Section: 3A4A - Religious
Number of quotes: 35
A Chronicle of the Last Pagans
Pierre Chuvin
Book ID: 4 Page: 143
Section: 3A4A
On the basis of this evidence, we might get the impression that under Justinian paganism was finally eradicated. It does not seem to have survived even in the desert outposts to which it was ultimately relegated. It was pushed to the edge of the Empire and the fringe of society with the Platonists of Harran. And yet, the episodes that are vividly related in enormous detail by John of Ephesus, a monk then bishop, bring us back to the heart of the Empire and within close range of the emperor. In 542 John of Ephesus became the chargé d’affaires for pagans, super paganos, in Asia (meaning the western part of Asia Minor): Caria, Phrygia, and Lydia.
Quote ID: 74
Time Periods: 6
A Dark History: The Popes
Brenda Ralph Lewis
Book ID: 5 Page: 10
Section: 3A4A
By the ninth century, papacy and popes were the playthings of noble families.
Quote ID: 78
Time Periods: 7
A.D. 381 Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 11 Page: xv
Section: 3A4A
the Greek tradition of free-ranging intellectual thought was challenged by the specific ways in which Christianity manifested itself in the fourth and fifth centuries as the servant of an authoritarian state.
Quote ID: 169
Time Periods: 45
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: 97
Section: 3A4A
Tertullian wrote two apologetic treaties in 197.It was possible that persecution would begin again; it was also possible that a new age was dawning. Tertullian hoped that his defense of the Christian position would bring about the reconciliation of the state with the church.
Pastor John’s note: Where in all of this was the pursuit of spiritual power, truth, gifts. The favor of Rome was their goal.
Quote ID: 612
Time Periods: 2
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: xi
Section: 1A,3A4A,4A
3A4AAs early as 150 a Roman apologist found the cross typified in the standards of the Roman legions, and a generation later several bishops in Asia Minor explicitly asserted the compatibility of Christianity with the Roman state.
. . . .
4A
At the same time, in spite of official church objections, Christian theologians continued a vigorous effort to interpret Christianity in terms derived from the leading philosophies of the day.
. . . .
1A
In spite of various vicissitudes and individual deviations from the general pattern, it is clear that during the third century Christians were making ready for the time when the church would be recognized by the state and there would be an empire at least nominally Christian.
Quote ID: 578
Time Periods: 23
Christian History Magazine: Be Christian or Die, pp.12-17, Issue 63 Vol. XVIII No. 3
James Reston, Jr.
Book ID: 367 Page: 14
Section: 3A4A,3G
Ethelred [PJ: 978–1013] presented his tormenter with royal gifts and, in return, Olaf promised never again to visit war upon England. To Ethelred, Christianity was more effective than gold, and to Olaf, his new faith conferred upon him a dignity and stature among kings that he had lacked.
Quote ID: 8191
Time Periods: 7
Early Church, The
Henry Chadwick
Book ID: 215 Page: 31
Section: 3A4A
But in Spain by A.D. 300 there were Christians happily holding the distinguished office of flamen in the cult of the emperor.
Quote ID: 5368
Time Periods: 3
Gregory of Tours: The Merovingians
Alexander Callander Murray (Edited and Translated)
Book ID: 102 Page: 245
Section: 3A4A
Domnolus, bishop of Le Mans, began to grow ill. In the time of King Chlothar I 561 he was the head of a monastic community at the basilica of Saint Laurence in Paris. The elder Childebert I 588 was still alive, but Domnolus always remained loyal to King Chlothar and repeatedly hid the agents that Chlothar sent as spies. For this reason, the king was waiting for a vacancy in a bishopric that Domnolus could fill.
Quote ID: 2567
Time Periods: 6
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: xx
Section: 3A4A
Pastor John’s note: (written on inside cover of book).This book is very good at seeing through Christian propaganda. The author demonstrates that there was no cultural-wide distinction between ancient and modern Roman religion (“paganism” and “Christianity”), and convincingly shows the impossibility of making a clear separation of the two, as far as the essentials of the religion are concerned. Since the mid-third century, the bishopric was increasingly political in nature, and after Constantine, it was increasingly expected to be so.
