Section: 2B - Monotheism/Sun Worship.
Number of quotes: 155
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 59
Section: 2B
Pythagoras of Samos [570–495 BC] had spoken of the one god who ruled the universe without the aid of any divine servants. Varro [116–27 BC], the great encyclopedist of the late republic, wrote of time when all the minor gods would be swept away, leaving Jupiter in sole command.
Quote ID: 274
Time Periods: 02
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 219
Section: 2B
Though the Senate showed an intense dislike for Elagabalus, the people briefly showered him with affection, and tolerated his strange ways. He summoned them to worship Baal, the unconquered Sun, and they raised no objection when in his newly erected temple of Baal on the Palatine he assembled all the sacred fetishes of the Romans - the vestal fire, the shields of Mars, the black stone of the Great Mother - insisting that the Romans should all bathe in the light of the Sun. From Carthage he imported the worship of the goddess Tanit, the heavenly mother, and celebrated the marriage of Astarte and the sun god.PJ Note: Elagabalus ? – 222.
Quote ID: 297
Time Periods: 3
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 219
Section: 2B
The man Elagabalus was evidently mad. Within a few years, Rome wearied of his outrageous presence, and he was murdered in a latrine and thrown into the Tiber. Yet he left a legacy: within a few decades the worship of the Sun became the official religion of the empire.
Quote ID: 298
Time Periods: 3
Ancient Rome by Robert Payne
Robert Payne
Book ID: 16 Page: 234
Section: 2B
Plotinus had gathered many followers about him as he set forth his doctrine that the search for truth or reality behind appearance would lead, step by step, toward a recognition of a spiritual “One” beyond all physical things, and to communion with that supreme force.
Quote ID: 309
Time Periods: 23
Ancilla To the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A complete translation of the Fragments in Diels
Kathleen Freeman
Book ID: 19 Page: 20
Section: 2B
21. XENOPHANES OF COLOPHON
Quote ID: 359
Time Periods: 04
Ancilla To the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A complete translation of the Fragments in Diels
Kathleen Freeman
Book ID: 19 Page: 23
Section: 2B
23. There is one god, among gods and men the greatest, not at all like mortals in body or in mind.
Quote ID: 360
Time Periods: 04
Ancilla To the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A complete translation of the Fragments in Diels
Kathleen Freeman
Book ID: 19 Page: 27
Section: 2B
32. That which alone is wise is one; it is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.
Quote ID: 363
Time Periods: 23
Ante-Pacem Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
Graydon F. Snyder
Book ID: 25 Page: 191
Section: 2B,2B2
Their difficult work took ten years, after which they reported their finds in the famous Esplorazioni of 1951. The following description follows their findings rather closely.The excavators found an extensive Roman necropolis under the Constantinian floor of St. Peter’s (fig. 36). Though the mausolea there are among the finest of their kind ever uncovered, there were basically no signs of Christianity. However, two exceptions should be noted. As indicated under mosaics (see above, p. 73), Mausoleum M contained the only certain pre-Constantinian Christian mosaic, that of Christ Helios. In addition, there were patterns for Jonah Cast out of the Boat and for the Fisherman. Guarducci would argue for late Christian burials in Tomb H, where she discovered an inscription with a petition to Peter and a reference to Christ or Christians. Her thesis has not been widely accepted (see under inscriptions, pp. 260-61; Fig 49).
Quote ID: 456
Time Periods: 34
Apology of Aristides on Behalf of the Christians: From a Syriac Ms. Preserved on Mount Sinai, The
Aristides Translated by J. Rendel Harris
Book ID: 423 Page: 39
Section: 2B
So too those have erred who have thought concerning the sun that he is God.….
Wherefore it is not possible that the sun should be God, but a work of God; and in like manner also the moon and stars.
PJ Note: St. Aristides delivered the Apology around the year 125, when Hadrian visited Athens [Eusebius, H.E. IV, iii].
Quote ID: 8633
Time Periods: 2
Apostasy that Wasn’t, The: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church
Rod Bennett
Book ID: 561 Page: 50
Section: 2B
Any literal belief in the old gods had died long ago, certainly among the educated classes. The language of religion was retained, of course,…but Apollo and Venus and all the rest had long since been reinterpreted as allegories or meta physical abstractions….
Quote ID: 9234
Time Periods: 0123
Apostasy that Wasn’t, The: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church
Rod Bennett
Book ID: 561 Page: 51
Section: 2B,4B
Elsewhere, earnest philosophers were making rudimentary attempts to create a new Roman monotheism from the ground up. Sol Invictus—the Unconquered Sun, upon which all life on earth does, in fact, depend—was being put forward as the closest thing available to a living, all-powerful deity.
Quote ID: 9236
Time Periods: 012
Arnobius, ANF Vol. 6, Fathers of the Third Century
Edited by Alexander Roberts
Book ID: 659 Page: 472
Section: 2B
But what shall we say of Jove himself, whom the wise have repeatedly asserted to be the sun, driving a winged chariot, followed by a crowd of deities; {7} ….
PJ footnote reference: Arnobius, Against the Heathen, III.30.
PJ Note: footnote 7 Plato, Phaedrus.
Gutenburg Online translation of Phaedrus:
Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demi-gods, marshalled in eleven bands.
Quote ID: 9472
Time Periods: 2
Arnobius, ANF Vol. 6, Fathers of the Third Century
Edited by Alexander Roberts
Book ID: 659 Page: 533
Section: 2B
You think that, by wine and incense, honor is given to the gods, and their dignity increase; we judge it marvelous and monstrous that any man thinks that the deity either becomes more venerable by reason of smoke, or thinks himself supplicated by men with sufficient awe and respect when they offer a few drops of wine.
PJ footnote reference: Arnobius, Against the Heathen, VII.36.
Quote ID: 9483
Time Periods: ?
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: 20
Section: 2B,2B2
Mithras was identified with the “unconquered sun” whom Aurelian and other emperors recognized as the tutelary deity of the empire.
Quote ID: 591
Time Periods: 23
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 623
Section: 2B
…this second Julia found there two promising grandsons. One, by her daughter Julia Soaemias, was a young priest of Baal; his name was Varius Avitus, and would be Elagabalus-“the creative god.” (Wrongly transformed by Latin writers into Heliogabalus-“the sun-god.”)
Quote ID: 913
Time Periods: 3
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 639
Section: 2B,3B
Turning to the tasks of peace, he re-established some economic order by reforming the Roman coinage; and reorganized the government by applying to it the same severe discipline that had regenerated the army. Ascribing Rome’s moral and political chaos in some degree to religious disunity, and impressed by the political services of religion in the East, he sought to unite old faiths and new in a monotheistic worship of the sun-god, and of the Emperor as the vicar of that deity on earth. He informed a skeptical army and Senate that it was the god, and not their choice or confirmation, that had made him Emperor. He built at Rome a resplendent Temple of the Sun, in which, he hoped, the Baal of Emesa and the god of Mithraism would merge. Monarchy and monotheism were advancing side by side, each seeking to make the other its aide. Aurelian’s religious policy suggested that the power of the state was falling, that of religion rising; kings were now kings by the grace of God. This was the Oriental conception of government, old in Egypt, Persia, and Syria; in accepting it Aurelian advanced that Orientalization of the monarchy which had begun with Elagabalus and would complete itself in Diocletian and Constantine.
Quote ID: 917
Time Periods: 3
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 14/15
Section: 2B
But even before those chaotic years, which marked the end of the reign of the Severi, there were two critical differences from the Old Empire. First, beginning in 193, the army, quite openly, became the institution that made the Emperors. Second, this family of Emperors were not Romans, but Semites, sprung from the union of Punic and Syrian stock.Thus with these rulers of Eastern stock were the seeds planted for the transmutation of the empire from pagan to Christian. It was “a logical, organic process. It was a development, an evolution, not an explosion or a ‘new departure’.”
Quote ID: 963
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 56
Section: 2B
Severans were connected with the sun god Homs (Syrian?).
Quote ID: 979
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 56
Section: 2B
“Generally speaking, the Syrian deities were connected with the sun, or were regarded as being one with it. Thus, they were well on the road to monotheism.”
Quote ID: 980
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 62
Section: 2B
Mithras: proponent of the Unconquerable Sun as the supreme deity.
Quote ID: 985
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 80
Section: 2B
The temple at Baalbek, or Heliopolis, was made for the sun god, patron god of the emperor, of Syrian lineage.
Quote ID: 989
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 116
Section: 2B
“Roman religion was as easy-going as it was eclectic.” The “exotic boy-emperor” from the East, Elagabalus, decided to bring that attitude to an end. His was an especially filthy life. Only the army could have saved such a teen from swift assassination. But the disgust he aroused among Romans and even the part of the army that elevated him (he disbanded them), was brought to fever pitch by his religious dictates.
Quote ID: 1002
Time Periods: 3
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 116
Section: 2B
“Elagabalus decided . . . to rally mankind, and the Roman state, to the worship of one supreme god. . . . The measures he took hastened his overthrow.”
Quote ID: 1003
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 116
Section: 2B
“Sun-worship was no new cult in Rome. Augustus himself in 23 BC had brought from heliopolis an obelisk of Rameses II, so old that Moses himself might have gazed upon it, and had it set up as an offering to the sun in Rome, where Tertullian, having viewed it as an especially remarkable symbol of idolatry. This obelisk, together with the original dedication, but now surmounted by a cross, is still to be seen in the center of the piazza del Popolo in Rome. The obelisk of Monte Citorio bears an identical inscription. The worship of the sun, therefore, was established and respectable--in its Roman form.”
