Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Number of quotes: 62
Book ID: 204 Page: 134
Section: 2B
Such is the religion of Marcus Aurelius. ‘This intelligence in every man is God, an emanation from deity. To be a philosopher is to keep unsullied, unscathed, the divine spirit within oneself.’ {3} Marcus was also a pious worshipper of the Roman gods, for such ritual was necessary for the survival of the state and cohesion of its people (p.164). But he saw these divine powers as aspects of a universal deity.. . . .
Call this god or gods, it does not matter.
Picture insert in middle of book (no page numbers)
Quote ID: 4715
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 163
Section: 3B,2B
During this whole period, most official pagan worships were fading into the background. Pliny the younger, on his arrival in northern Asia Minor early in the second century, had already found the temples becoming deserted and neglected, {1} and the withdrawal of paganism continued. During the third century its shrines in north Africa were abandoned, and at Rome, too, the cults lost ground.. . . .
This failure of enthusiasm was one of the prices paid for war and disaster. As Julian the Apostate later remarked, ‘It was the sight of their undeserved misery that led people to despise the gods.’ {4} Another reason for waning interest in the old religion was the growth of monotheistic feeling. Throughout this period the Olympians were coming to be regarded as branches or aspects or symbolic representatives of a single unknowable divinity (pp. 134, 174). {5}
Quote ID: 4716
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 204 Page: 164
Section: 3B,1A
Clearly the most Roman and patriotic of all cults was the worship of Rome itself. As the city began to lose its political and economic importance (p. 97), the emotional inspiration of its name remained as great as ever; the heavily charged slogan Roma Aeterna preserved and intensified its power.PJ: eternal city (used for searching tbis subject)
Quote ID: 4717
Time Periods: 1456
Book ID: 204 Page: 164/165
Section: 1A,1B,3B
….Diocletian gave even more massive and widespread publicity to the idea of Rome than any other ruler. For he and his fellow-emperors expressed this idea, without variation, on millions of the silvered bronze coins of their universally circulating reformed currency. These enormous and uniform issues, issued at many mints from c. 294 onwards for more than two decades, represent one of the largest outbursts of numismatic propaganda in the whole of Roman history. By such means, every household in the empire was repeatedly reminded of eternal Rome for many years.But the slogan of Diocletian and his colleagues was not simply concerned with Rome itself; instead it celebrated the Genius of the Roman People – GENIVS POPVLI ROMANI. The Genius was represented by a youthful male figure, carrying a cornucopia and wearing the turreted (mural) crown which was characteristic of the Fortune (Tyche) of cities.
Quote ID: 4718
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 204 Page: 165/166
Section: 2B,3C
However, it became established that the Genius of the Roman People – for such was the formula which emerged – was, as might be expected, male.. . . .
Genius again wears that crown, sometimes combined with the rays of fashionable Sun-worship, on the obverse of one of the last large bronze coins ever to be issued at Rome, and one of the very few, within the past two hundred and fifty years, to show any head at all other than some portrait explicitly ascribed as to an imperial personage. The coins may date from a short period of interregnum immediately following Gallienus’ death (268). {15}
. . . .
The principal issues with GENIO POPVLI ROMANI, diversified by a more varied range of Romanit` from Maxentius whose principal asset was his control of the capital city, declined and came to an end in AD 316, when Christianity was beginning to offer new watchwords (p. 180). Yet the appeal of Rome did not cease. A large painting, apparently of Constantine’s reign, shows a frontal seated figure of a goddess. {16} When Fortune (Tyche) and other gods vanished at this time, the Fortunes or spirits of cities were retained and interpreted as entities at God’s gift and will. Indeed Constantine himself, despite his Christianity, gave Constantinople a temple of Fortune, and placed in this shrine a statue of the Fortune of Rome. {17}
Quote ID: 4719
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 204 Page: 167/168
Section: 3B,2B,2D2
The days of the Olympians are nearly over, and there is nostalgia for the glorious past. But since the world is still unthinkable without Rome, Venus must survive, because Venus, as another part of the poem recalls, was the mother of all Rome’s glory; ….. . . .
