Looking beyond the World: The Christian Revolution
As we saw in previous chapters, Roman religion was diverse and capacious, both in the deities and cults that it recognized and in the different “modalities of belief” that it supported. But it did not encompass all faiths. Most importantly, it could not absorb or contain Judaism or Christianity. With Judaism, Rome maintained a fragile peace broken by periodic bouts of revolt and unsparing repression.1 With Christianity, relations were even less congenial; the Romans sometimes grudgingly tolerated Christians and sometimes subjected them to ferocious persecutions. (We will look more closely at these persecutions in the following chapter.)
Why did these religions in particular resist absorption into the Roman cornucopia of cults, rituals, and devotions? The answer, it seems, is that the Jerusalem-centered faiths represented a radically different form of religiosity—indeed, a fundamentally different orientation to the world—that was unassimilable into the Romans’ thoroughly worldly civic piety. In this vein, and with reference to Judaism and Christianity, the Israeli historian Guy Stroumsa argues that “the religious transformations of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world in the first centuries of the Roman Empire are so radical” that they are properly described as “a ‘paradigm shift’ in the domain of the religious.”2 And he observes that “the conflict between paganism and Christianity is so fascinating” because it had “decisive consequences for the future of Western culture.”3 Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins explains that “it is difficult for us now to recapture how very strange and offensive [Christianity] must have seemed to pagans in the Roman world.”4
In this chapter, we will attempt to discern the nature of the “revolution”5 that divided Judaism and Christianity from Roman religion. We will see how Judaism and Christianity represented a fundamentally different kind of religiosity from paganism, so that the empire’s eventual acceptance of Christianity would amount to a transformation—in aspiration and ideal if never fully in practice—not merely of “religion” (as if that were some discrete and severable compartment of life) but of the basic orientation of human beings toward the world, and toward the city.
Were Pagans and Christians Really So Different?
Recently, however, a few revisionist historians, whom we might think of as historical deconstructionists or perhaps as retrospective conciliators, have suggested that the supposed differences between pagans and Christians were not so fundamental after all, and that the conflicts were mostly constructed by sectarian Christians who needed a fearsome opponent to define themselves against.6 If the deconstructionists-conciliators are right, the inquiry proposed for this chapter might seem misdirected. So before proceeding, we should pause to notice the principal arguments for doubting that the supposed conflict between paganism and Christianity was as significant as scholars like Stroumsa and Hopkins—and many, many others—have supposed.
Two main and interrelated arguments run through the deconstructionist-conciliating interpretations. First, as we have seen already, what others call “paganism” was not a monolithic religious system; rather, the term is used to cover a sprawling panorama of deities, rituals, stories, and practices. Nor for that matter was Christianity, in the beginning (or ever), a monolithic, tightly defined and organized movement.7 So there could not have been a genuine conflict between “paganism” and “Christianity”—or so it might seem—because neither term refers to any unitary or organized movement or form of religion at all. Second, and relatedly, the so-called pagans never thought of themselves as “pagans”; Christians invented if not the word then the category, mostly as a way of classifying, dismissively,8 those who did not join up with their own movement.9
As a purely descriptive matter, these observations seem mostly accurate, and hardly novel. Indeed, even as he argues that the differences between Roman religion and Christianity as well as later Judaism were so “radical” as to constitute a “paradigm shift,” Guy Stroumsa points out that “neither ‘paganism’ nor even ‘Christianity’ can be reduced to a factitious unity that represents anything. The forms of Christian existence in the first centuries are numerous—and the concept of ‘paganism’ is of course only the creation of Christian thinkers and does not correspond to any concrete reality.”10
As a logical matter, however, the inference from these descriptive observations to the conclusion that there was no inherent and fundamental conflict between paganism and Christianity, or that the ostensible differences between them were artificial or constructed, seems a non sequitur. One can imagine an analogous argument maintaining that although pet lovers have from time immemorial contrasted and debated the relative merits of “dogs” as opposed to “cats,” in reality the various and sundry organisms placed under the label of “dog” are enormously diverse in size, color, and behavior. Moreover, no animal ever identified itself as a “dog”: the term and the category have been imposed entirely from the outside—by humans. Same for cats. Consequently, the supposed contrast between “dogs” and “cats” is profoundly misconceived.
But this conclusion would be merely silly. Let us concede (although a philosophical realist might dispute the point) that “dog” and “cat,” like most or all other general terms and categories by which we understand and engage with the world—germs, planets, rivers, islands, cities, animals, plants, etc.—are devised by humans for the purpose of describing diverse particulars that usually would not and could not claim the terms for purposes of self-description (often because such entities—dogs, cats, germs, plants, rivers, etc.—do not and could not engage in self-description to begin with). The question is whether such terms and categories usefully help us to address real similarities and differences in the world. Similarly, although the point can always be debated, the widespread use of the categories “pagan” and “Christian” from late antiquity to the present at least suggests that the terms have proven useful in this way.
One recent conciliating book seeks to shed light on the religious situation in late antiquity by drawing parallels between Christians of that time and the LGBT movement of today.11 An impressive achievement is that from the book’s title to its dedication to the text itself, the author manages to work allusions to the LGBT movement into virtually every page. And how does this relentlessly executed parallel illuminate the historical developments? The gist of the argument, it seems, is that although people then and now have often been mistrustful of perceived differences, once they get to know the supposedly different folks (“The New Neighbors Who Moved in Next Door,” as one chapter title puts it), they come to realize that the differences are not of great importance and need not impede a cordial human fellowship. Thus, by quietly getting to know their neighbors, and getting to be known by them, Christians “made a place [for themselves] in Caesar’s Empire.”
For this story line to work, the author has to emphasize and elevate those mostly inconspicuous Christians—“The Quieter Ones”12—who were content to mingle unobtrusively, to join in the Roman religious festivities, and (in disregard of the minimal essential prohibitions declared by the Christian council of Jerusalem)13 congenially to eat the meat sacrificed to pagan deities. In other words, the author elevates the Christians who, then and now, would be regarded by more rigorous Christians as lax or lapsed or “lukewarm.”14 Conversely, the author disapproves and attempts to marginalize, as unreasonable or “antisocial,”15 those more fervent Christians—including nontrivial figures like Saint Paul, Saint John, Tertullian, Cyprian, Perpetua, Athanasius, Ambrose, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, and John Chrysostom16—who stood out as leaders and exemplars of the Christian movement, who wrote and expounded its sacred texts, who defined its doctrines, and who sometimes persisted in professing it even though this meant going to the cross or the pyre or the lions. Other adjustments are also needed; we need not detail here the ways in which the historical record must be clipped and contorted to fit the conciliating story line.17 Even with these adjustments of the historical record, moreover, the story runs amok after Christianity achieves political dominance in the fourth century. Once Christians had earned the acceptance of their neighbors in the empire, it seems, the faction of more militant and unsociable Christians then seized control, to the considerable detriment both of the pagans and of the more congenial and reasonable Christians.18
For anyone who finds the book’s attempted parallel between ancient Christianity and the modern LGBT movement at all instructive, this outcome presumably ought to be ominous. In any case, both in the book’s overall treatment and in its grim culmination, the real lesson seems directly contrary to the author’s conciliatory intentions. It turns out that between Roman pagans and the more committed (or, if you prefer, more unsociable or unreasonable) Christians, there were real and profoundly consequential incompatibilities.