It is a dangerous situation for Christianity when its leaders lose their grip on political power; that is, when the people began to insist on truth and experience rather than claims and threats of divine judgment for unbelief.
Quote ID: 6027
Time Periods: 3457
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 133
Section: 3A4A
Priesthoods were regarded as political rewards rather than religious responsibilities.....
The future emperor Galba received the ornamental triumphalia and three priesthoods, one major and two minor, as a reward for victories in Africa and Germany.
Quote ID: 6043
Time Periods: 147
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 135
Section: 3A4A
For centuries, most aristocrats listed their priesthoods along with all their other honores on cursus inscriptions as a matter of course, . . . and there is no reason to suppose that the situation had changed by at any rate the age of Constantine. The prestige value of Roman priesthoods is clearly enough illustrated by their inclusion in the cursus.
Quote ID: 6046
Time Periods: 01
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 139
Section: 3A4A,3C
It is not without justification that membership of the priestly college in the early empire has been treated “as an aspect not of Roman religion but of the history of the senatorial elite.”{46} And in the fourth century, as before, it is clear that the qualifications for a priesthood remained either noble birth or (a distant second) a distinguished career.
Quote ID: 6047
Time Periods: 04
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 139
Section: 3A4A
In the Republic and early empire it was taken for granted that those who presided over the cults of the city should be chosen from among the elite. But the growing pressure of Christianity, with its very different priests, elected at a mature age to lead communities of Christians, may eventually have prompted more religiously inclined pagans to see their pontifical duties in a new light.
Quote ID: 6048
Time Periods: 045
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 151
Section: 3A4A
In this context Praetextatus’s famous quip that he would become a Christian if he was made pope takes on a new meaning. Nobles like Praetextatus and Kamenius would not have been happy to find themselves rank-and-file catechumens, gathering in groups with women and children to be instructed by some lowborn presbyter. They took it for granted that they were born to be top dogs in any religion they joined.
Quote ID: 6050
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 158
Section: 2C,3A4A
In the high empire the man in the Roman street knew, when comparing two otherwise parallel cursuses, that priesthoods implied noble birth and imperial favor. But by the second half of the fourth century priesthoods must have come to be viewed quite differently, by both Christians and pagans. The Christian man in the street was likely to see a pontifex as something like a pagan bishop and a quindecimvir sacris faciundis as someone personally stained with the blood of sacrifice. Aristocrats would not have continued to spend fortunes on games (Symmachus 2,000 pounds of gold on the praetorian games of his son) unless popular favor was still important to them. When they held (as most of them did sooner or later) the prefecture of Rome, they were faced with the delicate responsibility of provisioning the city. There were constant famines and riots. The elder Symmachus was not the only noble to have his fine Trastevere mansion burned down by a rampaging mob. In an increasingly Christian Rome, it was unwise for nobles to run further risks by “advertising” their paganism to everyone who passed their dedications in the public spaces of Rome on a daily basis. The reason members of the Roman elite had in the past routinely listed priesthoods along with the rest of their honores was the prestige they brought. Even before the 380s it was becoming clear that they were now becoming liabilities. It was not prudent to flaunt them.
Quote ID: 6051
Time Periods: 124
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 164
Section: 3A1B,3A4A,4B
Symmachus felt he could not do this “when so many are neglecting their priestly duties”. It is here that he makes his much-quoted remark that “it is now a way of currying favor for Romans to desert the altars”. What has not been sufficiently appreciated is that this is not a comment on the small numbers of pagans left because of the inroads of Christianity. It is a complaint about the small number of pontiffs who took the trouble to show up, whether at meetings of the college or at the festivals.. . . .
Ep. i.47 reproaches Praetextatus for vacationing at Baiae while Symmachus performs his pontifical duties in Rome, and while the tone is playful (“there is much to be discussed in our college; who allowed you a holiday from your public responsibilities?”), Symmachus devotes four sentences to the point.
