The Undivided Past (3 page)

Yet, as so often in the history of collective identities (and of the antagonisms and animosity that they express and engender), open war has never been the whole picture in the history of religion, for alongside (and even during) periods of wrenching disagreements and searing spiritual conflicts, there have also been times of toleration and episodes of peaceful interaction, even accommodation—certainly among individuals, but among groups, too. Indeed, the virtue of such amity across religious lines is implied, even in the passage from Matthew’s Gospel already mentioned, for while it proposes an unbridgeable gulf between the saved and the damned, it also plainly distinguishes those destined for paradise from those doomed to perdition by the
former’s kindness to “strangers”: their willingness to take them in, and to befriend, feed, and clothe them.
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It may be no surprise that the identity of such outsiders is unspecified, in terms (as we would
now say) of their age, gender, race, or sexual orientation—but religion isn’t mentioned either. It is because of their
humanity
, not their faith, that “strangers” should be cared for. Whatever his churches would later do in his name, Christ’s injunction to love one’s enemies and to turn the other cheek suggests that even religious difference was no grounds for mistreating one’s fellow human beings. Unfortunately, and too often, it has been the imperative to make
war in his name that has seemed easier to heed literally. But not always, for though less well attested than the violence resulting from religious difference, toleration and cooperation have a history all their own.
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This point has been well made by the historian
John Wolffe, when he observes that in addition to deeply rooted, widely held, and frequently publicized religious animosities, based on antagonistic collective identities, “there is another equally important side to the coin.” To be sure, he goes on, “religious conflict has always been what catches the headlines, both in history books and in newspapers,” but it has also been the case that

The conversations and encounters that have often taken place (and that still do) in various forms across the supposedly impregnable boundaries of religious identity provide the essential counterpoint to the dangerously oversimplified master narrative of inevitable and perpetual faith-based animosity—a story that has been revisited and reinforced in certain quarters in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent
Iraq War (which will be taken up in the final chapter). But this latest attempt to depict the world in terms of Manichean religious conflict merely remind us
that, as with all master narratives, the reality of religious encounters and identities is never so tidy or simple.