A different and more compelling qualification is noted by the historian Wayne Meeks, who points out that in early Christianity “the daily practice of most church members was doubtless indistinguishable in most respects from that of their unconverted neighbors.”19 But then, how could it have been otherwise? A person who heard and believed the message about Jesus naturally continued to speak the same language as before—Greek or Latin or whatever—and to work and dress and eat in much the same ways as she had always done. For similar reasons, Christians continued to talk about good and bad, virtue and vice, mostly in the same vocabulary that they had previously used, and that their non-Christian neighbors used.20 Consequently, “it is curiously difficult to say exactly what was new about Christian morality, or to draw firm boundaries around it.”21 “The Christian language of virtue and vice is ordinary, so much so that it is sometimes hard to see what all the fuss was about on the part of its attackers or its defenders.”22
And yet, beneath these surface similarities and continuities, Meeks shows, fundamental and transformative differences are discernible. The result was that “a tectonic shift of cultural values was set in motion by those small and obscure beginnings.”23
So it seems that we may pursue the chapter’s inquiry after all: In what fundamental if subtle ways did Christian religiosity differ from pagan religiosity?
While not precluding our inquiry, however, the acknowledgment of diversity within both paganism and Christianity, as well as of similarities between pagans and Christians, should warn us against expecting to find clean and simple categories. Different scholars suggest a variety of distinctions. Roman religion, it is said, was polytheistic; Judaism and Christianity were monotheistic.24 Roman religion focused on ritual, not on creed; Christianity cared about truth, doctrine, and belief—and heresy.25 Roman religion was a piety of outward performances; Judaism and especially Christianity were concerned with the inner person—with what was in the mind and the heart.26 Roman religion was a thing of this world; Christianity in particular emphasized the next world.27 The Roman gods demanded proper sacrifice but were otherwise mostly indifferent to (and far from exemplary of) morality; the God of Judaism and Christianity was intensely committed to the moral life.28 Although these distinctions are not without a basis in the historical evidence, it may turn out that they do not hold categorically. To borrow a familiar contrast articulated by Wittgenstein, what we find may not be unvarying and immutable essences of two utterly different religiosities, but rather partially overlapping but nonetheless distinct and distinguishable “family resemblances.”
We can begin to appreciate the important family differences, nonetheless, if we recall the discussion in chapter 2 suggesting that religion can be understood as a sense of and a relation to the sacred. We can then ask, both for pagan and for Jewish and Christian religion: What and where (so to speak) is the sacred?
In this respect, the work of the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann provides valuable illumination. Like Stroumsa, quoted at the outset of this chapter, Assmann argues that the shift from the pagan religiosity of Egypt, Greece, and Rome to the monotheistic faiths of later Judaism and Christianity represented a radical and portentous transformation—one that “has had a more profound impact on the world we live in today than any political upheaval.”29 This shift brought “with it a new mentality and a new spirituality, which have decisively shaped the Western image of man.”30
So, what exactly was the radical, transformative difference? Assmann does not make it easy for readers to ascertain his answer to that question. His most characteristic and frequent claim is that there was a fundamental and enormously consequential difference between the polytheism of paganism and the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity. Or so it seems. But then Assmann qualifies that position, and then qualifies it again.
As a descriptive matter, the assertion that paganism was polytheistic and Christianity was monotheistic is at best an oversimplification. Scholars find strains of monotheism in paganism: the various gods are understood by some pagans as different faces of a single divinity.31 The fourth-century Christian apologist Lactantius listed and quoted an assortment of pagan poets and thinkers who had understood the various pagan deities essentially as different masks or manifestations of one divine being.32 We saw one expression of this view already in the religious articulation of Balbus, the Stoic character in Cicero’s dialogue on the gods. Balbus, recall, defended the gods, plural, in a metaphorical sense but also asserted at one point that “the universe is god,”33 with the various deities representing different aspects of that divinity. Noting such expressions, Assmann observes that “God’s oneness is not an invention of monotheism, but the central theme of polytheistic religions as well.”34
Conversely, the monotheism of Christianity was at least complicated, and contestable. Christians believed in one God, yes, but that one God was somehow constituted as three persons.35 Christians also came to believe in angels, and in a host of saints that in some ways replaced the functions of paganism’s subordinate deities.36 Thus, Assmann asserts that “as an instrument for describing and classifying ancient religions, the opposition of unity and plurality is practically worthless.”37
So if the portentous difference was not actually between polytheism and monotheism, as much of Assmann’s writing on its face seems to suggest, what then was the vital distinction? “What seems crucial,” Assmann first explains, “is not the distinction between One God and many gods but the distinction between truth and falsehood in religion, between the true god and false gods, true doctrine and false doctrine, knowledge and ignorance, belief and unbelief.”38 In this respect, Assmann suggests, “biblical religion” (including “ancient Israelite, Jewish, and Christian religions”) contrasted with “all the alien and earlier cultures that knew nothing of the distinction between true and false religion.”39 The concern of biblical religion with truth and falsity was “a revolutionary innovation in the history of religion.”40
Perhaps. Still, if the real transformation was from pagan indifference to Jewish and Christian obsession with truth, why make so much of the distinction between polytheism and monotheism? The contrasts seem quite independent of each other. Why couldn’t a polytheistic religion be concerned with questions of truth? (The discussion in the previous chapter of Cicero’s dialogue on the gods shows that at least some pagans were interested in such questions.) Conversely, couldn’t a religion devoted to a single deity nonetheless take a tolerant or relaxed stance toward propositional truth? We might think of modern instances—Unitarianism, perhaps, or the familiar irenic invocations of the story of the six blind men of Indostan and the elephant.
