V

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM
CHRISTIANS AGAINST PAGANS

Between 70 and 100 C.E.—the interval between the writing of the gospel of Mark and of the gospel of John—the Christian movement became largely Gentile. Many converts found that having become Christians placed their lives in danger, and that they were threatened not by Jews but by pagans—Roman officers and city mobs who hated Christians for their “atheism,” which pagans feared could bring the wrath of the gods upon whole communities. Only two generations after Mark and Matthew, Gentile converts, many of them former pagans from Roman provinces—Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Africa, and Greece—adapted the gospel vocabulary to face a new enemy. As earlier generations of Christians had claimed to see Satan among their fellow Jews, now converts facing Roman persecution claimed to see Satan and his demonic allies at work among other Gentiles.

The pressures of state persecution complicated such characterizations of Gentiles as we found in Matthew and Luke; those writers, hoping for a favorable hearing among Gentile audiences, had depicted Romans and other Gentiles in generally favorable ways, as we have seen.¹ So long as Christians remained a minority movement within Jewish communities, they tended to regard other Jews as potential enemies, and Gentiles as potential converts. Although the apostle Paul, writing c. 55 C.E., complained that he had faced danger at every turn—“danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, even danger from false brethren” (2 Cor. 11:26)—he mentions actual persecution only from his fellow Jews: “Five times I received at the hands of the Jews forty lashes save one; three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned” (2 Cor. 11:24). According to Luke’s account in Acts, Paul regarded Roman magistrates as his protectors against Jewish hostility; and Paul himself, writing to Christians in Rome, orders them to “obey the higher powers; for there is no authority except from God, and the powers that exist are instituted by God,” even in their God-given right to “bear the sword” and “execute God’s wrath” (Rom. 13:1).

But Paul himself was executed, probably by order of a Roman magistrate; and about ten years later, when many Romans blamed the emperor Nero for starting a fire that devastated much of Rome, the emperor ordered the arrest of a group of Christians, charged them with arson, and had them hung up in his garden and burned alive as human torches.²

One follower of Paul, aware of the circumstances of his teacher’s death and of the various dangers Christians faced, warned in a letter attributed to Paul, called the Letter to the Ephesians, that Christians are not contending against mere human beings:

Our contest is not against flesh and blood [human beings] but against powers, against principalities, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places (6:12).

This Pauline author articulates the sense of spiritual warfare experienced by many Christians, especially by those who face persecution. The author of Revelation, claiming to have suffered exile “on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1:9), and aware of others suffering imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of Roman magistrates, describes horrific and ecstatic visions that invoke traditional prophetic images of animals and monsters to characterize the powers of Rome, which he identifies with “the devil and Satan” (20:2; passim). Despite the gospels’ generally conciliatory attitude toward the Romans, the crucifixion account nevertheless invites Christians to see demonic forces working through Roman officials as well as through Jewish leaders; Luke goes so far as to suggest that Jesus’ crucifixion forged an unholy alliance between Pilate and Herod, so that the Roman and Jewish authorities became friends “that day” (23:12).

Gentile converts who were hated by other Gentiles—often members of their own families, their townspeople, and their city magistrates—believed that worshipers of the pagan gods were driven by Satan to menace God’s people. As Christian preachers increasingly appealed to Gentiles, many found that what had offended most Jews about Christianity offended pagans even more: “Christians severed the traditional bonds between religion and a nation or people,” and, as the historian Robert Wilken points out, “Ancient people took for granted that religion was indissolubly linked to a particular city, nation or people.”³ Jews identified their religion with the Jewish people as a whole, united by tradition, however dispersed throughout the world; for pagans, pietas consisted precisely in respecting ancient customs and honoring traditional mores. The Christian movement, however, encouraged people to abandon ancestral customs and break the sacred bonds of family, society, and nation.

The movement that began as a sect within Judaism and was rejected by the majority of Jews, whom it repudiated in turn, now appealed to people of every nation and tribe to join the new “Christian society” and to break all former bonds of kinship and affiliation. “In Christ,” the apostle Paul had declared, “there is no longer Jew nor Greek … slave nor free, male nor female” (Gal. 3:28); for those “born again” in baptism (John 3:5–8), the world consists of only two kinds of people—those who belong to God’s kingdom, whose citizenship is in heaven (Heb. 12:22–24; 13:14), and those still ruled by the evil one, subjects of Satan.

Despite official Roman censure and popular pagan hostility, the movement grew. The North African convert Tertullian boasts in an appeal to the Roman emperors:

Those who once hated Christianity … now begin to hate what they formerly were, and to profess what they formerly hated.… The outcry is that the State is filled with Christians—that they are in the fields, in the cities, in the islands; many people lament, as if for some calamity, that both men and women, every age and condition, even people of high rank, are passing over to professing the Christian faith.⁴

What would impel pagans to “profess what they formerly hated”—even at the cost of endangering their lives? Tertullian and a few others—Justin, from the coast of Asia Minor, his student Tatian, from Syria, and Origen, an Egyptian—have left us some clues.

Justin, a young man who had come to Rome from Asia Minor about 140 C.E. to pursue his study of philosophy, went one day with friends to the amphitheater to see the spectacular gladiatorial fights held there to celebrate imperial birthdays. The spectators cheered the men who recklessly courted death, and thrilled to the moment of the death blow. The crowd would go wild when a defeated gladiator defiantly thrust out his neck to meet his antagonist’s sword; and they jeered and hooted when a loser bolted in panic.⁵

Justin was startled to see in the midst of this violent entertainment a group of criminals being led out to be torn apart by wild beasts. The serene courage with which they met their brutal public execution astonished him, especially when he learned that these were illiterate people, Christians, whom the Roman senator Tacitus had called “a class of people hated for their superstitions,” whose founder, Christos, had himself “suffered the extreme penalty under Pontius Pilate” about a hundred years before.⁶ Justin was profoundly shaken, for he saw a group of uneducated people actually accomplishing what Plato and Zeno regarded as the greatest achievement of a philosopher—accepting death with equanimity, an accomplishment which the gladiators’ bravado merely parodied. As he watched, Justin realized that he was witnessing something quite beyond nature, a miracle; somehow these people had tapped into a great, unknown source of power.

Justin would have been even more startled had he known that these Christians saw themselves not as philosophers but as combatants in a cosmic struggle, God’s warriors against Satan.⁷ As Justin learned later, their amazing confidence derived from the conviction that their own agony and death actually were hastening God’s victory over the forces of evil, forces embodied in the Roman magistrate who had sentenced them, and, for that matter, in spectators like Justin himself.

Sometime later, while taking a solitary walk in a field near the sea, Justin unexpectedly met an old man who turned out to be a member of this group.⁸ At first the old man questioned Justin about his pursuit of philosophy; but instead of being impressed, as Justin expected, the old man challenged him and said he could never find illumination in philosophy.

What Justin sought in philosophy was not simply intellectual understanding but self-realization: How shall I live in order to be happy? What are the steps toward transformation?⁹ At an earlier stage of his philosophical search, Justin says, he had “surrendered himself” to a Stoic teacher, hoping to transcend his ordinary, “human” point of view. Stoic teachers promised that by studying physics—literally, “nature”—one could learn to place each event, obstacle, or circumstance in one’s life within a universal perspective, and to participate in the divine, which is synonymous with nature. Justin says he became frustrated because his teacher seldom spoke about the divine and discouraged questions on the subject; so Justin left, and began to study with a peripatetic philosopher. After a few days, when his new teacher demanded a tuition fee, Justin quit in disgust, deciding that the man “was no philosopher at all.” Justin did not give up; next he tried a Pythagorean master, who offered to teach physical and mental discipline to attune the soul to the divine. Told that he would have to master astronomy, mathematics, and music before he could even begin to understand “what makes for a happy life,” Justin left this teacher as well.

