Pagans and Christians struggled for mastery in Rome during the first centuries of what is often called (spoiling the suspense) the Christian era. Initially subdued and utterly one-sided, the struggle became a genuine contest in the fourth century, as the emperor Constantine’s conversion tipped the balance in favor of the previously impotent Christians. Even so, the struggle persisted, with both sides experiencing unanticipated triumphs and reversals in their respective fortunes. By century’s end, though, the contest was effectively over: Christianity had prevailed.
Or at least so it may appear in hindsight. Contemporaries would have had a different perception.1 Few discerned any struggle in the early centuries; paganism enjoyed an overwhelming preeminence, while a marginal and virtually powerless Christianity was intermittently persecuted and suppressed (as we saw in the preceding chapter). Even after Constantine’s historic conversion gave Christianity a new importance, and even after Constantine and his imperial successors began issuing decrees constricting the practices of paganism, what Edward Watts has called “the final pagan generation,” including prominent pagans like the orator Libanius and the Roman prefect Praetextatus, failed to discern any actual struggle for dominance. Mostly overlooking a few irksome but largely unenforced religious restrictions, “the elite of the final pagan generation had better things to worry about. There was money to be made, honors to be gained, and fun to be had by those who could cooperate openly with the regime, even if they chose to criticize it privately.”2 These leading pagans lived in a world, as they saw it, “that was full of gods, had always been full of gods, and always would be full of gods.”3 They could not imagine that the world could ever be essentially different in that respect.
By century’s end, though, the world was different. Christianity was now officially in control; paganism was officially (if not in practice) banished.
How did this unimaginable transformation—unimaginable to the pagans—come to pass? And, most important for our purposes, what did the official triumph of Christianity and the official defeat of paganism mean for the future of these two religiosities, and of the orientations (toward transcendence, and toward a merely immanent sacredness) that they represented?
The first of these questions—how Christianity came to prevail over paganism—has commanded the attention of numerous able historians, among them our Enlightened friend Edward Gibbon (who described the question as “an important, though perhaps tedious, inquiry”);4 but the historians have disagreed about the answers. We revisit the question here, in comparatively summary fashion, not to offer answers that are either novel or definitive—in fact, we will see that definitive answers are almost surely unavailable—but because the question and its possible answers are directly relevant to the second question, and to our assessment of the modern condition. More specifically, the questions of whether and how and in what sense Christianity prevailed over paganism will be closely relevant to our assessment of T. S. Eliot’s proposition that modern Western societies face a choice between Christianity and “modern paganism.”
Two Accounts (and a Third That We Cannot Consider)
Leading accounts of the political triumph of Christianity have fallen into two main families. One family of interpretations stresses what we might call the “displacement” theme; the other emphasizes what could be called the “suppression” theme. The first kind of interpretation emphasizes cultural or intellectual or spiritual factors; the second focuses more on the political, and the coercive.
According to the first kind of interpretation (which was more or less Gibbon’s view),5 Christianity naturally came to displace paganism because the newer religion was more responsive to the needs of the empire’s peoples. By the fourth century, the Oxford historian E. R. Dodds asserts, “paganism appears as a sort of living corpse, which begins to collapse from the moment when the supporting hand of the State is withdrawn from it.”6 And so paganism came to be challenged by a diverse array of new or imported cults and faiths. Christianity ultimately turned out to be the winner among those challengers; it thereby displaced paganism because of some intrinsic quality that made it more appealing or efficacious.
Displacement interpretations can emphasize different features of pagan and Christian religions; these different emphases may reflect different assumptions about human psychology and motivation. A communitarian or cultural version suggests that Christianity provided a more satisfying and inclusive sense of community than paganism did.7 What we might call the creedal version suggests that Christian doctrines and teachings came to seem more believable than pagan stories and themes.8 A spiritual version suggests that Christianity did a better job than paganism did in satisfying people’s spiritual needs9—needs for meaning, for example, of the kind we discussed in chapter 2. These different interpretations are of course not mutually exclusive; it is conceivable that Christianity did better in more than one of these dimensions.
Or perhaps not. The other major family of interpretations, more political in its emphases, emphatically denies that paganism was dying out of its own force in the later empire, or that Christianity displaced paganism because of any cultural or creedal or spiritual superiority.10 Far from a steady decline into senility, Ramsay MacMullen asserts, “a general refreshing [in paganism] can be seen over the course of the second and third centuries.”11 So what happened, rather, is that the convert Constantine and his imperial successors were true believers; in a demonstration of what MacMullen calls “the murderous intolerance of the now dominant religion,”12 they used their authority and might to crush paganism.
It seems unlikely that either of these interpretations will ever finally and decisively defeat the other. After all, can we really know whether the appeal of paganism was waning in the second and third and fourth centuries? Temples were still open, perhaps. Sacrifices were still being performed. Auguries were still being taken. But what does all this activity demonstrate?
Consider an analogous contemporary question: Is traditional Christianity in decline in America today? True, people continue to attend church, to declare their affiliations with one or another denomination, to make monetary contributions to their churches. And yet, does this behavior reflect authentic Christian faith? Or is it something more superficial—mere habitual or inherited repetition perhaps? Or maybe a defensive reaction to the confounding challenges of the modern world, and thus perhaps more reflective of a desperate crisis of faith and meaning than of genuine conviction? Is Christianity alive and vibrant, or is it “a sort of living corpse,” to borrow Dodds’s phrase? In addressing such questions, pundits and social scientists and theologians today have vast amounts of evidence to work with—voluminous statistics quantifying declared faith and church attendance and financial contributions13—and yet they vary widely in what they take away from those vast and murky oceans of data.14
For the ancient world, by contrast, we have only the tiniest fraction of evidence available for measuring contemporary religiosity. How likely is it, then, that we can reliably ascertain what Romans and Greeks really felt and believed with respect to the received pagan religiosity? Ramsay MacMullen confidently declares that paganism was thriving until it was violently suppressed by Christian rulers and Christian mobs. And then he concedes that “we cannot poll the past; and adequately self-revealing moments in our sources are too few to support much generalization about what any given [religious] act meant to the participants.”15
In any case, given these disagreements among able historians, it seems improbable that any satisfactory resolution is achievable in a book like this one. Fortunately, for our purposes we need not try to decide whether the “displacement” interpretations or the “suppression” interpretations contain a greater measure of truth. We do need to consider some of the arguments and evidence associated with each family of interpretations, however, because these will bear upon the questions that are central to our inquiry. Namely, in what sense did Christianity prevail (if it did), and in what sense was paganism actually extinguished (if it was)?
Before considering this evidence, though, we note a wholly different kind of explanation of Christianity’s rise, not because scholars or students today would think to propose or ponder it, but because to the fourth-century Christians this might have seemed to be the decisive account of the crucial political and cultural developments. We could call this the providential-demonic account. From a Christian perspective, as Gibbon noted, the reason why Christianity came to prevail over paganism was because Christianity was true and paganism was not.16 But this description understates the claim. The idea was that the struggle between Christianity and paganism represented only one mundane theater in a larger, cosmic war between the forces of good and the legions of evil. Moreover, in speaking of the battle between good and evil, we are not (or rather, they were not) being merely metaphorical. The hosts of demons that beset Antony in the desert—and that he managed to fend off with, as he said, “much prayer and asceticism”17—were not poetic personifications, according to the account of Saint Athanasius; they variously appeared in the forms of wild animals—“lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions and wolves”—but also as female temptresses and even devout though devious monks.18 Keith Hopkins remarks on “how pervasive demons were in the thought world of Jews, pagans, and Christians alike.”19
This war between good and evil agents occurs here on earth, but even more importantly it is being waged in the celestial sphere. And the triumph of Christianity comes about because God’s armies eventually vanquish the hosts of Satan. Peter Brown explains that
the conflict between Christianity and paganism was presented, in fourth- and fifth-century Christian sources, as having been fought out in heaven rather than on earth. The end of paganism occurred with the coming of Christ to earth. It was when He was raised on the Cross on Calvary—and not, as we more pedestrian historians tend to suppose, in the reign of Theodosius I—that heaven and earth rang with the crash of falling temples. The alliance of the Christian church with Christian emperors, to abolish sacrifice and to close and destroy the temples, was not more than a last, brisk mopping-up operation, that made manifest on earth a victory already won, centuries before, by Christ, over the shadowy empire of the demons.20
Possibly. But any assessment of such a proposition—probably, indeed, any accurate presentation of the proposition—exceeds the jurisdiction of modern academicians (like myself). Whether there is a cosmic battle between good and evil, or between God and his followers against the devil and his minions, and how that battle has fared at any particular time, are questions about which the modern academic must humbly confess abject incompetence. In declining to consider whether Christianity’s triumph was due to its truth and to providential assistance, Gibbon coyly explained that his own discussion would focus on what might be deemed “secondary causes.”21 In this respect, we have little choice, in this venue at least, but to follow Gibbon’s lead.
