Quote from: BrantaiYou've piqued my curiosity.  Care to expound on this?

Let's see if I can explain... Gnosticism was basically the New Age Fad of the classical world.  It was like Reiki or something.
It was mocked by both erudite christians and erudite pagans.  

It was too weird, too life-rejecting (I mean, any religion where the Christians could accuse you of being life-rejecting must be very bad indeed), too (pseudo-)intellectual, and far too metaphysical (what with its ideas about dozens of dimensions, and orders of angelic beings, and ineffable names, and having to memorize all this shit before you even stand a CHANCE of being saved) for popular consumption. On top of that, the Gnostic movement was about as divided as the modern-day wiccan or new age movements are; it seems like everyone and their uncle was Grand High Poobah of the Gnostic Church, and they each had a different theory as to how many different dimensions there were, the exact names of the angels, and just who the fuck the "Demiurge" was (as well as some other equally deep differences).

Note that there are certain texts and certain movements that are today erroneously lumped in with the Gnostics, but in fact share few qualities with Gnostic thought.
The Gospel of Thomas, for example, is not "gnostic" in any way. It is rather a mystical work very much within jewish thought but influenced by hellenistic (especially epicurean) philosophy.

Anyways, Gnosticism, like most "metaphysical" movements out there, just lacks too many of the basic building-blocks of good sensible religion to be really viable as a largely-accepted belief system. It can appeal to many people, the way New Age or Wiccan ideas can appeal to many people today, but most of those won't be the sort of people who have what it takes to make an actual religion out of it, to pursue it beyond the "fad" or "fashionable" stage.

RPGPundit

Yeah, that makes sense.

hey pundit, you're the religion guy.  what do you think of this take?

http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/ijhnbb.htm

(thanks for the AH link, stumpydave)

Quote from: beeberhey pundit, you're the religion guy.  what do you think of this take?

http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/ijhnbb.htm

(thanks for the AH link, stumpydave)

Well, for starters I think the suggestion that the Talmud would not have been compiled were it not for Christianity.  The Talmud was an conscious effort to preserve the Jewish intellectual body of work.

The rest of his assertions are pretty good, mimicing my own suggestion that Neoplatonism could have replaced Christianity; and I think that given the Islamic world's respect for Plotinus' writings, its entirely possible that whatever form Mohammed's religion would have taken could have been based on a Neoplatonic influence in place of a Christian one.

RPGPundit

But did Neoplatonism have saints? Shrines? Faith healing? Basically all the stuff to make a religion for the common folks? (You'll note that even Buddhism picked up a heavy accretion of that stuff as it expanded out of its homeland.) Basically how much of the funky coolness, festivals, and sacrifices that was Greco-Roman syncretic paganism got wrung out in the course of making Neoplatonism?

What a coincidence. On my Paris vacation I picked up two recent books by Paul Veyne ("The Greco-Roman Empire," and "When Our World Became Christian"--this one's about Constantine), whose general awesomeness & pertinence to the subject I can't begin to sing.

So, I'll just say: Lots of great points by Pundy, ditto on Gnosticism (do you like Jonas, Pundy?). But I don't think (and I'm really just an amateur throwing this out) that Neoplatonism or Sol would have had any chance.

When it comes down to it, the former is an academic, hyper-elite philosophy with a lot of Grecian cachet but little, well, zip. Compare the Gospels and the Enneads--no contest. And the cult of Sol is an abstraction in a different way. It's a construct. It's Emperor propaganda (hate the term, can't think of a better one), and a soldier religion at best, without grounding in traditional Greco-Roman religion.

And that I think is the real question: without Jesus & Co. around to destroy it, how long will Roman polytheism last? Maybe forever. It had been around for a millennium or whatnot, and it's not like it was nearly dead when Constantine seized power.

Quote from: HinterWeltChrist dies as a child falling down a well or run over by horses and the effect would be? Yes, I concede the point that he was protected by God but what would be more human?

... ok ... fasten your safety belts.

From the original post there is this little bit about "God".  Ok so let me take it from there and run with this for a few minutes.  