So Assmann complicates the matter still further—but also clarifies it—by offering a second qualification: the really important distinction, he now says, is not so much either in the number of deities or in the concern about truth per se, but more in the character or location of divinity. More specifically, and crucially, the pagan gods were actors (albeit powerful and immortal actors) of and within this world. The God of Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, is “the creator of the world, which he guides in its course and maintains in its existence—an invisible, hidden, spiritual god who dwells beyond time and space.”41
In short, the ultimately crucial difference is not so much that the Jewish and Christian God is solitary while the pagan gods are plural. What matters, rather, is the relation of those deities to the world and even, we might say, their metaphysical status.42 Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and company are part of the world; they are creatures of time and space. As James O’Donnell explains: “The gods . . . were mainly the mightiest part of the world itself, not beings that somehow stood outside it all. When Olympus came to feel too earthen, then the planets were thought to be the homes of the gods, and the domains of space beyond were thought to be the highest and most perfect places in the world—but emphatically in the world.”43
Conversely, the God of later Judaism and of Christianity can create and maintain the world because he is not merely part of the world, and is not contained within time and space.
So if we understand religion as a relation to the sacred, as suggested in chapter 2, then pagan religion differs from Judaism and Christianity in its placement of the sacred. Pagan religion locates the sacred within this world. In that way, paganism can consecrate the world from within: it is religiosity relative to an immanent sacred. Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, reflect a transcendent religiosity; they place the sacred, ultimately, outside the world—“beyond time and space.” To be sure, a simple and stark distinction between “immanent” and “transcendent” cuts a bit too cleanly (as theoretical distinctions on this level of generality inevitably do), in part because the Christian deity is both transcendent and immanent, even incarnate. Acknowledging the simplification inevitable in any such distinction, however, we can appreciate along with Assmann, Heschel,44 and others the distinction’s value in illuminating a fundamental difference between pagan and Christian (or, more generally, biblical) religiosities.
This contrast in the conceptions of deity may help to explain what otherwise seems the puzzling and accidental connection with monotheism and polytheism. A transcendent God of the kind professed by Jews and Christians would necessarily be singular, for reasons articulated by Greek thinkers and later by Christian theologians.45 Aristotle had taught that it is matter that individuates things otherwise similar in form;46 my pen is not the same thing as your pen, even though they have the same shape, color, and function, because my pen is made of different matter or, if you like, of different atoms. But on this logic, it would make no sense to talk in the plural of immaterial beings possessing the same form or divine features; there would be nothing to individuate one god from another. Such reasoning had already persuaded a thinker like Xenophanes in the fifth century BC of the necessary unity of god.47
In addition, we can appreciate how questions of truth would come to assume greater importance in Judaism and especially in Christianity. If there are many gods, all with a good claim to some sort of divinity, then it probably doesn’t make much difference which or what sort of deity you choose to worship. Most likely, these are really just the same family of gods, going by different names in different places48—or maybe even just different names for different manifestations or aspects of the same divine Reality. Why would that Reality care under which of its names you choose to address it? Conversely, if there is only one supreme deity, who is the ruler of the universe, and if all the other supposed deities are either fictions or (as the early Christians believed) imposters and devils,49 then it becomes much more urgent that you know the truth about what—or Whom—you are worshiping. Who wants to be caught worshiping and sacrificing to something or someone who doesn’t exist or, worse, who is actually demonic and malevolent?
No Longer at Home in the World?
These distinctions in the conceptions of the metaphysical status of the divine and the location of the sacred may seem rarefied and academic, accessible mostly to theologians and philosophers, and of no conceivable interest to ordinary folk. If we were to stop the average religious devotee on his way to a pagan temple or a Christian service and ask, “Do you place your faith in a transcendent or a merely immanent sacred?,” we might expect to receive an uncomprehending “Sorry, but I don’t understand the question.” Suppose we follow up by asking, “Do you believe that God or the gods created the world out of nothing, or rather that God or the gods are themselves part of the natural world?” Perhaps this question would lead to a meaningful and confident response—but probably not. And should that be a decisive question anyway? Would the answer make any real difference in the way people actually feel and live and worship?
We can press the doubt further. Christians might say that God is an entity beyond time and space, even beyond “being” (whatever that means). God is transcendent. But, the Christians would say, he is also immanent—and thoroughly involved in this world. Moreover, as humans in this world, Christians will necessarily and inevitably picture God in human images and terms50—as a muscular, majestic, white-haired figure, perhaps (as in countless medieval and early modern sculptures and paintings including, most famously, the depiction of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling). What else could they do? Could we do? We humans are, well, human; so we will inevitably engage with the world in human terms and images.
In the end, in short, do abstract theological claims about God’s transcendence of the natural world—which is, after all, the world we inhabit and the only one we can really conceive of in any concrete way—have any practical significance?
Well, yes, actually. Perhaps not immediately and directly; it is not as if the typical farmer or cobbler learns one day that God is transcendent and promptly revises his opinions and his way of life. And yet, what may seem like abstract differences in the location of the sacred support fundamentally different orientations or attitudes toward the world—different orientations with effects and profound implications for even the most mundane aspects of life. First let us consider the difference in orientations; later we will look at a few of the divergent practical implications of these different orientations.
The function of paganism, once again, is to consecrate or sacralize nature and the world. As we saw in chapter 2, Abraham Heschel argued that the Greeks “regarded the elemental powers of nature as holy” and treated “nature” as an “object of ultimate adoration.”51 In a similar vein, Jan Assmann explains that “a world of gods does not stand opposed to the world made up of the cosmos, humankind, and society, but endows them with meaning as a structuring and ordering principle.” In this way, “a world of gods constitutes the world of human destiny, which in its joys and sorrows, its crises and resolutions, its epochs and transitions, presents itself as a meaningful whole only in relation to the destinies of the gods.”52
By locating the sacred within the world, in short, pagan religion gave life in the world shape and meaning, and sublimity. It helped to consecrate the world—to make the world a fit, orderly, even beautiful home for human habitation (assuming, of course, that the gods were rendered cooperative through proper propitiation). The polytheistic religion of antiquity, says Assmann, “seeks to make its votaries at home in the world.”53 Insofar as the city is part of that world, and indeed is a sort of “second nature” or image of the world (as Balbus argued),54 paganism served to sacralize the city as well. And as we saw in chapter 3, this sacralization was no mere academic hypothesis; it was embodied, rather, in a host of buildings, rituals, performances, processions, and holidays.
For pagans, in sum, this city and this world were, and are, our home—the only home we have. This life, and the good things of this life, are the only ones we need to concern ourselves with.
