Pagans and Christians

When Gregory arrived in Pontus, said the local tradition, he found only seventeen Christians. When he died, he left only seventeen pagans. These stories of mass conversion have often been used as history, the first clear hint, it is felt, of a rising tide of Christianity in the mid-third century which was to sweep Constantine with it, some sixty years later. To a great modern historian of Christianity’s expansion, they have seemed an “extremely instructive sketch of the way in which the mission was carried out and how paganism was ‘overcome,’ or absorbed.”⁴ Yet wherever we can test the panegyric’s stories, they are mistaken. They ignore Gregory’s own description of his early years. They allege that both his parents died, that he became a Christian when he first saw how the philosophers disagreed to no purpose, that he studied in Alexandria, that he met Firmilian of Cappadocia, then Origen. The stories had outgrown Gregory’s own letter, which the panegyric did not consult.⁵

When he returned home to Pontus with many offers of a job, he is said to have opted for a quiet spiritual retreat. However, the bishop of nearby Amaseia obliged him to become bishop of Neocaesarea and to embark on a career of miracles and mass conversion. Origen had written praises of a spiritual retreat, as opposed to holding clerical office, and his view would not, perhaps, have been lost on a pupil. However, Gregory’s letter shows no such interest: the intervention from Amaseia does not conform to the usual pattern of a bishop’s election; it is better to look to the panegyrist’s own times. It is deeply misleading to use the panegyric as if it gives a correct historical image of Gregory’s appeal in the 250s. The story was shaped to suit the tastes of an author and an audience in the 380s, and much of the shaping may be the author’s own.⁶ The relation between spiritual withdrawal and life as a bishop was an evident interest of the speaker himself; “compulsion” to clerical office was a particular feature of his age. When Gregory entered his home town, said the panegyric, neither his glance nor his expression strayed, to the amazement of his spectators. The scene recalls the entry of an Emperor or holy man into cities of the fourth century, where this “immobility” was widely noticed. Gregory, it was also said, had won repute by writing a note of banishment to a demon and driving it from a pagan oracle. Perhaps he did, but it was a nice touch of the panegyrist to make the keeper of the shrine appeal at once to the Emperor. In such details, we see something of the Emperor’s continuing image in the mind of his subjects, the speaker and his audience. We do not see Gregory’s own history.

Gregory’s success, we are told, was assured by his protection of the Christians during a plague. Afterwards, the demons fled before a puff of his breath; Christians brought him their quarrels and disputes, which he settled as a good bishop should. While he practised his shrewd arbitration, flooding rivers returned to their beds and rough justice was done to the Jews. About Gregory’s invitation by the nearby Christians of Comana to intervene in their election of a bishop, the panegyrist told a splendid story. Gregory rejected the local gentry’s choice and gave his inspired preferment to a simple charcoal burner who turned out to be a philosopher in disguise, well able to speak educated Greek.⁷ The gentry’s dominance over clerical elections was a topic dear to the panegyrist’s own heart, and here, too, we must allow for his shaping of the saint’s legend.

As for the detailed stories of miracles, the chastening and conversion of the Jews are a commonplace,⁸ and in two examples, we can see how stories had become attached to local landmarks. When the local river Lycus flooded, Gregory was said to have planted his stick as its marker and kept the water’s course thereafter within bounds. Known locally as the “staff,” Gregory’s “original” willow tree was visible at the riverside and became the stock from which this story subsequently sprouted. Elsewhere, two brothers were said to have disputed the right to their father’s lake, and they were preparing to arm their dependents and fight the matter out, an interesting hint of the scope for private armies among the large landowners of the area. Gregory put an end to their quarrel by twitching his cloak and drying up the property under discussion. The “vanishing lakes” and dried plains of inner Anatolia are common enough to explain how this local tale of a miracle began. Just outside Gregory’s Neocaesarea they have an unrecognized relevance.⁹ In the 1830s, William Hamilton travelled into Pontus and approached Gregory’s home town with no idea of the legends of the saint. “It was impossible,” he wrote, “to look on this rich and level plain without being convinced that it was the site of an ancient lake which had been drained by some convulsion… but I was surprised to find that the Turks themselves had a tradition that the plain was once a lake or sea, navigated by large ships. They pretended that formerly, a great chain was hung across the gorge below the bridge and our guides pointed out to what parts of the rock it had been attached. From this chain were suspended smaller ones, to which pieces of leather and skins were fastened by which the waters were kept in to form the lake. I could not learn at what period this event was supposed to have taken place, but… it is remarkable that a people so unimaginative as the Turks should have conceived such an idea.” Before the Turks, Christians in Pontus had conceived another: they explained their curious landscape by a legend of Gregory, their saint.

