Why are we Christians? Part 3

“the Cross superimposed on the Sun”

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

By the very essence of Christianity, Christianization meant depaganization, that is, the complete loss of religious freedom in the Roman Empire. For the Romans, the acceptance of a new religion was never a problem; but the eradication of all other forms of beliefs and worship was a trauma that shook their civilization to the core.

In this series of articles, my ultimate purpose is not to disparage Christianity, but to get a deeper understanding of what our ancestors were converted from, and lost. “Paganism” was so utterly destroyed that Christians have a very poor understanding of what it meant, and the very word “paganism” encapsulates that misunderstanding. As Alan Cameron wrote in The Last Pagans of Rome:

There is a very real sense in which Christianity actually created paganism. … The lumping together of all non-Christian cults (Judaism excepted) under one label is not just an illustration of Christian intolerance. As far as the now Christian authorities were concerned, whether at the local, church, or governmental level, those who refused to acknowledge the one true god, whatever the differences between them, were for all practical purposes indistinguishable. … Fourth-century pagans naturally never referred to themselves as pagans, less because the term was insulting than because the category had no meaning for them.[1]

It is commonly assumed that polytheism was obsolete and declining, that the Roman Empire needed for its cohesion one form of monotheism or another, and that Christianity was the best offer. Those assumptions are false. The Romans had everything they needed in terms of religious life, including widespread notions of monotheism.

All roads lead to the Sun-God

If by monotheism we mean the concept of the unity of the divine, then it had always been a common idea among so-called “polytheists”. It was as natural as the concept of the unity of the Cosmos. Most people agreed that the gods were many but united under a supreme god, or that they were different manifestations of the one God. At the turn of the second century AD, Dio Chrysostom (Discourses XXXI, 11) testified that “many people combine into one strength and power absolutely all the gods, so that there is no difference in honoring one or the other.” Ramsay MacMullen quotes many other statements to that effect, and comments: “It appears thus to be a part of the intellectual heritage of the times that god might be one; all ‘gods,’ simply his will at work in various spheres of action.”[2]

What Christianity offered was exclusive monotheism, that is, the idea that the god who revealed himself to the Jews was the only real god, and that all other gods worshipped throughout the world were either non-existent or satanic demons. That is why Christian monotheism was atheism to the Romans; “monotheists rated as atheists: to have one's own god counted for nothing if one denied everybody else's” (MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, p.2).

Since the Romans believed, like the Greeks, that the Universe had always existed—time and space are coextensive, so that there cannot be a time when the Universe didn’t exist—they didn’t ask themselves which of the gods should be called “the Creator”. “So far as ordinary worship was concerned, there remained only the question of what name to put to the top of the pyramid.”[3]

Jupiter (etymologically the “sky father”), identified with the Greek Zeus, was the traditional head of the Olympians. But he had been so compromised by stories of adultery that many preferred to think of Apollo as the supreme god. A Greek god with no obvious Roman equivalent, Apollo was a wholly benevolent god, and as the patron deity of Delphi, the most panhellenic god; he was a legislator, a healer and protector from evil (the Hippocratic Oath begins with: “I swear by Apollo the Healer…”), the inspirator of all arts, companion of the Muses, and the god of pretty much everything that makes a civilization.

Most importantly, Apollo was the Sun, as Apollo Helios, identified as Sol and sometimes called Phoebus in the Latin world since the first century AD. The sun had always been the most obvious symbol for the supreme benevolent god watching over all of humankind. Sun-worship and the associated light-symbolism were at home throughout the mediterranean world. To the philosophers since Pythagoras and Plato, the sun stood as the most appropriate symbol for the Cosmic God but also, as the source of light, a fitting representation of the divine Reason. In Egypt, where Akhenaton had tried solar monotheism in the fourteenth century BC, we have Hellenistic papyri invoking the Sun as “Lord god who grasps the whole, gives life to all, and rules the universe.”[4] As the Hellenistic era turned into the Roman era, we observe, in the words of Michael Grant,

the spread of the Sun-cult throughout the Mediterranean world. As Semitic, Iranian and Greek theology, astrology and philosophy intermingled, there was an ever-growing tendency to explain the traditional gods in solar terms. Mixtures and blendings of deities were now universal, the gods are of many names, but one nature, and their common factor is the Sun.[5]

