polity
My thanks go to my wife, Dr Estelle Blanc, Laure Adler, Lucien Jerphagnon, Claude Lepelley, Thierry Marchaisse, Dr Françoise Mareschal, Hélène Monsacré, Pierre- François Mourier, Olivier Munnich, Jean- Claude Passeron, Jérôme Prieur and Maurice Sartre, for all their references, suggestions, critiques and encouragement.
Damien Veyne, who has passed on from this world, told me something, drawn from his American experiences, which has illuminated this subject for me.
One of the decisive events in western and even world history occurred in 312 ad, in the immense Roman Empire. The fourth century of the Common Era had started badly for the Christian Church: between 303 and 311, it had been subjected to one of the worst persecutions in its history, in which thousands had perished. In 311, one of the four emperors who shared the government of the Empire resigned himself to putting an end to the persecution, bitterly noting in his law decreeing tolerance that persecution was pointless, since the many Christians who, in order to save their lives, had abjured their faith had nevertheless not returned to paganism. As a result, there were gaps in the religious fabric of society (a fact that constituted a subject of anxiety for a leader at this time).
In the following year, 312, a most unprecedented event occurred: another of the co-emperors, Constantine, the hero of this great story, converted to Christianity, following a dream in which he was told: ‘By this sign, you will conquer.’ It is thought that at most 5–10 per cent of the population of the Empire (possibly seventy million inhabitants in all) were at this time Christians.1 As J. B. Bury commented,2 ‘It must never be forgotten that Constantine’s revolution was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.’
As we shall see, eighty years on, on a different battlefield by a different river, paganism was to find itself banned and, although spared persecution, knew that it was vanquished. For, throughout the fourth century, the Church, itself no longer persecuted as it had been for the previous three centuries, had been supported in every way by most of the Empire’s Caesars, all converts to Christianity. As a result, by the fourth century the Empire was almost wholly populated by Christians and there are one and a half billion Christians in the world today. It is, however, true that, after the 600s, half the Christian regions that had belonged to the Empire became Muslim without any apparent difficulty.
What kind of a man was this Constantine who played such a decisive role? I believe that, far from being a calculating cynic or a person steeped in superstition, as has even recently been claimed, he was a man of great vision. His conversion made it possible for him to take part in what he regarded as a supernatural epic, indeed to direct it himself and thus ensure the salvation of humanity. He felt that, thanks to this salvation, his reign was a religious turning point in which he himself had an enormously important role to play. He had hardly become master of the Roman West (probably at the age of no more than thirty-five), when in 314, he declared in a letter to his ‘very dear brothers’, the bishops, that ‘the eternal and inconceivable holiness of our God will absolutely not allow the human condition to wander in darkness any longer.’3
Constantine was certainly sincere, but that is to put it mildly. For this was an altogether exceptional man. Historians tend to be less accustomed to coping with the exceptional than with the safe method of ‘setting things in ordered series’. Moreover, they have an acute sense of the banal, the ‘everyday,’ that is not possessed by the many intellectuals who either believe in political miracles or, on the contrary, as Flaubert put it, ‘denigrate the age in which they live out of historical ignorance’. Constantine considered himself to have been chosen, destined by a divine decree to play a providential role in the thousand-year-old system of salvation. That is what he said and also what he wrote in an authentic text that we shall be considering later but that is so extravagant that most historians are too embarrassed to mention it.
There is nevertheless nothing unbelievable about Constantine’s excessive claims. They too can be arranged in an orderly series, for cases do arise in which potentates, thinkers or religious or political leaders believe themselves called to save the human race and revolutionize the course of the world. To doubt their sincerity would be a grave mistake, for it is all the more credible given that, in Rome, the role of an emperor was sometimes interpreted far more liberally than that of our own kings. In those distant times, it was not students who were inspired to action by the power of their imagination, but the potentate himself. However, Constantine, an imaginative, even megalomaniac, potentate, was also a man of action, steeped in prudence as much as in energy.4 So he achieved his aims: the Roman throne became Christian and the Church became a power to reckon with. Without Constantine, Christianity would have remained simply an avant-garde sect.
