०४ Christianization

Summary

• Christians were far more willing to take consistent and forceful political action in favor of their religion (rather than “Rome”).
• The diverse pagan traditions in the Empire didn’t begin to think of themselves as one religion until the Christians in power began taking uniform action against them.

Rise to being a strong minority

• Christians were a miniscule minority at the time, and hardly noted even a few decades later by the historian of the age - Dio Cassius who wrote the famous “History of Rome” till 229 AD
• But Christianity even as late as 300 CE just a decade before Constantine’s conversion in 312 CE, accounted for barely 10% of the Roman Empire. But this 10% was united. With a somewhat uniform religious culture, and a common sense of community in part furthered by persecutions. The Christians could define their new identity by drawing sharp boundaries. With conversion, they cut themselves from their past and the religious beliefs of the masses around them.

Finiancial prowess

• 1. By AD 250, the church was supporting fifteen hundred people (mostly widows and poor) in the city of Rome
• 2. After the barbarian raids of 254 and 256 AD, the Churches of Rome and Carthage sent large sums to Africa / Cappadocia to free Christian captives

Pagan weakness

• The pagans though more numerous had no sense of community that cut across city and region.
• Back in 2nd cen, the wealthy notables lavished wealth to patronize religious activity. Be it rites, processions, statues, temples. This was always city-specific. By the 4th cen, the elites were now immensely richer, than they were in 2nd cen. With weaker local ties. They did not feel the need to spend on public works in their cities anymore. Their spending was now on private living and mansions. Not on religious and communal activities. This is supported by empirical data as well. E.g. The lavish inscriptions in honor of the traditional gods comes to a halt after 250 AD.

Constantine and Constantius 324-361

• We see a pattern of slow start, followed by a sudden quickening.
• Privileging christians: “Constantine himself apparently endorsed this goal and tried to further it through a series of legislative and administrative measures.48 Some of these explicitly favored Christianity. Constantine exempted Christian clergy from financial obligations to city councils, he supplied Christian bishops with large amounts of money and goods that they could use to support their congregations, he paid for the construction of new churches, and he gave bishops a form of judicial power that they could use to manumit slaves and resolve legal disputes within their communities.”
• “The empire had nominally prohibited sacrifices since at least 324, but the first law against sacrifices with enforceable penalties appeared only five years before Julian’s accession. And, while the law was technically enforceable, not only do we know of no person ever prosecuted under that law, but we have a great deal of evidence that public sacrifices continued to be performed between 356 and 361. Theodosian Code 16.10.4, which forbids access to temples, similarly seems not to have been widely enforced even if it was technically enforceable.39”
• “Eusebius discusses a nomos (literally, a law) issued immediately after Constantine took control of the Eastern half of the empire in 324. This nomos forbade provincial governors and their superiors from offering sacrifice. .. "
• “Between Constantine’s conversion and Constantius’s victory over the usurper Silvanus in 355, imperial policy had carefully worked to create a reality in which traditional religion slowly melted away. It was only after 356 that Constantius began to reach aggressively for this goal by proposing specific penalties for sacrifices, closing some temples, transferring others to the Christian church, and allowing materials taken from temple sites to be reused in new construction.”
• “By the time of his death in 361, Constantius had mandated the death penalty for those who sacrificed, and tried to cut off access to pagan temples. ..”
• “The Olympic, Nemea, Isthmian, Pythian and Panathenian games were stopped.”

