Table Of ContentChristianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
by the same author
Constantine
(Constantin, le premier empereur chretien 1971)
Roman Social Relations
(Rapports entre les classes sociales dans
I 'empire romain 1980)
Paganism in the Roman Empire
(Le paganisme dans I Empire romain 1984)
Christianizing the Roman Empire
(La diffusione del cristianesimo
nell }impero romano 1989)
Christianisme et paganisme
du IVe au VILLe siecle
("Les Belles Lettres" 1998; French
edition of the present volume)
Christianity and Paganism
in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Copyright © 1997 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Rebecca Gibb and set in Centaur type by The Marathon Group, Inc., Durham,
North Carolina.
Printed in the United States of America.
MacMullen, Ramsay, 1928—
Christianity and paganism in the fourth to eighth centuries / Ramsay MacMullen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-07148-5 (cloth : alk paper)
ISBN 0-300-08077-8 (pbk : alk paper)
i. Church history—Primitive and early church, ca. 30—600. 2. Rome—
Religion—Relations—Christianity. 3. Paganism—Relations—Christianity.
4. Christianity and culture—History—Early church, ca. 30—600. 5. Evangelistic
work—History—Early church, ca. 30—600. 6. Christianity and other religions—
Roman—History. I. Title.
BRI7O.M33 1997
270.2—dc2i 97-7786
CIP
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Contents
1 Persecution,
describing the determination of the Christian leadership to extirpate all religious
alternatives, expressed in the silencing of pagan sources and, beyond that, in the
suppression of pagan acts and practices, with increasing harshness and machinery
of enforcement. 1
2 The Cost to the Persecuted,
describing the successive layers of paganism which came under threat of destruction,
what each had brought to religious life, and what was lost to the extent those layers
were destroyed. 32
3 Superstition,
describing how best to understand the transition of the classical religious thought-world
to the medieval and Byzantine, with newly dominant ideas henceforth controlling the
relations between paganism and Christianity. 74
4 Assimilation,
describing the reception by the church of pagan acts and practices along with pagan
converts, and how these helped to shape Christianity. 103
Contents vi
5 Summary 150
Notes 161
Bibliography 247
Index 277
i
Persecution
Looked at from a sufficient distance, if indeed any distance is sufficient for a
clear view, what seems to confront the observer of the religious scene in the
period of my chosen title is a transition from one Establishment to another.
That is the grand event. Thanks to our omniscience, however, we know the
ancient Establishment will not survive. In that knowledge we focus our atten-
tion on the winner (and it is an old saying that history doesn't like losers). We
write off the losing Establishment, we pay it no mind; we look closely only at
the rising Church, in which all significance seems to lie. We offer our findings
then in terms of the Council of Nicaea, Arianism, monasticism, barbarian
kings and their conversion, iconoclasm, perhaps contacts with Islam. The
flow of relatively little events sweeps us along, all, Christian. It is the religious
history of the Mediterranean world from the fourth to the eighth century.
But we could also follow out the engagement of the two religious systems as
an event in its own right, taking it to the end. We could try to define when and
what "end" might mean and what it looked like, while, on the way, trying also
to see what the two did to each other as their quite different strengths were ap-
plied and tested against each other. This would be quite a new way of assess-
ing what, after all, no one would deny is the most notable fact within religious
history of the fourth to eighth century: that you have one system in place at
the start, and another when you finish. What alone could prevent this assess-
Persecution * z
ment being made would be the view that really no testing took place, no chal-
lenge was protracted, beyond the fourth century; therefore there was and can
be no story to tell of the ancient world s religious life much past Constantine.
