AUGUSTUS GRANDLY REVIVED A THING THAT HAD BARELY BEEN invented in his own time: “old-time religion,” rather like the nearly postmodern version of Christianity invented in nineteenth-century America and called “fundamentalism.” Both offered fresh and tendentious packaging of carefully selected older beliefs and practices mixed with others as new as next week. What made it the Roman old-time religion was that the leaders of the new, improved, greatly expanded Roman Republic/Empire identified with it and propagated it under their authority. In all the welter of cults and practices and beliefs that in fact flourished in the lands where Roman armies prevailed, this old-time religion was a very modern sort of thing.
Did the Romans believe in their gods? The question needs a little more attention, for to “believe in god” is originally a Christian expression, having nothing to do with accepting the proposition that a divine being exists.1 It takes divine existence for granted and emphasizes trust and confidence. A popular song lyric will say “I believe in you” not to mean “I have concluded through rational argument and examination of the evidence that you exist,” but rather something like “I admire and trust you to an extreme degree.” It’s a medieval development to debate endlessly whether the supreme being exists or not; and real “atheism” is a modern creation.2
To a Roman—to any citizen of the ancient Mediterranean world—the question of whether gods existed was either unvoiced or peripheral. The Platonic philosophers of later antiquity, like Plotinus and Porphyry in the third century, arguably had a higher opinion of “the divine” than did the enthusiasts of Augustus’s ludi saeculares but were at the same time less fearful and less expectant of immediate intervention. They came to accept the idea that the gods people knew and dealt with were manifestations of things that lay beyond, while allowing that one need not take the stories quite seriously as stories. They didn’t offer anything so vulgar as disbelief, but the divine existence had become something quite new—and recognizable to moderns. The most sophisticated form of such an argument would hold that the many manifestations of divinity corresponded to the interests, abilities, experiences, tastes, concerns, and cultures of individual people, but that some underlying power or small group of powers in the universe were behind such behaviors.
So even the intellectuals of late antiquity were believers. The only people who didn’t, as a rule, honor and respect gods were the Christians.
Where gods were taken for granted, where many gods and many temples and many stories and many communities of interpretation coexisted, benevolent lazy indifference was the rule. I went my way, you yours. What you did might intrigue or attract me, or leave me uninterested and aloof. When I traveled, I would visit temples on my way, curiously and respectfully, careful not to offend any powers that lurked there, even sometimes pausing to curry favor. I wouldn’t often meet a god I liked and try to take him or her home with me, unless I fell deathly ill or was a wealthy general who felt blessed by a god’s favor and built grateful temples to him wherever I went. The religious sites of antiquity are notable for tourists carving their “Kilroy was here” inscriptions in likely places around shrines. Placid, accepting curiosity was the norm.
To such people, all of whom quite plausibly thought of themselves as reasonable and devout, a community that took the trouble not merely to disbelieve in, but to deny and deplore the religious behavior of others was bound to be provocative. That community’s claim to have a single god of unique power was self-evidently laughable—who could that god be, how old, how venerable, how powerful? Where has he been all this time? If there are many gods, people who claim to believe in exactly one god, a god few had heard of, a newcomer, a god without temples and signs of power—are, functionally speaking, atheists.3
The late-second-century philosopher Celsus paid Christianity the tribute of polemic, which offers the modern reader a valuable look at traditionalist views as well as an unsettling view of Christianity. He wrote close to the years 176–77, when Marcus Aurelius issued general dictates against extravagance and innovation in religion. Celsus knew Christianity and its tenets well, but he also seemed to know about Judaism and enough about Egypt to suggest that he’d spent time there. Celsus called his book The True Word, a title that hints at his intent to refute the Gospel of John, which claimed Christ was the Word. We don’t have the book itself, but seventy years later, The True Word provided the immensely learned Christian exegete and theologian Origen the material for a large work called Against Celsus that quotes Celsus at length and in detail. If we tune out Origen, we can hear Celsus’s second-century picture of a religion he thought would never amount to much.
Celsus’s voice is clear and calm: “If you shut your eyes to the world of sense and look up with the mind, if you turn away from the flesh and raise the eyes of the soul, only so will you see god. And if you look for some one to lead you along this path, you must flee from the deceivers and sorcerers who court phantoms.”4 These are words that many Christian theologians could well write. But then Celsus rejects the Christian claim that to worship many gods is to serve many masters: “This,” he goes on to say, “is a rebellious utterance of people who wall themselves off and break away from the rest of mankind.”
Christianity for him had the worrying marks of a secret society, barbarian (he means “Jewish”) in origin. They kept apart from rituals others took for granted and kept the doors closed for their own rites—leading to the comical suspicions Tertullian reported. Their secrecy seemed to him a mark of cowardice, unlike the bravery of Socrates accepting the death penalty for his irreligion. It has no teaching that is new or impressive. For what Christians claim, he can always find precedents—as when Heraclitus centuries earlier clearly knew that idols are not themselves gods.5 After all, “If these idols are nothing, why is it terrible to take part in the high festival? And if they are demons of some sort, obviously these too belong to God, and we ought to believe them and sacrifice to them according to the laws, and pray to them that they may be kindly disposed” (8.24).