These stories Christianized the local landscape, but they are not evidence for their hero’s true career. Only twice does the panegyric allude to external events; Gregory was believed to have preached during a plague and went into retreat during the persecution of the year 250. Evidently, he was not martyred and his relics did not receive a cult, an omission which the panegyric neatly evaded. The stories also retained some plausible names of cities and local rivers and recorded the first man of property in Neocaesarea who gave Gregory the use of his house: in the panegyrist’s own age, the local bishop bore the same name as this first patron and might have been his direct descendant in the city.¹⁰ It is as well to remember that Pontus was a province of very large landowners and that Gregory enjoyed the birth and position to greet them on equal terms. They seem to have taken no exception to his activities, until Decius’s edict required them to start a persecution. For the rest, there is only the mention of Gregory’s church, “surviving” despite earthquakes and natural disasters in a “very conspicuous” place in the fourth-century city. It also contained the creed “written in the saint’s own hand.” Like the text, the building had probably enjoyed a few later embellishments.

Elsewhere, we can see from Eusebius how many concerns of Gregory’s lifetime the speech has suppressed.¹¹ While Gregory preached, Pontus was vexed by the problems of rebaptizing heretics. During the 260s, the bishop of Rome sent aid to the nearby churches in a crisis. Then Gregory himself went south to Antioch to join in the hearing and assessment of the heretical bishop Paul. The panegyric omits every one of these episodes, just as it omits Gregory’s partner, his brother Athenodorus, with whom he had attended Origen’s classes. Like Gregory, Athenodorus was made a bishop in Pontus, a fact which we only know from Eusebius and which adds to our early examples of bishoprics which ran in families. Perhaps Gregory appointed his brother personally.

Can we, then, take the stories of mass conversion literally in a speech which builds on such a vague set of legends? They ignore practical problems. In other churches, candidates still had to be selected and prepared at length for baptism: did Gregory simply dispense with this pronounced feature of Church life?¹² Perhaps his social contacts gave him an unusual access to large local estates, but a mass conversion of the countryside raises the old problem of dialect.¹³ In Pontus, people presumably spoke a dialect, like the adjoining Cappadocians. It was not entirely lost on educated local people: in the 370s, Basil, the Christian bishop, could cite the problems of the word “and” in “native Cappadocian” while arguing a complex point of theology in Greek. This piece of knowledge is not proof that he spoke the language freely himself. Perhaps many Pontic peasants were themselves bilingual, but it is hard to think that Gregory combined a mastery of “Pontic” with his Greek and Latin.

In the panegyric, the main episodes occur in the inland cities of the province, and here, we can give Gregory’s legend a context. Most of the city sites have now been located, although none has been excavated. Study of Pontus is still in its infancy, but the surviving coins and inscriptions can be joined to a precious description by Strabo, the geographer, writing at the turn of the era. Together, they cast the scene of the Christians’ triumph in an unexpected light.

Gregory’s home and mission lay in the distinctive landscape of the old Pontic kingdom. By the late 230s, it had recently been detached and set beneath its own Roman governor for the first time: capital justice lay nearer than ever to the sites of Gregory’s adventures.¹⁴ Escape, however, was easy, away into the woods and hill forts which were later to house the Christian ascetics. The isolated clifftops bore ancient strongholds, framed against wooded mountains and river plains which teemed with vines, fruit and precious crops. Gregory’s home town lay beside the steep river Lycus, which races between deep ravines and spreads here and there into pockets of exceptional fertility. In antiquity, the locals themselves felt the magic of this countryside.¹⁵ The contrasts of sheer cliffs and deep valleys left a mark on the prose of Basil and his brother Gregory and moved them to a Homeric imagery of hanging forests and changing colours, until their pictures in words took on the tone of an Alpine sketch by Salvator Rosa. Through and beyond the river valleys branched the military roads which Roman governors had built and extended for their eastern campaigns since the Flavian era. “If a man asks you to go with him one mile, go with him twain…”: Gregory’s Christian preaching lay in regions where these exactions were frequent.