What about Satan?  Hmmm... lets take this from his point of view.  There he is in all his infernal glory, demons stomping through the underbelly of hell, the flames rising around him, looking in the icy glass pool around his burning hot belly and seeing the image of the world above where man is sinning away merrily, all to his grim delight.

And lo - here comes the Son of GOD!  Oh my.  He's going to redeem mankind and save the world!   This is bad bad bad! (Good good good, but you know Satan, always seeing things upside down).  And then just as young Jesus is stepping out into the court yard at the tender age of 9, there's a bad die roll.  Woopsie.  A critical Fumble!  What's this?  Did he just slip down the well?  And die?   OMG!  

Fantastico!  This is really unbelievable!!  And so Satan roars with delight and the world shudders in some incomprehensible way to the core of humanity's being.   There is no redemption coming.  The Roman Empire will not fall, and the Caesar will remain unthwarted, and humanity will not learn that there is a narrow gate to heaven.  It will be as it ever was, to the Strong goes the Power.  The ideals of brotherly love and compassion will falter on in the cradle and perish.   And the rule of the Strong over the weak, the Law of the Wolf, will reign supreme.  Forces will come into play that never had the chance, and mankind descends into madness and horror.   But slowly.  We go a hundred years.  The Roman Empire get stronger.  There is no mercy.  The Empire grows.  It invades the far reaches of Africa.  It follows Alexander to India.  Another few hundred years and even the great Chinese Empire is under threat and invaded.  Soon the world is under the dominion of the One Great Emperor.   Satan himself.   And there is great dread laughter.  And the human race ... I leave to your imagination.

Sorry about that.  It was just too tempting.



- Mark

Quote from: Pierce InverarityAnd that I think is the real question: without Jesus & Co. around to destroy it, how long will Roman polytheism last? Maybe forever. It had been around for a millennium or whatnot, and it's not like it was nearly dead when Constantine seized power.

Interesting points but it was my understanding from a number of books I have read that the big reason Christianity could make such inroads into Roman society had a lot to do with a cultural search for a more fulfilling religion/spiritual explanation. I think it was the Cult of Isis that first introduced the idea of forgiveness through supplication to the Romans. I think, eventually, if Christianity did not dominate the scene, you would end up with some other religion close to it. Perhaps a tempering of Mithraism in the form of blending with Sol Invictus. I agree with your on neoplatonism, just have a rough time imagining it as appealing to the common man. Still, I think the Romans had grown beyond the original pantheons and that is one of the big reasons that Christianity could be adopted by Constatine for the Empire despite not being a Christian himself.

Interesting thread though.

Bill

Quote from: VBWyrde... ok ... fasten your safety belts.

From the original post there is this little bit about "God".  Ok so let me take it from there and run with this for a few minutes.  



Sorry about that.  It was just too tempting.



- Mark

I am asking nicely, please do not bring that into this thread.

Bill

Quote from: HinterWeltInteresting points but it was my understanding from a number of books I have read that the big reason Christianity could make such inroads into Roman society had a lot to do with a cultural search for a more fulfilling religion/spiritual explanation. I think it was the Cult of Isis that first introduced the idea of forgiveness through supplication to the Romans. I think, eventually, if Christianity did not dominate the scene, you would end up with some other religion close to it. Perhaps a tempering of Mithraism in the form of blending with Sol Invictus. I agree with your on neoplatonism, just have a rough time imagining it as appealing to the common man. Still, I think the Romans had grown beyond the original pantheons and that is one of the big reasons that Christianity could be adopted by Constatine for the Empire despite not being a Christian himself.

Interesting thread though.

Bill

Bill, I think this argument is a reasoning backwards from assumed results: Christianity was inevitable; what made it so? Answer: some "spiritual zeitgeist," "it was in the air," "Rome ripe for the picking." In order to prove that, people would have to show how at some point Romans abandoned the old gods *consistently and in droves* for Isis etc.

Personally, I think all it took was Constantine, which was a hell of a lot, and who, says Veyne, was absolutely a Christian. And all it might have taken to reverse it may have been Julian sticking around longer. Who knows!