For many in the West, the prototypical case of two religious communities locked in inexorable conflict, from which it was thought only one could emerge victorious, is still the one that preoccupied the first half millennium of the Common Era, when the pagan
Roman Empire was undermined and overwhelmed by the rise of what has been termed “Christian Europe.”
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Within three hundred years of the crucifixion of
Jesus, a small and localized religious sect in the eastern Mediterranean, having survived relentless and murderous
imperial persecution, came to be recognized as an official religion by the emperor
Constantine in 313 CE under the so-called
Edict of Milan, and went on to vanquish paganism across the whole of Rome’s realms. This extraordinary story, of one religious collectivity defeating and conquering another, was recounted in heroic terms by the earliest chroniclers of the Christian church, such as
Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, and was only much later to receive an exhaustive (and much more skeptical) treatment by
Edward Gibbon in his
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
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Gibbon would describe and explain Rome’s collapse as “the triumph of
barbarism and religion.” What barbarism meant to Gibbon will be treated in a later chapter. For now, suffice it to say that by religion, Gibbon meant
Christianity, a vigorously assertive new belief system that would prove fatal not only to paganism but to the Roman Empire as well.
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Gibbon was much influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of his time, which helps explain why
The Decline and Fall
is shot through with so many contrasts, polarities, dichotomies, and antitheses, of which that between paganism and Christianity is one of the two most prominent (along with that of barbarism and civilization). Having been attracted at different times to
Protestantism and to
Catholicism, Gibbon in his mature attitude to the Christian religion was by turns cool, ironic, skeptical, and detached. He disliked priests, monks, and
ecclesiastical hierarchy;
he was suspicious of saints and scornful of miracles; he deplored religious asceticism and the “superstition” on which it was based; and he thought the historic role of the church had been more destructive than creative. But Gibbon was also an ardent follower of theological disputes, and he recognized that religion was a major force in history, albeit one that needed to be understood in human terms rather than just accepted uncritically and credulously as the preordained working out of the divine will and providential purpose.
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As he once observed, “For the man who can raise himself above the prejudices of party and sect, the history of religions is the most interesting part of the history of the human spirit.” More than half a century after Gibbon’s death, Cardinal
Newman grudgingly admitted that he was the most incisive historian of religion that Britain had ever produced, and
Gladstone (who was no less alert to religion’s importance in human motivation and identity) regarded Gibbon as one of the three greatest historians of all time.
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According to
The Decline and Fall
, paganism was one of the two principal reasons why the Roman Empire managed to expand and endure long enough to reach such heady heights of achievement by the time of the death of the emperor
Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE. The Roman
belief system was capaciously and inclusively
polytheistic, while also effectively reinforcing the imperial virtues of civic duty and public commitment.
¹⁴
Across the empire, a great variety of gods were worshipped and venerated, many of them carried over from indigenous cults that had long thrived before the arrival of the conquering legions. These diverse deities provided Rome’s many peoples with the comfort of local loyalties, while an overlay of official Roman idols and cults ensured that the fortunes of the empire actively engaged the hopes and concerns of its citizens and subjects. As Gibbon described and acclaimed it, this “mild,” eclectic, flexible, nonproselytizing civic religion, devoid of any separate priesthood or church hierarchy, and without any agreed scriptural authorities, was a great source of strength, and the resulting imperial culture of
tolerance and forbearance, enforced by local magistrates, effectively prevented religious discord or doctrinal conflict.
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In an oft-quoted summation, he writes, “The various modes of worship which prevailed
in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” However cynical Gibbon’s admiration, he recognized in paganism’s practice a tolerant spirit that engendered among the subjects and citizens of the empire not only a disinclination toward religious strife, but also actual social concord.
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Christianity, by contrast, was a very different kind of religion: it was monotheistic, it was dogmatic, it was all-consuming, it was proselytizing, it was exclusive, it was well organized, and it had its own priesthood and hierarchy.
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Gibbon outlined five reasons why, from its unpromising beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean, it eventually triumphed over paganism to become the state religion of the Roman Empire.
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To begin with, the early Christians were “obstinate” in their faith: once converted, they felt zealously that they were on the right side of an absolute, Manichean divide between the godly and the unrighteous. Moreover, in a world where life was hard for most, Christianity benefited from its doctrine of the immortality of the soul and its promise of future glory in heaven, which boosted
conversions and stiffened the morale of the faithful. In the third place, the many early claims of miracles and visions established Christianity’s truth and efficacy, appealing especially to what Gibbon lamented as the “dark enthusiasm of the vulgar” (although it was hardly a faith restricted to the lower echelons of society). Fourth, it was difficult not to respect the Christians for their superior conduct and rigid rectitude; in aspiring to holiness and salvation, they were highly moral, sometimes extraordinarily ascetic, and often exemplary in their fortitude in the face of persecution. Finally, Christianity was remarkably well organized, with its cellular network of churches and its hierarchy of priests and bishops. So it was scarcely surprising that in the aftermath of the emperor
Constantine’s conversion, and with unprecedented official support, Christianity “was received throughout the whole empire” in “the space of a few years.”
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Yet Gibbon saw a great irony in Christianity’s triumph as the official religion of Rome, in the faith’s subsequent destruction of the empire itself. In stark contrast to paganism’s reinforcement of the quintessential Roman virtues of imperial patriotism and
public duty, Christianity undermined them from within. Being so preoccupied with the life in the hereafter, Christians were far less interested in fruitful engagement with the affairs of this world; indeed, many of them repudiated and disdained the political and cultural and technological achievements of the Roman Empire. The result, according to Gibbon, was a corruption of the civic and martial values of Rome: “the active virtues of society were discouraged, and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.”
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This preoccupation with otherworldliness was especially true of Christian ascetics, whom Gibbon scorned and ridiculed not only for their self-indulgent self-denial, but also for their lack of civic commitment and neglect of public duties: “the lives of the primitive monks were consumed in penance and solitude, undisturbed by various occupations which fill the time and exercise the faculties of reasonable, active social beings.” There was also the fanatical dogmatism of Christian theology, unleashed in the aftermath of
Constantine’s
conversion, which further destabilized the empire. “Tolerance” disappeared and “concord” vanished, the persecution of pagans by Christians was more savage and bloody than the persecution of Christians by pagans had been, and “the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods [and] the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny.”
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Such, as Gibbon saw it, were “the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity,” and this in turn explained “by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth.”
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The narrative that would later be celebrated as “the rise of Christian Europe” was far from being a happy story or a triumphant outcome in Gibbon’s eyes, for “on the ruins of the [Roman] Capitol,” Christianity had “erected the triumphant banner of the Cross,” an ironic gesture of an empire’s self-conquest in which he took no pleasure.
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As he explained in a letter to his friend
Lord Suffield, “The primitive Church, which I have treated with some freedom, was itself, at that time, an innovation, and
I
was attached to the old Pagan establishment.”
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Indeed, Gibbon would later claim that it was a sudden realization that Christianity had ruined a once-great empire that inspired him to undertake his great historical
work—an awakening that occurred on his only visit to Rome, in 1764, as he had “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter.”
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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.
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