Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Number of quotes: 92
Book ID: 58 Page: 8
Section: 2E2
For example, ancient Isaics “possessed a moral system purer, more elevated than that of classical Roman religion. Who did not feel his soul shaken with feelings of admiration as he watched those votaries of Isis plunge thrice into the frozen Tiber and, shivering cold, creep about the temple?” But some non-Christian spectators saw it instead as madness; indeed, so did some Christians, before Saint Anthony had established new modes of worship.
Quote ID: 1405
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 58 Page: 10
Section: 4B
Human sacrifice, at least, was to be found in the past of the Etruscan, Roman, Punic, and Celtic populations. But that was all over, in the centuries that concern us.
Quote ID: 1407
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 58 Page: 10
Section: 1A
The religious views most easily recoverable from the non-Christian Roman world do not, at any rate in some respects, strike a modern reader as alien or outlandish.
Quote ID: 1408
Time Periods: 16
Book ID: 58 Page: 11
Section: 2A3
Their religious views we might suppose began with, or logically rested on, ideas of immortality. Homer portrayed man as having a soul, and Elysian Fields to go to after death. Plato taught of life indestructible. When you hired one of the town’s eloquence professors (never a priest) to speak at the funeral of a loved one, he followed the book, the conventions of his culture, even literally a little handbook on speechification composed for the more customary occasions. He would work himself up to a passionate pitch, according to the rules of his art, and then, perhaps with a catch in his voice at the most effective intervals, extemporize a bit; “for it is not unsuitable on these topics also to philosophize,”. . .
Quote ID: 1409
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 58 Page: 12
Section: 2A3
Resurrection in the flesh appeared a startling, distasteful idea, at odds with everything that passed for wisdom among the educated.
Quote ID: 1410
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 58 Page: 12
Section: 2B
The Highest ruled by some figure, perhaps very abstractly conceived, that Plato had envisioned and descendants in his line of thought had elaborated over centuries, a figure without corporeal qualities, needs, or susceptibilities, perfect in every respect: One God, maker of heaven and earth. All other beings could be seen as mere expressions of his will: in short, monotheism.
Quote ID: 1411
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 58 Page: 13
Section: 2B2
Living worshipers, in the world we are considering, instead entered a shrine of Isis to put up a vow or an altar to Aphrodite, and the priest let them. They worshiped Mithras in Hadad’s temple. West or east, wherever one looked, there reigned a truly divine peace and undisturbed religious toleration.
Quote ID: 1414
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 58 Page: 15
Section: 4B
Theirs Christians, however, was no crime per se; for sacrilege punishable by law referred to actions not so much against piety as against property (temple-robbing). Nor was atheism illegal on the municipal level.
Quote ID: 1415
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 58 Page: 16
Section: 4B
On the other hand, the emperors themselves pressed no special religious views on their subjects, who no doubt waited with curiosity to see which deities would receive the publicized favor of each new ruler.
Quote ID: 1418
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 58 Page: 17
Section: 4B
To the possibility of a new deity and new cult, no opposition arose.
Quote ID: 1419
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 58 Page: 17
Section: 2B
That the deity presented was sole and unique likewise raised no difficulties. Something close to monotheism, by one approach or another, had long been talked about and attracted adherents among Greeks and Romans alike. That He should be envisioned as a monarch enthroned on high was familiar; that He should have his angels and other supernatural beings to do his work, just as Satan had his throngs- that was familiar too.
Quote ID: 1420
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 58 Page: 18
Section: 2E
More sharply still, the real God was pictured as being at war against all rivals, ranged with his angels in combat against Satan.Such a view “impiously divides the kingdom of god and makes two opposing forces, as if there was one party on one side and another at variance with it” (it is a non-Christian speaking here, of course).
Quote ID: 1421
Time Periods: 347
Book ID: 58 Page: 19
Section: 4B
It was not the church’s liturgy, nor morals, nor monotheism, nor internal organization (when these things were correctly understood) that seemed to non-Christians much different from other people’s or at all blameworthy. At least, there is no evidence for anything of that sort.
Quote ID: 1423
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 58 Page: 19
Section: 4B
As to Christians’ everyday neighbors, whose ideas of social entertainment were inextricably rooted in festival practices (even if those were no more than superficially religious), they felt offended at being snubbed. Surely that was natural, at times, too, historically important, the chief cause of suspicion, dislike, and readiness to persecute.
Quote ID: 1424
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 58 Page: 20
Section: 4B
. . . how much there is to be found on practice and how relatively little ancient comment or discussion exists about that practice. I suppose the disproportion is mostly due to the unimportance of dogma.
Quote ID: 1425
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 58 Page: 22
Section: 1A,2D3B,4B
. . . the Apostles’ success in winning recruits arose from their deeds, above all, in healing.
Quote ID: 1426
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 58 Page: 22
Section: 4B
We cannot easily divest ourselves of our great knowledge and superior reasoning, so as to think more nearly like the people of the Roman Empire. They, however, took miracles quite for granted. That was the general starting point. Not to believe in them would have made you seem more than odd, simply irrational, as it would have seemed irrational seriously to suppose that babies are brought by storks.
Quote ID: 1427
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 58 Page: 32
Section: 4B
But it is just here that more puzzling problems arise. How did it ever happen that the church could grow at such a rate, so as actually to predominate in occasional little towns or districts by the turn of the second century and, by the turn of the fourth, to have attained a population of, let us say, five million?
Quote ID: 1428
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 58 Page: 33
Section: 4B
The church before Constantine had only a tiny share in what was at all times a tiny segment of the population, the elite; and the setting usually assigned to its leaders is the catechetical schools, to which were admitted only persons already converted.