Another patriotic goddess who defied the decline of the Olympians by her continued impact on the later Roman world was Vesta. Her shrine in the forum is repeatedly shown on coins and medallions of Septimius and subsequent emperors, and the neighbouring courtyard devoted to her service contained many dedications persisting right up to the fourth century AD. The fire-cult of Vesta (Hestia) corresponded to contemporary Sun-worship and to the fire-altars of Sassanian Persia; and her Vestal Virgins suited contemporary tastes for asceticism and monastic seclusion. As the ancient, everlasting guardian of Rome and its rulers, Vesta in these dangerous times received more devoted veneration than ever.
Quote ID: 4720
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 168
Section: 2E5
So, for a time did the great Roman emperors of the past, called divi to distinguish them from the dei of Olympus. {20} Drawing upon Greek ideas of deification as a reward for merit, the Romans had fostered similar legends relating to Hercules and their own founder Romulus. {21} And just as those had been human beings whose mighty deeds raised them to be gods after their deaths, so also Augustus and some of his successors and their wives and relatives were posthumously appointed to this honorific godhead by a grateful state.
Quote ID: 4721
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 204 Page: 169
Section: 3B,3C
And yet the appeal to the divi was a failure, for except in some countries such as Africa, where their worship was especially strong, this cult did not outlast the third century; in the revivals of paganism under Diocletian, it played only a very minor part. Nevertheless Maxentius deified his own son, who had died in boyhood (c. 310), and Constantine honoured Divus Claudius Gothicus, a fellow-Illyrian emperor and Sun-worshipper from whom he claimed descent (p. 180). Moreover, the Christian Constantine himself became Divus after his death.
Quote ID: 4722
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 204 Page: 170
Section: 3C
Yet for centuries the official coinage, while offering every other conceivable form of adulation, scrupulously refrains from declaring the living emperor to be a god. He was never named divus in his lifetime, and it was not until the later third century that a few rare issues of Serdica (Sofia) in his homeland call Aurelian deus. But that was untypical isolated flight of fancy (cf. p. 279, n. 20); the empire was not a theocracy.
Quote ID: 4723
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 204 Page: 170
Section: 2C
The terms ‘conqueror’ and ‘unconquerable’ (victor, invictus), which henceforward become official designations of the ruler, again imply a comparison with Hercules, and with Alexander the Great as well.
Quote ID: 4724
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 204 Page: 170/171
Section: 3B
Commodus used to appear dressed as other gods also. His coins present a dedication to ‘Jupiter the youthful’ (IOVI IVVENI), and in order to point this comparison the god is endowed with the imperial features. Similarly, on the Arch of Septimius at Lepcis Magna, the emperor’s Triumph no longer leads him to Jupiter on the Capitol; in his own person, he is not only the victorious general but Jupiter as well. Although emperors were not officially deified in their lifetimes, there was now little more that could be done to emphasise their elevation to the rank of the gods.
Quote ID: 4725
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 171
Section: 2B,3B
Nevertheless, in an increasingly spiritual age, these pretensions began to ring false. In spite of the ruler’s growing autocracy and magnificence, he was not the same as the quasi-monotheistic transcendent divine power in which people of this epoch believed (p. 163). And so while the adulation of reigning Augusti continued and intensified, a different and indeed contradictory interpretation of their relationship with the deity gained ground. This was the idea that the emperor was not one of the gods, but was instead their favoured and chosen delegate and regent upon earth.
Quote ID: 4726
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 172
Section: 3B
This, then, was the spirit in which Aurelian, while describing the divine power as his consort (consors), explicitly rejects the deification attributed to him on one of his coins (p. 170); it was more in keeping with the spirit of the times to claim divine grace. The god, he said, had given him the purple and fixed the length of his rule, {33} and his coins stress various aspects of the concord between the emperor and this divine power. It was again as elect of the gods, rather than as gods themselves, that Diocletian and his colleague Maximian attempted to renew and restore the pagan worship to which they had been devoutly brought up in the Balkan peasant homes.
Quote ID: 4728
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 204 Page: 172
Section: 2B,3B
The link was made still more explicit when Diocletian and Maximian founded their whole theology on the specific comradeship and protection which they received from Jupiter and Hercules respectively, and which led them to assume personal titles of Jovius and Herculius. Although there were later continuations and revivals of paganism, this was the last great official manifestation of the Olympian cults. But the culmination of this, while tendency to treat the emperor as the elect of pagan deities was reached under Constantine, when he devoted his coinage throughout the empire to proclaiming that his comrade was the Sun-god.
