Constantine and the Christianization of Europe
A. M. Jones
London, 1948
Paganism and Christianity
Source: A.M. Jones, Constantine and the Christianization of Europe, Galaxia Publications.
It is impossible to give a complete picture of idolatry during the later Roman Empire, because it was not a system with herds. It was a strange amalgam of beliefs and cults which came from many countries and represented every stage of culture, from the lofty if rather vague pantheism to the most vulgar animal worship. They were connected to each other only by mutual tolerance, and even respect, and by a strong tendency towards syncretism, thanks to which gods from different countries were identified with each other, and their myths were interwoven within the general framework of Greek mythology.
At the head of the pantheon were the official gods of Rome, with whom the Olympians of the Greeks had been identified for a long time. But one can doubt whether outside of Italy and Greece, their original cradles, these gods gave enough spiritual fairy tale to their believers. The educated classes, it is true—the senatorial and patrician classes, and the older and wealthier families of the local lords who made up the provincial aristocracy—had deeply rooted emotional ties to them. From their childhood they were brought up with the Greek or Latin classics and associated with the ancient gods the glorious heritage of art and literature and the glorious history of Greece and Rome.
But beyond its literary and historical connections the official pantheon had little meaning in the later pagan world. The official worship of emperors, dead and alive, had even less religious content. No one really believed that the emperors were gods – no one, for example, prayed to them when they were sick or in danger, to be healed or saved. Their worship was merely the traditional way of showing respect to the head of state, usually a dry type, once the form in which a genuine feeling of devotion to the empire was manifested. Most members of the educated aristocracy, while faithfully performing the rites of the olden days, finding in them an aesthetic and nostalgic satisfaction, found the spiritual fairy tale either in philosophy or in one of the Eastern cults, which appealed more to feeling.
In this period philosophy had already moved far away from its Greek starting point. It was no longer inspired by spiritual curiosity, but became fundamentally religious. In the religious textbooks of the time it was very common to set forth the doctrine as a revelation from some divine sage, such as Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian Thoth. The prevailing schools of the day of the Neoplatonists and Neopythagoreans were hierarchical systems based on faith and held that matter is evil, the body a tomb, and salvation lies in the subjugation of the flesh and the contemplation in the purity of the spirit of God, the mysterious One, for of whom the human mind can ascertain nothing. This philosophy was not incompatible with popular religion. The Transcendent was thought to manifest itself in a succession of streams, and to the uninitiated it was revealed through allegories.
Thus the attitude of the educated towards the faith of the mob was rather one of condescending respect. Even the most childish fables and the most savage rites, not only of Greece and Rome, but also of the lower civilizations, were considered divinely inspired. To the sage, who could penetrate their innermost message, they were allegorical illustrations of supreme truths. To the unlearned, who believed them literally, they were the highest form of divine truth to which his soul, blinded by the mists of the material world, could reach. Nor was philosophy incompatible with belief in astrology and magic. The universe was moving in one great harmony, and the orbits of the sun, moon, and stars were part of the same vast movement as were the lives of men. The sage, freed from the shackles of this materialistic universe, could by his spiritual powers overcome purely material obstacles: most of the famous philosophers of the day had the reputation of miracle workers.
At the lower end of the scale the peasants and the great mass of the urban proletariat, especially in the smaller towns whose character was preeminently rural, believed in a smorgasbord of local cults. The Egyptians worshiped their animal-headed gods, and the sacred animals were venerated while they lived, and when they died they were solemnly embalmed. In the huge temples, crowds of bejeweled Seres in white cotton robes performed ancient rites in an ancient language they themselves barely understood. In Syria and Carthaginian North Africa peasants and small town dwellers worshiped a host of local Baals and Astartes with wild rites that violated Christian notions of morality.
The pilgrimage in Ilioupoli, and especially in Afaka, whose river was reddened every year by the blood of the murdered Adonis, justifiably forced Constantine to later close these two great temples. To the north was Emesa, where the people worshiped a stone which the Sun God had sent down from heaven, and Dolichus, a center of worship of another meteorite stone, which the legions had brought west to the Balkans. In Asia Minor, a dominant figure under an amazing variety of names – Cybele Pessinuditis, Ma of the Komans, Artemis Ephesia – was the Great Mother and her young son and husband, in whose honor the furious worshipers castrated themselves. In Thrace, mounted war gods were worshipped, and even further west, in Illyria, the main object of worship was the Invincible Sun. In the Celtic countries the worship of nature prevailed, and the gods and goddesses of springs, rivers and forests, and above all of the sun, were objects of respect.