Quote ID: 1429
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 58 Page: 34
Section: 4B
That adds up to a fact recognized also in the abstract: that, after Saint Paul, the church had no mission, it made no organized or official approach to unbelievers; rather, it left everything to the individual.
Quote ID: 1430
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 58 Page: 35
Section: 1A,4B
Granted, because rich and distinguished Christians “nowadays offer welcome to them on account of the word,” some are drawn into the work by hopes of social climbing.
Quote ID: 1431
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 58 Page: 35
Section: 4B
During most of the period I speak of, from around A.D. 100 to 312, Christians as such avoided attention. The fact is well known and easily illustrated.
Quote ID: 1432
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 58 Page: 37
Section: 4B
We should listen also to non-Christians who describe them; and first, to Celsus. There, the Christians’ injunctions are like this: “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils. But as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly.” By the fact that they themselves admit that these people are worthy of the God, they show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable and stupid, and only slaves, women, and little children . . .
Quote ID: 1433
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 58 Page: 38
Section: 4B
We have to confront the fact, because for us it is most important: it prevents us too from drawing close to what was a predominantly lower-class religious movement. Christianity after New Testament times is presented to us almost exclusively in pages addressed to upper-class readers. And they preferred to keep a good distance between themselves and their inferiors.
Quote ID: 1434
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 58 Page: 39
Section: 2E3
A particularly striking example is the meeting-place Christians bought or leased in the western basement rooms of a building in Rome, now Santa Prisca, toward the start of the second century, adjoining which were other rooms already in use by a non-Christian group,{12}.
Quote ID: 1435
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 58 Page: 44
Section: 2B2,3C
However deep or shallow its wellsprings, imperial preference was not at all influenced by strategy. Constantine himself, for years after A.D. 312, continued to pay his public honors to the Sun. They were paid in coin of the realm - rather, on coins, in the form of images of the emperor shown jointly with Sol; but other coins showed the Chi-Rho sign; so it was known that both compliments were acceptable to Constantine.
Quote ID: 1436
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 44
Section: 3C
. . . it is therefore quite mistaken to conclude that “Constantine’s revolution was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.” It wasn’t that, nor can the great majority of his subjects have seen it that way. Its immediate effect on them was nil.The distinction needs to be drawn in this way between the emperor’s favor, freely shown, out of his feelings toward the church, and his favor shown in order to gain political advantage; for, further, it governs the kinds of inducements and therefore the kinds of response that make up the whole history of conversion post-312.
Quote ID: 1437
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 45
Section: 2B
Equally anxious not to give offense, the men in the ranks were accustomed to shout monotheistically, in choral invocations of divine help and approval: “they called god as witness, in their usual way, that their leader” (here, Julian, the ardent non-Christian) “was invincible”; and he replied that “god and myself are your leaders”; but the same nameless power was invoked for the troops’ encouragement by a Christian commander, or they initiated the invocation themselves, “the whole assembly...calling god” (or “God”? The capital letter does not reveal itself viva voce) “as witness in the usual way, that Constantius” (ardent Christian) “was invincible.”
Quote ID: 1438
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 58 Page: 45
Section: 3A1
. . . we have the one breach of toleration certainly recorded: a moment when three legions in the east support a (non-Christian) pretender with “the invocation of Jupiter, as soldiers do.”
Quote ID: 1439
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 45
Section: 2B2,3C
Even the best reasoning must occasionally yield to fact; and it is no doubt a fact, even though reported by Eusebius - devout, obliging, panegyrical biographer of Constantine - that the emperor did some evangelizing among the Palace Guard and gave Sundays off to his coreligionists in the forces generally.A capital error, however, leading to or showing all sorts of fundamental misunderstandings about the empire and its normal operations, is to suppose that after A.D. 312, specifically, on “Oct. 28, 312, the army of Constantine became officially Christian.” Evidence that there was widespread in the empire a sense of lawful norms in religion, other than mutual respect among all faiths, that these norms were customarily to be enforced by the chief officers of the state, or even that some vaguer kind of religious guidance was to be sought from the ruler, cannot be found so early in the century.
Constantine, then, was not expected to change the faith of his men “officially”, and made no great effort in that direction; but he and his remaining rival in the east, Licinius, could not avoid some statement on the subject - it seemed to be, after all, a moment only of hiatus in the persecutions. So they issued one of many most ambiguously worded calls, in those decades, for piety “toward the divine and holy” (or similar periphrases). Believers of every persuasion could certainly swallow that.
Quote ID: 1440
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 47
Section: 2E1,3C
Commemorating his victory in 324, Constantine’s mints in his new eastern domains issued coins showing him spearing Licinius (portrayed as a nasty dragon) with the staff of a little battle flag. On the flag was the Chi-Rho, or Christogram.. . .and his sons adopted the same symbolism. But it was so empty of religious meaning by the 350’s that it could be displayed by a non-Christian, the pretender Magnentius, in issue after the issue for years.
Quote ID: 1441
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 47
Section: 3A1,3A4,3C
Turning back to our point of departure, the weight of religion in Constantine’s day, we have noted that two-thirds of his government at the top were non-Christian.
Quote ID: 1442
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 47
Section: 2C
There is, in summary thus far, an easy case to be made for a live-and-let live tradition within the armed forces, against which the Christians predictably but not very strenuously made their objections felt. How else could it have happened that, after Julian’s abrupt death when the army turned to the choice of a successor (it had become their traditional right to make that choice), they first settled on a pious pagan? But he was too old, so they turned to Jovian the Christian. And who were “they” anyway? Two little coteries of high officers, we are told.Therefore Julian himself had chosen to keep on under his own command, undisturbed, the enemies of his own faith.