Quote ID: 1004
Time Periods: 2
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 157/158
Section: 2B
Aurelian dedicated to the sun god. His mother had been a priestess of his temple. He saw in the worship of the sun a hope of unity in the empire. He was a powerful ruler, restoring lands east and west--and south (Egypt).PJ NOTE: Aurelian 214–275.
Quote ID: 1019
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 160/161
Section: 2B
Aurelian had ideas of uniting the empire religiously in an effort to unite the empire politically.. . . .
In Rome itself the Temple of the Sun was now raised. A college of priests was established. “Everything, in fact, was done to establish an official religion which should satisfy the demands of a movement towards monotheism which was now animating Roman paganism as much as the paganism of the orient.”
Quote ID: 1020
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 161
Section: 2B
Of oriental perceptions of the gods of Aurelian’s time, Leon Homo wrote, “the separate divinities, Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, Sarapis, Attis, the Baals of the east, Mithras, all appeared more and more as so many incarnations, so many manifestations, of a higher deity, namely, the Sun.”
Quote ID: 1021
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 161
Section: 2B
Aurelian declared that the Sun was lord of the Roman Empire. As a corollary to this, he himself became the “god and lord born”. Though the process obviously started earlier, Aurelian’s reign marks the definitive end of the old Roman notion that the chief ruler was merely the “first citizen”.
Quote ID: 1023
Time Periods: 23
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 174
Section: 2B
Constantine “had long been an adherent of monotheism, first as a worshipper of the sun god, and then with a more elevated belief in the divine spirit which governs the world, and of which the sun is but the symbol.”
Quote ID: 1040
Time Periods: 234
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
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
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
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
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
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
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 106
Section: 2B
Celsus, however, has a point, and it is central to his case against Christianity. Christians threatened the hard-won view that there was only one God, a conviction shared by many pagan intellectuals in the early empire, and which was thought to be distinctly superior to the polytheism and anthropomorphism of popular religion.
Quote ID: 4563
Time Periods: 2
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 106
Section: 2B
Another second-century pagan philosopher Aristotle, De mundo, 401a said:God being one yet has many names, being called after all the various........
Celsus expresses the same sentiment. “It makes no difference if one invokes the highest God or Zeus or Adonai or Sabaoth or Amoun, as the Egyptians do, or Papaios, as the Scythians do” (c. Cels. 5.41).
Quote ID: 4564
Time Periods: 02
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 107
Section: 2B,2B1
“In the midst of such contention, strife, and disagreement on other matters,” wrote Maximus of Tyre, a second-century pagan intellectual, “you would see in all the earth one harmonious law and principle that there is one God, king and father of all, and many gods, sons of God, fellow rulers with God. The Greek says this, and the barbarian says it, the mainlander and the seafarer, the wise and the unwise” (Or. 11.5; ed. Holbein). When a person worshipped these lesser gods, it was assumed that he or she was also worshipping the one high god. Such worship did not detract from the honor shown the highest god, nor did it, in the view of the ancients, threaten the belief that God was one.PJ: Three in one.
Quote ID: 4565
Time Periods: 2
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 107
Section: 2B
Excessive adoration of Jesus robbed the one high God of his proper due and discouraged devotion to other divine beings.The singular emphasis on Jesus implied that there were two supreme objects of worship, thereby destroying the most fundamental principle of the philosophical view of God. If there are two high gods, there is no longer a single source of all things.
Quote ID: 4566
Time Periods: 2
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 136
Section: 2B,4A
Porphyry presents an elaborate discussion of the theology of the various ancient peoples - Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chaldeans, even the Hebrews - to show that these ancient beliefs were similar to the philosophical religion accepted by many educated people in the third century. He does this by showing that the “oracles” of the traditional religions could be used as a source for belief in the One Supreme Being. His strategy was to provide a way to incorporate Christianity, which also claimed to believe in the one high God, into the religious framework of the Roman world.
Quote ID: 4574
Time Periods: 23
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 148
Section: 2B,2B1,4A
If all that was known of Porphyry’s attack on Christianity were what we have discussed thus far, it would be hard to imagine why his work was so feared by Christians. This is* precisely the conclusion to which a recent writer on Porphyry’s Against the Christians has come. “That its burning should have been thought necessary as late as 448 is sufficient evidence of its power to move men’s minds. Yet when we look at the undoubtedly genuine fragments it is difficult to see why such a fear existed if they are indeed characteristic of the whole.”{11}[Footnote 11] Meredith, 1136.
Porphyry was feared because he also wrote another book, the Philosophy from Oracles, and this work sets forth more fundamental criticism of Christianity. In it Porphyry provided a sympathetic account and a defense of the traditional religions of the Greco-Roman world, and he sought to make a place within this scheme for the new religion founded by Jesus of Nazereth.
....sophisticated thinkers such as Porphyry or Celsus believed that though there was one supreme God this did not prevent people from believing in other lesser gods. The term divine designated a category of being stretching from the one high God down through the Olympian gods, the visible gods (e.g., the stars), the daimones, and finally to heroes or deified men. The supreme God presided over a company of gods.
PJ: Three in one.
Quote ID: 4580
Time Periods: 23
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 149
Section: 2B,2B1
Each type of god required a different form of worship. To the one supreme God only spiritual worship of the mind and heart was thought appropriate, whereas to other gods it was proper to bring sacrifices.“The first God is incorporeal, immovable, and invisible and is in need of nothing external to himself.” Hence, to this god “who is above all things, one sacrifices neither with incense, nor dedicates anything sensible to him....Neither is vocal language nor internal speech adapted to the highest god...but we should venerate him in profound silence with a pure soul, and with pure conceptions about him” (Abst. 2.37, 34.) To his “progeny,” however, “hymns, recited orally, are to be offered.” To other gods, like the stars, sacrifices of inanimate objects are fitting, whereas to lower gods, religious observances and other sacrifices should be offered. The daimones, for example, love the smell of burning flesh (Abst. 2.42).
...from Plutarch that illustrates this point, and it may be helpful to cite it again. He says that some heroes are borne upward, “from men into heroes and from heroes into daimones....But from the daimones a few souls still, in the long reach of time, because of supreme excellence, come, after being purified, to share completely in divine qualities” (De def. Or. 415c).
Quote ID: 4581
Time Periods: 12
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 153
Section: 2B
To summarize Porphyry’s argument: There is one God whom all men worship, and Jesus, like other pious men, worshipped this God and taught others to venerate him. By his teaching Jesus directed men’s attention to the one God, but his disciples fell into error and taught men to worship Jesus. “Thus Hecate said that he (Jesus) was a most devout man, and that his soul, like the souls of the other devout men, was endowed after death with the immortality it deserved; and that Christians in their ignorance worship this soul” (Civ. Dei 19.23).
Quote ID: 4587
Time Periods: 23
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 154
Section: 2B,2B2,4A
On the basis of Augustine’s writings, Porphyry’s discussion of Christianity in the Philosophy from Oracles included the following: (1) praise for Jesus as a good and pious man who ranks among the other sages or divine men, for example, Pythagoras or Hercules, venerated by the Greeks and Romans; (2) criticism of the disciples, and of those who follow their teaching, because they misrepresented Jesus and inaugurated a new form of worship; (3) defense of the worship of the one high God; (4) praise of the Jews for worshipping this one God.In his Adversus Nationes written in 311 C.E., Arnobius says that he is at a loss to explain why the pagans attack and the gods are hostile to the Christians. “We have,” he writes, “one common religion with you and join with you in worshipping the one true God. To which the pagans reply: ‘The gods are hostile to you because you maintain that a man, born of a human being.....was God and you believe that he still exists and you worship him in daily prayers’” (Adv. Nat. 1.36).
Quote ID: 4589
Time Periods: 23
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 159
Section: 2B
Porphyry, however, did not accuse Jesus of practicing magic. Instead he praised him as a “wise man” and disassociated himself from such criticism so that Jesus could be integrated into his portrait of the traditional religion.
Quote ID: 4594
Time Periods: 23
Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The
Robert L. Wilken
Book ID: 201 Page: 160
Section: 2B,3C1
Christians feared Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles because it was the first work to give a positive appraisal of Jesus within the framework of pagan religion. Precisely at the time Porphyry was writing his book, Christian leaders were on the verge of a major dispute about the status of Christ. Shortly afterward, the Arian controversy exploded and Christian bishops became engaged in a far-reaching debate about whether Jesus was fully divine and equal to the one supreme God. It would be stretching the point to say that some of the Christian bishops would have agreed with Porphyry’s view of Christ. But many of them, among whom was Eusebius of Caesarea, were very reluctant to consider Jesus as divine in the same sense that God the creator was divine. Indeed, the controversy, which was to divide the Christian world for several generations, centered precisely on that issue: Was Jesus to be thought of as fully God, equal to one high God? Or was he a lesser deity, who, though sharing an intimate relation to God the Father, was nevertheless in the second rank?
Quote ID: 4595
Time Periods: 23
Clement of Alexandria, LCL 092
Loeb Classical Library
Book ID: 140 Page: 155
Section: 2B
Exhortation to the Greeks - Chpt. IVCertainly Menander seems to me to be in error where he says,
O Sun, thee must we worship, first of gods,
Through whom our eyes can see the other gods.
Quote ID: 3026
Time Periods: 2
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 134
Section: 2B
Such is the religion of Marcus Aurelius. ‘This intelligence in every man is God, an emanation from deity. To be a philosopher is to keep unsullied, unscathed, the divine spirit within oneself.’ {3} Marcus was also a pious worshipper of the Roman gods, for such ritual was necessary for the survival of the state and cohesion of its people (p.164). But he saw these divine powers as aspects of a universal deity.. . . .
Call this god or gods, it does not matter.