But let us start by getting a brief account of the events out of the way. Constantine’s conversion was but one episode in the course of one of those monotonous struggles between generals bent solely on possession of the throne, struggles that take up a good half of Roman political history. At the beginning of the fourth century, the Roman Empire was divided between four co-emperors who were expected to reign in fraternal concord. Two of them shared the rich Roman East (Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt and so on), while the vast West (which included the Danube regions and the Maghreb desert) was divided between a certain Licinius (about whom there will be more to say) and our hero, Constantine, who, for his part, governed Gaul, England and Spain.
By rights he should also have governed Italy, but a fifth, thieving, player, by the name of Maxentius, had become involved. He had usurped the power in Rome and Italy as a whole. Later, the Christians there, with a view to praising Constantine, falsely claimed that Maxentius had remained a persecutor. It was in order to recapture Italy from Maxentius that Constantine declared war on him and it was during the campaign that ensued that he became a convert, placing his trust in the god of the Christians in order to emerge victorious. His conversion was sealed by a dream in which, during the night before the battle, the god of the Christians promised him victory, provided he would make his new religion public.
And the next day, the memorable 28 October 312, on the outskirts of Rome and on the banks of the river Tiber, God did indeed procure him the famous victory of the Milvian Bridge. Maxentius was crushed and killed by Constantine’s troops, who promoted the personal religion of the leader whom they served5 : their shields6 displayed an entirely new symbol7 that had been revealed to the emperor as he slept,8 a symbol that he himself then sported on his own helmet.9 This was what was to become known as the ‘Christogram’, constructed from the first two letters of Christ’s name, the Greek X and P, the one superimposed upon the other and the two interlocked.
On the following day, 29 October, Constantine, at the head of his troops, made his solemn entry to Rome by way of the Via Lata, the present-day Corso. The date, 29 October 312 (rather than that of the so-called ‘edict of Milan’ of 313) marks the switch from ancient paganism to the Christian era.10 Let there be no mistake about this: the historic role of Constantine was not to put an end to persecutions (for those had ceased two years earlier, when Christianity obtained the freedom from persecution that paganism enjoyed). Rather, it was to make Christianity, now his own faith, the religion that was favoured in every way over paganism.
In the rest of the Empire, in the following year, 313, Licinius, who had remained a pagan but was not a persecutor, overcame the persecuting co-emperor who reigned over the East. Licinius, too, had had a dream. On the eve of the battle, an ‘angel’ had promised him victory provided he prayed to a certain ‘supreme god’ and got his army likewise to pray to this deity.11 Sure enough, he was victorious and thus became the master of the East, where he issued an edict of tolerance, thereby delivering the eastern Christians from their persecutor. The two co-emperors, the pagan Licinius and the Christian Constantine, now reigned together over an indivisible empire. They had reached agreement, in Milan, to treat their pagan and Christian subjects on an equal footing. This was a compromise, a concession that ran contrary to all their principles, but it was indispensable in an age that now set out to be at peace (pro quiete temporis).12
After the victory at the Milvian Bridge, the pagans may have assumed that Constantine’s attitude to the god who had procured him victory would be similar to that of his predecessors. Augustus, following his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, had, as we know, settled his debt to Apollo by consecrating a sanctuary and a local cult to the god. The Christogram that appeared on the shields of Constantine’s army indicated that victory had been won thanks to the god of the Christians. However, what was not understood was that the relationship between this god and his creatures was a permanent, passionate and mutual one, whereas the relationship between the human race and the race of pagan gods, who were primarily concerned about themselves, was, so to speak, international,13 contractual and spasmodic. Apollo had not instigated his relationship with Augustus and had never instructed the latter to sweep to victory under his divine sign.