Quote ID: 1443
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 48
Section: 3C,4B
Our point of inquiry has thus been turned all around and subjected to various questions from various angles. Were coreligionists given a monopoly in office by an incoming emperor in this half-century up to the mid-360’s? No. Did emperors or their men use good clear language when they called on divine aid in the camp, and did the symbolism of victory that they used for advertisement in army settings have a clearly religious meaning? No. The negatives all prepared us for the final question, whether the political history of this period can be written in religious terms at all. The answer is surely no.On an unofficial level, the physical facilities for non-Christian worship in every city and, for that matter, in most rural settings as well, were regularly given as a present.
Quote ID: 8160
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 49
Section: 3C,4B
The role of patron, then, permitted Constantine in his new faith to have “quite enormous consequences,” as I termed it a few pages back.
Quote ID: 1444
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 49
Section: 2E3,3C
Best known are the extraordinary number, size, and grandeur of the basilicas with which Constantine enriched the church in Rome, many of them also assigned great endowments of land and other wealth, others in Aquileia to the north, Trier, Antioch, Nicomedia, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Cirta, and Savaria. In some now-lost decree, he exempted church lands from taxation; he ordered provincial officials to make available materials and labor for construction; set up a system of gifts of food to churches, grain allowances to nuns, widows, and others in church service; excused clerics from shouldering onerous, sometimes ruinous, civic obligations, indeed, saw that they were given regular “contributions” from the fiscus; and, in short and in sum, “presented the churches with many things.” Overnight, it seemed, he created “a Christianity whose bishops and clergy had had their social horizons blown wide open by finding the open-handed Constantine in their midst.”
Quote ID: 1446
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 50
Section: 3C
The fear inspired in his subjects, needing no armed force in supplement, is easily understood. The empire had never had on the throne a man given to such bloodthirsty violence as Constantine. He could hardly control the tone of his proclamations. For instance: “The inhabitants of Egypt, especially the Alexandrians, were accustomed to offer cult-worship through eunuch priests. Constantine issued a decree that every species of androgyne ambigender should be exterminated as a sort of monstrosity” - that is, subjected to summary execution - “and that no one henceforward should be seen contaminated with such impurity.”The 320’s and 330’s did not, then, see the forces of law or the police enlisted under the banner bearing the Chi-Rho - indeed, the regime had announced from the start, as its explicit policy, that everyone should respect everyone elses religion. But it was easy to see what the emperor really wanted; easy, too, to calculate the costs of countering the will of so angry an autocrat.
Constantine was a quarter-century on the throne as a Christian monarch, the first ever. In so long a reign, though its Christian years had begun without the least intent to propagate the Faith, his violent energies were gradually and to some degree drawn into a more truly Christian posture of active aggression: error, he saw, must be confronted and given its right name, and those who counted as his coreligionists must all pull together, “lest the Highest Divinity should be aroused not only against the human race” (bad enough, one would think) “but even against me, myself.”
Quote ID: 1447
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 51
Section: 3C
But of far greater importance, and the chief reason for that enormous impact he had on the rate of the church’s growth, was the set of his measures making his favor explicit and official: first, toleration decreed; second, money or its equivalent assigned in such forms as tax exemptions and grand buildings.
Quote ID: 1448
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 52
Section: 1A,4B
. . .we have the campaign between two North African congregations to secure for themselves their share of the good things in life. In the town of Tagaste, where the very rich Albina Martyred
Quote ID: 1449
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 58 Page: 53
Section: 3A3B,4B
The costs of pagan worship could be very considerable. Fancy offerings like an ox required a city’s purse; private offerings you had to save up for, and then you sent out invitations to the feast.Around pagan shrines it was not uncommon to find a dependent population. In good times, to which Libanius looked back regretfully in the later fourth century, the temples stood open, “and there was wealth in every one, a sort of common resort for people in need.”
The kind of generosity he remembered at its grandest appears for us in the second century, in proof of the boundless ambition of mind of a provincial millionaire, “which he would, for example, often turn to the sacrificing of a hundred oxen to the goddess (Athena) on a single day, banqueting the Athenian citizen populace at the sacrifice, tribe by tribe, clan by clan; and whenever the Dionysus-festival came around, in which the image of Dionysus descends to the Academy, he would provide drink in the Ceramicus for the city residents of all sorts, including aliens, as they lay on couches of ivy leaves.” How delightful! Of course, all this was easily brought to an end.
Or placed under new management. Judaism taught concern for poverty (and who outside that tradition in the ancient world would have been recorded on his tombstone as “a lover of the poor”?). The tradition carried forward within Christianity. As the pagan temples closed, the churches opened: . . .
Julian was right to see this transfer of function to his rivals as important to their success.
Quote ID: 1451
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 58 Page: 53
Section: 3D
It was such considerations of a material sort that often appear to have been decisive in the selection of late Roman church leaders - like Synesius, not really a Christian, or like Saint Ambrose, not even a priest, both of whom were correctly judged to be of the right circles, eloquence, vigor, and place in the world to provide strength at the summit of the community. Time of Theodosius
Quote ID: 1452
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 53
Section: 3C
Constantine’s sons continued and extended their father’s gifts to the church - gifts of exemptions from taxes and inheritance rights “and ten thousand other matters, as he Constantius reviewed them, through which he supposed he might bring his subjects over to the faith.”
