The Undivided Past Read online

  Yet in chronicling the divisive and decisive conflict between paganism and Christianity, and its destructive impact on the Roman Empire in the West, Gibbon was well aware that he was describing two very different religious constituencies, and he also recognized that neither of them was anything like as united or homogeneous as his generalized accounts sometimes suggested to the inattentive reader. It bears repeating that paganism had no priesthood, no canonical texts or ethical codes, no single, all-encompassing belief system, and no concept of orthodoxy, heresy, or unbelief; nor did it embrace a Manichean view of humanity. Pagan practices in the Roman Empire took myriad forms and comprised varied modes of relating to the divine world, and such “mild” requirements and definitions meant that paganism’s diverse and geographically dispersed adherents could have possessed only a loose collective sense of themselves.26 Worshipping different gods in different places in different ways, pagan cults were generally tolerant of one another, and felt no imperative to convert those following an alternative set of practices or beliefs. Accordingly, it was not they but their Christian antagonists who in the fourth century CE first referred to them as “pagans” (or “gentiles”), as a disparaging way of imputing to non-Christians a collective identity that they themselves had no consciousness of possessing.27

  Between the death of Christ and the Edict of Milan, Christians, by contrast, came to feel a powerful sense of identity and community, which, as Gibbon recognized, was only reinforced by their escalating persecution at the hands of the imperial authorities.28 Yet as he also took pains to point out, as soon as it had triumphed to become the established faith of the Roman Empire, Christianity split and sundered into warring sects and disputatious factions, typically characterized by mutual accusations of heresy and by more hostility to one another than to their pagan opponents.29 In keeping with his fascination with theological disputes, Gibbon devoted a great deal of attention to explaining (and often ridiculing) doctrinal schisms among different Christian groups, on such matters as the nature of the Eucharist and of Christ himself, and he traced with great skill the splintering and subsequent anathematization by the church of various sects adhering to Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism.30 Between the loose affiliation of the pagan world and the factious disputations of the Christians, the epic drama of a pitched battle between two warring monolithic religious collectivities, with one “winner” and one “loser,” dissolved in Gibbon’s telling into a more varied, localized, ambiguous, and complex series of encounters, interactions, relationships, and outcomes.

  To be sure, there were significant episodes of conflict between pagans and Christians during the late third and early fourth centuries, and again during the late fourth end early fifth centuries. But the massive imbalance which existed between the empire’s pagan majority and the Christian minority made any sort of large-scale armed confrontation both unfeasible and unlikely. As late as 313 CE, when Christianity was declared an official religion, it seems probable that only 4 or 5 percent of the citizens of the empire actually espoused the faith.31 And so, despite the triumphalist tone of the early church historians (there are, incidentally, hardly any comparable pagan sources to provide a balanced perspective), the emperor Constantine’s decree can scarcely have transformed the whole of the Roman Empire overnight into a unified and monolithic Christian community according to some preordained divine purpose. Moreover, Constantine’s belated baptism may not have been wholehearted; he remained in some significant ways wedded to the traditional belief systems; when he created his new imperial capital at Constantinople, he adorned it with statues of pagan gods and deities; the Roman army and administration were still overwhelmingly pagan in their beliefs and practices; and in the aftermath of the promulgation of the Edict of Milan, most people prudently said that they were Christian, but many of them went on living and believing much as they had done before.32

  So it is hardly surprising that it is Gibbon’s more nuanced sense of the relations and divisions between faltering paganism and assertive Christianity that has found widespread support among scholars of this period, one indication of which is that since the 1970s they have preferred to describe it in religiously neutral terms as the epoch of “late antiquity.”33 Despite the triumphalism of early church historians, and even the gloomy pagan nostalgia of Gibbon, it has become clear that paganism and Christianity coexisted as the joint heirs and successors of Rome, in what has been described as a “patchwork of religious communities” representing a wide variety of arrangements and interactions, the scene bearing little resemblance to the empire-wide clashes of earlier accounts.34 To be sure, these localized encounters were sometimes confrontational, but whether the violence was rhetorical (polemical writings or speeches) or actual (riots and protests, persecution and martyrdom), it stopped short of religious war or outright armed conflict. Sometimes it was resolved by conversion from paganism to Christianity, a change that might be imposed and coercive, or persuasively negotiated, or the result of the converts’ free and voluntary choice. But the encounter might also take the form of peaceful coexistence, sometimes achieved by social and residential segregation, but sometimes also possible in more integrated circumstances, implying a genuine acceptance of religious diversity. Accordingly, relations among pagans and Christians in the world of late antiquity were much more fluid and interactive than any simplistic dichotomy between them would suggest.35

