Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  Ah! life’s best hours are ever first to fly

  From hapless mortals; in their place succeed

  Disease and dolorous eld; till travail sore

  And death unpitying sweep them from the scene.143

  And Catullus sadly intoned:

  When the sun sets, it sets to rise again,

  But for us, when our brief day is over,

  There is one endless night that we must sleep.144

  Second, although the gods might serve to endow the world with beauty and enchantment, their doings and purposes were not actually concerned with us—with humans. True, a god or goddess might occasionally take a liking, or a loathing, to some particular mortal (especially if that mortal, like Achilles, or like Rome’s ancestor Aeneas, happened to be the offspring of some momentary tryst between the god or goddess and a mortal woman or man), or even to a nation. In the Iliad, the various gods intervene aggressively, as Zeus intermittently permits, for the Greeks or for the Trojans. For the most part, though, the gods were out for themselves, so to speak. They were mostly indifferent to the joys and sorrows of all the Marcuses, Gaiuses, and Juliuses of this world.

  How much if at all did these features detract from the ability of paganism to provide meaning to the matters of mortal life? As usual, no single or manifestly correct answer is forthcoming. Attitudes toward death vary. The Stoical emperor Marcus Aurelius found in the inexorability of death a sort of morose comfort against the vicissitudes of life. Why worry about misfortunes when you know that “within a very little time . . . you . . . will be dead; and soon not even your names will be left behind.”145

  Odysseus opts to reject the promise of immortality with the lovely nymph Calypso in favor of returning to his home and his wife, Penelope.146 And it can be argued—it sometimes is argued—that the inevitable fact of death is what gives human life its shape and meaning, and what makes possible courage and nobility of character.147 The warriors in the Iliad may come across as more interesting and admirable figures than the gods themselves. That is precisely because Achilles and Hector and their comrades, knowing that they must unavoidably go down to the House of Death, and soon, understand that their only hope of immortality lies in winning glory for themselves; and they accordingly exert themselves to demonstrate valor and resourcefulness. There is an unmistakable nobility in their exertions, and in their defiance in the face of death.

  And yet there also remains a tragic sense, and a kind of profound futility, in the Homeric assumption that the best a man can hope for is to kill gloriously and die gloriously, so that his name will be recalled in the lyrics chanted by bards when the man himself is no longer around to hear the songs. “Then what’s the good of glory, magnificent renown,” Sophocles has the aged Oedipus ask, “if in its flow it streams away to nothing?”148 Marcus Aurelius agreed: “Fame after life is no better than oblivion.”149 A hero may grimly make the best of mortality, but, given the chance, wouldn’t he eagerly exchange it for a life of endless contentment? And so in the midst of battle on the plains outside Troy, the gallant warrior Sarpedon confesses to his comrade Glaucus:

  Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray

  and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,

  I would never fight on the front lines again

  or command you to the field where men win fame.

  But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,

  thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive

  can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack!

  Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!150

  The tragic futility of this mortal condition leads Homer’s Apollo to remark on

  wretched mortals . . .

  like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire,

  feeding on earth’s gifts, than they waste away and die.151

  And Zeus, preeminent among the gods, echoes the sun god’s judgment:

  There is nothing alive more agonized than man

  of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.152

  When Odysseus, visiting the underworld, attempts to console the shade of Achilles with the observation that he seems to be a lord among the dead, the renowned warrior responds:

  No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!

  By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—

  some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—

  than rule down here over all the breathless dead.153

  Christianity offered an utterly different picture of humans’ lives and destinies. Like the pagan poets, Christian authors could comment wistfully on the brevity of life. “All flesh is like grass,” says an apostolic epistle, “and all its glory like the flower” that fades.154 “For every man dies in a little while,” remarks Augustine, “nor is that to be deemed a benefit which vanishes like a mist in a moment of time.”155 But men and women would not linger in the grave; rather, they would be resurrected and, if their lives had been faithful, would go on to enjoy eternal life with God. This was the good news of the gospel, which Christians eagerly proclaimed to the world.

  “O death, where is thy victory?” Paul exults. “O grave, where is thy sting?”156 Luc Ferry asserts that “the entire originality of the Christian message resides in ‘the good news’ of literal immortality—resurrection, in other words and not merely of souls but of individual human bodies.”157

  The historian Paul Veyne contends that its message of eternal life gave Christianity a huge spiritual advantage over paganism. Under Christianity, a person’s life “suddenly acquired an eternal significance within a cosmic plan, something that no philosophy or paganism could confer.”158 To Edward Gibbon, the idea of a life after this one was “an idle and extravagant opinion, which was rejected with contempt by every man of a liberal education and understanding.”159 The Enlightened historian nonetheless argued that its promise of immortality was a major selling point for Christianity.160 He could appreciate the point, perhaps, because he himself was not immune to a sort of poetic despondency when contemplating the brevity of life. “The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.”161 The illustrious historian’s memoirs conclude with the observation that “I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.”162