Quote ID: 1454
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 55
Section: 3D
Ambrose intervened and supported his fellow bishop, resisting until in the end, “the authority of divine law being explained, at last and with difficulty the emperor gave in to our reasoning.”
Quote ID: 1455
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 55
Section: 3D
Last, in A.D. 394, the triumphant emperor Theodosius turned from the battlefield where non-Christian arms had been defeated and addressed the stubborn center of non-Christian loyalties, Rome itself. He had before him a delegation of senators come to his palace. He made “a speech calling for the abandoning of the error in his terms that they once espoused, and the adoption of the Christian faith, the good word of which brought acquittal from every wrong doing and impiety” - a speech for conversion, in sum, and from the very throne. Yet it availed nothing. The senators could only talk about their ancestral heritage. “Theodosius then replied that the Treasury was overloaded by the costs of cult and sacrifices, he wanted to abolish them, and he did not concur in these practices. Besides, military necessities required the cash.” Against reasons of state, naturally the senators could put up no argument.
Quote ID: 1456
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 56
Section: 3D
Theodosius assumed that people, at any rate some people, could be turned into coreligionists with his party and himself simply because it would cost them too much money to refuse. He was right, if he can be allowed his own notions of what was involved in becoming or being a Christian. At the very outset of the Christianizing of the monarchy under Constantine, Eusebius noted and deplored “the unspeakable hypocrisy of those accepting the church and adopting the facade, the deceitful name of ‘Christian.’” He gave the cause as “fear of the emperor’s menaces,” which we have seen mentioned already. As a Christian, however, and if otherwise well enough connected, you could line up to receive some of those confiscated estates. You could qualify better for imperial appointment, too, . . .
Quote ID: 1457
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 56
Section: 3C
You could even win a new and improved municipal charter for your hometown by informing the emperor that it was now (he would be glad to know) completely Christian. So the port city of Maiouma told Constantine, who renamed it Constantia. It was, in sum, manifestly profitable in worldly terms to declare yourself Christian; . . .Some apparent converts were moved by their alarm; “others, envious at the honor in which Christians were held by the emperor, deemed it necessary to follow in the emperor’s path.
Quote ID: 1458
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 57
Section: 3D
The penalties for not subscribing to the religion of the new Establishment by this time, from A.D. 380 or so, were thus being felt throughout the upper levels of society and, of course, much more sharply among the more vulnerable folk. They yielded a natural harvest. But all converts were to be accepted - “that they are false is not for us but for God to judge.”From the 360’s on, there were also times when the man at the top, Julian or a pretender, was non-Christian. Such moments were few and brief; yet they, too, produced their evidently insincere “converts.”
It is reasonable to guess that the bias in source-transmission has passed on to us more information about conversion or apostasy to the church than away from it. Still, it is obvious in which direction the current was flowing the more strongly.
Quote ID: 1459
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 57
Section: 3C
Things changed after A.D. 312. Thereupon, people simply not of a very religious temperament were drawn to the church, at least to its periphery, and constituted a numerous though not very stable group. They were far too numerous to be ignored, nor did the church want to ignore them.Their [general Christian public, not devout] role is a little more important, too, than the purely numerical one of being counted by someone as Christians. They added to the impressiveness and presence of the church. Thereby they played a casual part in the inclining of others to a slower, more serious conversion. Though too ignoble to have ensured any record, the change of heart that began out of mere imitation, fashion, and respectability must surely be assumed to have been at work in the great burst of growth that the church enjoyed after Constantine.
Quote ID: 1460
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 62
Section: 2E2,2E6
Occasionally the bargain was explicit: acknowledge God or be punished. So an ascetic of Hermoupolis in Egypt reduces a procession of non-Christian worshipers to frozen immobility, right in the middle of the road, through spells; and they cannot regain the use of their limbs until they “renounce their error.”
Quote ID: 1461
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 58 Page: 63
Section: 2E6,3C
In Alexandria in A.D. 391, by whose instigation we are not told, but in any case in the wake of the great antipagan riots, “busts of Sarapis which stood in the walls, vestibules, doorways and windows of every house were all torn out and annihilated..., and in their place the sign of the Lord’s cross was painted in the doorways, vestibules, windows and walls, and on pillars.”
Quote ID: 1462
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 63
Section: 4B
Mass media in antiquity were pretty limited. Such as they were, however, they belonged almost entirely to the church and its advocates. In the cities, at any rate, you heard the town crier roaring out the emperor’s decrees, full of preaching (see above, 12, p. 50) . . .
Quote ID: 1463
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 64
Section: 4B
Of all the instruments of publicity favored in the empire, rhetoric was by far the most familiar.
Quote ID: 1464
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 58 Page: 64
Section: 4B
Maximus of Turin ]PJ: 380?–420? or 465], in the passage just quoted, goes on to appeal to his listeners for their active alliance: you may be good Christians yourselves, he says, but you must not neglect “your people; for there is hardly one of you whose fields are not polluted by idols, hardly any estate held free of worship to demons. The obligation fell on the master, then. He must address himself to the non-Christians among his dependents.
Quote ID: 1465
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 58 Page: 65
Section: 1A,4B
“Many people,” says John Chrysostom [PJ:349–407] in Antioch, “have villages and estates and pay no mind to them nor communicate with them, but do give great attention to how the baths are working, and how the rates are set, and how halls and houses are constructed - not to the harvest of souls...Should not everyone build a church, should he not get a teacher and make a congregation and, above all things, see to it that all are Christians?” Reference - Hamily on the book of ActsJust as the emperor’s servants followed his lead (though not always), so the slaves and tenant farmers and dependents of one of those counts or senators, or any rich man, were open to both pressure and persuasion from him.
