Quote from: Elliot WilenRight, so...I don't think we've really compared apples to apples in the issue that's haunting this thread: why did traditional Greco-Roman paganism fail, and why was Christianity the replacement?

It's a faulty assumption (albeit one with a long history behind it) that Greco-Roman religion "failed" and was consequently replaced by Christianity. That's centuries of Christian propaganda talking, but the actual evidence doesn't support that view. Not to mention scholars of religion and anthropology don't subscribe to an evolutionary model of religious development anymore (wherein people were thought to naturally "progress" from animism to polytheism to monotheism as they gained in sophistication).

The shift from "paganism" (for lack of a better word) to Christianity wasn't a process of natural, peaceful evolution, as many Christians today would like to believe. It wasn't inevitable, and it certainly wasn't peaceful. And the mainstream religion of the day wasn't struggling in any discernible way until it lost state support in favor of Christianity and began to experience active persecution. And yes, the persecution suffered by non-Christians under the Christian emperors was at least as bad as what the Christians themselves had previously suffered, and it went on much longer. The main difference is that "pagans" never identified themselves as any sort of unified group and consequently didn't fare as well as the Christians, who were notoriously resistant to persecution and often willing to martyr themselves for their cause.

Moreover, ideas about the supposed decadence of classical religion derive from anachronistic assumptions about what the religion was supposed to look like in its ideal form, taking Christianity as the model of how a "real" religion should look. The fact is that it was functioning in late antiquity pretty much the same way it had always functioned. And most people weren't complaining one bit.

QuoteI suppose another way of thinking about this is to ask who the decision makers were. Average people? "Intellectuals"? Soldiers? Emperors?

This is the proper question. Certain (initially insignificant) segments of society adopted Christianity, probably out of a feeling of general disenfranchisement on account of the poor social mobility in the ancient world. It's also probable that the promise of a future in which everything would be made right appealed to a lot of the "nobodies" out there on the fringes. Such people were powerless individually, but there were lots of them, and there was always the fear that they would band together and cause trouble (remember Spartacus?). Early Christians also tended to be a law unto themselves, with the more radical among them carrying out acts that would be considered terrorist today. That gave them all a bad name for a long time, but it did get them the attention of the Roman state--for better or worse.

Constantine apparently decided that this untamed force could be used in a positive way, so he stopped the persecutions and tried to play both sides for a while (the multiple interpretations of the Chi-Rho, for example). But being one of the more autocratic emperors, it was natural for him to side with the underclasses against the Senate, et al., and that meant favoring the Christians. If it's true that a large segment of his army were Christians, that would also be an important factor. As the earliest emperors discovered, at the end of the day it's the army that matters. Constantine was also trying to hold together an empire that had got a bit too large to manage by himself, so he was looking to try something new.

So in the future generations (barring Julian) when the imperial family are Christians and the lowest levels of society are becoming increasingly Christian, what you have is a situation where the (pagan) middle is being squeezed on both sides. Many segments of Roman society managed to hold out for centuries, but the highly repressive policies of the Christian emperors systematically dismantled the old pagan power structure. On the one hand, the largely pagan Senate became increasingly extraneous. On the other, pagan intellectuals, teachers, bureaucrats, and others were being pushed out of their positions in favor of Christians (keep in mind the placing of loyal slaves and freedmen in administrative positions was a common tactic among emperors to begin with). Julian tried to reverse this trend, but he died before making any lasting change.

So within a few generations, everybody who was anybody in the Roman power structure was a Christian. Naturally, the ambitious middle classes followed suit. It's very similar to what happened in Vietnam under French rule, where by the 20th century the elites were almost entirely Catholic. That doesn't indicate that Buddhism "failed" in Vietnam, so much as it shows how state support of a particular religion--especially when coupled with active repression of the competition--can lead to widespread change in a population in a relatively short time. The same thing happened in Persia after the Muslim conquest. Was Zoroastrianism naturally inferior to Islam? There's no basis for saying so (although a Muslim would no doubt agree), but institutionalized favoritism towards Muslims led to the conversion of most of the population within just a few generations, such that the largest group of Zoroastrians now resides in India.

It's also important to remember that, prior to very recently, there was no "free market of religions" in which various creeds could compete on their respective merits. Most people throughout history had little or no choice in the matter, and there were almost always economic and/or political considerations involved. And when the guy with the army said, "We're all X now," Bob the peasant wasn't in a position to argue. Sure, Bob will try to be the best X he can, but that doesn't mean the teachings of X won his heart and mind by better appealing to his personal spiritual needs.

