Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity

226 Pages·2015·1.28 MB·English

by  James J. O'Donnell

DEDICATION
Ann
always
CONTENTS
Dedication
PROLOGUE
PART I
RELIGION WITHOUT A HISTORY
CHAPTER 1 THE TOUR GUIDE’S VERSION
CHAPTER 2 THE GAMES OF THE CENTURY
CHAPTER 3 AN ELOQUENT MAN WHO LOVED HIS COUNTRY
CHAPTER 4 WHAT IS A GOD?
CHAPTER 5 DIVINE BUTCHERY
CHAPTER 6 WAYS OF KNOWING
CHAPTER 7 THE SPECTER OF ATHEISM
CHAPTER 8 GODS AT HOME
CHAPTER 9 DIVINE EXALTATION
PART II
THE HISTORY OF PAGANISM
CHAPTER 10 CONSTANTINE IN HIS WORLD
CHAPTER 11 A NEW LEAF
CHAPTER 12 THE BIRTH OF PAGANISM
CHAPTER 13 THE BAPTISM OF PAGANISM
CHAPTER 14 THE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR
CHAPTER 15 THE SERVANT OF CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER 16 THE TRIUMPH OF PAGANISM
CHAPTER 17 WHAT REMAINED
CHAPTER 18 CICERO REBORN
CHAPTER 19 A ROMAN RELIGION
EPILOGUE
Notes
Further Reading
Index
About the Author
Also by James J. O’Donnell
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
W
HEN POLYNICES QUARRELED WITH HIS BROTHER, ETEOCLES, over control of
ancient Thebes, he raised an army led by seven mighty captains. Capaneus
among them was notorious for his arrogance. On his shield was the image of a
warrior with no weapon but a torch, instrument of an ancient city’s most dreaded
threat—fire. He appears in Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, but his best scene
comes in the Latin Thebes epic of Statius. There, as battle rages, Capaneus,
mighty and arrogant, scales a high tower of the city wall, aroar with boasting.
All the defenders launch their catapults and javelins against him, to no avail.
Taunting his enemies, he begins to rip walls apart with his bare hands.
Watching from high on Olympus, the gods are in full dither, taking sides in
the war and clamoring for Jupiter’s attention and favor. Bacchus, Apollo, Juno:
they all fret and fume as storm clouds gather over the divine palace itself. Then
Capaneus bellows his challenge:1
Are there no gods to defend this quaking Thebes? Where are the
coward gods who were born here? You, Jupiter, do your best against me
with all your flames! Or are you only brave when you’re scaring timid
girls?
Now even Jupiter snorts with angry laughter, and suddenly clouds rush
together, the sun vanishes, and storms brew in silence without a gust of wind. A
moment’s poise of terror, the warrior on his height, heaven holding its breath:
then the storm begins for real, lightning crashing on all sides, and Capaneus gets
one last line:
Here are the fires I need for Thebes! From these lightning bolts, I will
refresh my torch!
Then a thunderbolt strikes him, flung from above with all the power of the
king of the gods. Capaneus looks like a ball of flame on his high perch as the
armies draw back in fear, not knowing where he might fall. Helmet and hair
catch flame, his armor becomes a fiery furnace, but he stands firm there still,
gasping his life away. At last, beyond endurance, he fails and falls in a mighty
roar and crash—to the great relief of the bystanders, who could feel a second,
mightier thunderbolt gathering strength in case it was needed.
SO DO YOU BELIEVE in gods?
No, I didn’t ask, “Do you believe in God?” That’s a very different question. I
mean, do you believe in the gods Capaneus challenged, Jupiter and Juno and that
crowd? What about Serapis and the Thracian rider god and Epona the Gaulish
god who looked after the horses once they got back to the stables—do you
believe in them? Do you believe that once upon a time there were such beings
who went about the world with superhuman powers of various kinds, interfering
in the ordinary run of events?
No, I don’t either.2
How was it, then, that once upon a time, people all across western Asia, the
Mediterranean basin, and Europe took for granted that such gods existed, were
found everywhere, and involved themselves in running the world—and then one
day didn’t think that way any longer? As late as 300 CE, no one could have
imagined a world without those traditional gods, lords since time immemorial. A
century and a half later, few could remember what the world with those gods had
been like.
Their passing, as we will see, was disconcertingly easy and undramatic. The
Christians who prevailed made the noise—so much that moderns were long
persuaded that there had been a mighty struggle, pagans versus Christians,
somewhere on the scale of Ali versus Frazier or the Thirty Years War. It just
wasn’t so.
Yes, the variety of religious stories, beliefs, and practices in that old world
was simply too vast to comprehend, so their disappearance is all the more
remarkable. Altars in homes, shrines on street corners, and public ceremonies in
the open air made ancient Rome more akin to Kathmandu during festival season
than anything we could imagine in modern Europe. No one could inventory that
world in one book and I will not try. The modern scholars who bring together the
