As we celebrate Easter this year, we should remember the great struggle between Paganism and Christianity that occurred in the 4th to 6th centuries. It was a struggle for the ages and transformed an empire.
It is no secret that the Roman Pagans during the 4th and 5th centuries were feeling like the world was changing beyond recognition. Their religious life, which had been the mainstay of millions of Romans for centuries since the days of the Roman Kingdom, was being replaced by the ”cult” of Christianity. The Christians, who had been lurking in the shadows for many years in the hidden corners of the Empire, were now in the ascendant, taking over the government and replacing temples with churches. To a Roman Pagan, the Christians seemed like locusts that were damaging a great empire. There were many writers and intellectuals who were determined to commit to the struggle against Christianity and maintain the traditional values of the Roman Empire. However, the Roman state at this time was being governed by resolute Christians who were determined to bring the Pagans to heel and establish Christian supremacy in the empire.
In the opening days of Christianity’s revolution, it was persecuted in a haphazard way by various Emperors. The crucifixion went by without much notice by the Roman authorities. Jesus was simply a rebel and a criminal like the two other men on the crosses besides him. Christians like St. Paul and others would take the word of god to a variety of peoples across the Greco-Roman world. Christianity’s rise to power would be gradual but eventually by the 4th Century AD, the religion had become powerful enough that Constantine would take notice and give it the imperial stamp of approval with the Edict of Millan that he signed with his rival Licinius.
The Edict of Milan had given Christians the recognition they had been waiting for years. However, now that they were in power, what were they going to do with that power. It has been common in academic circles for people to write about how the Christians began persecuting their Pagan neighbors. Much of this idealizing comes from the left-wing hold that universities tend to have on history. However, the reality is alot more nuanced than that and shows the moral questions that many Christians had to face during this age. Christians must have been dogged with the paradox of tolerance. Could they truly attain god’s favor by trying to respect heathens who were essentially denying the will of the almighty and also had been persecuting Christians for ages. The Christians of those eras were not interested in the weak-willed ideology that was being propagated by the pastors of today’s Christianity. The church leaders of the day understood the importance of tending to their flock and the spiritual health of the Roman Empire. They were intolerant in the modern sense of the word but their intolerance had a very important reason; They had learned the hard way of what persecution meant. It meant a litany of suffering and despair in the face of a leviathan of an Empire.
The Christians of today do not understand the weight of the Roman Empire upon the Christians of Classical Antiquity. While persecution was sporadic, it could still occur at almost any moment at the whim of a particularly blood-thirsty emperor. When Christians were finally allowed to be able to worship god on their own terms, they could finally breath and practice their religion.
However, when was the transition from the celebratory mood of being able to practice a religion to the vengeful attacks on the Pagans occur? It was a murky transition, not one the historians are sure about. Constantine was a savvy political operator, knowing to still adhere to the pagan roots of the Roman Empire. He had coins minted that showed him depicted with the sun god, Sol Invictus. Pagan statues also still dotted the Christian capital of Constantinople, and the Neoplatonic philosophy would actually flourish during this time period in the Roman Empire. What this shows is that the founder of the Roman Christianity as informed by its imperial nature, Constantine, was still willing to combine the two traditions for political expediency.
Emperor Julian in the 360s would attempt to create a neo-pagan movement in the Roman Empire, but this would fail and Christianity would continue to spread in the Empire unabated. It was not until the 390s that Christianity would truly begin its war against the Pagans, even then it was not entirely coordinated in the way that neo-liberal historians like to portray it as.
Neo-liberal historians like to whine about the fall of Greco-Roman paganism but this war against Paganism was clearly an important turning point in the history of humanity. My opinion is that Christianity was clearly a superior moral force compared to that of the Greco-Roman Paganism and that some of this opposition to Paganism was justified. The Greco-Roman pagans, no matter how quaint they may seem to the moderns, were not following religions that truly elevated the human condition. Many of these religions and cults were focused on the worship of vain gods that were only interested in human beings to toy with them. Even if one was a complete rationalist and did not believe in the divine, the god of the New Testament and even that of the Old Testament is a morally superior deity to that of the Pagans.
People really like to romanticize the Roman and Greek Pagans but to be honest, they were religions that did not really care about the status of the human on the planet. They were more about putting emphasis on the gods and giving power to them instead of uplifting human beings. This is one of the great flaws of Greco-Roman Paganism. It is a religion that is more focused on the community engagement without any appeal to charity or anything that seeks to help the people. It is not surprising that many people were flocking to Christianity in those intervening years.
The war against the Pagans in the 390s was a culmination of many factors coming together. Constantine’s mild discrimination of Pagans had transformed into a righteous struggle to create a morally upright and religiously orthodox populace. While the Moderns can be disgusted with this, we have to understand that the Christians of the 5th and 6th centuries were determined to recuse the world from sin and temptation. They were not interested in being just a social group that celebrated holidays but in a being a truly transformative religion that sought to the change the moral fabric of the whole globe. Does this mean that every Christian met the high standards that were demanded in the Bible? Of course not. Many were as corrupt as the Pagans. However, on the whole, Christianity led to a moral revolution in the Roman population.
This moral revolution of course had a cost. The pagans, many of whom were well-meaning but misguided by piety to false idols, would have to see their traditions go into obscurity. Emperor Theodosius would decree that in the middle of that decade that Christianity would now be the official state religion of the Roman Empire. It was a total moral victory for the Christians. Those who had been hunted down by the Roman authorities for centuries could now be the ones at the top and acclaim themselves to be at the top of the globe. Of course, the battle had just begun and Christianity would still have to go into many places to root out the Pagans who were still inhabiting many places in high government and among the ordinary populace.
The Roman traditionalists, especially among the elite, were definitely people who were determined to fight for their traditions. There were many Pagans and Crypto-Pagans who hid their identity and their practices. There was the threat of banishment or even capital punishment for even trying to pursue this forbidden practice. However, many pagans continued to practice their religion, in spite of there being threats to their own lives.
Many of the Roman traditionalists had to be brought to heel and eventually many of them or their descendants did this. The Christians were already too numerous for the pagans to restore the old days of the supremacy of the polytheistic religion.
One of the few remaining strongholds of Pagan thought during the time of Late Antiquity was the Neo-Platonic School that was headquartered in Athens. Here, many adherents to the philosophical thought of Plato were located here and continue the study and elaboration of his ideas. However, unlike the more tolerant Christian Platonists of the Macedonian era, the Christians of the Theodosian era were less tolerant of such ideas. The Academy as it was called in those days, was closed down by the order of Emperor Justinian, in his continuing war against Pagans in government and in high positions in society.
Christianity’s triumph was in many ways total. We in the West may be less of a religious society than we were in previous centuries, but Christian ethics and its hold stretches throughout the entire West. Some try to reconstruct the Pagan rituals of the old gods and religions but their cultural impact will be limited to those with more free time than the ordinary peoples of their nations. Christendom may no longer be a concept that is understood by Europeans and Americans but Christianity as a moral force remains influential to this very day and continues to shape the hearts of others.
Byzantine-Empire.com 