Nothing could have been more different from, on the one hand, the relationship between the pagans and their gods and, on the other, that between the Christians and their God: a pagan was content with his gods if he had elicited their help by means of his prayers and vows; a Christian instead endeavoured to make his God content with him. Augustus did not serve Apollo; he simply turned to him for help; nor would his distant pagan successors be the servants of the Invincible Sun, their protector and celestial image. In contrast, throughout the twenty-five years that followed, Constantine repeatedly declared that he was simply the servant of Christ, who had admitted him to his service and would always procure him victory.
What Constantine had seen in his dream were the very initials of the name of Christ; Licinius, on the other hand, had simply heeded the ‘supreme god’ of an anonymous and ‘catch-all’ monotheism upon whom all enlightened minds of the period could reach agreement. With that victory of 312, the religious ‘discourse’ of the authority in power had changed radically. Constantine nevertheless did not nor ever would try to impose his new faith upon his subjects. No more did his successors. Even less did he regard Christianity as an ‘ideology’ to be inculcated in his subjects for political purposes. (We shall be returning, in conclusion, to this seemingly profound explanation that leaps spontaneously to the minds of many historians.)
Ten years later, in 324, the Christian religion at one stroke took on a ‘global’ dimension and Constantine acquired the historical stature that he would thereafter retain. For in the East Constantine had recently crushed Licinius, who was claimed to be a persecutor, and had re-established the unity of the Roman Empire under his sole authority, bringing together its two halves under his own Christian sceptre. Christianity now took over this vast empire that constituted the centre of the world and considered itself to be synonymous with civilization itself. This was the beginning of what was for many long centuries to be known as the Christian Empire or even Christendom. Constantine hastened to reassure his new subjects by reversing the terms of 312 and promising them that the pagans in the East would be treated on the same footing as Christians: they were free stupidly to remain pagans and ‘keep, if they wish, their sanctuaries of falsehood’,14 so the latter were not to be destroyed. Times had changed: in 312, the religion that was tolerated was Christianity; now, in 324, it was paganism.15
As early as the first year after his 312 victory, the religious policy of the emperor had been made clear and it was not to change; we shall be studying it in detail throughout this little book.
Convert the pagans? That would have constituted a vast endeavour. Constantine realized that their resistance (epanastasis) was so strong that he gave up the idea of forcing the Truth upon them and, despite all his hopes, remained tolerant. Following his two great victories in 312 and 324, he was at pains to reassure the pagans living in the provinces that he had just acquired: ‘Let those in error . . . gladly receive the benefit of peace and quiet . . . May none molest another; may each retain what his soul desires, and practise it.’18 And he kept his promises: the pagan cults were not abolished until half a century after his death; and not until two centuries later did Justinian start trying to convert the last of the pagans, along with the Jews.
Such was ‘Constantine’s pragmatism’19 ; and there was one great advantage to it. By forbearing to convert the pagans forcibly, Constantine avoided incurring hostility both against himself and against Christianity (the future of which was, in truth, far less assured than is generally believed, for – as we shall see – in 364 it was almost wiped out). Alongside the partisan elite constituted by the Christian sect, the pagan masses were left to live on in their ignorance, indifferent to the whims of their emperor. The only group to suffer was a small circle of educated pagans.
As we have seen, Constantine left the pagans and their cults in peace even after 324, when the reunification of the East and the West, under his sceptre, rendered him all-powerful. In that year, he issued proclamations first to his new eastern subjects, then to all the inhabitants of his Empire.20 These proclamations, written in a personal rather than an official style, were penned by a convinced Christian who rated paganism lower than earth itself and declared that Christianity was the only good religion, as was proved by the prince’s victories engineered by the one true God. However, he took no measures at all against paganism. Constantine himself was never a persecutor and under his rule the Empire lived in peace. Better still, he formally forbade anyone to turn against his neighbours for religious reasons: it was essential that public tranquillity should reign. No doubt his edicts were directed at overzealous Christians who were eager to attack the pagan ceremonies and temples.