Quote ID: 6053
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 165
Section: 3A4A,3A4B
The consulate was the supreme honor available to a private citizen (even rarer now that so many went to emperors and their sons), while membership of the priestly colleges (even assuming they still existed) was a distinction shared with scores of others, a distinction that came to nobles like Tertullus unsolicited in their teens. {141}It is hard not to connect this text with a strikingly similar passage in Paulinus of Nola, urging Augustine’s young protege Licentius in 396 to renounce his worldly ambitions and follow Augustine’s footsteps: “If you heed and follow Augustine. . . then indeed you will be fashioned consul and priest, not in the phantom of a dream, but in reality.” And then, “For Licentius will be truly a pontifex and truly a consul, if you hug the footsteps of Augustine... tread the ways of God in close attendance on your master, so that you may learn... to deserve the priesthood.”{142} To be both consul and pontifex had been the summit of a Roman noble’s ambitions since the days of the Republic.”{143}
Quote ID: 6054
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 165
Section: 3A1B,3A4A
The latest Roman pontifex known is Symmachus himself, who died in 402. No pontifex, augur, or quindecimvir is known to have lived later than 402.
Quote ID: 6055
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 167
Section: 3A4A
The fact is that, on the evidence we have, Symmachus (402) is the latest known pontifex, Praetextatus (384) the latest known augur, Kamenius (385) the latest known quindecimvir, Coelia Concordia (385) the latest known Vestal, and Q. Clodius Flavianus (if he outlived Kamenius) the latest known septemvir epulonum.. . . .
There is no indication that any pagan noble born later than ca.360 ever held any of the old priesthoods. The colleges were not abolished; they simply faded away as their older members died off, in the first decade of the fifth century.
Quote ID: 6057
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 167
Section: 3A1B,3A4A
Moderns tend to assume that nobles with many priesthoods were more dedicated pagans. In fact, the accumulation of more than two major priesthoods in a single person should probably be seen as an early sign of the decline of the priesthoods.. . . .
It may be that someone like Symmachus, who restricted himself to a single priesthood and took the trouble to attend as many meetings as he could, was actually serving the state cults better than those who ostentatiously filled their cursuses with a multitude of priesthoods they had no time for.
Quote ID: 6058
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 168
Section: 3A4A
There is little evidence that official Roman paganism survived the fourth century. By this I do not mean that Roman paganism itself died out (in a variety of ways and forms it never entirely died). Nor do I mean that no individual pagans were left. But there can (I would argue) be no serious doubt that the formal apparatus of the state cults as administered by the various priestly colleges was gone. There is one highly significant piece of evidence that has never so far been exploited by historians. The grammarian Servis frequently and systematically refers to pontifices, flamines, and countless details of sacrifice and other cult practices in his Vergil commentary, published in (at least) the 420s in the imperfect tense (Ch. 16.3). This, that, or the other was what the priest used to do or say.
Quote ID: 6059
Time Periods: 45
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 171
Section: 3A1B,3A4A
There is no reason to suppose the pontiffs were more pious than other pagans, or in any but a purely titular sense pagan leaders. In view of their wealth and social importance as aristocrats they were certainly the most authoritative representatives of Roman paganism, and so the obvious spokesmen to protest at the Christian abrogation of state subsidies for the cults in 382. On the other hand, they were not necessarily the most committed champions available. Indeed, the very fact that they were so prominent, both socially and politically, may have meant that most were unwilling to commit their prestige too decisively to a losing cause. Pontifices did not in any sense represent a pagan community in the sense that Christian clergy represented the Christian community.With a few pagan counterparts to bishops like Athanasius or Ambrose to rally the troops, the fate of Roman paganism just might have been different. But pagan priests known to have been appointed in their teens and twenties on the basis of birth and connections could hardly command either the authority needed for the task or the respect of their Christian counterparts. More important, it does not seem to have occurred to them to make the attempt. Men like Kamenius, Praetextatus, Flavian, and Symmachus were first and foremost aristocrats and landowners, not priests. The very fact that their descendants continued to hold high office in a Christian world is enough to show that it was their families and estates, not the cults, that they saw as their primary responsibilities.