Ah, you're putting rather a lot of weight on a single infelicitous choice of words. I suppose I could have used "succumb" instead of "fail". Nevertheless, your account shows that in the social-political environment of ancient Rome, Christianity did have inherent competitive advantages, the most significant of which were exclusivity toward other cults, the concept of being a distinct "religion", and a proselytizing impulse (rather than exclusivity toward individuals). (The same goes for Islam in the areas conquered in its name.)

Quote from: Elliot WilenAh, you're putting rather a lot of weight on a single infelicitous choice of words. I suppose I could have used "succumb" instead of "fail". Nevertheless, your account shows that in the social-political environment of ancient Rome, Christianity did have inherent competitive advantages, the most significant of which were exclusivity toward other cults, the concept of being a distinct "religion", and a proselytizing impulse (rather than exclusivity toward individuals). (The same goes for Islam in the areas conquered in its name.)

Sure, I'll admit to possibly being oversensitive to that choice of words. Not because I identify as a "pagan" myself (I'll gladly share my thoughts on neo-pagans elsewhere), but because in the field of Classics one constantly encounters outmoded assumptions about how and why Christianity won out in Rome. And it's often an uphill battle separating genuine history from Christian triumphalism.

But yes, early Christianity's group identity turned out to be a strength in the end. They more or less invented the notion of "a religion" (as a single, self-contained entity taken as a whole and contrasted with other "religions"), as well as the notion of exclusivity, religious authority, etc. Non-Christians, never having thought of themselves as belonging to a particular group identity, found themselves totally unprepared for that battle. Not that early Christianity was all that cohesive, by any means. But the orthodox church created by Constantine and his successors was certainly more organized than anything else around. Among the non-Christians, each temple and shrine was effectively autonomous. So by the time they even realized they were fighting a war, they had already lost. Sure, Julian tried to rally his own particular brand of defense, but so much had already been lost that it was probably a futile effort to begin with.

Another "strength" of the Christians was their ability to turn any death into a martyrdom and gain inspiration therefrom. And being unafraid of other people's gods, Christians were perfectly willing to desecrate holy sites, burn books, etc. In fact, thanks to them, and to the general lack of religious scriptures and records in antiquity, we'll probably always have an incomplete picture of pre-Christian religion. The Christians succeeded in wiping out 99% of what was there, effectively erasing it from history. As you mentioned, Islam was extremely successful in that regard, as well. We know next to nothing about pre-Islamic religion in Arabia, precisely because of how well the Muslim converts eradicated all trace of it upon adopting the greater Islamic group identity. In this respect, they learned from the success of the Christians, although they managed to accomplish much more in a much shorter time.

Dubious "strengths," to be sure. But in real life, it's often not the "nice guys" who win such battles. That's not to say that the non-Christians were particularly "nice" or otherwise--it's impossible to characterize them in any particular way, their having no core ideology--but their relative tolerance and acceptance of individual predilection was much more in keeping with our current values than was the orthodoxy enforced by their Christian successors. Ironically, it's also part of what did them in.

In this, it's important to remember that the old school of thought--i.e. that Christianity won because of its inherent superiority--dates from a time in our recent history when such freedom and tolerance was often not seen as a good thing, and in which an overtly competitive, evolutionary model of history was favored. To give you an idea of the intellectual climate, it was also in this period that people openly interpreted Anglo-Saxon dominance of the globe as proof of the inherent superiority of the "Nordic race." It's also the age of "White Man's burden," and so forth.

I suppose it's a given that when the victors write their own history, they'll try to come up with why their victory was inevitable, etc.

BF, most of what you say in your last two posts I basically agree with. But the bit about Constantine doing the "natural" thing when he threw in his lot with the Christians: that's your British will to common sense coming thru.

I don't think there was anything natural, i.e. politically obvious, about an aspiring Emperor hooking up with what were then still 10 percent of the populace, and a lowly 10 percent at that. Christianity wasn't yet "the people," over against "those rich old farts in the Senate." It was a tiny subgroup of the people, and as such not useful for playing the populism card at all.