The ambiguous nature of the role of a Roman emperor was enough to drive one mad (as, indeed, it had three centuries before Constantine, when Tiberius, the first successor of the founder of the imperial regime, sank into paranoia). A Caesar needed to master four languages: that of a leader whose civil power was of a military nature and who therefore issued orders; that of a superior being (albeit not a living god), who was the subject of a personality cult; that of a member of the Great Imperial Council, the Senate, in which he was simply the first among his peers (who still, however, feared for their heads under his rule); and that of the Empire’s first magistrate, who was in constant communication with his fellow citizens and was answerable to them. In his decrees and proclamations of 324, Constantine chose to use this fourth language, intermingling it with a fifth, that of a fervent Christian who acted as a propagandist for his faith and reckoned paganism to be a ‘disadvantageous superstition’, in contrast to Christianity, which constituted the divine and ‘most holy Law’.21
Despite everything, he kept his promises of religious tolerance and civil peace, which was affected by no bloody movements of persecution. The only conflicts to assail him were the quarrels that erupted between different Christian groups. He did not force anyone to convert22 ; he appointed pagans to the very highest of state offices,23 he never legislated against the pagan cults (even after his 324 triumphs, despite what is sometimes claimed)24 and he allowed the Roman Senate to continue to fund the official priests and public cults of the Roman state; these continued as before and did so until almost the end of the century.
Is the word tolerance really the right one to use? At the risk of being pointlessly didactic, perhaps a number of distinctions need to be made. One might be tolerant through agnosticism or because one reckoned that a number of different paths might all lead to the almost inaccessible Truth.25 One might become tolerant through a compromise, either being weary of religious wars or because persecution had proved unsuccessful. Or one might, as the French do, hold that the religions of the state’s citizens are none of its business, for religion is a private matter for individuals, or, again, as the Americans hold, that states should neither recognize, prohibit nor favour any type of religious confession. Constantine, for his part, believed in a single Truth and felt that he had the right and the duty to impose it.26 Nevertheless, he did not risk taking action and left in peace those whom he considered to be mistaken, claiming that he did so in the interests of public tranquillity: in other words because he would have come up against strong opposition. In consequence, his empire remained at once Christian and pagan.
But Constantine also insisted that there should be one particular domain reserved in his favour. Given that Christianity was his own personal religion (and was, under his successors, to become for all practical purposes that of the throne), he could not allow his own person to be defiled by the pagan cult.27 In 315, he went to Rome to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his rule. These anniversary celebrations were patriotic, marking ten years of the happiest of reigns. They involved performing sacrifices to honour the vows and prayers of ten years earlier for the prosperity of the Roman sovereign, followed by further sacrifices designed to renew the contract for a further ten happy years. Constantine allowed the people to rejoice amid great celebrations, but he banned all animal sacrifices,28 thereby (as Alföldi put it) disinfecting the pagan rites.
To cut a long story short, let us consider just one particular famous document that testifies to this disinfected paganism and this same pious horror of blood sacrifices. The city of Spello, in Umbria, asked Constantine to authorize the establishment of a great annual festival, the pretext for which would be the cult of emperors. It even proposed to build a temple for the dead, deified emperors of the reigning dynasty (to which Constantine’s own father belonged).29 Like all festivals in honour of the cult of emperors, it would feature gladiator fights, the greatest of entertainments, seldom on offer, extremely costly and of a purely secular nature.