Defeated and helpless, Justin finally discovered in the teachings of a brilliant expositor of Plato what he believed was the true path. He says he had already made great progress toward enlightenment and expected soon to be able to raise his mind to apprehend the divine. But the old Christian he met walking by the sea challenged his basic philosophic premise: “Is there, then, such a great power in our mind? Will the human mind ever see God through its own capacity?” The old man voiced Justin’s worst fear—that he was wasting his time; that the human mind, however one educates and increases its capacity, is intrinsically incapable of reaching that goal; the mind cannot understand God through its own efforts.

When the old man first challenged him, Justin vehemently objected, repeating Platonic clichés. Later, retelling the story, Justin acknowledged the irony of his earlier naïveté: he found himself repeating the phrase “Plato says … and I believe him.” Feeling increasingly foolish, Justin realized that his objections to the old man’s arguments derived simply from his blind acceptance of Plato’s authority—not from any conviction or experience of his own.

As Justin and the old man talked, he saw for the first time that he had stumbled into a process much deeper than the intellect could fathom. Justin had assumed that he possessed a mind free to think rationally about everything, including the divine. Now he heard the opposite: that the mind itself is infested with demonic powers that distort and confuse our thinking. Before he—or anyone else—could achieve understanding, the old man said, Justin would have to receive the divine spirit—a power far greater than our comprehension, a power that “illuminates the mind.”¹⁰ But first Justin would need to undergo exorcism, a ritual in which the celebrant, himself filled with the divine spirit, would invoke that spirit to drive out the demonic powers inhabiting the candidate’s mind and body and holding him, like all the unbaptized, captive to confusion and ignorance.

After heated argument with the old man and considerable internal struggle, Justin became convinced that Christians had discovered access to great power—divine power, which was always there, waiting to break through the clouds, and which was brought to earth by the Christians’ powerful rituals, beginning with baptism.¹¹

Before the old man left him, Justin says, he admonished the young man to

“pray that, above all things, the gates of light may be opened to you; for these things cannot be perceived or understood by everyone, but only by the person to whom God and his Christ have given wisdom.”¹²

After he left, Justin says,

immediately a flame was kindled in my soul, and a love … of those people who are friends of Christ possessed me; and, while turning his words over and over in my mind, I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.¹³

Seeking out other “friends of Christ,” Justin asked to become a candidate for the rite of baptism. He does not tell us the story of his own baptism, but other sources suggest the following: Having fasted and prayed to prepare himself, Justin would await, probably on the night before Easter, the rite that would expel the indwelling demonic powers and charge him with new, divine life. First the celebrant would demand to know whether Justin was willing to “renounce the devil, and all his pomp, and his angels”; Justin would ritually declare three times, “I renounce them.” Then Justin would descend naked into a river, immersing himself to signify the death of the old self and the washing away of sins. Once the divine name was pronounced and the celebrant had invoked the spirit to descend on him, he would emerge reborn, to be clothed with new white garments at the shore and offered a mixture of milk and honey—babies’ food, suitable for a newborn.¹⁴

Justin said that he had received in baptism what he had sought in vain in philosophy: “this washing we call illumination; because those who learn these things become illuminated in their understanding.”¹⁵ He later explained to other potential converts, “Since at our birth we were born without consciousness or choice, by our parents’ intercourse, and were brought up in bad habits and evil customs,” we are baptized “so that we may no longer be children of necessity and ignorance, but become the children of choice and knowledge.”¹⁶ His ritual rebirth to new parents—God and the holy spirit—enabled Justin to renounce not only his natural family but the “habits and evil customs” they had taught him from childhood—above all, traditional piety toward the gods, whom he now saw as evil spirits. Having entered the stark and polarized Christian world, Justin joined those brave, illiterate Christians whose bloody death he had witnessed in the Roman amphitheater. Now Justin, like them, saw the entire universe as a battleground where cosmic forces clash.

Justin believed that his eyes had suddenly been opened to the truth behind the most apparently innocuous appearances: the marble statues of the goddesses Fortuna and Roma that he saw every day in the marketplace, the image of Hercules that presided over the public baths, and those of Dionysus and Apollo at the theater. Behind those familiar chiseled faces Justin now recognized “spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.” Justin suddenly understood, as Paul had, that the forces that play upon a helpless humanity are neither human nor divine, as pagans imagined, but demonic.

Justin’s pagan parents had brought him up in traditional piety, revering the forces of nature as divine. For pious pagans, as the classicist A. H. Armstrong says,

the old gods have the beauty and goodness of the sun, the sea, the wind, the mountains, great wild animals; splendid, powerful, and dangerous realities that do not come within the sphere of morality, and are in no way concerned about the human race.¹⁷

Pagan worship mingled awe with terror of the vast forces that threaten our fragile species. The oracle at Delphi warned worshipers, “Know yourself,” not as an invitation to lofty contemplation or introspection, but as a blunt reminder that they were mortal, ephemeral, literally, “creatures of a day,” propelled toward living and dying by the interplay of cosmic forces far beyond their comprehension.

From the sixth century B.C.E. onward, philosophers reflected upon those cosmic forces in various ways. Plato spoke of “necessity,” others of the powers of “destiny” or “fate” that govern the universe. Later Stoic philosophers “demythologized” the old myths and reinterpreted the gods themselves—Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite—as representing elements of the natural universe. Some suggested, for example, that Hera represents the air, Zeus the lightning and thunder, Eros and Aphrodite the erotic energies that drive us into copulation, and Ares the aggressive energy that impels us into war.¹⁸ Many classical philosophers agreed that these gods were neither bad nor good in themselves; although the gods might appear to be capricious—sometimes benevolent, sometimes hostile—most pagan thinkers agreed that such judgments had nothing to do with the gods themselves, but only with human reactions to specific events.

For Justin, conversion changed all this. Every god and spirit he had ever known, including Apollo, Aphrodite, and Zeus, whom he had worshiped since childhood, he now perceived as allies of Satan—despite the brilliant panoply of their public processions, their thousands of temples and glittering priesthoods, despite the fact that they were worshiped by the emperor himself, who served in person as their pontifex maximus (“greatest priest”). Born again, Justin saw the universe of spiritual energies, which pious pagan philosophers called daimones, as, in his words, “foul daimones.”¹⁹ By the time the Christian movement had swept across the Western world, our language would reflect that reversed perception, and the Greek term daimones, “spirit energies,” would become, in English, demons.²⁰ So, Justin says,

we, who out of every race of people, once worshiped Dionysus the son of Semele, and Apollo the son of Leto, who in their passion for human beings did things which it is shameful even to mention; who worshiped Persephone and Aphrodite … or Asklepius, or some other of those who are called gods, now, through Jesus Christ, despise them, even at the cost of death.… We pity those who believe such things, for which we know that the daimones are responsible.²¹