  Veyne’s and Gibbon’s assessment finds support, it seems, in the fact that even some pagans came to embrace the notion of an afterlife. We have noted Ammianus’s report that on his deathbed the pagan emperor Julian was solemnly affirming the immortality of the soul.163 In response to such later pagan thinking, Augustine, after savaging the more popular idea that the gods conferred benefits in this life, went on to devote four books in his magnum opus to a critique of later pagan philosophies that taught that the gods could provide blessings after death.164

  Veyne adds that Christianity had another important advantage over paganism because it taught that God cared about—indeed, was essentially devoted to—human beings. “The pagan gods live above all for themselves,” Veyne observes. “In contrast, Christ, the Man-God, sacrificed himself for his men.”165 Thus, “Christianity owed its success as a sect to a collective invention of genius . . . namely, the infinite mercy of a God passionate about the fate of the human race, indeed about the fate of each and every individual soul, including mine and yours, and not just those of the kingdoms, empires and the human race in general.”166

  Although declaring himself “an unbeliever,”167 Veyne asserts that in consequence of these doctrines, Christianity’s “spiritual superiority over paganism was blindingly clear.”168 “Thanks to the historical-metaphysical epic of Creation and Redemption, . . . one now knew where one came from and for what one was destined.”169

  This ostensible spiritual superiority, of course, turned on the assumption that the Christians’ “good news”—about the resurrection, about eternal life
, about an infinitely loving God—was actually true. Which brings us back to the question of believability. For pagans, the idea that a god would become human (not just for purposes of a momentary coupling with a comely maid, but for the full, tedious, painful, humiliating duration of a life), would be born of a woman, would allow himself to be seized and subjected to a horrendous and humiliating death, this in order to save a pathetic race of mortals—all this was contemptible nonsense. Lactantius summarized the pagan objection:

  They say . . . that it was unworthy of God to be willing to become man, and to burthen Himself with the infirmity of flesh; to become subject of His own accord to sufferings, to pain, and death. . . . Why, then (they say), did He . . . render Himself so humble and weak, that it was possible for Him both to be despised by men and to be visited with punishment? why did He suffer violence from those who are weak and mortal? why did He not repel by strength, or avoid by His divine knowledge, the hands of men? why did He not at least in His very death reveal His majesty? but He was led as one without strength to trial, was condemned as one who was guilty, was put to death as one who was mortal.170

  And so the Christian conception was unworthy of a deity, and the Christian promises of meaning and sublimity were hollow. Worse than hollow, in fact: because in offering the false promise of eternal bliss, Christianity in fact deprived this world—the world we actually inhabit, and the only world we can count on—of the sublimity (transitory and tinged with tragedy as it might be) that paganism provided. With Christianity’s suppression of the gods, a beauty passed out of the world, a beauty all the more poignant because so fleeting, to be replaced by a grim, censorious emptiness.

  “Why should I desire to live in a world void of gods?” the emperor Marcus Aurelius had asked.171 With the triumph of Christianity, the question ceased to be hypothetical.

  Existential Orientations

  The competing strengths and weaknesses of paganism and Christianity are thus reflective of two different orientations to life in the world—orientations that were discernible then and are discernible now. (These are of course ideal types, so to speak, rarely encountered in their purity; and they are not the only possible orientations; we will consider a third major possibility in a later chapter.) We, all of us, find ourselves in the world for a brief interval. How should we regard this life, and this world? What stance or attitude should we take?

  According to one orientation, life in the world is sufficient unto itself—as it needs to be, because it is our only life in the only world that we have any reason to believe in. Life is—or at least can be—a beautiful and sometimes sublime thing, but its beauty and sublimity are finite and immanent to this world. The sacred exists, but it exists here—in the here and now. There is not, and there need not be, anything else. Not for us mortals, at least.

  The other orientation can acknowledge the beauty and sublimity of life in the world. It can go so far, as in much Christian thought, as to insist that although not actually divine, the world has a sacramental quality. In this view, however, the world is not sufficient unto itself. Rather, its blessed qualities of beauty and sublimity are reflective of a more transcendent Reality, and they point beyond themselves to a beatified existence that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man.”172 Cut off from that transcendence, life in the world would become empty, pointless, devoid of meaning. And humans, who, unlike animals, are aware of their looming dissolution into nothingness, would be (in the words of Homer’s Zeus) the most “agonized . . . of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.”173

  Perhaps no Christian thinker expressed this perspective more poignantly than Augustine. As discussed in chapter 5, his classic Confessions was in essence a narrative of how he arrived at the understanding famously expressed in the first pages—that “thou hast made us for thyself, and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.”174 The goods of this world may entice and entertain, but their appeal is ephemeral. Augustine himself was acutely aware of the pleasures of sexual intimacy, and loath to forgo them; hence his famous conflicted plea, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet” (8.17, p. 139).175 Ultimately, though, worldly goods cannot satisfy us. They are “glowing fantasies”—like food consumed in dreams, by which “the sleepers are not nourished” (3.10, p. 37). They “do not abide. They flee away” (4.15, p. 55). Taken by itself, this life is actually a “life-in-death” or a “death-in-life” (1.6, p. 4).