Consider the convert who was a slave in a non-Christian household. Insubordination! All sorts of problems! So, before Constantine, the church in Rome, and presumably elsewhere, sharply rejected such additions unless they had their master’s support. Later it still insisted, through the arm of the state, that he should determine the religion of his slaves - that is (at this quite different juncture), the master should enforce their religious conformity by means of a good beating, or, if one weren’t enough, “by progressively heavier beatings.” Here once more is the question: In what sense do you have a convert when he yields to mere force? We have confronted the problem before. So long as one got the semblance of results, Augustine, for one, saw no difficulties. Neither did Saint Gregory somewhat later. It is reasonable to take their views as representative of the religious Establishment overall as it had by then developed throughout the empire, because the same views are embodied in imperial legislation and accord entirely with that faith in violence that will be described in a later chapter.
Quote ID: 1466
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 58 Page: 66
Section: 4B
In rural settings, too, the population with no land, or too little land to support independence, was really very much under the thumb of a big man. This was true in the second century. A letter of Pliny describes what the role of religious leadership involved on his own holdings, not only for the benefit of his tenants but also to accommodate big crowds of worshipers attending the holy days at a shrine that happened to be on his property. In Spain in the third century there was a local custom according to which a landlord remitted to his tenants their costs for sacrifices, I suppose because the sacrifices were thought to be as much in the landlord’s interests as anyone’s. [USED] But these benevolent times were pre-Christian. A century later, the emperors announced that they would confiscate the lands of any man who so much as allowed, even in ignorance, a meeting for prohibited worship on his acres. Such an announcement, with introductory sermonizing of a highly colored sort, would be promulgated by being read aloud in public places at the most crowded times.
Quote ID: 1467
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 58 Page: 69
Section: 4A
So an illiterate hermit might “philosophize” or a pious nun be called “philosopher”.
Quote ID: 1468
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 58 Page: 75
Section: 1A,2A
In other words, ritual gives authority to belief; and Christianity must not be seen to need anything of the sort from the pagan past.
Quote ID: 1469
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 58 Page: 76/77
Section: 3D
Emperor-worship likewise, as is well known, continued in its more formal aspects: the appointment of provincial high priests, for instance, and the display of imperial images in the chapels of troop commanders and high civil officials. But there were popular manifestations of a genuinely enthusiastic kind that should have been intolerable but weren’t. How could Theodosius in his capital, even that self-consciously Christian monarch, officially rebuke the pious throngs that propitiated the statue of Constantine with sacrifices, lighted lamps, incense, and prayers (and expected this cult to ward off evil in return)? What minatory notice could he possibly take, from his ceremonial carriage, when crowds in a town turned out to welcome him, pagan priests at their head? Or when a no doubt highly nervous orator called him a god to his face, “What are you going to do,” as the girls asks in Oklahoma, “spit in his eye?”
Quote ID: 1470
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 78
Section: 2A3,2B2
The tangible record gives the same impressions of shared territory. For example, among the grave-goods of late Roman Egypt, very much the same things are found whether the burial be Christian or not. In a Pannonian grave was placed a box ornamented with a relief of the gods, Orpheus in the center, Sol and Luna in the corners, but the Chi-Rho as well; elsewhere, in Danube burials, similar random mixtures of symbolism appear, with gods and busts of Saint Peter and Saint Paul all in the same bas-relief. The Romans who bought cheap little baked clay oil-lamps from the shop of Annius Serapiodorus in the capital apparently didn’t care whether he put the Good Shepherd or Bacchus or both together on his products. . . .
Quote ID: 1471
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 58 Page: 82
Section: 3D
. . . directly, when the families of the losers in the civil war of A.D. 394 took refuge from the battlefield in churches, though themselves non-Christians, and the victorious emperor Theodosius let them redeem their lives by becoming Christians.
Quote ID: 1472
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 83
Section: 3D
In Egypt, history hardly seemed to happen outside of Alexandria. There, in the theater and the streets, non-Christians rioted against the emperor’s hostility toward their beliefs in the 380’s and 390’s.
Quote ID: 1473
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 83
Section: 2C
. . . the empire overall appears to have been predominantly non-Christian in A.D. 400.
Quote ID: 1474
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 58 Page: 85
Section: 1A,4B
As conversion progresses, the new religion becomes in its social dimension increasingly like the old . . . In the long run, conversion gave rise to strong pressures that affected the course of development of the new religion.”[Footnote]: Note also Geffcken (1978) 325, referring to a “vast mass of cultural forms passed from paganism into Christianity. . . a huge stream of tradition.”
Quote ID: 1475
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 58 Page: 88
Section: 2E6
On another occasion, the sign of the cross expels a daimon . . .“A number of idolaters see this miracle and straightway believe in our Lord Jesus Christ; and so, converted from superstition, they accompanied us to church and were baptized”.
Quote ID: 1476
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 58 Page: 89
Section: 1A,4B
All Gaza’s temples are torn down and burned and the city is cleansed of every belief but the Christian. The most stubborn opponents, faute de mieux For lack of something better, are tied up, marched away to the provincial capital, severely tortured, and all killed mala morte, “a great number”. Less stubborn folk repair to Porphyry’s [PJ: "of Gaza" 347–420] grand new church. There a question is raised about those “who had not left their mistaken ways of their free will but in fear and terror of the emperors”, to which Porphyry answers as the Apostle had: "Whether falsely or truly, Christ is preached, and I rejoice in that.’” (Phil. 1:18). His views fit naturally in a tradition already well established (see above, p. 12, 57, & 65).