Picture insert in middle of book (no page numbers)
Quote ID: 4715
Time Periods: 2
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 163
Section: 3B,2B
During this whole period, most official pagan worships were fading into the background. Pliny the younger, on his arrival in northern Asia Minor early in the second century, had already found the temples becoming deserted and neglected, {1} and the withdrawal of paganism continued. During the third century its shrines in north Africa were abandoned, and at Rome, too, the cults lost ground.. . . .
This failure of enthusiasm was one of the prices paid for war and disaster. As Julian the Apostate later remarked, ‘It was the sight of their undeserved misery that led people to despise the gods.’ {4} Another reason for waning interest in the old religion was the growth of monotheistic feeling. Throughout this period the Olympians were coming to be regarded as branches or aspects or symbolic representatives of a single unknowable divinity (pp. 134, 174). {5}
Quote ID: 4716
Time Periods: 234
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 165/166
Section: 2B,3C
However, it became established that the Genius of the Roman People – for such was the formula which emerged – was, as might be expected, male.. . . .
Genius again wears that crown, sometimes combined with the rays of fashionable Sun-worship, on the obverse of one of the last large bronze coins ever to be issued at Rome, and one of the very few, within the past two hundred and fifty years, to show any head at all other than some portrait explicitly ascribed as to an imperial personage. The coins may date from a short period of interregnum immediately following Gallienus’ death (268). {15}
. . . .
The principal issues with GENIO POPVLI ROMANI, diversified by a more varied range of Romanit` from Maxentius whose principal asset was his control of the capital city, declined and came to an end in AD 316, when Christianity was beginning to offer new watchwords (p. 180). Yet the appeal of Rome did not cease. A large painting, apparently of Constantine’s reign, shows a frontal seated figure of a goddess. {16} When Fortune (Tyche) and other gods vanished at this time, the Fortunes or spirits of cities were retained and interpreted as entities at God’s gift and will. Indeed Constantine himself, despite his Christianity, gave Constantinople a temple of Fortune, and placed in this shrine a statue of the Fortune of Rome. {17}
Quote ID: 4719
Time Periods: 234
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 167/168
Section: 3B,2B,2D2
The days of the Olympians are nearly over, and there is nostalgia for the glorious past. But since the world is still unthinkable without Rome, Venus must survive, because Venus, as another part of the poem recalls, was the mother of all Rome’s glory; ….. . . .
Another patriotic goddess who defied the decline of the Olympians by her continued impact on the later Roman world was Vesta. Her shrine in the forum is repeatedly shown on coins and medallions of Septimius and subsequent emperors, and the neighbouring courtyard devoted to her service contained many dedications persisting right up to the fourth century AD. The fire-cult of Vesta (Hestia) corresponded to contemporary Sun-worship and to the fire-altars of Sassanian Persia; and her Vestal Virgins suited contemporary tastes for asceticism and monastic seclusion. As the ancient, everlasting guardian of Rome and its rulers, Vesta in these dangerous times received more devoted veneration than ever.
Quote ID: 4720
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 171
Section: 2B,3B
Nevertheless, in an increasingly spiritual age, these pretensions began to ring false. In spite of the ruler’s growing autocracy and magnificence, he was not the same as the quasi-monotheistic transcendent divine power in which people of this epoch believed (p. 163). And so while the adulation of reigning Augusti continued and intensified, a different and indeed contradictory interpretation of their relationship with the deity gained ground. This was the idea that the emperor was not one of the gods, but was instead their favoured and chosen delegate and regent upon earth.
Quote ID: 4726
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 172
Section: 2B,3B
The link was made still more explicit when Diocletian and Maximian founded their whole theology on the specific comradeship and protection which they received from Jupiter and Hercules respectively, and which led them to assume personal titles of Jovius and Herculius. Although there were later continuations and revivals of paganism, this was the last great official manifestation of the Olympian cults. But the culmination of this, while tendency to treat the emperor as the elect of pagan deities was reached under Constantine, when he devoted his coinage throughout the empire to proclaiming that his comrade was the Sun-god.
Quote ID: 4729
Time Periods: 34
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 173
Section: 2B
In Egypt, for example, where this worship abounded, the rising Sun appears upon reliefs of Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton) who in the fourteenth century BC instituted a revolutionary new cult of his Sun-god Aton, including novel emphasis upon its light-giving and life-giving properties, accompanied by a claim to have achieved personal revelation through the embrace of the god’s caressing hands (shown as the termination of his golden disc). In Asia Minor and the near east, all-seeing Marduk, who became supreme in the Babylonian pantheon, had at first been a solar divinity. So had Shamash, who was originally secondary to the Moon-god; but experts on the heavens reversed their roles.
Quote ID: 4730
Time Periods: 2
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 174
Section: 2B,2B2
Although few people were prepared to join Aristarchus of Samos in asserting that the earth revolved round the Sun, {54} the next two hundred years witnessed the spread of the Sun-cult throughout the Mediterranean world. As Semitic, Iranian and Greek theology, astrology and philosophy intermingled, there was an ever-growing tendency to explain the traditional gods in solar terms. Mixtures and blending of deities were now universal {55}; the gods are of many names, but one nature, and their common factor is the Sun.
Quote ID: 4731
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 175
Section: 2B
Apparently native to Rome, Sol had its festival on 9 August, and was linked in inscriptions with the fire-goddess Vesta (Hestia), who was analogous to the power worshipped at Persian fire-alters (p.168). An antique Roman shrine of the Sun still existed in Nero’s reign. The god’s radiate-crowned personification appears on Republican and early imperial coins. {61} Upon the summit of the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, which stood for the régime of Augustus, there was a magnificent sculptural group showing Sol Charioteer, whose old identification with Apollo the Augustans repeated and stressed.
Quote ID: 4732
Time Periods: 2
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 176
Section: 3B,2B
Under Septimius Severus and his family solar worship almost took charge of the entire pantheon.
Quote ID: 4733
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 176/177
Section: 3B,2B,2E6
In this atmosphere, designs on imperial coinage show advances upon their customary conservatism. {67} In particular the boy Geta, son of the Unconquerable and Pious Septimius, not only appears as Sol himself, portrayed in a novel half-length representation with radiate crown, but his right hand is raised in the Sun’s magic gesture of benediction (c. AD 200). This gesture, which warded off evil influences as well as conferring blessing, was very ancient, and had reappeared in statues of Roman orators. {68}. Court-poets wrote of the holy or divine hand of their emperor, and Sol’s arm is similarly lifted on Alexandrian coins of Trajan. This symbol, still the sign of Episcopal blessing today, was to become frequent on sarcophagus reliefs and in the catacombs of Christians, where Jesus outstretches his hand in the most popular of all Christian themes, the Raising of Lazarus from the dead (p.214).
Quote ID: 4734
Time Periods: 3
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 177
Section: 3B,2B
And then Elagabalus, though he adopted the names of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus which Caracalla had used before him, swept aside any caution or tradition in his haste to incorporate Sun-worship into the Roman imperial theology (218-22).
Quote ID: 4735
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 177
Section: 3B,2B
A huge temple was now built for this Sun-god at Rome, and the deity’s Semitic name ELAGAB (alus) or Baal, identified with Sol, strikes an outlandish note amid the conservative traditions of the official coinage.. . . .
He placed the Sun-god in a chariot adorned with gold and jewels and brought him out from the city to the suburbs. A six-horse chariot bore the Sun-god, the horses huge and flawlessly white, with expensive gold fittings and rich ornaments. No one held the reins, and no one rode in the chariot; the vehicle was escorted as if the Sun-god himself were the charioteer. Elagabalus ran backwards in front of the chariot, facing the god and holding the horses’ reins. He made the whole journey in this reverse fashion, looking up into the face of his god. Since he was unable to see where he was going, his route was paved with gold dust to keep him from stumbling and falling, and bodyguards supported him on each side to protect him from injury. The people ran parallel to him, carrying torches and tossing wreaths and flowers. The statues of all the gods, the costly or sacred offerings in the temples, the imperial ornaments, and valuable heirlooms were carried by the cavalry and the entire Praetorian Guard in honour of the Sun-god. {72}
Elagabalus was too rash, and was murdered. And yet in spite of this setback, the worship of the Sun did not cease to flourish and increase.
Quote ID: 4736
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 178
Section: 3B,2B,2E4
Nevertheless, forty years later, matters had advanced so far that Gallienus proposed to dominate the city, from the highest point of the Esquiline Hill, with a chariot-group including a colossal statue of himself as the Sun. {73} His successor Claudius II Gothicus (268-70) was devoted to the same deity, and then the logical, conclusive move was taken soon afterwards by the next emperor Aurelian. For he established, as the central and focal point of Roman religion, a massive and strongly subsidized cult of Sol Invictus (274), endowing him with a resplendent Roman temple, and instituting on the model of the ancient priestly colleges, and as their equal in rank, a new college of Priests of the Sun. {74} The birthday of the god was to be on 25 December, and this transformed into Christmas Day, was one of the heritages which Christianity owed to the solar cult.
Quote ID: 4737
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 178/179
Section: 2B
….Aurelian was not overturning the Roman cults; he was adding to them, and thereby changing their emphasis and balance of power, so that Sol now stood at the head of the pantheon. {79}. . . .
But Aurelian’s decision was even more comprehensive, because it sought to weave the main religious strands of east and west into a united, cosmopolitan universal faith.
Quote ID: 4738
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 179
Section: 3B,2B
Moreover, when Constantius I Chlorus took London from the usurper Allectus (296) and brought England back into the empire, a medallion hailed in as Restorer of Eternal Light (REDDITOR LVCIS AETERNAE).. . . .