And so, acknowledging that everything said here might seem to the actual combatants wholly to miss the most important facts, and to treat eternally foreordained events as fortuitous contingencies, we will limit ourselves to considering the two major contemporary accounts of the ancient conflict between paganism and Christianity—namely, the displacement and the political or suppression accounts.
How the West Was (and Wasn’t) Won for Christianity
The Political Struggle. Despite significant differences in historical interpretations, some aspects and episodes of the sometimes latent and sometimes open struggle between paganism and Christianity can be recalled with tolerable confidence. Whether or not these episodes constitute the explanation for Christianity’s success, they will at least provide an acceptably secure framework for our inquiry.
Thus, as we have seen, in the early centuries of the Christian era, and for understandable reasons that we considered in the previous chapter, Roman authorities generally looked on Christianity with suspicion and disfavor, and they often expressed their disapproval with repressive measures, including, sometimes, harsh methods of punishment and execution. Exactly how many Christians were punished or executed is, as we saw, unknowable. What we can say with confidence is that the persecution of Christians was intermittent, not constant or ubiquitous, but that it did occur, repeatedly; and when it did, the repression could be savage.
In the middle of the third century, in the midst of what many historians perceive as a “time of troubles”—of grave political, military, and economic challenges that threatened the very survival of the empire22—the emperors Decian and Valerian promoted campaigns of severe repression. Then again in the early fourth century, under the emperor Diocletian, his imperial associate Galerius, and his successor Maximinus Daia, Roman authorities instituted what came to be known as “the Great Persecution.” The Christian thinker and rhetorician Lactantius, who lived through that harrowing period, reported that
presbyters and other officers of the Church were seized, without evidence by witnesses or confession, condemned, and together with their families led to execution. In burning alive, no distinction of sex or age was regarded; and because of their great multitude, they were not burnt one after another, but a herd of them were encircled with the same fire; and servants, having millstones tied about their necks, were cast into the sea. Nor was the persecution less grievous on the rest of the people of God; for the judges, dispersed through all the temples, sought to compel every one to sacrifice. The prisons were crowded; tortures hitherto unheard of, were invented; and lest justice should be inadvertently administered to a Christian, altars were placed in the courts of justice, hard by the tribunal, that every litigant might offer incense before his cause could be heard.23
Under these circumstances, “to be beheaded was an indulgence shown to very few.”24 Lactantius, to be sure, seemed almost to find a morbid pleasure in detailing the horrifically slow and excruciating methods devised to execute Christians, and he took even more delight in lingering over the gruesome deaths of the persecuting emperors Galerius and Daia.25 Although Lactantius insisted that his accounts were all based on “the authority of well-informed persons,” and that he had “commit[ted the events] to writing exactly as they happened,”26 surely the details are subject to doubt—for example, whether the stench from the dying Galerius’s worm-addled intestines could have been so potent as to “pervade . . . the whole city.” And once again, it is impossible to quantify how many Christians were condemned, tortured, and killed.
Still, the fact of the persecution is plain enough. Robert Markus observes that “in the Great Persecution at the beginning of the fourth century, the forces of Roman conservatism rallied in a last attempt to eliminate a dangerous threat to the traditional consensus.”27
Reversal came relatively suddenly, after an ambitious upstart named Constantine somewhat ambiguously embraced Christianity (following a vision that he claimed to have experienced in 312), proceeded to win a decisive battle against numerically superior forces near the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome, and went on to make himself first joint and later sole emperor over the realm. Constantine (along with his coemperor Licinius) initially declared, in the so-called Edict of Milan, that Christianity would be tolerated. But he soon went further, favoring Christian churches and Christian bishops with influence and lavish endowments.28
Exactly why he did all this is a subject of much dispute. Some historians have viewed the man as a “cynical opportunist”29 who embraced Christianity for crass political purposes. The eminent Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt pronounced Constantine an “essentially unreligious” man who was “driven without surcease by ambition and lust for power.”30 The dominant view today, by contrast, seems to be that Constantine was a sincere and even zealous convert—albeit a somewhat irregular one: Christians, after all, are normally discouraged from slaughtering their wives and children—who gained no political advantage from his conversion to Christianity.31 Either way, within a generation Christianity had passed from being a persecuted to a preferred faith.
While favoring Christianity, however, Constantine himself maintained a policy of religious toleration. The French historian Paul Veyne explains that “despite his deep desire to see all his subjects become Christians, . . . [Constantine] never persecuted pagans or denied them the right to express themselves; nor did he disadvantage them in their careers: if superstitious people wished to damn themselves, they were free to do so.”32
In fact, insofar as imperial rigor was exercised in religious matters, it was mainly toward the Christians themselves,33 who upon the cessation of persecution promptly became mired in intricate theological disputations. Constantine was dismayed by this contentiousness. “He attributes the origin of the whole [Trinitarian] controversy,” Gibbon commented, “to a trifling and subtle question, concerning an incomprehensible point of law, which was foolishly asked by the bishop, and imprudently resolved by the presbyter.”34 Disgusted, the emperor reproved a group of bishops: “Even the barbarians . . . know God and have learned to reverence him, . . . [while the bishops] do nothing but that which encourages discord and hatred and, to speak frankly, which leads to the destruction of the human race.”35 For pagans, however, the Christians’ theological quarrels were a welcome distraction of the emperor’s attention. “The divisions of Christianity suspended the ruin of paganism,” Gibbon observed.36
Still, Constantine was not wholly forgetful of, or permissive toward, the pagans. At least according to Eusebius, the emperor did order the closure of several pagan temples.37 (Other evidence suggests the contrary: the pagan orator Libanius later reported that “Constantine made absolutely no changes in the traditional form of worship.”)38 While discounting a report that Constantine prohibited pagan ceremonies, Gibbon noted that the emperor did suppress some practices of divination, and that while promising his subjects religious freedom, he also exhorted them to follow his example in accepting Christianity. “Without violating the sanctity of his promise [of religious freedom], without alarming the fears of the pagans, the artful monarch advanced, by slow and cautious steps, to undermine the irregular and decayed fabric of polytheism.”39
Constantius, Constantine’s son and eventual successor (following a turbulent series of events, including a massacre of potential family rivals, a civil war, and the untimely deaths of his two brothers), took after his father in favoring Christianity, albeit under an Arian interpretation condemned by many bishops as heretical. A good deal of sometimes violent tension between the emperor and the Christian church accordingly ensued. Instead of being persecuted by pagan authorities, Trinitarian Christians were now being hounded and harassed by a nominally Christian emperor.40
Even so, a species of Christianity remained ascendant. In 341, moreover, Constantius issued an order that by its terms forbade pagan sacrifices; fifteen years later, he prescribed actual penalties, including capital punishment, for the violation of this prohibition and also ordered the closure of temples. These seemingly draconian orders nonetheless appear to have gone entirely unenforced, and were scarcely noticed by pagan officials.41 Gibbon concluded that the prohibition was “either composed without being published, or was published without being executed.”42 Indeed, when visiting Rome in 357, Constantius himself (who, like his father and his Christian successors up until the emperor Gratian, retained the traditional imperial title of pontifex maximus over the pagan priesthoods)43 made a friendly tour of the city’s pagan temples.44 Edward Watts reports that “most temples remained open despite the laws, statues and images of the gods stared down from every corner of the cities, public sacrifices continued to be offered in many parts of the empire (including in Rome itself), and the traditional religious routines of households throughout the empire could continue unaffected.”45
Despite lax enforcement, however, antipagan laws and precedents were slowly and quietly accumulating. Then, in 361, fortunes flipped again. Constantius unexpectedly died, cutting short yet another incipient civil war, and he was succeeded by his learned and colorful cousin Julian (who as a child had been deemed too youthful and innocuous for inclusion in the earlier family massacre). The new emperor promptly came out and declared himself a pagan. “I feel awe of the gods,” he exuded. “I love, I revere, I venerate them.”46 Gibbon observed that a “devout and sincere attachment for the gods of Athens and Rome, constituted the ruling passion of Julian.”47
And the gods rewarded this devotion—or so the new emperor believed.