evidence for what Greeks and Romans and Egyptians and Jews and Phoenicians
and Scythians and Carthaginians and Thracians and Gauls did about their gods
deserve vast respect for taking on an endless and thankless task.3 The story of
what happened when those gods passed is easier to grasp and colorful enough.
It’s also important for us today—and easy to get wrong.
Sure, everybody knows—though always be careful of what everybody knows
—that there were once pagans and Christians, people of the old and people of
the new, engaged in that mighty struggle that only one side could win. The new
prevailed. Conflict like that makes for great stories and the pagan–Christian
dustup tale has been written repeatedly.4 But the passing of the gods who never
existed needs a different kind of story. It’s not a question of who vanquished
whom, but of just what changed when and where.
Remember, the story of Christianity’s rise takes a long time, from Jesus’s
lifetime to the emperor Constantine’s conversion, three centuries. The traditional
way to think about it is to imagine fervent Christians adding to their number,
each generation larger than the last, carrying a pristine Christian message to the
world. On that model, when the last Roman citizen was baptized, everyone had
become what the earliest Christians had been.
The world doesn’t work that way. Whatever core ideas Christianity sought to
transmit, every baptism brought someone unshaped by Christianity into the fold,
mixing their ideas and expectations with what they found. The pristine essence
of Christianity acquired a lot of old-fashioned baggage along the way. When
Christians talked about their pure and unique gift of illumination for a dark
world, who really needed to be persuaded?
The storytelling is itself important. For us, religion comes with history, and
history matters. No classical Greek or Roman writer ever thought to address the
history of religion, because religion was woven seamlessly into everyday life,
the kind of life that has no history to speak of. Our modern historians can make
history for everything, to be sure,5 but when they reconstruct a story for Greco-
Roman religion, they tell a story the ancients didn’t themselves know. And when
they do so, they are in cahoots with the story-making Christians of the fourth
century.
So the first half of this book is about that ancient world of religion that had
no history. The second part will show what happened when religion acquired a
history in the fourth century CE.
The apparent victory of the Christians then was one upheaval among many.
The fundamental notion of divine power itself had grown so large in the hands of
various philosophers and cults that it overpowered the small, quarrelsome gods
of old. Earlier practices, like blood sacrifice and augury, had faded so much from
favor that they almost didn’t need abolishing. Fresh ideas are always exciting,
and we’ll see how Judaism reinvented itself for a new world, while Christianity
discovered its ability to take advantage of unearned good luck and make itself
powerful in a way that crossed boundaries between empires and nations,
between genders, and between classes.
To go back to the world of the gods and their worshippers, we must learn to
do without a coherent story. Indeed, we must forget much of what we take for
granted about “religion”—like its intimate connection to questions of ethical
conduct. And we will see that what people thought about gods was much less
important than what they did about them.
All religion was local. Even when you found the same gods in different
places, meaningful connection between worshippers in one place and those in
another was rare. When we visit Delphi in these pages, we’ll come as close as
we can to a single location drawing together believers from many places, but
even that was more Times Square than Vatican. For the most part, what
happened in Antioch stayed in Antioch; what trickled down to villages and
towns stayed there, of no interest to anybody elsewhere.
My first chapters will offer more travelogue than story, with selected sites
and sights and rites and rituals, to give an idea of what went on that would go
away. This tour will concentrate on the Roman Empire, starting with the age of
Augustus. We’ll keep a special eye on practices of blood sacrifice as the most
vivid way of watching for what changed—and what didn’t.
Then we’ll settle down for a real story, when we begin, quite late, to hear of
“pagans” and their ways. The very notion of paganism was invented late, to
persuade people that something else, a very different something else, existed and
deserved to succeed. That’s when the historical narrative we inherit was first
constructed, to give that something else a credible backstory. Nobody we might
call a pagan would have thought it made any sense at all. To do justice to all
sides, we’ll have to tell it differently.
And the gods? Few noticed their passing, few wept. Collateral damage, we
might say.
I
RELIGION WITHOUT A HISTORY