It is also solar language, for Constantius was a monotheist who revered the Sun, {80} like his forebears before him in their Sun-worshipping Balkan homeland.
Quote ID: 4739
Time Periods: 234
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 179
Section: 3C,2B
Then in c. 309 Constantius’ son Constantine the Great began his vast, homogeneous series of coinages inscribed SOLI INVICTO COMITO (pg. 173). {81} Therefore, for a decade, he continued to concentrate upon this design and theme. Indeed Constantine, before finally turning to Christianity, stressed the worship of the Sun more frequently and emphatically than any of his predecessors.
Quote ID: 4740
Time Periods: 4
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 180
Section: 3C,2B
. . .And on the sculptures of the Arch of Constantine at Rome (c. 315) the old gods have gone but the Sun still remains: the emperor is represented between the rising Sun and Moon, and the victory-giving figure is the Sun-god, whose statuettes are also carried by the army’s standard-bearers. An inscription describes Constantine himself as the Sun who sees all.
Quote ID: 4741
Time Periods: 4
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 180
Section: 3C,2B
Even as late as 321, when official Christianity was forming deep roots, Constantine forbade legal proceedings on the day of the week ‘celebrated by the veneration of the Sun’.
Quote ID: 4742
Time Periods: 4
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 180/181
Section: 3C,2B
Constantine was now sole ruler of the Roman world and arbiter of its religion, upon which he had already begun to impose such revolutionary changes. Yet his panegyrist still sees him ‘with a circumambient halo resembling rays of light’; and when his great statue was erected at the central point of the new capital at Constantinople (428-30), it portrayed him as Apollo-Helios, wearing the Sun’s radiate Crown. This crown was also fashioned from the nails from the True Cross, for he now saw himself as the Vicegerent of Christ. In his own mysterious way, Constantine seems to have worshipped Sun and Christ at the same time, or regarded them as interchangeable, assimilating the Christian faith into an inherited solar tradition as Aurelian had assimilated the Sun into the traditions of Rome.
Quote ID: 4743
Time Periods: 4
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 181
Section: 2B
In the time of Marcus Aurelius, Jesus’ baptism had been described as the Bath of Helios. {86} Christians in east and west, in their public and private prayers, turned to Oriens, the rising Sun, in order to glorify its resurrection from the prison of the dark, which they identified with the Resurrection of Christ. Origen (d. 254/5) link Christ with the rising of the Sun {87} – and in the same period a mosaic beneath St Peter’s showed a composite Christ-Helios (p. 218). Some people confused the two deities: fourth-century Christian writers criticised co-religionists for their veneration of Sol, pointing out the superiority of the Christian Sun of Justice to the pagan Sun. {88} Owing to such links and analogies, the solar cult acted as a bridge by which many people were converted to Christianity.
Quote ID: 4744
Time Periods: 2
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 184
Section: 2B
Mithraism, then, could seem to be a specialised form of the Sun-worship which was soon to assume increasingly official shape (p. 177).
Quote ID: 4747
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 185/186
Section: 2B
The worship of Mithras, then, had ideas, moral urgency, emotional intensity and receptive breadth. It also possessed considerable superficial resemblances to Christianity. Mithraic baptisms, sacrifices, communal meals and martyrdoms seemed to the church a sinister mimicry of its own rites and sacraments. {103} Yet Christianity won the day. In part this was because the story of Mithras, although the subject of a ‘biography’ recounting his ostensible exploits, sounded too mythical for his devotees really to feel that they had ever happened upon this earth: he seemed much more distant than Jesus, whose life as a historical figure kindled the imagination of millions.
Quote ID: 4748
Time Periods: 23
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 218
Section: 2B
A Christian chapel at Dura shows its remoteness from central trends by exceptionally depicting Christ in a painting as early as AD 232-3 (some writers interpreted the Old Testament as attacking sculptural rather than painted representations). The Mausoleum of the Julii under St. Peter’s at Rome, redecorated by Christians in c. 250-75, displays a less direct approach, for its vault-mosaic identifies Jesus with the Sun-divinity who was now emerging as the principal official god of Rome (p.181). Christ is shown driving the Sun’s four horses, symbols not only of the four Gospels but of the Resurrection, ….
Quote ID: 4760
Time Periods: 23
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 69
Section: 2B
By the second century A.D. it was increasingly commonplace to see the divine world as subject to one supreme god, with the other gods being either manifestations of his divinity or as lesser divinities. The Egyptian goddess Isis, for instance, spreads across the empire as a mother goddess with many concerns. “I am the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are.” Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass (c. A.D. 160)
Quote ID: 4803
Time Periods: 2
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 69
Section: 2B
What is central to these cults is their flexibility. The device of allowing different gods to be assimilated into a supreme deity was an effective one. “It makes no difference,” wrote the second-century Platonist Celsus, “whether we call Zeus the Most High or Zeus or Adonis or Sabaoth or Amun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians.”17 It is possible even to go so far as to say that a belief in an overriding deity was, by this period, the most widespread belief of pagan religion.17. The quotation, which comes from Origen’s Contra Celsum 5:41, is to be found in the introduction to Athanassiadi and Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism, p. 8. See also the quotation from the so-called Theosophy of Tubingen in Mitchell, Anatolia, vol. 2, p. 44:
There is one god in the whole universe, who has set boundaries to the wheels of heavenly rotation with divine ordinances, who has distributed measures of equal weight to the hours and the moments, and has set bonds which link and balance the turnings of the heavens with one another, whom we call Zeus, from whom comes the living eternity, and Zeus bearer of all things, life-providing steward of breath, himself, proceeding from the one into the one.
Quote ID: 4804
Time Periods: 23
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 70
Section: 2B
“Pagan monotheism,” write Athanassiadi and Frede in summing up their own survey, “was a deeply rooted trend in ancient philosophy which developed under its own momentum, broadening sufficiently to embrace a good part of the population.” They go on to argue that Christianity, with its supreme God and his surrounding entourage of divine forces--Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, angels, saints and martyrs--should be seen as an integral part of this trend, not as a force outside it.
Quote ID: 4806
Time Periods: 0123
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 73
Section: 2B,4A
If Plato was right and the Forms existed eternally, then others living before Plato might have been able to grasp them. Philo went so far to argue that Moses had been a Platonic philosopher who had understood the Forms in the way Plato had hoped his followers would. Moses’ Old Testament God was none other than “the Good” of Plato. (The later Platonis Numenius second century A.D. went so far as to claim, “Who is Plato, if not Moses speaking in Greek?”)
Quote ID: 4807
Time Periods: 2
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 77
Section: 2B
Nevertheless, there clearly existed a wide range of spiritual possibilities, any of which could be followed without any sense of impropriety, and, even though there existed some degree of competition between the different movements for adherents, none excluded other beliefs. The traditional gods of the state might be offended by neglect, but they were not jealous of other cults. It is certainly too simplistic to argue, as many histories of Christianity have done, that spiritual life in the empire had reached some kind of dead end and that Christianity provided a solution all had been yearning for.
Quote ID: 4812
Time Periods: 234
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 49
Section: 2B
The Roman imperial public was becoming more and more monotheistic at this time. {1} Aurelian decided to revive the cult of the Sun, and to make it the hub of the whole of Roman religion. It was already honoured and revered by a number of disparate temples. Septimius Severus and his successors (as well as usurpers) had honoured it; Maximinis I Thrax had put up a monument to the god; and he had been glorified as ‘Invictus’ by Victorinus (268-279) and Probus (276-282).[Footnote 1] For example the tendency was turned to good advantage by the State: the series of coins with the heads of long deified emperors, usually attributed to Trajanus Decius, but possibly issued by Trebonianus Gallus.
In this determined effort to revivify and concentrate paganism, Aurelian was not overturning the Roman cults; he was adding to them, and thereby changing their emphasis and balance of power, so that Sol now stood at the head of the pantheon.
This was not only an integration, it was a creative, novel deed of religious statecraft. Aurelian’s decision . . . sought to weave the main religious strands of east and west into a united, cosmopolitan, universal faith . . . Since Aurelian reconquered Gaul as well as the east, his cult of Sun-Apollo may also have echoed the Gallic worship of gods of light and healing identified with Apollo. {2}
[Footnote 2] M. Grant, The Climax of Rome (1968), pp. 175ff., 283. Aurelian honoured Sol Invictus, and saw himself as his vice regent. This remained the chief imperial cult until Christianity. But Jupiter was not neglected: Diocletian called himself ’Jovius’, and Maximian ’Herculius’. An effort was also made -as numerous coins show- to exalt the GENIVS POPVLI ROMANI.
Quote ID: 5020
Time Periods: 23
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 50
Section: 2B
It is said that Aurelian...roundly told his troops that it was not they, but the god, who assigned the imperial power. Herein may be seen one of the springs of that religious policy which Aurelian followed throughout his reign and crowned in 274 by the erection in Rome of a magnificent temple to the Sun-god and the establishment of a new college of senators as pontifices dei Solis. Sol dominus imperii Romani was to be the centre of revived and unified paganism and the guarantor of loyalty to the emperor, whose companion and preserver he was.....
Quote ID: 5021
Time Periods: 23
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 51
Section: 2B
The strongest part of Aurelian’s army came, like himself, from Sun-worshipping Pannonia. . . The cult was now officially prescribed for the army, and its symbols were added to military insignia.
