Between Pagan and Christian

Christopher P. Jones

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674369528
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

For the early Christians, "pagan" referred to a multitude of unbelievers: Greek and Roman devotees of the Olympian gods, and "barbarians" such as Arabs and Germans with their own array of deities. But while these groups were clearly outsiders or idolaters, who and what was pagan depended on the outlook of the observer, as Christopher Jones shows in this fresh and penetrating analysis. Treating paganism as a historical construct rather than a fixed entity, Between Pagan and Christian uncovers the ideas, rituals, and beliefs that Christians and pagans shared in Late Antiquity.While the emperor Constantine's conversion in 312 was a momentous event in the history of Christianity, the new religion had been gradually forming in the Roman Empire for centuries, as it moved away from its Jewish origins and adapted to the dominant pagan culture. Early Christians drew on pagan practices and claimed important pagans as their harbingers—asserting that Plato, Virgil, and others had glimpsed Christian truths. At the same time, Greeks and Romans had encountered in Judaism observances and beliefs shared by Christians such as the Sabbath and the idea of a single, creator God. Polytheism was the most obvious feature separating paganism and Christianity, but pagans could be monotheists, and Christians could be accused of polytheism and branded as pagans. In the diverse religious communities of the Roman Empire, as Jones makes clear, concepts of divinity, conversion, sacrifice, and prayer were much more fluid than traditional accounts of early Christianity have led us to believe.

CHAPTER ONE

The Perception of Paganism

IN ONE OF his great missionary journeys, Paul of Tarsus, a Jewish convert to Christianity, came to Athens. Now far declined from its days of imperial greatness, the city was still the heart of Hellenic culture, and Paul found it to be “full of idols” (kateidôlos). He began to preach in the public space of the Agora, where certain of the philosophers for which the city was renowned considered him “an announcer of strange divinities (daimonia).” They brought him before city’s senior and most exclusive body, the Areopagus, and asked him to explain his teaching, “since you bring certain strange things to our ears.” As recounted by Luke, the presumed author of Acts, Paul’s speech begins: “Men of Athens, in general I see that you are very devout. For as I went along and surveyed your cult-objects, I found an altar on which was written, ‘To an Unknown God.’ Him therefore whom you venerate without knowing I announce to you.” Paul goes on to expatiate on this god in terms that pagans could understand, quoting as he does so a half line from the Greek poet Aratus referring to Zeus, “For of him we are descended.” “As God’s descendants,” he continues, “we should not think that the divine (theion) resembles gold, silver or stone, something carved by art and by human imagination.” Only at the end of his speech does he allude to Jesus, not by name or even as the son of God, but as “a man that God has determined, giving a pledge to all by raising him from the dead.” Some of his hearers mocked him, others promised to hear more, but others “believed,” among whom Luke names Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman called Damaris. Centuries later, a Christian using the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite wrote a synthesis of Neoplatonic and Christian philosophy that was to have an enormous influence on Christian thought, in part because its author seemed to have been one of the first converts to the new faith.¹

Luke uses this event to illustrate an attempt of the first missionaries to reach out to Greeks (Hellênes), for whom Athens was still a focal point of history and culture, “the most ancient, wise and devout city, loved equally by gods and men.” The Athenians, Paul suggests, are worshiping the Christian god without knowing it, and hence for them he is an “unknown god.” Yet for the Athenians, Paul is the herald of divinities (daimonia) of whom they have never heard. Though he is concerned to minimize the distance between Greeks and Christians, the gap remains: it is crossed only when some of his hearers “believe.”²

This incident is a harbinger of issues that were to prove crucial in later centuries. One is the possibility of compromise between non-Christian Greeks and Christians: perhaps both shared the same god, even if one of the two parties did so “without knowing.” Behind this idea is another and more profound one: while knowledge of the true God had existed since the formation of mankind, and certain virtuous men such as Socrates had already had a partial glimpse of Him, the possibility of full knowledge had come with the advent of Jesus Christ. Another concept important in Luke’s account is that of creatures below the level of God or of gods, daimonia; long familiar to Greeks as a word for minor divinities, this was eagerly caught up by Christians to designate all the supposed gods of paganism, and passed into modern languages as “demon.” A third issue is conversion: some of Paul’s hearers “believed” on the strength of his arguments alone, and thus were converted. To modern ears, “conversion” suggests a turn from one system of thought to another: though early Christians also talked of “turning,” for them conversion was more a matter of passing from unbelief to belief, from blindness to seeing, or of ceasing to “wander” and finding “the Way.”

