Why are we Christians? Part 2

“a thousand terrors of the laws”

Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

To say that Christianity won because of some inherent superiority is a Darwinian-type tautology. How do we know that Christianity was superior, apart from the fact that it won? Perhaps it won because emperors deemed it the best suited for mass control. And perhaps Christianity won simply because it was the most intolerant religion, the most lethal to its competitors. There is even the possibility (which I will cover in this series) that Christianity won because it was sold to the Romans by the greatest religious peddlers, the Jews, as their god’s Trojan Horse into the Gentile city. If so, then Christianity won not because it was the best for us, but because it was the worst.

If Christianity was so obviously better for the Romans, then let’s reverse the question: why did they resist so hard being Christianized? Despite the Edict of Thessalonica issued by Theodosius the Great in 380 to outlaw all religions except Nicaean Christianity (and Judaism), his grandson Theodosius II lamented 58 years later—one century after Constantine’s death—that so many still resisted baptism, unconvinced that this spiritual vaccine was for their best: “A thousand terrors of the laws that have been promulgated, the penalty of exile that has been threatened, do not restrain them!”[1] The Christianization of the Roman cities (the countryside is another matter) was not completed before Justinian (527-565), and with tremendous violence.

Ban on sacrifices and defunding of pagan cults

By the Edict of Milan (313), under the pretext of religious tolerance, Constantine the Great brought religious intolerance into the Roman Empire, by legalizing and then sponsoring the most radically intolerant religion. Ecclesiastical historian Sozomen wrote (Ecclesiastical History, II, 5):

It appeared necessary to the emperor [Constantine] to teach the governors to suppress their superstitious rites of worship. He thought that this would be easily accomplished if he could get them to despise their temples and the images contained therein. To carry this project into execution he did not require military aid; for Christian men belonging to the palace went from city to city bearing imperial letters. The people were induced to remain passive from the fear that, if they resisted these edicts, they, their children, and their wives, would be exposed to evil.

Besides the arbitrary looting of temples beginning in 331, from which “tremendous wealth in precious metal … flowed into the imperial treasure” (Ramsay MacMullen),[2] two legal measures were particularly damaging to non-Christian religious practices: the ban on animal sacrifices and the defunding of public cults. They started under Constantine’s three sons, but took a more severe turn after the brief “pagan restauration” of his nephew Julian (361-363), under Valentinian, his brother and his two sons (364-392), followed by his son-in-law Theodosius and his heirs (379-457).

Constantine had forbidden that Christian clergy be “compelled” to “celebrate” sacrifices in public ceremonies. Under his sons, several edicts forbade animal sacrifices entirely.[3] This was to strike at the heart of the Roman way of life. Christians have often condemned animal sacrifices as cruel, primitive and, of course, satanic. But it is important to understand that, in the ancient world, taking an animal’s life was never a purely secular matter. Charles Freeman writes about the Greeks:

The sacrifice was the central point of almost every ritual. An animal, an ox, sheep, goat or pig, would be presented to the gods and then killed, burnt and eaten by the community. Sacrifices were not an aberrant or cruel activity—they were a sophisticated way of dealing with the necessity of killing animals in order to eat. In fact the rituals surrounding sacrifice suggest that the Greeks felt some unease about killing animals they had reared themselves. So the illusion was created that an animal went to its death willingly and before the killing all present threw a handful of barley at it, as if the community as a whole was accepting responsibility for the death.[4]

Needless to say, animal sacrifices were not shows of ascetic spirituality. In Roman times, they were often boastful displays of wealth and prodigality, as the offering of animals brought prestige and popularity. Philosophers found them repellant. But the “idea” of sacrifice was not in itself a mark of cruelty or materialism. It was a basic, universal principle of civilized life. Any banquet, any festival, any occasion for a shared meal of meat involved some kind of ritual invocation to the gods, so that banning animal sacrifices was not only perceived as a crime against the gods, it was an assault against everything that made life worth living.

Public religious life included temples, priesthoods, festivals, sacrifices, and the feeding of the poor and less poor. The Roman state used to be the main sponsor of many cults. Michael Gaddis: “Emperors as far back as Octavian Augustus had held that their primary duty was to safeguard the pax deorum, the ancient arrangement by which the gods provided peace, security, and prosperity to the human race in return for proper worship and sacrifices.”[5] That is why the emperor was pontifex maximus, overseeing all religious cults. But the Christian god is a jealous one; public funds were withdrawn from pagan cults from under the Constantinian dynasty, and under Gratian (367-384) and Theodosius (379-395), all public rituals were forbidden.[6] A rescript of Honorius, Theodosius’s son, sent to Carthage in 415, commands that “in accordance with the constitution of the sainted Gratian … all land assigned by the false doctrine of the ancients to their sacred rituals shall be joined to the property of our privy purse,” the decree being meant “for all regions situated in our world.”[7] Private contributions could make for the suppression of public funding to some extent. The rich had always paid for the building and repair of temples as well as other public works. However, it was understood that public support and public performance were indispensable for the validity and efficiency of public cults, in Rome as in other cities. When Theodosius cut public funding of traditional sacred ceremonies and rites, the Roman Senate complained that “the sacrifices were not duly performed, unless the charges were defrayed from the public funds,” as recounted by Greek historian Zosimus (Historia Nova, IV, 59). Because Christian emperors abolished those rites, pagans would later hold Christians accountable for the sack of Rome (410) and the rapid decline of the empire, as we learn from Augustine’s City of God, Book 1.