Quote ID: 4729
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 204 Page: 173
Section: 2B
In Egypt, for example, where this worship abounded, the rising Sun appears upon reliefs of Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton) who in the fourteenth century BC instituted a revolutionary new cult of his Sun-god Aton, including novel emphasis upon its light-giving and life-giving properties, accompanied by a claim to have achieved personal revelation through the embrace of the god’s caressing hands (shown as the termination of his golden disc). In Asia Minor and the near east, all-seeing Marduk, who became supreme in the Babylonian pantheon, had at first been a solar divinity. So had Shamash, who was originally secondary to the Moon-god; but experts on the heavens reversed their roles.
Quote ID: 4730
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 174
Section: 2B,2B2
Although few people were prepared to join Aristarchus of Samos in asserting that the earth revolved round the Sun, {54} the next two hundred years witnessed the spread of the Sun-cult throughout the Mediterranean world. As Semitic, Iranian and Greek theology, astrology and philosophy intermingled, there was an ever-growing tendency to explain the traditional gods in solar terms. Mixtures and blending of deities were now universal {55}; the gods are of many names, but one nature, and their common factor is the Sun.
Quote ID: 4731
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 175
Section: 2B
Apparently native to Rome, Sol had its festival on 9 August, and was linked in inscriptions with the fire-goddess Vesta (Hestia), who was analogous to the power worshipped at Persian fire-alters (p.168). An antique Roman shrine of the Sun still existed in Nero’s reign. The god’s radiate-crowned personification appears on Republican and early imperial coins. {61} Upon the summit of the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, which stood for the régime of Augustus, there was a magnificent sculptural group showing Sol Charioteer, whose old identification with Apollo the Augustans repeated and stressed.
Quote ID: 4732
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 176
Section: 3B,2B
Under Septimius Severus and his family solar worship almost took charge of the entire pantheon.
Quote ID: 4733
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 176/177
Section: 3B,2B,2E6
In this atmosphere, designs on imperial coinage show advances upon their customary conservatism. {67} In particular the boy Geta, son of the Unconquerable and Pious Septimius, not only appears as Sol himself, portrayed in a novel half-length representation with radiate crown, but his right hand is raised in the Sun’s magic gesture of benediction (c. AD 200). This gesture, which warded off evil influences as well as conferring blessing, was very ancient, and had reappeared in statues of Roman orators. {68}. Court-poets wrote of the holy or divine hand of their emperor, and Sol’s arm is similarly lifted on Alexandrian coins of Trajan. This symbol, still the sign of Episcopal blessing today, was to become frequent on sarcophagus reliefs and in the catacombs of Christians, where Jesus outstretches his hand in the most popular of all Christian themes, the Raising of Lazarus from the dead (p.214).
Quote ID: 4734
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 204 Page: 177
Section: 3B,2B
And then Elagabalus, though he adopted the names of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus which Caracalla had used before him, swept aside any caution or tradition in his haste to incorporate Sun-worship into the Roman imperial theology (218-22).
Quote ID: 4735
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 177
Section: 3B,2B
A huge temple was now built for this Sun-god at Rome, and the deity’s Semitic name ELAGAB (alus) or Baal, identified with Sol, strikes an outlandish note amid the conservative traditions of the official coinage.. . . .
He placed the Sun-god in a chariot adorned with gold and jewels and brought him out from the city to the suburbs. A six-horse chariot bore the Sun-god, the horses huge and flawlessly white, with expensive gold fittings and rich ornaments. No one held the reins, and no one rode in the chariot; the vehicle was escorted as if the Sun-god himself were the charioteer. Elagabalus ran backwards in front of the chariot, facing the god and holding the horses’ reins. He made the whole journey in this reverse fashion, looking up into the face of his god. Since he was unable to see where he was going, his route was paved with gold dust to keep him from stumbling and falling, and bodyguards supported him on each side to protect him from injury. The people ran parallel to him, carrying torches and tossing wreaths and flowers. The statues of all the gods, the costly or sacred offerings in the temples, the imperial ornaments, and valuable heirlooms were carried by the cavalry and the entire Praetorian Guard in honour of the Sun-god. {72}
Elagabalus was too rash, and was murdered. And yet in spite of this setback, the worship of the Sun did not cease to flourish and increase.