Philosophers who say that “whatever happens, happens according to fatal necessity” are proved wrong, Justin says, by the evidence of those “born again to God”; for in them we see “the same person making transition to opposite things.”²² Justin says that he found that “the words of Christ” have a “terrible power in them that can inspire those who turn away from the right path”²³; now he and his fellow Christians, once driven, like most others by passion, greed, and hatred,

stand apart from demons and follow God;… we, who once took pleasure in fornication, now embrace self-control; we, who … valued the acquisition of wealth and possessions above everything else, now put what we have into a common fund, and share with everyone in need; we, who hated and killed one another, and would not share our lives with certain people because of their ethnic differences from us, now live intimately with them.²⁴

Justin sees in his own life and the lives of Christians all around him evidence of divine power that enables them to live “beyond nature.” Just as those Christians he watched die in the amphitheater overcame with their inspired courage the instinct to survive, so, he says, may others have overcome the tyranny of instinctual drives:

Many among us, both men and women, who have been Christians since childhood, have remained pure at the age of sixty or seventy; and I boast that I could produce such people from every race.… and what shall I say of the innumerable multitude who have reformed intemperate habits?²⁵

Justin mentions those in whom powerful compulsions—for example, for strong drink—have been broken. Many others, Justin says, “have changed their violent and tyrannical dispositions,” overcome by the astonishing forbearance, patience, and unwavering honesty they have found in their Christian neighbors.²⁶

Celebrating the new society formed by these “reborn” people,²⁷ Justin now sees the old society as evil—a society that, for example, abandons infants to die or to be raised by opportunists, who train them as prostitutes and sell them on the slave markets “like herds of goats or sheep.”²⁸ As a privileged philosophy student, Justin might have displayed moral indifference; instead he is indignant about those abandoned children, and castigates moral relativists who pride themselves on their philosophical sophistication: “The worst evil of all is to say that neither good nor evil is anything in itself, but that they are only matters of human opinion.”²⁹

Justin’s life now has a moral direction. He contrasts the natural life he once lived as passive prey to demons, with the spirit-infused life he lives now:

We have learned to find God … and we believe it is impossible for the evil or envious person, or the conspirator, or for the righteous person—to escape God’s notice; and every person goes to eternal punishment or salvation according to the value of his works.³⁰

In his new life, Justin sees his role in the universe enormously enhanced; the stand he takes and the choices he makes not only decide his eternal destiny but engage him at present as an active combatant in the universal struggle between God’s spirit and Satan.³¹

Yet Justin realizes the irony—and the terror—of his new situation: receiving divine illumination has ripped him out of all that was familiar, alienated him from his family and friends, and uprooted him from much of his culture. Most frightening, it has stripped him of all security. His baptismal exorcism placed him in opposition to the gods he had worshiped all his life and in potentially lethal conflict with virtually everyone he had ever known—above all, with governmental authorities. He now belongs to a group that the Roman majority and government magistrates regard with suspicion and contempt, despite all the evangelists’ efforts to calm their fears.³² Those publicly accused of allegiance to Christ are liable to arrest and interrogation, often under torture; to “confess” means immediate condemnation to death, by beheading, if one has the good fortune to be a Roman citizen, or, if not, by prolonged torture and public spectacle, including condemnation ad bestias—that is, being torn apart by wild animals in the public sports arena. Justin knows of cases in which believers or their slaves, including women and children, had been tortured until they “admitted” seeing Christians engage in atrocities, including ritual eating of human flesh and drinking blood from freshly slaughtered infants. Only thirty years earlier, even such a sober-minded official as Pliny, governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, having satisfied himself by torturing Christians that they were not guilty of criminal acts, had decided that they deserved the death penalty, if only for their sheer “obstinacy.”³³

But why does the mere mention of the Christian name arouse such violent, irrational hatred? Reflecting on this question, Justin finds clues in what he calls the apostles’ memoirs (which we call the gospels). There Justin reads that after God’s spirit descended on Jesus at baptism, Satan and his demonic allies fought back, opposing Jesus, and finally hounded him to his death. So also now, Justin realizes, when the spirit descends on those who are baptized, the same evil forces that fought against Jesus attack his followers. The gospels show Justin how spiritual energies, demonic and divine, can dwell within human beings, often without their knowledge, and drive them toward destruction—or toward God. Now Justin understands the Pauline warning that

our contest is not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against principalities, against the world-rulers of this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

The conviction that unseen energies impel human beings to action was, of course, nothing new; it was universally accepted throughout the pagan world. A thousand years earlier, Homer had described how such energies played upon human beings—how Athena had inspired Achilles to heroic warfare, and how Aphrodite had seized and possessed Helen of Troy, driving her into the adulterous passion that led her people into war. Recalling the death of Socrates, Justin realizes with a shock that Socrates himself had said the same thing the Christians are saying—that all the gods Homer praises are actually evil energies that corrupt people, “seducing women and sodomizing boys,” and terrorizing people into worshiping them as gods.³⁴ It was for this reason, Justin says, that Socrates denounced traditional religion and was charged with atheism. These same demonic powers, furious with Socrates for threatening to unmask them, drove the Athenian mob to execute him. This universal demonic deception, Justin realizes, accounts for the irrational hatred that the mere presence of Christians arouses among pagans—not merely for the violent passions of the ignorant and unruly mob, but also for the criminalizing of Christians, approved even by the most enlightened emperors who ever ruled Rome.

Justin boldly addresses an open letter of protest to these rulers—the emperor Antoninus Pius and his two sons, the Stoic prince Marcus Aurelius, whom he calls “truest philosopher,” and “Lucius the Philosopher”—appealing to them as fellow philosophers, hoping, he says, to open their eyes. Justin declares that he writes on behalf of “those people of every nation who are unjustly hated and slaughtered; I, Justin, son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, of Flavia Neapolis, myself being one of them.”³⁵ By publicly identifying himself with those whom the demons seek to kill, Justin initiates a public challenge that will end not with amnesty but, as he admits he fears, with his own arraignment and execution.

Although Justin begins by honorifically addressing the emperor Antoninus Pius and his sons, he soon tells them bluntly that despite their philosophic aspirations, they are not even masters of their own minds. “Even now,” Justin warns the rulers of the Roman world, “these demons seek to keep you as their slaves, by preventing you from understanding what we say.”³⁶ Their irrational public hatred of Christians proves, Justin says, that their minds have been captured by the same evil spirits who incited the Athenians to kill Socrates; now, for the same reason, these spirits are driving them to kill Christians.

Not long after Justin wrote to the emperors (and apparently received no answer) he heard of a case involving the arrest of an aristocratic woman convert. Before conversion, Justin says, she had participated with her husband in drunken liaisons with their household slaves and other people; but after baptism, she became sober, refused to participate in such acts, and wanted to divorce him. Her friends persuaded her to stay with him, hoping for a reconciliation, and, Justin says, “she violated her own feeling and remained with him.” But when she heard that her husband, on a trip to Alexandria, had behaved worse than ever, she demanded a divorce and left him. Her husband denounced her to the authorities as a Christian, and although she succeeded in delaying her own trial by appealing to the emperor, her husband turned in fury against Porphyry, her teacher in Christianity, and had him and several others summarily arrested and executed.³⁷

Alarmed and distressed by this judgment, Justin wrote a second letter of protest, this time addressing himself to the “sacred Senate.”³⁸ Sometime later Justin himself was accused, arrested, and interrogated. Rusticus, prefect of Rome, ordered Justin and those of his students who were arrested with him to “obey the gods and submit to the rulers.” When he was offered acquittal from the death penalty if he sacrificed to the gods, Justin defiantly refused: “No person in his right mind turns from piety to impiety.” Rusticus again warned the accused of the consequences, and then, finding them adamant, pronounced sentence:

Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and obey the commands of the emperors be beaten and led away to suffer the punishment of beheading, in accordance to the laws.³⁹

Having lost their case in the Roman court, Justin and his companions walked toward the flagellation cell, consoling themselves that they had nonetheless won the decisive battle; they were triumphing over the demons, who wielded terror—fear of pain and death—as their ultimate weapon.

