In The Final Pagan Generation, Edward J. Watts examines the religious life of the Romans on the eve of the Christianization.
The Roman Empire was full of gods in 310. Their temples, statues, and images filled its cities, towns, farms, and wildernesses. Whether they willed it or not, people living within the empire regularly experienced the sight, sound, smell, and taste of the gods’ celebration. Traditional divinities also dominated the spiritual space of the empire as figures whose presence could not be sensed but whose actions many felt they could discern.[1]
The empire of the first decades of the fourth century contained millions of religious structures, artifacts, and materials that cities and individuals had fashioned over the past millennia to honor the traditional gods. Festivals honoring the gods crowded the calendar, and fragrant smells connected to their worship filled the air of cities.[2]
An illustrated calendar listing the holidays and festivals celebrated in Rome in the year 354 … classifies fully 177 days of the year as holidays or festivals. … Overall the calendar marks the public celebrations of the cults of thirty-three different gods and goddesses—and this does not account for the various commemorations of imperial birthdays and divinized emperors.[3]
Imagine the state of constant angst of Christians living in Roman cities then. The gods—all of them demons from hell—were floating around and lurking at every street corner. Watts explains how Tertullian of Carthage helped his fellow Christians survive in this demon-infested world:
His On Idolatry (De idolatria) tried to show Christians how to recognize the traditional religious elements in daily life and separate them from normal social, commercial, and familial activities. Idolatry, he claims, is “a crime so widespread, . . . [that] it subverts the servants of God.” While most people simply “regard idolatry as interpreted by the senses alone, as for example, if one burns incense,” Tertullian warns that Christians must be “fore-fortified against the abundance of idolatry” and not just its obvious manifestations. He then walks the readers through all of the unnoticed places where idolatry exists. He points to those who make and sell idols, the astrologers and teachers who practice in the presence of idols, and the other trades that tainted Christians by bringing them into contact with idols. Tertullian then considers the various aspects of daily life that one must avoid in order not to be tainted by “idolatry.” This comprehensive list includes festivals and holidays, military service, the swearing of oaths, the acceptance of blessings in the name of the gods, and even certain types of clothing. … Tertullian’s text shows just how daunting a prospect it was to try to disentangle one’s daily activities from the gods and their presence. He wrote in order to point out all the places where the gods lurked because most people, both pagan and Christian, likely did not notice them. Their children and grandchildren would not either.[4]
The Roman Empire was a collection of nationalities, but more importantly it was a network of cities, each with its own religious traditions and festivals. The city of Rome had four colleges of priests, headed by a pontifex maximus. From 17 to 23 December, the Romans celebrated the Saturnalia, centered in the Temple of Saturn in the Roman forum. The civic cults of Rome obviously held a special prestige beyond Italy, but they were not “the religion of the Empire”. The Empire, in fact, didn’t have a religio universalis until the emperors thought of giving it one. In the second century, the emperors of the Antonine dynasty determined to revive Hellenism, and Hadrian sponsored the cult of Antinous as a new Osiris, with a success attested by the great number of statues found throughout the empire. Later on, the Severan emperors (193-235), who had Syrian family ties, promoted an oriental cult of the Sun; one of them, Heliogabalus (218-22), had been a priest of that cult in Emesa (modern Homs in Syria). Finally, Aurelian (270-75) promoted a more Helleno-Roman form of Sun worship: Sol Invictus (the Invincible Sun). It was not a new invention, since sol invictus already had two temples in Rome and appeared on coinage from the time of Antonius Pius (138-161). But Aurelian endowed him with a bigger temple and a priestly college, and inaugurated the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (“birthday of the Invincible Sun”) on 25 December, the day of the winter solstice in the Roman calendar, with pan-Roman games to be held every four years.
There was always a syncretistic approach in the Empire’s religious policy. The solar deity was commonly identified with Apollo, sometimes called Apollo Helios. The adepts of Mithra also recognized their own god in Sol Invictus. He was also Horus, the son of Isis, whose cult had spread from Egypt to every province of the Empire. Known to the Greeks as Harpocrates (from the Egyptian Har pa khrad, “Horus the child”), Horus was identified in Egypt to the solar god Ra and celebrated on his birthday, 25 December. In fact, long before the appearance of heliocentrism in astronomy, it is appropriate to speak of an imperial attempt at creating an heliocentric religious system, in which all gods revolved, at various distances, around the Sun, understood as the Theos Hypsistos, “the Highest God”, and the divine companion of the emperor.
In January 250, the newly acclaimed emperor, Decius, issued a decree that everyone in the empire must sacrifice to the emperor. The compulsory character of the imperial cult was later reinforced by Diocletian (284-305). It was a means of fostering political and social cohesion, after a period of chronic instability following the fall of the Severan dynasty. Many emperors had been posthumously deified before, but the divinity of the living emperor was a relative novelty. It was addressed to the genius of the emperor, rather than to his person, at a time when the Neoplatonic theory of genii (the Latin equivalent of daimones) was commonly accepted. Genii could be understood as either Platonic ideas, or lesser gods. The emperor had his own genius, the “Roman people” had its own genius, and so did the city of Rome, and so did the Empire, all these genii being interconnected. The new imperial cult did not supplant, but was added to the cult of Sol Invictus, the emperor being honored as some kind of son of the Sun God.