However. Veyne (who, being French, is of course a happy atheist) makes a "great" case for Christianity's appeal: It was like a modern bestseller. Like Rousseau's Heloise or Goethe's Werther, it produced a longing in you that you didn't know you had (because you actually didn't have it), but which from now on you had to satisfy.

At one and the same time you learned you had a soul (and a personal one, not the neoplatonist, universal one) AND that it was in danger of damnation AND that God deeply cared for that not to happen. So, personal salvation was the thing, as you put it for Isis. You're being loved, and you're scared. Also, all other gods are false.

One last thing: I'm an art historian, not a historian, so I know the visual record, not the written one. Late Roman art (not coins), especially religious art like all those thousands of funerary sarcophagi, was overwhelmingly polytheistic. No Sol, no Neoplatonism, a tiny number of Mithras reliefs (the Near East is always a different matter, I mean the heartland). Over and over again people put their fate in the hands of the old gods--and then in the hands of Christ. So, where I'm coming from there are only those two contenders.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityWhen it comes down to it, the former is an academic, hyper-elite philosophy with a lot of Grecian cachet but little, well, zip. Compare the Gospels and the Enneads--no contest. And the cult of Sol is an abstraction in a different way. It's a construct. It's Emperor propaganda (hate the term, can't think of a better one), and a soldier religion at best, without grounding in traditional Greco-Roman religion.

And that I think is the real question: without Jesus & Co. around to destroy it, how long will Roman polytheism last? Maybe forever. It had been around for a millennium or whatnot, and it's not like it was nearly dead when Constantine seized power.

Two points here: First, to address your second paragraph, the accepted academic consensus is that Roman Paganism was on the way out already by the time that Christianity came around.  Christianity got to become what it did because it filled a niche, it was at the right place at the right time (even though it was, in fact, a kind of odd choice to supplant paganism; the fact that it succeeded in spite of that oddness is more evidence that it was really in a fertile time/place to have had the incredible success it did).

The emperors from Augustus onward were deeply concerned with the moral collapse of "roman religious virtues"; the common man in Rome felt very badly served by Roman Paganism, which had by that time evolved into a very decadent very corrupt institutional religion that did a lot to serve the state and those in power but very little to serve the regular person (not unlike the Catholic Church today, some would add-- this is something that can't be emphasized enough to many of those who might read this with a bias of thinking of Christianity as a stodgy conservative religion; the message of Christianity at that time was extremely radical, it was the hip new thing to get into).

And it wasn't like Greco-Roman religion was in a great strong place and somehow this one weird religion wormed its way in there; no, there was a HUGE influx of "strange mystery cults from the east" (including Sol Invictus, Mithraism, the Gnostics, the cult of Isis, the Bachus cults, and COUNTLESS others). Just like in our time, in our place, all kinds of foreign religions, sects, and spiritual movements have found ample ground in the western world (be it Buddhism and Hinduism, fringe sects, scientology, raelians, reiki, wicca, crystal healing, feng shui, etc etc), Rome in the 1st-3rd century AD found itself in the same situation.  Many many people were desperate for something new that gave them more meaning and felt more personally accesible to them than the boring, sometimes oppresive, totally out-of-touch religion that they grew up with.

So there's no doubt in my mind that SOMETHING would have replaced Greco-roman paganism more or less at the same time that Christianity did, had Christianity never come about; and that something would probably have been a kind of monotheism (or at the very least some kind Pan-entheism or Monism; "Oneness" was the hot new idea that almost all of the most succesful cults of this period had in common).

As to the second point: Neoplatonism never got the chance or time to develop into a wider sort of populist religion because by the time it arose (early in the 3rd century AD) it was "too little, too late"; christianity had already taken that slice of the pie, so it spent its entire brief history as a coherent movement fighting the rising tide of Christian triumphalism.
If, as we are postulating, Christianity had never come to exist, Neoplatonism would have had more breathing space, and instead of being drier sort of "hinayana buddhism of the west" it could easily have developed into a more populist "mahayana buddhism of the west", had it only had the chance to.