An atheist might say much the same thing, of course. Or at least he might utter much the same words. But there is a crucial difference. The pagan could make those affirmations in an appreciative or laudatory or even rapturous tone, because our home in this city and this world and this life is a consecrated home—consecrated by its association with the gods. This world is our home not merely in the atheist’s sense that, however shabby, it’s the only one we’ve got, but rather in the sense of acknowledging how the gods have endowed this home with a “shining beauty and grace.”55
The pagan orientation, in short, accepts this world as our home, and does so joyously, exuberantly, worshipfully. (Or at least that is one part of the pagan orientation; we may encounter other, darker aspects as we proceed.)
The transcendent monotheism of Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, disrupts this comfortable sense of being at home. Though created and sustained by God, the world is now also separated from God—a separation aggravated, in Christian doctrine, by the Fall. Christians (and also Jews) effectively undid the pagan sacralization of the world, and instead effected a “desanctification of nature,” as Heschel explained.56 As a result, Assmann observes, the monotheist “does not feel entirely at home in the world any more.”57 Judaism and Christianity are religions “of distantiation, in contrast to religions of complete immersion in the world.”58
In Christianity, this distantiation generated an orientation that was complex—one that was, and is, difficult for non-Christians (and, often, Christians as well) to understand, and even more difficult for Christians actually to maintain. Matters would have been simpler if Christianity had simply and starkly rejected “the world” as a fallen realm to be resisted and escaped. Some Christian heretics took this view.59 And indeed, even what became the canonical Christian Scriptures repeatedly warned disciples to keep themselves “unspotted from the world,”60 sometimes coming close to what sounded like flat condemnation of the world.61 Saint Simeon Stylites sitting for years atop his pillar, or Saint Antony dwelling in the desert, living on bread and water consumed only after sunset once a day, or once every few days,62 would seem to embody this sort of contempt of the world.
At the same time, Christianity early on condemned as a heresy the view that the world is simply evil. Although fallen, the world is a creation of the true God, and hence good. It is to be appreciated as a blessing, not shunned or despised as an affliction.63 We can try to appreciate this complex and challenging stance by considering how the desacralization of the world influenced the way Christians thought (or aspired to think) on an assortment of related topics: nature, the goods of this world, sexuality, and the city.
Nature
As noted, paganism sacralized nature—every mountain, valley, and stream had its proper deity—while Christianity revoked this sacralization. And yet Christianity also taught that nature was God’s good creation. Though not “sacred” in the way it was for pagans, the world as God’s creation continued to have a “sacramental” quality. The delicate prescription was thus neither to deny the beauty of the natural world (which would be ungratefully to disparage God’s work), nor to rest in any adoring appreciation of that beauty (which would be a form of idolatry), but rather to appreciate natural beauty while looking beyond it to its source in the Creator.
Addressing the emperor Marcus Aurelius, Athenagoras the Athenian used analogies to illustrate the distinction and explain why “Christians do not worship the universe.” When people visit the imperial family, “if they chance to come upon the royal residence, they bestow a passing glance of admiration on its beautiful structure,” Athenagoras pointed out. “But it is to you yourselves that they show honour.” Likewise, “at the musical contests the adjudicators do not pass by the lute-players and crown the lutes.” In the same way, “beautiful without doubt is the world.” And “yet it is not this, but its Artificer, that we must worship.”64
Augustine made the point in poetic terms.
And what is this God [that I love]? I asked the earth and it said: “I am not he”; and everything in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea, and the deeps and the creeping things, and they replied, “We are not your God; seek above us.” I asked the fleeting winds and the whole air with its inhabitants answered, “Anaximenes was deceived; I am not God.” I asked the heavens, the sun, moon and stars; and they answered, “Neither are we the God whom you seek.” And I replied to all these things which stand around the door of my flesh: “You have told me about my God, that you are not he. Tell me something about him.” And with a loud voice they all cried out, “He made us.” My question had come from my observation of them, and their reply came from their beauty of order.65
In the abstract, these attitudes toward nature are importantly different. And yet, the practical significance of the difference still may not be obvious. The pagan thinks nature is divine; the Christian claims that nature itself is not divine but rather a creation and reflection of the divine. So the pagan gazes up at the starry sky and exclaims, “How divine!” The theologically fastidious Christian looks up and says, “What a sublime manifestation of the divine!” As a practical matter, how important is this difference? The pagan might praise nature in poetry—as in Virgil’s Georgics, for example—but the Christian might do the same. Think of Saint Francis’s famous “Canticle of the Creatures.” Or Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.”
Glory be to God for dappled things. . . .
All things counter, original, spare, strange; . . .
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.
Praise him.66
If the differences in pagan and Christian attitudes to nature did not have hugely different practical implications, however, the divergences become more conspicuous when we come to the other topics.
Goods
In the pagan conception, the gods’ assistance is sought in the pursuit of a variety of this-worldly goods. Life. Health. Wealth and power. Glory and fame. Peace. Happiness. These are by and large the same kinds of goods that the “interest-seeking conception” of the person that we looked at in chapter 2 recognizes as the desiderata that govern human pursuits and that inform the instrumental reasoning by which personal and public decisions are made.
Christianity recommended a complex but fundamentally different attitude toward these goods. It did not deny their goodness. The world, once again, is a creation of the true God, and hence good; its pleasures and beauties are genuine goods. But they are not the ultimate good. That more ultimate good is something often described as “eternal life.” To this the worldly goods needed to be subordinated; otherwise they would lose their goodness.
“Eternal life.” The term recurs repeatedly in the New Testament to describe the goal and reward of Christian faithfulness.67 The Apostles’ Creed repeats the theme: “I believe in . . . the life everlasting.” For his part, Augustine over and over emphasized that “eternal life is the Supreme Good.”68
And what is “eternal life”? For Christians, the term connoted two things. As its literal meaning suggests, it meant life that goes on forever—that continues or resumes after death in a physical resurrection. But eternal life also meant something like the life of and with God, the Eternal. “For, impelled by the desire of the eternal and pure life,” Justin Martyr declared, “we seek the abode that is with God, the Father and Creator of all.”69
In both respects, the Christian orientation contrasted sharply with paganism. To be sure, many Greeks and Romans surely hoped for some sort of existence beyond the grave.70 And some of the so-called mystery cults did seek to prepare their initiates for life in the next world. Even so, as the historian John Scheid explains, the mystery cults were not “religions of salvation and spirituality.” “The wellbeing or salvation sought by these cults was of a nature just as material as that offered by the traditional cults: it had to do with this world, the here and now. True, they showed that death was not an evil, and offered hope for the beyond, but above all they set out to achieve a happy life in this world and possibly even to prolong it and help the deceased after their deaths.”71
Scheid concludes that “there is no similarity between these cults and Christianity. They conveyed no message of triumph over death nor did they offer any fundamentally new revelations.”72 In particular, pagans rejected the idea of physical resurrection and of a final judgment. Indeed, Guy Stroumsa observes that this was “one of the characteristics of Christianity that would repel intellectual pagans the most.”73
In addition, while hoping that the gods would assist them in achieving the goods of this world, pagans typically did not imagine any higher good—anything like union with the gods—that transcended earthly flourishing.74 For pagans, the goods of this world—of the here and now—would be, so to speak, as good as it gets. By contrast, Christians looked for a blessedness that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man.”75 Once again, it did not follow that for Christians the goods of this world were not authentic goods. But if they were pursued as the ultimate goods, then they would, paradoxically, lose their goodness and turn to evils.