Constantine gave his permission for the festival, the gladiator fights (which he had always hesitated to ban, since they were so very popular), the dynastic temple and the imperial priest; but he forbade the latter to inflict the defilement of sacrifices upon his dynasty. This was to be an imperial cult without the bloodshed of victims. Since an imperial priest, through his function, depended immediately upon the emperor himself, Constantine made the most of this personal link that justified his ban on this pagan rite. For it was only in the (admittedly extensive) sphere that surrounded his own person that he prohibited paganism and favoured Christianity. As we have noted above, it was in just the same manner that he had had the Christogram painted on the shields of his soldiers, for the army was the personal instrument of the emperor, its direct leader.
Out of solidarity with his co-believers, he took care to spare them, like himself, any impure contact with the blood of sacrificial victims. Christian magistrates were thus dispensed from performing the rites that went with their function as magistrates, such as the lustrations that led up to a sacrifice. The law prescribed a beating or a fine for anyone who forced Christian municipal councillors to comply with such ‘superstition’.30 Double or even treble advantages stemmed from this law: wealthy Christians lost their excuse for avoiding heavy municipal duties31 and unscrupulous Christians were encouraged to behave more in conformity with their faith.
Constantine also spared Christians, even criminal ones, from a legal obligation to sin. Some offenders found to be guilty were customarily sentenced to fight as gladiators; and given that God’s Law rules that ‘thou shalt not kill’, gladiators had always been banned from the Church. Constantine decided that the penalty of fighting as a gladiator would henceforth be replaced by that of forced labour in the mines or quarries, ‘so that those condemned should pay for their crimes without shedding blood.’ The great emperor’s successors were to observe the same law.32
We should note that anyone condemned to death, to forced labour or to the gladiators’ arena automatically became the property of the imperial Exchequer33 and therefore of the emperor himself. So, in this instance too, Constantine was observing his principle of imposing his own religion only within his own personal sphere. By virtue of that same principle, his son Constantius was to forbid high-ranking pagan magistrates who continued to lay on spectacles in the gladiators’ arena to engage as gladiators either soldiers (since the army belonged to the prince in person) or officers of the imperial palace.34
All in all, Constantine did more or less respect his pragmatic principle of tolerance. However, in one instance at least, in 314, it did happen that he ‘forgot’ to celebrate the extremely solemn Centennial Games which, once every 110 years, occasioned several days and nights of pagan ceremonies and sacrifices designed to celebrate35 the legendary date of the foundation of Rome. Furthermore, he introduced a number of very cunning measures, such as decreeing that Sunday be a day of rest (a matter to which we shall be returning). As we shall see, he also introduced a law totally abolishing all pagan sacrifices, but this was never applied. It was only under Constantine’s successor that the pagan religion began to suffer.
Constantine’s way of introducing an imbalance between the two religions was not so much to attack paganism but rather to favour the Christians. He made it clear to all his subjects that their sovereign was a Christian, in his official declarations he denigrated paganism as a base superstition and he bestowed traditional imperial favours upon the Christian religion (ordering the construction of many churches, but no temples). The fact was that, although paganism continued to be a religio licita and Constantine, like any emperor, was its Great Pontiff, in all domains he acted as the protector of the Christians alone.
It was thanks to him that the slow but total Christianization of the Empire began. The Church, formerly a prohibited ‘sect’, now became more than a licit one: it was part of the state and was eventually to supplant paganism as the standard religion. For its first three centuries, Christianity had remained a sect (in the by no means pejorative sense that German sociologists apply this term), that is to say a group that individuals choose to join and a collection of beliefs to which some become converted, as opposed to a ‘church’, a collection of beliefs into which one is born and that are held by all. In 197, Tertullian36 wrote, ‘Christians are made, not born.’ This slow transition from sect to the customary religion was brought about by providing the population with a clerical framework, which became possible because the Church was protected and also because Christianity was the religion that the government itself, publicly expressing its scorn for paganism, adopted.
Thus, around 400, Christians could feel that they would soon triumph totally: ‘The authority, which the Christian faith hath, is diffused all the world over.’37 But what was the source of the new religion’s power over people’s minds? Its spiritual superiority over paganism was blindingly clear, as we shall see, but this could be appreciated only by a religious elite. Besides, why was it that the emperor himself had converted?