Had the rulers whom Justin addressed actually read his petitions (it is more likely that an imperial secretary deposited them in a government archive), they would have regarded Justin’s vision of the spiritual world with contempt.⁴⁰ Marcus Aurelius, well known from the writings preserved in his private journal, probably would have detested Justin’s “Christian philosophy” as obscenely grandiose—the opposite of what Marcus regarded as the hard-won truths he himself had gained from philosophy.⁴¹ Marcus, revered during his reign as master of the civilized world (c. 161–180), valued more than his imperial wealth and honors the religious philosophy that helped him bear his responsibilities and sustained him through loneliness, disappointment, and grief. In his daily round of duties, Marcus constantly invoked philosophic reflection to remind himself that he, like everyone else, was subject to the forces that rule the universe.

Marcus was raised by his father, the emperor Antoninus Pius, to rule. Reluctantly Marcus gave up philosophy, his first love, to study such practical activities as martial arts, public speaking, riding, and building a character suitable for an emperor. Marcus praises his father as his greatest model of human character, and praises the gods for all the circumstances of his life, especially for his divinely given capacity “to imagine, clearly and often, a life lived according to nature,” and for the “reminders—and, almost, the instructions—of the gods,” who embody the forces of nature.⁴²

Although Marcus often expresses himself in the language of traditional piety, he had adapted for himself the reflections of certain Stoic teachers such as Musonius Rufus, who had reinterpreted the “old gods”—Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo—as elements of the natural universe. In the process of demythologizing the ancient myths, Stoic philosophers tended to diminish the uncanny, capricious, and hostile qualities that the ancient poets Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod attributed to the gods.⁴³ Marcus had come to believe that all gods and daimones (“spirit beings”), however chaotic or even conflicting they appear, are actually part of a single cosmic order.⁴⁴ Alone, at night, writing in his journal, perhaps in a tent encamped with his soldiers in the alien wilderness along a tributary of the Danube or on the Hungarian plain, Marcus often expresses awe mingled with a clear sense of the vulnerability of our fragile species. Yet he believes that piety consists in willingly submitting to nature, necessity, and destiny, terms Marcus regards as interchangeable. In his mind there is no question but that we all are subject to these cosmic forces; the only question is whether we can submit ourselves to them with equanimity.

Speaking as a man trying to tame the passions of anger and grief, Marcus continually reminds himself that “death, like birth, is a mystery of nature,”⁴⁵ each necessarily complementing the other:

Everything that happens is as ordinary and predictable as the spring rose or the summer fruit; this is as true of disease, death, slander, and conspiracy as anything else.… So, then, if a person has sensitivity and a deeper insight into the things that happen in the universe, virtually everything, even if it be only a by-product of something else, will contribute pleasure, being, in its own way, a harmonious part of the whole.⁴⁶

Recalling gladiatorial fights and shows featuring people being torn to death by wild animals, Marcus reflects that a true philosopher

will look upon the actual gaping jaws of wild animals with no less pleasure than upon artistic representations of them; and will be able to appreciate, in old people, both men and women, the quality of age, and look with tempered wisdom on the erotic beauty of the young.⁴⁷

Marcus speaks of “the gods” as the vast universal powers through which our own individual lives are woven into the fabric of existence, into which our elements eventually will dissolve:

The human soul is most arrogant [hybrystes] when it becomes, so far as it can, a kind of abscess or tumor in the universe. For to complain at anything that happens is a rebellion against nature.⁴⁸

Acutely aware that catastrophe and good fortune “fall without discrimination on those who are good and those who are evil,” Marcus struggles to make sense of this fact. Does the universe simply function chaotically, “with no design and no direction”?⁴⁹ Does honesty require us to become atheists? But he rejects the idea that life is meaningless, and says instead,

It is not a flaw in nature, as if nature were ignorant, or powerless, or making mistakes, that good and evil things fall without discrimination upon those who are good and those who are evil.⁵⁰

On the contrary, this indiscriminateness shows that “living and dying, reputation and disgrace, pain and pleasure, wealth and destitution, actually are neither good nor evil”; instead, all alike are simply part of “nature’s work.” What does involve good and evil, however, is how we respond to what nature does:

The only thing that makes the good man unique is that he loves and welcomes whatever happened, and what has been spun for him by destiny; and … does not pollute the divine daimon within … harmoniously following god.⁵¹

Intent on transcending his own natural responses to betrayal and loss—anger, self-pity, and grief—Marcus directs his whole moral energy toward the discipline of practicing equilibrium, often returning to what the ancients called “the unbearable grief,” the loss of a child. Marcus and his wife, Faustina, like so many of their contemporaries, experienced this repeatedly; eleven of the fourteen children born to them had died in infancy or childhood. During one of these crises Marcus wrote to himself, “I see that my child is ill. I see. But I do not see that he is in danger”⁵²—since his philosophy insists that dying is equivalent to living. Marcus chides himself harshly for his impulse to pray, “Let my child be spared”⁵³; even to long that his child live and not die, Marcus believes, is to “complain against nature.” Marcus consoles himself with the words of Epictetus, one of the great Stoic masters: “When you are kissing your child, whisper under your breath, ‘Tomorrow you may be dead.’ ” “Ominous words,” others reproached Epictetus, but he replied, “Not at all, but only indicating an act of nature. Would it be ominous to speak of harvesting ripe corn?”⁵⁴ Like Epictetus, Marcus ignores the obvious objection that a child is hardly “ripe” for death’s harvesting; he muses only that every one of us will fall, “like grains of incense on an altar, some sooner, some later.”⁵⁵ So, he continues in his internal dialogue, instead of saying, “How unfortunate I am, that this has happened to me,” one should strive to say, “How fortunate I am, that this has happened, and yet I am still unhurt, neither crushed by the present, nor terrified of the future.”⁵⁶ Reflecting on reverses of fortune—emperors suddenly assassinated, slaves freed—Marcus tells himself:

Whatever happens to you, this, for you, came from destiny; and the interweaving of causes has woven into one fabric your existence and this event.⁵⁷

Marcus’s primary article of faith, then, involves the unity of all being:

All things are woven into one another, and the bond that unites them is sacred; and hardly anything is alien to any other. For they are ordered in relation to one another, and they join together to order the same universe. For there is one universe, consisting of all things; and one essence, and one law, one divine reason, and one truth; and … also one fulfillment of the living creatures that have the same origin, and share the same nature.⁵⁸

Marcus perceives nature and destiny collapsed into one divinely charged reality and strives to accept his own lot as a matter of religious obligation. He expects no less of everyone else—certainly of anyone who aspires to philosophy.

Marcus was unique; few pagans tried to construct such a working synthesis of philosophy, ethics, and piety. Yet virtually all who worshiped the gods would have agreed that these invisible energies preside over every element of life, giving or withholding fertility, fixing at birth each person’s life span, allotting health and wealth to some, and to others poverty, disease, and slavery, as well as presiding over each nation’s destiny.

