Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Number of quotes: 141
Book ID: 57 Page: 1
Section: 1A,4B
Looked at from a sufficient distance, if indeed any distance is sufficient for a clear view, what seems to confront the observer of the religious scene in the period of my chosen title is a transition from one Establishment to another.
Quote ID: 1252
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 57 Page: 1
Section: 1A
In that knowledge we focus our attention on the winner (and it is an old saying that history doesn’t like losers). We write off the losing Establishment, we pay it no mind; we look closely only at the rising Church, in which all significance seems to lie.
Quote ID: 1253
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 57 Page: 2
Section: 1A,3C
Whatever might have been said back in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, by the twentieth it had become clear and agreed on all hands that nothing counted after Constantine save the newly triumphant faith. From that point on the “Roman” had become “the Christian Empire.”
Quote ID: 1254
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 2
Section: 1A
It is now possible to see that there might well be a story to tell of a good deal of significance, involving the two systems as both alive and interacting to a much later point in time than anyone would have said until recently. A part of the interest in their interaction lies in their quite different structures.
Quote ID: 1255
Time Periods: 17
Book ID: 57 Page: 2
Section: 3A2B
In the succeeding generation, Theodosius promulgated harsh anti-pagan laws and ordered the destruction of the huge, the world-famous, Sarapis temple in Alexandria.
Quote ID: 1256
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 4
Section: 3A2B
They misrepresent, first, because what was written in the past had to be transmitted from generation to generation across succeeding centuries, and those centuries, as everyone knows, constituted a differentially permeable membrane: it allowed the writings of Christianity to pass through but not of Christianity’s enemies.
Quote ID: 1257
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 57 Page: 4
Section: 3A2B
Quite to the contrary: at the very point of origin, back then in late antiquity, both secular and ecclesiastical authorities repeatedly destroyed unedifying texts, in well advertised ceremonies, most obviously in sectarian disputes where rival claims for orthodoxy were pitted against each other; whereupon one of them along with its creeds and treatises would be declared heterodox by the other, and measures would be taken to insure that no trace of its existence remained except, perhaps, what might be embedded in victorious disproofs and rejoinders.{4}
Quote ID: 1258
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 57 Page: 4
Section: 3A2B
Non-Christian writings came in for this same treatment, that is, destruction in great bonfires at the center of the town square. Copyists were discouraged from replacing them by the threat of having their hands cut off.{5}[Footnote 5] To evidence in MacMullen (1984) 125 n. 15 on Celsus and Hierocles and at p. 164 n. 49 on Sibylline oracles, add Thurman loc. cit. on the campaign against the texts of Porphyry, which were targeted earlier also, cf. Soc., H. E. 1.9 of 325 (PG 67.85A) and CJ 1.1.3.1 (a. 448); also, unspecified pagan writings targeted in 529, Constantelos (1964) 375; again in a. 555 at Antioch, cf. Vita S. Symeon. Iun. 161, Ven (1962 - 70) 1 p. 144; and in 562 in the easter capital, Malal. 18f. p. 491 Dindorf and Michael Syr., Chron. 9-33 = Chabot (1899-1910) 2.271 two episodes, one involving thousands of books in “Asia.” Contrast the careful copying of accepted writings on the best materials, e.g. Hier., De viris ill. 113 (PL 23.707)
Quote ID: 1259
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 57 Page: 4
Section: 3A2B
Together with the destruction of unwanted books, unwanted fact itself might disappear even in those books that were not destroyed, because of their partisan reporting. The father of ecclesiastical history, Eusebius, in a particularly serious aside, disclaimed the telling of the whole truth. Rather, he proposed to limit his account to “what may be of profit.” His example found favor among successors, by whom all sorts of details were bent out of shape or passed over, events were entirely suppressed, church councils deliberately forgotten, until in recent times even the wrong saint and pope might vanish from the record, or almost.{6}
Quote ID: 1260
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 57 Page: 5
Section: 1A
As the rich and influential became increasingly Christian, or we may say, as the upper ranks of the church themselves became more rich and influential, so the chances improved of their version of things being written down and circulated.
Quote ID: 1261
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 57 Page: 5
Section: 3A2B
Historians’ consensus, such as it was until at least the 1980s, rested on a corrupt foundation.
Quote ID: 1262
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 57 Page: 13
Section: 3A2B
More to the fore were specific demands for aggressive action by fulminating synods or individual zealots, of whom I may pick out Firmicus Maternus in 346, adjuring the emperors, “Little remains, before the Devil shall lie utterly prostrate, overthrown by Your laws, and the lethal infection of a vanquished idolatry shall be no more. . . .The favoring numen of Christ has reserved for Your hands the annihilation of idolatry and the destruction of profane temples.”
Quote ID: 1264
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 57 Page: 14
Section: 3A2A
Among those enemies, not to be forgotten, were Jews and Manichees against whom laws and arms were turned in about the same period and manner,{43} while sectarian rivalries within the church continued unabated and with freer use of force, now that it was safe (so, in the century opened by the Peace of the Church, more Christians died for their faith at the hands of fellow Christians than had died before in all the persecutions).{44}For a concurrent note see Gibbon, 1.XVI (Vol. 2 in my series, p. 79).
Quote ID: 1265
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 57 Page: 14
Section: 3A2A
Christian readiness for action carried to no matter what extremes has not always received the acknowledgment it deserves in modern accounts of the period. Among them, prior to the 1980s, readers will be hard put to find Firmicus’ word “persecution” describing the conduct of the Christian empire toward its non-Christian subjects. Instead they will find a reference to that happy moment in 312 “when the era of persecutions ended and Christianity became publicly established in the Later Roman Empire.”
Quote ID: 1266
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 15
Section: 3A2A
The lynching of Hypatia took place toward the beginning of the fifth century (A.D. 415). Her fate is illuminating. It may be recalled that, snatched from the street by a mob of zealots in Alexandria, she was hacked to death in the gloom of the so-called Caesar-church and her body burned. She was a non-Christian and a prominent voice for her views; she had become the focus of the patriarch Cyril’s resentment; the lector had caught his master’s wishes and led the crowd that killed her. All this seems certain.{47}
Quote ID: 1267
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 57 Page: 16
Section: 3A2A
Yet another century still, and the bishops assembled in council (at Toledo in 681), like Firmicus quoting vengeful verses from Deuteronomy, called on the civil authorities to seize and behead all those guilty of non-Christian practices of whatsoever sort.{53}
Quote ID: 1268
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 57 Page: 18
Section: 4B
When their own beliefs were ridiculed, they answered indirectly through comic pieces on the stage, in both western and eastern cities. It was an age-old tradition to present the Olympian family as a target for laughter but something new to add the local saint or bishop; and perhaps against the church another tradition was invoked as well, of free speech against despotic or dictatorial force such as the little people in the audience as individuals would never dare to voice out loud—for that matter, like the theater in Communist-occupied Czechoslovakia.{62}
Quote ID: 1269
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 57 Page: 26
Section: 3A2
From Alexandria, Severus [PJ: "of Antioch" @460–538] and Zacharias removed to Beirut to study law. There they learned of the discreet paganism of certain leading citizens, whose servants and friends could be persuaded to expose and inform against them. The first victim of the Christians’ efforts fell at their feet in terror, asserting his true Christian faith and lamenting what had only been a recent lapse from it. He convinced them of his sincerity and they let him off, but kept an eye on him. Their success encouraged them to form a small society, to elect a president, receive further denunciations, and bring charges against various fellow students before the bishop. Public hearings held by the latter and the city Recorders culminated in a second bonfire, this time of suspect books, and in the flight of the accused.
Quote ID: 1270
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 57 Page: 27
Section: 3E
Especially so under Justinian (527-565). A brutally energetic, or energetically brutal, ruler enjoying a very long reign, he pursued the goal of religious uniformity as no one before him. “He did not see it as murder if the victims did not share his own beliefs.” Those he disagreed with he was likely to mutilate if he didn’t behead or crucify them; and among a number of highly placed pagans who escaped baptism by suicide, at least one he pursued to the grave, and buried him like an animal; apostates, he declared, should be executed.{89} Persecution came in waves, or at least it is so reported, toward the start of his reign, again in 545/6 and 562, and at the very end: “There was a great persecution of pagans, and many lost all their property. . . .A great terror was aroused . . . with a deadline of three months to be converted.”{90}
Quote ID: 1271
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 57 Page: 30
Section: 3A2
A time would come, however, at different points in different localities, when government would have passed into the hands of Christians alone, or in such preponderance that the legal system became wholly an instrument of persecution—by 450, let us say.