At the time of Constantine’s birth, Christianity was ‘the burning issue of the age’38 : whoever possessed the slightest religious or philosophical sensitivity was concerned with it and many of the literate elite had already become converts. I must therefore, albeit with considerable trepidation, try to sketch in a picture of Christianity in the years between 200 and 300 in order to determine the diverse factors that made conversion a tempting option. Hélène Monsacré tells me that the motive for Constantine’s conversion is clear: if he wanted to be a great emperor, he needed a great God. A gigantic, caring God who passionately desired the wellbeing of the human race aroused far stronger sentiments than the crowd of pagan gods who lived for themselves. And this Christian God revealed a no less gigantic plan for the eternal salvation of humanity. He involved himself in the lives of the faithful, demanding that they observe a strict moral code.
Over the years, Christianity, while encountering nothing but hostility or indifference from the populous masses, had acquired the status of an avant-garde talking point among the elite. For the educated, it represented either the greatest religious problem of the age or its very worst mistake. In our own times, anyone at all enlightened is preoccupied by ethico-political questions relating to the evolution of the world. In the third century, what people worried about were the highest truths and the soul’s destiny, hence the success of Neo-Platonism among the educated. What is interesting is not the fact that there were so few Christians but the major place that Christianity occupied in public opinion and debate by reason of its manifest superiority over paganism.
Let me try to list those relatively superior elements, for some of them must have been decisive in Constantine’s choice of this religion, which he perceived as both true and worthy of his throne. Over the centuries, few religions – possibly none at all – have been as greatly enriched spiritually and intellectually as Christianity. In Constantine’s day, Christianity was still a somewhat summary religion, but even so it was greatly superior to paganism. Certain agnostic historians may think it less than scholarly to draw up a comparison between the merits of different religions. But, as I see it, to do so is not to violate the principle of axiological neutrality any more than one does when one recognizes the superiority of certain artistic or literary creations, a superiority to which Constantine’s contemporaries were no more blind than we ourselves are. Why ever should the creative imagination of religions not produce masterpieces, likewise?
However, its very superiority disadvantaged this elite religion, for the demands that it made upon the faithful outweighed its promises of good harvests or cures. It had no more chance than great music or great literature of winning over a population whose religiosity was of a more short-sighted nature. It owed its victory, not so much to its own merits, but more to the authority of the Empire and the Church. Moreover, Christianity smacked of an originality that was not to everyone’s taste. In the eyes of certain educated people,1 Neo-Platonism was less melodramatic. In the history of Christianity, only an external authority had the power to supplant one custom by another. That is why Constantine’s role was crucial.
Let us start by noting Christianity’s principal asset: early Christianity owed its initial rapid success among the Roman elite to its great originality, namely the fact that it was a religion of love. It also owed that success to the superhuman authority that emanated from its master, the Lord Jesus. For whoever accepted the Christian faith, life became more intense, more organized and was placed under greater pressure. An individual had to conform to a rule that marked him or her out, as was the case in the philosophical sects of the period. But, in exchange, his or her life suddenly acquired an eternal significance within a cosmic plan, something that no philosophy or paganism could confer. Paganism left human life just as it was, an ephemeral amalgam of details. Thanks to the Christian god, that life received the unity of a magnetic field in which every action and every internal response took on a meaning, either good or bad. This meaning, which, unlike in the case of philosophers, was not conferred by the individual involved, steered the believer towards an absolute and eternal entity that was not a mere principle but a great living being. As Etienne Gilson put it, a Christian soul sought substance in being so as to escape the trauma of becoming. This inner security was accessible to all and sundry, the literate and the illiterate alike.