Notwithstanding the modest silence of Julian himself, we may learn from his faithful friend, the orator Libanius, that he lived in a perpetual intercourse with the gods and goddesses; that they descended upon earth, to enjoy the conversation of their favourite hero; that they gently interrupted his slumbers, by touching his hand or his hair; that they warned him of every impending danger, and conducted him, by their infallible wisdom, in every action of his life; and that he had acquired such an intimate knowledge of his heavenly guests, as readily to distinguish the voice of Jupiter from that of Minerva, and the figure of Apollo from that of Hercules.48
Acting on his newly declared faith in the old religion, Julian reinstituted the imperial sacrifice of animals on a massive scale. A contemporary quipped that if Julian were to enjoy a long tenure as emperor, “the breed of horned cattle must infallibly be extinguished.”49 While purporting to embrace religious toleration, Julian gave preference to pagans for high office,50 declined to discipline a mob that had rioted and murdered the Christian bishop of Cappodocia51 (though the emperor did appropriate the bishop’s much-admired library),52 and required that churches that had been built on pagan sites be demolished so that the temples could be rebuilt.53
Probably his most controversial measure, however, was his edict banning Christians from teaching in the schools on the grounds that, since they did not believe in the gods, they were morally unfit to teach the classics.54 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.”55 The law was “a masterstroke,” Adrian Murdoch observes: it “marginalized Christianity to the point where it could potentially have vanished within a generation or two, and without the need for physical coercion.”56 The exclusion provoked outrage, including from Julian’s fervent admirer, the pagan soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus (who served in Julian’s army).57 Edward Watts observes that Julian’s educational exclusions were the first instance in Roman history of citizens being legally sanctioned purely because of their beliefs.58
Government-sponsored paganism was back, it seemed, with a vengeance.59
Julian was and has remained a fascinating figure; in modern times he has inspired not only extensive historical study but also novels, plays, and poems.60 Bookish, slovenly, bearded (in imitation of the philosophers but in defiance of the fashions of the day), mystical, ascetic, and sexually abstemious, he proved to be an unlikely but capable military commander, crushing opposition to the empire in Gaul and Germany.61 In addition to performing his governmental and military duties, he wrote books on philosophy, history, and religion, including the virulently anti-Christian Against the Galileans. His paganism (or “Hellenism,” as he preferred) mixed academic learning and philosophical refinement with an old-fashioned devotion to the gods and the auguries.62
Had Julian’s reign been extended, some historians surmise,63 he might have succeeded in repressing Christianity and reestablishing paganism as the official and dominant religion of the realm (albeit in a reformed version that attempted to incorporate some of Christianity’s advantageous features, including a disciplined priestly hierarchy and a commitment to caring for the poor).64 But after less than two years as emperor, in uncharacteristic defiance of the omens but in accordance with his intense identification with Alexander the Great, Julian resolved on a military campaign into Persia.65 Having reached the Tigris River, to the dismay of his soldiers, and in a decision that has perplexed observers both ancient and modern, the emperor ordered the supporting ships—more than a thousand of them—to be burned.66 Their means of convenient retreat having been destroyed, the legions then proceeded with the invasion, marching now into territory unknown to them.
Soon the ill-advised and badly executed invasion was floundering, and the armies were faced not only with hostile forces but also with scanty supplies and scorching heat.67 Forced to acknowledge the failure of his campaign, Julian attempted to lead his exhausted and demoralized troops back to friendlier country, but in the retreat the emperor was killed by a stray arrow. One legend had it that just before expiring, Julian gasped, “Thou hast won, O Galilean.”68 Ammianus, by contrast, depicts the emperor on his deathbed discoursing in good Socratic fashion with pagan philosophers on the immortality of the soul.69
Needing a leader to conduct the desperate retreat, the embattled legions hastily selected a distinguished pagan officer, Salutius, who refused the perilous appointment; and so they turned to another senior officer named Jovian, who happened to be Christian.70 Jovian managed to get the army out of Persia (in part by striking a disastrous deal that relinquished a sizable piece of territory to the Persians), and though his reign was short, he was succeeded by a series of Christian rulers. Jovian favored a policy of religious toleration, as did his immediate successors, Valens and Valentinian.71 Gradually, however, and perhaps (as one historian argues)72 acting on fears lingering from “the Great Persecution” and reawakened by Julian’s anti-Christian campaign, the emperors, and in particular the Spanish and severely orthodox emperor Theodosius, adopted a harsher series of laws closing temples and forbidding pagan sacrifices.73
Although the scope of these measures and the extent of their enforcement continue to provoke disagreement among historians,74 the clear overall trend was toward the official elevation of Christianity and the repression of paganism. And when emperors stopped short in these efforts, mobs of militant monks and other faithful sometimes stepped in to carry out the task75—hence the destruction of the famous temple of Serapis in Alexandria and the murder of the distinguished female pagan scholar Hypatia.76
The Politics of Symbolism. In explaining how and when Christianity prevailed over paganism, it is tempting to point to some watershed edict or law that signaled the change and that effectively suppressed the older religion. Perhaps the alleged closing of several pagan temples under Constantine? Or the law under Constantius that purported to make pagan sacrifice a capital offense? Or the edicts of Theodosius in 391 and 392 that expanded prohibitions on pagan worship?77
But these explanations encounter a puzzle. Despite the apparent severity of some of these measures taken at face value, it seems that they had little actual effect on the practice of pagan religion. Indeed, as Edward Watts explains, prominent and politically involved pagans like Libanius and Praetextatus seem scarcely to have noticed them.78 These seem to have been paper prohibitions that went largely unenforced. And even while adopting such antipagan measures, emperors like Constantine, Constantius, and Theodosius continued to tolerate or even support paganism in various ways,79 and to appoint substantial numbers of known pagans to high positions within the empire. Gibbon, never charitable toward Christianity, nonetheless acknowledged that even under Theodosius, “the profession of Christianity was not made an essential qualification for the enjoyment of the civil rights of society, nor were any peculiar hardships imposed on the sectaries, who credulously received the fables of Ovid, and obstinately rejected the miracles of the Gospel. The palace, the schools, the army, and the senate, were filled with declared and devout Pagans; they obtained, without distinction, the civil and military honors of the empire.”80
What, then, to make of the apparent legal prohibitions issued by Constantius, Theodosius, and other Christian emperors of the period? Were these simply empty gestures, made to appease more aggressive Christian critics perhaps but not intended to have any real effect? There is no certain answer to such questions. But what seems clear is that however negligible their actual coercive effect may have been, such measures had a symbolic impact. Together with other overtly symbolic measures, these laws and policies gradually came to induce subjects to conceive of the empire in more Christian terms.
Thus, Edward Watts explains that Constantius’s facially tough but practically feckless edicts against pagan sacrifice amounted to “largely symbolic policies.”81 But this is not to minimize their importance: symbolism can be important. An admired modern scholarly study argues that political communities are “imagined.”82 They exist not as physical facts, but as constructs in the minds of their citizens. And public symbols are the matter around and by which such imaginings occur. The competing pagan and Christian parties at least implicitly understood this point.
Thus, when the Christian emperors of the later fourth century cut off funding for the support of the temples and the vestal virgins, it was not merely the withdrawal of material resources that Christians applauded and pagans resented; it was the denial of support that was perceived to be public in nature.83 Gibbon explained that for the pagan senatorial faction, “the Roman sacrifices would be deprived of their force and energy, if they were no longer celebrated at the expense, as well as in the name, of the republic.”84
It was precisely this public sponsorship that Ambrose, feisty bishop of Milan and perhaps the most powerful figure in the church at the time, found most objectionable. Responding to the pagan senator Symmachus’s argument that monies for the temples had originally been bequeathed for that purpose by “dying persons,”85 Ambrose argued to the emperor that even if the funds technically came from past donations by private parties, they had long been deemed part of the public treasury; hence, if the emperor were to restore the monies for pagan worship, “you will seem to give rather from your own funds,” and thus to be giving imperial approval to pagan worship.86 The optics, as modern pundits say, were crucial.