I think (= I'm persuaded by Veyne) that Constantine made a huge gamble based on a personal conviction. He actually did believe in the Christian god. (On top of that, of course, he was just as shrewd, paranoid and ruthless as the next Emperor. But the history of Christian kings tells us there's no contradiction here.)

So, if one asks what drives massive historical change in this instance, one ends up saying: power (the various strengths of Christianity you've outlined) harnessed to contingency (the wacky fact that a Roman Emperor, of all people, should see the light; aided & abetted by the other fact, that Julian died after three years, not thirty).

Black Flag: I have to wonder at this point, given your fairly particular writings in these last few posts, if you aren't personally allowing issues with Christianity to cloud your vision here.

You know that I personally am NO fan of Christianity (I certainly think it ultimately did more harm than good), and could give all kinds of criticisms of both historical and modern Christianity: But first and foremost I'm an historian, and I have to say that your work here seems absolutely drenched in bias.

First, while your statement that Greco-Roman paganism didn't fail in the light of Christianity's advances is technically true in one sense, in another, far more accurate sense, that's exactly what happened. Paganism FAILED. WHY it failed is a whole other question, but the fact that we're living a Christian (some would say post-Christian) society today and not a Pagan or post-pagan society is pretty well proof of that failure.

Next, as to your particular accounts of why this came to pass: according to you, Christians were nothing but disgruntled outcasts and maniacs... until suddenly Constantine showed up and made it the state religion.
Now, that doesn't sound very plausible does it?
It seems to me that you're INTENTIONALLY skipping the whole middle part of the story of Christianity's rise: by the time Constantine got ahold of it, the reason it was worth his while to bother with Chrstianity was that by that time Christianity was NOT the domain of looneys and outcasts, and was in fact in great vogue among considerable segments of the Roman intelligentsia, beaurocracy, and upper classes.

Christianity's strength was in its promise of "salvation", its metaphysical appeal, its philosophical appeal, its progressive thinking (yes, Christianity was the progressive and radical bleeding-heart liberal movement of its time), and its emphasis on creating a better society (the "City of God"); not just in its members fanaticism or its martyrdom.

There's really way more too it than "Christians bad, pagans good", which is just as stupid a position as "pagans bad, christians good". Either of these are just a product of projecting modern issues (and usually personal issues) to history rather than looking at what actually happened.

RPGPundit

but paganism didn't just fail, it was driven out.

any thoughts of bias aside, i think BF still has a convincing argument.  

things change, and christianity was around for the change at the right time, with the right drives.  but it shouldn't be looked on as the "natural evolution" of religion, just that it managed to combine religion and philosophy into one package.

Quote from: beeberbut paganism didn't just fail, it was driven out.

any thoughts of bias aside, i think BF still has a convincing argument.  

things change, and christianity was around for the change at the right time, with the right drives.  but it shouldn't be looked on as the "natural evolution" of religion, just that it managed to combine religion and philosophy into one package.

No one is looking at it as the "natural evolution"; that's not the issue; the issue is that the success of christianity wasn't something imposed in a world that didn't feel any need to change anything, it was a product of a situation that made such a change viable because of the instability of the current religious situation.

Christianity wasn't the one that was "doomed" to win, but something was bound to change at that time.

RPGPundit

it was better organized, that seems to be the major point to me, anyway

bowing out--religion gives me a headache :confused:

It might be worth noting that even biologists don't think of evolution in terms of "progress". Given that, think about what "evolution" might mean in terms of adaptation to a given environment.

I.e., I find myself agreeing with Pundit to a fair degree.

Quoteertain (initially insignificant) segments of society adopted Christianity, probably out of a feeling of general disenfranchisement on account of the poor social mobility in the ancient world. It's also probable that the promise of a future in which everything would be made right appealed to a lot of the "nobodies" out there on the fringes. Such people were powerless individually, but there were lots of them, and there was always the fear that they would band together and cause trouble (remember Spartacus?).

Even this suggests that there was something in Roman society at the time that made it ripe for Christian inroads.

Apologies for the sketchy post; I'm pressed at work.

I'll freely admit to being no fan of Christianity in general. I'll further admit to a certain amount of devil's advocacy. And while nothing I've said on the matter is patently untrue, it's also fair to say it's not the whole story. But that's a danger of analyzing history on webfora, isn't it?