Extending the Jewish religion and the Psalms, Christianity found its basis in a mutual passion shared by the deity and humanity or, to be more precise, every single one of us. To give some idea of the chasm that separated Christianity from paganism, let me give a minor, trivial example that is perhaps unworthy of this important subject. An ordinary woman could go and tell the Madonna all her family or conjugal problems. If she had confided them to Hera or Aphrodite, the goddess would have wondered what crazy whim had passed through the mind of this silly woman who had come to tell her of things that were no concern of hers.
It was by this love, by the charisma of its Lord and by its sublime vision of the world and of man that the new religion took hold and not, I think, through the doubtful monotheism that represents such a laborious point of honour for theologians. In itself, monotheism is not particularly exceptional. The term itself is a deceptive one that covers many different types of religion and is too vague to be one of the keys to its history. I would like to substantiate this claim, using the example of the ‘monotheism’ of the ancient Jewish religion but, for this, will refer the reader to the Appendix of the present work.2 The philosophical monism of the pagan literate elite did not prevent them from believing in gods that were subordinate to the supreme God.3 Furthermore, the ‘three monotheisms’ that are so much talked of today and to which so many evils are attributed are of three different kinds. (And, by the way, it is not monotheism itself that makes a religion fearsome, but the imperialism of its ‘truth’).
The originality of Christianity lies not in its so-called monotheism, but in the gigantic nature of its god, the creator of both heaven and earth: it is a gigantism that is alien to the pagan gods and is inherited from the god of the Bible. This biblical god was so huge that, despite his anthropomorphism (humankind was created in his image), it was possible for him to become a metaphysical god: even while retaining his human, passionate and protective character, the gigantic scale of the Judaic god allowed him eventually to take on the role of the founder and creator of the cosmic order and all that was Good: this was the very role attributed to the supreme god in the pale deism of the philosophers.
Given that it presents two or even three supernatural objects to be worshipped, namely God, Christ and – later – the Virgin, the Christian religion was, quite literally, polytheistic; but never mind. Those divine figures shared nothing in common with the ancient gods, even though they possessed personalities (and, up until Saint Augustine) bodies too. With the Christian deity, religious inventiveness, in the beat of a wing, tore away from the basis of a narrative imagination, that unquenchable and therefore polytheistic source of fables, and raised itself to a transcendental level: the plural figures of Christianity came together in a cosmic order that, for its part, was a unity. Christianity was a monist polytheism.
It was this monism, that is to say the metaphysical nature of Christianity, which made it a superior religion. In the eyes of the Neo-Platonists, it was no more than a popular story; but this story was a philosophical one that rose far above a pantheon of disparate cults. Christianity considered itself to be the only true religion, the one that demanded universal recognition because it presented all human beings with a supernatural vocation and spiritual equality. This was a monism that was sanctioned by a single, united Church. And it was a religion that won over many educated people and was considered worthy of a great, pious emperor such as the young Constantine and also of his throne.
Another specific feature that set Christianity apart was the fact that it was a religion of love. Through the Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, that love represented a development (using Catholic terminology referring to the family of Catholicism, one might even go so far as to say a family relationship of Father, Mother, Brother and Son) of the equally novel relationship between Jehovah and his people described in the Historical Books of the Bible and even more so in the Psalms. Christianity owed its success as a sect to a collective invention of genius (for Saint Paul was not solely responsible for this): namely, the infinite mercy of a God passionate about the fate of the human race, indeed about the fate of each and every individual soul, including mine and yours, and not just those of the kingdoms, empires and the human race in general. This was a Father whose Law was strict and who set one on a straight and righteous path, but who, like the god of Israel, was always ready to forgive.4
The human race and this God were joined together in a loving and sensitive relationship focused on the Lord Jesus, while the human race, for its part, acquired a celestial nature. Paganism had not been totally insensitive to love between a deity and a chosen individual (as we may be reminded by the love for Artemis of Euripides’ Hippolytus). On the other hand (as is testified by Artemis’ distant attitude to the dying Hippolytus), it made no room for a mutual and passionate relationship of love and authority, a relationship which, being essential both to God and to man, is a lasting one, not an occasional one as in paganism. When a Christian returned to God in his mind, he knew that he had never ceased to be watched and loved, whereas the pagan gods lived above all for themselves.