Quote ID: 4736
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 178
Section: 3B,2B,2E4
Nevertheless, forty years later, matters had advanced so far that Gallienus proposed to dominate the city, from the highest point of the Esquiline Hill, with a chariot-group including a colossal statue of himself as the Sun. {73} His successor Claudius II Gothicus (268-70) was devoted to the same deity, and then the logical, conclusive move was taken soon afterwards by the next emperor Aurelian. For he established, as the central and focal point of Roman religion, a massive and strongly subsidized cult of Sol Invictus (274), endowing him with a resplendent Roman temple, and instituting on the model of the ancient priestly colleges, and as their equal in rank, a new college of Priests of the Sun. {74} The birthday of the god was to be on 25 December, and this transformed into Christmas Day, was one of the heritages which Christianity owed to the solar cult.
Quote ID: 4737
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 178/179
Section: 2B
….Aurelian was not overturning the Roman cults; he was adding to them, and thereby changing their emphasis and balance of power, so that Sol now stood at the head of the pantheon. {79}. . . .
But Aurelian’s decision was even more comprehensive, because it sought to weave the main religious strands of east and west into a united, cosmopolitan universal faith.
Quote ID: 4738
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 179
Section: 3B,2B
Moreover, when Constantius I Chlorus took London from the usurper Allectus (296) and brought England back into the empire, a medallion hailed in as Restorer of Eternal Light (REDDITOR LVCIS AETERNAE).. . . .
It is also solar language, for Constantius was a monotheist who revered the Sun, {80} like his forebears before him in their Sun-worshipping Balkan homeland.
Quote ID: 4739
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 204 Page: 179
Section: 3C,2B
Then in c. 309 Constantius’ son Constantine the Great began his vast, homogeneous series of coinages inscribed SOLI INVICTO COMITO (pg. 173). {81} Therefore, for a decade, he continued to concentrate upon this design and theme. Indeed Constantine, before finally turning to Christianity, stressed the worship of the Sun more frequently and emphatically than any of his predecessors.
Quote ID: 4740
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 180
Section: 3C,2B
. . .And on the sculptures of the Arch of Constantine at Rome (c. 315) the old gods have gone but the Sun still remains: the emperor is represented between the rising Sun and Moon, and the victory-giving figure is the Sun-god, whose statuettes are also carried by the army’s standard-bearers. An inscription describes Constantine himself as the Sun who sees all.
Quote ID: 4741
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 180
Section: 3C,2B
Even as late as 321, when official Christianity was forming deep roots, Constantine forbade legal proceedings on the day of the week ‘celebrated by the veneration of the Sun’.
Quote ID: 4742
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 180/181
Section: 3C,2B
Constantine was now sole ruler of the Roman world and arbiter of its religion, upon which he had already begun to impose such revolutionary changes. Yet his panegyrist still sees him ‘with a circumambient halo resembling rays of light’; and when his great statue was erected at the central point of the new capital at Constantinople (428-30), it portrayed him as Apollo-Helios, wearing the Sun’s radiate Crown. This crown was also fashioned from the nails from the True Cross, for he now saw himself as the Vicegerent of Christ. In his own mysterious way, Constantine seems to have worshipped Sun and Christ at the same time, or regarded them as interchangeable, assimilating the Christian faith into an inherited solar tradition as Aurelian had assimilated the Sun into the traditions of Rome.
Quote ID: 4743
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 181
Section: 2B
In the time of Marcus Aurelius, Jesus’ baptism had been described as the Bath of Helios. {86} Christians in east and west, in their public and private prayers, turned to Oriens, the rising Sun, in order to glorify its resurrection from the prison of the dark, which they identified with the Resurrection of Christ. Origen (d. 254/5) link Christ with the rising of the Sun {87} – and in the same period a mosaic beneath St Peter’s showed a composite Christ-Helios (p. 218). Some people confused the two deities: fourth-century Christian writers criticised co-religionists for their veneration of Sol, pointing out the superiority of the Christian Sun of Justice to the pagan Sun. {88} Owing to such links and analogies, the solar cult acted as a bridge by which many people were converted to Christianity.