Christian ambition

• “After Christians gained tolerance & patronage from Constantine, they quickly began dreaming of depaganizing the Empire by ending rituals and destroying monuments.” … “Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History shows that the years bracketing Constantine’s victory over Licinius saw Christians begin to imagine a Roman world that not only tolerated Christianity but even welcomed its widespread physical and social presence.”
• “A second law was connected to this and ordered officials to build churches according to specified dimensions, “as though it were expected that, now that the madness of polytheism was wholly removed, pretty nearly all mankind would henceforth attach themselves to the service of God.”
• “Eusebius drew on two strands of thought. The first was the longstanding Christian abhorrence of sacrifice, a view laid out in depth by numerous second- and third-century Christian authors. The second strand was far older and evoked the only case Eusebius knew about in which a religious group claimed to have successfully suppressed an established traditional religion. This was the account of the Israelite conquest of Canaan in Deuteronomy, a story in which God commanded his people to “demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are about to dispossess served their gods.“58 Eusebius imagined that Roman paganism would die away in the same way that traditional Canaanite religion did if sacrifice was restricted, temples torn down, and the emperor readied churches for the new Christians his policies would create. A Christian empire filled with churches and believing congregations would naturally emerge, but only as a result of Roman de-paganization.”

Julian’s apostacy

Crypto-pagan past

• “child of the 330s who had been born in Constantine’s empire, was educated under the careful supervision of Constantius and his Christian associates, and entered adolescence just as his cousin started to implement his vision of a Christian empire. "
• Porphyry of Tyre (232-303 CE) wrote a stinging criticism of Christian scriptures (banned by Constantius). His disciple was Iamblichus. And it was Iamblichus’s pupils who reconverted Julian.
• “While Constantius lived, “fear of the consequences had kept him from practicing its rites, except in the greatest possible secrecy.” When Constantius died, “this fear was removed,” and Julian ordered “that the temples should be opened, sacrifices brought to their altars, and the worship of the old gods restored.“24 A pagan emperor again ruled the Roman world.”
• " Julian’s entire public career from 355 to 361 had been a sequence of improbable successes. He won military victories along the Rhine despite a lack of command experience and actions in battle that put him at great personal risk. He had survived as a Caesar for six years despite Constantius’s suspicions… Julian could not help but believe that the gods had chosen and supported him throughout his most unlikely rise.”
• “Julian understood intimately both Constantius’s goals and the institutions that he used to further them in ways that average members of the final pagan generation could not. Unlike those older men, Julian understood that Constantius’s initiatives pointed toward a world in which traditional religious practices were suppressed and temples replaced by churches. That frightening thought prompted Julian to build new institutions that would strengthen non-Christian cults and return a more traditional religious balance to the Roman world.”

Pagan revival

• Julian purged relatively few Christians, but ended the light persecution of pagans. “Because Julian hoped to create a court befitting a philosopher, he replaced these courtiers with some of the intellectuals who had taught him.”
• “Sacrifices were reinstituted, temples were reopened, and Nicene bishops were recalled to their sees. … In these cases, Julian simply reversed an ineffective policy that had been in place for only a relatively short time.”
• “He sought to revitalise the appeal of paganism through the introduction of a similar charitable system to the Christian church, the restoration of grand sacrifices and ancient traditions and publicly proclaimed that the empire should be tolerant towards both pagans and Christians. However, coupled with this positive evolution of paganism, he also sought to undermine the church by encouraging the growth of the schisms which had formed through different interpretations of the Bible and he ensured that any damage caused to pagan temples resulted in harsh punishments for Christians and churches in the locality.”
• " Julian created a pagan priesthood modeled on the system of imperial administration in which worthy figures were appointed governors (achieros) of all of the temples in a defined region.45 While their fundamental duty was to encourage men not to violate the laws of the gods,46 their conduct was in every way to be guided by the principles of philanthropy. Julian broadly defined philanthropy to include sharing “money with all men” even with the wicked and the Christian, because all humanity fundamentally derives from a common origin.”
• In AD362 Julian banned Christians from teaching using pagan literature. (Reminds one of the 2019 BHU muslim sanskrit literature prof case.)
  • “The classic texts, such as the Aeneid and Iliad, were to be taught only by pagans, while the edict stated that ‘if they [Christians] want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark’.”
  • “This edict was a major financial blow for Christian teachers, potential students, who wanted to progress through Roman society, needed a classical education and both Christian and pagan parents were forced to employ pagans to teach their children.”
  • “Even for Julian’s most ardent supporter, the historian Ammianus, the edict was labelled a ‘harsh act which should be buried in lasting oblivion’ and was listed by the author amongst the failings of Julian’s regime.”