Quote ID: 6061
Time Periods: 4
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 173
Section: 3A4A
As Henry Chadwick charmingly put it, “Pagans did not know they were pagans until the Christians told them they were.” {1} Even then, no pagan would have thought of himself as a pagan except in relation to Christians.. . . .
It is also a problem that we have so few conversion stories – for the aristocracy, none.
Quote ID: 6063
Time Periods: 456
Later Roman Empire, The
Averil Cameron
Book ID: 243 Page: 55
Section: 3A1,3A4A,3C
Constantine had a law which exempted Christian clergy from certain public obligations. Later, “Constantine found himself legislating to control the numbers of those who now flocked to be ordained and gain these privileges for themselves.”
Quote ID: 6111
Time Periods: 4
Natural Symbols
Mary Douglas
Book ID: 157 Page: 5
Section: 3A4A
A movement which begins as a sect expressing the religious needs of the poor gradually moves up the social scale. It becomes respectable. Its rituals increase, its rigorous fundamentalism in devotion to the Word becomes as weighted with magic as the sacramental edifice it started by denying. With respectability comes ritualism.
Quote ID: 3323
Time Periods: 3
Natural Symbols
Mary Douglas
Book ID: 157 Page: 14
Section: 3A4A
This one example suggest that when the social group grips its members in tight communal bonds, the religion is ritualist; when this grip is relaxed, ritualism declines. And with this shift of forms, a shift in doctrines appears.
Quote ID: 3324
Time Periods: 3
Natural Symbols
Mary Douglas
Book ID: 157 Page: 21/22
Section: 3A4A
After the protest stage, once the need for organization is recognized, the negative attitude to rituals is seen to conflict with the need for a coherent system of expression. Then ritualism re-asserts itself around the new context of social relations. Fundamentalist, who are not magical in their attitude to the Eucharist, become magical in their attitude to the Bible. Revolutionaries who strike for freedom of speech adopt repressive sanctions to prevent return to the Tower of Babel.
Quote ID: 3325
Time Periods: 3
Natural Symbols
Mary Douglas
Book ID: 157 Page: 157
Section: 3A4A
Magicality is a product of social control. To insist that the symbols are efficacious is to threaten blasphemy and sacrilege with automatic danger and to promise the reverent automatic blessing. Magicality is an instrument of mutual coercion which only works when common consent upholds the system. It is useless for a witch doctor to invest a fetish with magic power by the sole authority of his charisma. Magic derives its potency from the legitimacy of the system in which this kind of communication is being made.
Quote ID: 3327
Time Periods: 3
Natural Symbols
Mary Douglas
Book ID: 157 Page: 160
Section: 3A4A
Anti-ritualism is therefore the idiom of revolt. It must be so, and it must inevitably press the case by decrying not only meaningless rituals, but all rituals as such. Even when the case demands more articulate communication, even when more meaningful rituals are needed, anti-ritualism is undiscriminating in its sweeping condemnation of formality.
Quote ID: 3328
Time Periods: 3
Organization of the Early Christian Churches, The
Edwin Hatch, M. A.
Book ID: 255 Page: 143/144
Section: 3A4A,3C
Lecture VI: The Clergy as a Separate Class.But under the vicious system of the later Empire they were an almost intolerable burden. The magistrates were charged with the collection of the revenue, and, the quota of each municipality being fixed, they had to make up the deficit–in days in which deficits were chronic–out of their private resources{10}. The holding of office consequently involved in some cases an almost ruinous expenditure. It was a heavy and unequal tax upon property. An addition to the number of those who were exempt from it added to its oppressiveness and its inequality. It had also another result, it added to the number of claimants for admission to the privileged class. When the officers of Christian Churches were exempted, many persons whose fortunes were large enough to render them liable to the burden of municipal offices, sought and obtained admission to the ranks of the clergy, with the view of thereby escaping their liability. The exemption had barely been half-a-dozen years in operation before the Emperor found it necessary to guard it with important limitations{11}. These limitations were, for the most part, in the direction of prohibiting those who were liable to municipal burdens from being appointed to ecclesiastical office.
