The Triumph of Christianity (22 page)

Persecution and Persistence

A
LTHOUGH HE RULED FOR
only eighteen months and was killed during battle in a foolish campaign against the Persians, Julian’s name still terrorized Christians a generation later.
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However he was not replaced by another pagan emperor, although his favorite Procopius tried to take the throne, naming himself emperor at Constantinople late in 365. But Procopius was deserted by the army and executed as a rebel, so it was Jovian who managed to take the throne. Jovian was a Christian who undid some of Julian’s anti-Christian actions, but he ruled for only a year before being succeeded by Valentinian in the West and by his brother Valens, who ruled in the East. Although Valentinian was a devoted Christian, he also was quite tolerant
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and continued to appoint many pagans to high office. Valens was a rather fanatical Arian Christian who persecuted non-Arian Christians from time to time, but who also appointed many pagans.

Nevertheless, in the wake of Julian’s campaign for paganism, the church was able to obtain statutes forbidding certain pagan activities. In three edicts issued during 391–392, Theodosius I banned public and private sacrifices to the gods, not only blood sacrifices, but also “such pagan devotions as sprinkling incense on altars, hanging sacred fillets on trees and raising turf altars.”
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However these prohibitions were so widely ignored that each of the next two emperors, Arcadius and Justinian, reasserted the ban. Pagans obeyed to the extent of no longer conducting massive public animal slaughters, but commitment to paganism remained open and widespread.
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It is important to recognize that paganism was not merely a set of superficial practices and only half-believed myths—or, as Lactantius put it, “no more than worship by the fingertips.”
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In past work I have been as guilty as most early church historians of underestimating the depth of paganism. Indeed, late fourth and fifth century pagans often are portrayed as little more than “nostalgic antiquarians.” But, in fact, theirs was an active faith “premised upon the conviction that the world was filled with the divine, and that proper sacrifice brought the human into intimate communion with the divine.”
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Although the rapid and extensive Christianization of the empire showed that pagans were very susceptible to conversion by their friends and relatives, the failure of legal prohibitions to dent paganism demonstrated that coercion was no greater deterrent to commitment to the gods than it had been when used against commitment to the One True God. Moreover, imperial efforts to actually suppress paganism by force were far less sustained and far less vigorous than has long been claimed. Consider that well into the fifth century, men who were openly pagans were still being appointed as consuls and prefects as were many more who kept their religious preference obscure—something Christians had no reason to do (see table 11.1). As late as the sixth century, temples remained open in many parts of the empire,
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and some survived into the tenth century.
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In the post-Julian era, the public persistence of paganism did not reflect imperial tolerance, so much as imperial pragmatism. Emperors often grumbled that their edicts against paganism were ignored. One imperial letter complained that “Provincial governors set aside imperial commands for the sake of private favors, and they openly allow the [Christian] religion which we [emperors] properly venerate to be openly disturbed, perhaps because they themselves are negligent.”
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The emperor Honorius charged that laws against paganism were not enforced because of the “sloth of the governors... [and] the connivance of their office staffs.”
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However the emperors carefully did not crack down on those provincial governors who justified their inaction on grounds that enforcement of edicts against paganism would create levels of public discontent that “would seriously disrupt the collection of taxes in the province.”
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Hence, in 400
CE
the emperor Arcadius rejected a proposal to destroy the temples in Gaza, remarking “I know that the city is full of idols, but it shows [devotion] in paying its taxes.... If we suddenly terrorize these people, they will run away and we will lose considerable revenues.”
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Roger Brown suggests that persistent paganism served the emperor especially well, as cities would “have been all the more punctual in paying their taxes, if they needed to preserve... their ancestral religious practices” from imperial intervention.
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It even is questionable whether most emperors expected their various edicts involving Christianity and paganism to be fully observed. For example, when urged to do so by the bishops, Constantine outlawed gladiatorial combats. But when some Umbrian towns petitioned him for permission to celebrate the imperial cult with a festival that would include gladiatorial combats, Constantine granted their request. In similar fashion, Constantius issued an edict to close all pagan temples immediately. Then, in virtually the same breath he advised the prefect of Rome to care for and sustain the temples around the city. During a subsequent visit to Rome, Constantius toured these temples and expressed his admiration for them.
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For the fact was that even well into the fifth century “a considerable section of the population of the Roman empire, at all social levels, remained unaffected” by Christianity. “They [remained] impenitently polytheistic, in that the religious common sense of their age, as of all previous centuries, led them to assume a spiritual landscape rustling with invisible presences—with countless divine beings and their ethereal ministers.”
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In the end, of course, the pagan temples did close and Christianity became, for many centuries, the only licit faith, although most peasants and members of the urban lower classes seem never to have been fully Christianized. Even so, to the extent that Europe was Christianized, it didn’t happen suddenly nor did it involve substantial bloodshed; the latter was mainly limited to conflicts
among
Christians which sometimes resulted in military action against various heretical movements.
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The Decline of Paganism

G
IBBON DATES THE “FINAL
destruction of Paganism” to the reign of Theodosius (379–395), noting that this “is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition; and may therefore deserve to be considered, as a singular event in the history of the human mind.” And, of course, this extirpation occurred because “Rome submitted to the yoke of the Gospel.”
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But as with so much else reported by Gibbon, it simply isn’t so. Consider one fact alone: Theodosius, the emperor who, according to Gibbon, extirpated paganism, appointed nearly as many men who were openly pagans as he did Christians to the positions of consuls and prefects, as can be seen in table 11.1.