Quote ID: 1272
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 57 Page: 34
Section: 2B2,3C
When Constantine, therefore, at the very center of his capital, the New Rome, placed his image portraying him as the Sun God, with rayed head and thunderbolt in hand, atop a huge red stone column, there receiving sacrifices and prayers exactly as Caesar’s statue on its column, in old Rome had once been the object of prayers and offerings, or again, when his smaller image was paraded about the hippodrome in the so-called Sun Chariot, among torches, and saluted ceremoniously from the royal box—by his successors, on their knees—no doubt ecclesiastical protest should have been instant.
Quote ID: 1275
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 35
Section: 3C,3D
By orators, careful to say only what was safe and more than safe, Christian emperors from Constantine on continued to be addressed to their face as “god-like,” divinus, or even as “god,” deus; still at the accession of Justin the Second in 565, the poet laureate rejoiced that kings offered him their bowed heads, “tremble before his name, and adore his divinity.”
Quote ID: 1276
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 35
Section: 3C
During his lifetime, Constantine referred to his father as divinized and made elaborate arrangements for his own worship after his own decease.
Quote ID: 1277
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 39
Section: 2E4
So far as regulation had rested with the central authorities through lists of days to be observed by the army or by any city sufficiently duteous to notice them, the world changed with Constantine’s conversion, for Christian emperors, outside of the imperial cult, could not prescribe pagan days and rites as an obligation.
Quote ID: 1279
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 39
Section: 2E4
So, too, the birthday of Helios at the winter solstice persisted, on December 25th, as did the vernal equinox of March 21st;{19} also a first-of-March festival of which little is known.{20}
Quote ID: 1280
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 39
Section: 4B
Otherwise, traditions of local independence were too long established to be much affected by incorporation into the Roman empire; shared festivals were few, and each city observed its own holy days. Almost nothing is known of these past the third century, for lack of resources; but we know they continued in some places for hundreds of years.{22}
Quote ID: 1281
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 57 Page: 41
Section: 3A2A
Addressing at least this supreme provocation, law eventually decreed the death penalty for Christians joining in pagan festivals. There is no sign it was enforced; the irritation it was intended to remove had yet to be endured awhile.{27}Pastor John notes: John’s Note: look up
Quote ID: 1283
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 41
Section: 3A2
A glimpse of the irritation appears toward the year 409: at Calama in Africa Proconsularis, “at the June 1st festival, the impious ceremony of the pagans was celebrated without hindrance from anyone, with such impudent audacity was not ventured in Julian’s day: an aggressive crowd of dancers in this precinct passed directly in front of the church doors. And when the clergy attempted to prevent such an outrageous thing, the church was stoned.”
Quote ID: 1284
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 57 Page: 42
Section: 3A1
That was against the law. For Constantine had spoken and legislated against the slaughter of animals in offering to the gods; so had his son, followed by Theodosius most sternly in the 390s.
Quote ID: 1286
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 42/43
Section: 3A2,3E
It is safe to say that the law was not enforced in any quite Prussian manner; yet the emperors certainly meant what they decreed. Any of their subjects who offered sacrifices should be executed, this in 352, in 356, and again in 451; should be exiled, perhaps more realistically, since before Justinian we hear of no one in fact put to death for this particular crime; should be dismissed from rank and office; or should lose all property and rights to bequeath it, thus bringing his relatives to bear upon him.
Quote ID: 1287
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 45
Section: 2A3,3A2A
Perhaps, therefore, it was inevitable that legislation aimed at first at sacrifices conducted by high personages in the name of whole communities should be broadened intentionally to include those more ordinary folk and more ordinary acts that Libanius declared innocent. “It shall in no wise be permitted to hold convivial banquets in honor of sacrilegious rites in such funereal places as temples, honoring not the living but only “dead” gods, or to celebrate any solemn ceremony. We grant to bishops of such places the right to use ecclesiastical power to prohibit such practices,” and provincial governors shall second them without excuse or delay.
Quote ID: 1288
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 57 Page: 51
Section: 3A2B
Then was the fated moment for the assault on Sarapis [PJ: in 389]. At the head of a great mob of Christians, “one of the soldiers, fortified more by faith than by arms,” with an axe smashed at the jaw of the god, and others joined in to hammer off the head and burn the whole.{61}....
The bishops’ aim was of course to demonstrate as insultingly as possible the ridiculous nothingness of sacred images.
Quote ID: 1291
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 74
Section: 3A2
In the 380s, Diana cult provoked the bishops of north Italian churches; again in the opening years of the tenth century the abbot Regino of Prum found somewhere in ecclesiastical records of the ninth what were there termed “great crowds” of women who, reporting on their experiences during deathlike trances, had careered about the skies with a mistress at their head named Diana. In the eleventh, the fourteenth, the sixteenth century her worshipers had nonsense phrases on their lips, strange new names for the objects of their worship, strange couplings with Satan. Bishops became more than ever disgusted; their persecution became ever more angry and particular. It was a witch-hunt.{2}
Quote ID: 1292
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 57 Page: 83
Section: 4B
Under Diocletian’s rule, the rate of increase in government was hugely accelerated. Increase continued more slowly over the next century or so. Impossible, though, any exact census of the administration must remain, still, it is safe to say that the roughly three hundred career civil servants in the reign of Caracalla (a. 211-217) had become thirty to thirty-five thousand at any given moment in the later empire, a change attributable in the greater part to Diocletian.{18} Over the same period, the clergy, too, grew enormously.
Quote ID: 1293
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 57 Page: 86
Section: 4B
Little pagans and little Christians of more or less the same social stratum went to school together, went to the baths together, and together watched and learned from grown- ups of every religious persuasion dealing with an illness in the family, a bad harvest, or other similar challenges to understanding.
Quote ID: 1294
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 88/89
Section: 4B
There is a certain heresy regarding earthquakes, that they come not from God’s command and indignation but, it is thought, from the very nature of the elements, since it knows not what scripture says at Ps 103.32. . . . Paying no attention to God’s power, they presume to attribute the motions of force to the elements of nature, . . . . like certain foolish philosophers who, ascribing this to nature, know not the power of God.{31}Pastor John’s Note: look up
....
The Greeks, silly men, lavished their time and effort on the identifying of the elements in nature, etc., etc.; but “to the infinite number of points regarding such matters as they have discovered, or think they have discovered, a Christian will pay no mind.” No need to know how nature works, for such pretended knowledge is irrelevant to blessedness.
....
To a different Eusebius of the same period, this one the familiar church historian, “Investigation of natural phenomena is superfluous and beyond the human mind, and the learning and study of these matters are impious and false.”
....
Chrysostom, just like earlier bishops, vaunts the wisdom of the believing unlearned over the unbelieving learned; ridicules and rejects Plato and the other great names of the philosophic pantheon, just as Constantine had done; dismisses their teachings as mere cobwebs; and in the end approves only “rustics and ordinary folk.”{36}
Quote ID: 1295
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 57 Page: 91
Section: 2A3,2E6
Satanic agents were to be seen as the cause not only of wars and rebellions, persecution and heresy, storms at sea and earthquakes on land, but of a host of minor or major personal afflictions. So, in consequence, Christians were forever crossing themselves, whatever new action they set about, and painted crosses on their foreheads, too, from Tertullian’s day forward, responding to their leaders’ urging them to do so. It would protect them against all evil, so said Lactantius.{43}
Quote ID: 1296
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 57 Page: 93
Section: 2E6
Still another church historian, Theodoret (bishop of Cyrrhus 427-449), writes of the saving of Nisibis from Persian armies by the prayers of its bishop from the battlements, bringing down a plague of gnats upon the enemy; and he mentions with less detail the dragon reduced to dust by the signing of the cross in its face by a holy man.{48} Dragon-encounters by church officials and holy men are often recorded in the eastern regions as well as in the west.