Quote ID: 1477
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 89
Section: 3A2A
But beyond miracles and money, the element presented to readers as essential to the final solution - the element on which I wish now to focus - is evidently force. Without that, pagan intransigence simply could not be overcome. And Gaza, I think, may be taken as a sort of model for the empire as a whole.
Quote ID: 1478
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 90
Section: 3A2B
In 363 they killed Bishop George for repeated acts of pointed outrage, insult, and pillage of the most sacred treasures of the city. The emperor Julian, like Theodosius twenty-five years later, was talked out of harsh reprisals by his advisers.
Quote ID: 1479
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 90/91
Section: 3A2B
There were incidents of vandalism against non-Christian shrines in what is now central Turkey in the 350’s and early in Julian’s reign; also in Syria (a bishop was lynched by pagans who had not forgiven his destruction of their city’s chief temple.)
Quote ID: 1480
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 91
Section: 3A2
The fact is surprising, for, whatever may be said against its persecutors, earlier, the church even quite undisturbed was not a good neighbor. Detestation of non-Christians, found in Constantine’s edicts, can also be heard in the urgings of a recent convert under the reign of his sons: “There remains only a very little for your laws to accomplish, whereby the devil may lie prostrate and overthrown before them, and the baneful contamination of a dead idolatry shall have vanished away.... Raise aloft the banner of faith! For you this is divinely appointed! . . . . Need commands you, most sacred emperors, to exact vengeance and punishment upon this evil! This is prescribed to you by the law of the supreme deity, that Your Severity should follow up on all fronts the crime of idolatry.”
Quote ID: 1481
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 92
Section: 3A2A,3A3B
In support, their care of the poor among them is adduced, with abundant and unchallengeable testimony; even more remarkable, though less often noticed, is their care of the plague-stricken, whether or not of their own faith and at the obvious risk of their own lives. Behold an ethic of love new, taught, and at work before one’s very eyes!But it could only be displayed from parity or strength, toward the like-minded or toward suppliant sufferers. It must never involve any cost to doctrine. Anyone who asserted wrong teachings, anyone serving the devil or his demons, earned instead an equally remarkable antagonism.
Two scenes from earlier times show a readiness for mortal animosity holding sway over great churches in the very moment of attack from outside. First is Carthage in 304, where the victims of a search of the city were thrown in jail, there to suffer from their wounds and chains but also from hunger and thirst; for the jail keepers didn’t feed you, that had to be done by your friends. A hostile crowd of Christians, however, set “whips and scourges and armed men in front of the prison gates in order, by inflicting serious hurt on persons entering or leaving, to prevent them from supplying food and drink to the martyrs.”
Quote ID: 1482
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 58 Page: 93
Section: 3A2A,3A4C
Sectarian rivalry was thus a very real thing, a spur to great exertions. Egypt especially, being split three ways echoed to the shouts of partisans, the din of violence, and laments for those robbed, stripped naked, flogged, imprisoned, exiled, sent to the quarries and coppermines, conscripted into the army, tortured, decapitated, strangled, or stoned or beaten to death. The express object was to make converts.Imperial officials and their troops played an extremely prominent role in all this - naturally, to account for the severity of punishments and loss of life; and it was a role played in numerous disconnected acts, from Constantine’s publicly proclaimed edicts against “Arius, wicked and impious” (A.D. 333), announce the cause and stimulate the contestants; he goes on to promise that “whoever hides them” (Arius’ writings) “shall be condemned to death”; and the course of action that then followed was, as we have seen, entangled in deadly struggles.
Application of physical coercion to produce conformity of cult within the church of other eastern provinces outside of Egypt can be traced through various fourth-century sources and episodes. Perhaps the most striking is the law imposing the death penalty for celebrating Easter on the wrong day of the year (A.D. 382)
Quote ID: 1483
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 94
Section: 3A2A
Augustine is likewise our source (along with other materials) for the struggles inside the church in North Africa, in which bishops and priests had their eyes torn out, as he relates, and “one bishop had his hands and tongue cut off.” At the roots of such atrocities lie not only the strength of passion on both sides but the invocation of civil force. Mustered under one of Constantine’s “most savage laws, against the party of Bishop Donatus,” by 317 it had filled the well outside the chief Donatist church in Carthage with the bodies of the slain, long afterward to be discovered by excavation.Last, in A.D. 383 at Bordeaux, Urbica was stoned to death for her beliefs, and the bishop she followed, Priscillian, was charged as a heretic by a synod there assembled in the next year. He appealed to the western emperor, whom other bishops in turn inflamed against him. He was accordingly tried, found guilty, and executed by the praetorian prefect, along with others of his views.
Quote ID: 1484
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 95
Section: 3A2
. . . later, at the turn of the century, Augustine addressed his congregation in Carthage with ringing invocations to smash all tangible symbols of paganism they could lay their hands on; “for,” he tells them, “that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!” - words uttered “to wild applause,” as one modern biographer puts it, and very possibly the cause of religious riots, with sixty dead, in a city to the south. So another biographer supposes, very reasonably.
Quote ID: 1485
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 96
Section: 3C
. . . he also spoke out on non-Christians, as we have seen. They were a bad lot. He would have liked to obliterate them, no doubt. But, lacking the means for that, and only toward the end of his reign, he had to be content with robbing their temples.By established tradition, he restrained religious practices that might diminish divine favor or disturb the state. With this, we first begin to sense anti-pagan legislation, through which religious liberty was to be reduced, at the last, to nothing. Needless to say, hexing the imperial house was illegal. Divination except at the usual shrines was suspect. If it touched on political questions, it was a capital crime (and Constantine, for added emphasis, specified death by burning as the penalty).