The mass of the peasants and the inhabitants of the small towns perceived the gods as local rulers, protectors of the village or town. In Egypt each province had its own patron gods, with corresponding sacred animals, and wild rifts were common, when the inhabitants of a province which honored Suho and held the crocodile sacred killed a hippopotamus, the totem, of a neighboring province. Even when a god or goddess was worshiped over a large area, he was often identified by a local epithet, and acquired a particular local personality.
The Artemis of the Ephesians, although she was identified with the Artemis of Greek mythology, was the special protector of Ephesus and the Ephesians who were far from their homeland probably honored her rather than the local Artemis. But in the most cultured classes the local gods were identified without restriction, and often on very flimsy grounds, with the figures of the Greek and Roman Pantheon, and very often in inscriptions the local goddess is disguised as Zeus or Juriter, Aphrodite or Nenus, Heracles. In this way the numerous and diverse cults of the empire were bound together in some loose apparent unity. In some more cultured circles this development of syncretism was carried to its logical conclusion, and all gods and goddesses were regarded as local manifestations of either their preferred god or group of gods, or, if they were philosophically inclined, of the Absolute One.
Between the philosophical pantheism of the aristocracy and the local cults of the great mass were the mystery religions. They exercised a special influence on the cosmopolitan population of the larger cities, on the slaves and freedmen who had been cut off from the cult of their place, on the merchants and sailors who spent their whole lives traveling from place to place; also on the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the army and public services, where people from the most diverse countries mingled. Their main clientele was the urban middle and lower classes. Little if any did they penetrate the rural areas, villages and small towns, whose inhabitants were mostly content with their traditional local gods. On the contrary, they exerted considerable attraction among the aristocracy, which was no longer emotionally satisfied with the official pantheon and did not find enough fairy tale in philosophy.
One of the distinguishing features of these religions is, as their name implies, that they were secret. Their rites and their theology were revealed only to the initiates, often gradually, during the successive stages of initiation. A second characteristic was their interest in a future life. All of them, with greater or lesser vagueness, ensured the mementos bliss in some world beyond the grave. All of them tried to some extent to relieve the feeling of sin. They offered purification, primarily through taboos and ritual acts, although most included some moral teaching. All of them, after all, were of Eastern origin and owed a large percentage of their success to their exotic aroma and to the glow of ancient wisdom that common belief ascribed to the ancient East.
The cult of the Great Mother Pessinuntos and her husband Atteos was first established in the West. The black stone which was her fetish, accompanied by Phrygian eunuch priests, was solemnly carried from Pessinunda to Rome, by order of the Sibyllian books, during the dark days of the second Carthaginian war, when the official Roman religion failed to appease the popular worry and despair. The senate, of course, was somewhat appalled by the barbaric and orgiastic character of the rites and strictly confined this worship to its temple, on the Palatine Hill. The piety of the Roman people was manifested in the western way, with annual chariot races. But in the reign of Claudius the isolation ended and the cult of the Great Mother began to spread among the people of Rome, the Italian and provincial cities, where she was given a certain prestige over the other Eastern religions, due to her official recognition by the Roman state.
We can restore with some precision the ceremonies at her great spring celebration. It started on the 15th of March with a procession of the reed-bearers, which probably took place to honor the finding of Atteus by the goddess. Attis, like Moses, had been abandoned on the banks of a river, the Phrygian Sangarius. On that day a bull was sacrificed. A week of fasting followed. Then the pine tree symbolizing Atti was cut down and decorated, followed by a day of mourning. The next day, March 24, was the day of the Blood, during which the devotees of the goddess, who with the music and dance went into a state of religious frenzy, tore their flesh with knives and finally castrated themselves with a flint.
A night of vigil followed and on the 25th the resurrection of Attes was celebrated with joyous events. Finally, after a day of rest, the statue of the goddess was taken with a solemn procession to the sea to be washed. This was what the uninitiated mob saw. For those who wanted to delve deeper into the occult meaning of the rites, there was a Last Supper, where the faithful “ate from the drum and drank from the cymbal and became mystics of Atteus.” Isis with her husband Osiris and their son Horus later arrived in the Latin West.