Discrimination and opportunism

The senatorial aristocracy was “of central importance in the Christianization of the empire,” Michele Salzman explains in The Making of a Christian Aristocracy, especially since “[t]he Romans had never separated the secular from the sacred. For centuries the same men who held high state office also held the most important priesthoods in the pagan state cults.” Christianity had little appeal to this class, despite accommodations such as Jerome’s transformation of nobilitas into a Christian virtue. But the old Roman aristocracy—around 36,000 people, in Salzman’s estimate—, while immensely rich, had lost much of its political power in the late third century, to the equestrians, the upstart provincial nobility, the military, and career bureaucrats.[8] All these people were competing for imperial appointments, and highly suggestible to religious discrimination. “At the very moment when the Constantinian dynasty declared its new religious allegiance,” Peter Heather writes, “the landowning classes of the Empire were queuing up for jobs in a rapidly expanding imperial bureaucracy.” Therefore, “the structures of the imperial system, and, in particular, the precise ways in which they shaped competition between members of the landowning elite, played a critical role in the process [of conversion].”

the vast majority felt that they had no choice but to come into line in some way with the new imperial cult sweeping through the fourth-century Empire. The emperor was willing to tolerate some carefully tempered dissent, but even this much ran the risk that a well-connected converted competitor might use the operations of public life to undermine you. Unless you were willing to oppose outright, as a minority certainly were, then—real, fake, or something in between—an accommodation had to be made. The alacrity with which many converted is a strong indication in itself that, for many, deep religious convictions were not in play.[9]

The 360s, under Gratian, were a pivotal time in the discrimination against non-Christians for civic careers, and in 408, the Western emperor Honorius decreed that non-Christians could no longer serve in the imperial administrative bureaucracy.

Even bishoprics were coveted by opportunists, because bishops were “rapidly assimilated as quasi civil servants into the mandarinate which administered the empire. Their churches were no longer obscure conventicles but public buildings of increasing magnificence.”[10]

Pegasios, bishop of Ilios (ancient Troy) in the 350s and early 360s, is a case in point. He is mentioned in a letter written by Emperor Julian (361-363). As summarized by Peter Heather:

Sometime in 362/3 Pegasios, the Christian bishop of his home city, applied for a job in the new-style pagan priesthood that Julian, now entirely open about his non-Christian religious allegiance, had just begun to establish. The emperor wrote the letter to assure his officials in Constantinople that Pegasios was an appropriate candidate for the position of pagan priest. Pegasios had a reputation as a Christian bishop who had been destroying pagan temples, which made the officials want to reject his application; the emperor was writing to banish their doubts. Julian and Pegasios had first met almost a decade previously [when Julian visited Troy].

… on arrival, he was greeted by Bishop Pegasios—completely unknown to him previously—who conducted Julian to a temple dedicated to the Trojan hero Hector. Far from being destroyed, Julian wrote, ‘I found that the altars were still alight, I might almost say blazing, and that the statue of Hector had been anointed till it shone.’ The same turned out to be true of a second temple, dedicated to Athena, where Julian noticed that—unlike most Christians, who regarded pagan gods as demons—Bishop Pegasios did not cross himself or hiss to ward off evil spirits. ‘Then, on the final stop of the tour: Pegasios went with me to the temple of Achilles as well and showed me the tomb in good repair; yet I had been informed that this also had been pulled to pieces by him. But he approached it with great reverence … and I have heard … that he also used to offer prayers to Helios [in Julian’s theology, the supreme sun god] and worship him in secret.’[11]

Most bishops, admittedly, were fanatic Christians, encouraging and enforcing vigorously anti-Christian laws. But Pegasios was certainly not a unique case of closet pagan high-official. Many upper-class Romans made formal conversion, while maintaining their pagan lifestyle and interests. “Conversion, in other words, is a deceptively simple word. … Conversion to Christianity clearly meant a wide range of things to different fourth-century Romans.”[12]

Persecution and criminalization