RPGPundit

Quote from: VBWyrdeThe Roman Empire will not fall, and the Caesar will remain unthwarted, and humanity will not learn that there is a narrow gate to heaven.  It will be as it ever was, to the Strong goes the Power.  The ideals of brotherly love and compassion will falter on in the cradle and perish.   And the rule of the Strong over the weak, the Law of the Wolf, will reign supreme.  Forces will come into play that never had the chance, and mankind descends into madness and horror.   But slowly.  We go a hundred years.  The Roman Empire get stronger.  There is no mercy.  The Empire grows.  

You have an utterly bizzare conception of both the Roman Empire's character as a state (it was actually far more open and equanimitous than, say, the British Empire ever was), and the conception of Roman values.

Methinks you should read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations to get some idea of what Roman moral thought was really like. It was certainly not "the law of the wolf"; that was, in fact, exactly what they saw themselves (the light of civilization and the one shining hope of mankind) as fighting against (barbarism).

RPGPundit

Quote from: Pierce InverarityBill, I think this argument is a reasoning backwards from assumed results: Christianity was inevitable; what made it so? Answer: some "spiritual zeitgeist," "it was in the air," "Rome ripe for the picking." In order to prove that, people would have to show how at some point Romans abandoned the old gods *consistently and in droves* for Isis etc.

Personally, I think all it took was Constantine, which was a hell of a lot, and who, says Veyne, was absolutely a Christian. And all it might have taken to reverse it may have been Julian sticking around longer. Who knows!

However. Veyne (who, being French, is of course a happy atheist) makes a "great" case for Christianity's appeal: It was like a modern bestseller. Like Rousseau's Heloise or Goethe's Werther, it produced a longing in you that you didn't know you had (because you actually didn't have it), but which from now on you had to satisfy.

At one and the same time you learned you had a soul (and a personal one, not the neoplatonist, universal one) AND that it was in danger of damnation AND that God deeply cared for that not to happen. So, personal salvation was the thing, as you put it for Isis. You're being loved, and you're scared. Also, all other gods are false.

One last thing: I'm an art historian, not a historian, so I know the visual record, not the written one. Late Roman art (not coins), especially religious art like all those thousands of funerary sarcophagi, was overwhelmingly polytheistic. No Sol, no Neoplatonism, a tiny number of Mithras reliefs (the Near East is always a different matter, I mean the heartland). Over and over again people put their fate in the hands of the old gods--and then in the hands of Christ. So, where I'm coming from there are only those two contenders.

Well, I am not even that close to a history degree. However, the sources I have read all say Constantine converted on his deathbed and therefore was not a Christian during his life. However, it is a minor point.

As to looking to the old gods, I wont argue. As you pointed out, it had been around for generations and people do not just dump their parents beliefs because and in an instant. Generally, they are searching for something. Now, culturally, the Romans were conservative but when religions fell in line with their tolerances, it was adopted or adapted to some degree. Again, the faiths you point to as not being referenced would not have simply due to the lack of popularity. I, nor anyone, can say definitively what religion would have filled the gap but I do think something would have. Partly it seemed the natural evolution that the Romans were progressing on and partly this desire to find better definitions of their spiritual world.

I totally agree with you that Constantine was critical. Still, imagine if he, say, threw himself behind stoicism and saw Sol Invictus as a tool to carry it to the masses. I am just supposing here. It could have been a different religion, a philosophy. Whatever it might be, Constantine could have used it like Christianity, to rejuvenate the Empire. There are interesting possibilities. I do not think, though, that it would have just reverted to Jupiter and the Gang. As I have said though, that really seems more opinion than anything at this point.

Thanks,
Bill

Quote from: RPGPunditYou have an utterly bizzare conception of both the Roman Empire's character as a state (it was actually far more open and equanimitous than, say, the British Empire ever was), and the conception of Roman values.

Methinks you should read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations to get some idea of what Roman moral thought was really like. It was certainly not "the law of the wolf"; that was, in fact, exactly what they saw themselves (the light of civilization and the one shining hope of mankind) as fighting against (barbarism).

RPGPundit

I was, of course, posing this from the Christian point of view.

- Mark

Quote from: VBWyrdeI was, of course, posing this from the Christian point of view.

- Mark

The hell you were?