Anyway, the early Christians were not all just a bunch of losers and maniacs, although that was the initial perception of them among educated Romans. No doubt there were some of both, but there were also lots of them who just wanted to do their thing and be left alone. The younger Pliny encountered many examples of such while governing in Bithynia and was of the opinion that they were mostly harmless and even seems to have felt bad about having to torture them (which was legally required when interrogating slaves, since they were expected to lie). On the other hand, there were folks who did go around setting fire to temples and such, and those ended up giving the rest a bad name--much like Americans' view of Muslims today is determined largely by the actions of a few extremists.

Now, the shift from a religion of slaves and foreigners to one of the bureaucratic elite isn't as big a jump as it sounds. By the time of Constantine, a considerable portion of the imperial bureaucracy was in the hands of slaves and freedmen, many of whom were foreign-born and could be quite well educated. Having been appointed and enriched by the emperor, they were naturally loyal to the monarchy and ultimately (if not openly) more important to the running of the state than was the Senate, which was comprised entirely of an exclusive class of native aristocratic families.

In this sense, to say that Christianity was popular among the elites of Rome bears qualification. The patrician families would have held out the longest, since much of their claim to nobility was tied up with divine ancestry, etc., which would have been undermined entirely. Moreover, they monopolized the priesthoods of the state cult, such as the flamines and the Arval brothers, which were prestigious bureaucratic positions in their own right. The equestrian class were generally aspiring to the senatorial class, so they have no interest in subverting the power structure, either. Both groups had been largely converted by the 5th century, but early on Christianity had nothing to offer them. If anything, it threatened the power structure on which their status depended.

But subverting the old, rigid power structure of wealth and lineage was a good thing as far as those beneath them in rank were concerned. And being "beneath" someone in Roman society doesn't necessarily mean you're an illiterate shit-shoveler. Remember this is a society in which a freed slave can grow to be wealthier than the average equestrian yet still not have the rights of a citizen or be able to run for office. Actually, many of them were pillars of the local economy and might even be responsible for the municipal infrastructure, etc. So in a sense, they constitute an elite class from the perspective of other foreigners and slaves, of which there were an increasing number, and perhaps even some poor Romans. And yet they're still disenfranchised, in a legal sense. In short, if Christianity caught on among wealthy freedmen (or was retained from their days as slaves), then it could very quickly claim the devotion of a wealthy and influential class of people--many of whom came to own their own slaves, who would naturally adopt the practices of their masters.

The problem with saying Christianity had the support of the elites is that the people we usually think of as the elite classes of Rome (i.e. the senatorial and equestrian orders) seem to be the ones who most uniformly denigrated it. Of course, another problem is that they're responsible for nearly all of the literature, being the only ones with sufficient leisure time to indulge in the arts. It's given that pretty much all of Roman literature has an aristocratic bias (hence their often unflattering depiction of the emperors, under whose authority they routinely chafed). So we know that Tacitus and Pliny and their peers had little good to say about Christians, but prior to Constantine's time we don't have much in the way of pro-Christian literature.

In that sense, Christianity seems to have mostly filtered up from the lower classes and down from the imperial family. The conversion of the latter was probably the deciding factor for the aristocrats, even though it still took many of them a long time to convert (the Senate was the embodiment of ultra-conservatism, after all). But imperial favor was quite an incentive, as was the threat of losing their status to a new Christian elite.

Was the native religious tradition decadent or broken? No, not unless it was "broken" from the start. There's no sign of it breaking down prior to the advent of Christianity. And even then it had to be actively pushed out of power and destroyed with great effort and over a period of centuries. Of course, that's probably not what Constantine intended to happen (of course, I can't claim to understand Constantine's mind, which is probably a good thing). He never openly embraced Christianity himself, and he seems to have thought like a pagan, probably aiming for a sort of syncretism that would bolster a sense of unified "Roman" culture. That did eventually happen (with the syncretism more incidental than intentional), but it was a harder and bloodier road than if they had somehow managed to coexist.

The intolerance and repression came with later generations of Christian emperors who decided the only way to unify the empire was to enforce a single way of thinking by any means necessary. And it wasn't just the "pagans" that suffered; lots of early Christian sects were wiped out in that period, as well--some of which (like Arianism) had previously been considered the orthodoxy. Another question that relates to all of this is to what degree early Christianity resembled the unified religion Constantine tried to create--and further, to what degree Constantine's vision had anything to do with what orthodox Christianity eventually came to be. My guess would be that we're dealing with two, if not three, very different things. At the very least, the official state Christianity of the Roman empire is clearly a different animal from what Pliny's slaves were practicing at night in a garden in Bithynia.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityI don't think there was anything natural, i.e. politically obvious, about an aspiring Emperor hooking up with what were then still 10 percent of the populace, and a lowly 10 percent at that.