Quote ID: 5022
Time Periods: 23
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 51
Section: 2B
Gallienus proposed to dominate the city, from the highest point of the Esquiline Hill, with a chariot group including a colossal statue of himself as the Sun. His successor Claudius II Gothicus (268 - 70) was devoted to the same deity, and then the logical, conclusive move was taken soon afterwards by the next emperor Aurelian. For he established, as the central and focal point of Roman religion, a massive and strongly subsidised cult of Sol Invictus (274), endowing him with a resplendent Roman temple, and instituting on the model of the ancient priestly colleges, and as their equal in rank, a new college of Priest of the Sun....PJ Note: This second para I used separately.
. . . .
. . . official religion had long been moving in this direction.
Aurelian now restored the temple of Malachbel (Baal) [the Sun-god] at Palmyra, and interpreting its deity as a form of Sol Invictus, adorned his own Roman temple of the Sun with statues not only of Helios-Sol but also of Belos or Baal....Sol now stood at the head of the Pantheon.
Quote ID: 8169
Time Periods: 23
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 59
Section: 2B
He is the pioneer of psychedelic experience for the west, but he achieved his end by purely cerebral, intellectual discipline – not by schizophrenia and not by drugs, and not by religion....The moral and social implications of his doctrine have sometimes inspired repugnance. . . Plotinus’ world was no ivory tower but reality at its highest level, raised to its most exalted plane by the intensest concentration on what seemed to him the most real...Union with the One is to tackle life with a daring and dedicated brand of realism . . .
Quote ID: 5034
Time Periods: 2
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 59
Section: 2B
The One, as he Plotinus conceived it, is beyond thought for definition of language: it inhabits summits where reason . . .
Quote ID: 5035
Time Periods: 2
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 60
Section: 2B
So Christianity defeated and outlived both Manichaeanism and Sun-worship.
Quote ID: 5041
Time Periods: 234
Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 206 Page: 83
Section: 2B
Christians, Jews, agnostics and atheists must be equally concerned with the rise of monotheism in the Greek and Roman world, where it gradually replaced polytheism: as certain examples quoted in this book have shown. That is to say, it was a development from paganism, and how it developed is a matter of absorbing interest.
Quote ID: 5058
Time Periods: 2
Constantine by Ramsay Macmullen
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 69 Page: 110/111
Section: 2B
As he could have learned from Constantius, or for that matter from Diocletian, certain of his subjects worshipped a God higher than all others, and took their name from One who taught and revealed this God; but pagans knew very little about relations between Father and Son, still less about relations between Son and man,….
At the forefront of his mind stood only the bare conviction that the supreme power was that which Christians proclaimed, “the Supreme Divinity,” “divine favor,” “greatest holy God,” “the divine piety,” “the holiest heavenly power,” “the divinity of the great God,” and so on, in a dozen periphrases, all quoted at various points in the preceding pages, where we would expect the one word, “God.”
Quote ID: 1882
Time Periods: 234
Constantine by Ramsay Macmullen
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 69 Page: 112
Section: 2B
Over the middle ground between pagan and Christian, Sol presided.
Quote ID: 1884
Time Periods: 234
Constantine by Ramsay Macmullen
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 69 Page: 112
Section: 2B,3C
Constantine remained loyal to Sol for more than a decade after his conversion; or at least his coins, with all the authority and perhaps the distortion of headlines in a government-controlled newspaper, continued to celebrate that god, though with diminishing honor, frequency, and emphasis, after all others had disappeared for good.
Quote ID: 1885
Time Periods: 34
Constantine the Great
Michael Grant
Book ID: 66 Page: 134/135
Section: 2B
Moreover, Apollo was equated or identified with the Sun-god, and the form of monotheism which particularly appealed to Constantine in his early years was the worship of the Sun. Anyway, it appealed to Constantine himself, who in 311 hailed the Sun as his tutelary god, and persistently portrayed the same deity on his coinage as his invincible companion (’SOLI INVICTO COMITI’). Coins attribute his victories to the Sun, and Julian the Apostate speaks of Constantine’s special links with the Sun-god.Sol, honoured at Rome by the city prefects Aradius Rufinus and Rufius Volusianus, remains on the coinage until 319/20, unlike the traditional pagan gods, who had vanished in 317. The Sun seems to be depicted in a brick pattern on the north wall of the church of St Gereon at Colonia Agrippinensis (Koln). Some of Constantine’s troops were called solenses, and the city of Termessus (Golluk) in Pisidia proclaimed him to be ’the Sun’. But he saw himself rather, not as the Sun, and not even as a fellow deity of the Sun, but as his ’companion’ (and, perhaps, his incarnation upon earth), since the Iranian concept of kingly power as trust from God or the gods had replaced the idea of actual identification with him or them.
Quote ID: 1709
Time Periods: 234
Constantine the Great
Michael Grant
Book ID: 66 Page: 136
Section: 2B
This was all too clear to Pope Leo I the Great (440-61), who - aware, perhaps, that people at Contantinople had sacrificed to the statue of Constantine as if it stood for Sol - reprimanded his congregation for performing devotions to the Sun on the steps of St Peter’s before turning their backs to it and entering the Basilica to perform Christian worship there. Nearly a century earlier, as he no doubt also knew, when Julian the Apostate had reverted to the pagan religion, this sort of feeling made it easy for many to abandon Christianity in favour of solar monotheism. The bishop of Troy was an interesting case in point. He found it possible at that time, with a clear conscience, to switch from Christian to pagan belief because, even while holding episcopal office, he had secretly continued to pray to the Sun.
Quote ID: 1711
Time Periods: 234
Continuity and Change in Roman Religion
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Book ID: 313 Page: 263
Section: 2B
The essence of Christianity as presented by Lactantius, is monotheism, worship of the one supreme God. The argument for Christian monotheism was aided by the fact that from the earliest times a kind of monotheism had coexisted with the worship of innumerable deities.
Quote ID: 7616
Time Periods: 23
Continuity and Change in Roman Religion
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Book ID: 313 Page: 265
Section: 2B
It is evident that (as preached by Lactantius) Christian worship would appeal to an educated, philosophically-minded Roman.
Quote ID: 7618
Time Periods: 23
Continuity and Change in Roman Religion
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Book ID: 313 Page: 300
Section: 2B
…the speeches written after 321, including the speech addressed to Julian the Apostate,{4} are written in terms of a neutral monotheism which would be acceptable to Christians and pagans alike.
Quote ID: 7632
Time Periods: 234
Continuity and Change in Roman Religion
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Book ID: 313 Page: 301
Section: 2B
The last panegyric in the collection was addressed in 389 by the Gallic orator Pacatus to the pious Christian emperor Theodosius. The orator too appears to have been a Christian. He relates that in worship (divinis rebus operantes) ‘we’ turn towards the rising sun.….
…the speech gives expression to the same neutral monotheism as its predecessors.
Quote ID: 7634
Time Periods: 234
Continuity and Change in Roman Religion
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Book ID: 313 Page: 302
Section: 2B
…Constantine himself had been a monotheist before he became a Christian.{5}{5} Euseb. V. C. i. 27.
Quote ID: 7635
Time Periods: 4
Conversion
A.D. Nock
Book ID: 70 Page: 27
Section: 2B
Orpheus would not honour Dionysus, but regarded the Sun, whom he called also Apollo, as the greatest of deities. He rose at night and would wait on Mount Pangaion to see the first rays of dawn. As a result Dionysus caused his worshippers to tear him limb from limb. Here Orpheus is the lonely prophet.
Quote ID: 1909
Time Periods: 0
Conversion
A.D. Nock
Book ID: 70 Page: 111
Section: 2B,2B2
But in the third century Porphyry as a young man wrote a work On the Philosophy to be drawn from Oracles, giving oracles from Apollo of Claros and shrines of Hecate which not merely prescribed cultus but also defined the nature of god and asserted the existence of one Supreme Being who is Eternity (Aion), the ordinary gods of paganism being his ‘angels: another oracle saying that the Supreme Being is Iao (that is Jehovah), identified with Hades, Zeus, Helios, is quoted by Cornelius Labeo, who probably belongs to the early part of the same century.
Quote ID: 1944
Time Periods: 23
Conversion
A.D. Nock
Book ID: 70 Page: 260
Section: 2B
The paganism of educated men was largely philosophical and monotheistical in character. Pagan worship was for it a way of approach to the central mystery of the universe, not the only way but the time-honoured way. As Symmachus had said in his speech on behalf of retaining the Altar of Victory in the Senate-house, ‘There cannot be only one way to so great a secret.’For many who shrank from becoming Christians, the deities of paganism had ceased to matter as individual and personal figures. An exchange of letters between Augustine, when bishop, and one Maximus, a scholar of Madaura says, ‘Which of us is so mad or mentally blind as to deny that it is most sure that there is one supreme God without beginning or physical offspring, a great and magnificent Father? We invoke by many titles his virtues, which are spread throughout the universe, because we do not know his own name. For God is a name which all religions share’...to such a man monotheism was obvious.
Quote ID: 1997
Time Periods: 45
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 14
Section: 2B
In October 69, at the Battle of Cremona, the Syrian soldiers of the IIIrd ‘Gallica’ legion hailed the rising sun according to eastern custom. {14}
Quote ID: 5129
Time Periods: 2
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 65
Section: 2B
In the early 1970’s, in the countryside around Medvida, a life-sized head of Attis was found, provided with holes in which gilded bronze rods could be fixed, thus likening the image of the dead and revived god to the Sun.PJ Note: Don’t know where Medvida is.
