In 394, a river in Slovenia bore witness to a clash of civilizations. On one side stood a rebel army bearing statutes of Jupiter and Hercules. On the other stood the forces of Emperor Theodosius, bearing the standard of Christ. Battle commenced. Theodosius smashed the would-be usurpers, aided by a miraculous wind that conveniently threw the missiles of his enemies back at them. Idols and idolaters destroyed, the pagan threat was no more. From that point forward, Empire and Church would be indissoluble, then and forever God’s kingdom on earth.
This is an epic story. But the thing that makes it epic—the struggle between the old pagan order, and the new Christian one—wasn’t the reason for the fight. Instead, as classicist James J. O’Donnell explains, the battle was a typical imperial coup, part of "the ordinary events and mischances of emperors, generals, and those who played their hands wrong in seeking to influence imperial succession." Faith—Christian or otherwise—had little to do with it.
This argument is counterintuitive. We expect faith—and a violent fight over it—to be the issue of late antiquity. This is as true for people hostile to Christianity as it is for devout believers. The former, echoing Gibbon, bemoan the end of paganism as the destruction of what made Rome strong. The latter see Christian triumph as vindication against the decadent polytheists, and retribution for the martyrs they made.
By putting late Roman sources in historical context, Pagans makes the case that neither view is entirely accurate. O’Donnell gleefully takes aim at the idea that Christianity triumphed only after a long confrontation with paganism. Instead, he argues, Rome’s traditional religion passed rather quietly into history, as a new faith replaced the old. This is a sure-footed and witty account, which should be read by anyone interested in late antiquity, the early Church, or religious history in general.
O’Donnell begins by noting that the terms "pagan" and "paganism" aren’t the most accurate descriptions of pre-Christian Romans or their religion. The words—which originally meant something like "farmer," but were used by Christian polemicists as a slur, closer to "hick" or "rube"—suggest uniformity and coherence, but this wasn’t the case.
Traditional religion didn’t have an organized, doctrinal belief system or moral code—one couldn’t "be a pagan" in the way one can "be a Christian." Rites were transactional—"Dear god, if you do this for me, I’ll sacrifice a really splendid heifer to you." They were daily and obligatory, not constant and transcendent. And worship of the gods was a fundamentally local affair, often linked to ancestral burial grounds. As such, "meaningful connection between worshippers in one place and those in another was rare."
That being said, travelers throughout the empire would look for similarities between their gods and those they encountered elsewhere. This phenomenon is most familiar with the Greek and Roman versions of the Olympian gods—Zeus and Jupiter, Hera and Juno, Ares and Mars. But O’Donnell notes that it also occurred with far more obscure deities, such as "Jupiter Dolichenus," or Jupiter of Doliche.
The people of Doliche, a town "a little west of the Euphrates" in modern Turkey, worshiped a god that bore some resemblance to Jupiter. Army officers stationed nearby, perhaps grateful to this local deity "for a victory or a cure or a promotion," gave him a Latinized name, and took the cult with them to future posts across the empire. This very human penchant for analogy lay at the heart of Rome’s religious pluralism.
Emperors played a major role in this pluralism through official patronage. Septimius Severus promoted Jupiter Dolichenus, while Augustus favored Apollo. Imperial support often enhanced a deity’s reputation in the minds of the people—after all, "[a] powerful emperor’s god was, by definition, a powerful god." Likewise, the throne gained divine mystique from close affiliation with a special deity. The pantheon of Roman gods was thus always wrapped up in politics. And the Pantheon in Rome, built by Hadrian as a temple to all gods, served as a physical embodiment of that fact.
Into this world came Constantine, son of a senior Roman general and co-emperor.
Born in 272 AD, he sought to take power by participating in one of the era’s many civil wars. Shortly before a key battle in 312, he dreamt that God told him to put the sign of Christ (the chi-rho) on the shields of his men. Constantine did so, won the fight, and soon after, the throne. Once emperor, he gave Christianity official patronage, and funded church construction and lavish clerical salaries.
O’Donnell rightly observes that there was nothing unusual about Constantine’s selection of God as his god—like Augustus and Apollo, an emperor simply gave patronage to a special deity. That Christian communities in Asia Minor opposed one of Constantine’s adversaries was all the more reason to do so. As O’Donnell says:
. . . Constantine made a very ordinary kind of political choice during the years when he was fighting off his rivals for the imperial throne, one that turned out, quite unexpectedly, indeed unexpectedly, to have long-lasting effects.
So, why did Christ live on, while Jupiter Dolichenus did not? Raw number of followers isn’t the whole answer. Christians were spread throughout the empire when Constantine adopted the faith, but "there were not communities of Christians everywhere, nor were the communities large." Organizational competence (which O’Donnell, in an oversight, doesn’t discuss at length) certainly played a role. Christians imitated the hierarchy of Roman civil offices in their ecclesiastical structure, creating a shadow bureaucracy that outlasted the empire and endures to this day.
The most important factor was that Christian tenets were contained in writing. O’Donnell notes that this made it easy to spread these tenets from one place to another, while maintaining basic theological consistency in each locale. Once Christianity received official imprimatur and financial backing, this "common trove of books and ideas animated a lively, extensive community unlike any the ancient world had ever known."
This community included a lot of new members. Many people, from all walks of life, converted out of genuine belief. This group included urban intellectuals, attracted by Christianity’s theological complexity and potential for a rich literary culture. Others were drawn by ambition and venality—the emperor’s faith was the one an ambitious Roman needed to profess. Taking communion allowed such strivers "to be seen in the right religious places to curry favor with other, more powerful people."
So, where were the pagans in all this? Like the new God, everywhere and nowhere. They continued to exist throughout the empire and practice their rituals well into the sixth century. Though there were occasional outbursts of religious violence, these were mostly one-sided—Christian persecution of pagan holdouts.
But O’Donnell argues that notions of a great struggle between Christianity and paganism are largely an invention of the early Church, to provide a villain for its creation story. Followers of traditional religion didn’t think of themselves as belonging to a coherent community, much less a community that could mount concerted opposition to a new faith.
Nonetheless, one of Constantine’s successors, Julian, who reigned from 361 to 363, did mount some opposition to Christianity. Raised as a Christian, Julian came to prefer the old gods as an adult. But he viewed traditional religion in an entirely Christian way—as a "holistic paganism" instead of the multifaceted, disparate, and localized thing it actually was. His revolutionary act was to provide funding to the old cults, and attempt to transform their rites into a more organized "faith"—in other words, make them more like Christianity.
Unsurprisingly, Julian’s efforts didn’t work out. O’Donnell observes that Julian’s failure was in part due to his untimely death, but also because of the apathetic nature of most traditional practitioners. The zeal simply wasn’t there—after all, how could someone be zealous about practices that were seen (and had always been seen) as quotidian, not sublime?
Though O’Donnell largely avoids commenting on our time, the image of the apathetic pagan has a certain resonance. Americans (to say nothing of Europeans) are increasingly unchurched. Though it is easy to imagine that Christianity will always be with us, Pagans offers the implicit caution that divine revelation can be as impermanent as the monuments men build in its name.