...

I think (= I'm persuaded by Veyne) that Constantine made a huge gamble based on a personal conviction. He actually did believe in the Christian god.

..

So, if one asks what drives massive historical change in this instance, one ends up saying: power (the various strengths of Christianity you've outlined) harnessed to contingency (the wacky fact that a Roman Emperor, of all people, should see the light; aided & abetted by the other fact, that Julian died after three years, not thirty).

Yeah, you might be on to something there. Although some aspects of Constantine's reasons might make rational sense, for the most part they most certainly don't. And either way, it was certainly a gamble, and tenuous at that. From a historical perspective this is confounding, since it makes it harder for us to trace the causes involved. But from a human perspective it's quite normal for people to act for reasons that seem "irrational" to the outside observer (i.e. the historian).

There may be more to this one observation than in a half-dozen of my long-ass posts.

Quote from: Black FlagWas the native religious tradition decadent or broken? No, not unless it was "broken" from the start.

Of course it wasn't. But it's certainly true that the Greco-Roman world had changed, perhaps in ways that subverted the foundations of the native religious tradition and provided fertile ground for new cults. Or which made a certain cult especially attractive to emperors. (E.g. the ability to use an empire-wide religious hierarchy for social control. Just a thought.)

Let's review who the early fathers of the Church (and a few early christian heretics) actually were, from the 1st century AD but prior to constantine:

-Marcion: a wealthy ship-merchant.
-Tertullian: son of an equestrian
-Dionysus of Alexandria: son of a wealthy plebiean family
-Clement of Alexandria: son of a wealthy plebiean family
-Justin Martyr: unkown, but he was a landowner of some wealth obviously
-Clement of Rome: freedman
-Anthony of the Desert: Son of a wealthy plebeian family

So we have a lot of rich plebs in there; these origins clearly give you some context into just which social groups were the big movers and shakers in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditBut first and foremost I'm an historian, and I have to say that your work here seems absolutely drenched in bias.

Bear in mind that the whole fields of archaeology and ancient history are drenched (or at least dipped) in bias because there are often a lot of missing details to be filled in.  In the September/October 2007 issue of Archaeology is an article about a pre-Constantine site of Christian worship in Meggido that seems to turn a lot of assumptions about Roman Christianity on their head.

"The find at Megiddo is a key piece of evidence in a radical rethinking of how Christianity evolved during its first three centuries, before it was backed by the might of empire.  Until recently, scholars had to rely on ancient texts that emphasize the vicious persecution of the church---think lions dining on martyrs in Rome's Colosseum.  A growing body of archaeological data, however, paints a more diverse and surprising picture in which Christians thrived alongside Jews and the Roman military.  These finds make this a 'definitive time in our field' since they appear to contradict the literary sources on which historians have long depended, says Eric Meyers, a biblical archaeologist at Duke University."

Maybe that interpretation is wrong, too (others suggest the site should be dated later), but it's always questionable to talk with absolute certainty about a period and situation for which the evidence is actually pretty sparse.  It's often not unlike judging life in the entire United States based on a half-dozen issues of the New Yorker.

The problem with historical academia is that it suffers from being "fashion conscious", like any other field.

There'll be fads where something new is discovered, and bearing in mind that professors are desperate to "publish or perish", to show some research that is so utterly revolutionary as to justify their tenure, so they'll blow some little tiny discovery out of proportion to "prove" that cleopatra was actually ugly, or that Augustus was actually dimwitted or wasn't dimwitted or whatever; and of course in the field of religious studies these things become especially acute; where the discovery of some little shard of text or some piece of pottery is given a significance that is utterly overblown just because its the newest thing.

So what you have to do to get some kind of a real idea is to look at the whole picture, and the weight of all the details, all the evidence, and try to interpret new evidence in the light of what fits with the rest of that evidence.  If you get thousands and thousands of images and references to cleopatra's beauty, and you get a couple of coins where she doesn't look particularly attractive, its probably just that the coins aren't very well made. You don't throw away all the previous scholarship just because they've found some new fucking pottery shard.

RPGPundit