11. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 106.
12. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 14.
13. See, e.g., Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
14. Compare, e.g., Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World, ed. Peter L. Berger (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 1–19; with Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
15. Cf. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 149.
16. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:447.
17. Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. and ed. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980), 47.
18. Athanasius, Life of Antony, 38, 48, 50.
19. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 207.
20. Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4–5 (footnote omitted).
21. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:447.
22. See Michael Grant, The Climax of Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 5–6.
23. Lactantius, On the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, Addressed to Donatus, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), chap. 15, p. 21.
24. Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 22, p. 31.
25. Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 33, p. 44.
And now, when Galerius was in the eighteenth year of his reign, God struck him with an incurable plague. A malignant ulcer formed itself low down in his secret part, and spread by degrees.
[H]is bowels came out, and his whole seat putrefied. . . . The humours having been repelled, the distemper attacked his intestines, and worms were generated in his body. The stench was so foul as to pervade not only the palace, but even the whole city; and no wonder, for by that time the passages from his bladder and bowels, having been devoured by worms, became indiscriminate, and his body, with intolerable anguish, was dissolved into one mass of corruption.
On the painful death of Daia, see chap. 49, pp. 62–63.
26. Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 52, p. 65.
27. Robert Austin Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 21.
28. See W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 484–88, 503–5.
29. Adrian Murdoch, The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2003), 5.
30. Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Pantheon, [1852] 1949), 292.
31. For an overview of the debate and an argument that Constantine was genuinely Christian, see Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010), 79–96. See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin, 2009), 191 (“There is no doubt that [Constantine] came to a deeply personal if rather capricious involvement in the Christian faith”). Cf. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–394, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 121 (“All in all, the Christianization of the ancient world constituted a revolution set in motion by a single individual, Constantine, with motives that were exclusively religious”).
32. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 8. See 11 (“He did not force anyone to convert; he appointed pagans to the very highest of state offices; he never legislated against the pagan cults . . . and he allowed the Roman Senate to continue to fund the official priests and public cults of the Roman state; these continued as before and did so until almost the end of the century”) (footnotes omitted).
33. See Hugo Rahner, Church and State in Early Christianity, trans. Leo Donald Davis, SJ (San Francisco: Ignatius, [1961] 1992), 46–49.
34. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:789.
35. Quoted in H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 4.
36. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:827.
37. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 48.
38. Quoted in Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 49.
39. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:825.
40. See Rahner, Church and State, 49–60.
41. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 86–89.
42. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:827.
43. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:827n172.
44. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 89; Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33.
45. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 102.
46. Quoted in G. W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 16.
47. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:864.
48. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:873.
49. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:878.
50. Cf. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:892 (asserting that “it was the object of the insidious policy of Julian, to deprive the Christians of all the temporal honours and advantages which rendered them respectable in the eyes of the world”).
51. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 80–81.
52. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:901n120.
53. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:895.
54. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 83–85.
55. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 84.
56. Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 139.
57. See Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire (A.D. 354–378), ed. and trans. Walter Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1986).
58. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 113–14.
59. G. W. Bowersock argues that Julian “never contemplated any other solution to the religious problem than total elimination. His view of the Christians was totally intolerant from the start.” Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 85.
60. See Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 206–18.
61. See generally Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 12–20, 33–45. On Julian’s slovenliness, see Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:854–55.
62. Consider Ammianus’s description of Julian on the eve of his accession to power. “Preparing to battle Constantius for supreme authority, Julian busied himself with the inspection of the entrails of sacrifices and with observation of the flight of birds. He was eager to discover how things would end, but the answers were ambiguous and obscure and left him in doubt about the future. At last the Gallic rhetorician Aprunculus, a master of this branch of divination, . . . announced that he had discovered what was to come by the inspection of a liver, which he had found covered with a double layer of skin. Julian was afraid that this might be an invention designed to flatter his hopes and was in consequence depressed, but he then experienced himself a much more convincing omen, which clearly symbolized the death of Constantius. At the very moment when the latter died in Cilicia [a fact not yet known to Julian] the soldier whose right hand was supporting Julian as he was mounting his horse slipped and fell to the ground, whereupon Julian was heard by a number of people to exclaim that the man who had raised him to high station [i.e., Constantius] had fallen.” Ammianus, The Later Roman Empire, 234.
63. See Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971), 93; Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 99 (asserting that but for the early death of Julian, “Christianity might have constituted no more than a historical parenthesis, opened by Constantine in 312, which would now close forever”); Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 139. Gibbon was more skeptical. See Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:879, 908.
64. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 87–88. Julian was not the first emperor to try to regularize and reform th
e pagan priesthood. See Lactantius, On the Manner, chap. 37 (describing reform efforts by Maximin Daia).
65. On Julian’s identification with Alexander, see Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 15, 78, 101. On his defiance of the omens, see Bowersock, 107–11. For a different interpretation, see Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 157–59.
66. See Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 114–15; Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 179–80; Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:937–38.
67. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:940–43.
68. Murdoch, The Last Pagan, 190.
69. Ammianus, The Later Roman Empire, 294–95.
70. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 118.
71. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 116; Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:980.
72. See Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 409.
73. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 182, 207.
74. For a careful review of the evidence on these questions, see Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans, 33–92.
75. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 408; Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76.
76. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 401, 409–11; Brown, Power and Persuasion, 89–103, 119.
77. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 207.
78. E.g., Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 89, 102, 207–9.
79. See, e.g., Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 88: “Constantine . . . accepted pagan honours from the citizens of Athens. He ransacked the Aegean for pagan classical statuary to adorn Constantinople. He treated a pagan philosopher as a colleague. He paid the traveling expenses of a pagan priest who visited the pagan monuments of Egypt.”
80. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:88–89. Gibbon added: “Theodosius distinguished his liberal regard for virtue and genius by the consular dignity which he bestowed on [the pagan senator] Symmachus; and by the personal friendship which he expressed to [the pagan orator] Libanius; and the two eloquent apologists of Paganism were never required either to change or to dissemble their religious opinions. The Pagans were indulged in the most licentious freedom of speech and writing; the historical and philosophical remains of Eunapius, Zosimus, and the fanatic teachers of the school of Plato, betray the most furious animosity, and contain the sharpest invectives, against the sentiments and conduct of their victorious adversaries. If these audacious libels were publicly known, we must applaud the good sense of the Christian princes, who viewed, with a smile of contempt, the last struggles of superstition and despair” (88–89).
81. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 102.
82. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006).
83. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 183 (“Part of this had to do with the idea that the state needed to pay for the public rituals if those rituals were to represent true expressions of collective devotion”).
84. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:75 (emphasis added).
85. Symmachus, Relation 3, para. 13, reproduced at https://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/symrel3f.html (introduction by J. Vanderspoel).
86. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 3, reproduced at https://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/ambrepf.html (introduction by J. Vanderspoel).
87. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 137.
88. See Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 409; Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:78–87.
89. See Brown, Power and Persuasion, 120–21.
90. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, rev. ed. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 77.
91. Ambrose’s efforts in this respect are described in Garry Wills, Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, 78 (observing “the practical impact of church building”).
92. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:73.
93. Symmachus, Relation 3, para. 14.
94. Symmachus, Relation 3, para. 8.
95. Ambrose, Epistle 18, para. 31, reproduced at https://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/ambrepf.html (introduction by J. Vanderspoel).
96. Ambrose, Epistle 18, para. 31.
97. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 9. Pressing the point, or perhaps overarguing it, the bishop went on to depict how “the smoke and ashes from the altar, the sparks from the sacrilege, the smoke from the burning might choke the breath and throats of the faithful” (para. 9).
98. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 31.
99. Ambrose, Epistle 17, para. 13.
100. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, and above, 174.
101. See Franz Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Chicago: Open Court, 1911), 196–212. See also Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 63 (“The spread of the oriental cults in western Europe . . . is a notorious feature of the first and second centuries. There cults spread because they gave the immigrant, and later the local adherent, a sense of belonging, a sense of loyalty that he lacked in the civic functions of his town”).
102. Cumont, Oriental Religions, 203, 204.
103. Norman F. Cantor, Antiquity: From the Birth of Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 39. See also Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2004), 93 (asserting that “by the first century of the Common Era, . . . the classical paganism of Greece and Rome was already in decline”).
104. Antonia Tripolitis, Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 2. As noted, E. R. Dodds described the paganism of the fourth century as “a sort of living corpse.” Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 132.
105. See, e.g., MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire. See also Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), 115 (“Far into the second and third centuries AD, this piety of the majority survived the wit of poets and philosophers”), 123 (“By the early Christian period, the forms of religious life had grown, but the idea of divine encounters [with pagan deities] had not faded: it had grown with them”), 669 (arguing that “the pagan cults were not quick to die away”).
106. See generally MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism (generally depicting paganism as tolerant and attractive and Christianity as oppressive); Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 19, 22 (asserting Christianity’s clear superiority over paganism) (see below, 188).
107. Cantor, Antiquity, 39.
108. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 68.
109. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 66.
110. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:493. For elaboration of the point, see Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 112–19.
111. See, e.g., 1 Cor. 1:10–17; James 2:1–9.
112. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:559.
113. See Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 133: “The religious tolerance which was the normal Greek and Roman practice had resulted in a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe.”
114. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 43–44. Veyne adds, however, that “among the simple masses, paganism was generally accepted and was therefore solidly rooted; it could have endured indefinitely” (44).
115. See above, chap. 4.
116. See R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 130–37, 147–51.
117. These interpretations, attributed to Varro, are discussed and criticized in Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6.8, p. 255; 7.19, p. 290.
118. This was Varro’s interpretation, as described by Augustine, City of God 7.28, p. 303 (emphasis added).
119. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:869.<
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120. See above, 94.
121. Augustine, City of God 7.28–30, pp. 303–6. See also generally Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, trans. B. P. Pratten (Pickerington, OH: Beloved, 2016).
122. For a discussion of the similarities in pagan and Christian allegorical interpretation, see Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 130–31.
123. Augustine, City of God 4.18, pp. 670–71.
124. Augustine, City of God 15.26, p. 686.
125. Augustine, City of God 15.1–3, pp. 634–37.
126. Augustine, City of God 15.2, p. 637.
127. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 5.24–25, pp. 81–82; 6.8, p. 89.
128. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. J. F. Shaw (New York: Dover, 2009).
129. For an insightful study of such debates, see generally Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
130. Gibbon, not surprisingly, had no more patience for this approach when employed by Christians than when it was used by pagans. He commented scornfully that “acknowledging that the literal sense is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as reason, they deem themselves secure and invulnerable behind the ample veil of allegory.” Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:457.
131. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 137.
132. Augustine, City of God, bks. 6–7.
133. Augustine, City of God 8.5–9, pp. 318–25.
134. Augustine, Confessions 7.13, p. 114.
135. Augustine, City of God, bks. 8–10.
136. Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 49–50.
137. Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 6.
138. Fox, Pagans and Christians, 83.
139. See above, 71.
140. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 78.
141. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 4.192.
142. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1998), 13.776, p. 363; 20.78–79, p. 505.
143. Virgil, Georgic III, in The Georgics of Virgil, trans. James Rhoades, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1891), 66.
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