical practices, financial arrangements, and so on. It also defined religious deviance. Heretics, apostates, Jews, and pagans were now situated as legal categories, hemmed in with legal disabilities. Religious difference was dangerous. It undermined public safety and the prosperity of the empire.

These new legal taxonomies of deviance both created and witnessed to the late empire’s redefining of diplomatic relations between heaven and earth. The many-ness of traditional Mediterranean religions—the vibrant variety that denies an “-ism” status to “paganism”—was labeled as “other.” To be a pagan—or a Jew, or a nonconforming Christian—was to be, in some essential way, not only un-Christian but also un-Roman.

But how did these so-called pagans—or paganizing Christians—identify themselves? Here we must attend to oblique evidence: the complaints that stand in the treatises and sermons of literate authorities. Those many Christians (including clerics) who honored Decius’s mandate to perform a supplicatio to the gods may well have thought that they were simply fulfilling their duty as Romans. It was (some of) the bishops who told them that they were lapsi, “lapsed.” (And some of the bishops were lapsi themselves.) Post-250, martyr narratives, starring unambiguous heroes, evolved specifically to counter this looser construction of Christianness. Astrologers, diviners, makers of amulets, healers, celebrants at martyrs’ graves and at urban spectacles: the highbrow rebuffed all these Christians as “pagans.” They answered back, “I am baptized, just as you are.”

When ecclesiastical elites summoned the rhetoric of “paganism,” they were not describing difference, but making it. These differences of practice were an intra-Christian issue. By deploying the word and the concept “pagan,” churchmen were able to construct and to present these Christian practices that were beyond their control—and indifferent to their authority—as “other” than Christian; indeed, as essentially non-Christian. At stake was the concept of the church as a universal and uniform translocal entity—as, after Caracalla in 212, was the idea of Rome itself.

The very rhetoric of “paganism” when leveled at other Christians gives the measure of how fluid and multifaceted Christian identity could be.