The idea is tirelessly and eloquently elaborated as the central theme of Augustine’s Confessions. The spiritual autobiography relates how, as a boy, Augustine is immersed in childish games, and then in sexual adventures and carousing with friends.76 Slightly later, as a talented and ambitious young man, Augustine leaves his provincial African town and travels to Rome and Milan in search of prosperity and eminence. Sexual gratification continues to be important to him (bk. 5).
Gradually, however, he becomes convinced, at least in the abstract, that wisdom is to be preferred to sensual gratification. This conviction is reinforced by the sudden death of a dear companion. As friends, they had enjoyed everything together; now everything reminds Augustine of what has been lost beyond hope of recovery. “My heart was utterly darkened by this sorrow,” he recalls, “and everywhere I looked I saw death” (4.9, p. 51).
Generalizing, he concludes that “every soul is wretched that is fettered in the friendship of mortal things—it is torn to pieces when it loses them, and then realizes the misery which it had even before it lost them” (4.11, p. 52).
Nonetheless, thoroughly immersed in careerism and the gratifications of sexuality, Augustine finds it difficult to relinquish the pursuit of these mundane goods. Even after he becomes intellectually convinced of the truth of Christianity, the allure of the world is strong. “But wait a moment,” he tells himself, resisting conversion.
This life also is pleasant, and it has a sweetness of its own. . . . We must not abandon it lightly. . . . See now, it is important to gain some post of honor. And what more should I desire? I have crowds of influential friends, if nothing else; and if I push my claims, a governorship may be offered me, and a wife with some money. . . . This would be the height of my desire. . . . I talked about these things, and the winds of opinions veered about and tossed my heart hither and thither. (6.19–20, p. 99)
Sexual gratification in particular is difficult to forswear. “Lord, make me chaste,” Augustine famously prays, “but not yet” (8.17, p. 139).77
Eventually, though, in part through study and mystical experience, and in part through the influence and example of prominent Christians like Ambrose, the eloquent and erudite bishop of Milan, and Victorinus, a philosopher and Christian convert, Augustine is able to embrace the Christian faith more fully. That faith points him to a higher good—eternal life, or union with God—that is fulfilling, not shallow and transitory in the way earthly goods are. This new understanding culminates in a mystical experience that Augustine enjoys with his mother, Monica, shortly before her death. Mother and son are “discussing together what is the nature of the eternal life of the saints: which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of man.” Their conversation gradually brings them “to the point where the very highest of physical sense and the most intense illumination of physical light seemed, in comparison with that life to come, not worthy of comparison, even of mention” (9.23–24, p. 163). Looking back on the experience, Augustine would recall that “this world, with all its joys, seemed cheap to us even as we spoke.” And he would add: “If this [experience] could be sustained, . . . and . . . should so ravish and absorb and envelop its beholder in these inward joys that his life might be eternally like that one moment of knowledge which we now sighed after—would not this be the reality of the saying: ‘Enter into the joy of thy Lord’?” (9.25–26, p. 164).
And yet the worldly goods, once again, are authentically good. “Now there is a comeliness in all beautiful bodies, and in gold and silver and all things. The sense of touch has its own power to please and the other senses find their proper objects in physical sensation. Worldly honor also has its own glory, and so do the powers to command and to overcome. . . . For these inferior values have their delights, but not at all equal to my God, who hath made them all. For in him do the righteous delight and he is the sweetness of the upright in heart” (2.10, p. 25).
In short, Christians were—are—faced with a delicate challenge. They must live in the world, rejoicing in its beauties and blessings; in that respect, their mode of life seems not so different from that of the pagans. And yet they must not forget that the ultimate good is God, not the world, and that this world is not their true home.78
Sex and the City, Sex and the Cosmos
As noted, one aspect of the pagan orientation that Augustine found especially difficult to relinquish was its easy, open sexuality. As we saw in chapter 3, the pagan approach to sexuality was characterized by two main assumptions. First, sexual fulfillment, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and whether within or outside of marriage, is inherently natural and good (for men at least); it is a manifestation of the “mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods.”79 Opportunities for sexual satisfaction abounded, not only or mainly with spouses, but also with the hosts of prostitutes and slaves that the city maintained. But, second, sexual activity must be subordinated to the needs of the city—which was a principal reason why respectable women were expected to marry and to remain chaste before marriage and celibate afterward.
Within this matrix of assumptions, the Christian view of sexuality was not only radically alien; it was close to incomprehensible.80 To be sure, assertions about “Christian” views of sexual morality are simplifications; then, as now, Christian thinkers differed in their understandings of sexuality. Moreover, Christian views of sexuality were not hermetically sealed off from ideas prevalent in their world; they were influenced by, among other things, the doctrines of the Platonists, Stoics, and Pythagoreans.81 With these caveats, though, we can still say that Christian sexual ethics represented, as Kyle Harper explains, a “paradigm shift” and a “deep earthquake in human morality.”82
The most obvious change was in the specific rules and prohibitions. For Christians, sex was permissible only within marriage—for both men and women: no more “double standard.”83 Same-sex sexual relations were condemned, as was pederasty.84 Prostitution was regulated and discouraged85 (though never actually eliminated). Even more important than the specific prohibitions, though, was the “new foundational logic of sexual ethics”86 that supported the specific rules. In its underlying logic, Christian sexual morality did not rely on the assumptions that informed Roman attitudes and practices, but instead was grounded in an entirely different set of premises.