Quote ID: 1297
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 57 Page: 94
Section: 2D3B
But Augustine himself is the obvious figure to focus on, to determine the place of the wonderful in his most mature thinking. The last book within his major opus is the best place to look. Here he recalls the excitement at Milan, when he was last there, over a miraculous restoration of sight brought about by Saints Protasius and Gervasius. The prior miracle by which Ambrose had recently discovered their remains was one on everyone’s lips; this other, of healing, was witnessed by huge crowds.
Quote ID: 1299
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 57 Page: 95
Section: 2A3
Fuller description is given to the entry of a water demon into a local youth who is rendered insensible by the invasion and is carried to a shrine which contains certain relics of Protasius and Gervasius. There the demon, driven out of his victim by the hymns of the lady who owns the land, seizes the alter “with a terrifying roar, unable to move, as if chained or nailed there, and confesses with a great howl” (like the demon that Ambrose on another occasion exorcized before the eyes of his whole congregation) “just where, when, and how he had entered the youth.” As he leaves, he pulls out one eye of the youth, but, replaced, it is as good as ever.
Quote ID: 1300
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 95
Section: 2E6
In medieval France, as we must call it post-400, what the elite thought about the operations of the divine can be read first in Sulpicius Severus, whose hero Martin could raise the dead to life, among his other supernatural acts and powers; Bishop Germanus (d. 448) doing the same; and there is the priest of Caesarius of Arles telling how that bishop’s staff, planted on a hilltop overlooking a farmer’s fields, protected them from bad weather and guaranteed their rich crops; also Nicetus of Trier impressing a Lombard monarch with scenes from around the shrines of various saints in France, dramatic with healings, where “the afflicted (those having demons) are suspended and whirled around in the air and confess the power of the Lords i.e., the saints that I have named to you.”{56}Pastor John notes: John’s Note: look up
Quote ID: 1301
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 96
Section: 2E6
No encomiast of wonders is more familiar than Gregory of Tours (ca. 538-593). His Saint Stephen from the tomb flies to the rescue of distressed mariners and, returning dripping wet, wets the floor of the shrine.{58} Everyone could see the fact, in support of the subsequent testimony of one of the men he saved. Gregory’s Saint Caluppa, ascetic in a cave, is visited by dragons which, when he makes the sign of the cross at them, decamp; and the account is confirmed by the detail that as they left they farted monstrously.
Quote ID: 1302
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 57 Page: 96
Section: 2E6
In Italy, the land of Livy’s birth, various literary figures in the later empire write about and evidently credit such wonders as the apotropaic powers of the sign of the cross, protecting flocks and herds; dramatic exits of demons from the possessed; and the riveting of a sinner in his place, unable to move, paralyzed, until carried to the tomb of the saint he had dishonored where he confesses and is freed.{63} The writer is Paulinus of Nola.
Quote ID: 1303
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 57 Page: 96
Section: 2E6
Another Paulinus, biographer of Ambrose, describes the bishop’s relics able to drive out spirits from those who were brought to him in his church; and “there the throngs of demons shouted aloud how they were tormented by him, so that you couldn’t stand their howls.”{64} (look up) Like other writers, Ambrose himself bestowed the term “patron” on the saints of Milan Protasius and Gervasius, as Paulinus of Nola did on Felix, seeing in them a force to shape the history of their homes.{65}
Quote ID: 1304
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 96
Section: 2E6
And another Gregory, the Great, credits the bishop of Todi with exorcisms, restoration of sight to the blind, even restoration of life to the dead; credits Benedict with many wonders, too, and the bishop of Placentia likewise, able to control the flooding of the Po by dropping a letter of command into its waters.{66}
Quote ID: 1305
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 97
Section: 2E6
He describes Severinus’ mission to Noricum some generations earlier in which a chief instrument were the bishop’s demonstrations of divine power, to resuscitate the dead and banish blight from the wheat fields; even, by marking boundary posts with the cross, toward off floods.{68}
Quote ID: 1306
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 57 Page: 97
Section: 4B
Everyone knows that the world after the Decline differed from antiquity, everyone has some sense of what “medieval” means when “science” is mentioned and how the explanations offered by the one differ from those offered by the other.
Quote ID: 1307
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 57 Page: 98
Section: 4B
In the earlier years of the present century Gustave Bardy had only to refer to it in an aside. “Is it not,” he asked, “one of the most characteristic traits of the third century—that blind faith and irrational engagement, by the best minds, in diviners of every sort and origin, in wonder-workers and prophets? Historians have yet to explain this invasion of the Mediterranean world by the worst superstition.”{70}....
Given the proportions and significance of the phenomenon, such lack of scholarly interest seems odd.
Quote ID: 1308
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 57 Page: 99
Section: 1A
[Bold used]People do not like to be told their faith is utter nonsense. Witness in a very different age the reactions to Gibbon’s famous twenty-eighth chapter, shot through as it was with contempt for “ignorant rustics,” the “vulgar,” “the prostrate crowd,” and the transfer to the church of “the superstition of paganism.”{73}
Quote ID: 1309
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 57 Page: 99
Section: 4B
The contempt shown by Lucian and his like for their inferiors was not, it should be emphasized, a thing unheard of in later times—times when the views they had once scorned now generally prevailed. It is in fact easy to find the masses looked down on or at least seen as very different from the educated among the upper crust of the church in Basil’s day, or Augustine’s, or at any point thereafter. Illustrative passages have been cited at various points already, and discussion in modern sources appears just below (note 80).
Quote ID: 1310
Time Periods: 2456
Book ID: 57 Page: 103
Section: 2A3
A generation earlier, an eastern bishop addressing his flock on the feast day of a martyr asked them, “What offering shall we bring to the martyr in repayment, what gift in thanks? . . . Let us, please, dance to him in our usual way.”
Quote ID: 1311
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 57 Page: 109
Section: 2A
Here as throughout this chapter my aim is to describe the flow of practice andbelief from the old faith into the new. With that end in view, I sketched various practices in paganism, above, for comparison at this point; and they are indeed evident in Christianity.
Quote ID: 1312
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 57 Page: 109
Section: 2A3
Christian burials were protected with the usual old invocations of divine punishment upon any person disturbing them; the stone was occasionally inscribed with the usual old formula at the top, “To the gods and the ghosts of the departed,” d(is) m(anibus); and the disposal of the body by cremation only slowly gave way to inhumation, by a change of custom which took place anyway in the non-Christian population as well, so that its origin is hard to establish and the religious loyalty of the deceased is likewise hard to establish, at least from archeological data.
Quote ID: 1313
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 111
Section: 2A3
The identical nature of the Christian and non-Christian cult of the dead appears not only in its physical details themselves, all of those just reviewed being of the third century and so at the earliest end of the chain of information we possess; but they are clear as well in the impossibility, sometimes, of determining which religion is represented by a given piece of evidence: for example, in the line of a third-century epitaph from Mauretania, where the dedicants recall how “We decided we would add on this stone table,” mensa, to their mother’s grave.....
Or it may equally be said: for hundreds of years, the pagan cult of the dead was a common part of Christianity.{25}
Pastor John’s Note: look up
Quote ID: 1314
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 113
Section: 2A3
In Rome, the focus of cult was naturally on Paul and Peter, at various times and points in and about the city. The apostles were the object of pilgrimage recorded in hundreds of graffiti, the largest number under the present-day San Sebastiano. Here as elsewhere, the faithful acquitted themselves of vows to provide the martyrs with the refreshment of a banquet in return for their favor. One memorial was pierced to receive the pouring in of wine, while the pair together under San Sebastiano were equipped with a handy dining area and benches.{31}There is nothing to distinguish the physical arrangements for martyr cult from all those that so
commonly surrounded the unsanctified dead. The latter setting indeed proves useful to explain
the former.