The concern expressed here explains another seeming contradiction when, in A.D. 341, Constantius banned sacrifices. He had to explain what he meant a year or so later: temples were, after all, not to be destroyed. They were to continue serving as the sites of public entertainment and spectacles. Then, a little later, he ordered them closed; and, a generation after that, a successor reopened at least one of them by special legislation.
PJ: Conflicted heart.
Quote ID: 1486
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 97
Section: 2E3
This is only an exaggerated illustration of a common fact: temples were centers of commerce. Their porticoes were also commonly used as classrooms by grammar-school teachers and professional rhetors and lecturers; and in Rome the physicians customarily met daily for professional discussions in the shadow of Pax - the closest thing there was to a medical school. Sometimes there were local senate meetings in the porches, banquets of workers’ fraternal associations, and so forth. The most used, and ordinarily the most handsome and central, facilities in the empire’s cities really could not be declared off-limits. Reality was acknowledged in the careful wording of later laws specifying “loitering with intent” (as our laws say, meaning intent to commit a crime) - that is, no walking about or frequenting temples for worship.
Quote ID: 1488
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 58 Page: 97
Section: 3C
In A.D. 356, worship of images was also declared a capital crime. The law was promulgated at Milan.The 356 law was generally ignored.
Quote ID: 1489
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 98
Section: 3D
. . . the praetorian prefect Cynegius.Theodosius had issued to him, or he had somehow obtained, a particularly harsh edict against anyone making burnt offerings. A person like the prefect, armed with such legislation, would naturally welcome and vigorously pursue charges of forbidden sacrifices brought by monks; and , Libanius laments, they used their license to rampage around the cities (of Syria, evidently) and particularly the countryside, in vandalizing mobs. They resemble Egyptian monks a generation later, whose leader, when his victims brought suit for the return of their holy images, boasted, “I peacefully removed your gods...there is no such thing as ‘robbery’ for those who truly possess Christ.”
Quote ID: 1490
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 98
Section: 3A2B
At some date between Libanius [PJ: 314–392] and these latter figures, Syria saw Bishop Marcellus of Apamea in operation. He felt he could get no further with the non-Christians by peaceful exhortation and so used the license of the law to call in the army against both the chief city of his see and the villages around about. While the demolition crew was at work on a vast Zeus-shrine in the suburbs one day, and he was watching from the sidelines, the locals noticed him, grabbed him, carried him off, and burnt him alive. Later the provincial council forbade his sons to seek vengeance, saying they should rather consider him blessed in the opportunity of his martyrdom.
Quote ID: 1491
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 99
Section: 3D
In Alexandria, A.D. 391 produced events rather more violent and, in historical perspective, most important. The familiar elements were at work. The bishop there wanted the temple of Dionysus for a church. He asked Theodosius to assign it to him, and he got it. He used that success as a claim on all the city’s temples, took control of them and rifled the vaults of some to learn their secrets. Then, whatever would best arouse contempt and mockery he paraded through the main square. Non-Christians reacted by taking over the Serapeum en masse. They were said to have Christian captives with them, whom they tortured and crucified. After a stand-off of some little time, the bishop called in the provincial troop commander with his soldiers to conduct a sort of siege, while reports to the emperor solicited his intervention. It came in the form of a letter declaring the Christian casualties in the rioting to be martyrs in need of no avenging; but the temple itself was forfeit and, along with all the others, was condemned to destruction. As to non-Christians, their lives were safe, but the emperor’s antagonism was clear from his opening words, accusing “the idle superstition of the heathen.” Monks were called in from the desert to help in the task of demolition; they next moved on to the sacred buildings at Canopus (where they themselves afterward settled among the ruins); and the impulse to destroy spread rapidly over all Egypt.Now for the world to hear that Serapis had gone, that he was nothing, that he had been driven from his home by the Christians, exerted a powerful effect. There were conversions almost on the spot.
Quote ID: 1492
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 100
Section: 3A2
And the bishop of Constantinople, “learning that Phoenicia was still infatuated with the rites of its daimones, assembled monks inflamed with divine zeal and, arming them with imperial laws, sent them against the sanctuaries of idols,” there to provoke resistance and bloodshed on both sides.
Quote ID: 1493
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 100
Section: 3D
The February law was issued from Milan and represented the will of its bishop, Ambrose; for Theodosius - recently excommunicated by Ambrose, penitent, and very much under his influence - was no natural zealot. Ambrose, on the other hand, was very much a Christian. His restless and imperious ambition for the church’s growth, come what might for the non-Christians, is suggested by his preaching (see above, p.55 & 64), and some of the quality of the man is suggested, too, in the exchange with his sovereign over Callinicum. At issue was the outburst of that city’s bishop and monks against the local Jews. The emperor proposed to punish the offenders, Christians though they were. Ambrose would have none of that. “Perhaps that bishop did grow a little inflamed over the conflagration,” he says with an airy play on words (referring to the burning of a synagogue); “but should not the rigor of the law yield to piety?”. Theodosius for his part grudgingly conceded that, after all, the monks probably ought to be forgiven because they were always into crimes of one sort or another. From the two minds thus revealed, non-Christians could expect little concern over their “rights”.