Theodosius and Gratian 380

• “In the 380s, Eastern Empire turned pagan holy sites into museums, while the Western Empire confiscated pagan property. No doubt the state profited immensely from its new property, in an eerie foreshadowing of the monastery seizures in the Reformation.”
• “The Christian persecution of Roman religion under Theodosius I began in 381, after the first couple of years of his reign in the Eastern Roman Empire. In the 380s, Theodosius I reiterated Constantine’s ban on some practices of Roman religion, prohibited haruspicy on pain of death, decreed magistrates who did not enforce laws against polytheism were subject to criminal prosecution, broke up some pagan associations and tolerated attacks on Roman temples.”
• “Between 389–392 he promulgated the Theodosian decrees (instituting a major change in his religious policies), which removed non-Nicene Christians from church office and abolished the last remaining expressions of Roman religion by making its holidays into workdays, banning blood sacrifices, closing Roman temples, confiscating Temple endowments and disbanding the Vestal Virgins. The practices of taking auspices and witchcraft were punished.”
• “In 392 he became sole emperor. From this moment till the end of his reign in 395, he ordered, authorized, or at least failed to punish, the closure or destruction of many temples, holy sites, images and objects of piety throughout the empire. "
• “Gratian took a different approach in the West. In 382, he undertook a series of actions that undercut the financial and practical foundations of traditional Roman religion. … He ended some of the beneficial financial privileges enjoyed by the cult of the Vestal Virgins. He eliminated imperial funding for public cult rituals. And he confiscated the property that belonged to the traditional Roman cults, endowments that had funded rituals and maintained temples for centuries.23 This final measure imperiled the very functioning of the traditional public cults of Rome. It is not clear whether Gratian appreciated the significance of these actions. He may simply have thought them symbolic measures that demonstrated his Christian piety, an important concern after Theodosius’s anti-pagan legislative program and church council in Constantinople had established his own Christian leadership credentials.”
• “Pagans tried to preserve their practices using an appeal to Emperor ‘s civic duty and Roman identity. Christians controlled enough levers of power to prevent the appeal from reaching the Emperor.”

Generation gap

• From “The Final Pagan Generation”- “these men, most of whom belonged to the generation born following the death of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, sometimes contrast markedly with those of the pagan and Christian elites born in the 310s and early 320s. These younger pagan and Christian religious warriors were bom into a world in which Christianity was clearly ascendant. They anticipated its destructive and transformative power, and as they matured, they came increasingly to understand that the dawning new religious order threatened the very existence of traditional Roman cults. Men like Rufinus and Olympus saw the conflict between a rising Christianity and traditional religion as the defining struggle of the fourth century, and they fought hard to advance the interests of the religious community with which they identified.”
• “Older men did not see the world in this way. They generally shared neither their juniors’ interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their tendency toward violent religious confrontation. The temple destructions and Christian provocations of the 380s and early 390s dismayed these older men, but, unlike some younger men of similar social and economic station, they did not violently resist these acts. They reacted instead as if they could not imagine a world in which traditional religious practices did not have a part. They had good reason to think this way. This generation was born during or immediately following a time of Christian persecution when the old gods had ruled, without interruption, for thousands of years. They were raised in the politically functional and economically prosperous environment created following the third-century stabilization of the Roman Empire by the tetrarchy. The empire of the fourth century depended on an administrative system in which locally prominent men could play important”
• “To them, the Christian Empire was at hand. .. Their enthusiasm would likely have confused members of the final pagan generation like Libanius or Themistius. They certainly did not approve of the sort of policies that Christian extremists like Maternus had been pushing, but they also saw little that could be gained by actively opposing them. Most temples remained open despite the laws, statues and images of the gods stared down from every corner of cities, public sacrifices continued to be offered in many parts of the empire (including in Rome itself), and the traditional religious routines of households throughout the empire could continue unaffected. At the same time, there were careers to advance, honors to be earned, positions to be gained, transfers to better jobs to be secured, deaths to mourn, issues of inheritance to resolve, new marriages to arrange, and fun to be had. This was not a good time to raise concerns about ineffectual religious policies or to wage foolish crusades against a powerful emperor. It made much more sense to swallow one’s discomfort with a set of largely symbolic policies and work with the emperor and his administration.”