Other symbolic changes were more purely visual, and perhaps even more salient to average Roman subjects. Pagan temples served, Edward Watts explains, “to visually overwhelm people.”87 So when these temples were converted into Christian churches, the symbolism of displacement was starkly on display—as it was when Christian mobs, sometimes with imperial approval or at least acquiescence, destroyed those same temples.88 No wonder that the emperor Julian, in his short-lived pagan revival, required that the churches be taken down and the pagan temples rebuilt in their place.
Similarly, the magnificent new Christian churches and basilicas dominated city skyscapes89 (as they still do in places like Rome and Florence). These edifices and the ceremonies conducted in them “left visitors amazed,” Peter Brown reports. One traveler of late antiquity reported back to his correspondent: “You simply cannot imagine the number and the sheer weight of the candles, tapers, lamps and everything else they use for the services. . . . They are beyond description.” Brown observes that “the churches spoke far more loudly and more continuously of the providential alliance of Church and empire than did any imperial edict.”90 Understanding the importance of this visual and tangible message, Milan’s powerful bishop Ambrose built, and fought tenaciously to retain, impressive basilicas—sometimes against imperial edicts and imperial troops—as part of his campaign not only against paganism but also against the Arian heresy that for a period dominated the imperial family.91
Perhaps the most sustained struggle over a public symbol concerned the so-called Altar of Victory—a shrine to the goddess Victory that had been placed next to the door of the Senate House by the first emperor, Augustus. Gibbon explains that the altar “was adorned by . . . a majestic female standing on a globe, with flowing garments, expanded wings, and a crown of laurel in her outstretched hand. The senators were sworn on the altar of the goddess to observe the laws of the emperor and of the empire: and a solemn offering of wine and incense was the ordinary prelude of their public deliberations.”92 In 357, Constantius ordered the altar removed. The pagan emperor Julian had it restored. Then, in 382, the Christian emperor Gratian again had the altar taken down. Whereupon the pagan senator and Roman prefect Symmachus wrote an eloquent plea to Emperor Valentinian II requesting restoration of the altar—a plea that was in turn stoutly opposed by Ambrose the bishop.
All the disputants in this controversy recognized the symbolic importance of the shrine. While arguing that removal of the altar had led to “misfortunes,” including a poor harvest,93 Symmachus primarily emphasized that the maintenance of the shrine was a way of preserving a continuity of identity with Rome’s pagan past. “We ought to keep faith with so many centuries, and to follow our ancestors, as they happily followed theirs.”94 For his part, Ambrose acknowledged the existence of “altars in all the temples, and an altar also in the temple of Victories.” In fact, the pagans “celebrate their sacrifices everywhere.”95 But Symmachus’s proposal was different: the senator and his allies were demanding a pagan shrine “in the Senate House of the city of Rome,”96 where Christian senators as well as pagans met to deliberate, and where “an altar is so placed for this purpose, that every assembly should deliberate under its sanction.”97 To place a pagan altar in that centrally important public spot would be to “insult the Faith.”98 Such a symbolic gesture would be intolerable: Ambrose thus threatened that if the emperor were to approve the restoration of the altar, he would betray the faith and would be denied worship privileges. “You indeed may come to the church, but will find either no priest there, or one who will resist you.”99
In this fierce polemical struggle over a central symbolic manifestation of the empire, Ambrose prevailed: Symmachus’s plea was rejected. As all sides recognized, a symbolic victory was significant in defining the empire as Christian or pagan. And in winning the fight over this and other symbols, Christians managed to create a conception of the city—of the “imagined community”100—as Christian, not pagan.
The Cultural-Spiritual Struggle. But was the eventual triumph of Christianity a purely top-down development, the result of the emperors’ halfhearted coercive and somewhat more consistent symbolic support of the new religion? At least some historians have suggested that the emperors were not so much causing and guiding cultural developments as responding to and reflecting them.
Thus, the seminal work of the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont discerned a kind of corruption and a waning of credibility in the classical paganism of the second through fourth centuries; this decline was reflected in the increasing popularity of imported Oriental cults like those dedicated to Isis, Serapis, and Mithra.101 “The gods and heroes of mythology had no longer any but a purely literary existence,” Cumont argues. “The old national religion of Rome was dead.”102 Other scholars have agreed. Norman Cantor declares that “by 150 AD whatever vitality had once existed in ancient polytheism had mostly declined, and the gods played little or no role in individual lives. The state temples to the old gods became civic centers rather than religious entities.”103 Antonia Tripolitis contends that “confidence in the traditional cults and their gods that served as the basis of the political, social, and intellectual life was waning. The general populace no longer placed its hope or faith on the ancient gods.”104
As noted, however, other historians dispute this interpretation.105 Even with vastly more evidence, it would likely be difficult to resolve this disagreement; given the paucity of data, resolution seems impossible. We can nonetheless consider the paganism of late antiquity relative to the emerging Christianity to appreciate the intellectual and spiritual strengths and limitations of each. Our consideration can take note of three dimensions on which the advantages of paganism and Christianity might be compared: the communal, the creedal, and the spiritual or existential.
From the outset, caveats are in order. Not everyone has the same need for community, or for the same kind of community. Then, as now, some people will find association in a closely knit congregation of like-minded people to be comforting or fulfilling; others will experience it as stifling. Similarly, evaluations both of the believability of creeds and of spiritual efficacy will differ from person to person, just as religiosity itself varies greatly among people. What strikes one person as a self-evident and ennobling truth will appear to another as a demeaning absurdity.
So although partisans of each orientation did confidently and aggressively proclaim paganism or Christianity spiritually superior, and although modern scholars occasionally offer similar assessments,106 we will refrain here from pretending to render any final judgment. For our purposes, it will be enough to observe how both paganism and Christianity had their profound and discernible strengths. One pertinent consequence of this more tentative assessment will be that although particular aspects or features of paganism might fade or be repressed, it was unlikely that paganism did or could simply disappear; and in fact, it didn’t.
So, let us start with community. Norman Cantor argues that “the [Christian] Church provided a sense of community and institutions of friendship and caring within the largely joyless, anomic world of the Roman Empire.”107 In a similar vein, Peter Brown contends that the “appeal of Christianity lay in its radical sense of community: it absorbed people because the individual could drop from a wide impersonal world into a miniature community, whose demands and relations were explicit.”108 A distinctive feature of this new community was its egalitarian quality: “the Church included a powerful freedman chamberlain of the emperor; its bishop was the former slave of that freedman; it was protected by the emperor’s mistress, and patronized by noble ladies.”109 And the community was notable for caring for its poor and sick; even the pagans, Gibbon points out, admired this feature of the Christian community.110
Then, as now, of course, the more close-knit a community may aspire to be, the more distressing internal dissensions and jealousies can become. This problem is already painfully evident in New Testament epistles chastising the various churches for their internal divisions and for their tendency to favor richer over humbler members.111 Making an exception to his usual policy of discounting the testimony of Eusebius, Gibbon comments in a jaundiced tone that during Diocletian’s reign, “fraud, envy, and malice, prevailed in every [Christian] congregation.”112 Moreover, admission into the Christian community might seem to be a sacrifice of full participation in the convivial pagan associations, entertainments, and festivities that devout Christians were taught to shun as idolatrous: in gaining one community, a person might be losing another.
In addition, even insofar as Christian communities approximated their ideals, and even for those who might yearn for the community that the church could offer, entrance might still be deterred by the fact that admission was conditional on the affirmation of a creed—one that pagans often regarded as, well, offensive and preposterous. Which brings us to the question of believability—a concern that could be an issue both for pagans and for Christians.