At first they were banned by the Roman government, but then Caligula officially recognized them. Their worship was a mixture of Greek and Egyptian elements. The artistic depiction of the Trinity, in completely human form, the bearded father, and the mother with the infant was Greek. In contrast, the temples of Isis were more or less reminiscent of the Egyptian ones, and her priests were dressed in the Egyptian fashion and used seistras. The rites seem to have been performed in Greek, but they were a repetition of the daily formality that applied in Egyptian temples – at dawn the sanctuary was opened, the goddess was washed and dressed, and so on. until sunset, when the sanctuary was closed. The main annual celebration took place in autumn, and symbolized in dramatic form the death and dismemberment of Osiris by Typhon, the efforts of Isis to find his dismembered corpse, and the resurrection of Serapis. The deeper meaning of these rites and myths was only gradually revealed to the faithful who had passed the three degrees of initiation.
The third and most recent cult was that of the Persian Mithras, who for a long time occupied eastern Asia Minor. It appears that he first migrated westward in the late first AD. century. Mithras was the God of heavenly light, often identified with the sun, champion of justice and truth against the dark forces of evil. The main incident of his career, which is also the subject of most Mithraic sculptures, was the slaughter of the bull from whose corpse was born all the plant and animal kingdom useful to man. The believer passed through seven stages of initiation and became successively a raven, a cryptic, a soldier, a lion, a Persian, a sun and a father. The rites, which took place in caves or crypts, included a Last Supper of bread and wine and, the Taurobolion, where the worshiper, placed in a pit in the floor, was literally bathed in the blood of a bull that was slaughtered on a grill above him , and thus acquired the vital force of the bull which Mithras had slaughtered for the good of humanity. This rite became very popular and was associated with the cult of the Great Mother.
Some general features of the period should be particularly emphasized. First of all, it was an intensely religious era. Outside a small circle of Auxiliaries, rationalism or skepticism was non-existent. Everyone, from the most educated intellectual to the most uneducated peasant and laborer, firmly believed in the existence of supernatural forces and their interest in human affairs. Men believed that good or bad fortune depended on the unseen, and tried, according to their temperament and beliefs, to divine the inevitable future, to influence the supernatural by magic, to appease the wrath of the gods, or to win the their favor or to communicate with the divine who would deliver them from earthly woes.
On the other hand, the religion of the time was largely indifferent to worldly things, a religion of flight. Having lost hope that they would find in this life personal happiness or that peace, justice and prosperity would prevail on earth, men turned their thoughts to a future life beyond the grave, or to a spiritual life away from the material world. The central idea of the mystery religions was, as demonstrated above, the search for certainty about life after death. As Attis was slain and resurrected, so those who came into secret communication with him and learned his secrets would live happily after earthly death. As Osiris was dismembered and resurrected, so those who mastered the ancient knowledge of Egypt would gain the allusion to the beyond. As many souls as were purified by his mysteries, Mithras would lead them through the seven planetary spheres to the highest heaven, where they would live in eternal light. In philosophical circles there was a strong tendency to regard the material world as inherently evil, and the body “cloak of darkness, web of ignorance, pillar of evil, bonds of corruption, living death, conscious corpse, moving grave.” Its initiates sought to be freed from the world’s ills by insight into and communication with the Unspeakable One.
This is not to say that religion or philosophy did not offer practical moral instruction. Philosophers taught that the soul must rid itself of its fleshly desires and passions by the practice of virtue, in order to attain the purity required for the insight of the divine. The doctrine of Mithraism was that the Universe is a battleground of the forces of Light and Darkness, Evil and Good, and Mithra’s followers must take part in his battle to unite with him. In the religion of Isis, too, moral purity was required of the faithful if they were to hope to be acquitted in the judgment beyond the grave and attain eternal bliss. But, with the possible exception of Mithraism, morality was seen as a concern of the individual, a means of purifying one’s soul and personal attainment of full enlightenment or future bliss. Neither philosophy nor religion cared at all about social justice or had any hope or even desire to remedy the ills of the world.