Many pagans, perhaps the majority, performed rituals at temple festivals, participated in feasts, and poured out sacred libations, thus revering these supernatural powers as elements of “the divine.” By Marcus’s time, however, many worshipers would have agreed that all the gods and daimones, even those apparently in conflict with one another, must be part of a unified cosmic system, whether they called it the divine, nature, providence, necessity, or fate.

Belief in the universal power of fate, which Marcus struggled to accept, aroused in others a strong impulse to resist its all-pervading power. As Hans Dieter Betz and John Gager have shown, many people visited magicians who claimed to summon certain daimones and to bind them, for a fee, to improve one’s health, or to guarantee success in love, horse races, or business.⁵⁹ Other people sought initiation into foreign cults, hoping to find in such exotic Egyptian gods as Isis and Serapis divine power that surpassed that of all the more familiar gods and could overturn the decrees of destiny. Lucius Apuleius, who may himself have undergone rigorous initiation into the mysteries of Isis, describes his ecstatic discovery that worshiping the Egyptian goddess could break the power of fate:

Behold, here is Lucius, who rejoices in the providence of powerful Isis. Behold, he is released from the bonds of misery, and is victorious over his fate.⁶⁰

Although many pagans had come to believe that all the powers of the universe are ultimately one, only Jews and Christians worshiped a single god and denounced all others as evil demons. Only Christians divided the supernatural world into two opposing camps, the one true God against swarms of demons; and none but Christians preached—and practiced—division on earth.⁶¹ By refusing to worship the gods, Christians were driving a wedge between themselves and all pagans, between divine sanctions and Roman government—a fact immediately recognized by Rusticus, Marcus’s teacher in Stoicism and his personal friend, who, in his public role as prefect of Rome, personally judged and sentenced Justin and his students to death.

After Justin’s beheading, his young student Tatian, a zealous young Syrian convert, wrote a blistering “Address to the Greeks,” which begins by attacking Greek philosophy and religion, and ends by denouncing Roman government and law. Tatian wants to show “the Greeks”—which Tatian takes to mean “pagans”—their demonically induced delusions. He asks the crucial question:

For what reason, O pagans, do you wish to set the governmental powers against us, as in a wrestling match?⁶²

Then he declares his spiritual independence:

If I do not wish to comply with some of your customs, why am I hated, as if I were despicable? Does the governor order me to pay taxes? I do so willingly. Does he order me to do service? I acknowledge my servitude. For one must honor human beings in a way appropriate to humans; but one must fear God alone—he who is not visible to human eyes, nor perceptible by any means known to us.⁶³

Tatian agrees with Justin that pagans cannot understand the violence of their own response to Christians until they begin to see that all the supernatural powers they worship are evil beings who are holding them captive. All the powers they worship are nothing more than the continuing fallout of a primordial cosmic rebellion. So Tatian, like Justin, begins at the beginning: “God is spirit,” he explains, creator of supernatural and human beings alike. Originally, all supernatural beings were free, but, Tatian explains, drawing on Jewish accounts of the angels’ fall, “the firstborn of these rebelled against God, and became a demon … and those who imitate him … and his illusions, become an army of demons.”⁶⁴ This swarm of demons, enraged when punished for their apostasy, are nevertheless too weak to retaliate against God: “No doubt, if they could, they undoubtedly would pull down the very heavens themselves, together with the rest of creation.”⁶⁵ Restrained from totally destroying the universe, they turned all their energies toward enslaving humanity. “Inspired by hostile malice toward humankind,” they terrify people by images they send in dreams and fantasies. Tatian does not deny that these “gods” actually possess powers; he says they use their power to gain control over human minds. Nor do demons prey only upon the illiterate and superstitious. Philosophical sophisticates like Marcus Aurelius are no less vulnerable than the local shoemaker, for, as Marcus’s own philosophy might show, daimones can turn philosophy itself into a means of subjugating people to their tyranny. Tatian ridicules the philosophers, calling Aristotle “absurd” for his famous statement that a human being is a mere “rational animal” (logikon zoon), part of the natural order.⁶⁶ Even elephants and ants, Tatian says, are “rational animals” in the sense that they “participate in the instinctive and rational nature of the universe,” but to be human means much more. It means that one participates in spirit, having been created in the image of the God who is spirit.⁶⁷

Deriding the philosophers, Tatian adamantly refuses to see himself as merely part of nature. Since baptism, Tatian says, his own sense of self has had virtually nothing to do with nature; “having been born again,” he now identifies with the God who stands beyond nature. Tatian perceives his essential being as spirit, ultimately indestructible:

Even if fire should annihilate my flesh, and the universe disperse its matter, and, although dispersed in rivers and seas, or torn apart by wild animals, I am laid up in the storehouse of a wealthy master … and God the king, when he pleases, will restore the matter that is visible to him alone to its primordial order.⁶⁸

The power of destiny is not divine, as Marcus imagines, but merely a demonic conspiracy; for it was daimones, Tatian caustically explains, the offspring of fallen angels, who,

having shown humans a map of the position of the stars, invented destiny—an enormous injustice! For those who judge and those who are judged are made so by destiny; the murderers and their victims, the wealthy and the destitute, are the offspring of the same destiny; and every human birth is regarded as a kind of theatrical entertainment by those beings of whom Homer says, “among the gods arouse unquenchable laughter” (emphasis added).⁶⁹

Like the spectators who flock to the city amphitheater to amuse themselves, making bets while watching some gladiators win and others die in agony, so, Tatian says, the gods entertain themselves with human triumphs and tragedies. But those who revere the gods ignorantly “attribute events and situations to destiny, believing that each person’s destiny is formed from birth”; and they “cast horoscopes and pay for oracles and divination” to find out what destiny has in store.

Tatian ridicules such superstitious people for failing to see that disease and other sufferings happen simply because of elements intrinsic to our physical constitution: surprisingly, he secularizes disease, accident, and death, removing them from the supernatural. Although everyone is vulnerable to these contingencies, Tatian says, they hold no real power over people who belong to God, since baptism breaks the bonds that once bound us to destiny and to nature. Now, he says,

we are superior to destiny, and instead of worshiping planets and daimones, we have come to know one Lord.… We do not follow the guidance of destiny; rather, we reject those [daimones] who established it.⁷⁰

Tatian refuses to acknowledge any subjection to nature and refuses to submit to the demands of the culture and society into which physical birth delivered him:

I do not want to be a ruler; I am not anxious to be rich; I decline military command; I detest sexual promiscuity; I am not impelled by any insatiable love of money to go to sea; I do not contend for reputation; I am free from an insane thirst for fame; I despise death; I am superior to every form of disease; grief does not consume my soul. If I am a slave, I endure slavery; if I am free, I do not boast of my fortunate birth.… Why are you “destined” so often to grasp for things, and often to die? Die to the world, repudiating the insanity that pervades it. Live to God, and by apprehending God, apprehend your own nature as a spiritual being created in his image.⁷¹

Tatian rails against nature and culture—polemics that articulate the suspicion of both that will be woven into Christian theology for nearly two thousand years. The kind of attack Tatian launched would eventually transform Western attitudes toward Greek civilization. Classical civilization would become for Western Christendom virtually synonymous with paganism.⁷² Like Justin, Tatian protests pagan indifference to human life:

I see people who actually sell themselves to be killed; the destitute sells himself, and the rich man buys someone to kill him; and for this the spectators take their seats, and the fighters meet in single-handed combat for no reason whatever; and no one comes down from the stands to help!… Just as you slaughter animals to eat their flesh, so you purchase people to supply a cannibal banquet for the soul, nourishing it with the most impious bloodshed. Robbers commit murder for the sake of loot; but the rich man buys gladiators to watch them being killed!⁷³