We have already seen how even in the pre-Christian era, many educated Romans found the myths about the gods incredible, and this difficulty likely increased in ensuing centuries as cults proliferated and new deities swelled the pantheon.113 Paul Veyne contends that by the time Christianity arrived, “for six or seven centuries already, paganism had been in crisis. It was crammed with too many fables and naiveties; a pious and educated pagan no longer knew what he should believe.”114
One remedy for this embarrassment among traditional but educated pagans was to interpret the myths more metaphorically. We have already seen this allegorical-philosophical approach employed by Balbus, the Stoic character in Cicero’s dialogue on the gods;115 later thinkers developed the method with dedicated ingenuity.116 So the story of Saturn eating his children might be taken as a sort of allegory representing the fact that seeds return to the earth from which they grew, or perhaps as a poignant poetic expression of the existential truth that Time (i.e., Saturn, aka Cronos) inexorably destroys all that it begets.117 In a more philosophical vein, Jupiter might represent heaven, Juno earth, and Minerva the Platonic ideas: “heaven being that by which anything is made; earth being that of which it is made; and the ideas being the form according to which it is made.”118 Gibbon commented scornfully: “As the traditions of Pagan mythology were variously related, the sacred interpreters . . . could extract from any fable any sense which was adapted to their favorite system of religion and philosophy. The lascivious form of a naked Venus was tortured into the discovery of some moral precept . . . ; and the castration of Atys explained the revolution of the sun between the tropics, or the separation of the human soul from vice and error.”119
To critics (like the proto-Humean character Cotta of Cicero’s dialogue), this philosophizing strategy might seem a futile maneuver. Indeed, Cotta said as much.120 In their attacks on paganism, Christian thinkers like Athenagoras, Lactantius, and Augustine pressed the point. If the divine reality is one, and is spiritual rather than corporeal, why not forthrightly acknowledge and worship that divine reality or Being? What is the point of fragmenting divinity into a thousand tiny anthropomorphized subdeities, each of which is deemed not exactly real but only a metaphor, or an analogy?121
But then Jewish and Christian Scripture sometimes provoked comparable embarrassments, which Christian thinkers sometimes tried to escape through the same philosophizing or analogizing strategy. Christians were after all committed to a sacred Scripture that contained many ancient stories that challenged devotees’ credulity or assaulted their moral sensibilities in the same way the pagan myths did. And sophisticated Christians like Origen and Augustine sometimes responded to this difficulty by adopting analogical or metaphorical interpretations.122 In this spirit, Adam’s sons Abel and Seth and his descendant Enos could be taken as symbols of Christ, and of the church,123 as could Noah’s ark.124 Abel’s murderous brother Cain (who was said in Scripture to have founded a city), Abraham’s concubine Hagar, and Hagar’s son Ishmael were all symbols of the earthly city. Conversely, Abraham’s wife Sarah and the city of Jerusalem were symbols of the heavenly city.125
The symbolism could become intricate and multilayered, one symbol serving to symbolize another.126 Indeed, it was his discovery of this hermeneutical possibility that allowed Augustine to embrace the Bible and Christianity after years of incredulity;127 he later wrote a treatise expounding in detail the rich assortment of methods by which Scripture should be interpreted.128
For Christians, to be sure, there were limits to this strategy. Pagan critics attacked the most central historical-theological claims of the Gospels—that God had condescended to become incarnate in the man Jesus, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that after his crucifixion he was resurrected—but on these essential claims Christian apologists needed to, and did, stand firm. The debate over such historical and hermeneutical issues between learned apologists like Origen or Augustine and astute pagan critics like Celsus or Porphyry was as vigorous and sophisticated as more modern debates on the same subjects with which contemporary believers and skeptics are familiar.129 Still, many of the less theologically central biblical stories could be, and were, reinterpreted in more spiritual or metaphorical terms.130
But although both pagans and Christians might offer spiritual or philosophical readings to domesticate stories that would otherwise seem offensive or far-fetched, this philosophizing turn favored Christianity over the long run. That is because philosophy tended to push the sacred in a transcendent direction. Plato’s idea of the Good, unlike the pagan deities but like the God of the Hebrews and the Christians, was not in and of this corruptible and corrupted world. So there was an implicit incongruity in the efforts of Stoics and Neoplatonists to use philosophy to shore up a pantheon of gods who definitely were in and of this world. It was as if enfeebled gods were being treated with a regimen that was in fact slowly lethal to them. With respect to the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and the later Athenian School, R. T. Wallis observes that “among [the school’s] unintended results was the draining of the traditional gods of such personality as they still retained; hence in seeking to establish traditional worship on a philosophical basis the post-Iamblicheans ironically ensured the triumph of Christianity.”131
Augustine mocked without mercy the incongruities and the arbitrariness in thinkers like Varro who tried through allegorical interpretations to reconcile pagan deities with the loftier teachings of the philosophers.132 And while praising Plato effusively and at length133—by his own account, after all, Platonic books had played a major role in his own transition to Christianity134—Augustine hammered on the implausibilities and inconsistencies in later philosophies that attempted to use Plato to justify worship of the pagan gods.135
We will return to the question of believability, but let us first consider the matter of spiritual or existential efficacy. Which form of religiosity—pagan or Christian—was better able to give meaning to people’s lives, and sublimity to the world in which they passed their days?
Each position had its manifest advantages. We have already seen, in chapter 3, how paganism served to consecrate and beatify the world and the polity. Robin Lane Fox observes that the gods endowed the world with a “shining beauty and grace.”136 In the philosophical renderings of paganism, E. R. Dodds explains, “the whole vast structure [of the cosmos] was seen as the expression of a divine order; as such it was felt to be beautiful and worshipful.”137 In a similar vein, Fox observes that “everywhere, the gods were involved in life’s basic patterns, in birth, copulation, and death[, in] adolescence, marriage and childbirth.”138 The beatification was not limited to the philosophically trained; it was extended to the multitudes in vivid forms—in the sights and smells of the sacrifices, the music and swirl of the pagan theater, the pomp and rhythm of the processions, the press and roar and tumult of the games and the races. And also, of course, in the ecstasy of sexual intimacy, experienced and understood as the “mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods.”139
In short, paganism sacralized the world and rendered it beautiful—for some, hauntingly beautiful. Noting “the echo of divine beauty which had been rendered visible and so mysteriously potent, by the material image of a pagan god,” Peter Brown suggests that “it was the sense of the intimate and intangible presence of the unseen that consoled the last pagans.”140 There were, however, limitations to this pagan beatification of life and the world, among which two stand out.
First, and most starkly, for every actual man and woman, it would all precipitously end with, as Homer had put it, “the dark mist of death.”141 What came after death was murky, but there was no general expectation that it would be happy. Homer had spoken of the “hateful darkness,” and of “the houses of the dead—the dank, moldering horrors that fill the deathless gods themselves with loathing.”142 Virgil observed mournfully:
Ah! life’s best hours are ever first to fly
From hapless mortals; in their place succeed
Disease and dolorous eld; till travail sore
And death unpitying sweep them from the scene.143
And Catullus sadly intoned:
When the sun sets, it sets to rise again,
But for us, when our brief day is over,
There is one endless night that we must sleep.144
Second, although the gods might serve to endow the world with beauty and enchantment, their doings and purposes were not actually concerned with us—with humans. True, a god or goddess might occasionally take a liking, or a loathing, to some particular mortal (especially if that mortal, like Achilles, or like Rome’s ancestor Aeneas, happened to be the offspring of some momentary tryst between the god or goddess and a mortal woman or man), or even to a nation. In the Iliad, the various gods intervene aggressively, as Zeus intermittently permits, for the Greeks or for the Trojans. For the most part, though, the gods were out for themselves, so to speak. They were mostly indifferent to the joys and sorrows of all the Marcuses, Gaiuses, and Juliuses of this world.
How much if at all did these features detract from the ability of paganism to provide meaning to the matters of mortal life? As usual, no single or manifestly correct answer is forthcoming. Attitudes toward death vary. The Stoical emperor Marcus Aurelius found in the inexorability of death a sort of morose comfort against the vicissitudes of life. Why worry about misfortunes when you know that “within a very little time . . . you . . . will be dead; and soon not even your names will be left behind.”145
Odysseus opts to reject the promise of immortality with the lovely nymph Calypso in favor of returning to his home and his wife, Penelope.146 And it can be argued—it sometimes is argued—that the inevitable fact of death is what gives human life its shape and meaning, and what makes possible courage and nobility of character.147 The warriors in the Iliad may come across as more interesting and admirable figures than the gods themselves. That is precisely because Achilles and Hector and their comrades, knowing that they must unavoidably go down to the House of Death, and soon, understand that their only hope of immortality lies in winning glory for themselves; and they accordingly exert themselves to demonstrate valor and resourcefulness. There is an unmistakable nobility in their exertions, and in their defiance in the face of death.