Paganism was rudimentarily organized and largely lacked a professional priesthood. The religions were maintained by the Roman state, by the cities, the villages and by private “troupes”. The Roman state practiced the worship of the Roman gods with its rulers and official priests. He also exercised a police supervision over all religions by regulating or banning those he deemed inimical to the material, moral or spiritual interests of the empire. But beyond this negative and very loose control, the central authority did not interfere. Most local cults were maintained by the cities of the empire, which appointed their priests, and financed them either from the city’s annuities or from special sacred funds and donations. Villages likewise often had their own temples and priests. The sacramental religions were based on the congregation. A number of believers formed a union, elected its priests and supported its worship by subscriptions.
A professional priesthood existed in Egypt. It was a hereditary body, and an official of the Roman government regulated its renewal, scrutinizing the candidates’ pedigree and physical fitness as well as their knowledge of hieroglyphics. He also inspected the temples to make sure that worship was conducted properly and that the priests devoted all their time to their sacred duties and observed the rules of their form, such as shaving the head and wearing the linen cassock. It is possible that in the cult of Isis which had spread throughout the empire, the priesthood was also professional, since otherwise the elaborate daily rites could not be performed, but there is nothing to assure us that the priests belonged to the Egyptian priestly caste. It is possible that other Eastern temples were also served by professional priests, and that Eastern religions that spread to the West, such as Mithraism, required the round-the-clock services of regular clergy.
But even in the most widespread cults, such as those of Isis and Mithras, there was no central authority to formulate doctrine, regulate formality, or sanction the election of priests. In most local cults the local dignitaries constituted the priesthood and combined or alternated their religious duties with other public offices. Most priests were elected by the city council, either, as in most offices, for one year, or for life, as an honorary distinction. Some priestly positions that yielded significant incomes were auctioned off. Few were hereditary members of the cult’s founder’s family.
Although incomplete and disorganized idolatry had crept in everywhere. Religion was intertwined with public and social life. The sessions of the Roman Senate began with the burning of incense on the altar of Victory, and it is possible that the meetings of the city councils also began with some ritual. Among other duties, the lords had to offer sacrifices to the gods on behalf of the city and take part in litanies and religious celebrations. Virtually all public spectacles were festivals in honor of the gods, and theatrical performances, athletic contests, and chariot races began with prayers and sacrifices. All education was based on the study of the ancient poets, and pagan mythology provided the subjects of the expositions.
Christianity in many ways resembled the mystery religions. Christians had their Savior God, who had died and risen. They had the degrees of initiation into His mysteries, and they had their own Last Supper, where the inner circle of the mystics communicated with Him. Like the other cults, they were also organized in parishes, and they supported their priests with subscriptions. Their religion, moreover, appealed to the same social strata as the other sacramental cults, to the bourgeois, middle, and lower classes. And this too did little to move the peasant masses. In the higher ranks it had made less progress than the other mystery cults.
But it also had a big difference from other cults. The believers of Christianity refused to worship other gods and even detested them as demons. This is where their exclusivity and commitment to their team came from. They did not attend public holidays, sporting meetings or theatrical performances. They also did not like to eat outside their home, since most of the meat in the shops came from animals that had been sacrificed to the gods. They avoided enlisting in the army, either because in the performance of their military duties they would be forced to take part in pagan festivals or because as soldiers of the Lord they could not obey an authority that once resembled the Lord of Darkness. For the same reasons the wealthiest believers refused to take office in the cities or to become members of the council and to contribute to the needs of the city.
Focused exclusively on themselves, the Christian communities developed a very strong esprit de corps and a tight-knit though flexible organization. The faithful of each city, their elders and deacons were under the absolute authority of a bishop who was elected for life by a rather complicated process, which combined the approval of both the clergy and the flock of the city and the consent of the neighboring bishops, a from whom at least he had to transfer to the candidate his own divine grace. The churches of the various cities always kept in close contact with each other by correspondence, and little by little the habit prevailed of settling doctrinal and disciplinary differences by synods of bishops.
From the beginning the Christians, like the Jews whom they so closely resembled, were averse to the pagans. They were accused of being atheists and traitors to the empire, but above all they hated them as strange people, who did not take part in social life, but remained closed to themselves. And since they were disliked, public opinion believed that they indulged in debauchery at their secret “love festivals” and that they performed hideous child-sacrifice rituals. Didn’t their holy books exhort them to “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood”?