We might note the essential pagan assumptions that Christianity did not share. The view that sexual activity was a necessity and that, as Kyle Harper puts it, “mankind might find in erotic fulfillment nothing short of salvation”87 emphatically did not apply to Christianity; on the contrary, Christians tended to believe that the celibate life was not only possible but also commendable. So sexual renunciation became a prominent theme in Christian thinking.88 In addition, Christian sexual ethics shared none of the typical Roman assumptions about manliness—assumptions that encouraged sexual gratification as natural and necessary but sternly condemned men who acted as the passive partners in sexual encounters.89 Nor were Christian sexual ethics primarily based on social or political exigencies, such as the need for orderly reproduction within the family.90 In the Christian view, Kyle Harper explains, “the cosmos replaced the city as the framework of morality.”91
Thus, in the Christian view, the human body was, as the apostle Paul put it, a “temple of the Holy Spirit.”92 In Paul’s understanding, the body became “a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine.”93 Unsanctioned sex functioned to pollute or desecrate that space.94 By contrast to the Roman and Greek encouragement of sex in moderation, in the Christian view “the sexual machinery of the body was something to be protected from contamination, not simply to be kept in proper balance.”95 And “the harmless sexual novitiate that was an unobjectionable part of sexual life in antiquity” now became “an unambiguous sin, a transgression against the will of God, echoing in eternity.”96
To the detached modern critic, this logic may seem like question begging. Let us grant for argument’s sake that the human body is a temple, and thus at least in a derivative sense holy; even so, unless one begins by assuming that sexual relations are somehow presumptively impure, why should they be perceived as compromising that holiness? To the pagans, as we have seen, just the opposite description seemed to apply: sexual passions were not impure but rather the “indwelling presence of the gods.”97
But then, from a Christian perspective, that proposition only aggravated the problem. Let us suppose that sexual passion reflects the “indwelling presence of the gods”; we must then ask, Which gods? And the pagan answer, it seems, would be Eros, or perhaps Venus,98 or (if sexual passion is supplemented with wine) maybe Dionysus, or perhaps Priapus of the prodigious phallus. Foreign or false gods, in other words.
The observation helps to explain why early Christians commonly equated fornication with idolatry.99 The confinement of sex to one partner within the sanctified bonds of matrimony was correlated with monotheism; conversely, the Roman practice of a more wide-ranging sexual prodigality was the manifestation of a kind of polytheism. Consequently, “for Paul the sexual disorder of Roman society was the single most powerful symbol of the world’s alienation from God.”100
In this way, sexual morality “came to mark the great divide between Christians and the world.”101 That divide did not become operative immediately upon the political acceptance of Christianity under Constantine. Harper reports, rather, that the implementation of the new sexual morality was not effectively implemented until the reign of the emperor Justinian in the mid-sixth century. Still, looked at from afar, the change was dramatic, amounting to “a revolution” not only in rules of behavior but also in conceptions of the human person and his or her relations to the state and the cosmos.102 And “sex was at the center of it all.”103
Harper seems unhappy, or at least ambivalent, about the transformation. Although he is harsh in his descriptions of the brutal exploitation of prostitutes and slaves in the Roman system, his account of the new Christian morality is censorious as well. The change was recklessly effected, he suggests: “Christian norms simply ate through the fabric of late classical antiquity like an acid, without the least consideration for the well-worn contours of the old ways.”104 And he strikes a wistful tone about what was lost. “The tradition of frank eroticism withers, and the visual depictions of lovemaking slowly recede. Gone is the warm eroticism of the Pompeian fresco, vanished is the charmed sensuality of the Greek romance.”105 Justinian’s implementation of the new Christian morality reflected “the haze of ruin and violent puritanism.”106
As we will see, a similar censoriousness toward the new Christian regime, and a similar wistfulness at the loss of the pagan world, are themes that have resonated through the centuries and continue to influence attitudes and agendas even today.
One City or Two?
Though pagan and Christian sexual morality were starkly different, they were not necessarily incompatible as a practical matter,107 at least so long as Christians remained a powerless minority. If Christians chose to refrain from sex with prostitutes and slaves, and to confine sex to marriage, such restraint did nothing to impede pagan sexual expression. But in another area the differences were more likely to lead to conflict—namely, in what we might think of as their civic sensibilities, or their attitudes toward the city.
As we saw in chapter 3, Roman government and Roman religion were intimately intertwined. In Rome and elsewhere, paganism generally was at its core a religion of the city—of the earthly city: the Greek polis, the city of Rome, later the empire.108 John Scheid observes that the founders of Rome or of other cities of antiquity also founded the religions of those cities and dictated the rules of those religions.109 Consequently, “in trying to understand the religious behaviour of the ancient Romans, we should never forget the fundamental importance of city ideology. . . . That ideal of collective life determined most aspects of religious practice.”110
More specifically, we have already seen in chapter 3 how Roman religion was thoroughly integrated into Roman political and civic life. Through a melding of religion, politics, and civic culture, the full majesty of the gods was deployed in support of the political community and its rulers—and vice versa. The community was religious; religion was communal.111 And that religious life served to enlist the subjects’ full loyalty to the city and its rulers. Patriotism and paganism were coextensive.
By contrast, although most Christians likewise believed that they could and should pay allegiance to the political community and its rulers, that belief was grounded in an entirely different and more complicated set of premises. Pagan Romans paid their devotions and performed their propitiating rituals to immanent gods who were in and of this world. Christians, by contrast, worshiped a transcendent God. Although actively concerned with and involved in mundane affairs (to the point that he had actually—and from the pagan perspective shamefully112—condescended to become a mortal human being, subject to pain and death), the Christian God was ultimately beyond time and space. This theological difference generated different attitudes toward the world: whereas pagans were fully at home in the world, Christians aspired to live for eternity—to be in but not of the world.
These conceptual and attitudinal differences in turn manifested themselves in radically different conceptions of the relation of persons to the political community and its rulers. Paganism sacralized the city, while Christianity did the opposite. And although Christians lived in and felt loyalty to the city, they could not be citizens of it in the same full and exclusive sense that pagans could. On the contrary, to invoke a metaphor often used by Augustine (significantly, used even after the empire had embraced Christianity), Christians were more like “pilgrims” in the world, and in the city.