  Let us briefly consider three examples of this encounter, beginning with North Africa (especially the region corresponding to present-day Libya and Tunisia) during the early fourth century CE, the period immediately before the promulgation of the Edict of Milan. North Africa was a prosperous, prominent, and cosmopolitan region of the Roman Empire, where Christianity had gained an early hold, perhaps explaining why the new faith was espoused there with particular passion and conviction, and why the region produced many important writers, apologists, and clerics. These, in turn, wrote narratives of persecution and martyrdom, some of which were apparently based on court records, others on alleged eyewitness reports of martyrs’ imprisonment and death, and yet others on the writings of the martyrs themselves.36 These contemporary accounts vividly depict a classic Manichean confrontation between two competing and conflicting religions, in which the Christian martyrs were hounded and hunted and compelled to die for their faith. Yet it is far from clear that this is what always happened, for while these Christian narratives cast the local pagan magistrates in the role of religious persecutors, they also show that the authorities were often patient and forbearing, and in many cases were reluctant to send Christians to their deaths. In those cases where this was the final outcome, it would seem the magistrates had no choice, for it was the Christians themselves who, keen to suffer a passion worthy of Jesus himself, seemed determined to invite martyrdom by refusing to recant their faith.37

  As a second example, consider the city of Rome itself, during the later third and early fourth centuries, when Christians were experiencing their last period of persecution and their first phase of imperial favor. At the time, the imperial capital was declining in influence and prosperity, which meant that few new public buildings or monuments were being constructed. But the Christian residents began to create their own distinctive works of art, by introducing their own religious subject matter into conventional decorative schemes, initially in paintings in underground burial chambers, and subsequently on the carved marble sarcophagi used by the wealthier among them in accordance with general fashion. Yet in so doing they often adopted and adapted familiar pagan images, as when they intruded the Gospel likeness of the Good Shepherd into recognizably classical rural landscapes. Once the Edict of Milan was put into effect, Rome’s Christians became more confident and assertive, but even in the new churches they were now free to build, much of their artwork continued to merge the new Christian iconography with earlier classical models.38 Nor was this the only religious syncretion during the years immediately after 313 CE, for while every emperor except Julian “the
Apostate” was Christian, the Roman Senate remained strongly pagan, and a long and heated debate took place about the continued use of the Altar of Victory in Rome, at which senators traditionally performed official rites and sacrifices. The altar would not be removed until 382 CE at the behest of the emperor Gratian, and even at that relatively late date pagan art was still being commissioned for domestic decoration by families who could afford it and who had not converted.39

  On the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, the city of Antioch offers a third version of the varied encounters between pagans and Christians in late antiquity, this time toward the end of the fourth century CE, when it was among the most prosperous and influential urban centers of the Greek-speaking world.40 Antioch was also a Roman administrative and military headquarters, it commanded a large Syrian hinterland, and it contained a significant Jewish community. The city’s cultural traditions were strongly Greek, and fundamental to its civic life were the public observances of its long-established religious cults. But as related in the Acts of the Apostles, Christianity had come to Antioch early, through the ministries of Paul and Barnabas, and it flourished there peacefully alongside paganism, as well as other religious and ethnic groups. In the aftermath of the Edict of Milan, pagans and Christians were brought together on Antioch’s city council as representatives of the imperial government, and debates ensued about coexistence between pagan and Christian, Christian and Jew, religion and secularism. The ensuing tensions and compromises are vividly described in the writings of three very different men who happened to be in the city in the second half of the fourth century: the emperor Julian “the Apostate,” the pagan orator and teacher Libanius, and John Chrysostom, then the local bishop. Together, their testimonies chart the many varied and different levels of interaction between paganism and Christianity, and they also show that neither constituted a monolithic self-enclosed religious system.41

  Many ancient Christian writers, following Eusebius, described the period from the third to the fifth centuries CE as witnessing the inevitable progress of Christianity from its persecution to its total victory over paganism, and insisted that within such a master narrative, conflict, conversion, and coexistence all worked to Christian ends in a providential and preordained way.42 Yet as these three examples suggest, the encounters between paganism and Christianity were often more complex, nuanced, and open-ended, with adherents of both religions often living together, and on a more equal and tolerant footing than the triumphalist accounts recognized. In many large cities of late antiquity, it is clear that pagans and Christians got along well enough; in smaller towns, they formed their own separate enclaves; in the countryside, Christianity was generally slower to take hold. The result was not an open war between good and evil, saved and sinners, the light and the dark, but rather what has been described as “a high degree of un-enforced co-existence.”43 Pagans and Christians alike often seem to have been generally indifferent to the organized expression of their religion, with elements of paganism and Christianity coexisting in individuals’ lives, as the religiously inclined worked out their own faith in a sort of compromise with the norms and demands and conventions of the society to which they belonged. And despite their religious differences, Christians and pagans (and Jews) were held together by the bonds of a common culture, which derived from what were, after all, their shared experiences of life in the Roman Empire.44