2A1
Quote ID: 1315
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 113/114
Section: 2A3
It is convenient to begin a more detailed account around the turn of the fifth century, with the verses of Paulinus, bishop of Nola. It was he who there put Saint Felix on the map, so to speak, by advertising and richly patronizing the martyr’s tomb; and since his acquaintance numbered the very most cultivated, the very richest of the western empire, to whom his accounts were well known, as he wished, clearly he is describing nothing that he thought odd or shameful. He is therefore a good witness for the practices of his day. His building program at the shrine included a cleared space (already mentioned, above at p. 11) enfolding a porticoed court decorated with frescoes showing appropriate religious scenes. For the walls of the chapel in which lay the tomb, he commissioned inscriptions to describe and glorify the martyr; on other walls he dedicated the shavings of his youthful beard, and he notes the testimonials on display, hung up by grateful ex-sufferers.{32} The slab over the tomb itself was pierced, the burial filled with aromatic unguents by the faithful; also with wine, “for they,” the worshipers though not Paulinus, “believe, wrongly, that the saints delight in having their tombs bathed in the fragrant wine.” They came with candles and torches, bringing votive incense, silver, and rich textiles. On festival days, the banquets of slaughtered animals as offerings which the local rich contributed, like those in temple precincts of yore, drew the poor to share in them; there was singing, of course, and for the laetitia everyone stayed up all night.{33} It is a picture of worship even to its slightest points of action and belief recognizable by Pliny or his like, were he only supplied with one necessary clue: that graveside cult and some admixture of temple cult could flow together.
Quote ID: 1316
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 57 Page: 114/115
Section: 4B
Augustine wanted everything serious. His strictures one day provoked much grumbling from his congregation: hadn’t the people, before, who raised no objections, been Christians? The challenge he confronted on the morrow with carefully chosen words."That it might not seem as if we wished to put down our forebears, who had either tolerated or did not dare to forbid such excesses of an unthinking people, I explained by what necessity this bad custom seemed to have arisen in the church. For, when peace came after so many and such violent persecutions [i.e. post-313], crowds of pagans wishing to become Christians were prevented from doing this because of their habit of celebrating the feast days of their idols with banquets and carousing; and, since it was not easy for them to abstain from these dangerous but ancient pleasures, our ancestors thought it would be good to make a concession for the time being to their weakness and permit them, instead of the feasts they had renounced, to celebrate other feasts in honor of the holy martyrs, not with the same sacrilege but with the same elaborateness, luxus."{37}
The explanation he offered was of course not quite straightforward; for the “ancient pleasures” that converts wouldn’t surrender were not so much, or at all, the feasting that attended worship in the temples, however convenient he found it at this particular moment to depict them as such; rather, what had flowed into martyr cult was graveside cult, and this he chose not to correct.
2A1
Quote ID: 1317
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 115
Section: 2A3
Well, such was indeed the pagan view of the rewards in refrigeration, as was acknowledged by bishops quoted above, indeed by Augustine himself in comparing the offerings to “a sort of parentalia, very much the same as those of pagan superstition”; and various texts have been quoted also to show that the same hopes of conciliation prevailed among most Christians in the act of martyr cult. More evidence will appear a little later.{39} Truly, if no conciliation, what could possibly have been the purpose of pouring a little wine into a tomb, inhabited, so everyone said, by a superhuman being (though not to be called a god!)? By what claim might you ask such a being to bear you in mind? What point to all the toasts, what point to the invitation that he should “Enjoy the party”? What could be the point of all the other offerings? Augustine, however, avoids these challenges by saying only what may well have been the case: nobody within the clergy had ever stood at an altar proclaiming it to be a saint’s and there made any offering.2A1
Quote ID: 1318
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 115/116
Section: 2A3
About the same time that Augustine was obliged to defend the boundaries around martyr cult, so was Jerome.{40} “Why,” he was asked by a certain Vigilantius, speaking perhaps from experiences in the west but most recently from a visit to the Holy Land as well, “why must you honor with such great honor, or rather, adore” the martyr in his tomb? And he goes on to say, “We see something close to a pagan rite brought into the church in the guise of religion: in full daylight, a mountain of candles lit,” and so forth. To which Jerome replies, specifically, that “we do not light candles, as you vainly and untruly allege, in the daytime but only to lessen the darkness of the night,” in vigils (which he must have known was by no means the case). “And bear in mind,” he goes on, “that we are not born Christians, but re-born; and because we once worshiped idols, are we now not to worship God?—lest we appear to venerate him with the same honors accorded to idols?” So Vigilantius’ accusation must be borne, after all. Yet “what used to be done for idols, and is therefore detestable, is done for martyrs, and on that account is acceptable.” His defense at the center of it sounds just like Augustine’s: pagan usages had inevitably entered the church in the past, inevitably they still did so and could not be excluded, because converts could not be expected to leave all of their paganism behind them.
Quote ID: 1319
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 120
Section: 2A3
The country people especially were forever finding another martyr and setting up an altar on or by the burial.{51} Everyone, meaning rustic and urban nobodies alike, unbelievable because unauthorized enthusiasts, stole and then advertised other people’s martyrs, i.e. relics, in Egypt of the 360s; there, again, some decades later, showed themselves no better than “drunk with false knowledge, who say, The martyrs have appeared to us and told us where their bones lay”; provoked an imperial decree from the eastern capital in the 380s to control the marketing of relics; from about the same date on, accounted for a strange novelty in France that amounted to fraud in the invention of martyrs, so it was charged; induced in Africa a resolution from the assembled bishops in 401 “that altars set up here and there in the countryside and along roads as if in memory of martyrs, in which it is shown that no body or relics of martyrs have been deposited, shall be overthrown, though, if this is impossible because of demonstrations by the people, at least the population should be admonished”Pastor John’s Note: everyone was eager to advance the cult!
Quote ID: 1320
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 120
Section: 2A3
The sequence of incidents and testimonies to such spontaneous and unregulated enthusiasm may, more or less arbitrarily, end with a certain rascal (so seen by the Roman council of 745), Aldebert, who claimed to have been visited by nothing less than an angel in a dream and vouchsafed relics by which he could obtain all sorts of wonders from God.{52}
Quote ID: 1321
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 57 Page: 120
Section: 2A3
Beyond all or any of this surge of religious energy, Lucius it was who saw the meaning that lay in a match of dates: the abrupt rise in martyr cult began in the generation preceding Julian, that is, starting in the latter years of Constantine, just when the numbers of converts began immensely to increase as well.{53} Here was more than coincidence. The two facts must be bound together as cause and effect. Converts evidently needed what they had put away, or something very like it.....
For, by their own act, they found themselves without gods. A strange way to put it.
2A1
Quote ID: 1322
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 121
Section: 2A3
Conversion and the repudiation of their old patrons and rescuers among the divine ranks had left an emptiness, a loneliness in times of trouble, not comfortably to be filled by the Power preached from urban pulpits. We find Augustine again and again contesting his congregation’s doubts whether God should be bothered about affairs of everyday life.{54}
Quote ID: 1323
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 121
Section: 4B
“There are those who say God is good, great, the top, beyond our perception, incorruptible, who will give us eternal life and that incorruptibility which he has promised in the resurrection, while temporal matters and matters of this world belong to daemones,” to superhuman beings of a lower order, those that scripture calls demons and the heathen, gods.2A1
Quote ID: 1324
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 121
Section: 2A3
In a very similar strain, a generation earlier, Basil had confronted his people with their inclination, when some minor problem or anxiety beset them, to turn to daemones.{55} But there was a Christian answer: sanctified martyrs were the answer. If we happen to know of no miracle wrought by any of them for, with, on, or among hens, yet in Italy at Nola, it was Saint Felix who cured one’s larger animals, Felix who found the runaways; in Bithynia, Saint Hypatius, in Cilicia, Saint Thecla; in France, Martin who exorcised a demon from a mad cow or Fides (Foy) who would resurrect one’s mule. Perhaps we may add Saint Germanus, though in his living self, not from the tomb, who almost met Augustine’s challenge: ministering not to a hen but to a rooster which had somehow lost its cock-a-doodle-doo.{56}2A1
Quote ID: 1325
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 121
Section: 2A3
Absent the doctors of today, hospitals, clinics, drugstores, or any accepted pharmacopoeia, what else would one expect them to do? In this realm of difficulty, Christians were well served in Basil’s and Augustine’s day by the powers from the tomb.{57} The principal business of the martyrs, by far, then as for a thousand years to come, was to restore fertility, straighten limbs, clear the sight, or untwist the mind. Like Asclepieia, like sacred springs presided over by their healing deities, the martyria served as hospitals to urban and rural masses alike—even as the resort of the wealthiest, once they learned the limits of their medicos.