This attitude was firmly rooted in Christian Scripture. The epistle to the Hebrews, ascribed to the apostle Paul, reminded Christians that the patriarch Abraham had left the city of his birth and had “made his home in the promised land [of Palestine] like a stranger in a foreign country. . . . For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”113 In this he had been joined by his wife and progeny. These venerated ancestors had “admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”114
The conclusion of this reasoning was that “here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.”115
Later Christian writers reiterated and elaborated on the theme. In a metaphor enthusiastically taken up by some twentieth-century theologians,116 one anonymous early Christian expressed the basic stance in a letter to someone named Diognetus by affirming that Christians were “resident aliens” in the earthly cities they temporarily inhabited. “Yet while they dwell in both Greek and non-Greek cities . . . and conform to the customs of the country in dress, food, and mode of life in general, the whole tenor of their way of living stamps it as . . . extraordinary. They reside in their respective countries, but only as aliens. They take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their home, and every home a foreign land. . . . They spend their days on earth, but hold citizenship in heaven.”117
In a different and even more influential metaphor, Augustine famously conveyed a similar idea with the image of the two cities.118 We Christians, Augustine taught, are pilgrims in the earthly city, which performs a necessary and valuable function and hence deserves our support. But our ultimate connection and our deepest loyalties must be to the heavenly city, or the city of God.119
We might express the fundamental difference by saying that, perhaps paradoxically, pagan religious polytheism was consistent with a sort of political monism; Christian monotheism, conversely, led to a kind of political polytheism—or at least to political dualism. Pagan religion thus served to support and consecrate the earthly city: the polis, or Rome, or the Roman Republic, or, later, the empire. Under the auspices of the diversity of gods, human beings were subjects of one city—the only city that mattered, the city served by a carefully integrated blend of politics and priesthoods. Christians, by contrast, though they worshiped one God, were subjects of two cities—an earthly city and a heavenly city. Both cities were real; both were valuable; both were ordained of God. But the Christians’ true home was in—and thus their ultimate loyalty was to—the heavenly city. To the city of God, which provided the title for Augustine’s magnum opus.
The fact that Christians considered themselves residents of two cities, not one, with their primary loyalty to the heavenly city, had important though complicated practical implications. The position could support a kind of quietism, or resignation. Our life in this city and this world is only for a brief moment in the span of eternity, so why fret overmuch about conditions here? Though it seems particularly prominent in the early years when Christians expected Christ’s second coming to bring a quick end to the temporal city, this quietistic theme would resonate through the centuries.120
Conversely, the belief in a heavenly city—and, more generally, in a transcendent reality or truth against which this world might be judged—gave Christians a critical perspective and standard that pagans whose reality was limited to this world did not have. That transcendent standard could be used to criticize—and, in time, to reform—practices that were taken for granted in the pagan world: infanticide, slavery, inequality, the neglect of the poor and the diseased. It is not by accident that the idea that history and society should be progressing toward some sort of ideal condition comes with the emergence of transcendent religion and, in particular, Christianity.121
More immediately, though, and more problematically, their commitment to two cities meant that Christians did not and could not give the same total, undivided allegiance to the earthly city that pagans could offer—and that pagan authorities sometimes demanded. In the first Christian centuries, this division in allegiance would prove to be a source of serious, sometimes ferocious, conflict and persecution.
In sum, Christianity amounted, as scholars like Guy Stroumsa and Pierre Chuvin and Jan Assmann have explained, to a “religious revolution.” And regimes in place typically do not treat revolutionaries kindly. The Romans were no exception. As we will see in the next chapter.
1. See generally Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
2. Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2.
3. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 101. Cf. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–394, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 19 (describing “the chasm that separated Christianity from paganism”).
4. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 76.
5. See Pierre Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Revealing Antiquity), trans. B. A. Archer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 11 (describing the emergence of Christianity as “a political, intellectual, and religious revolution”).
6. See Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place for Themselves in Caesar’s Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015). Similar themes are discernible in James J. O’Donnell’s Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). In a generally similar vein is Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
7. Cf. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xxxvii (noting “the infinite variety of Christianity throughout this period”). The diversity of early Christianity is stressed in James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
8. Although it is often suggested that the term was one of abuse, meaning something like “country bumpkin,” a recent careful analysis casts doubt on this interpretation. See Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–32.
9. See, e.g., O’Donnell, Pagans, 5–6, 159–64, 214; Boin, Coming Out Christian, 112–18.
10. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 2–3.
11. See Boin, Coming Out Christian.
12. Boin, Coming Out Christian, 15–35.
13. Acts 15.
14. Cf. Rev. 3:15–16 (“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth” [KJV]).
15. Boin, Coming Out Christian, 37.
16. Boin, Coming Out Christian; see, for Saint Paul, 38–40; for Saint John, 40; for Tertullian, 21; for Cyprian, 31; for Perpetua, 29; for Athanasius, 128; for Ambrose, 121–24; for Gregory of Nazianzus, 118–20; for Augustine, 128; for John Chrysostom, 128.
17. Here is one example that may suffice. In 362, the emperor Julian, in a campaign to restore paganism to dominance, issued decrees that effectively prohibited Christians from teaching in the schools. Oxford historian Averil Cameron explains that “this measure effectively debarred Christians from teaching altogether, since rhetoric and grammar constituted most of the education syllabus.” Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 94. Historians have recognized that this was a drastic and unprecedented step in excluding people whose Christian beliefs the pagan ruler disapproved of, and in attempting to exercise control over the formation of the culture. See, e.g., Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 113–15. The projected effect of this ban, Princeton historian G. W. Bowersock observes, was that “within little more than a generation the educated elite of the empire would be pagan.” G. W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 84. Even Julian’s great admirer, the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, found these decrees “intolerable.” See Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire (A.D. 354–378), ed. and trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1986), 298 (“The laws which [Julian] enacted were not oppressive, . . . but there were a few exceptions, among them the harsh decree forbidding Christians to teach rhetoric or grammar unless they went over to the worship of the pagan gods”). When Boin narrates the episode, however, he first converts the prohibition into a bland conditional—Christians “shouldn’t be employed as teachers if they refused to educate children about the Greek and Roman gods”; Boin, Coming Out Christian, 119 (emphasis added). This makes it sound as if Christians were excluded from teaching only if they refused to teach the subject matter. Boin then blithely describes Christian resentment over the debilitating exclusion as much ado about nothing: “a debate over educational policy had turned into spiritual battle” (120).
18. Boin, Coming Out Christian, 110–37.
19. Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2.
20. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 15.
21. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 2.
22. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 66 (emphasis omitted).
23. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality, 1.
24. See, e.g., Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2004).
25. See, e.g., Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 19, 173. See also Chuvin, Chronicle of the Last Pagans, 10; Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 33–36; Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 80. Cf. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 90 (describing “the definition of religion in Rome as the observance of rites, without belief really playing an independent role”). Robin Lane Fox remarks that “there was . . . no pagan concept of heresy” (Pagans and Christians, 31).
26. In this vein, Stroumsa observes that “the idea of the transformation of the internal life remained unknown to the official religion of the ancient city, as well as to the mystery cults.” And he suggests that “if one has to specify in a single word the nature of this change [from paganism to Christianity], I would accept the Hegelian analysis that stresses the interiorization of religion” (The End of Sacrifice, 15, 2). See also Wilken, The Christians, 63–65; O’Donnell, Pagans, 69.