And yet there also remains a tragic sense, and a kind of profound futility, in the Homeric assumption that the best a man can hope for is to kill gloriously and die gloriously, so that his name will be recalled in the lyrics chanted by bards when the man himself is no longer around to hear the songs. “Then what’s the good of glory, magnificent renown,” Sophocles has the aged Oedipus ask, “if in its flow it streams away to nothing?”148 Marcus Aurelius agreed: “Fame after life is no better than oblivion.”149 A hero may grimly make the best of mortality, but, given the chance, wouldn’t he eagerly exchange it for a life of endless contentment? And so in the midst of battle on the plains outside Troy, the gallant warrior Sarpedon confesses to his comrade Glaucus:
Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray
and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,
I would never fight on the front lines again
or command you to the field where men win fame.
But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,
thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive
can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack!
Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!150
The tragic futility of this mortal condition leads Homer’s Apollo to remark on
wretched mortals . . .
like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire,
feeding on earth’s gifts, than they waste away and die.151
And Zeus, preeminent among the gods, echoes the sun god’s judgment:
There is nothing alive more agonized than man
of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.152
When Odysseus, visiting the underworld, attempts to console the shade of Achilles with the observation that he seems to be a lord among the dead, the renowned warrior responds:
No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.153
Christianity offered an utterly different picture of humans’ lives and destinies. Like the pagan poets, Christian authors could comment wistfully on the brevity of life. “All flesh is like grass,” says an apostolic epistle, “and all its glory like the flower” that fades.154 “For every man dies in a little while,” remarks Augustine, “nor is that to be deemed a benefit which vanishes like a mist in a moment of time.”155 But men and women would not linger in the grave; rather, they would be resurrected and, if their lives had been faithful, would go on to enjoy eternal life with God. This was the good news of the gospel, which Christians eagerly proclaimed to the world.
“O death, where is thy victory?” Paul exults. “O grave, where is thy sting?”156 Luc Ferry asserts that “the entire originality of the Christian message resides in ‘the good news’ of literal immortality—resurrection, in other words and not merely of souls but of individual human bodies.”157
The historian Paul Veyne contends that its message of eternal life gave Christianity a huge spiritual advantage over paganism. Under Christianity, a person’s life “suddenly acquired an eternal significance within a cosmic plan, something that no philosophy or paganism could confer.”158 To Edward Gibbon, the idea of a life after this one was “an idle and extravagant opinion, which was rejected with contempt by every man of a liberal education and understanding.”159 The Enlightened historian nonetheless argued that its promise of immortality was a major selling point for Christianity.160 He could appreciate the point, perhaps, because he himself was not immune to a sort of poetic despondency when contemplating the brevity of life. “The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.”161 The illustrious historian’s memoirs conclude with the observation that “I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.”162
Veyne’s and Gibbon’s assessment finds support, it seems, in the fact that even some pagans came to embrace the notion of an afterlife. We have noted Ammianus’s report that on his deathbed the pagan emperor Julian was solemnly affirming the immortality of the soul.163 In response to such later pagan thinking, Augustine, after savaging the more popular idea that the gods conferred benefits in this life, went on to devote four books in his magnum opus to a critique of later pagan philosophies that taught that the gods could provide blessings after death.164
Veyne adds that Christianity had another important advantage over paganism because it taught that God cared about—indeed, was essentially devoted to—human beings. “The pagan gods live above all for themselves,” Veyne observes. “In contrast, Christ, the Man-God, sacrificed himself for his men.”165 Thus, “Christianity owed its success as a sect to a collective invention of genius . . . namely, the infinite mercy of a God passionate about the fate of the human race, indeed about the fate of each and every individual soul, including mine and yours, and not just those of the kingdoms, empires and the human race in general.”166
Although declaring himself “an unbeliever,”167 Veyne asserts that in consequence of these doctrines, Christianity’s “spiritual superiority over paganism was blindingly clear.”168 “Thanks to the historical-metaphysical epic of Creation and Redemption, . . . one now knew where one came from and for what one was destined.”169
This ostensible spiritual superiority, of course, turned on the assumption that the Christians’ “good news”—about the resurrection, about eternal life, about an infinitely loving God—was actually true. Which brings us back to the question of believability. For pagans, the idea that a god would become human (not just for purposes of a momentary coupling with a comely maid, but for the full, tedious, painful, humiliating duration of a life), would be born of a woman, would allow himself to be seized and subjected to a horrendous and humiliating death, this in order to save a pathetic race of mortals—all this was contemptible nonsense. Lactantius summarized the pagan objection:
They say . . . that it was unworthy of God to be willing to become man, and to burthen Himself with the infirmity of flesh; to become subject of His own accord to sufferings, to pain, and death. . . . Why, then (they say), did He . . . render Himself so humble and weak, that it was possible for Him both to be despised by men and to be visited with punishment? why did He suffer violence from those who are weak and mortal? why did He not repel by strength, or avoid by His divine knowledge, the hands of men? why did He not at least in His very death reveal His majesty? but He was led as one without strength to trial, was condemned as one who was guilty, was put to death as one who was mortal.170
And so the Christian conception was unworthy of a deity, and the Christian promises of meaning and sublimity were hollow. Worse than hollow, in fact: because in offering the false promise of eternal bliss, Christianity in fact deprived this world—the world we actually inhabit, and the only world we can count on—of the sublimity (transitory and tinged with tragedy as it might be) that paganism provided. With Christianity’s suppression of the gods, a beauty passed out of the world, a beauty all the more poignant because so fleeting, to be replaced by a grim, censorious emptiness.
“Why should I desire to live in a world void of gods?” the emperor Marcus Aurelius had asked.171 With the triumph of Christianity, the question ceased to be hypothetical.
Existential Orientations
The competing strengths and weaknesses of paganism and Christianity are thus reflective of two different orientations to life in the world—orientations that were discernible then and are discernible now. (These are of course ideal types, so to speak, rarely encountered in their purity; and they are not the only possible orientations; we will consider a third major possibility in a later chapter.) We, all of us, find ourselves in the world for a brief interval. How should we regard this life, and this world? What stance or attitude should we take?
According to one orientation, life in the world is sufficient unto itself—as it needs to be, because it is our only life in the only world that we have any reason to believe in. Life is—or at least can be—a beautiful and sometimes sublime thing, but its beauty and sublimity are finite and immanent to this world. The sacred exists, but it exists here—in the here and now. There is not, and there need not be, anything else. Not for us mortals, at least.
The other orientation can acknowledge the beauty and sublimity of life in the world. It can go so far, as in much Christian thought, as to insist that although not actually divine, the world has a sacramental quality. In this view, however, the world is not sufficient unto itself. Rather, its blessed qualities of beauty and sublimity are reflective of a more transcendent Reality, and they point beyond themselves to a beatified existence that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man.”172 Cut off from that transcendence, life in the world would become empty, pointless, devoid of meaning. And humans, who, unlike animals, are aware of their looming dissolution into nothingness, would be (in the words of Homer’s Zeus) the most “agonized . . . of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.”173
Perhaps no Christian thinker expressed this perspective more poignantly than Augustine. As discussed in chapter 5, his classic Confessions was in essence a narrative of how he arrived at the understanding famously expressed in the first pages—that “thou hast made us for thyself, and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.”174 The goods of this world may entice and entertain, but their appeal is ephemeral. Augustine himself was acutely aware of the pleasures of sexual intimacy, and loath to forgo them; hence his famous conflicted plea, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet” (8.17, p. 139).175 Ultimately, though, worldly goods cannot satisfy us. They are “glowing fantasies”—like food consumed in dreams, by which “the sleepers are not nourished” (3.10, p. 37). They “do not abide. They flee away” (4.15, p. 55). Taken by itself, this life is actually a “life-in-death” or a “death-in-life” (1.6, p. 4).
So the world is good, yes, but it is not sufficient unto itself. “For wherever the human soul turns itself, other than to you,” Augustine says, addressing God, “it is fixed in sorrows, even if it is fixed upon beautiful things external to you and to itself, which would nevertheless be nothing if they did not have their being from you” (4.15, p. 61).
Whether Christianity or paganism was more spiritually efficacious, or whether the immanent or transcendent orientation to life in the world was more true and satisfying, may ultimately boil down to the question of whether Augustine was right on this crucial point.
When paganism and Christianity are understood in terms of these existential orientations, it becomes apparent why neither form of religiosity could ultimately and decisively vanquish the other. Probably there has not been a time in which each orientation has not claimed its constituency—whatever labels might be applied. Indeed, it seems likely that most human beings have, as individuals, felt the power and pull of—and have at times inclined toward—each orientation.