When Gregory arrived, said the panegyric, the Pontic countryside was totally under the sway of the demons. The remark gains point from the local antiquities.¹⁶ Old sites of worship show up on the peaks of mountains outside the towns, while nymphs and local divinities watched moodily over their glades and springs. An hour or so’s walk from several townships lay springs and pools of healing, holy places which were known by their latest identity as haunts of the god Asclepius. The countryside was the refuge of odd minorities, worshippers of fire in the manner of the Persian Magi, or devotees of the “Most High god.”

The five cities of the area had formed into a local league of “inland Pontus” which organized a cult of the Emperors and held the accompanying shows and amenities.¹⁷ However, their monuments were not confined to the usual equipment of cities with Greek pretensions. Before the Romans encouraged these city foundations, Pontus had enjoyed a royal history as the heartland of old Mithridates’s kingdom. At Amaseia, images of the royal tombs were still shown prominently on the city’s third-century coinage.¹⁸ Cabeira, near Gregory’s home, had housed the dynasty’s palace and zoo, and the surrounding forests had been royal hunting grounds. They continued to be rich in game, as Christian ascetics later proved by hunting it and living off their catch. It was a rough country, through which the river Lycus hurtled with enough force to power the first recorded water mills in history: long after Strabo’s mention, the nineteenth-century travellers remarked their frequency along the nearby river Iris.¹⁹ This royal past had been combined with an older presence of gods and temples which its rulers respected, but did not create. We see it memorably in Strabo’s descriptions, which were written from his own local knowledge around the turn of our era. The handsome coin types of the local cities bring his picture into the early third century and the years of Gregory’s Pontic childhood: proudly, they reflect local cults and temples which were surely still in use.

At Amaseia, where Gregory found a bishop, people were still proud of the ancient cult which Greeks called Zeus Stratios, and which was practised on a hilltop at nearby Ebimi, an hour’s climb from the city. Zeus Stratios was honoured with a fire altar whose picture stands on the city’s coins with the types of a tree, sometimes a pine, an eagle astride a sacrificed bull and a four-horsed chariot in the sky above.²⁰ The city lay dramatically round two steep pinnacles of rock above the river Iris, a setting which is beautifully caught on the portraits of its early-third-century coinage. Matching Strabo’s sketch, these coins show the city’s two temples still thriving, one by the river, the other perched high up on the mountain peak. The first must be the city’s temple of the goddess Ma, while the other ought to be Zeus Stratios’s on his nearby hill, still honoured with the old local rites which had been quite unspoilt by the arrival of the city’s first Christians.

At Zela, southwest of Gregory’s home, a high mound housed an old temple of the Persians’ goddess Anahita, whose priesthood had once dominated the life of the town.²¹ The cult may have reached Zela through nearby Armenia in the Persian period, and in Strabo’s day it was still flourishing. “All the local men of Pontus swear their oaths on matters of the greatest importance there,” he wrote: the oaths perhaps included those inscribed vows and “confessions” to the goddess which are known from her cult sites in Lydia. The temple survived in the enlarged city of the Roman period and at least in the early first century, it continued to house sacred slaves. By then, its priests’ powers had been reduced after abuses, but the rites had continued with great sanctity and the yearly festival of the Sacaea was still the occasion for men to dress in “Scythian” clothes, eat, drink and flirt with one another or with the women who came to drink in their company. As elsewhere, the women presumably included temple prostitutes.

We do not know if the slaves and women persisted during three centuries of Roman rule, but the local coins again bring pride in the old cult and temple into Gregory’s youth, showing fire altars and the half-moon and other attributes of a Persian Artemis and her fellow Persian gods far into the third century. There may be a much later echo. In the early fifth century, the “girdle” of the Virgin Mary was deposed in a special church in Constantinople and various stories were told of its origin.²² One story connected it with a relic which the Emperor Justinian had brought from Zela, the old temple city of Anahita-Artemis. As at Ephesus, so at Zela, the cult of two rival virgins coincided: perhaps this exact tradition refers to some relic of Artemis in Zela which Justinian had found and added to the new Virgin’s shrine in his capital.