Quote ID: 1494
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 101
Section: 3A2B
But force and violence in this period could break through law at any moment. Archeological demonstration of this fact is abundantly scattered across the northern provinces, for which written sources hardly survive: broken buildings, burnt-out buildings, hastily buried icons and sacred vessels. To the south, there is testimony in the fact (A.D. 399) that “Gaudentius and Jovius, Counts of the emperor Honorius, on March 19 overthrew the temples and broke the images of the false gods” in Carthage. “From that time to the present” (writes Augustine, a quarter-century later) “who does not see how much the worship of the name of Christ has increased?” Experience in Carthage thus matched that of Alexandria: smashing the physical fabric of all competing cults could produce solid results, though not absolutely final ones. Smashing spread out from Carthage to other towns, and still there remained some people not convinced or converted.From Rome in 407 issued a decree to the west, “If any images stand even now in the temples and shrines..., they shall be torn from their foundations...the buildings themselves of the temples which are situated in cities or towns shall be vindicated to public use. Altars shall be destroyed in all places.” Nothing could be more explicit. It was no longer enough to favor the church, no longer enough to forbid the murkier practices of pagan cults; now anything and everything to do with them must be annihilated. It had been a long war. “We recognize,” the emperors continue, “that this regulation has been very often decreed by repeated sanctions.” but by A.D. 407 it could be fairly claimed that non-Christians were outlaws at last, and (it followed) that a state religion had at last emerged.
Quote ID: 1495
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 113/114
Section: 3A1,3A4,3C
Bishops now actually dined with Constantine himself; they used Constantius’ palace as their headquarters. They were seen riding along provincial highways in state conveyances, bent on their high affairs, as guests of the government. All the world could behold what fantastic changes had come about in the repute and position of ecclesiastical officials. What they said now had an authority acknowledged by the emperors themselves; it hardly needed miracles to rest on.
Quote ID: 1496
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 114
Section: 3C,4B
Yet the successes of Christian conversion were multiplied many fold. The rate of growth became still more rapid-growth, that is, measured by the only means available to us. They include number and size of basilicas, number and distribution of bishoprics, and size of following or congregation reasonably estimated from these data, matched by correspondingly fewer and less well-cared-for pagan temples, fewer priesthoods, and less attendance at festival days. What can have accounted for such dramatic developments?
Quote ID: 1497
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 114
Section: 3C
They are of the same sort as before, but there are now material benefits also to be won through joining the church. Are these to be ignored? To give them serious consideration seems like an indecent attack on the church of martyrs, indeed on the whole city of God. But that is theology. Everything else makes me think that converts, in their moral nature, temperament, motivation, and every other characteristic, differed not a whit from the neighbors they left behind them. So, then, if we can credit the emperor Julian’s calculation that adherents to his cause could be won over in part through money, then we must suppose that Constantine’s calculations were of the same order - and his gifts, of course, over ten times as long as a reign, were vastly greater. Or if the emperor Maximin Daia thought that whole communities could be swayed to “the better view,” as he would have said (in this case, the pagan), through promotion to higher civic status, then why should not Constantine hope to appeal to the port town of Maiouma in the same way? There is no sign or likely-attracted a kind of person who felt himself above material benefits.
Quote ID: 1498
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 115
Section: 3A3B
There is no reason to think that life was any easier for the urban masses once they were Christianized than it had been before cult groups, retirement [PJ: ??] and obsequies insurance societies, civic banquets, and the surplus offerings at temples were all suppressed. The disappearance of these institutions, however, left pressing needs unfilled. Thereupon the local bishop stepped forward, to the great benefit of his stature in the community.
Quote ID: 1499
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 58 Page: 115
Section: 3C
The local Bishop was now a landowner, too: in Italy, overnight, on a very large scale indeed, thanks to Constantine; elsewhere, on a scale we cannot yet measure. Thousands of field hands and shepherds and so forth came under the direction of ecclesiastical bailiffs and slave drivers. So did their counterparts on private estates and in grand city houses, as their masters were attracted to the church by the prospect of more rapid promotion in the civil service and a more cordial welcome as a dinner guest or son-in-law. Among the many persons, daughters of doorkeepers and the like, who were dependent on such great men, prudence would teach conformity to their choice of worship.
Quote ID: 1500
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 116
Section: 2B2,4B
The inscription and the cult, then, are not pagan themselves but, like many a glimpse we have of the veneration of saints, strongly colored by pagan tradition, which could not be suppressed. On other inscriptions, undoubtedly Christian but Italian not African, appear dedications “to the gods and spirits of the departed,” showing the survival of a pagan picture of the afterlife; and, in Egypt. Christians likewise held views on that subject essentially unchanged from their remotest past, . . .
Quote ID: 1501
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 58 Page: 117
Section: 2B2,3C
What had been a point difficult to cross before A.D. 312 was so no longer; yet people who did cross were reluctant to leave behind all their old ways. So they made such adaptations as were really necessary and kept what they could. In this process changes were slow but important.
Quote ID: 1502
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 117
Section: 3A1B
Symmachus did nothing better known or more eloquently recorded than to deliver to the emperor in A.D. 384 an address re-questioning the restoration of religious privileges to the pagan world he represented. They had been lost under the emperor’s brother and predecessor a few years earlier, and were now sought from what was thought to be a better-disposed government. The appeal, however, failed when Ambrose intervened.
Quote ID: 1503
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 58 Page: 118
Section: 3A2
They enter the picture now, to disturb relations between Christians and non-Christians, because Christians could sense that they would get no further without armed forceYet they also began to sense their own influence. As Saint John Chrysostom says of any bishop who chooses to enter the palace, “No one is honored before him.”
Quote ID: 1504
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 58 Page: 119
Section: 3A2
Silencing, burning, and destruction were all forms of theological demonstration; and when the lesson was over, monks and bishops, generals and emperors, had driven the enemy from our field of vision. What we can no longer see, we cannot report.
Quote ID: 1505
Time Periods: 45
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