Tatian does not exaggerate here. The French scholar Georges Villes reports that spectators at the Roman amphitheater might watch as many as three hundred and fifty gladiators die before their eyes at a single day’s entertainment.⁷⁴

Declaring himself free from all worldly affiliations, Tatian openly defies pagan rulers: “I reject your legislation, along with your entire system of government.” Only allegiance to the one true God “can put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and restore us from many rulers, and then from ten thousand tyrants”—freeing the believer from innumerable demonic tyrants and simultaneously from all the thousands of human rulers whom they secretly control.⁷⁵

We know almost nothing about Tatian’s life or what this conviction meant for him in practice; but we do know what it meant to the young Egyptian Christian named Origen, who was seventeen years old when he saw his beloved Christian father, Leonides, arrested and summarily executed for refusing to sacrifice to the gods. Thereafter Origen, later nicknamed Adamantius (“the adamant,” or “the indomitable”), resolved to be a warrior on God’s side against the forces of Satan. From childhood, as we shall see, Origen witnessed bitter conflict—and then the most astounding series of shifts and reverses—in the relationship between Christians and imperial power. He remained wary of those in power all his life. Though he believed that Christians benefited from the peace the Roman empire provided, he became the first Christian to argue publicly that people have an innate moral right to assassinate tyrants.

Born in the year 185 to a Roman father and an Egyptian mother, both baptized Christians, Origen was seven years old when the reigning emperor, Lucius Commodus, the sole surviving son of Marcus Aurelius, was murdered in his bath.⁷⁶ Rumor blamed a palace conspiracy involving Commodus’s athletic trainer and Marcia, his concubine; but masses of people, hearing that the emperor was dead, poured into the streets to celebrate, for Commodus had rebelled against everything his distinguished father stood for. By the time he was strangled, Commodus was widely despised as a madman and a tyrant; he had shocked his constituents by pretending to be a gladiator, engaging in public combats in the arena, effectively abdicating his imperial responsibilities by playing the role of a slave. He had also neglected to persecute Christians: Marcia apparently favored Christians and had encouraged Commodus to leave them alone.

The battles of succession lasted three years. Septimius Severus emerged as victor, and seven years later, in 202 C.E., initiated new measures to purge his empire of Christians. It was then that Origen saw his father arrested along with others, charged with professing Christianity, and sentenced to beheading; apparently he was protected by Roman citizenship, as Justin had been, from slow torture and public execution.

While Leonides was in prison, Origen impulsively tried to join the group of martyrs and escaped death, it was said, only because his mother hid his clothes so that he could not leave the house. But Origen passionately urged his father not to lose heart out of concern for his wife and their seven children: “Be careful not to change your mind because of us.”⁷⁷ His father stood firm; but his execution left the family destitute, since the state confiscated his property as that of a condemned criminal. Origen never forgot that imperial forces, however benign they later seemed to many Christians, might at any moment show their demonic origins.

Origen was rescued from destitution by the generosity of a rich Christian, who invited him into her household and supported him for several months while he continued studying literature and philosophy. The following year, already recognized, at the age of eighteen, for his brilliance and learning, Origen began to teach on his own, supporting himself, his mother, and her six younger children. The persecution that had cost Leonides his life continued in Alexandria under several changes of administration; several of Origen’s own students were arrested and executed for professing Christianity, and he himself lived under suspicion. More than once, angry crowds threatened his life, especially when he ignored fears for his own safety and publicly embraced a condemned friend, a man named Plutarch, and attended his execution. So far, Origen himself escaped arrest and interrogation, probably because Severus’s persecution had targeted upper-class converts, especially Roman citizens, like Origen’s father and many of his students. Origen was protected, apparently, by having inherited from his Egyptian mother the low status Roman law accorded to native noncitizens.

When Origen was twenty-six, and still teaching, writing, and interpreting the Scriptures, Septimius Severus died and was succeeded by two sons, one of whom, Caracalla, promptly assassinated his brother Geta but left the Christians alone. For the moment the government seemed almost benign. One day in 215, during Caracalla’s reign, soldiers arrived in Alexandria with a letter from the governor of Arabia (present-day Jordan), summoning Origen to appear at the palace. The governor had heard of Origen’s brilliance and wanted to meet the young man; and Origen agreed. But after Caracalla had ruled for six years, he was assassinated by Macrinus, who reigned for only a year before he, too, was killed. He was succeeded by Heliogabalus, Caracalla’s cousin, a reclusive, fanatical young worshiper of the sun god, a man whom many people regarded as insane.

Four years later, another cousin, Alexander Severus, replaced Heliogabalus on the throne, and now, for the first time in Roman history, members of the imperial house not only tolerated Christians but even favored them. Severus’s mother, the empress Julia Mammea, who gathered many distinguished people at her court, sent soldiers to invite Origen to join them; when he arrived, she discussed with him, among other things, the possibility of reconciling Christians to Roman civilization. Christians of the time would have been astonished to hear a rumor circulating in the empire—whether true or not—that the emperor himself had set up statues of Abraham and Jesus along with those of Socrates and other holy men in his private palace sanctuary!

Hopes for a new age of tolerance were shattered, however, when Maximinus, a rough peasant from Thrace, assassinated Severus, took over the throne, and immediately renewed the persecution of the Christians. Origen followed with great concern the threatened arrest of several of his close friends and associates, including Ambrose, his rich and influential patron and friend, and the priest Protoctetus. Origen, who was not arrested, wrote to them in a passionate “exhortation to martyrdom,” warning them not to waver, nor to be deceived by apparently genuine pleas to renounce their faith in order to save their lives. To give in, he said, would be to capitulate to Satan; for those arrested for Christ’s sake, only death brings victory.⁷⁸

In the struggle for the throne that followed Maximinus’ death, the young emperor Gordian III prevailed, and he, too, left Christians alone. Assassinated by his own soldiers after ruling for four years, he was succeeded by his own chief general. The newly acclaimed emperor, Philip, the first Arab to achieve that position, immediately secured his rule by killing Gordian’s young son.

Philip the Arabian may have been the first Christian emperor. At least three witnesses attest that he performed public penance for that murder in view of the astonished congregation, during the huge gatherings that attended the Easter vigil the following spring—penance imposed on the emperor by the Christian bishop of Antioch. During Philip’s reign, thousands of new converts filled the churches. Now Origen complained in a sermon that conversion had become so common and even fashionable that it was no longer dangerous.

But Origen’s suspicions of government power were confirmed when Decius killed Philip, seized power, and initiated a new and more aggressive persecution of Christians. This time, however, Origen, now in his mid-sixties and more renowned than ever, was arrested and brutally tortured; the governor hoped to gain a useful recantation from his most famous prisoner, but the attempt failed.

Origen knew that pagan opposition to Christianity was often based on more than superstition and prejudice. Years before his arrest, Origen had read a tract, “The True Word,” which charged that Christian “atheism” masked a rebellion against everything society and government upheld. Only a few years before his arrest, Origen had decided to respond to these charges, for this was one of the most incisive and devastating attacks on Christians ever written.⁷⁹

Celsus, who wrote the tract around 180 C.E., was a religiously inclined Platonic philosopher. He begins by charging that “the cult of Christians is a secret society, whose members hide together in corners for fear of being brought to trial and punishment.” Citing their refusal of the magistrates’ orders to sacrifice to the gods, Celsus says that if everyone adopted the Christians’ attitude, there would be no rule of law.⁸⁰ Celsus lived at a time when the Christian movement was growing rapidly, especially among the illiterate. He writes that the Christians’ refusal to obey certain laws and to cooperate with local or imperial officials threatens to “destroy legitimate authority, and return the world to chaos and barbarians”—even to “bring down the empire, and the emperor with it.”