Quote ID: 4744
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 181
Section: 3C2
That is partly why devotees of the Sun, in spite of all these connections, were among the fiercest enemies of the Christians. When Julian the Apostate (361-3) temporarily brought the official religion of the empire back to paganism, he was moved by a prophecy to choose the worship of the Sun, the religion of his Illyrian ancestors, and censured his relative Constantine for deserting it.
Quote ID: 4745
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 181
Section: 3D
St. Leo the Great (d. 461) complained that Christians still worshipped the Sun.
Quote ID: 4746
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 204 Page: 184
Section: 2B
Mithraism, then, could seem to be a specialised form of the Sun-worship which was soon to assume increasingly official shape (p. 177).
Quote ID: 4747
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 185/186
Section: 2B
The worship of Mithras, then, had ideas, moral urgency, emotional intensity and receptive breadth. It also possessed considerable superficial resemblances to Christianity. Mithraic baptisms, sacrifices, communal meals and martyrdoms seemed to the church a sinister mimicry of its own rites and sacraments. {103} Yet Christianity won the day. In part this was because the story of Mithras, although the subject of a ‘biography’ recounting his ostensible exploits, sounded too mythical for his devotees really to feel that they had ever happened upon this earth: he seemed much more distant than Jesus, whose life as a historical figure kindled the imagination of millions.
Quote ID: 4748
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 192
Section: 2E2
He writes scathingly of the wandering, abusive preacher Peregrinus, …. whose morbid craving for notoriety impelled him to throw himself in the fire at the Olympic Games (AD 165) . . .
Quote ID: 4749
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 198
Section: 5D
. . .- and after the middle of the second century AD the largest of their groups, the one expressly calling itself Gnostic, appeared at Rome. {138}
Quote ID: 4750
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 209
Section: 4A
One of the pioneers of these attempts to harmonise Christianity with pagan philosophy was Justin (p.206), though this did not save him from martyrdom at Rome, where he had taught during the wave of anti-Christian feeling under Marcus Aurelius (c. 165/7). {10}
Quote ID: 4751
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 210
Section: 4A
. . .Clement of Alexandria . He was a convert from paganism, like so many of these apologists – whose writings were thus a personal defense of their own life’s choice. Justin and men of his persuasion, known as the Greek Apologists, had sought to commend their faith to educated pagans and Jews.. . . .
Clement was not satisfied with faith alone, which he regarded as a summary of urgent truths suitable for people in a hurry. He wanted to endow the New Testament with a rationalist basis: to use knowledge and learning to build a faith that was scientific, employing philosophy as ‘an evident image of the Truth, a divine gift to the Greeks’—though a somewhat esoteric gift (in the Gnostic traditions), . . .
. . . .
Like Justin, he saw Christ as the final expression of the Hellenic Word or Divine Reason, and Plato as Attic Moses and fore-runner of Jesus. Yet Clement expressed his Christian idea of the function of philosophy with jubilant vigour.
Quote ID: 4752
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 210
Section: 4A
In Origen (d. 254/5), the most prolific author of antiquity, the church for the first time found a theologian who had really mastered Greek thought and particularly Plato, and had been in close contact with the head of a philosophical school.. . . .
His sophisticated refutation of Celsus, whose Platonism had been anti-Christian (p. 226), is second only to Augustine’s City of God as a landmark in the struggle with paganism.
Quote ID: 4753
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 211
Section: 4A
Philosophers, pagan and Christian alike, were now in fashion; and in the latter half of the third century, just as pagan sarcophagi pictured the after-life in terms of philosophical tranquility (p. 190), so too their Christian counterparts show Jesus in the guise of a philosopher.
Quote ID: 4754
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 204 Page: 211/212
Section: 3C1
Nor did those of another thinker on similar lines, the Alexandrian priest Arius (d. 336). The emphasis of these philosophically trained apologists on the humanity of Jesus, with consequent depreciation of his divinity, reached its culmination in his work. Brought up on Origen’s doctrine of the singleness of God, Arius, like Unitarians of later times, regarded Christ as distant from God and inferior and, although created before all time, in a sense posterior: he could even have sinned—although, because of his free-will, he did not. The influence of Arius was strong at Licinius’ court, which turned against the church when that took a different view (320). Constantine called the Council of Nicaea (325) and promoted its Creed in order to achieve a consensus, but the result was Arius’ excommunication: though his doctrine became temporarily dominant after both he and the emperor were dead, {16} and later prevailed in the leading Germanic kingdoms of Italy and the west.