Whatever might have been said back in the eighteenth or nineteenth cen-
tury, by the twentieth it had become clear and agreed on all hands that noth-
ing counted after Constantine save the newly triumphant faith. From that
point on the "Roman" had become "the Christian Empire" Such was the
title chosen for the first volume of the Cambridge Medieval History (1911), taking
up its account exactly with this emperor and matched by the same title with
the same point of commencement in French by Andre Piganiol (1972). With
the new foundation of Constantinople as a Christian capital, the ancient
world was over and done with, the Middle Ages had begun; likewise the
Byzantine era had begun.
This, the consensus, was rarely called in question before the 1980$. Then
hesitant doubts and contrary hints found their way into print, discussion
grew animated, new details were added or the old presented in a way to reveal
the past more clearly. It is now possible to see that there might well be a story
to tell of a good deal of significance, involving the two systems as both alive
and interacting to a much later point in time than anyone would have said
until recently. A part of the interest in their interaction lies in their quite dif-
ferent structures. I return to the fact in my last chapter. For the moment, I
need speak only of their external appearance: how they looked as antagonists.
On the one hand was paganism, no more than a spongy mass of tolerance
and tradition, so it might seem, confronting a growing number of people de-
termined to do away with that mass utterly, so as to replace it with what was
enjoined upon them by the tremendous will of the one God—such were the
opposites making up the religious world of Late Antiquity.
Constantine s conversion in 312 had had almost immediate consequences:
legitimacy was bestowed on the church along with other great favors and priv-
ileges, while at the same time, under this ruler as under his sons, an increas-
ingly explicit disapproval was directed at the old religious organizations and
institutions. In the succeeding generation, Theodosius promulgated harsh
anti-pagan laws and ordered the destruction of the huge, the world-famous,
Sarapis temple in Alexandria. These are the events that stand out in the
Greek-speaking half of the empire. In the Latin half over the same period,
after Symmachus' ill-success in debate with Ambrose, Eugenius tested his
Persecution * J
cause; his failure, involving his pagan supporters, gave great publicity to the
ascendancy of the Christian faith in Italy. In Africa five years later on a single
day Counts Gaudentius and Jovius " over threw the temples of the false gods
and broke up the images."1 A synod at Carthage pressed successfully for still
more imperial intervention. Everywhere, "the irresistible power of the Roman
emperors was displayed in the important and dangerous change of the na-
tional religion ." So, Gibbon in his notorious twentieth chapter.2
Well and good. The triumph of the new religion appeared now manifest
and irreversible. The moment had come to accept the verdict of history as it
was realized, beyond all denial, in "the Christian empire."
But there remained quite contradictory practices and events to be noticed
from time to time post~3i2, post-4oo, indeed for many centuries to come,
showing the church s enemies not yet swept from the field, the national reli-
gion still stubbornly alive. They are to be noticed, yet not easily; for the truth
left little mark. We may fairly accuse the historical record of having failed us
not only in the familiar way, being simply insufficient, but through being also
distorted. How and why this may be so deserves a little attention before pro-
ceeding to the substance of the truth.
On the simple matter of the numbers of the two antagonists, we have no
estimates made by pagans of Christians, while estimates by apologists like
Tertullian or historians like Eusebius are manifestly absurd. We are used to
their exaggerations as an expression of the authors' zeal and their sense of the
distance traveled by their church since the first century. Similar misrepresen-
tations continued to appear later, for instance in the demurral "if there be
any," when emperors of the fifth or sixth century urged final suppression of
religious dissent.3 Yet the emperors certainly knew better.
Beyond numbers, the record of events, personalities, and motives should
most naturally be corrected by reports from pagans matching what is pro-
vided to us by Sulpicius Severus, Gregory of Tours, or Justinian; yet anyone
familiar with the sources post-4oo, anyone standing before the hundred
imposing volumes of the fifth to seventh centuries that are Christian while
holding in his hand only the one unimposing volume of Zosimus, can mea-
sure their disproportion. Very little of whatever there once was from non-
Christian authors has survived. The Christians, not only in their triumphant
exaggerations but in their sheer bulk, today, seriously misrepresent the true
proportions of religious history.