Church over state service

• Late 4th century Church officials had great authority and influence from their wealth and the masses of faithful. Bishop of Rome already one of the most important men in the Empire.
• “By the 370s, large urban churches controlled such sizable property portfolios that the middle-class bishops of the late third and early fourth centuries no longer had the administrative experience necessary to administer their finances.22 Churches now needed bishops who knew how to manage large estates, diverse properties, and complicated political relationships. This led them increasingly to turn to talented members of the upper class to manage their affairs. In return, the churches offered these men a way to do recognizably elite activities in a new context of Christian service. … They came to the job already possessing social relationships with influential figures, familiarity with the imperial appeals process, knowledge of how to organize and conduct an embassy, and training in how to use the language of the cultured elite to advocate for friends and associates.24”
• “Clergy and even bishops had tended to be people of middling rank who could pursue careers in the church but lacked the background, means, or the social standing to hold high municipal or imperial office. Beginning in the 370s, however, men who had once served as teachers, advocates, and even imperial governors entered into bishoprics, a trend that accelerated as the fifth century approached.”

Gradually, then suddenly

• “The ascetics and bishops celebrated by Chrysostom pushed imperial authorities toward ever more aggressive antipagan and anti-Jewish actions, while older men like Libanius worked within the confines of the imperial system to slow things down. These septuagenarians cared about the temples, 110 but they sought to protect them by working through the same formal and informal procedures that they used to blunt the effect of midcentury religious policies. In earlier decades, appeals to imperial officials and requests for special treatment limited the effect of both anti-pagan policies and Julian’s pro-pagan religious reforms.111 Unfortunately, the nature of the assaults on traditional religion had changed by the 380s, and actions taken within the confines of the old imperial social and administrative system now worked less well.”
• “In the East in the 380s, the most devastating assaults on traditional religion came not from emperors and governors but from people working outside of the formal imperial administration.”
• “Theodosian policy, however, went beyond what legislation spelled out. The emperor issued no laws ordering the destruction of temples, but he tacitly sanctioned this activity in ways that challenged formal administrative models. The most notorious assaults came during the praetorian prefect Cynegius’s inspection tour of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in 386-88. … The nature of the tour changed quickly, however, as monks and bishops traveling along with him destroyed temples in Mesopotamia and Syria and sacked shrines in Egypt. Cynegius certainly approved of these assaults, but his campaign was only a part of a larger sequence of events in which imperial administrators either encouraged or simply turned a blind eye toward Christian violence against non-Christian sacred sites. In 387, after Cynegius’s tour moved into Egypt, an unnamed comes Orientis attempted to cut the sacred grove at Daphne outside of Antioch.114 Then, in 388, a group of Christian monks and their bishop burned down a synagogue in the garrison town of Callinicum. All of this activity was done in such a way that the emperor could conveniently feign ignorance, but Christian thinkers understood what Theodosius aimed to do. Theodoret prefaces the segment of the fifth book of his Ecclesiastical History in which he discusses temple destructions with a celebration of Theodosius’s unique achievement. No emperor, not even Constantine, had destroyed temples, 116 until Theodosius ordered the destruction of the “shrines of the idols” and “consigned (traditional rites] to oblivion.””
• With no fear of Imperial authority, Christians attacked pagan shrines & temples with support of friendly local officials. With no extralegal authority, pagans were only able to beg for state to protect them.
• “Oration 30, a text that apparently dates to the period immediately following Cynegius’s departure from Syria, serves as Libanius’s first effort to respond to this new and troubling dynamic.”
  • Libanius’s appeal.
• “The destruction of the Serapeum was a momentous event, second perhaps only to the Gothic sack of Rome in 410 for the amount of attention it received from contemporary sources. In the same way that the sack of Rome shocked an empire unaccustomed to questioning its military superiority, the disappearance of Serapis’s temple in Alexandria highlighted the vulnerability of large centers of traditional religion that had once seemed a permanent fixture of Roman life. However, like the sack of Rome, the destruction of the Serapeum was both a singular event and the culmination of a longer process.”
• “Later representations of Theophilus celebrated the Serapeum destruction as the defining moment of his career. An early fifth century Alexandrian chronicle included a picture of Theophilus standing atop a statue of Serapis (see fig. 14), a visual parallel that linked his anti-pagan efforts to those of earlier Hebrew prophets.4 The notion that a bishop should act aggressively against traditional religious sites eventually became so ingrained in the fifth-century Alexandrian Christian community that Theophilus came to serve as a prototype of ideal episcopal behavior. Some ascetic communities also quickly adopted the idea that ascetics should act aggressively against traditional religion and its practitioners.”