Quote ID: 5146
Time Periods: 2
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 70
Section: 2B
The Christian apologists Arnobius and Firmicus Maternus were most indignant that anyone should dare to identify with the radiant star an emasculated shepherd over whom there was much noisy lamentation in the theatre and the streets every year in March. How could anyone ‘Attin castratum subito praedicere Solem’, ‘suddenly proclaim the castrated Attis “Sun”’. To take a line from the pamphlet published against Nicomachus Flavianus. {124}
Quote ID: 5147
Time Periods: 234
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 93
Section: 2B
Later, the Augustan History and Aurelius Victor would state that Caracalla introduced Egyptian cults to Rome, for in fact he was the first to consecrate them on this side of the augural wall. This was the period when, in the Baths of Caracalla, an inscription proclaimed: ‘One and only is Zeus Sarapis Helios, invincible master of the world’. {88} But after 217 the name of Sarapis was hammered out to be replaced by that of Mithras.
Quote ID: 5150
Time Periods: 23
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 112
Section: 2B
This office of the reborn day, which coincided with the resurgence of the god (Serapis-Helios), continued.....
Quote ID: 5157
Time Periods: 2
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 216
Section: 2B
Unlike the other religions of oriental origin, Mithraism worship of Attis and Isis included no public ceremonies. People could take part in the festivals of Attis or Isis without being initiated or incorporated in the priestly body.
Quote ID: 5171
Time Periods: 123
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 339
Section: 2B
In the third century, the major aspirations of Roman paganism had converged in solar henotheism and notably, in the end, in the official cult of Sol Invictus, held dear (at least apparently) by Constantine’s father himself. For Plato and the Platonists, the Sun was the perceptible image of Good, the supreme god. The second creator god Numenius, the luminous Nous who conceived the cosmos, prefigured the second hypostasis of Plotinus, whose triadic scheme answered the same need systematically to hierarchize the action of the divine on and in the world as the Christian trinity. All these simultaneously religious and philosophical trends were to crystallize in the representation of Christ-Helios, remarkably illustrated in a mosaic of the St Peter Necropolis in the Vatican: Lux mundi, the visible Word of the invisible God. {10}
Quote ID: 5181
Time Periods: 234
Daily Life in Ancient Rome
Jerome Carcopino
Book ID: 72 Page: 124
Section: 2B
Tacitus was compelled to officiate at the public ceremonies of polytheism; and his aversion for the Jews was at least equal to Juvenal’s. So much for proof of his orthodoxy. But there are things that make us doubtful of it; much as he abhors the Jews, he is not afraid indirectly to praise their belief in one eternal and supreme God, whose image must not be counterfeited and who cannot pass away. {87}
Quote ID: 2007
Time Periods: 12
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: 112
Section: 2B
This devotion to Serapis was perpetuated by their son, Caracalla, who erected a temple to him on the Quirinal, and the climax of this orientalization was reached by Elagabalus when he sought to introduce the worship of the Syrian Baal, enthroning the black stone of Emesa in a shrine on the Palatine. This identification of the solar religion with one of its local forms was, however, too much for the Romans and was in part responsible for the opposition to Elagabalus that resulted in his assassination.
Quote ID: 5279
Time Periods: 23
Early Christian Doctrines
J. N. D. Kelly
Book ID: 428 Page: 12/13
Section: 2B
Two phenomena in the welter of superstition and genuine piety call for notice. First, the extraordinary vogue of the so-called mystery religions.….
Secondly, the growing attraction, for educated and uneducated people alike, of a monotheistic interpretation of the conventional polytheism. More and more the many gods of the pagan pantheon tended to be understood either as personified attributes of one supreme God or as manifestations of the unique Power governing the universe.
*John’s note: 2nd – 3rd centuries A.D.*
Quote ID: 8698
Time Periods: 123
Early Christian Doctrines
J. N. D. Kelly
Book ID: 428 Page: 13
Section: 2B
When in 274 the emperor Aurelian instituted the state cult of Sol Invictus, he was not merely saluting the sun as protector of the Empire, but acknowledging the one universal Godhead Which, recognized under a thousand names, revealed Itself most fully and splendidly in the heavens .
Quote ID: 8699
Time Periods: 23
Early Christian Doctrines
J. N. D. Kelly
Book ID: 428 Page: 83/84
Section: 2B,4A
These ideas derive almost exclusively from the Bible and latter-day Judaism, rarely from contemporary philosophy. Echoes of later Stoicism, however, are audible in Clement’s references{9} to God’s ordering of His Cosmos. When we pass to the Apologists, the infiltration of secular thought is even more obvious.*John’s note: “These ideas….” About God being one, in the earliest post-apostolic writers*
Quote ID: 8700
Time Periods: 2
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 129
Section: 2B
This is all of a piece with Leo’s worries about people who turned towards the East to greet the sun before entering Saint Peter’s for mass.{17} It may be that this practice, which had been common in the cult of the Unconquered Sun as well as among Manichees, was being adopted by Christians in perfectly good faith, guilty of no more than trying to give a sound Christian meaning to a traditional pagan gesture. The pope’s objection may in fact have been not so much to what these Christians were doing as to the private nature of their action. The church’s answer was to turn the private ritual gesture into public worship: liturgical turning to the East for prayer, or the rapidly spreading practice of orienting churches, were more effective than attempts to suppress private orientalism.{18}Pastor John’s note: Leo I (c. 400 – 461). Pope from 440 – 461.
Quote ID: 5436
Time Periods: 2345
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 122
Section: 2B
Rome represented the union of the greater part of humanity under one head, and also more and more under one law. Its capital was the capital of the world, and also, from the beginning of the third century, of religious syncretism.
Quote ID: 8739
Time Periods: 23
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 204
Section: 2B
1. In accordance with the purely spiritual idea of God, it was a fixed principle that only a spiritual worship is well pleasing to Him, and that all ceremonies are abolished….
Quote ID: 8750
Time Periods: ?
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 292/293
Section: 2B
Speculations that take no account of history may make out that Catholicism became more and more Jewish Christian. But historical observation, which recons only with concrete quantities, can discover in Catholicism, besides Christianity, no element which it would have to describe as Jewish Christian. It observes only a progressive hellenising, and in consequence of this, a progressive spiritual legislation which utilizes the Old Testament….
Quote ID: 8757
Time Periods: ?
History of Dogma
Adolph Harnack, translated by Neil Buchanan
Book ID: 432 Page: 335
Section: 2B
The number of sacred ceremonies already considerable in the second century (how did they arise?), was still further increased in the third….
Quote ID: 8763
Time Periods: 23
Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 321 Page: 171
Section: 2B
Slowly there loomed through the mists of earlier Greek thought the consciousness of one God.
Quote ID: 7745
Time Periods: 2
Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 321 Page: 173
Section: 2B
There was one God. The gods of the old mythology were passing away, like a splendid pageantry of clouds moving across the horizon to be absorbed in the clear and infinite heaven. “But though God is one,” it was said, “He has many names, deriving a name from each of the spheres of His government.....He is called the Son of Kronos, that is of Time, because He continues from eternity to eternity; and Lightning-God, and Thunder-God, and Rain-God, from the lightnings and thunders and rains; and the Fruit-God, from the fruits (which he protects); and the God of births, and homesteads, and kinsmen, and families, of companions, and friends, and armies.....God, in short, of heaven and earth, named after all forms of nature and events as being Himself the cause of it all.” “There are not different gods among different peoples,” says Plutarch, “nor foreign gods and Greek gods, nor gods of the south and gods of the north; but just as sun and moon and sky and earth and sea are common to all mankind, but have different names among different races, so, though there be one Reason who orders these things and one Providence who administers them....there are different honours and appellations among different races; and men use consecrated symbols, some of them obscure and some more clear."
Quote ID: 7746
Time Periods: 12
Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, The
Edwin Hatch
Book ID: 321 Page: 207
Section: 2B,4A
We may sum up the result of the influence of Greece on the conception of God in His relation to the material universe, by saying that it found a reasoned basis for Hebrew monotheism. It helped the Christian communities to believe as an intellectual conviction that which they had first accepted as a spiritual revelation.
Quote ID: 7748
Time Periods: 234
Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony, the First Decade, 1607-1617
The Black Boys Ceremony Text by William White. Edward W. Haile, editor
Book ID: 330 Page: 141
Section: 2B
William White reporteth these their ceremonies of honoring the sun: By break of day, before they eat or drink, the men, women, and children above ten years old run into the water, and there wash a good space till the sun arise; and then they offer sacrifice to it, strewing tobacco on the land or water; the like they do at sunset.
Quote ID: 7804
Time Periods: 2
Justin Martyr, ANF Vol. 1, The Apostolic Fathers
Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson
Book ID: 674 Page: 280
Section: 2B
even from the dramatists, hear even Sophocles speaking thus: -
“There is one God, in truth there is but one,
Who made the heavens and the broad earth beneath,
The glancing waves of ocean and the winds
But many of us mortals err in heart,
And set up for a solace in our woes
Images of the gods in stone and wood,
Or figures carved in brass or ivory,
And, furnishing for these our handiworks,
Both sacrifice and rite magnificent,
We think that thus we do a pious work.”
PJ footnote: Justin Martyr, Address to the Greeks, XVIII.
Quote ID: 9691
Time Periods: 0
Lactantius, ANF Vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 675 Page: 13
Section: 2B
But let us leave the testimony of prophets, lest a proof derived from those who are universally disbelieved should appear insufficient. Let us come to authors, and for the demonstration of the truth let us cite as witnesses those very persons whom they are accustomed to make use of against us,—I mean poets and philosophers. From these we cannot fail in proving the unity of God; not that they had ascertained the truth, but that the force of the truth itself is so great, that no one can be so blind as not to see the divine brightness presenting itself to his eyes. The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind. Orpheus, who is the most ancient of the poets, and coeval with the gods themselves, . . . speaks of the true and great God as the first-born, but all things sprung from Him. He also calls Him Phanes because when as yet there was nothing He first appeared and came forth from the infinite.