Quote ID: 1326
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 122
Section: 2A3
The need for divine help, as the traditional was banished by mission and persecution together, was no doubt enormous; to supply it, the Christian God might seem very distant; but the beneficence of the sanctified dead was close and comfortable. The religious world of antiquity thus retained or resumed its traditional character “under new management.”
Quote ID: 1327
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 122
Section: 2A3
However, the negative means of demonstration should be considered as well: the fact that benefits sought not from saints but directly from God are very rare (I recall seeing only one or two). He assured the greatest benefit of all, salvation from eternal torture; favors merely in this life and on this earth were more naturally in the gift of the saints, thanks to whose great numbers and comforting nearness, the loss of the old gods could be borne.
Quote ID: 1328
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 123
Section: 2A3
He goes on to remind his listeners of the source of that power, God not the saints; and Augustine and other bishops and church writers do the same very insistently.{60} In vain, so we must suspect, much or most of the time.Pastor John’s Note: Theodoret
Quote ID: 1329
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 123
Section: 2A3
Even the educated of the church often expressed themselves in a way that left out God entirely, in the working of miracles, or came to terms with the divinity in saints: John of Damascus, for one, insisting that they were “truly gods.”{61}
Quote ID: 1330
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 123
Section: 2A3
Of an infinite number of illustrations, a bronze stamp may be instanced, to be used in the manufacture of clay lamps, inscribed with words, “Receive, O Saint, the incense, and heal all,” where the holy Symeon is addressed, and a picture drawn of the suppliant with censer in hand; or the sixth- and seventh-century lots may serve, surviving on papyri from Antinoe and Oxyrhynchus and inquiring about people’s individual concerns from the “all-conquering God of Saint Philoxenus” or “of Saint Kollouthos”; but sometimes, instead, the inquiry addresses the saint unassisted.{62}
Quote ID: 1331
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 123
Section: 2A3
Before as after Vigilantius and Faustus, there were even openly expressed perceptions that conflicted with the sole divinity of God; for, says Augustine, “I know many people are worshipers of tombs and painted representations.” He uses a word, adoratores, which in his lexicon carries a meaning that reserves it for address to God alone.
Quote ID: 1332
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 123/124
Section: 2A3
First, Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, presiding in 429 over the resurrection of two martyrs’ remains to prominence and veneration at a site, Menuthis, only a morning’s walk from his own great city. Thus Saints John and Cyrus displaced a long-famous healing shrine dedicated to Isis. Cyril delivered three celebratory orations on the event, explaining that “these districts were in need of medical services from God,” and, in that need, “those who had no martyr shrine went off to other i.e., Isis’ places, and, being Christians, thus went astray; so, out of necessity, for this reason we sought out the remains of holy martyrs.”
Quote ID: 1333
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 124
Section: 2A3
What he makes plain as his strategy finds an echo in Pope Gregory’s directive for the conversion of the Angles, “that the shrines should not be destroyed but only the idols themselves. Let it be done with holy water sprinkled in those same shrines and let altars be built and relics be placed there so that the Angles have to change from the worship of the daemones to that of the true God”; and thus, with the shrine intact, “the people will flock in their wonted way to the places they are used to.”{65}
Quote ID: 1334
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 124
Section: 2A3
There is no saying if the feelings of reverence and love toward the divine beings at the center of the traditional ritual inspired the celebrants of the Christian imitation, too, since we lack the same sort of revealing texts from individual worshipers of Christian times that have survived from the pagan; but there is no reason to suppose that much was lost, so to speak, in translation. In other respects the Christian vigils seem to have been nearly identical with the pagan. Too nearly: they were sometimes condemned as immoral by church authorities, as has been seen; yet the authorities also tolerated them, having little choice, or, like the pope, actually instituted them.
Quote ID: 1335
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 125
Section: 2A3
Their success appears in the seamless join of the old to the new. Occasional accounts of miracles at the tombs show us pagans making their appeals to the saints in uncertainty as to just what wonderful being was to be found there, and by what name. Sometimes conversions resulted.{67} The converts had cared little for sect or theology, only for relief from what ailed them.
Quote ID: 1336
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 125
Section: 2A3
They resided in a big, famous resort for healing in the capital, and, like John and Cyrus, charged nothing. At one of Asclepius’ best known centers, in Aigai in Cilicia, not very long after Constantine had destroyed the building, the cult of Cosmas and Damian became established as “his real successors.”{69} Similarly, Apollo’s healing spring in Bithynia was turned into a center of healing by Justinian, presided over by the archangel Michael, the latter being “quite obviously” the successor.{70}
Quote ID: 1337
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 125
Section: 2A3
To leave the subject of “ordinary” saints, for a moment, and pursue the angelic: Michael, like Cosmas and Damian, maintained an important residence in the suburbs of Constantinople, built for him by Constantine and extravagantly amplified by Justinian. Justinian also built or improved a Michaelion near Perge in Pamphylia and another, elsewhere; later, likewise, the emperors Leo and Zeno. The church historian Sozomen recalls how he himself was made whole by the archangel in the Constantinopolitan center, like many other suppliants whose wonderful stories were to be heard there, pagans included; and pagans applied to Michael at his Colossus home, too, where he had brought a spring forth from the earth and healed through its waters.{71}
Quote ID: 1338
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 125
Section: 2A3
Michael’s services to the church and the high honor in which he was manifestly held throughout the empire from Italy to Syria were at odds with the condemnation of angel worship in the 360s, by the Council of Laodicea.{72}
Quote ID: 1339
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 125
Section: 2A3
He was thus at home in all three religious systems; but the home was itself too magical.
Quote ID: 1340
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 126
Section: 2A3
Accounts of the archangel’s miracles of healing, for which he was especially noted, add details to the broad outline of his cult: that suppliants to his power, like those in scripture but in all paganism around them, too, need only believe to receive his healing; that he worked his wonders through the application of water from his sacred springs, as did Cosmas and Damian or Cyrus and John, or Thecla; and somehow the fish in those springs were also sacred to Michael.{74}Pastor John Note: Where?
Quote ID: 1341
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 126
Section: 2A3
The descriptions of epiphanies—how the saints appeared, spoke, and were thanked with hymns and offerings—make use of the vocabulary and phrases familiar in, for example, the worship of Asclepius.{77}
Quote ID: 1342
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 127
Section: 2A3
The traditions that surrounded divine healing seem thus to have flowed forward from eastern pagan to eastern Christian without check or change.
Quote ID: 1343
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 128
Section: 2A3
Those origins were of course troubling to Augustine, in speaking of misguided adoratores of the representations of martyrs; troubling notoriously in the provinces of the iconoclastic controversy, much later; and troubling still at the turn of the millennium to the monk Bernardus of Angers, hagiographer of Saint Fides (Foy). He described her miracles and cult in the village church of Conques, some twenty-five miles from Rodez in the south. There she sat enthroned, a little less than life-sized, covered with jewels and herself (at least her face) of pure gold. The devout had somewhere found the image of an emperor of Julian’s time or thereabouts and used it to make a reliquary.{87} Thus as the focus of imperial cult in the fourth century, from the ninth on it gained in fame as a worker of wonders, generally of healing but of many other acts, too. Bernardus was challenged to defend what appeared, to “the learned,” to be “very much like the rites of the ancient worship of the gods, or rather, of demons.”
Quote ID: 1344
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 128
Section: 2A3
The true character of this extraordinary image, the oldest surviving from the medieval west, has been rightly described as “marking the continuity of the Christian religion with the pagan” in sculptured terms.{88}
Quote ID: 1345
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 129
Section: 2A4
Processions of images had always been at home both in this part of the world and elsewhere throughout the pagan empire, still inviting condemnation by the bishops in the eighth century.{89} The ritual accounted for Saint Martin’s mistake in thinking that a funeral procession which he met on a country road was rather a religious parade. Celebration and advertisement of the saints through the parade of their relics or perhaps their images (they are termed “the martyrs”) Gregory Nazianzenus described as early as the 380s, with, of course, a familiar history subsequently. The flow from non-Christian into Christian usage was thus unbroken.
