Constantine's Pagan Triumph
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing CONSTANTINE'S PAGAN TRIUMPH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Christtantty's rapid triumph over paganism has remained one of history's major puzzles. Scarcely any independent...
...Christianity faced internal dissension and apathy, and found itself in danger of losing momentum...
...Constantine never dared suppress worship of the old gods, though the Church was now powerful enough to campaign against their rites...
...It was vital to thank them for favors rendered—they could turn nasty on ingrates...
...A Persian named Mani (circa 215-275) founded a faith that "was to survive the Roman Empire and in the East would last for very much longer...
...The Church aspired to a classless society, in which a slave who converted became equal to a highborn Roman matron proselyte...
...Not only did they refuse to make the slightest concession to the state worship of the Emperor or local deities, they positively sought out martyrdom, sometimes compelling reluctant authorities to prosecute them and enforce death sentences...
...During the second and third centuries many Middle Eastern cities seem to have arranged to celebrate Jewish and pagan holidays together...
...Apart from Christianity, Judaism was unique in demanding fidelity to one God...
...Fox does not draw his insights from newly discovered materials such as the Dead Sea Scroll trove...
...The whole Church engaged in ceaseless proselytizing...
...Backsliding into sexual sins or pagan customs usually meant expulsion from the community, with a promise of eternal damnation...
...Better a pagan than a heretic...
...The book's first section describes the daily life and religious practices of pagans during the years around the advent of Christianity...
...Among the upper classes it promoted learning, the arts, and often devotion: In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church found the religious reverence of Plato and Virgil so moving that it considered them proto-Christians...
...The pagans' primary loyalties were to their own families, class, hometowns, and local cults...
...Citing the authority of Cicero, the Emperor claimed this Sybil had prophesied the Last Judgment in a poem where "the first Greek letter of each line spelt Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, Cross, inaperfect Greek acrostic...
...By the closeof the third century, theChristian community had grown to the point where it was losing the intimacy and fervor of its beginnings...
...When Apollo was heard to complain that these new religions interfered with his own oracles, the Emperor took the god seriously enough to institute the last major Christian persecution in the West...
...It became a convenient way to atone for otherwise unforgivable lapses: Martyrs wiped out their sins with their own blood, and were believed to enjoy paradise immediately...
...Pagan worship ebbed away until it was finally suppressed by the Church in the sixth century...
...Manicheanism spread so rapidly among Christians and their potential converts that the Church was galvanized into recovering the zeal of its early days...
...Fox concludes his study with a rather large irony...
...A number of scholars have suggested that all these new faiths had an edge over outmoded Hellenism, and that Christianity managed to incorporate a winning combination of their "modern" elements...
...Were it a forgery, the author argues, Eusebius would have corrected Constantine's heresies...
...They might do this by Consulting an oracle, by making a pilgrimage to some holy spot, or by resorting to divination to discover the god's will...
...In 325 the Emperor attended the great Council of Nicaea, where with his sanction the bishops established Christian orthodoxy...
...Fox' brilliantly simple breakthrough has been to bridge the three...
...Intended as a universal religion, it "improved" upon the teachingsof Buddha, Jesus and Zoroaster...
...Not so, insists Robin Lane Fox in his radical study, Pagans and Christians (Knopf, 799 pp., $35.00...
...Still, pagan literature emphasizes the love worshipers felt more than the fear...
...By 317, Christians had begun to kill each other over issues of doctrine...
...As for the mystery cults, they appealed to small, elite groups and hardly influenced outsiders...
...Perpetual virginity (unheard of among pagans), long fasts, and provision for the poor were urged...
...The closing of the gymnasia later in the century signaled the demise of classical culture...
...In his second section, Fox contrasts early Christian society with the easy-going pagan world...
...Unfortunately, the squabbling between the two groups attracted the attention of the government...
...It was on the way to becoming a state religion...
...Slaves counted as nonpersons...
...The principle source documenting his religious convictions is Eusebius' great History of the Church...
...Certain seasons had special rites, and so did certain groups—young men and married women, for instance...
...Paganism continued to flourish centuries after the conversion of Constantine, he says, until Christianity finally suppressed it...
...The Christian life demanded chastity and turning one's possessions over to the Church...
...The supreme pagan authorities, the jewels of classical learning, were now appropriated by the Church to celebrate its triumph...
...Life was held sacred, despite the fact that martyrdom was applauded, indeed encouraged...