PJ footnote: Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, I.v.
Quote ID: 9693
Time Periods: 2
Lactantius, ANF Vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 675 Page: 14
Section: 2B
Ovid also, in the beginning of his remarkable work, without any disguising of the name, admits that the universe was arranged by God, whom he calls the Framer of the world, the Artificer of all things.
PJ footnote: Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, I.v.
Quote ID: 9694
Time Periods: 4
Lactantius, ANF Vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 675 Page: 14
Section: 2B
Maro was the first of our poets to approach the truth, who thus speaks respecting the highest God, whom he calls Mind and Spirit:
“Know first, the heaven, the earth, the main,
The moon’s pale orb, the starry train,
Are nourished by a Soul, A Spirit, whose celestial flame Glows in each member of the frame,
And stirs the mighty whole.” (Æn., vi. 724)
PJ footnote: Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, I.v.
Quote ID: 9695
Time Periods: 2
Lactantius, ANF Vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 675 Page: 225
Section: 2B
poets also, and philosophers, and inspired women,{2} utter their testimony to the unity of God.
PJ footnote: Lactantius, The Epitome of the Divine Institutes, III.
Quote ID: 9703
Time Periods: 2
Lactantius, ANF Vol. 7, Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 675 Page: 225
Section: 2B
Plato asserts His monarchy, saying that there is but one God, by whom the world was prepared and completed with wonderful order. Aristotle, his disciple, admits that there is one mind which presides over the world. Antisthenes says that there is one who is God by nature,{4} the governor of the whole system. It would be a long task to recount the statements which have been made respecting the Supreme God, either by Thales, or by Pythagoras and Anaximenes before him, or afterwards by the Stoics Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Zeno, or of our countrymen, by Seneca following the Stoics, and by Tullius himself, since all these attempted to define the being of God,{5} and affirmed that the world is ruled by Him alone, and that He is not subject to any nature, since all nature derives its origin from Him.
PJ footnote: Lactantius, The Epitome of the Divine Institutes, IV.
Quote ID: 9704
Time Periods: 2
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 133
Section: 2B
In 274 Aurelian established the new college of pontifices Solis, at once counted among the major priesthoods. {8}
Quote ID: 6045
Time Periods: 3
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 256
Section: 2B,3C
More will be said on the subject in later chapters: for the moment it will suffice to refer to Liebeschuetz’s discussion of the “neutral monotheism” of fourth-century panegyric as providing “a wide area of common ground between Christians and pagans.” {106} We should not be misled by the polemical writings of an aggressive Christian minority. For the majority on both sides who wished to avoid confrontation, the “conspiracy of silence” was actually a welcome solution.2B
Quote ID: 6094
Time Periods: 234
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 265
Section: 2B,3C
So was Macrobius himself a pagan? Surely not – at any rate not a committed pagan. One of the most widely discussed passages in the entire Saturnalia is the long discourse on solar theology put in Praetextatus’s mouth in Bk i (17-23), arguing that almost all the gods of the Graeco-Roman pantheon (and a few others as well) represent one aspect or another of the sun.
Quote ID: 6095
Time Periods: 245
Making of a Christian Aristocracy, The
Michele Renee Salzman
Book ID: 297 Page: 64
Section: 2B
When Aurelian instituted his new cult of Sol in 274, he chose as pontifices Solis senatorial aristocrats, and they continued in this role into the late fourth century. Indeed, holding a priesthood of Sol appears to have been associated with certain families who saw it as a point of family honor. {281}
Quote ID: 7432
Time Periods: 23
Minor Latin Poets, LCL 484: Minor Latin Poets II
Minor Latin Poets
Book ID: 153 Page: 769
Section: 2B,2B2
Rutilius Namatianus note - “the last of the classical Latin poets” c.400A Voyage Home to Gaul Book I
Line 57-58
For thee the very Son-God who holdeth all together doth revolve: his steeds that rise in thy domains he puts in thy domains to rest.
Quote ID: 3273
Time Periods: 25
Minucius Felix, Octavius, LCL 250: Tertullian, Minucius Felix
Minucius Felix
Book ID: 332 Page: 371
Section: 2B,4A
Octavius: Almost all philosophers of any marked distinction designate God as one, though under great variety of names, so that one might suppose, either that Christians of today are philosophers, or that philosophers of old were already Christians. Octavius XX.1
Quote ID: 7823
Time Periods: 23
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 13
Section: 2B
The celestial and solar divinities of the East were crucial in the shift towards belief in a supreme deity. This belief, by which the Sun, a male god both in Greek (Helois) and in Latin (Sol), was promoted to an all-powerful godhead whose life-giving power extended throughout the universe, became fused with the monotheistic tendencies of rationalist philosophy. And so it was that in the course of the Principate a solar pantheism – the idea that the Sun is all-powerful, and that Sol comprehends most gods – spread all over the Roman world.
Quote ID: 8341
Time Periods: 2
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 59
Section: 2B
The ‘handshake’ of Mithras and Sol is here connected with the sacrifice of the bull….*John’s note: See page 42 called “the hand-shaken”.*
This spot is blessed, holy, observant and bounteous:
Mithras marked it, and made known to
Proficentius, Father of the mysteries,
That he should build and dedicate a Cave to him;
And he has accomplished swiftly, tirelessly, this dear task
That under such protection he began, desirous
That the Hand-shaken might make their vows joyfully forever.
Quote ID: 8343
Time Periods: 234
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 61
Section: 2B,2E4
…the cult of Mithras had no public ceremonial of its own. The festival of the natalis Invicti, 25 December, was a public festival of the Sun and thus by no means limited to the mysteries of Mithras.
Quote ID: 8344
Time Periods: 234
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 62
Section: 2B
The inscriptions confirm this nomenclature: one even reads: D(eo) O(mnipotenti) S(oli) Invi(cto), Deo Genitori, r(upe) n(ato), ‘To the almighty God Sun invincible, generative god, born from the rock’. {78} Mithras is here invoked as the all-powerful, invincible sun-god, as creator-god, and as rock-born.
Quote ID: 8345
Time Periods: 234
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 146
Section: 2B
Roman Mithras is the invincible sun-god, Sol Invictus.
Quote ID: 8349
Time Periods: 234
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 168
Section: 2B
This long controversy was sparked off by a stimulated remark of Ernest Renan, in his book on the cultural history of the later Principate: ‘If Christianity had been arrested in its growth by some fatal malady, the world would have become Mithraist.’ {177}*John’s note: an exaggeration, maybe, because Mithraism was not evangelistic*
Quote ID: 8352
Time Periods: 234
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 171
Section: 2B
The cult of Mithras disappeared earlier than that of Isis, for example, and, unlike her, almost without trace. Isis survived in legend, and was known still in the Middle Ages as a pagan deity, whereas Mithras was already forgotten in late antiquity.
Quote ID: 8354
Time Periods: 45
Mithras: Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, The
Manfred Clauss
Book ID: 389 Page: 172
Section: 2A4,2B
Moreover, the similarities between the two religions adduced above must have encouraged Mithraists in particular to become Christians. They had no need in their new faith to give up the ritual meal, their Sun-imagery, or even their candles, incense and bells. Some elements of Mithraism may well have been carried over into Christianity, which partly explains why even in the sixth century the Church authorities had to struggle against those stulti homines, those simple clowns, who continued on the very church-steps to do obeisance to the Sun early in the morning, as they always had done, and pray to him. {183}
Quote ID: 8356
Time Periods: 2345
Orosius: Seven Books of History against the Pagans
A. T. Fear
Book ID: 165 Page: 261
Section: 2B,4B
For their philosophers, to pass over our saints, when inquiring into and observing everything with all their mental energy, have found that One God is the Author of all and that all things ought to be traced back to This One. So now even the pagans, whom the manifest truth now convicts of insolence rather than ignorance, when they debate with us, say that they do not follow many gods, but rather venerate many agents who are ruled by one great god {2}. There remains a confused discrepancy about the apprehension of the True God because of the many theories about how to apprehend Him, nevertheless one opinion is held by almost everyone--namely that there is One God. This is the point, albeit with difficulty, to which man’s investigations have been able to bring him. {3}Pastor John’s note: early 400’s
Quote ID: 3478
Time Periods: 45
Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety
E.R. Dodds
Book ID: 167 Page: 116/117
Section: 2B
What was the debate about? It touched on far more problems than I can mention here; but the main issues were not those which a modern Christian might expect. In the first place, it was not a debate between monotheism and polytheism. It has been said with some justification that Celsus was a stricter monotheist than Origen...
Quote ID: 3516
Time Periods: 2
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 108/109
Section: 2B
In A.D. 321, Constantine decreed that Sunday would be a day of rest—a legal holiday. {74} It appears that Constantine’s intention in doing this was to honor the god Mithras, the Unconquered Sun. {75} (He described Sunday as “the day of the sun.” {76}) To further demonstrate his affinity with sun worship, excavations of St. Peter’s in Rome uncovered a mosaic of Christ as the Unconquered Sun. {77}
Quote ID: 3555
Time Periods: 4
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 84/85
Section: 2B
Sol as invictus, whose invincibility is as specific as the beneficent power of his raised right hand, appears on Antoninus Pius’s coins first (and about that time, too, in inscriptions); then on Commodus’s coins; and on Septimius Severus’s (and at that point the epithet is first applied to an emperor himself on his coins): then on Callienus’s and with great but not exclusive emphasis on Aurelian’s; briefly, on Probus’s; again, in A.D. 305-310, minted by Galerius and (in many issues) by Maximin Daia, with Sol bearing the special title, “Guardian of the Emperors and Vice-Emperors,” conservator Augustorum et Caesarum, on issues of both Maximin Daia and Constantine; and finally, after the Tetrarchs had all been destroyed (all but Licinius), Constantine and Licinius each resumed a specially advertised relationship with Sol, Constantine carrying it forward to a point some years beyond Licinius’s death.{42}
Quote ID: 3734
Time Periods: 234
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 85
Section: 2B
It may seem only the last stage of a logical development that finally subordinates the many of traditional paganism to the one, Sol.