  So the world is good, yes, but it is not sufficient unto itself. “For wherever the human soul turns itself, other than to you,” Augustine says, addressing God, “it is fixed in sorrows, even if it is fixed upon beautiful things external to you and to itself, which would nevertheless be nothing if they did not have their being from you” (4.15, p. 61).

  Whether Christianity or paganism was more spiritually efficacious, or whether the immanent or transcendent orientation to life in the world was more true and satisfying, may ultimately boil down to the question of whether Augustine was right on this crucial point.

  When paganism and Christianity are understood in terms of these existential orientations, it becomes apparent why neither form of religiosity could ultimately and decisively vanquish the other. Probably there has not been a time in which each orientation has not claimed its constituency—whatever labels might be applied. Indeed, it seems likely that most human beings have, as individuals, felt the power and pull of—and have at times inclined toward—each orientation.

  So the beauties of the world and gratifications of life seem precious, and sufficient. “A book of verses, a jug of wine . . . , and thou beside me . . . , is paradise enough.”176 What more is needed? What more could anyone want? And then . . . a dullness sets in. Life is fleeting, and empty. Food is flat; music is mere sound; physical beauty does not arouse. “The long, looming days lay up a thousand things closer to pain than pleasure,” the Sophoclean chorus chants mournfully, “and the pleasures disappear, you look and know not where.”177 Or even if pleasures retain their pungency, we know that they will soon cease. Can this really be all there is? And if so, what is the point?

  The sensually satiated soul seeks more spiritual delights—and perhaps, turning to faith, finds them. For a while, at least. And yet . . . doubt persists. Is this faith, this hope of “eternal life,” mere delusion, mere wishful thinking? Is the spiritual seeker exchanging the only real satisfactions available to mortals, limited and transitory though such satisfactions are, for an illusion?178

  “You Christians deny yourselves all the satisfying pleasures,” Keith Hopkins’s scornful pagan complains, “and for what? For a ‘dream of posthumous immortality.’ For a vain hope—because ‘No one knows the secret of the universe.’ ”179 In a similar vein, while noting that “our devout predecessors, vainly aspiring to imitate the perfection of the angels, . . . disdained, or they affected to disdain, every earthly and corporeal delight,” Gibbon recommended a different course: “In our present state of existence, the body is so inseparably connected with the soul, that it seems to be our interest to taste, with innocence and moderation, the enjoyments of which that faithful companion is susceptible.”180

  In the face of this commonsensical view, the Christian movement has been a centuries-long struggle to assure its devotees of the superiority of the goods of the spirit over the more tangible but transitory pleasures of the world. In his Confessions, Augustine recounted that struggle in his own soul; in City of God he projected it onto the sweep of history. The struggle is one that must be perpetual, one that is always a struggle against natural inclinations. Augustine recognized this fact as well. Consequently, there are many who identify with the earthly city but will ultimately end up in the heavenly kingdom. And vice versa.181 The saint was uncertain of the ultimate outcome even in himself.182

  And so emperors like Domitian and Decius and Diocletian could execute Christians, but they could not thereby deprive the believers of their heavenly hope. Conversely, emperors like Theodosius and, later,
Justinian could use the force and violence of law to suppress the incidents of paganism. They could close temples and prohibit animal sacrifice. But if paganism is not exhausted by these outward manifestations but rather is understood in terms of the immanent orientation that sacralizes life in this world, denying or at least remaining practically noncommittal toward any other, then it seems that neither Christian emperors nor bishops could or did abolish the substantial essence of paganism. Not even within themselves (as their own extravagantly worldly conduct sometimes exhibited).

  If anything could achieve that abolition, it would not be Christianity, but rather science and secularism: but we will defer that prospect to a later chapter.

  1. Peter Brown argues that the “struggle” version was articulated by late fourth- and early fifth-century Christian authors. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 128–29.

  2. Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 89.

  3. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 36.

  4. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:497.

  5. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:497–99.

  6. E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 132.

  7. See below, 178–79.

  8. See below, 179–82.

  9. See below, 183–88.

  10. See Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 62–73 (presenting evidence of the vitality of paganism); Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 13 (“The real vitality of paganism is instead recognized; and to explain its eventual fate what must also be recognized is an opposing force, an urgent one, determined on its extinction”).