So the beauties of the world and gratifications of life seem precious, and sufficient. “A book of verses, a jug of wine . . . , and thou beside me . . . , is paradise enough.”176 What more is needed? What more could anyone want? And then . . . a dullness sets in. Life is fleeting, and empty. Food is flat; music is mere sound; physical beauty does not arouse. “The long, looming days lay up a thousand things closer to pain than pleasure,” the Sophoclean chorus chants mournfully, “and the pleasures disappear, you look and know not where.”177 Or even if pleasures retain their pungency, we know that they will soon cease. Can this really be all there is? And if so, what is the point?
The sensually satiated soul seeks more spiritual delights—and perhaps, turning to faith, finds them. For a while, at least. And yet . . . doubt persists. Is this faith, this hope of “eternal life,” mere delusion, mere wishful thinking? Is the spiritual seeker exchanging the only real satisfactions available to mortals, limited and transitory though such satisfactions are, for an illusion?178
“You Christians deny yourselves all the satisfying pleasures,” Keith Hopkins’s scornful pagan complains, “and for what? For a ‘dream of posthumous immortality.’ For a vain hope—because ‘No one knows the secret of the universe.’ ”179 In a similar vein, while noting that “our devout predecessors, vainly aspiring to imitate the perfection of the angels, . . . disdained, or they affected to disdain, every earthly and corporeal delight,” Gibbon recommended a different course: “In our present state of existence, the body is so inseparably connected with the soul, that it seems to be our interest to taste, with innocence and moderation, the enjoyments of which that faithful companion is susceptible.”180
In the face of this commonsensical view, the Christian movement has been a centuries-long struggle to assure its devotees of the superiority of the goods of the spirit over the more tangible but transitory pleasures of the world. In his Confessions, Augustine recounted that struggle in his own soul; in City of God he projected it onto the sweep of history. The struggle is one that must be perpetual, one that is always a struggle against natural inclinations. Augustine recognized this fact as well. Consequently, there are many who identify with the earthly city but will ultimately end up in the heavenly kingdom. And vice versa.181 The saint was uncertain of the ultimate outcome even in himself.182
And so emperors like Domitian and Decius and Diocletian could execute Christians, but they could not thereby deprive the believers of their heavenly hope. Conversely, emperors like Theodosius and, later, Justinian could use the force and violence of law to suppress the incidents of paganism. They could close temples and prohibit animal sacrifice. But if paganism is not exhausted by these outward manifestations but rather is understood in terms of the immanent orientation that sacralizes life in this world, denying or at least remaining practically noncommittal toward any other, then it seems that neither Christian emperors nor bishops could or did abolish the substantial essence of paganism. Not even within themselves (as their own extravagantly worldly conduct sometimes exhibited).
If anything could achieve that abolition, it would not be Christianity, but rather science and secularism: but we will defer that prospect to a later chapter.
1. Peter Brown argues that the “struggle” version was articulated by late fourth- and early fifth-century Christian authors. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 128–29.
2. Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 89.
3. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 36.
4. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:497.
5. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:497–99.
6. E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 132.
7. See below, 178–79.
8. See below, 179–82.
9. See below, 183–88.
10. See Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 62–73 (presenting evidence of the vitality of paganism); Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 13 (“The real vitality of paganism is instead recognized; and to explain its eventual fate what must also be recognized is an opposing force, an urgent one, determined on its extinction”).
11. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 106.
12. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 14.
13. See, e.g., Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
14. Compare, e.g., Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World, ed. Peter L. Berger (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 1–19; with Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
15. Cf. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 149.
16. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:447.
17. Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. and ed. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980), 47.
18. Athanasius, Life of Antony, 38, 48, 50.
19. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 207.
20. Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4–5 (footnote omitted).
21. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:447.
22. See Michael Grant, The Climax of Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 5–6.
23. Lactantius, On the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, Addressed to Donatus, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), chap. 15, p. 21.
24. Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 22, p. 31.
25. Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 33, p. 44.
And now, when Galerius was in the eighteenth year of his reign, God struck him with an incurable plague. A malignant ulcer formed itself low down in his secret part, and spread by degrees.
[H]is bowels came out, and his whole seat putrefied. . . . The humours having been repelled, the distemper attacked his intestines, and worms were generated in his body. The stench was so foul as to pervade not only the palace, but even the whole city; and no wonder, for by that time the passages from his bladder and bowels, having been devoured by worms, became indiscriminate, and his body, with intolerable anguish, was dissolved into one mass of corruption.
On the painful death of Daia, see chap. 49, pp. 62–63.
26. Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 52, p. 65.
27. Robert Austin Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 21.
28. See W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 484–88, 503–5.
29. Adrian Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2003), 5.
30. Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Pantheon, [1852] 1949), 292.
31. For an overview of the debate and an argument that Constantine was genuinely Christian, see Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010), 79–96. See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin, 2009), 191 (“There is no doubt that [Constantine] came to a deeply personal if rather capricious involvement in the Christian faith”). Cf. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–394, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 121 (“All in all, the Christianization of the ancient world constituted a revolution set in motion by a single individual, Constantine, with motives that were exclusively religious”).
32. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 8. See 11 (“He did not force anyone to convert; he appointed pagans to the very highest of state offices; he never legislated against the pagan cults . . . and he allowed the Roman Senate to continue to fund the official priests and public cults of the Roman state; these continued as before and did so until almost the end of the century”) (footnotes omitted).
33. See Hugo Rahner, Church and State in Early Christianity, trans. Leo Donald Davis, SJ (San Francisco: Ignatius, [1961] 1992), 46–49.
34. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:789.
35. Quoted in H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 4.
36. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:827.
37. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 48.
38. Quoted in Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 49.
39. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:825.
40. See Rahner, Church and State, 49–60.
41. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 86–89.
42. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:827.
43. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:827n172.
44. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 89; Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33.
45. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 102.
46. Quoted in G. W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 16.
47. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:864.
48. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:873.
49. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:878.
50. Cf. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:892 (asserting that “it was the object of the insidious policy of Julian, to deprive the Christians of all the temporal honours and advantages which rendered them respectable in the eyes of the world”).
51. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 80–81.
52. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:901n120.
53. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:895.
54. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 83–85.
55. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 84.
56. Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 139.
57. See Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire (A.D. 354–378), ed. and trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1986).
58. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 113–14.
59. G. W. Bowersock argues that Julian “never contemplated any other solution to the religious problem than total elimination. His view of the Christians was totally intolerant from the start.” Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 85.
60. See Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 206–18.
61. See generally Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 12–20, 33–45. On Julian’s slovenliness, see Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:854–55.
62. Consider Ammianus’s description of Julian on the eve of his accession to power. “Preparing to battle Constantius for supreme authority, Julian busied himself with the inspection of the entrails of sacrifices and with observation of the flight of birds. He was eager to discover how things would end, but the answers were ambiguous and obscure and left him in doubt about the future. At last the Gallic rhetorician Aprunculus, a master of this branch of divination, . . . announced that he had discovered what was to come by the inspection of a liver, which he had found covered with a double layer of skin. Julian was afraid that this might be an invention designed to flatter his hopes and was in consequence depressed, but he then experienced himself a much more convincing omen, which clearly symbolized the death of Constantius. At the very moment when the latter died in Cilicia [a fact not yet known to Julian] the soldier whose right hand was supporting Julian as he was mounting his horse slipped and fell to the ground, whereupon Julian was heard by a number of people to exclaim that the man who had raised him to high station [i.e., Constantius] had fallen.” Ammianus, The Later Roman Empire, 234.
63. See Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971), 93; Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 99 (asserting that but for the early death of Julian, “Christianity might have constituted no more than a historical parenthesis, opened by Constantine in 312, which would now close forever”); Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 139. Gibbon was more skeptical. See Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:879, 908.
64. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 87–88. Julian was not the first emperor to try to regularize and reform the pagan priesthood. See Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 37 (describing reform efforts by Maximin Daia).
65. On Julian’s identification with Alexander, see Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 15, 78, 101. On his defiance of the omens, see Bowersock, 107–11. For a different interpretation, see Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 157–59.
66. See Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 114–15; Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 179–80; Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:937–38.
67. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:940–43.
68. Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 190.
69. Ammianus, The Later Roman Empire, 294–95.
70. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 118.
71. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 116; Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:980.
72. See Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 409.
73. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 182, 207.
74. For a careful review of the evidence on these questions, see Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans, 33–92.
75. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 408; Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76.
76. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 401, 409–11; Brown, Power and Persuasion, 89–103, 119.
77. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 207.