Origen’s defiant reply opens by challenging the moral legitimacy of imperial rule:

It is not irrational to form associations contrary to the existing laws, if it is done for the sake of the truth. For just as those people would do well who enter a secret association in order to kill a tyrant who had seized the liberties of a state, so Christians also, when tyrannized … by the devil, form associations contrary to the devil’s laws, against his power, to protect those whom they succeed in persuading to revolt against a government which is barbaric and despotic.⁸¹

Origen stops short of identifying imperial law directly with the devil, and elsewhere he even praises the pax Romana for having providentially kept the peace during Jesus’ lifetime. Nevertheless Origen characterizes as demon-inspired all laws and persons hostile to Christians. Christians, however, will triumph over their enemies; Jesus died, he explains, “to destroy a great daimon—in fact, the ruler of daimones, who held in subjection the souls of humanity.”⁸² Whoever considers empirical evidence will have to admit, he says, that the spread of Christianity, although unanimously opposed by human authorities, governmental and military, proves that some enormous, previously unknown power is now at work in the world:

Anyone who examines the matter will see that Jesus attempted and successfully accomplished works beyond the range of human capacity. For everything opposed the spread of his teaching in the world—including the rulers in each period, and their chief military leaders and generals, everyone—everyone, to speak generally—who possessed even the slightest influence, and in addition to these, the rulers of all the various cities, and the armies, and the people.⁸³

Origen admits that the astounding success of the Christian movement has occurred principally among the poor and illiterate, but only because “the illiterate necessarily outnumber the educated.” Yet “some persons of intelligence and education”—he might have mentioned Justin, Tatian, even himself—have committed their lives to the Christian faith. So, against all odds, Origen continues,

our Jesus, despised for being born in a rural village—not even a Greek [that is, civilized] one, nor belonging to any nation widely respected; and being despised as the son of a poor laboring woman, [nevertheless] has been able to shake the whole civilized world.⁸⁴

Jesus’ impact surpasses that of “even Pythagoras or Plato, let alone that of any ruler or military leader in the world.”

Astonishing turns of events in world history offer empirical proof that God’s spirit, acting in Jesus, is conquering Satan. Origen agrees with Matthew and Luke that

one fact which proves that Jesus is something divine and sacred is this: that the Jews have suffered because of him for a very long time such terrible catastrophes.… For what nation is exiled from its own capital city, and from the place sacred to the worship of its ancestors, except the Jews alone?… It was fitting, then, that the city where Jesus underwent sufferings should utterly perish, and the Jewish nation be overthrown.… And we can say with confidence it never will be restored to its former condition.⁸⁵

If the suffering of the Jews proves that God is punishing them, what does that say about the suffering of Christians? And what about those innocent people who suffer disease, catastrophe, or human brutality? Here Origen chooses to be inconsistent. Such difficult problems, he says, are insoluble, “matters of deepest and most inexplicable insight into the whole administration of the universe.”⁸⁶ Unlike many later Christians, Origen refuses to attribute the sufferings of the innocent simply to “God’s will,” for, he says, “not everything that happens happens according to God’s will, or according to divine providence.” Some things, he says, are “accidental by-products” of the works of providence; others occur when human beings—and, for that matter, supernatural beings as well—violate the divinely ordered administration of the universe and intentionally inflict harm. Many instances of human evil, as well as certain seemingly gratuitous natural catastrophes, like floods, volcanoes, and earthquakes, are instigated by “evil daimones and evil angels.”⁸⁷

Celsus would have found such suggestions profoundly disturbing, for as a Platonist philosopher he claims to revere “the one god who rules over all.” Here the pagan Celsus argues for monotheism against what he sees—quite accurately—as the Christians’ practical dualism:

If one accepts that all of nature, and everything in the universe, operates according to the will of God, and that nothing works contrary to his purposes, then one must also accept that the angels and daimones, heroes—all things in the universe—are subject to the will of the one God who rules over all.⁸⁸

Celsus urges Christians, too, to worship the one God and to revere everything that providence brings as manifestations of his goodness.

In advocating such monotheism, Celsus agrees not only with other philosophically minded intellectuals like Marcus Aurelius, but also with millions of people all over the empire—the vast majority of them illiterate—who worshiped the gods. The hymns that they heard intoned at the temples of Isis, the liturgies celebrated at the great altars of Serapis, the incantations chanted during processions honoring Helios or Zeus, and the prayers intoned at the festivals of Hecateten often identified the particular deity they had come to worship with the whole of the divine being. By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the classicist Ramsay MacMullen says, many took for granted the unity of all the gods and daimones in one divine source.⁸⁹

What divided pagans from Christians, then, was not so much monotheism, since many pagans also tended toward monotheism, as the pagans’ essential conservatism. Pagan worship binds one to one’s place in the world, and asks the worshiper to fulfill whatever obligations destiny, fate, or “the gods” have decreed. As we have seen, Marcus continually reminds himself that piety means taking a reverent attitude toward his familial, social, and national responsibilities. Musing on whether the gods concern themselves with individual destiny, Marcus declares:

If the gods took counsel together about me, then their counsel was good … and even if they have no special thought for me, at least they took thought for the universe; and I ought to welcome and accept everything that happens as a result. And even if the gods care nothing for human concerns, my own nature is a rational and political one; I have a city, and I have a country; as Marcus I have Rome, and as a human being I have the universe; consequently, whatever benefits these communities is the only good I recognize.⁹⁰

We have seen how hard Marcus struggled to accept his obligations, aware as he was of his privileges and responsibilities, but many of his contemporaries found less incentive to do so. As the empire continued to expand and pressures of inflation and war increased, the advantages Roman citizenship had offered to millions of people diminished; furthermore, an increasing number of people found themselves excluded from its benefits while being enormously burdened by taxes and conscription. Emperor Caracalla, in 213, issued an edict that extended citizenship to all inhabitants of the empire, but what actual effect this had is difficult to determine.

The Christian movement offered a radical alternative—perhaps the only genuine alternative besides Judaism in the Roman empire. What the Roman senator Tacitus complained of in the Jews was doubly true of these breakaway sectarians:

The first thing they do when they get hold of people is to teach them to despise their gods, neglect their cities, and hate their families; everything that we know as piety they neglect.⁹¹

We have seen that Christians did teach converts not only that the bonds of family, society, and nation are not sacred, but that they are diabolic encumbrances designed to enslave people to “Roman customs,” that is, to demons.