...Eusebius was a bishop who often preached before the Emperor, and Fox accepts the authenticity of Constantine's utterances as recorded by him, especially the controversial "Oration to the Saints...
...Fox believes it was saved at this stage by the arrival of a newer religion...
...Everyone was obliged to pay lip service to Emperor worship...
...What civilized pagan could have guessed that a century later, the Emperor himself would be a Christian, and homage to the ancient gods would be dying out...
...Ethics was important, but the pagan code did not discourage the practice of abandoning unwanted babies, nor did it foster concern for the poor...
...Paganism, in short, maintained the status quo and thus proved enduringly comfortable to most conditions of life...
...This wide horizon could perhaps only have occurred so naturally to a man on the open frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires,' observes Fox...
...By then over 1,000 years old, the rituals offered to the ancient gods of Olympus centered on local shrines, as in the case of Diana of Ephesus and the cults of Apollo at Delphi and Miletus...
...Fox characterizes the pagans' attitudes toward their gods as a combination of "awe and intimacy...
...The first era of mystery cults was passing, and the Church had temporarily gained some measure of toleration from Roman authorities (who were more preoccupied with repulsing barbarian incursions on the Empire's borders than with religious differences...
...Further, he has made comprehensible a vast amount of material, and drawn many provocative conclusions...
...Rather, he subjects late pagan and early Christian sources to side-by-side scrutiny—something no one has attempted to do before...
...Most quickly faded out of existence on their own, with no help from paganism, Judaism or the burgeoning Christian Church...
...Constantine did not base his conversion on the Bible—he attributed it to a pagan-style dream, in which "the One God" declared that if the prospective Emperor's soldiers drew crosses on their shields, they would prevail in battle...
...Scarcely any independent writings refer to the followers of Jesus until 100 years after his crucifixion...
...When Constantine preached his new faith, he likewise appealed not to the words of Scripture, but to such pagan oracles as the Sibyl of Erythrae, who anciently served Apollo at Delphi...
...Henceforth, Christianity became increasingly strict about theology, even as it relaxed some of its moral standards...
...In fact, the official documents of the Roman Empire might not have bothered to mention the Christians at all were it not for their stubbornness...
...Cities usually boasted a divine patron, honored by the populace...
...Subsequent accounts alleged that the Sibyl of Cumae had approached Augustus Caesar on the Capitoline Hill to foretell the birth of Christ to him, and that Virgil recorded the event...
...As history demonstrates, this formula became astoundingly popular...
...It endured in China until the 1930s...
...Throughout the second century his disciples still constituted a minor sect, competing among a variety of "mystery cults" that were springing up at the time...
...The traditional explanation for this amazing reversal holds that paganism was withering away when Christianity appeared...
...However, Fox quotes inscriptions from several Jewish groups who had somehow managed to reconcile monotheism with participation in the rituals at shrines to Apollo in Miletus and Didyma...
...The Apostles bore witness to an era already rife with sects, many of which had features similar to their own: denial of plural divinities, rejection of animal sacrifice, and the practice of symbolic "sacraments" like baptism and Eucharist...
...The Olympians did not demand exclusive veneration: Earthier gods like Pan or Dionysius presided over pastures and woodlands, and Egyptian mythology became intertwined with the Hellenistic pantheon in some corners of the Empire...
...Ironically, among the soldiers of the Imperial Guard who were present as Apollo's voice issued from a cave at Didyma was a young army officer named Constantine...
...Followers of Christ opposed most pagan values...
...The early Church expected its baptized members to be "perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect...
...Occasionally a crowd of devotees would all witness some heavenly apparition (one thinks of contemporary mass sightings of the Virgin Mary...
...As the Imperial Court accepted Christian values, paganism entered a long decline...
...Universal brotherhood was a foreign idea...
...became the rallying cry...
...Among the participants was Saint Augustine, a convert from Manicheanism...
...Fox stresses that visions in dreams were regarded as particularly significant in communicating with deities...
...Hellenistic studies, ancient history and Church history have traditionally been pursued as separate academic fields, and scholars of one can be woefully ignorant of the others...
...Men regularly invoked divine guidance when making important decisions involving finances, marriage and health...
...Historians have long debated the sincerity of Constantine's conversion, and several have questioned whether he became a Christian at all...
...But the bishops were more concerned with Manicheanism than with garlands offered to Venus or Pan, and with the followers of the unorthodox Arms and Marcion among its own ranks...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 5