Outside Gregory’s own city lay a shrine of the goddess Men, whom the province’s rulers had invoked in their royal oaths.²³ The temple, in Strabo’s day, controlled a sacred village with “many temple serfs and sacred land which the priest alone can harvest.” Its fate is complex, as the nearby town of Cabeira changed its name and ceased coining in the first century, while nearby Neocaesarea was founded in one or other early Caesar’s reign. There, the third-century coins show a superb pillared temple from several angles, revealing that it housed the statues of two divinities. The neatest view is that these gods are the same two, Men and Selene, who had earlier been honoured jointly at Cabeira. If so, theirs was another cult which lived beyond Strabo’s lifetime into Gregory’s. Perhaps it kept up a system of sacred slaves and land, but they may not have survived the transfer of the cults to the new city.

At nearby Comana, beside the river Iris, cult and landscape drew neatly together.²⁴ Here, Strabo had described how the impressive shrine of the goddess Ma dominated the social and commercial life of the entire region. Vines covered the allotments in the temple estates and allowed the priests and temple devotees to live in enviable luxury. In the mid-first century B.C., the temple slaves had numbered six thousand, he said, and changes since then had merely enlarged the temple’s lands. Again, we do not know their fate under later Roman rule, but the third-century coins still show Ma and her temple with its boldly broken pediment and pillared façade. Even if her slaves had died out, her seasonal festivals may have flourished as Strabo first described them. When the goddess had one of her “exoduses,” visitors from as far as Armenia would swarm in for her religious fair. Comana, as Strabo knew it, housed temple prostitutes, and on the days of “exodus,” the goddess expected them to serve the crowds. Few cities could offer such a mixture of trade and religious worship, processions, sex and a drinkable local wine. The drink was hardly less novel than the women: at nearby Sebaste, in the colder climate to the southeast, Gregory of Nyssa described the inhabitants as men who never saw vines at all unless they travelled. They listened to tales of wine, he said, as if it was the rarest luxury from India.

This long history of a pagan temple society is the unacknowledged background to Gregory’s mission. Against it, he begins to seem like a hopeful nineteenth-century missionary let loose in heathen Tibet. The local coins were still portraying these temples and their images in his own lifetime, just as he left for Origen’s classes: it is natural to take them as living, contemporary portraits, not as allusions to cults which had died away. The temples’ estates and social dependents may perhaps have altered, but their gods, buildings and ceremonies were sufficiently vigorous for cities to display them as marks of their identity. Although we cannot be sure that every custom had continued since Strabo’s day, there is a certain pleasure in imagining a pupil of Origen attempting to convert temple prostitutes and their clients in a city like Comana.

In 250, there were still sufficient pagans in Pontus to enforce a Christian persecution. We begin to see why, and we must add to these temples the usual patterns of civic life.²⁵ Coins show the Fortune of Neocaesarea, the “mother city,” among five lesser cities of the league of inland Pontus, arranged beside the river Lycus. In the 130s Neocaesarea had sent a choir to Apollo at Claros. Third-century coins show her baroque buildings, her temples and her provincial cult of the Emperors. Whereas she claimed an Emperor as her founder, Amaseia claimed the god Hermes, the old royal tombs and the title of metropolis too. No doubt there was the usual civic rivalry between the two “mother cities.”²⁶ Doctors and poets still speak from Amaseia’s tombstones, while its arena echoed with a Christian’s worst enemies, gladiatorial contests and shows of wild beasts. Their dreaded enemies, the bears, were hauled in for the occasion, being trapped in the surrounding forests. The cities of inland Pontus revelled in the usual games and festivals; from a Christian speech, around 400, we catch a lively glimpse of the festival of the Kalends of January, which had persisted in Christian Amaseia. It was a time of crowds and shows, pantomimes and the exchange of New Year presents among family members, patrons and social inferiors. In this speech, we are seeing an older occasion, familiar in civic life under the pagan Empire and one we should probably picture in Gregory’s lifetime too. Most of these worldly audiences were not ripe for a missionary’s preaching. “I have spoken in many theatres, I have travelled far and wide,” said the tombstone of Gemellus the actor which was set up near the hill shrine of Zeus Stratios outside Imperial Amaseia, “and now I have paid my debt and gone my way. All this is simply dust.” “I did not exist, I knew nothing,” said Prinnas the gladiator’s tombstones in a traditional farewell, “I was born, I exist no more, I know nothing: this does not bother me”.

By a happy chance, we can relate this city culture to an episode in Gregory’s panegyric.²⁷ “At the time of some traditional festival,” said his panegyrist, a pagan crowd had packed their theatre for a civic show. Only Gregory stood outside, a lone Christian who muttered his disgust at the roars of the heathen audience. “Give us space,” bellowed the crowds to Zeus as they sat jammed elbow to elbow in their seats. “Space, indeed, you shall have,” replied Gregory’s voice outside the gangways, and space, indeed, they had, when a plague thinned their numbers soon afterwards. Widespread plague beset Asia during the 250s: in the panegyric’s view, this prophecy and Gregory’s subsequent role in the epidemic accounted for Christianity’s great success.