What makes the Christians’ message dangerous, Celsus writes, is not that they believe in one God, but that they deviate from monotheism by their “blasphemous” belief in the devil. For all the “impious errors” the Christians commit, Celsus says, they show their greatest ignorance in “making up a being opposed to God, and calling him ‘devil,’ or, in the Hebrew language, ‘Satan.’ ” All such ideas, Celsus declares, are nothing but human inventions, sacrilegious even to repeat: “it is blasphemy … to say that the greatest God … has an adversary who constrains his capacity to do good.” Celsus is outraged that the Christians, who claim to worship one God, “impiously divide the kingdom of God, creating a rebellion in it, as if there were opposing factions within the divine, including one that is hostile to God!”⁹²

Celsus accuses Christians of “inventing a rebellion” (stasis, meaning “sedition”) in heaven to justify rebellion here on earth. He accuses them of making a “statement of rebellion” by refusing to worship the gods—but, he says, such rebellion is to be expected “of those who have cut themselves off from the rest of civilization. For in saying this, they are really projecting their own feelings onto God.”⁹³ Celsus ridicules Paul’s warning that Christians must not eat food offered to the gods, lest they “participate in communion with daimones” (1 Cor. 10:20–22). Since daimones are the forces that energize all natural processes, Celsus argues, Christians really cannot eat anything at all—or even survive—without participating in communion with daimones. Celsus declares that

whenever they eat bread, or drink wine, or touch fruit, do they not receive these things—as well as the water they drink and the air they breathe—from certain various elements of nature?⁹⁴

Therefore, he adds,

we must either not live, and indeed, not come into this life at all, or we must do so on condition that we give thanks and offerings and prayers to daimones who have been set over the administration of the universe; and we must do so as long as we live, so that they may be well disposed toward us.⁹⁵

Celsus warns Christians that just as human administrators, whether Roman or Persian, take action against subjects who despise their rule, so these ruling daimones will surely punish those who prove insubordinate. Celsus ironically agrees, then, with Christians who complain that the daimones instigate persecution; he argues that they have good reason to do so:

Don’t you see, my excellent sir, that anyone who “witnesses” to your [Jesus] not only blasphemes him, and banishes him from every city, but that you yourself, who are, as it were, an image dedicated to him, are arrested and led to punishment, and bound to a stake, while he whom you call “Son of God” takes no vengeance at all upon the evildoer?⁹⁶

Origen admits that this is true and concedes that at such moments one might imagine that the evil powers have won. “It is true,” he says, “that the souls of those who condemn Christians, and those who betray them and enjoy persecuting them, are filled with evil,” being driven on by daimones.⁹⁷ Yet for martyrs, suffering and death are not the catastrophic defeat they seem. On the contrary,

when the souls of those who die for the Christian faith depart from the body with great glory, they destroy the power of the demons, and frustrate their conspiracy against humankind.⁹⁸

The demons themselves, perceiving this, sometimes retreat, afraid to kill Christians, lest they thereby ensure their own destruction. It is for this reason, Origen says, that persecution occurs only intermittently. But when the daimones recover their boldness and rage again at Christians, “then again the souls of the pious will destroy the army of the evil one.” The daimones’ awareness that Christians win by dying manifests itself, Origen declares, in the attitudes and actions of human judges

who are distressed by those who endure the outrages and tortures, but glad when a Christian is overcome [and yields]. And it is not from any philanthropic impulse that this occurs.⁹⁹

Origen had experienced this firsthand when he was arrested at Caesarea during Decius’s persecution in 251. When he refused the judge’s demands to renounce his faith, Origen endured repeated torture. He was chained in a dark cell. His torturers first wrenched his limbs apart and chained him into stocks; at other times they burned him and threatened him with terrible forms of execution. One of his grieved companions, moved by the old man’s courage, writes that Origen’s ordeal ended only after “the judge had tried him every way at all costs to avoid sentencing him to death,”¹⁰⁰ not out of compassion, but hoping to get him to publicly recant his faith. Failing this, the judge released him; but the torture and exposure Origen suffered in prison hastened his death.

Celsus warns that the “insanity” that impels Christians to “refuse their religious obligations, and rush headlong to offend the emperor and governors,”¹⁰¹ actually may ruin the empire, eclipse the rule of law, and plunge the world into anarchy. Celsus demands that Christians do instead what all pious and patriotic citizens should,

namely, help the emperor in his effort to provide for the common good, and cooperate with him in what is right, and fight for him, if it becomes necessary.¹⁰²

Origen dismisses such suggestions with contempt. He answers that Christians do help the emperor through their prayers, which “conquer all daimones who stir up war and … disturb the peace … so, although we do not believe in being fellow soldiers with him, we do fight on behalf of the emperor.”¹⁰³ (Tertullian, writing in North Africa, declares that many Christians do serve in the army; such practices varied, apparently, from one circumstance to another.)¹⁰⁴ As for taking public office, Origen says, “we recognize in every land the existence of another national organization”—God’s church. Origen knows that he is fighting over souls to help diminish the power of Satan; and he ends his polemic against Celsus by saluting his patron Ambrose, who ten years earlier had stood trial and endured prison and torture.

Persecuted Christians like Origen forged a radical tradition that undermined religious sanction for the state, claiming it instead for the religious conscience—a tradition that would enormously influence subsequent Western government and politics. Baptism opened access to vast new dimensions of reality—to the Kingdom of God, where God’s people find their true home, and to the dominion of Satan, perceived as the ultimate moral reality underlying “this present evil age.” Although unbelievers like Celsus ridiculed Christians for believing absurd and childish fantasies, many converts found in their vision of God’s kingdom a place to stand, and new perspectives on the world into which they had been born.

This does not mean that Christians were the seditious conspirators that Celsus imagined. Justin and others staunchly insisted that most Christians were good citizens, most of whom, no doubt, wanted to avoid confrontation with the authorities, and attempted to follow the precepts expressed in New Testament letters like First Peter, which translates into Christian terms ancient conventions of civic virtue:

For the sake of the Lord, accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor, as supreme, or of governors, as those sent by him to punish those who do wrong and praise those who do not.… As slaves of God, live as free people.… Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor (1 Pet. 2:13–16).

What was revolutionary, however, was that Christians professed primary allegiance to God. Such allegiance could divide one’s loyalties; it challenged each believer to do something most pagans had never considered doing—decide for oneself which family and civic obligations to accept, and which to reject.

Tertullian, for example, who lived in a world where what we call freedom of religion was alien or unknown, nevertheless claims such liberty for himself and censures the emperors for “taking away religious liberty [libertatem religionis] so that I may no longer worship according to my inclination, but am compelled to worship against it.”¹⁰⁵ Origen, as we have noted, defending Christians against charges of illegality, dares argue that people constrained by an evil government are right not only to disobey its laws but even to revolt and to assassinate tyrannical rulers:

It is not irrational to form associations contrary to the existing laws, if it is done for the sake of the truth. For just as those people would do well who enter a secret association in order to kill a tyrant who had seized the liberties of a state, so Christians also, when tyrannized … by the devil, form associations contrary to the devil’s laws, against his power, to protect those whom they succeed in persuading to revolt against a government which is barbaric and despotic.¹⁰⁶

Such convictions did not arise from a sense of the “rights of the individual,” a conception that emerged only fifteen hundred years later with the Enlightenment. Instead they are rooted in the sense of being God’s people, enrolled by baptism as “citizens in heaven,” no longer subject merely to “the rulers of this present evil age,” the human authorities and the demonic forces that often control them.

A hundred years after the gospels were written, then, Christians adapted to the circumstances of pagan persecution the political and religious model they found in those gospels—God’s people against Satan’s people—and identified themselves as allies of God, acting against Roman magistrates and pagan mobs, whom they see as agents of Satan. At the same time, as we shall see in the next chapter, church leaders troubled by dissidents within the Christian movement discerned the presence of Satan infiltrating among the most intimate enemies of all—other Christians, or, as they called them, heretics.