Quote ID: 3735
Time Periods: 2
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 86
Section: 2B
Its obliteration was no doubt due to the unpopularity of its author, since in the 270s Aurelian renewed the experiment, and under his hand its history can be traced long after his death, in the form of a sun temple he built in the capital. It honored a Syrian deity, from Emesa or Palmyra (the story is confused); and games and priesthoods were established; and the cult announced on the currency through the most emphatic legend possible, “Sol Master of the Roman Empire,”{45}These reigns and their particular religious focus are often thought to support the view that “if the solar cult had not had not succumbed to Christianity, … it could well have become the permanent religion of the Mediterranean area.”{46}
Pastor John’s notes: author disagrees
Quote ID: 3736
Time Periods: 23
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 86
Section: 2B
Dio Chrysostom reminds his audience that “some people say Apollo, Helios and Dionysus are all one, and so you,” the citizens of Rhodes, “believe; and many people combine into one strength and power absolutely all the gods, so that there is no difference in honoring one or the other.”
Quote ID: 3737
Time Periods: 12
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 88
Section: 2B
We must first confront the very term “monotheism.” Like most big words, and “-isms” worst of all, it is no friend to clear thought. It indicates acknowledgment of one god only. Very good. But it suggests no definition of “god.” That, as we have seen in our discussion of demons, was a crucial point of disagreement between the Jews and Christians, on the one hand, and most other people in the empire, on the other.Pastor John’s note: good
Quote ID: 3742
Time Periods: 2
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 187
Section: 2B
46. Grant (1968) 173 speaks of the moment around A.D. 309. Cf. Merkelbach (1962) 234: “The last stage of ancient paganism is the syncretistic Helios cult. In the 3rd cent. It was for long periods the official religion of the roman state; all other religions were to be subsumed in that of Helios.” The statement is in accord with the importance most scholars attribute to the cult.
Quote ID: 3780
Time Periods: 234
Pagans and Christians: Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to Fourth Century A.D.
Robin Lane Fox
Book ID: 173 Page: 34/35
Section: 2B
By the Imperial period, however, were pagans beginning to merge these multiple gods into a single whole a pagan “drift into monotheism” on which Christian teaching could capitalize?. . . .
However, it did not amount to monotheism, because it did not exclude worship for lesser gods too.
. . . .
Coexistence remained the hallmark of pagan divinities, from the age of Homer to Constantine.
Quote ID: 3833
Time Periods: 234
Pagans and Christians: Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to Fourth Century A.D.
Robin Lane Fox
Book ID: 173 Page: 168/169
Section: 2B
In the late second or third century, prayer to the east found an unexpected home which leads us directly to the language of the gods. The small city of Oenoanda lies in the Lycian uplands of southwestern Asia Minor….. . . .
In this primary home of Epicurean wisdom, we now have words from a god on the city wall, which run in hexameter verse as follows:
’Self-born, untaught, motherless, unshakeable,
Giving place to no name, many-named, dwelling in fire,
Such is God: we are a portion of God, his angels.
This, then, to the questioners about God’s nature
The god replied, calling him all-seeing Ether: to him, then, look
And pray at dawn, looking out to the east.’
The text had been carefully sited. It was carved high on the wall’s northeast aspect at a point which catches the first dawn sunlight along the rise and fall of the perimeter. The site was suited to the message of the god.
Quote ID: 3859
Time Periods: 2
Pagans and Christians: Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to Fourth Century A.D.
Robin Lane Fox
Book ID: 173 Page: 260
Section: 2B,4A
While art and the ancient cult statues continued to define people’s sense of the gods, philosophy continued to discuss the concept of a Supreme god, his qualities and relation to the other divinities. Oracles then made this language the language of gods themselves: ….
Quote ID: 3869
Time Periods: 2
Painting the Word
John Drury
Book ID: 174 Page: 75
Section: 2B
The classical Renaissance opened a cornucopia of resources for the visual representation of God’s incarnation in Christ’s body. Apollo, the pagan god of light, had been taken into Christ by early Christian painters and teachers.Translation by: AJW; Socrates (NPNF2 vol. 2, p. 14)
Quote ID: 3885
Time Periods: ?
Severans: The Changed Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 350 Page: 5
Section: 2B,3B
Three more points need to be made about what we may call the ‘Severan’ period, AD 193-235.....
Monotheistic religion, too, had gained ground to an extraordinary extent. When one says this, one thinks of course first of Christianity, whose writer Tertullian possessed immense authority and power (Chapter 12). But it is also necessary to recognize that the pagan, monotheistic worship of the Sun, despite the excesses of Elagabalus in importing a Syrian version of the cult, had become very widely practised; and that the Olympian deities tended increasingly to be regarded as appendages or manifestations of this all-powerful deity.
....
There was a great deal of pagan monotheism.
Quote ID: 8049
Time Periods: 23
Severans: The Changed Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 350 Page: 58
Section: 2B
Picture. As a prominent feature of the fashionable cult of past heroes, there was an immense respect for Alexander III the Great (356-323 BC), especially in his native Macedonia, where this gold medallion was a prize at the Games of AD 242-3. The lasting reverence for Alexander was enhanced by Caracalla (his portrait appears on the other side of the medallion), who was particularly attached to his memory, and by Severus Alexander (it was in his reign that the medallion was created), who on coming to the throne changed his name from Alexianus to Alexander.On this medallion Alexander the Great looks upward, with the gaze into the heavens that had become so familiar in the third century, which was so devoted to the cult of the Sun and to monotheism.
Quote ID: 8060
Time Periods: 34
Severans: The Changed Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 350 Page: 72/73
Section: 2B,3B
In Rome, Elagabalus (built a) magnificent temple on the Palatine to house the cult-image of the Baal of Emesa, together with an adjoining garden and shrine of Adonis....The Temple of Sol Invictus Elagabalus occupied the site of what had been the Aedes Caesarum on the east spur of the Plaltine, opposite Hadrian’s Temple of Venus and Rome.....
After Elagabalus’s death it was rededicated to Jupiter the Avenger (Jup[p]iter Ultor.{25}
The successor of Elagabalus, Severus Alexander, was responsible for this rededication.
Quote ID: 8065
Time Periods: 23
Severans: The Changed Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 350 Page: 74
Section: 2B,3B
The age of the Severi witnessed two very important developments in paganism: the persistence of monotheistic views and the growth of syncretism, which imported Egyptian and Syrian religious motifs to Rome, with the encouragement, no doubt, of the Syrian Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius (Chapter 8)As to monotheism, it came to be increasingly felt that there was one god, who might as well be called Jupiter, and that the other Olympians were, as one could say, manifestations of the single deity. He should be worshipped with high-minded austerity. The most significant pagan writing of the time was the long, partly fictitious Life of Apollonius of Tyana (215-38) by Flavius Philostratus. {2}
Quote ID: 8066
Time Periods: 23
Severans: The Changed Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 350 Page: 77/78
Section: 2B,3B
Monotheism was often identified with the worship of Sol or Helios (the Sun).There was a belief, during this same epoch, which much more nearly (than Neo-Platonism) competed with Christ for the control of the western world. This was the cult of the Sun, which was revered by millions of the inhabitants of the Roman empire. And its religion for a time even became the state worship...There was an ever-increasing tendency to explain the other traditional deities in terms of the Sun, in all but monotheistic fashion.
The cult of this deity offered flattering analogies to the imperial regime and its resplendent, sun-like leaders. Under Septimius Severus, whose wife Julia Domna came from Syria where reverence for the Sun was expecially strong, its worship almost took command of the whole state religion.
The Sun-cult could well have become the religion of the Mediterranean area for an indefinite period ahead. But it did not do so, in the end, because such a divinity was too impersonal, too lacking in urgent human appeal. Devotees of the Sun themselves felt that this excessive remoteness failed to satisfy their needs. And a branch of the cult came into vogue in order to respond to such yearnings. It was the worship of an ancient Iranian deity, Mithras, who was god of the Morning Light, and...was identified with the Sun himself.
But unlike the solar cult the ritual of Mithras always retained its private character...in marked contrast to the Sun’s innumerable appearances on the official coinage....[So] it was Christianity, instead, that won the day. For the ‘biography’ that was Mithras’s holy book...failed to persuade its readers that he had ever really appeared on earth to provide help for human beings.
Besides, Mithraism had no place for women; and it is they, as the cults of Isis and Cybele and Jesus made clear, who provided the largest numerical support for successful faiths. {12}
Quote ID: 8068
Time Periods: 23
Severans: The Changed Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 350 Page: 78
Section: 2B,3B
A figure of Sol had the features of Commodus, whose father Marcus Aurelius, on his death-bed, declared him to be the Rising Sun. A relief from Ephesus shows the deified Marcus ascending to the sky in the god’s chariot which returns dead souls to their heavenly element.
Quote ID: 8069
Time Periods: 23
Why Rome Fell
Edward Lucas White
Book ID: 343 Page: 222
Section: 2B
Other divinities regarded as nearly or quite Major Divinities were:….
{20} Helios—Sol, the Sun-God.
Pastor John’s note: It is remarkable that Helios blended with Apollo, etc., and became for many, including Constantine, the supreme (or only) god.
Quote ID: 7954
Time Periods: 234
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