Beginning in the reign of Gordian, the surviving coins of Neocaesarea show the symbols and legend of a series of local Actian games.²⁸ These new coin types ought to refer to a new set of games in the city, and perhaps they took their cue from the Emperor’s presence in Asia, like the Actian games which a group of cities in southwestern Asia began at the same date. If so, Gregory’s return to his home town coincided with a sumptuous new festival of pagan athletics. It was hardly the likeliest setting for mass conversions to Christ. A coin type of the 260s happens to survive, still showing the symbols of athletic victory in these same Actian games. The festival, it seems, survived Gregory’s mission and fits neatly with the scene in the panegyric of his life. The continuing imagery of pagan games on the city’s coins tempers the extreme stories of the Christian conversion of Neocaesarea. Actian games honoured the local gods and continued to draw pagan crowds in Gregory’s home city long after the plague was supposed to have won him his converts. These local games add weight to a different episode: after the persecutions in 250, Gregory introduced festivals of Christian martyrs to the people of Pontus. He planned them, said his panegyrist, as an alternative focus for converts who were accustomed to the pleasures of heathen games. In the late fourth century, this pragmatic motive was often ascribed by Christian authors to their churches’ cults of martyrs. Its relevance has been questioned, but the continuing pagan games in Pontus during the 260s give it a sharper edge. A city with such symbols on its coins was not reduced to seventeen pagans by the time of Gregory’s death.

In nearby Armenia, some sixty years later, the established shrines of Anahita were only dislodged with the help of its king. He was sympathetic to a subsequent Gregory, the kingdom’s missionary, who converted him at a date around the year 314.²⁹ In Pontus, Gregory’s impact is known from the continuing local respect for his sayings and example. However, there was no king, and here a Christian mass conversion is neither evident nor plausible. Over a century later, the panegyric ignores the province’s strong pagan setting. It is not history, and its legends should not be used to support the idea of a rapid growth in the mid-third-century Church.

Since leaving Caesarea, Gregory has wandered at the mercy of local legend and his panegyric’s better stories. All we can do is point to their exaggerations and allow throughout for the tastes of its speaker and audience a hundred and twenty years later. If the work “To Theopompus” is really by our Gregory, it probably belonged in the years in Pontus and would cast yet more doubt on the panegyric’s stories. It shows him discussing and philosophizing, like a Christian apologist, not a charismatic worker of miracles. Perhaps one man could be both at once, but the picture is not of Christians being gained in crowds and spared the usual teaching. Doubts, however, continue to form round this text’s authenticity.

To return to history, we must turn elsewhere, to the so-called Canonical Letter, which survives from this period in Pontus and is unquestionably Gregory’s own work. It has probably been shortened, but it passed safely into the main body of Church law and drew comments from late Byzantine editors.³⁰ Once again, it shows us Gregory through his own words, although, typically, the panegyric ignored it. The Letter belongs with a well-attested crisis, the raids on Pontus which brought Gothic tribesmen across the Bosphorus in the year 251/2.³¹ These raiders had profited from deaths and faction in the Bosphoran dynasty which Rome had previously been subsidizing. On their first raid, these Goths, the Borani, took captives back with them to man their newly built fleet. On a second raid they used a calm summer to sail far and wide and sack the temples and city of Trapezus, seat of the Romans’ Pontic fleet.

The Letter belongs in the aftermath of this second raid and addresses a nearby Christian “father,” or pappas.³² He had authority over a country district and was evidently a bishop, perhaps the bishop of Trapezus itself. Gregory had heard of some shocking misconduct: the Goths had stolen and scattered property; they had raped Christian women and obliged Christian captives to lead them to profitable targets. When necessary, Christians had strangled their fellow men, “Pontic people,” said Gregory, with a touch of local indignation, marking off the members of this province as something special.³³ In the wake of the raids Christians had seized other people’s lost property and were also detaining captives who had escaped the Goths’ clutches. The raid had left Christians with awkward problems. Were the victims of Gothic rape innocent victims, the church leaders wondered, or had they encouraged the Goths to the act?