Table 11.1: Religious Affiliations of Men Appointed as Consuls and Prefects, 317–455

* Computed from Barnes, “Statistics and the Conversion of the Roman Aristocracy” (1995).

** Computed from von Haehling (1978) in Barnes, 1995.

This table has often been referred to earlier in the chapter, but here is the appropriate place to consider it in detail. The initial coding was done by Raban von Haehling in 1978. Subsequently, T. D. Barnes corrected von Haehling’s statistics through the reign of Constantius (351–361) to eliminate some duplications when the same man was appointed several times. Although Barnes’s figures are undoubtedly more accurate, they resulted in no fundamental reinterpretations, and there are no grounds not to use von Haehling’s original findings for the reign of Julian and later.

Reading across the table, there seem to be three major patterns. First, except narrowly during the reign of Constantine and by a greater margin among those appointed by Constantius, men known to be Christians were not in the majority, and this held for the first half of the fifth century as well. Second, Julian did discriminate against Christians, although not entirely. Third, if it can be assumed that men whose religious affiliation is unknown were unlikely to have been Christians, then the decline of pagan influence and power was very slow indeed.

Many have argued that paganism held its own far longer among the upper classes and the educated than among persons of lesser rank.
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But that is mostly inferred from the known paganism of many persons of rank and the assumption that Christianity’s primary appeal was to the lower classes. However since it is now recognized that Christianity had as much or more appeal to the upper classes as to the lower, that inference is unjustified.
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Rather, what table 11.1 more likely demonstrates is that paganism died slowly in all classes and, as it did, the upper classes became increasingly discreet about their religious identity, seeking to maintain their positions and their access to imperial favor.

And that brings into view a major factor in the Christianization of the empire:
opportunism
. From the time of Constantine, with the very brief exception of Julian’s reign, the imperial throne was in Christian hands and very likely to remain there. Although identifiable pagans continued to be appointed to high political offices, their prospects were on the downward trend. In addition, the many powerful and increasingly lucrative positions in the church were closed to them. Understandably, many ambitious individuals and families chose to convert. As Roger Brown put it, “A groundswell of confidence that Christians enjoyed access to the powerful spelled the end of polytheism far more effectively than did any imperial law or the closing of any temple.”
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Even many pagan philosophers broke ranks, some of them becoming leading bishops of the church.
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Assimilation

T
HE WORD
PAGAN
DERIVES
from the Latin word
paganus,
which originally meant “rural person,” or more colloquially “country hick.” It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the pagans were rural people. However, even in the cities, as already noted, an elaborate mixture of Christianity and paganism flourished for centuries. As for rural people, most of them seem never to have been fully Christianized, in that they transplanted their familiar gods, sacred places, rites, and holidays into Christianity. As MacMullen put it: “The triumph of the church was not one of obliteration but of widening embrace and assimilation.”
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The assimilation of paganism reflected several things. First of all, once established as the official faith of the empire, Christian leaders soon adopted a “trickle down” theory of conversion.
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It was sufficient that the upper classes in an area acknowledged the authority of the church and then to wait for their example to eventually trickle down the ranks until the peasants were Christians too. But the peasants tended to respond to Christianity as they always had to the appearance of various new gods within paganism—to add the new to the old, rather than to replace it. Hence Jesus and various saints were simply added to the local pantheon. As was written in the Icelandic
Landnánabók,
Helgi the Lean “believed in Christ, but invoked Thor in matters of seafaring and dire necessity.”
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A second basis for the assimilation of paganism was overt church policy. In a letter dated 601 and preserved by the Venerable Bede,
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Pope Gregory the Great advised Abbot Mellitus, who was setting out to missionize Britain: “[I] have come to the conclusion that temples of the idols among that people should on no account be destroyed.... For it is certainly impossible to eradicate all errors from obstinate minds at one stroke.” Instead, the pope recommended that altars and sacred relics should be placed in the pagan temples which would transform them into Christian edifices. The same policy was applied to the other pagan sites. “The hundreds of magical springs which dotted the country became ‘holy wells,’ associated with a saint, but they were still used for magical healing and for divining the future.”
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The famous healing shrine just outside Alexandria, dedicated to the goddess Isis, underwent an elaborate transformation into a Christian healing site when the remains of two martyrs were placed inside. The same process of assimilation was applied to the plentiful sacred groves, rock formations, and other pagan sites. People continued to visit these traditional sites for the original reasons, even if these sites now took on Christian coloration, although many of the visitors continued to direct their supplications to the old gods.
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