In contrast, Christ, the Man-God, sacrificed himself for his men. The other main reason for the success of the Christian sect was the image of the Lord in all his authority and charisma. And the accent was laid on authority rather than tenderness for – let us be clear – we are still quite a way away from the time of Saint Bernard or Saint Francis of Assisi. Nor was the Christ of the early centuries the humanitarian figure who led an exemplary life and who, ever since Renan, has become the Christ held dear even by unbelievers. For, lofty and universal though those attributes were, they were not the ones that drew believers to the Lord. What early Christianity exalted above all was ‘not the attraction exerted by the humanity of Jesus, but rather his superhuman nature that was predicted by the Prophets and demonstrated by his miracles, the Resurrection and the Master’s teaching.’5
Converts were drawn more to the supernatural nature of Christ than to the personality of this man-god, his life and all that is written in the Gospels. (In Saint Augustine’s works, still, the humanity of Christ remains in the background.) ‘The early Apologists had little to say about the personality of Jesus or about the doctrine of atonement.’ 6 The Cross was a symbol of not pain, but victory, tropaeum Passionis, triumphalem crucem.7 One was not constantly confronted with the Passion and Christ’s death;8 it was not the expiatory victim and the sacrifice of the crucified Christ on Calvary that triggered conversions, but rather the triumph over death represented by the Resurrection.
The figure of Jesus was also imposing by virtue of his earthly life and his historical credentials, which were recently established and clearly dated.9 Christ was no mythical being living in some fairytale time. Unlike the pagan gods, he ‘seemed real’, even human. This was an age that was very receptive to ‘divine men’ (theioi andres) and to miracle workers and prophets who lived among ordinary people and were revered by some as masters. On sarcophagi (whose sculptures illustrated the relation of the dead individual to the Lord), the Lord appeared as a shepherd caring for all his sheep, including the deceased, which he loved and which followed wherever he led them, or as a young teacher whose ethical commandments the deceased individual had heeded.
The conversion of the new faithful was also encouraged by the Christians’ moralizing zeal, which was akin to the popular stoicism, and their taste for respectability, that humble form of pride. Many were moved by the passionate morality of the Christians and lent a keen ear to any moral preaching. The Christian God was worshipped not with offerings or with the sacrifice of victims, but with obedience to his Law. The cardinal role that morality played in Christianity was largely alien to paganism. It was yet another feature of Christianity that made it something different.
I was greatly surprised to find that Christian texts are far more prone to dwell on this morality than on love. Although the Epistle to Diognetes, the work of an educated man, encouraged its readers to imitate God’s love for human beings by loving and helping the weak and the poor, Bishop Cyprian prescribed avoiding sin and obeying God without presuming to imitate him, in the same way as an army forbears to imitate its general, but simply follows and obeys him.10 Those in authority usually prefer subordinates who content themselves with not disobeying them, rather than those who take positive initiatives.
The success of Christianity may be compared to that of a ‘best-seller’ (and, in the eyes of an unbeliever like myself, as a worldwide masterpiece). It gripped its readers ‘by the guts’, not necessarily droves of them so long as the preceding, regular religion still reigned, but at least a spiritual or ethical elite drawn from every social class, rich and poor, uneducated, educated and semi-educated, including one particular emperor … I certainly do not claim that Christianity was immanent in the human soul or that society was positively waiting for it. There is another explanation for its success: a ‘best-seller’ (such as Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise or Goethe’s Werther) reveals to some readers a thitherto unsuspected sensibility. And this new sensibility that it brings into being (in this case that of a religion that spoke of love) then sustains the success that it has itself produced.11
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