The barbarian raids of the mid-third century have been regarded by many historians as a prelude to economic ruin. There were Christians in Pontus who, took a different view. They had seized windfalls and were asking high prices for escaped captives whom they had trapped. They had used the Goths to loot their neighbours’ property. Throughout the episode, the poor had not risen against the rich.³⁴ Individual enemies, rather, had used the Goths to settle a varied range of old scores. In the aftermath, Gregory wrote a letter of authority and urged the “father” to adopt his own practices of discipline and authority. In his Letter, we see the church founder at work, the pupil of Origen and the Beirut school in a new, Christian role.

Gregory had inquired carefully about the Goths’ habits. Before eating meat, he found, they did not offer it to their idols and did not pollute it with demons. Christian captives who had eaten Gothic food had no need to fear and make amends. Did not Scripture prove that man is defiled by “what goes out,” not by “what goes in”? With embarrassing pedantry, Gregory applied this text to the Goths’ female victims.³⁵ Rape, which “goes in,” was not a defilement, a point which a humane text in Deuteronomy supported. What, though, of the looks and enticements which “went out” of the supposed victims? With the precision of a High Court judge, Gregory classed these victims as sinners, defiled by the looks which “went out” and urged the Goths to come “in.” He ordered a search among the Christian communities for any women who were known, on past form, to be flirtatious. The result, no doubt, was a horrible witch-hunt.

Christians who had found windfalls were no more fortunate. It made no difference, wrote Gregory, if the Goths had dropped the spoils, for the principle “finders, keepers” amounted to theft. Black passages from Genesis and Deuteronomy were brought to bear on these Christians’ misconduct.³⁶ Just as Achan in the Book of Joshua had sinned and stolen the spoils of God, so Christians in Pontus who retained this lost property were held to be provoking divine wrath. Like Achan’s spoils, the Goths’ lootings were “anathemata,” goods dedicated to God, and if they belonged to anyone, they belonged to God’s Church. For a similar theft, Achan, his sons, his daughters and all his animals had been stoned and burned. Just as all Israel had suffered for his greed, so these Christian profiteers were bringing down the wrath of God on every Christian’s head. They must be “excommunicated,” a threat of the bishop’s strongest weapon. Fellow Christians who were retaining the Goths’ former captives and hoping to sell them could expect no mercy. District “commissioners” must comb the countryside and catch them “so that the thunderbolts of God may not fall on those who practise such behaviour.”³⁷ Otherwise, God’s anger would fall on the entire community and “especially on those leaders who fail to hunt the sinners out.” It would come, as it once came on Achan, a punishment of fire on sinners, their flocks and innocent relations. To avoid this fate, the accusations, wrote Gregory, must follow fixed rules.³⁸ Christian sinners must be urged to stand forwards and denounce themselves, whereupon they would find a place in their fellow brethren’s prayers. The churches should not lose respect for the laity’s judgement. General assemblies of all the faithful, wrote Gregory, must judge the gravest cases of Christian collaboration, while lesser offenders should be consigned to different remedies, guilt and public shame. They could hope for a gradual, public reconciliation, whose various grades Gregory defined with a fine precision. Extreme sinners must stand weeping outside the church door, while minor sinners could proceed by stages to a presence inside church for all but the sharing of the Eucharist. Although some have thought these stages a later addition to the Letter, they sit well at this date, when the churches were becoming patient schools for sinners. They are close to the advice to bishops which is given by Cyprian and by the third-century “Apostles’” letter on this topic.³⁹

These Christians’ misconduct throws a rare light on Christian charity in action. It has been excused as the result of a hasty mass conversion, but the mass conversion is uncertain and the conduct recurs in other churches where the legends of crowd conversion found no place. There is a further dimension to the Letter. Seventy years before Constantine entrenched bishops as civil judges, Gregory was ruling on crimes of property and violence as if only the Christians’ justice was relevant. He says nothing about civil authority or the intervention of Roman governors. It is striking how soon, in the fourth century, civic life in Pontus and Cappadocia depends on the benefactions of the Christian patrons in its upper class: is Gregory’s Letter already a sign that the Church had filled a very large gap in Pontic society and that it alone stood forward when Roman rule broke down? The conclusion is excessive. As a bishop, Gregory was only concerned with Christians and a Christian settlement of mutual disputes. His Letter says more about the lengths to which Christian investigators would go than about the “collapse” of a separate pagan framework of justice, which Gregory was not concerned to discuss.