Quote ID: 4755
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 204 Page: 212
Section: 4A
First, there was much vigorous hostility to the whole philosophical approach, for example from Tertullian (p. 227) and his fierce fellow-African Arnobius (c. 305). {17}
Quote ID: 4756
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 213
Section: 3C,2E1
The Crucifixion is rarely depicted before the fourth century. As to Constantine’s alleged vision of the cross in the sky, followed by his employment of the cruciform labarum-monogram XP (=Christos) (p. 236), the cross meant magic more than anything else to him, and in any case it stood not so much for the Passion as for the Resurrection – a new era and a new stage in the divine plan.
Quote ID: 4757
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 214
Section: 2A3
At Rome, such catacombs evolved from subterranean graves of the Jews and other western and eastern traditions. The dark, soft, vocanic rock, strong but easily cut, was hollowed out first into a simple Greek cross or a grid of the Catacomb of St Calixtus—to whom pope St Zephyrinus (d. c. 217) entrusted the administration of ‘the cemetery’ {19} –and then into miles of several-storied mazes, containing between half and three-quarters of a million tombs.
Quote ID: 4758
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 204 Page: 217
Section: 3C
Since men had to live in the world and wished to avoid sin after baptism, they often did not take this sacrament until they were on their deathbeds (p. 237), though the christening of infants had already become common in the third century. Baptism, even more than the initiations of pagan faiths, was a direct, personal, intimate contact with the divinity, blending the sacramental with the transcendent, combining splendor with simplicity. Above all, the rite was believed to effect escape from damnation into immortality; it was a second birth, a birth-giving wave, a calm pure light which came from above and flooded the cleansed heart of its receiver. {30}
Quote ID: 4759
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 218
Section: 2B
A Christian chapel at Dura shows its remoteness from central trends by exceptionally depicting Christ in a painting as early as AD 232-3 (some writers interpreted the Old Testament as attacking sculptural rather than painted representations). The Mausoleum of the Julii under St. Peter’s at Rome, redecorated by Christians in c. 250-75, displays a less direct approach, for its vault-mosaic identifies Jesus with the Sun-divinity who was now emerging as the principal official god of Rome (p.181). Christ is shown driving the Sun’s four horses, symbols not only of the four Gospels but of the Resurrection, ….
Quote ID: 4760
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 220
Section: 2E2
The earliest known Christian hermit (anchorite), Narcissus in the second century AD, went into retreat to escape from slander; ….[Next para:]
And so in the third century the monastic movement was born in Egypt. The idea was encouraged by the exile of Christian leaders, such as St Dionysus of Alexandria whom the persecution of Valerian forced to withdraw to the Kufra oasis. But already before that the persecution by Decius had compelled a young ascetic, Paul of Thebes, to flee into the desert, where he stayed until he died, reputedly 113 years old. Soon afterwards St Anthony was to begin his life of seclusion which was to make monasticism famous. Born in upper Egypt in c. 251, he found a much older solitary already living near his native village....
Quote ID: 4761
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 220
Section: 2E2
And so in the third century the monastic movement was born in Egypt. The idea was encouraged by the exile of Christian leaders, such as St Dionysius of Alexandria whom the persecution of Valerian forced to withdraw to the Kufra oasis. But already before that the persecution by Decius (250) had compelled a young ascetic, Paul of Thebes, to flee into the desert, where he stayed until he died, reputedly 113 years old. Soon afterwards St Antony began his life of seclusion which was to make monasticism famous.
Quote ID: 4762
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 204 Page: 221
Section: 2E2
People continually flocked to join him, no longer in fear of persecution since persecution had ended, but hankering for a substitute—martyrs for mortification in an age when blood-martyrdom was no more. This self-torment, pursued even to extreme forms such as castration (forbidden in the fourth century by canon law), seemed to such men the only way to be soldiers of Christ and to avoid worldly temptation and the eternal damnation that followed in its wake. This movement of escapist unworldliness was alien to contemporary ecclesiastical spokesmen, but gained remarkable impetus within a short time.