When Paul talks of “one of your poets,” he implicitly places the Athenians in the community of “Hellenes.” The Christian New Testament several times uses this word alongside “Jews” (Ioudaioi) to refer to the two most conspicuous groups of nonbelievers in Jesus as the Messiah: thus Paul in Corinth tries to convince “both Jews and Hellenes” and in Asia causes “both Jews and Hellenes” to hear the word of the Lord. Jews writing in Greek had used “Hellenes” in the sense of “nonbeliever” or “idolater” from the later Hellenistic period, and from them it passed into the first Christian Greek authors, and persisted well into Late Antiquity. With the growth of the Greek-speaking church, “Hellene” came also to characterize those who were not true Christians in the eyes of the speaker. It could designate those who represented a “split” (schisma) within the community of believers, for example by lapsing in time of persecution, or by slipping into pagan practices after baptism, or worse, who had made a “choice” (hairesis) that shut them off altogether. Thus the term “consubstantial” (homoousios), chosen by the Council of Nicaea to represent the relation between God the Father and God the Son, failed to end the controversy: according to the historian Socrates, “one party considered those who accepted this to be blasphemers, for they considered the Son as without a beginning and held the beliefs of Montanus and Sabellius, while the other side shunned their opponents as pagans (Hellênes) and accused them of introducing polytheism.” “Hellene” thus has a variety of senses according to the context, and it is not always possible to determine if a person was a devotee of traditional religion, a Christian rightly or wrongly suspected of “paganism,” or merely a suspected heretic. Moreover, many Christians of undisputed orthodoxy were Greek by birth or culture, and Gregory of Nazianzus among others vigorously denied that Christians could not be “Hellenes.”³

Hellên had not only the disadvantage of ambiguity, but was inappropriate to designate those pagans who were not ethnically Greek, though it was sometimes so used. For these a better term was ethnikos, “gentile.” This adjective and its noun ethnos, “nation,” were borrowed by Christianity from Greek-speaking Judaism, in which the words reflected the view of “the nations” as a sea of nonbelievers surrounding the Jewish “people” (laos); hence the resurrected Jesus bids the apostles to “instruct all the nations (ethnê).” In later Christianity, when the struggle with Hellenism was a thing of the past, ethnikos retained its usefulness to designate those such as Huns who stood outside the Christian pale, as once the “nations” hemmed in the Jewish people.⁴

When Greek-speaking Christians wished to refer to nonbelievers in terms of their beliefs, the richness of their language gave them several other designations. “Idolater” (eidôlolatrês, literally “image-worshiper”), another borrowing from Jewish Greek, in Christian usage marked an essential difference between both Jews and Christians on one side, and nonbelievers on the other, since the Jewish abhorrence of graven images went back to the First and Second Commandments and passed directly into Christianity. In Acts, the Council of Jerusalem, the first-ever meeting held to define the basic laws of Christianity, made “avoiding the pollution of idolatry” the first of its new rules. A similar term was “polytheist” (polytheos), since the rejection of multiple gods, like that of idolatry, derived from the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods but me,” and hence polytheos served to characterize one of the most obvious features of paganism. Though Christians sometimes took the view that pagan gods were really deified mortals, they often did not deny their continuing existence, but maintained that they were malign incorporeal beings, “demons” (daimonia) and not gods. Paradoxically, the refusal of pagans to revere the true God caused them also to be labeled as “godless” (atheoi), since their supposed gods were no gods at all; Eusebius says of Constantine’s father, Constantius, that “he condemned the polytheism of the godless (atheoi)” (pagans returned the compliment by calling Christians “godless” for not venerating the traditional gods). A less opprobrious term was those “outside” (ektos, exô, exôthen), and Eusebius famously reports Constantine’s claim, “I am perhaps a bishop appointed by God over those outside,” though the emperor’s precise meaning is disputed.⁵

The Roman Empire down to the late fourth century had managed to remain an administrative unity, despite losses in both East and West, but not a cultural or linguistic one. As Greek was the dominant language in the East despite the existence of many other languages such as Syriac and Coptic, so Latin was dominant in the West despite the survival of languages such as Celtic and Punic. “East” and “West” are only approximate terms for these two divisions of the empire. The eastern Balkans, Asia Minor, the Levant, and North Africa as far as Cyrene were ruled from Constantinople after the division of responsibilities between Arcadius and Honorius in 395; the rest of the former empire, from Pannonia (roughly the recent Yugoslavia) round to Africa (roughly modern Tunisia), was ruled from Rome. The political situation was later to grow more complicated, with the Germanic and Hunnic occupations of central and western Europe and of Africa in the fifth century, and the Byzantine reconquests of Italy, Africa, and a part of Spain in the sixth. Yet these did not immediately alter the linguistic divide at the level of secular and ecclesiastical administration. The churches of East and West continued largely to use Greek and Latin, and in the West the Germanic kingdoms such as those of the Franks and the Visigoths adopted Latin for administrative and legal purposes. Yet with all these qualifications, it is best to retain the terms “East” and “West” when talking of the linguistic and cultural traditions of the two parts.⁶