Quote ID: 1346
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 130
Section: 2E1
What could one do, after all, with a man frank to acknowledge to the chief of his churches, “We have received from Divine Providence the supreme favor of being relieved from all error”?{93} Meanwhile a rule had been broken. A jeweled gold image of Jesus was provided to the Peter shrine by the emperor at Xystus’ request.Pastor John’s Note: Constantine
Quote ID: 1347
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 131
Section: 2A3
Until grown familiar, however, veneration of images could hardly escape suspicion as heathen idolatry.
Quote ID: 1348
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 131
Section: 2E1
Eusebius goes on to mention the plant found nowhere else but at the foot of the Jesus statue, growing in the dirt that gathered there, which the pious picked and used for healing. Just so, the pious picked simples and herbs in Artemis’ temenos at Ephesus. Whatever place plants grew, near a grave or in a cemetery or a sacred precinct, it had much to do with their medicinal properties.
Quote ID: 1349
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 131
Section: 2A3
More to the purpose: accounts of the miracles wrought by the saints from Mesopotamia to Germany through the dust around their burials run through the hagiography of the fourth to the eighth century and beyond, highly approved by ecclesiastical authority and therefore, no doubt, all the more universal and pervasive in Christianity.
Quote ID: 1350
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 132
Section: 2A3
But until the second half of the fourth century, references in our sources to martyrs’ relics and their potency are few and obscure.
Quote ID: 1351
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 132
Section: 2A3
A few years later we have Basil’s mention of the gift of dust from a martyr to suppliants (above), and the revelation to Pope Damasus of undiscovered sanctified remains, through his dreams.{102} It was by dreams that the martyrs sometimes provided not only curative prescriptions to the suppliants but news of their own whereabouts as well. Audiences were eager to receive this news, since, over the course of time, a church was thought to be hardly complete without the remains of some hero of the persecutions.
Quote ID: 1352
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 132
Section: 2A3
They wanted a means of confronting and bringing an end to the paganism by which they were still surrounded; so it may be said without too much exaggeration that “it was in fact the bishop who invented the martyr.”{103}
Quote ID: 1353
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 132
Section: 2A3
Similar heroes may be recalled from earlier pages: Saints Cyrus and John, brought in to Menuthis to displace Isiacism. In charge of the effort was the patriarch Cyril. It was he also who opposed the alleged paganism of the city’s prefect and thereby lost one of his own most zealous supporters, a monk, Ammonius; for, in the course of rioting, Ammonius so cleverly threw a rock that it opened the prefect’s head and covered him with blood. Ammonius was seized and tortured to death. Cyril recovered the body, deposited it in a church under the new name of Saint Wonderful, and delivered the usual panegyric on the martyr.{105}
Quote ID: 1354
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 132
Section: 2A3
On the model of the Athenian Aclepius shrine (above), transformed into a church with the least possible change that might affront its servants, we have the chapel to Saint Hilarius in France, built by the local bishop just by the shrine where a goddess presided over a lake—the shrine, partially excavated, and the lake named Helarius.
Quote ID: 1355
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 133
Section: 2E3
Similarly around the empire, a number of sites—Athens, Carthage, Menuthis, Philae—have been mentioned where a temple was made into a church; many other examples might easily be added to the list.{107} To some degree, the pagan past thus determined the distribution of points of worship for the Christian future.
Quote ID: 1356
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 133
Section: 2A3
In the course of advertising the powers of the martyrs, a bishop, Theodoret, was quoted some pages earlier exulting in their curative power in those regions he knew best, the eastern. He instanced as proof the display of body parts in effigy, to show the points of suppliants’ afflictions and to testify to their recovery. In the western regions, Paulinus notes with pride the effigies covering the walls of Saint Felix’ shrine.{108} Of the whole picture empire wide, there is an assessment in Gibbon’s notorious twenty-eighth chapter: “The walls were hung round with symbols of the favours which they suppliants had received; eyes, and hands, and feet, of gold and silver, and edifying pictures, which could not long escape the abuse of indiscreet or idolatrous devotion.”
Quote ID: 1357
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 133
Section: 2A3
Quite right; but Gibbon goes on to add what is no better than a half-truth: “The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superstition of Paganism, if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity.”{109} Indeed and truly, Pualinus does smile with tolerant superiority at the crowds around Saint Felix; but his condescension is directed at their illiteracy and their uncomplicated perceptions. It is not true that the church’s more educated leadership differed in their fundamental view of miracles and conspired to impose on their congregations what they themselves did not believe. So far as concerns the central matter of Saint Felix’ miracles, Paulinus was as truly persuaded as the rustics; likewise, the rest of Gibbon’s unnamed bishops.
Quote ID: 1358
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 134
Section: 2A3
The point was argued in the previous chapter, as it has been by others in the past, with illustrations drawn from a variety of contexts—some, offering miraculous cures vouched for by the ancient authors, Augustine and others, as personal witnesses from the church’s upper ranks; some, affirming the martyrs’ sterner powers to punish, if they should be too closely provoked. Augustine it is who recommends that oaths of disputants be taken in the presence of Saints Gervasius and Protasius, who could (like good pagan gods, of course) be counted on to show in some dramatic way which was the liar.{110}
Quote ID: 1359
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 134
Section: 2A3
With these figures, however, a second generation of saints has stepped upon the stage: not martyrs but persons of a life so devoted to worship that they had gained a share in divinity itself. However far their antecedents may be traced back in Egypt or Palestine, however often and widely attested was the readiness among the eastern populations to see and acknowledge divine beings before them in the flesh,{112} Christian heroes really were something new. At the very least, they were new in the attention they attracted, from the latter decades of the wonderful Antony on through the centuries, and through the genius of Athanasius, too.
Quote ID: 1360
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 135/136
Section: 2A4
First, as to their closeness to the land, people, and past; in Lycia of the mid-sixth century, the clergy of Plenios came in a procession with the congregation of the faithful, chanting and with the venerated crosses, and met the servant of God Nikolaos at the chapel of St. George. From there he went with them with seven calves. They went into the chapel of the holy George and he sacrificed the seven calves, and the crowds gathered so that there were two hundred couches. The servant of God supplied enough to distribute a hundred measures of wine and forty measures of wheat, and everyone ate and was filled and thanked God who gave grace to his servant Nikolaos (and so forth, describing identical visits on Nikolaos’ rounds of the territory). A scholar of long ago, Gustav Anrich (friend and editor to Ernst Lucius), rescued the picture from oblivion: “The description,” he explains, “shows us the survival of the old sacrificial meal made over into Christian form. The churches or oratories are still the place for slaughter, feasting and drinking, the slaughter is ordinarily described as a sacrifice (oveiv, ovoias, ). . . .
Quote ID: 1361
Time Periods: 457
Book ID: 57 Page: 138
Section: 2A5
On the floor of the Elijah church they wrote in mosaic letters, “Prophet, thou who to our prayers hast providentially stirred the rain-bearing clouds and pitied the populace, remember the donors of this humble city.” Elijah in this dry land had succeeded to the local sky god of the pagan past.{124}
Quote ID: 1362
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 57 Page: 139
Section: 2A4
As Salvian reminded his readers, having in mind such writers as Varro, Cicero, or Pliny as points of comparison, “just about everything is still being done that even those ancient pagans thought to be useless and laughable.”{126}The laughter had died out long ago. Prediction in Salvian’s own day was known to be entirely possible. Christian Powers, the saints in their martyria at Antinoe or Oxyrhynchus, replied through sortition to the anxious queries posed to them in precisely the forms that pagans once had used; Christian holy men gave insights into the future or demand.
Quote ID: 1364
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 139
Section: 2A4
There was still more frequent resort to divination through little events that signaled the operation of some superhuman agency: lots or dice cast by expert readers of such signs, thunder, sneezing, the shape of the flame on the altar when the incense was burned, or words of children at play.{129} At a most famous moment, Augustine had relied on this latter means of learning divine wishes, in fully pagan fashion. He combined the guidance of what he heard with scriptural lots, modeled on the pagan sortes but using a copy of the Bible instead of Vergil. It was best if the Bible was placed on the altar during consultation.