Quote ID: 6429
Time Periods: 4
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 8
Section: 1A,3A4A
And the bishop of Constantinople was but the Emperor’s chaplain, incapable of pursuing a course for himself—the nominee, the puppet, and sometimes the prisoner of one who claimed in his own person to be most sacred, a Divine delegate, and a god on earth. In Rome, the Bishop had no rival or second. He tended more and more to become what Caesar had been of old…..
Quote ID: 7908
Time Periods: 167
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 25
Section: 1A,3A4A,3A4B,4B
But the Pontifex Maximus was a Roman and a statesman. He left to others the wrangling over terms of Greek art; for him it was enough to insist upon what had been handed down. These gladiatorial displays of logic went on for a well-nigh a hundred and seventy years, during which time the only Pope who furnished a statement of any length to the combatants was Leo I; and his manner is the Roman, sententious and judicial, not argumentative. The Latin language, copious in legal phrase, abounding in the technicalities of ritual, was neither delicate not flexible enough to express the finer shades of heresy. It was the language of command: strong, plain, and matter of fact.
Quote ID: 7921
Time Periods: 1567
Rise of Western Christendom, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 265 Page: 344
Section: 3A4A
He met, in Ethelbert of Kent (580-616), a Saxon king determined to use every asset including the new religion - to maintain his own distinctive, local style of hegemonial overlordship.Ethelbert knew how to control foreigners, lest the world they represented should undermine his own prestige. He had been married for 15 years to a Christian Frankish princess, Bertha. Bertha had been free to practice her own religion, with a Frankish chaplain-bishop. They had been allowed to use a Romano-British church that lay a little outside the Roman walls of Canterbury, on the Roman road which led to the coast. But Ethelbert was in no mood to receive baptism from the Franks, nor, apparently, were they eager to insist on it. They did not want a Christian equal, and Ethelbert had no intention of becoming the spiritual “sub-king” of rulers with hegemonial ambitions that were quite as marked as were his own. To receive baptism from Rome was a different matter.
Pastor John’s Note: Roman Baptism
Quote ID: 6730
Time Periods: 67
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 41
Section: 3A2B,3A4A
On 22nd November 498 both men were consecrated pope. A virulent pamphlet warfare broke out and clashes in the street followed. The supporters of Symmachus [PJ: not the earlier Symacchus] sought to prove with pamphlets purporting to describe incidents in the papacy’s history, none true, that the senate had always shown itself obdurate in the face of the Church’s interests; that senatorial charges of avarice against Symmachus were dispelled by his generosity; and that the pope was above judgment even by a synod of bishops, for ’the disciple is not above his master’; and that any bishop, of however historic a see other than that of Rome, of course, was subject to trial and sentence by Rome‘s bishop.
Quote ID: 4245
Time Periods: 5
Rome Triumphant: How The Empire Celebrated Its Victories
Robert Payne
Book ID: 192 Page: 220
Section: 3A4A
Meanwhile the churchly triumphs continued, and the Italians especially seemed haunted by these vast processions which imitated from a great distance the processions of the ancient emperors. Whenever the Pope ventured abroad, he rode in triumph. So we find Aeneas Piccolomini, Pope Pius II, entering Mantua through flower-decked streets in the spring of 1459. At the head of the procession rode three Cardinals followed by twelve white riderless horses with golden saddles and bridles representing the twelve apostles. There followed three immense banners, one bearing the Cross, another the keys of St. Peter and the third the heraldic arms of the Picolomini. Then came the clergy of Mantua, and another white horse bearing the Host in a golden box surrounded by candles, and then a host of nobles and ecclesiastics. Last of all came the little bent figure of the Pope resplendent in purple and jewels.Pius II, half-pagan, the most gentle of Popes, and perhaps the most intelligent, had prepared a sophisticated triumph, and had no illusions about his own magnificence. He was sufficiently Christian to prefer a Christian triumph, unlike Leo X who visited Florence fifty-four years later and rode in a triumphal chariot painted by Pontormo, accompanied by seven other chariots bearing figures from ancient mythology.
Quote ID: 4448
Time Periods: 7
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