78. E.g., Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 89, 102, 207–9.
79. See, e.g., Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 88: “Constantine . . . accepted pagan honours from the citizens of Athens. He ransacked the Aegean for pagan classical statuary to adorn Constantinople. He treated a pagan philosopher as a colleague. He paid the traveling expenses of a pagan priest who visited the pagan monuments of Egypt.”
80. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:88–89. Gibbon added: “Theodosius distinguished his liberal regard for virtue and genius by the consular dignity which he bestowed on [the pagan senator] Symmachus; and by the personal friendship which he expressed to [the pagan orator] Libanius; and the two eloquent apologists of Paganism were never required either to change or to dissemble their religious opinions. The Pagans were indulged in the most licentious freedom of speech and writing; the historical and philosophical remains of Eunapius, Zosimus, and the fanatic teachers of the school of Plato, betray the most furious animosity, and contain the sharpest invectives, against the sentiments and conduct of their victorious adversaries. If these audacious libels were publicly known, we must applaud the good sense of the Christian princes, who viewed, with a smile of contempt, the last struggles of superstition and despair” (88–89).
81. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 102.
82. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006).
83. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 183 (“Part of this had to do with the idea that the state needed to pay for the public rituals if those rituals were to represent true expressions of collective devotion”).
84. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:75 (emphasis added).
85. Symmachus, Relation 3, para. 13, reproduced at https://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/symrel3f.html (introduction by J. Vanderspoel).
86. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 3, reproduced at https://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/ambrepf.html (introduction by J. Vanderspoel).
87. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 137.
88. See Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 409; Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:78–87.
89. See Brown, Power and Persuasion, 120–21.
90. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, rev. ed. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 77.
91. Ambrose’s efforts in this respect are described in Garry Wills, Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, 78 (observing “the practical impact of church building”).
92. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:73.
93. Symmachus, Relation 3, para. 14.
94. Symmachus, Relation 3, para. 8.
95. Ambrose, Epistle 18, para. 31, reproduced at https://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/ambrepf.html (introduction by J. Vanderspoel).
96. Ambrose, Epistle 18, para. 31.
97. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 9. Pressing the point, or perhaps overarguing it, the bishop went on to depict how “the smoke and ashes from the altar, the sparks from the sacrilege, the smoke from the burning might choke the breath and throats of the faithful” (para. 9).
98. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 31.
99. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 13.
100. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, and above, 174.
101. See Franz Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Chicago: Open Court, 1911), 196–212. See also Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 63 (“The spread of the oriental cults in western Europe . . . is a notorious feature of the first and second centuries. There cults spread because they gave the immigrant, and later the local adherent, a sense of belonging, a sense of loyalty that he lacked in the civic functions of his town”).
102. Cumont, Oriental Religions, 203, 204.
103. Norman F. Cantor, Antiquity: From the Birth of Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 39. See also Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2004), 93 (asserting that “by the first century of the Common Era, . . . the classical paganism of Greece and Rome was already in decline”).
104. Antonia Tripolitis, Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 2. As noted, E. R. Dodds described the paganism of the fourth century as “a sort of living corpse.” Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 132.
105. See, e.g., MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire. See also Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), 115 (“Far into the second and third centuries AD, this piety of the majority survived the wit of poets and philosophers”), 123 (“By the early Christian period, the forms of religious life had grown, but the idea of divine encounters [with pagan deities] had not faded: it had grown with them”), 669 (arguing that “the pagan cults were not quick to die away”).
106. See generally MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism (generally depicting paganism as tolerant and attractive and Christianity as oppressive); Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 19, 22 (asserting Christianity’s clear superiority over paganism) (see below, 188).
107. Cantor, Antiquity, 39.
108. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 68.
109. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 66.
110. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:493. For elaboration of the point, see Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 112–19.
111. See, e.g., 1 Cor. 1:10–17; James 2:1–9.
112. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:559.
113. See Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 133: “The religious tolerance which was the normal Greek and Roman practice had resulted in a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe.”
114. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 43–44. Veyne adds, however, that “among the simple masses, paganism was generally accepted and was therefore solidly rooted; it could have endured indefinitely” (44).
115. See above, chap. 4.
116. See R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 130–37, 147–51.
117. These interpretations, attributed to Varro, are discussed and criticized in Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6.8, p. 255; 7.19, p. 290.
118. This was Varro’s interpretation, as described by Augustine, City of God 7.28, p. 303 (emphasis added).
119. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:869.
120. See above, 94.
121. Augustine, City of God 7.28–30, pp. 303–6. See also generally Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, trans. B. P. Pratten (Pickerington, OH: Beloved, 2016).
122. For a discussion of the similarities in pagan and Christian allegorical interpretation, see Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 130–31.
123. Augustine, City of God 4.18, pp. 670–71.
124. Augustine, City of God 15.26, p. 686.
125. Augustine, City of God 15.1–3, pp. 634–37.
126. Augustine, City of God 15.2, p. 637.
127. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 5.24–25, pp. 81–82; 6.8, p. 89.
128. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. J. F. Shaw (New York: Dover, 2009).
129. For an insightful study of such debates, see generally Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
130. Gibbon, not surprisingly, had no more patience for this approach when employed by Christians than when it was used by pagans. He commented scornfully that “acknowledging that the literal sense is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as reason, they deem themselves secure and invulnerable behind the ample veil of allegory.” Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:457.
131. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 137.
132. Augustine, City of God, bks. 6–7.
133. Augustine, City of God 8.5–9, pp. 318–25.
134. Augustine, Confessions 7.13, p. 114.
135. Augustine, City of God, bks. 8–10.
136. Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 49–50.
137. Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 6.
138. Fox, Pagans and Christians, 83.
139. See above, 71.
140. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 78.
141. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 4.192.
142. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1998), 13.776, p. 363; 20.78–79, p. 505.
143. Virgil, Georgic III, in The Georgics of Virgil, trans. James Rhoades, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1891), 66.
144. Catullus, Carmina 5, quoted in E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 20.
145. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (New York: Dover, 1997), bk. 4, p. 21
146. Homer, The Odyssey 5.212–234.
147. Cf. Fox, The Classical World, 47 (“In Homer’s poems, the dominant image is that there is no life beyond the grave. . . . This superb view of man’s condition heightens the poignancy of a hero’s life. We are what we do; fame, won in life, is our immortality”).
148. Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” in Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1982), lines 274–75, p. 299.
149. Aurelius, Meditations 2.15.
150. Homer, The Iliad 12.374–381, pp. 335–36.
151. Homer, The Iliad 21.528–530, p. 535.
152. Homer, The Iliad 17.515–516, p. 457.
153. Homer, The Odyssey 11.255–258.
154. 1 Pet. 1:24–25.
155. Augustine, City of God 4.5, p. 149.
156. 1 Cor. 15:55.
157. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 84–85.
158. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 19.
159. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:464.
160. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:447. See also 1:510 (“Minds afflicted by calamity and the contempt of mankind cheerfully listen to the divine promise of future happiness”).
161. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1984), 175.
162. Gibbon, Memoirs, 175.
163. See above, 172.
164. Augustine, City of God, bks. 6–10.
165. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 22.
166. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 21. Cf. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 51–52 (arguing that Christianity appealed to “a need for a God with whom one could be alone: a God whose ‘charge,’ as it were had remained concentrated and personal rather than diffused in benign but profoundly impersonal ministrations to the universe at large”).
167. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 24.
168. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 15. Cf. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 78 (“The Christian revolution promoted a radical message of love and charity, flaunted the idea that even the foolish and uneducated could be wise, that the virtuous simpleton could outargue learned philosophers, that the rich should be generous to the poor, that the holy should care for the sick”).
169. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 29.
170. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 4.22, p. 194.
171. Aurelius, Meditations 2.8.
172. 1 Cor. 2:9.
173. Homer, The Iliad 17.515–516.
174. Augustine, Confessions 1.1, p. 1. Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
175. This is a paraphrase; the actual quotation reads “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
176. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Fitzgerald, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1990), para. 12, p. 27.
177. Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” lines 1381–1383, p. 358.
178. Cf. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:520 (“The Pagan multitude, reserving their gratitude for temporal benefits alone, rejected the inestimable present of life and immortality, which was offered to mankind by Jesus of Nazareth”).
179. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 216.
180. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:478–79.
181. Augustine, City of God 1.35, p. 49; 18.49, p. 896.
182. Augustine, Confessions 10.48, p. 200.