They have their demons and their magic chants, these Christians—an argument exactly mirroring the Christian claim that the pagan gods were themselves demons! They remind him of other cultists he sniffs at: the begging priests of Cybele, the worshippers of Mithras, or the ones who claim to have visions of Hecate in their rituals. They got their doctrine from Moses, a magician who himself stole his doctrine from other nations. (This reversed a Christian claim that Moses was the source and other philosophers the beneficiaries, as when Plato was supposed to have visited Egypt and there met the prophet Jeremiah and learned from him.) Moses’s successors fabricated a story of virgin birth out of the misfortunes of a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. She was chased out of her house by her husband when she proved to be pregnant as a result of adultery. The boy who was born this way spent time in Egypt, training as a carpenter but learning some magic tricks from the local wizards.
Celsus’s primary grievance is not with the Christian religion, however. He just can’t stand Christians.
Marketplace know-it-alls, that’s what they are (3.50), never to be found in the company of truly intelligent men but always falling in with adolescent louts and slaves and fools (3.50). Their natural associates are wool workers, cobblers, laundry workers, and the most illiterate and rustic yokels who come and whisper their enticements to schoolchildren and silly women, all the better to overthrow the authority of fathers and schoolmasters (3.55). Did not the Christians’ own Paul say (1 Cor. 1.18ff) that “wisdom” means nothing to these people? They are like a cloud of bats or ants swarming out of a nest or frogs croaking sagely in their marsh. Like worms crawling about a filthy corner, they quarrel with each other about just who is the worst sinner—taking pride if they are the worst (4.23)! For them, his favorites, their god forgets about the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the whole world, and just keeps sending them special messengers to show his favor. They can barely get along with one another. So perverse are they, Celsus says, that “if all men wanted to be Christians, the Christians would no longer want them” (3.9).
Jesus is a second-rater for Celsus, a colleague of riffraff, a perpetrator of truly second-rate miracles, skulking about in shadows to avoid punishment, unable to inspire in his followers even the loyalty of a robber band, wallowing in pain and self-pity in Gethsemane, and surely never behaving like a god (1.62, 1.68, 2.9, 2.12, 2.24). “What fine action did Jesus do like a god? Did he despise men’s opposition and laugh and mock at the disaster that befell him?” (2.33). “Why, if not before, does he not at any rate now show forth something divine, and deliver himself from this shame, and take his revenge on those who insult both him and his Father?” (2.35). The crucifixion was just the moment when you would expect some glorious manifestation of divine power, but there was none. Real gods are not to be messed with: “You pour abuse on the images of these gods and ridicule them, although if you did that to Dionysus himself or to Heracles in person, perhaps you would not escape lightly. The men who tortured and punished your God in person suffered nothing for doing it, not even afterwards as long as they lived” (8.41). Resurrection? There have been plenty of people rising from the dead, like Zalmoxis, the slave of Pythagoras among the Scythians. What about Rhampsinitus in Egypt, who went down to Hades and played dice with the queen of the underworld, returning with the gift of a golden napkin from her?6 Orpheus and Protesilaus and Hercules and Theseus: Why should anyone take Jesus and his pallid story seriously?
Zalmoxis, of course, was a god for barbarians, admired by the Getae, as was Mopsus among the Cilicians, Amphilochus among the Acarnanians, Amphiaraus among the Thebans, and Trophonius with the Lebadians. According to Celsus, these are the gods Jesus resembles. Celsus even carries over a sneer of a different kind, comparing Jesus to Antinous, the beautiful young man with whom the great emperor Hadrian had fallen in love. After Antinous took his own life, Hadrian had him treated as a god, to the disdain of the Roman upper classes (3.34–36). Surely there were nobler examples of godly men, like Heracles, Asclepius, and Orpheus, or even more admirable philosophers, like Epictetus. Even the Sibyl has more to be said for her than Jesus does—no, even the Jews’ own Jonah and Daniel (7.53)!
Try reading this passage as though you knew little or nothing about Christians but were well disposed to hear what a wise philosopher had to say about them: “Reason demands one of two alternatives. If they refuse to worship in the proper way the lords in charge of the following activities, then they ought neither to come to marriageable age, nor to marry a wife, nor to beget children, nor to do anything else in life. They should depart from this world leaving no descendants at all behind them, so that such a race would entirely cease to exist on earth. If they are going to marry wives, and beget children, and taste of the fruits, and partake of the joys of this life, and endure the appointed evils (by nature’s law all men must have experience of evils; evil is necessary and has nowhere else to exist), then they ought to render the due honours to the beings who have been entrusted with these things. And they ought to offer the due rites of worship in this life until they are set free from their bonds, lest they even appear ungrateful to them” (8.55).
Origen had plenty to say in response to Celsus, but we’ll visit more gods instead.