On Gregory’s own outlook, however, the Letter casts an invaluable light. In his youth he had learned public speaking and admired and studied Roman law. He had read the Stoics, Platonists and Peripatetics under Origen’s open guidance. Yet none of his training survived his practical role as a bishop. Roman law had its own rules for theft or rape, and its own redress for the detection of lost property or the sale of escaped captives. They owed nothing to the separate and narrow province of sacred law. Roman justice held only the guilty liable for punishment and was praised for its express refusal to allow that the sins of one generation could ever be visited on another.⁴⁰ The concepts of intention and personal responsibility stood at the very centre of the pagan ethics which Origen expounded to his pupils. They were opposed by their entire origin and elaboration to the archaic doctrine of a collective liability for punishment. God’s treatment of Achan, his sons, his daughters and his entire household was a shocking betrayal of the principles of classical law and ethics.

At Caesarea, Gregory had considered the laws of the Romans to be “most Greek.” He had valued philosophy as a key to the meaning of Scripture. In Pontus, he turned to a different language and authority, the scriptural powers of a Christian bishop. Even if “To Theopompus” is his work, it does not remove the contrast: when writing and arguing, Gregory could still philosophize, though not exactly as Origen would have taught: when ruling as a bishop, classical culture fell away from his language and advice. As we have doubted “To Theopompus,” the contrast is particularly strong. Gregory turned for authority to Scripture, not philosophy: “Jerusalem,” not “Athens” was the setting in which his converts were taught to live. In the mid-third century, his progress is all the more telling because it does not stand alone.

As the age of the apologists ends, we begin to hear from other Christian leaders, from Cyprian and Dionysius, Novatian the Elder in Rome and the minor bishops of North Africa. Novatian was the most true to his philosophical schooling, an author whose theology drew on Platonism and whose writings did retain a clear stamp of his education.⁴¹ The quality was not lost on Cyprian: Novatian, he said, was made harsh by “the mischief of worldly philosophy.,” not “mild” by the wisdom of the Lord. He was not entirely fair to him. In Novatian’s Rome, there were Christians who marshalled the Old Testament to justify all manner of behaviour: why, they argued, could they not go to the games, if Elijah had driven a chariot and David had danced before the Ark? In the Scriptures, Novatian replied, lay the proper “spectacle” for Christians; they should contemplate the world and its sins, the rewards and punishments of God, the resurrection of the dead. The “mischief” of philosophy did not supplant Scripture in his priorities.

Like Gregory, Cyprian had also begun life as a pagan of rank and riches. He had had an oratorical training and could plead as an advocate: he carried his gifts for rhetoric into his Christian writings, which are steeped in the Latin Bible and the “scriptural orchestration” of his style.⁴² Like Gregory and Dionysius, he was developing a new literary imagery from biblical sources, but the influence of rhetorical schooling and its forms did not affect his writings at the deeper level of content. As a bishop, he drew heavily on proof texts from the Old and New Testaments and from the books of scriptural “testimonies” to which he added his own volume. With their help, he defended the “priestly” status of the bishop.⁴³ He used text upon Jewish text to stress the purity of God’s chosen ministers and the wickedness of those who defied their will. Like Gregory, he called down God’s vengeance against Christians who disobeyed their leaders. The bishop, he wrote, was both priest and judge, hedged about by texts from Samuel and Deuteronomy which lent the Lord’s support to his sanctity: “God commanded them to be slain who did not hearken unto his priests and obey the judges he appointed for the season… the proud and insolent are now killed by a spiritual sword, in that they are cast out of the Church…”

We know less of Dionysius’s writings, but enough to compare his progress with his fellow pupil Gregory. Again, his rhetorical training did not affect the hard, scriptural core in his thought. As we shall see, he quoted dark texts from the Old Testament to explain political events: “I will visit the sins of fathers upon children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me…”⁴⁴ When asked by the bishop of Libya, he also gave his advice on a series of sexual topics. Men who had had wet dreams were referred by Dionysius to Paul’s words on conscience, while menstruating women were to be banned from approaching the Eucharist, as they would defile the purity of the place of God. Not all Christians agreed, but Dionysius’s ruling lies at the root of a lasting tradition in the Eastern Church.⁴⁵ Ideas of pollution and purity took precedence in his answers over the views of educated men.