  Recent writing on the world of late antiquity has emphasized the diversity of both Roman and Christian traditions, rather than the deep and divisive differences between them. From this perspective, of endlessly shifting frontiers and constantly blurred boundaries, where generalizations about religious identities and confessional antagonisms distort more than they reveal, it is just too simplistic to suggest that two separate, competing religious collectivities did battle to the death, as a result of which pagan Rome “fell” while Christian Europe “rose.” The grand narrative of “the Christianization of the Roman world,” which a cursory reading of The Decline and Fall seems to confirm, has been superseded by a pluralistic picture, rejecting a single final, definitive outcome—a complexity with which Gibbon himself became in some ways more comfortable as his own great work progressed, developed, and matured.45 After all, the “Fathers of the Church” had been educated in the rhetoric and philosophy of the Roman Empire. Many aspects of their ostensibly triumphant new faith were derived from or were adaptations of earlier religious forms and festivals, which proved to be remarkably tenacious and persistent.46 Far from having caused the “fall” of the Roman Empire by vanquishing paganism, it seems more appropriate to suggest that “Christianity was part of the Roman legacy to medieval Europe.” There may be a Manichean battle taking place between the forces of divine light and demonic darkness in the next world, but here on earth, in the endlessly varied places and cultures of late antiquity, there was no such clear-cut sheep-and-goats conflict between pagans and Christians.47

  CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

  As with the allegedly collective and apparently clashing identities of pagans and Christians, so too with those of Christianity and Islam, Gibbon is by turns a vivid, influential, flawed, and suggestive place to start. He began The Decline and Fall with the Roman Empire at its majestic height, during “the second century of the Christian era,” and in the first three volumes he traced and sought to explain its destruction in the West. Then, in an artful reprise that is almost a mirror image of what he had already written, he opened the fourth volume with the eastern empire of Byzantium (now Christianized, and with its capital, Constantinople, portentously regarded as the “second Rome”) at its own equivalent apogee during the reign of the emperor Justinian in the early sixth century. But as Gibbon made plain in a famously disparaging chapter, Justinian’s successors were not up to the job of safeguarding their realms from the external danger that would be presented by the new and militant religion of Islam, which would turn out to be a less insidious but no less mortal threat to the eastern empire than Christianity had earlier been to the first Rome. Riven with internal religious disputes, and cut off from the Catholic Church of western Europe, the Byzantine Empire was no match for the predatory Arab invaders of the seventh century CE, who overran the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa; and still less could it later withstand the even more formidable forces of their Muslim successors, the Ottoman Turks, who besieged and eventually captured Constantinople itself in 1453. Thus was the Roman Empire finally vanquished, overwhelmed by the soldiers of an alien and all-conquering religion, as “Mahomet, with the sword in one hand, and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome.”48

  This fanciful description of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks unmistakably echoes Gibbon’s earlier remarks in The Decline and Fall, about the banner of the Cross being unfurled triumphantly on the ruins of the Roman Capitol. Once again, he depicts a deeply rooted and seemingly diametrical conflict between two religious collectivities as the determinative and implacably destructive agent of history. But whereas in the West, Christianity had (to Gibbon’s regret) undermined paganism from within, in the East, by contrast, militant Islam had (this time to Gibbon’s delight) vanquished Christianity from without. Incorrigibly hostile to the Byzantine Empire, as well as to its emperors, he dismissed its entire history as “a tedious tale of weakness and misery.”49 Islam, by contrast, Gibbon viewed more sympathetically, as a tolerant, unmystical, undogmatic religion, which was preferable to Christianity. Although it revered its sages, who were learned in sacred writings, Islam had stopped short of developing a rich, privileged, and powerful priesthood; this meant that, in contrast to the tortuous elaborations and schismatic tendencies of Christian thought, it retained a primordial doctrinal simplicity, which did not compete with and deter human aspirations. Nor did Islam weaken the sinews of the state by preaching disengagement and otherworldliness; instead, it actively encouraged such civil and civic values as hospitality, honor, and justice. In short, and like many of his contem
poraries who were influenced by Enlightenment thinking, Gibbon found in Islam a less clerically and theologically oppressive religion much preferable to Christianity (and especially to Roman Catholicism).50

  In retrospect, it is clear that Gibbon’s views of Byzantium were excessively and exaggeratedly hostile, for no empire could have lasted for more than a millennium being as corrupt, degenerate, and sclerotic, as infirm of purpose, or as wholly devoid of redeeming characteristics as the one he described in the second half of The Decline and Fall.51 Moreover, the fact that this Christian imperium had lasted for so long after the demise of the Western Empire casts serious doubt on the notion that the rival religion of Islam was a direct cause of its demise (can an empire be plausibly described as “declining” for over a thousand years?). By the same token, much that Gibbon wrote in praise of Islam was just plain wrong: it did in practice possess a sort of professional priesthood, its theology was neither static nor monolithic but evolving and disputed, and there was fierce internal strife and schism. To a greater extent than Gibbon was prepared to recognize (and it was an error of perception that many since have also made and, regrettably, still do), Christianity and Islam were in many ways mirror images of each other: both were monotheistic, both had spread thanks to charismatic early leadership, expanding rapidly after the deaths of their founding figures, and both were inclined to internal schism.52 As a result, the interrelations between an ostensibly monolithic “Christianity” and a no less putatively homogeneous “Islam” were more complex and equivocal than Gibbon’s Manichean depiction of that sustained and belligerent encounter suggests.