We should resist judging that religious system with our own Christian concepts of religion (implying a canon of sacred scriptures, a set of beliefs, a promise of salvation, and a contract of exclusivity). Those concepts simply did not exist back then, and many questions that we now regard as “religious” were considered “philosophical”. Accomplishing the simple symbolic gestures of the imperial cult, or participating in the festival of Sol Invictus were social and political activities that did not imply any kind of religious “faith”, beyond the general understanding that the gods existed, and that their benevolent power was both manifested and increased by human cultic activity.
Besides its political message, the cult of Sol Invictus had the advantage of being acceptable to the philosophically-minded who disapproved of the anthropomorphism of the gods in poetry and visual arts. In the Platonic paradigm, the sun was the best possible symbol of the One God, or the Cosmic Logos. In truth, it is hard to find a more natural and universal symbol of the divine. Therefore Michael Grant could write in The Climax of Rome: “Sun-worship, at that moment, was the state-cult of the Roman world, and the god was accepted by millions of its inhabitants. If the solar cult had not succumbed to Christianity a few years later, it could well have become the permanent religion of the Mediterranean area.”[5]
Constantine himself was a strong supporter of the solar cult until the last decade of his life, as I mentioned in “The Cross Superimposed on the Sun.” In 321, he decreed dies solis (Sunday)
a day of rest, and in 330, he dedicated a 100-feet-high column in
Constantinople, topped by a statue of himself as Apollo with a solar
crown. Michael Grant assumes that “the solar cult acted as a bridge by
which many people were converted to Christianity,”[6]
but the bridge did not exist until Christian authorities built the
appropriate bridgehead on their side of the river, by endowing Christ
with solar attributes. The key, obviously, was to declare that Jesus was
born on December 25, which was done in the late 330s. Around the same
time, the “day of the Sun” was declared the “day of the Lord”. Saint
Jerome, who was born 26 years after Constantine made Sunday a day of
rest, said: “If pagans call the Lord’s Day the ‘day of the sun,’ we
willingly agree, for today the light of the world is raised, today is
revealed the sun of justice with healing in his rays.”
To think that Sun worship was a transition from polytheism to Christianity is to think teleologically, something that historians are not supposed to do. It is more appropriate to say that Christianity absorbed or hijacked Sun worship.
Christmas is the clearest case—and probably the earliest one—of a Christianized “pagan” festival. It is the exception to the rule that prevailed from around 350 to 450: the destruction of temples and the prohibition of festivals. Conciliatory strategies of assimilation became more common later, when bishops were faced with the difficulty of eradicating ritual traditions connected not to temples but to natural sites. A good example is told by Gregory of Tours about a bishop who, around the year 500 in central Gaul, wanted to stop the rustici from offering libations to a god in a lake: “with the inspiration of the Divinity this bishop of God built a church in honor of the blessed Hilary of Poitiers at a distance from the banks of the lake.” His preaching did the rest, allegedly: “The men were stung in their hearts and converted. They left the lake and brought everything they usually threw into it to the holy church instead.”[7] The transformation of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti into the celebration of Jesus’ birth followed the same principle.
Does all of this matter? Only if you’re interested in the question “Why are we Christian?” “Why do we celebrate Christmas?” is part of that question. In my view, it is important to study the Christianization of the Roman Empire because we are now experiencing the final stage of the dechristianization of our civilization. The dechristianization leaves us spiritually naked and starving, and that is because the Christianization had meant the complete depaganization. Before Constantine, Christians advocated tolerance: “it is a characteristic feature of human law—and, indeed, it is an expression of our innate ability to determine what we want—that each of us worships how we see fit,” wrote Tertullian.[8] After Constantine, Christians changed their tune: tolerance for me, not for thee. Christianity therefore created a spiritual desert around itself, and now that Christianity has shrunk to insignificance, only the desert remains.
The Dechristianization is itself the unavoidable end result of the Christianization. Why? Because Christianity is inherently irrational, requiring the belief (the “creed”) in impossible things (lies, actually). Rationally mature adults cannot be true believers. Therefore, the dechristianization is irreversible. What we need, rather, it to reverse the Christianization.
Let’s make Roman civilization great again!
But don’t tell your children that Jesus was not born at Christmas. Rather teach them that Baby Jesus is the Sun God.
Notes
[1] Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, University of California Press, 2015, p. 17.
[2] Ibid., p. 12.
[3] Ibid., p. 24.
[4] Ibid., p. 36.
[5] Michael Grant, The Climax of Rome. The Final Achievements of the Ancient World AD 161-337, London, 1968, p. 224.
[6] Ibid., p. 234.
[7] Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors II, quoted by Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386 AD, HarperPress, 2012, p. 70.
[8] Tertullian, To Scapula, quoted in Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire, Bloomsbury Press, 2015.
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