By scriptural casuistry, these bishops applied their advice to questions which the Gospels had never discussed. They also explained and advanced their own authority in texts drawn freely from the Old Testament. So, too, the “Apostles’” letter in Syria supported its ideal of the bishop by long quotations from Jewish Scripture, ranging from the careers of David and Samuel to books as arcane as the “prayer of Manasseh.”⁴⁶ These sources reinforced a particular view of the Church itself. In September 256, a council of bishops met at Carthage to discuss the question of the rebaptism of heretics. The topic concerned the very nature and theology of the Church, and by a happy chance, the interventions of the lesser bishops have been preserved in the minutes of the council and transmitted with Cyprian’s letters. Among their free extension of texts from the Gospels, notes of the Old Testament also sound clearly. “And Lucian of Rucuma said: It is written, ‘God saw the light that it was good, and he divided the light from the darkness.’ Only if light agrees with darkness, may we have anything in common with heretics…” “Pelagianus of Luperciana said: It is written, ‘Either the Lord is thy God, or Baal is thy God.’ So now, either the Church is the Church, or heresy is the Church…”⁴⁷

It would be superficial to see these bishops’ use of Old Testament texts as nothing but a cynical prop for their authority. God’s words of anger and vengeance were useful allies, but the Scriptures also allowed bishops to give rulings and advice in a form which was not merely a personal opinion. In Scripture, a greater voice spoke, to which the bishop, too, was subordinate: this impersonality was never better remarked and commended than by Augustine: “If threats are made, let them be made from the Scriptures, threatening future retribution, that it should not be ourselves who are feared in our personal power, but God himself in our words.”⁴⁸ Like Gregory, Augustine had left a distant province in search of a pagan education. Away from home, he, too, had coincided with a great Christian teacher: Ambrose was to be his Origen, Milan his Caesarea.⁴⁹ Augustine, too, returned home to rapid promotion as a bishop and a life of hard, practical rule over a flock who knew only too well how to sin. In this life, the contacts with Ambrose and his philosophic culture gave way to a bedrock of Scripture and the Old Testament. No Christian ever wrote more sensitively of the changes which this progression involved, but the progress itself was not untypical: Augustine speaks for a course which other Christian leaders travelled.

We have seen how the ideals of Christian perfectionists appeared to overlap with much which pagan philosophers could admire. Among pagans, too, virginity and chastity were fine ideals; pagans, too, sought the vision of God and respected prophecy; it was admirable to die for one’s convictions, if those convictions were noble and worthy. Yet, in each case, the Christian ideals had a different motivation and a different core; the “life of angels” and the return to Paradise were quite irrelevant to pagan sexual ethics; Christian visions had their own obsessions and occasions; martyrdom was quite unlike a philosopher’s noble suicide. We can now add the different type of authority which aimed to control and lead these ideals. Under its leadership, the rise of Christianity is distorted if it is merged into a common religious culture of “Mediterranean” proportions and a shared attachment to one education, common to Christians and pagans. Christian authors could indeed present their faith in philosophical terms and defend it before pagans, as if it was the heir to pagan wisdom. These books were significant, but ultimately they did not relate to the realities of Christian discipline. The election, powers and scriptural resources of the bishop were quite unlike anything in pagan experience. Beside good, critical philosophy, the bishop’s resources can only seem archaic and alien. The living heart of a high culture cannot survive if it is transplanted into a different context of power and authority. The “continuity” of pagan and Christian culture founders on the powers of the bishop and that impersonal source of “threats,” as Augustine saw it: the Scriptures.

Christianity could appeal to ideals which pagans could recognize: it gave scope for intellectual defence and the refinement of faith. Yet it was also grounded in this different type of authority, and it now remains to be seen how this authority fared in the years of transition from the age of Decius to Constantine himself. In the final years of persecution before Constantine, it has been said, “the pagan wing of the intelligentsia tried to outlaw their Christian rivals. They failed. What a Christian author like Lactantius or Eusebius could offer, by way of negotiation, was to shelter the elevating traditions of classical education under the umbrella of a revealed religion…”⁵⁰ Negotiations, we now see, were likely to be rather more awkward, for the umbrella itself had a tough and alien central support. More than the safety of an education was involved in the change from pagan to Christian, and persecution itself had strong unintellectual roots. It is in this light, rather, that we can ask how far Christianity had grown by the year 300, whether, without Constantine’s support, it would have become the most prominent religion in the Mediterranean world, and how far, then, it made a difference to life.