27. See, e.g., Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 19.
28. See, e.g., O’Donnell, Pagans, 66 (“[The gods] mostly didn’t care whether or not human beings did the right thing. Ethical precepts, living the good life, avoiding sin: that was your business, not the gods’ ”).
29. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1.
30. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 2.
31. See, e.g., Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 103 (noting “the existence of a pagan monotheism”), and 5 (“For example, the Platonist Celsus seems to be more strictly monotheistic than the Christian Origen”). See generally Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
32. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 1.5, pp. 18–20.
33. See above, 91.
34. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 31.
35. Paul Veyne remarks (with less than complete theological precision, to be sure) that “given that it presents two or even three supernatural objects to be worshipped, namely God, Christ and—later—the Virgin, the Christian religion was, quite literally, polytheistic” (When Our World Became Christian, 20).
36. See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, rev. ed. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 161–65.
37. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 31.
38. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 31.
39. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 5, 11.
40. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 23.
41. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 39 (emphasis added).
42. Paul Veyne observes that “the originality of Christianity lies not in its so-called monotheism, but in the gigantic nature of its god, the creator of both heaven and earth: it is a gigantism that is alien to the pagan gods.” The Christian god was a “metaphysical god.” Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 20.
43. O’Donnell, Pagans, 67. See also Wilken, The Christians, 91 (“God, in the Greek view, dwelt in a region above the earth, but he did not stand outside of the world, the kosmos. Earth and heaven are part of the same cosmos, which has existed eternally. The world is not the creation of a transcendent God”).
44. See the discussion above, in chap. 2.
45. See, e.g., Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), I, q. 2, arts. 2–3.
46. See A. C. Lloyd, “Aristotle’s Principle of Individuation,” Mind 79 (October 1970): 519.
47. See Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987), 95–97.
48. See Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 50 (“As polytheists, the Greeks accepted many gods, and the gods which they met abroad were usually worshipped and understood as their own gods in yet another local form”).
49. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:459–60.
50. Cf. E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 53 (“It has become customary in some circles to ridicule the use of images in religion, but it is difficult to see how we can avoid them”).
51. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 88, 90.
52. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 40–41.
53. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 9.
54. See above, 93.
55. Fox, The Classical World, 50.
56. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 91.
57. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 42.
58. Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 43.
59. See Everett Ferguson, Church History, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 98; Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Touchstone, 1967), 34–35.
60. James 1:27; 4:4. See also, e.g., John 15:16–19; Gal. 1:4; 1 John 5:19.
61. E.g., 1 John 2:15–17 (KJV): “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”
62. Athanasius, Life of Antony 2.7.
63. See Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 136–38; Colin Gunton, “The Doctrine of Creation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 141, 147–48; Tillich, History of Christian Thought, 41–43.
64. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, trans. B. P. Pratten (Pickerington, OH: Beloved, 2016), 18.
65. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 10.9, p. 176.
66. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” Poetry Foundation, accessed July 1, 2017, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44399.
67. E.g., Matt. 19:16; Rom. 2:7; 1 Tim. 6:12; Titus 1:2; 1 John 1:2; Jude 21.
68. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.4, p. 918.
69. See, e.g., “The First Apology of Justin Martyr,” in The First and Second Apologies of Justin Martyr, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Cumming, GA: St. Polycarp, 2016), chap. 8, p. 23.
70. See, e.g., Fox, The Classical World, 48.
71. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 186–87.
72. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 188.
73. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, 9.
74. But see Fox, Pagans and Christians, 102–67 (describing ways in which pagans did expect to see and encounter the gods).
75. 1 Cor. 2:9.
76. Augustine, Confessions 1–3. Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text; the page references are to the Outler edition.
77. This is a paraphrase; the actual quotation is “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
78. Heb. 13:14.
79. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 67.
80. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 101 (describing the “vast gulf between Christian standards and contemporary sexual practice”). See also Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (London: University of California Press, 2003), 293 (“Paul’s unconditional imperative to flee fornication was radically new to the Greeks and other Gentiles, and its aim was to supplant religious sexual existence as they lived it, or, in the case of the philosophers, as they conceived it should be lived”).
81. Both points are developed in Gaca, The Making of Fornication. Gaca nonetheless emphasizes the discontinuities between Christian and non-Christian understandings of sex. Even when Christians were influenced by Stoic or Pythagorean ideas, these ideas were radically transformed in the Christian understanding.
82. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 8, 18.
83. Sarah Ruden, Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (New York: Random House, 2010), 15.
84. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 155–56.
85. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 186–88.
86. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 8.
87. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 21.
88. The theme is developed at length in Brown, The Body and Society.
89. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 99 (“Similarly, early Christian literature—with one exception—offers none of the vicious attacks on passivity . . . , because the precise synthesis of machismo and sexual moralism was wholly absent from Christian discourse”). See also Ruden, Paul among the People, 66–67.
90. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87.
91. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 8.
92. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87.
93. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 93.
94. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 87–92. See also Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 144 (“Christian bodies, [Paul] states, are the temple of the holy spirit and fornication is a sin ‘against the body’ [1 Cor. 6:18–19], not unlike the desecration of a temple”).
95. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 91.
96. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 92.
97. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 67.
98. Brown, The Body and Society, 18.
99. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 94. This point is developed at length in Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 119–46.
100. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 94.
101. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 85.
102. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 18.
103. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 1.
104. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 12.
105. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 14–15.
106. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 1. In a similar vein, see Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 304–5.
107. But see Gaca, The Making of Fornication, 293 (“The antifornication social order that Paul aspired to form could never peacefully coexist with the religious sexual heritage of any Gentile gods”).
108. Jan Assmann explains that “all the great [pagan] deities are gods of their respective cities.” And “the cult is nothing other than the tribute owed the gods as civic overlords.” Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 41.
109. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 20.
110. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 16.
111. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 20.
112. See Wilken, Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 102–3.
113. Heb. 11:9–10 NIV.
114. Heb. 11:13–16 NIV.
115. Heb. 13:14 NIV.
116. See, e.g., Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989). See also George Weigel, Soul of the World: Notes on the Future of Public Catholicism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 32–36.
117. “Epistle to Diognetus,” in Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, trans. James A. Kleist, SJ (New York: Newman Press, 1948), 135, 139.
118. Augustine, City of God. See, e.g., 14.28, p. 632: “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by the love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself, the other in the Lord: the one seeks glory from men, the other finds its highest glory in God.”
119. See, e.g., Augustine, City of God 19.17, pp. 945–47; 19.26, pp. 961–62.
120. See H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 45–82.
121. See generally Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).