Firmicus Maternus (fourth century AD), glorifies “the Sun, Best and Greatest, who holds the center of the heavens, the mind of the world, the moderator, chief of all and prince.”[6] As late as 400, “Macrobius observed that almost all gods are the Sun, for he is the Mind of the Universe.”[7]

Understandably, the cult of Apollo the Sun-God appealed to Roman emperors, who had to lean on a more universal religion that the old decrepit city cults of Rome. It was Antoninus Pius (138-161) who first introduced SOL INVICTUS on his coinage. Solar worship was also promoted by the Severan dynasty (193-235). According to Michael Grant: “Under Septimius Severus and his family solar worship almost took charge of the entire pantheon.” Under Caracalla, “the emphasis on Sun-worship became even stronger.” Then Elagabalus “imported his native, eastern local solar cult, unmodified, into the centre and headship of the religion of Rome. … A huge temple was now built for the Sun-god at Rome, and the deity’s Semitic name Elagab(alus) or Baal, identified with Sol, strikes an outlandish note amid the conservative traditions of the official coinage.” Despite Elagabalus’ unpopularity “the worship of the Sun did not cease to flourish and increase” after him. “The new emperor Severus Alexander, cousin of Elagabalus, repeatedly shows Sol on his coinage, but portrays him in classic form without Emesan accretions.”[8]

Then Aurelian “established, as the central and focal point of Roman religion, a massive and strongly subsidized cult of Sol Invictus (274), endowing him with a resplendent Roman temple, and instituting on the model of the ancient priestly colleges, and as their equal in rank, a new college of Priests of the Sun.”[9] Aurelian also inaugurated the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (“birthday of the Invincible Sun”) on the 25th of December.

By the time Constantine became emperor, the cult of Sol Invictus had become the central piece of the imperial religion, to which all Romans were expected to participate as a show of loyalty. Besides sustaining a powerful political theology, it was acceptable to intellectuals as well as to ordinary people. Michael Grant concludes about the early fourth century: “Sun-worship, at that moment, was the state-cult of the Roman world, and the god was accepted by millions of its inhabitants. If the solar cult had not succumbed to Christianity a few years later, it could well have become the permanent religion of the Mediterranean area.”[10]

Interestingly, French historian of Christianity Ernest Renan had said the same about Mithras in 1882: “if the growth of Christianity had been arrested by some mortal malady, the world would have been Mithraic.”[11] But Mithraism was really one particular form of sun-worship, as Grant notes: “Mithra himself was god of the Morning Light. … And indeed from about the first century A.D. he and the Sun were identified with one another.”[12]

We can see how contrived is the argument that Christianity was necessary to bring monotheism to the Roman Empire. When in 361 Julian briefly restored the old cults, he reaffirmed his devotion to Helios as the supreme God, in his Hymn to Helios. “The Sun-God, common father of all mankind and object of our longing, seemed to him, in the fashion of contemporary philosophical thought, intermediary between the One and the material world from which it is so remote; for our own eyes can see the solar power changing and swaying the cosmos.”[13]

Solar monotheism was something that everyone could relate to; it was as satisfying to the philosophers as a symbol of the divine Cosmos, as it was useful to the state as a symbol of Rome’s benevolent universalism.

From Sun-worship to Christ-worship

Constantine himself had inscribed on his coins soli invicto comiti (“to the Sun, the unconquerable companion”), although after 319, the sun progressively disappeared from his coinage, while the Christian cross made its appearance in 324. In 321, Constantine decreed “Sunday” (dies solis) a day of rest, and in 330, he dedicated a 100-feet-high column in Constantinople, topped by a statue of himself as Apollo with a solar crown. Constantine and his Christian advisers were certainly aware that the solar cult could facilitate the introduction of Christianity. The transition is illustrated by a mosaic found in Hinton St Mary, Dorset, England, representing Constantine with a Chi-Rho replacing Apollo’s solar crown (top picture).[14]

We are not sure if Eusebius and Lactantius’ story of Constantine’s vision of “a cross superimposed on the sun” is literally true, but the vision is symbolically accurate: when he switched his allegiance from Sun to Christ—who, it was decided much later, happened to have the same birthday—Constantine was in effect superimposing the Cross on the Sun.