Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity, by James J. O’Donnell. New York: Ecco, 2015. 273 pp. $27.99.
The distance between the birth of Christ and the Council of Chalcedon is similar to the gulf between the ascendancy of Queen Elizabeth I and the present. One naturally expects socio-cultural change in such a great passing of time, and the accompanying stories of such change. “The storytelling is itself important” (4). Pagans seek to write a constructive history by piecing together the remnants of religious, historical, and socio-cultural evidence. The author, James O’Donnell, is the University Librarian at Arizona State University and is a classicist by training. His previous books include Augustine, The Ruin of the Roman Empire, and Avatars of the Word.
The problem, claims O’Donnell, is that the “neat” story told of the Christian overpowering of the pagan Roman Empire is “a great yarn” that “deserves our suspicion” (15–16). O’Donnell begins his own re-telling of the story with the ludi (public games) supported by Caesar Augustus. Augustus’s use of the games to build his own political reputation reveals the interaction of religion and politics in the Roman mind. The following chapter examines the religious thought of Cicero, the famous Roman orator. O’Donnell argues that Cicero’s personal combination of philosophical skepticism all the while engaging in traditional religious customs was par for the course. “His skepticism, which some have thought an invention, was the most traditional thing about him” (53).
With these two personal portraits positioned in his gallery, O’Donnell’s next chapter turns to what “may be the most important thing I say in this book” (55). One can easily talk as if the gods were real beings, with definable names, traits, and proclivities (62). “Talking about these gods as if they really existed is easy. And if it’s easy for us, think how easy it was for the ancients” (63). Furthermore, insists O’Donnell, the early Christians thought of the gods (correlated with demons) as “real” beings who sometimes did favors for their followers (64). O’Donnell’s discussion could be supplemented by the Jewish tradition in Deuteronomy 32:17 and especially by 1 Corinthians 10:19–21 (within its wider context). O’Donnell concludes with an interesting discussion of the common approach to the gods, involving a quid pro quo bargaining mode of promissory notes and contracts. “A ‘religious’ or ‘pious’ man just did what he had to do” (69).
Chapter 5, “Divine Butchery,” paints a graphic picture of the ancient institution of sacrificial worship. Although the reader’s visceral reaction may be one of repugnancy, one is reminded that the sacrificial system prescribed in the Torah would have been a similarly bloody affair, including messy slaughters and “holocausts.” Chapter 6, “Ways of Knowing” examines such practices as augury (the reading of bird behavior), haruspicy (the reading of animal entrails), and the use of astrological and oracular predictions. “Below, behind, beneath, and around all the other religious practices of the ancient world lay the often hidden domain of magic” (95). The use of charms, amulets, and curse tablets all reveal the manipulative penchant “to bend the world to the wishes of the practitioner” (95).
Chapter 7 claims, “The only people who didn’t, as a rule, honor and respect gods were the Christians” (98). Here one should also mention the Jews, who could have been added in other key passages of the volume as well. For his part, O’Donnell desires “to see Judaism with fresh eyes, as just another religious community in the Greco-Roman world” (111). In a religionsgeschichtliche manner, O’Donnell claims that “the distinctive features of Judaism are few, their god and their practices are very similar to others of the region” (113). In fact, some pagans, such as the philosopher Plotinus, were moving toward quasi-monotheistic constructs (chap. 9).
The flow of the book’s narrative seems to pick up with the entrance of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity is portrayed as “a very ordinary kind of political choice” (126). “Religious consistency took second place to his political ambitions” (145). In turn, Roman citizens began joining churches “in greater numbers,” for various and sometimes self-serving purposes (148). For his part, Constantine “expressed his support for orthodoxy without much caring what orthodoxy was” (155). A few decades later, Julian “the Apostate” came to the throne, the first Roman emperor “with a long and deep experience of Christianity” (167), a formative influence which still affected him even after he had repudiated it. Julian tried to bring back paganism, although O’Donnell downplays any supposition of an ominous pagan revival.
Christian power soon returned, however, and Theodosius “finally took away the last public support—financial support—from the old religious practices” (198). In sum, “It could be very lucrative to be on the right side” (206). “Christianity as we know it was being invented in plain sight. It was acquiring its large buildings, elaborate services, elegant vestments, well-fed clergy, and enormous wealth” (209). Concomitantly, traditional polytheism was fading away. “As late as 300 CE, no one could have imagined a world without those traditional gods, lords since time immemorial. A century and a half later, few could remember what the world with those gods had been like” (3). Ending more with a whimper than a bang, “The gods were no longer needed” (241). Nevertheless, pockets of traditional religion (paganism) persisted where possible (197).
The rise of Christianity led to the defining of traditionalist religion as “paganism,” which O’Donnell describes as “one of the slipperiest and most misleading words I know” (159). In his view, it is a socio-rhetorical othering by Christians, in an effort to self-define their own uniqueness. “It’s a stereotype, a club to hit people with” (162). “Outside Christian imaginations, there was no such thing as paganism, only people doing what they were in the habit of doing” (214). These claims could be informed by the Christian reception of the Jewish censorious “othering” of polytheism and idolatry. At times, early Christian literature demonstrably borrowed from Jewish anti-polytheistic, anti-idolatrous rhetoric.
This penchant for minimizing the differences between the Judeo-Christian traditions and the surrounding religious traditions affects the chapter on Augustine as well. In O’Donnell’s understanding, Manicheism was a form of Christianity (217). And the young Augustine, with Christian parentage in his mother, could be viewed as a “Christian already”; in fact, one could conclude that he “never converted at all” (218). Augustine was simply “a typical Roman failure” who had “gone home to go to seed” at age thirty-seven (222). Yet even a phenomenological approach could empathetically take an insider’s view of professed conversion. At the same time, O’Donnell rightly places the City of God within the classical literary tradition (233). Socio-cultural influence works both ways in the march of history. Yes, the Roman Empire became Christian. But Christianity also became Roman (232).
O’Donnell would have us see Christianity as the winning religion among similar peers. Its win over paganism allowed Christianity to claim an inflated exceptionalism. “Christianity’s claim to unique truth was plausible because only Christians made that claim” (211). And pagans served as “the perfect foil” to this Christian self-construction (240). Christianity rewrote its past “to make it suitable for its purposes, and at the same time rewrote itself to be a worthy heir and rival to the past it was claiming” (232). In their rise to prominence, Christians “cherished the idea that they were despised or feared or outlawed or persecuted by the Roman government—a view that had just enough truth to it to shape behavior” (129).
O’Donnell’s work was intended as a socio-historical explanation of the religious transitions of the Roman Empire, not a theological one. Nevertheless, even on a sociological level, it seems to put too much weight upon the konstantinische Wende and not enough emphasis upon the pre-Constantinian appeal and growth of Christianity (as reflected in Rodney Stark’s sociological studies). On a theological level, one might expect an incarnational theology to take on forms of the receptor culture, while retaining claims of exceptionality.
Are there lessons to be learned that are outside of O’Donnell’s playbook? First, there is the human tendency to turn Christianity itself into a quid pro quo bargaining chip of manipulating the divine. Second, one is reminded of the anesthetizing effect of a comfortable Christianity, nestled within the warmth of a general social acceptance, yet foreign to the New Testament counter-cultural call to be aliens and sojourners. Third, there may be mirror insights concerning how the post-Constantinian “social position” of Christianity “increased the pressure” on pagan religiosity (179). As one compares the religious transitions of the pre-Christian Roman Empire with the opposite religious transitions of post-Christian Western culture, one wonders what the lack of social and economic privileging will do to and for Christendom in the future.