Quote ID: 4763
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 223
Section: 4B
The position of the Jews in the Roman empire was ambiguous. Since they did not worship the gods of Greece and Rome, they seemed atheists. They were also exclusive, both in regard to their customs—circumcision, diet of the Mosaic law, sacredness of the family—and in their conviction of being the Chosen Race. This exclusiveness endangered their survival by making them unpopular with their neighbours, whom they, in turn, appeared to dislike. ‘They regard the rest of mankind’, said Tacitus, ‘with all the hatred of enemies.’
Quote ID: 4764
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 204 Page: 224
Section: 3C
Nevertheless, Jews were exempted from the major persecutions of Christianity, or at least did not feel their full force.When the empire became Christian, this ambiguous pattern did not change. Constantine used forcible language against the Jews, forbidding them to circumcise their Christian slaves or molest those who had abandoned the Hebrew faith for Christianity. Yet he also allowed their rabbis exemption from municipal duties.
Quote ID: 4765
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 224/225
Section: 3C
Moreover, if the Jews were excusable because they followed their ancestral religion, there was no such excuse for the Christians; and so they were even more unpopular. Besides, the appeal of Christianity to the lower classes and slaves, and its promises of a classless salvation, {62} could easily be interpreted as subversive, especially in times of national emergency (p. 229).
Quote ID: 4766
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 226
Section: 4A
It was perhaps in the later second century that Minucius Felix, apparently a north African, wrote the first extant defence of Christianity in Latin.
Quote ID: 4767
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 230/231
Section: 2E1
And the faithful threw their clothes on the place where Cyprian himself was to be executed, in the hope that they would soak up his blood.
Quote ID: 4768
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 204 Page: 231
Section: 2A3
But most venerated of all was the Roman Martyrium of St Peter, who by at least AD 100 was believed to have been executed by Nero; a shrine (c. 160-70) recently discovered under the Vatican Basilica dedicated to Peter (p. 110) has been identified with the Trophy celebrating his victory over death and paganism, which was seen by a priest at the turn of the third century. From then onwards, liturgical celebrations and memorial services for martyrs became continually more prominent. For ‘where their bones are buried, devils flee as from fire and unbearable torture’. {82} The demonstration that Christianity had been found worth dying for made it seem worth living for as well.
Quote ID: 4769
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 204 Page: 236
Section: 3A,3B
To encourage this repressive action, Maximinus Daia obtained and circulated confessions from prostitutes that they had taken part in Christian orgies. He also directed that spurious anti-Christian Acts of Pilate should be included in schools curricula. Executions took place, but they were few, for Maximinus preferred tortures to death-penalties, in order to improve his statistics of apostasy: the obstinate were blinded in one eye and had one leg ham-strung, and were then sent to mines and quarries. But what interested Daia more than such penal measures was the positive establishment of a pagan organisation which would rival and outdo its efficient Christian counterpart. And so he created an elaborate, homogeneous, pagan ecclesiastical system with its own priestly hierarchy.While this was happening in the eastern provinces, Constantine defeated Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, and became the sole master of the west (312). Constantine was in the midst of his determined but rather confused transition from Sun-worship to the Christian faith (p. 180).
PJ: Used only first sentence so far.
Quote ID: 4770
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 204 Page: 236
Section: 3C
In the east, Constantine had two emperors to deal with—Maximinus Daia in the non-European part of the empire, and his rival Licinius (a friend of the late Galerius) in the Danubian provinces. Professing amicable relations with both, Constantine requested Daia to stop the persecution of Christians—and gave Licinius his half-sister Constantia in marriage. At the wedding celebrations, Constantine and Licinius published the so-called Edict of Milan, which introduced universal religious tolerance. Constantine then left Maximinus Daia and Licinius to fight it out (313). Daia, defeated, agreed to a tolerant policy just before his death, and Licinius remained emperor of the east as Constantine’s colleague for another eleven years.