Massacre of Greeks

• 17th Volume of Res Gestae Libri XXXI, which covers the 4th century AD, by the famous Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus: “The bishop of Alexandria Georgios and his gang went through the streets of Alexandria cutting up people and setting fire to everything. From the remotest areas of the Roman Empire countless Greeks of all ages and social backgrounds were dragged chained. Many of these died on the way or in the prisons of different places. Those that managed to survive ended up in Skythopolis, a remote town in Palestine, where instruments of torture and death were set up.”
• “The Christian historian Sozomen, in his book Ecclesiastical History, wrote that almost all Greeks were ordered to be killed, some by sword and some by fire. All the philosophers and those wearing the clothing of philosophers were also killed.”
• “It is estimated that between the 4th and 10th century at least 20 million Greeks were exterminated. We should not forget that Greeks made up the biggest population of the Roman Empire and possibly of the world. The Greek population, before this systematic extermination, numbered about 40 million living around in the geographical areas now known as Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine.”
• “By some trick, history stops at the point at which the nasty Romans persecute the virtuous Christians. The history relating to the criminal Christians as persecutors of the Greeks is hushed up, just as the first death camp in world history in Skythopolis is hushed up.”

Plethon’s academy

• “The most vigorous group of Neoplatonists, living in Athens and still adhering to the old rituals, disbanded in the aftermath of Emperor Justinian’s legislation of 529, which resulted in the closing of the Platonist academy.”
• MT says: “The heathen revivalist Plethon and his students reintroduced classical Greek thought back into Cosimo de’ Medici’s court and had a great influence on key figures in the renaissance. … It was under the aegis of this forum provided by the Medici clan that Leonardo, several other artists and later Galileo [who dedicated his Sidereus Nuncius to member of the clan] received patronage.”
• MT says: “First, the followers of the shavamata quickly realized that Plethon was introducing something really dangerous to their foundations: indeed, he has himself remarked to a pretAcharin that both the religions of love and peace would soon be replaced by heathenism, like that of the Hellenes. At the same time they saw that the attractive feature of Plethon’s thought was the knowledge which it brought along on scientific and mathematical topics: this is apparent from both their and the Moslems’ acknowledgment (even with tinge of admiration, despite loathing for his heathenism) of the extensive knowledge of Plethon. Thus, the realized that the best thing for the shavamata would be to absorb this knowledge and recast it inside an Abrahamistic framework while throwing out the heathenism propounded by Plethon. Ironically, this happened right in the academy of the Medici’s which was inspired by Plethon wherein his descendents in the preceptorial line like Bessarion and Argyropoulos tried to work his ideas into the pretamata. This is comparable to the earlier appropriation of heathen material by the pretamata during the period of the fall of the Roman empire. On the whole what happened was that the pretamata was not diluted, but it simply digested the alien ideas and incorporated them into its corpus.”