STORIES END, LIFE GOES ON. I CLOSE MY NARRATIVE OF THE GODS with Augustine and Macrobius and their continuing loyalties to the past even in the hour of Christian victory. The history of paganism was just beginning. Once you had been taught what a pagan was, you started seeing them everywhere. Christian conquerors and missionaries would find paganism wherever they went for the next thousand years and more. They would read the religious practices of newfound peoples as extensions of the familiar story of credulous primitives and Christian exceptionalism. Examples among such missionaries of respect, curiosity, and a willingness to learn are few on the ground. The Jesuits in China are the most notable exception.
No question, Christianity welcomed and took advantage of its new privileged position in the Roman world with energy and imagination that are scarcely believable in retrospect. A Christian of the year 300 CE would be astonished if he could see what his community would become in a single century. By the 530s, Justinian’s vast Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople (he boasted of having outdone Solomon and his temple) manifested the drama of Christianity’s self-proclamations and the power of its leaders. We lack, still, the transformative book that needs to be written about the history of Christianity, one that can step back from the familiar claims and counterclaims of believers, other-believers, and unbelievers and tell the story in a way that does it real justice.
Note first the smallness, modesty, and persistence of the communities that invoked the name of Christ for the first three centuries, demonstrating their differences of belief and practice in a hundred ways. The explosive growth of those communities when once they were given imperial patronage cannot be overstated. The idea of orthodoxy and the coherence of a community that now spread across the empire and beyond its borders had the power to set Christianity free of emperors, armies, and boundaries. New forms of religious expression blossomed with that success.
By comparison with that effervescence of faith and practice, the undramatic persistence within Christianity of traditional ways of thinking and acting has understandably been of lesser interest, but needs to be understood. Christianity seized its time and made its message compelling, even for many of those who had joined because of another kind of compulsion. In many respects Christianity was as much a creation of the fourth and fifth centuries as the idea of paganism had been.
In one way Christianity’s triumph really is universal. If the non-Christian philosophers of late antiquity had succeeded in making people think of a divine world larger and simpler and stranger and more overpowering than anything their old gods could show them, the Christians succeeded in introducing the movement of time into the cosmic landscape. Nineteenth-century thinkers called this the introduction of the idea of progress, an enthusiasm much in the air a century and more ago.1 Even as we become skeptical about progress with a capital P, we have settled for understanding progression. Time’s arrow really does fly in one direction and some change is irreversible. Few moderns may think of the linear development of human history in the same terms the old Christians used, but the modern world of ideas is unimaginable without the irreversible linearity of connection and direction they provided. Everyone on the planet recognizes the Christian scheme of marking and pointing time’s arrow, even when we noncommittally mark our dates BCE/CE.
And of course much of what was old and familiar survived and lived, overtly and covertly, consciously and unconsciously, in the new world of Christian emperors and powerful bishops. We’ve seen examples of this and cited more of the evidence, but the historical record necessarily understates such persistence. What continued in family and household and city practice would naturally escape attention and leave scant record. Sure, blood sacrifice had very nearly vanished by the fourth century, but it had been on the way out for a long time. By comparison, antiquity’s new age cult of astrology has turned out to be unkillable.
Then there are a few notorious anecdotes that should be read cautiously, telling a familiar story of doughty pagan resistance. One story goes that a band of philosophers from Athens, evicted when the emperor Justinian closed their school in 529, sought refuge for their pagan ways in the Persian empire. Closer examination reveals a very local claim about Christians undermining an institution they mistrusted and a Christian source telling us the story. Whatever went on there was less dramatic than telling has made it.2 The better the story, the less likely that it is true (as often).
And so time passed. Looking back fifteen hundred or two thousand years can be a pleasant pastime, watching costume dramas unfold in our imaginations with just enough of the exotic about them to hold our attention. What we should remind ourselves at the beginning and end of such stories is how easily we assume that the people in them are really just like us. The stories I have told of sites and shrines, slaughter and superstition, should certainly remind the reader how far away most people today stand from the most civilized and reasonable ancients. The Christians in these stories are no less distant from us, even those of us who claim to be orthodox believers. The material, social, intellectual, and spiritual conditions of their world differed dramatically from our own. A Christian of the sixth century has some things in common with a modern Christian that a Roman of the first century did not, but at least as much separates him from us as connects him. Perhaps the lasting lesson of this book is that the creation of “Christianity” as an idea in the course of our story is the truly interesting and important historical development we have seen: the idea of a single community of thought and action, consistent and unchanging in important ways over time. “Pagans” offered the perfect foil to set off and glamorize that idea.
To recite the creed of Constantinople’s council from 381 CE in a church in 2014 is to assert a uniquely stable and unchanging identity over time. Christianity’s transformations, however, did not end with that age of innovation; they continue to this very moment. The claim that Christianity then and Christianity now are the same thing is a theological proposition, not a historical one. That so many non-Christians accept it unthinkingly should astonish us. That is another great triumph of Christianity.
Will Christianity’s many victories be permanent? It might seem so. Creating paganism in order to have vanquished it let Christianity emerge from antiquity presenting itself as a modern, intellectual, imperial, and highly organized religion with extraordinary resilience. It constituted itself, though, by reading books and reacting to them, and it created its own abundant literature of response to biblical authority. The age of Augustine was a great one for broadening, deepening, and extending the world of readers and writers. Classical Islam was equally fortunate in presenting itself as radically new in the seventh century, while rabbinic Judaism succeeded with very similar tactics in fashioning itself as radically old and traditional. (The Talmud’s first versions fall in the age between Augustine and Muhammed.) The making and management of books was fundamental to all three Abrahamic families. With books, they could offer all that the gods had offered and more besides. If the great age of the written word, however, is ending or morphing into something very different from what we have known and depended on for more than twenty-five hundred years, the future of the children of Abraham may be a clouded one.
And what became of the gods who never existed yet lived so long? In a nutshell, they got small. Novelty intervened to distract people. War and social upheaval shrank their revenues. Then one day an ordinary sort of emperor happened to pick as his patron a god whose followers, all unknowing, were ready to take their deity very large indeed. That deity brought in his train, moreover, a parade of exciting new saints and martyrs who could find places in churches and stories everywhere. He and his team did a remarkably good job of satisfying the religious needs of the culture. Humankind learned new ways, then prided itself on thinking those new ways were newer than they actually were. And in the process forgot some old ones.
The gods were no longer needed.