Since Christianity developed first in the East (though there were Latin-speaking Christians already in the time of the first apostles), Latin evolved a Christian vocabulary later than Greek, and its first surviving texts are not earlier than the late second century. Latin also reflects the spread of the new faith in a way different from Greek. The term “gentile” (gentilis) is a direct calque of the Greek ethnikos, but about the beginning of the fourth century this starts to lose ground to another term, apparently of popular origin, paganus. The etymological meaning of this is “belonging to a village” (pagus), from which develops a secondary one of “civilian” as opposed to “enlisted soldier.” Some have derived paganus in the sense of “non-Christian” from the military sense, so that a paganus is one not enrolled in the army of Christ. Another view is that paganus denotes attachment to a single place of any kind, even within a city, but this view has little linguistic support.⁷

The Christian association of paganism with religious practices of the countryside is a recurrent theme of later antiquity. A law of 399 rules that “if there are any temples in the countryside (in agris), let them be destroyed without noise and disturbance; for once these are demolished and removed, the whole basis for superstition (omnis superstitionis materia) will be consumed.” The Christian poet Prudentius imagines the emperor Theodosius urging Rome to “leave the gods of gentiles to barbaric villages” (sint haec barbaricis gentilia numina pagis). A few years later Augustine’s associate Orosius affirms that pagans were so named “from the cross-roads and villages of country places” (ex locorum agrestium conpitis et pagis), and a pagan aristocrat, the senator Rutilius Namatianus, found “villages” (pagi) on the west coast of Italy joyfully celebrating the resurrection of Osiris “around the rustic cross-roads” (per compita rustica). In the late sixth century, Martin, bishop of Braga in Galicia, denounced the persistence of paganism in a sermon, On the Correction of Peasants (De correctione rusticorum). It seems therefore that Latin-speaking Christians first applied the term “villagers” (pagani) to peasants among whom the old beliefs and practices lingered on, and eventually extended the term to all “pagans.” By a similar process, the German Heide and the English heathen were chosen to translate paganus because non-Christians belonged on the “heaths,” in the untamed lands outside civilization; in French, paganus becomes païen, and pagensis becomes paysan. The fact that Hellên refers to high culture, and paganus to rusticity, is a reminder that the evolution of Christianity occurred in different ways in the two main divisions of the empire.⁸

Even among undoubted Christians there was a distinction between those who were Christians in the full sense and those who were not. Christianity soon developed an elaborate system of preparation for full initiation into the community, the “catechumenate” (from the Greek katêchoumenoi, “those undergoing instruction”). Adults wishing to be admitted as full Christians by the sacrament of baptism had to undergo a long period of instruction and preparation, and those not yet baptized were not true Christians: they were “faithful” (pistoi, fideles) but were not yet “illuminated” (pephôtismenoi, illuminati). Hence texts sometimes equate being Christian with being baptized. Caesarius of Arles in the early fifth century tells his hearers that anyone who consults a magician (praecantator) “immediately destroys his oath of baptism and straightaway becomes a sacrilegious pagan,” and Pope Gelasius at the end of the same century rules that “no-one baptized, no-one who is a Christian” may celebrate the pagan festival of the Lupercalia.⁹

The word “pagan,” when used by modern scholars of Christian history to designate those who were neither Christian nor Jew, is therefore inappropriate insofar as it borrows a Latin term used primarily by an in-group to denote an out-group, when the modern observer stands outside either group. This is even more of a drawback when applied to those whom Greek-speaking Christians called “Hellenes,” since now it lumps into a single class people so different as Roman aristocrats fondly cherishing the religion and antiquities of their ancestral city, and Arabs and Germans worshiping gods outside the Greek and Roman pantheon. “Polytheist” might appear a possible alternative, but has the disadvantage of blurring the wide range of conceptions that “pagans” had about the divine: some are indeed polytheists, but others come close to monotheism, and yet others have a conception of a supreme being to whom all others are subservient or inferior (so-called “henotheism”).¹⁰ “Hellenism” has the advantage of being a word commonly used by Greek-speaking Christians to designate pagans, but has the disadvantage of ambiguity mentioned above, and is not applicable in the Latin West. “Paganism” is potentially misleading, but less so than the alternatives that have been proposed.¹¹

In the following I shall use the term “pagan” for the wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Authors
• Preface
• 1. The Perception of Paganism
• 2. Constantine
• 3. After Constantine: Indifference and Intolerance
• 4. God and Other Divinities
• 5. Idolatry
• 6. Sacrifice, Blood, and Prayer
• 7. Debate
• 8. Conversion
• 9. The West
• 10. The East
• 11. Conclusion: The Persistence of Paganism
• Appendix: Was Macrobius a Christian?
• Timeline
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index