Martin was chosen bishop obedient to its dictates;{130} it led to “the use of clarifications exactly comparable to the pagan manuals for drawing lots,” that is, preset interpretations for each type of Bible passage that might turn up, written into the margins of manuscripts.{131} This convenience had been long familiar in earlier tradition and simply continued in common use under slightly different forms.
Quote ID: 1365
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 140
Section: 2A5
In turn, the word-sets to accomplish this are best known through what priests recited at baptisms, that doorway to the church. Every entrant thus received instruction in the doctrine. It explains why one unhappy victim paralyzed by hexing, in hopes of help, applied to Saints John and Cyrus. Sleeping in the martyrion, he was vouchsafed a vision and advice from them: to roast a pig’s lung and rub it on his body with wine: but also, to dig near his bedroom, to discover and disarm the defixio buried there by his enemy. The desired cure was thus ensured while the doctrine of demonic causation was confirmed.{133}
Quote ID: 1367
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 57 Page: 141
Section: 2A4
Or instead, as so-called ligatures, a text might be inscribed in ink on paper and worn in a tiny sack around the neck. The wearing of ligatures, common in the pagan world, was often condemned by church authority, perhaps aiming only at partly or wholly non-Christian texts. Gregory the Great as a special mark of favor sent one to the Lombard queen in Milan. He describes it as a phylactery with a few lines of scripture written on it and a piece of the true cross enclosed or accompanying it; and he himself wore a favorite phylactery.{135}
Quote ID: 1368
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 141
Section: 2A4
Among not only ordinary folk but the privileged of sixth-century France as well, protective spells “were by common custom tied about the neck for health’s sake, with exorcistic writings,” while, around Saint Peter’s, they were displayed for sale in Boniface’s day.
Quote ID: 1369
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 141
Section: 2A4
The symbol of a fish was one of the popular ones to ward off evil, and gave a shape to amulets not only for the living but to those buried with the dead throughout the western areas, from pagan times up into twentieth-century Italy and Sicily. In eastern martyria you could buy stamps to impress a spell on paper, showing a saint or his or her name and the words “Blessing of . . . . ”; or you could buy medico-amuletic armbands for the pilgrim trade inscribed with the five-pointed star (the pentalpha or Solomon’s seal), the lion-headed snake (Chnoubis), the Annunciation or Women at the Tomb, bits of Psalm 90, and so forth—a jumble of mostly Christian but also non-Christian symbols and word sets long in circulation.{136}
Quote ID: 1370
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 141
Section: 2A4
A sampling of archeological data of this sort spread across Syria, Palestine, and Egypt of the early Byzantine period “reveals a world thoroughly and openly committed to supernatural healing, and one wherein, for the sake of health, Christianity and sorcery had been forced into open partnership.”{137}
Quote ID: 1371
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 142
Section: 4B
Nevertheless, it too belonged to ordinary life and ordinary people. Opposing views once held by Pliny, Plutarch, Plotinus and their like had long since been crowded out. Bishops and their salves, aristocratic landowners like Melania the Younger and her many thousands of peasants, high and low, all agreed about the essentials: about relics, saints, angels, demons, God, and Satan. No sharp division separated the different classes within the whole population calling themselves Christian.
Quote ID: 1372
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 57 Page: 143
Section: 2A4
Bell-ringing during cult acts was common in Roman temples and, to keep away demons, in tombs throughout the empire; subsequently, of course, in Christian ritual. At many points and places, as is familiar to the present day, offerings of incense and candle--or lamplight--framed the acts of cult.
Quote ID: 1373
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 144
Section: 4B
No two churches existed, no two tiers, rather a “spectrum” of beliefs, to recall that useful term from the preceding chapter: a spectrum at one end of which was the very most authoritative, best thought-out Christianity, formed of long education in ecclesiastical traditions and literature, while at the other end lay the most careless and ill-informed. Even at the authoritative end, it is worth noticing a good deal of self-contradiction, in both rejecting as heathen and accepting as Christian the very same novelties.
Quote ID: 1375
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 57 Page: 144
Section: 1A
Inflow of novelties into the church was perpetual. And why should this not be so since the period post-Constantine brought about the baptism of so many persons raised in another religious faith?
Quote ID: 1376
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 145
Section: 1A
Just what might result can be seen in a fourth scene, also on the edge, near the Euphrates among farmers and shepherds. An anchorite who happened among them found them never meeting for worship and ignorant of the most basic parts of the liturgy. He asked them, “ ‘Tell me, my sons, are you Christians or Jews?’ But they were indignant at these words, and they say, ‘O! indeed, blessed man, we are Christians.’ ” They explained that they had not laid eyes on a priest for as long as anyone could remember, and in the interval they had forgotten whatever they or their ancestors had once known of Christianity.{147}
Quote ID: 1377
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 57 Page: 145
Section: 1A
Likewise those Christians that Isaac of Antioch (d. ca. 460) encountered in Syria; yet they continued in the rites and celebrations of the old gods and goddesses.
Quote ID: 1378
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 146
Section: 3E
And still in these Greek-speaking regions, the uncovering in the sixth century of persons in the highest positions who were active in the old faith as well as in the new, so far as it was safe and even beyond safety—these too were indicated in earlier pages.Against such, the decree of the Justinianic Code spoke out: “Since some persons have been discovered given over to the error of the unholy and wicked pagans, performing acts that stir a loving God to just wrath, . . . who offer sacrifices to insensate idols in insane error and celebrate festivals replete with every impiety, even those persons who have already been judged worthy of holy baptism,” let them now be killed.{150}
Pastor John’s Note: look up
Quote ID: 1379
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 147
Section: 1A,4B
To begin with the world of letters: it was ruled by patrons. If patrons were Christians, who would remain a nonbeliever? There were conversions, of Nonnus, Kyros, Synesius;{156} converts became bishops; yet we might look for some retrospection—some hint of Persephone (or Lot’s wife) in, for example, the verses of Ausonius.
Quote ID: 1380
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 147
Section: 1A,4B
Christian literature in either learned language was permeated by the allusions, thought, symbolism, mythology, and esthetic of the pagan past, inevitably.{157} Inevitably, too, the pagan classics permeated the life and thought of the highly educated. Tags of Vergil or Homer could not be kept out of their very epitaphs, however Christian the deceased had been; they intruded on the dreams of ascetics in the desert, so we know from the famous confession of Jerome in the 370s.{158} In fear of such contamination of the mind, the bishops tried, without much success, to displace the older canon with truly Christian equivalents, to banish nonbelievers from the school- and lecture room, and to forbid at least the clergy to read outside their faith.{159}4B
Quote ID: 1381
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 148
Section: 1A,4B
For depictions of Jesus, as for those of pagan gods, much imperial symbolism was borrowed, explaining the ball (orb, globus) held in the hand, the throne (for bishops as well), the little tent (baldachin) above the throne—except that the baldachin may have come to the emperors from the gods, and only thereafter to Christian art and ceremony.{161} There were symbolic gestures borrowed, too: proskynesis, for example.{162}Finally, an illustration of the flow of art from pagan to Christian settings: a well-known horde of silver objects found on the Esquiline hill in Rome, dating to the later fourth century, with various dishes and various reliefs showing the ancestral deities of the city; also, a bridal casket showing on one of its panels Venus at her toilet surrounded by her Nereids, and in a conspicuous place the dedication to the nuptial pair, “Secundus and Projecta, may you live in Christ!”{163}
4B
Quote ID: 1382
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 151
Section: 1A,4B
Conversions were made, because they could only be made, through intimidation and physical force. So the authorities evidently judged.
Quote ID: 1383
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 151/152
Section: 3E
Two hundred and fifty years after Constantine was converted and began the long campaign of official temple destruction and outlawry of non-Christian acts of worship— 250 years after great buildings in the capital, great estates in the west and east alike, and great sums of cash and precious metals were first lavished on his coreligionists by the first Christian emperor—Justinian was still engaged in the war upon dissent. To this end he bent his armies and his treasury, his power to mutilate or crucify, exile or bankrupt, build and bribe. His general, Narses, assigned a regiment to the minutely careful smashing of offensive wall carvings in a temple which we happen to know about because it has been excavated and studied, while his agent in charge of the peaceable side of the effort, a certain John, was supplied with the equivalent of many months’ wages to offer to each person willing to be baptized. Eighty thousands were the harvest of John’s efforts, as we happen to know because he very naturally boasted about them.Pastor John notes: John’s Note: !!!!