Unlike the Jews, the Christians very quickly and for reasons that remain obscure attracted the hostility of the imperial government. The two religions had equally unacceptable characteristics in common, but in the eyes of the Roman authorities there was one important difference. The Jews were a people who followed the traditions and religion of their forefathers, and very early, when they were still a political entity, they had wrested from Rome the legal recognition of their strange customs. Because of their great respect for ancestral customs and legal precedent, the Romans tolerated the Jews, even granted them privileges. The Christians, however, were innovative, creating a new religion, which was undesirable only because of the fact that it worshiped a criminal who was lawfully executed by a Roman commander. The government generally abhorred the new cults because they tended to cause political unrest and often introduced immoral customs. This religion in particular always caused disturbances and was seriously suspected of immorality. Whatever the reason, in the early second century, Christians who, after being warned, persisted in their religion faced the risk of being sentenced to death.
However, at first the imperial government did not take drastic measures against the new cult. The task of denouncing Christians was left to the prosecutors, and repressive measures were only sporadic and applied in places, usually by pressure of public opinion. Because in the ruling classes during the first two centuries agnosticism prevailed and they certainly did not take religion very seriously. But as in the late third century religiosity increased among all classes, and as uneducated people with strong religious convictions rose from the lower social classes to high administrative or military offices, and even to the throne, the mood of government changed. Civil wars and barbarian raids, famines and pestilences were unmistakable evidence that the gods were angry with the empire. And it was not difficult to find the cause of their wrath; the number of the infidels who refused to worship them was ever increasing.
The soldier emperor Decius made in 250 the first systematic attempt to impose the worship of the gods and thus to eradicate Christianity. According to his order, all the inhabitants of the empire had to offer sacrifices to the gods before the authorities and get the relevant certificate. The apparent success of the measure was impressive. Thousands of Christians, especially in the upper classes, who would have found it harder to defy the order, succumbed. But too many went into hiding, and a significant number defied the government, bravely facing prison, torture, and death. The courage of the confessors and martyrs increased the enthusiasm of the Christians and impressed the pagans, and as soon as the persecution relaxed, those who had renounced their faith petitioned the bishops to be readmitted. Seven years later the emperor Valerian renewed the attack on another line.
He ordered the arrest of members of the senatorial and equestrian order and of imperial freedmen who refused to sacrifice, while he first exiled and later put to death all bishops and priests and forbade religious meetings. But before long Valerian was captured by the Persians, and his son Gallienus not only freed the clergy but gave the Church its buildings and cemeteries. During the next forty years the Church enjoyed almost uninterrupted peace. The converts flocked and in the big cities spacious churches were built, in the most prominent places. The old caste mentality began to relax. We know of a Christian who, for reasons of conscience, refused to serve when he was called up during Diocletian’s recruitment, and of two or three soldiers who refused to be disciplined.
But the lieutenant who dealt with the first case proved to the young recruit that there were already many Christians in the imperial army. As Christianity penetrated the upper social classes, objections to holding office began to fall away, and on the eve of the Great Persecution a synod of Spanish bishops laid down the terms under which Christians could hold municipal offices and become provincial high priests of the imperial cult—a sign of how worldly this worship had become. Christians were becoming prefects and even found themselves holding high positions in the imperial court. And as the closed-mindedness of the Christians disappeared, the prejudice of the pagans also began to decline. In the last persecution, the initiative was taken by the government, while the public seems to have remained apathetic and even occasionally resented the brutality of the authorities.
In this period also the Church completed its organization. The custom was established for the bishops of a province to meet regularly in its capital, the metropolis. The bishop of the capital, the metropolitan, who presided over this gathering, thus acquired some primacy and the claim to dominate his neighbors. Ecclesiastical organization tended to keep pace with politics, and when Diocletian grouped the provinces into “divisions,” the cities in which the vicars settled became the natural centers for wider synods, and their bishops acquired a certain authority over the other metropolitans of the administration. . Carthage was recognized as the ecclesiastical capital of Africa, and Antioch of the East, outside of Egypt, where Alexandria held a prominent position; for in analogy with the centralized system which, until the reforms of Diocletian, prevailed in the political administration, the bishop appointed all the bishops of the country to her. Rome exercised similar authority over the neighboring administration of southern Italy and the islands; from ancient times, either as the capital of the empire or as the seat of Peter, it had some indefinite preeminence in the whole Roman world.
Conversion Of Constantine-Edward Gibbon: PT-1
Deed of Donation by Constantine to Pope (A forged Document Created by Roman Catholic Church)