Quote ID: 4771
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 204 Page: 237
Section: 3C
Their priests, other than those of dissident sects (p. 241), were, like those of the Jews, exempted from municipal obligations. But a more decisive step had already been taken when funds (presaging a heavy drain upon the national exchequer) were sent to subsidise provincial churches, for example at Carthage. The lodging of the bishop of Rome or pope changed sharply for the better when he was given the royal palace of the Laterani {99} and magnificent new churches. The liturgy borrowed imposing features from official and court ceremonial. Moreover, the church, in keeping with its new privileges, was entrusted with public responsibilities. In spite of the differences between Christian ideas and pagan legal traditions, Episcopal courts were given jurisdiction in civil cases (318). People were permitted to bequeath their property to the church, which thus ranked as a civic corporation. {100} Finally Constantine himself was baptised, after postponing this, like many Christians, until his deathbed when he could sin no more (p. 217).
Quote ID: 4772
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 237
Section: 1A,3C,3C2
Church and state were to be run in double harness. But as the emperor increasingly became aware of his personal mission, the successive Councils of Arelate (314) and Nicaea (325) – the former attended by western, and the latter mainly by eastern bishops—showed that the master was Constantine, to whom the celestial will had committed the government of all things on earth. Consequently membership of the church now meant resignation to the claims of the state, and an extremely oppressive state it was (pp. 63 ff). Since, however, there was going to be an official church, nothing but this enforced subordination could produce the power-structure needed to guarantee that state and church, and the empire with them, would not fall apart. Eusebius, whose Life of Constantine framed the new theory of Christian sovereignty in terms comparing the relationship of the emperor to Jesus with that of Jesus to God the Father, {101} felt so anxious not to return to the relative ineffectiveness of earlier Christian institutions, whose persecution by Diocletian even seemed to him deserved and merciful, that he applauded the capitulation of the church to Constantine.
Quote ID: 4773
Time Periods: 14
Book ID: 204 Page: 237/238
Section: 3D
And St Augustine, bearing in mind unsavoury aspects of Constantine’s régime, could not fully accept Eusebius’ eulogy of that ruler, reserving unqualified praise for the contemporary monarch Theodosius I (d. 395). It remained for St Ambrose to introduce a new era of intrepid churchmen by rebuking Theodosius.Pastor John notes: John’s note: Who was really in charge? Theodosius, emperor of Rome as it was, or Ambrose, emperor of Rome as it would be?
Quote ID: 4774
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 240
Section: 4A
This feeling had ancient roots. Before the official recognition of the church, many Christian writers had detested not only the Roman state but the whole philosophical education in which the Apologists had tried to dress Christianity’s Jewish doctrines (p. 210). For instance, the easterner Tatian in the second century had gloried in Christian ‘barbarity’. {107} And he was echoed by Tertullian, who after initially attacking all deviations from official doctrine (c. 197) {108} had later identified himself with their most extreme version, Montanism.
Quote ID: 4775
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 204 Page: 241
Section: 3C
A newly elected bishop of Carthage was denounced by his colleagues from the less sophisticated regions of Numidia, because he was opposed to the deliberate seeking-out martyrdom. The second of two rival bishops successively put forward in his place was Donatus. Like a contemporary sect in Egypt, the Donatists to whom he gave his name completely denied humanist, urban, traditional culture, and at the same time rejected the sovereignty of the church. Constantine, regarding these Donatists as irreconcilable enemies of the unity which was his aim, excluded them from the subsidies distributed to Christian churches. In spite of endless argument, the attitudes of the two sides took irreversible political shape, for and against the government (316). After Constantine’s dismissal of repeated appeals, the Donatists asked the new and crucial question of the day: what has the emperor to do with the church? And he for his part, tougher against Christian splinter-groups than against pagans, confiscated their churches and banished their bishops. The Donatists began to form a calendar of martyrs of their own.
Quote ID: 4776
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 204 Page: 241
Section: 3A2A,3C
For when his unfriendly eastern colleague Licinius was goaded by Arian defiance into reviving persecution (p. 238), Constantine thought it best that he himself, by way of contrast, should not punish disobedient Donatists, but should leave their punishment to God. Yet an ominous tradition was already established: Christianity, as soon as it became official, had begun to persecute Christians. In the east, too, Constantine confiscated the churches of the various sects, and forbade them to hold services. {112}
Quote ID: 4777
Time Periods: ?
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