Quote ID: 1384
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 57 Page: 152
Section: 1A
So much for my first chapter—and its conclusion I make no attempt to determine when the thorn was finally removed, or when paganism had disappeared for good and the Grand Event which I set out to describe was over. In fact the event in some sense, I would say, never ended, at least not if the disappearance of paganism is what’s in question.
Quote ID: 1385
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 153
Section: 4B
For an illustration: the sociocultural equivalent of Ambrose, but of the period before 250, would have explained hailstorms to you in natural terms; but after 250, whether Christian or pagan, high or low, such a person would have explained it in terms of supernatural agencies.
Quote ID: 1386
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 57 Page: 153
Section: 4B
Elite and masses were in broad agreement about how the universe worked, though they put different names to the superhuman agencies at work in the world and preferred different forms of address to them.
Quote ID: 1387
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 57 Page: 153
Section: 1A,4B
It must not be forgotten, since both pagan and Christian spokesmen drew attention to the fact, that conversion under pressure was unlikely to reach very far down into the mind. Prudential considerations, to curry favor or gain a rich wife, or not to lose one’s job or one’s life, diminished the meaning of conversion. True, post-Constantine, everything encouraged a sense of triumph and conviction among the crowds attending church; but everything also encouraged hypocrisy.{2} In the nature of the case no one today can make any good guess at the depth or prevalence of the converts’ inner feelings.
Quote ID: 1388
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 154
Section: 1A,4B
The results of the surge of recruitment, as they are described in the fourth chapter, were not destructive of the church. Quite the reverse: a wonderfully dynamic phase in church history commenced in which the deficiencies outlined in the opening paragraphs above were largely made good. The initial and lifetime appeal of the new faith was enormously enhanced. Christianity became (as a salesman would say today) a “full-service” religion. Converts could find in it, because they brought in to it, a great variety of psychological reward that had been important to them before, when they had addressed the divine within the pagan tradition.
Quote ID: 1389
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 154
Section: 2A3
Foremost was the cult offered to the immortal in humans, the everliving spark or spirit of the dead. Its beliefs and practices as they were to be found among most pagans in every region of the empire flowed into Christian communities and their cemeteries. The cult of the dead became equally widespread and flowed into and was gradually replaced by the cult of the specially honored heroes of the Christian history: the martyrs. Additionally, in due course, prayers, offerings, and thanks were offered by pagans and in due course by Christians to living or dead men (not women, at least for some centuries) whose habits of life expressed an extraordinary concentration on the divine—themselves “divine men” in the traditional Greek phrase, theioi andres, wonder-workers, who appeared to be addressing the divine and acting out its teachings in their every waking moment.
Quote ID: 1390
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 154
Section: 2A3
Martyrs, divine men, and certain angels together were “the saints.” With certain prophets, their worship constituted the chief point of growth, drama, and interest in the church throughout the period of my study. It was, however, no more vital and significant than problematic; for nothing in it lacked obvious antecedents in pagan grave cult.
Quote ID: 1391
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 154/155
Section: 1A
The creed that was the true heart of the Christian community in the first century or two of its existence was retained untouched by the inflow of new members after Constantine. Church organization, too, showed no effects.{4} But in the ideas and rites just described a large area of new loyalties opened up. Augustine called the sum total of imported paganism among his congregation their “mother,” while what he himself would teach them was “the father.”{5} They must choose; or he hoped they would. But he could not make them do so. He conceded that they must be allowed some latitude in their manner of worship.
Quote ID: 1392
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 155
Section: 2A3
At just about the same time, toward the beginning of the fifth century, Jeromemade the same acknowledgment: better, worship of saints in the pagan manner than none at
all.{6}
Quote ID: 1393
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 155
Section: 2E4
The same need forced the invention of many celebrations during the year, since Christians’ attendance at events like the Kalends proved too much for the church leadership to control except by competition (and these indeed survived all too vigorously into the sixteenth century and later, west and east alike).{7}A twelfth-century Syrian bishop explained, "The reason, then, why the fathers of the church moved the January 6th celebration [of Epiphany] to December 25th was this, they say: it was the custom of the pagans to celebrate on this same December 25th the birthday of the Sun, and they lit lights then to exalt the day, and invited and admitted the Christians to these rites. When, therefore, the teachers of the church saw that Christians inclined to this custom, figuring out a strategy, they set the celebration of the true Sunrise on this day, and ordered Epiphany to be celebrated on January 6th; and this usage they maintain to the present day along with the lighting of lights."{8}By similar inventions other popular pagan celebrations were directly confronted with a Christian challenge. Saint John’s day has been instanced, also the festival of Saint Peter’s throne; or the Robigalia of April 25th, in protection of the crops against blight, perpetuated for the same ends on the same date under the title Laetania Maior. There are many other examples of the process.
Quote ID: 1394
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 57 Page: 155/156
Section: 2E3
In the same way, the choice of where to build shrines for Christian worship was dictated by the location of the antecedent pagan ones. They must be challenged and resanctified, if not rather destroyed.
Quote ID: 1395
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 156
Section: 2E3
It is really no wonder that so many worshipers who flocked to them should continue in their old habits of mind, the time and place so reminding them of traditions.
Quote ID: 1396
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 156
Section: 2E5
The worshipers’ too traditional piety, the bishops hardly opposed—indeed, believed, approved and passed on the saying of Demetrios of Thessaloniki to a suppliant in a vision, “Don’t you know that the saints are moved to their good offices the more, according to how long an offering,” a grand, big candle as opposed to a small one, “works and is a alight?”{11}2E5
Quote ID: 1397
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 156
Section: 2A3
What Eusebius had ridiculed in pagan practice continued unchanged, except in the Powers addressed: do ut des went with prayers for counsel, prayers for miracles, and testimonial dedications.
Quote ID: 1398
Time Periods: 3456
Book ID: 57 Page: 157
Section: 2A4
A propitiating kiss bestowed on the doorpost of a temple was just as well given to a church; likewise the honorific bow in the direction of the rising sun, offered “partly in ignorance,” says the pope, “partly in a pagan spirit” by worshipers pausing as they climbed the steps of Saint Peter’s.
Quote ID: 1399
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 157
Section: 2A4
In addition, because they were surrounded by superhuman beings of evil intent, Christians made use of various devices to protect themselves. These devices, all but signing with the cross, derived from non-Christian practices.
Quote ID: 1400
Time Periods: 3456
Book ID: 57 Page: 158
Section: 2A3
Nevertheless, these suppliant messages continued to be directed to whatever Powers might be, by Christians as by pagans, regardless of warnings from the pulpit, because the realities of life demanded relief, and the teachings of the ecclesiastical directorate did not suffice to fill the demand. Hence, the abundant borrowings, or rather, the continuation, of ancient usages, made tolerable in large measure by the changes described in my third chapter. After some centuries, a part of these usages were reduced, a part reluctantly allowed, a part heartily embraced within official Christianity.
Quote ID: 1401
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 158
Section: 4B
Official Christianity—the older, the urban, the bishop-directed—might be declared the whole, all that counted or deserved the name: a community with a creed, resembling as closely as possible the community sketched in the opening paragraphs, above, with all its deficiencies—a religious system, then, of a certain strict, narrow structure. The pagan system had a very different structure which events forced upon the church and so in good measure reshaped it.
Quote ID: 1402
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 57 Page: 159
Section: 2E5
A female image of pagan times near a spring in Savoie, a mother-goddess-made-Saint Mary, wrought miracles of healing attested from the seventeenth century, through the water that flowed first from her breasts and, then, when for decency’s sake these were hammered off, from a pipe issuing at the image’s base, into the second half of the twentieth century.2E5
Quote ID: 1403
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 57 Page: 159
Section: 1A
Yet it serves to support once more my chief point: that the grand event which I have tried to describe did not and could not conclude in any sort of a total eclipse or displacement of the past. The triumph of the church was one not of obliteration but of widening embrace and assimilation.
Quote ID: 1404
Time Periods: 124
End of quotes