God Against the Gods (13 page)

The universality of Isis is affirmed in
The Golden Ass
, a rather bawdy work of literature dating from the second century C.E., and one of the precious few examples of pagan writing that survived the Christian censorship of pagan texts after the triumph of Constantine. The tale is told by a young man who is turned into a donkey by a sorcerer and then restored to human form by a savior-goddess. In a passage that shows exactly how syncretism worked in the ancient world, the goddess catalogues her many names and guises before revealing her true identity.

[T]he Phrygians call me Mother of the Gods. The aboriginal races of Attica call me Minerva. The Cyprians call me Venus. The Cretans call me Diana. The Sicilians call me Proserpine. The Eleusinians call me the ancient goddess Ceres. Some call me Juno. Some call me Bellona. Some call me Hecate. But those who are enlightened by the earliest rays of that divinity the sun, the Ethiopians, the Arii, and the Egyptians, who excel in antique lore, all worship me with their ancestral ceremonies and call me by my true name, Queen Isis.
¹⁰

Roman paganism was proud of its willingness to honor the vast array of gods and goddesses as equally authentic expressions of divinity: “The Romans respect the gods of all the others,” affirms Caecilius, “just as their power and authority have reached the compass of the whole world.”
¹¹
But it is also evidence of a movement in the direction of monotheism that was already in progress in the pagan world when it first encountered Judaism and then Christianity. One could readily imagine a convergence of monotheism and polytheism if only the easygoing pagans of antiquity had been allowed to find their own way to the worship of one high god. Indeed, some of the oldest and most civilized traditions of paganism had already arrived at a kind of monotheism of their own.

Philosophers and Jugglers

Yet another voice that could be heard, quite literally, in the marketplace of ancient Rome belonged to the philosopher. Nowadays, philosophy has come to be regarded as an intellectual pastime that has little to do with the practice of religion—and nothing at all to do with real life. But the philosophers of pagan antiquity were the functional equivalent of what we would today call theologians: they pondered the beginning and ending of the world, the nature and destiny of humankind, the identity and will of the divine. For the same reason that some of the ancients found more spiritual meaning in the mystery religions than in the staid ceremonies of the official cults, others placed themselves under the tutelage of philosophers who offered to reveal the arcane secrets of the cosmos.

Philosophy was fully as diverse as any other expression of paganism. Just as one might worship one or another of the many gods and goddesses, one might study and practice the teachings of the Stoics or the Epicureans, the Skeptics or the Cynics, the Peripatetics or the Pythagoreans or the Platonists. And, like the mystery religions, the philosophers offered something that the priests in the official cults ignored—a concern for the happiness and fulfillment of the men and women who placed themselves under their tutelage. “[T]hey specialised in an activity that one could call in modern language pastoral care, life counseling or psychotherapy,” explains historian Hans-Josef Klauck.
¹²

While the
Pontifex Maximus
and the lesser priests and priestesses of the official cults called upon the old gods and goddesses of the Greco-Roman pantheon to preserve the empire, the philosophers were offering advice to ordinary men and women about how to live a decent life. Here is another example of the moral and ethical concerns that were among the core values of classical paganism—the philosophers instructed their followers on “what is honourable and what is shameful, what is just and what is unjust,” according to one ancient orator, “how a man must bear himself in his relations with the gods, with his parents, with his elders, with the laws, with strangers, with those in authority, with friends, with women, with children, with servants.”
¹³

The most accomplished philosophers held forth in the academies, the houses of wealthy patrons or the royal court—King Philip of Macedon set the standard when he engaged Aristotle as the tutor for his son, the future Alexander the Great—but others plied their trade in public, wandering from town to town and collecting the odd coin in an outstretched bowl. Bearded, cloaked in a toga and holding a staff—the standard iconography of a working philosopher—they would deliver their oratory at the gates of a pagan temple, in the public baths or amid the bustle of the marketplace. Not unlike a stand-up comic, a philosopher had to work the crowd and cope with hecklers: “What, is a juggler coming on?” was one common taunt as reported by an ancient source.
¹⁴

Some of the most colorful trappings of paganism were regarded with skepticism and even contempt by the most sophisticated philosophers. The gods and goddesses of myth and legend, so prone to sexual adventure and other human passions, were already something of an embarrassment. So was the belief that the deities routinely revealed themselves to ordinary human beings, a notion that was openly ridiculed by pagan philosophers even before it was lampooned in the Christian Bible in a scene where Paul and Barnabas are mistaken for Mercury and Jupiter by a crowd of benighted pagans.
¹⁵
“Plato complained of Homer’s support for such absurdities,” observes historian Robin Lane Fox, “and was inclined to see them as a particular delusion of women.”
¹⁶

Indeed, philosophy was already moving toward what we would today call ethical monotheism
.
All of the gods, goddesses and godlings of paganism, some philosophers suggested, ought to be understood as fanciful ways of describing the various attributes or manifestations of a single high god—the “Great Ruler of Intelligent Beings,” as Plotinus (c. 205-270) dubs the deity.
¹⁷
“[I]t makes no difference,” insists Celsus, writing in the first century of the Common Era, “whether one calls god Zeus or Adonai or Sabaoth or Ammon such as the Egyptians do.”
¹⁸

Just like Akhenaton, the world’s first monotheist, some polytheists adopted the single brightest object in the sky as an austere and elegant symbol for the supreme divinity—King Helios (“Sun King”) or
Sol Invictus
(“Unconquered Sun”) came to be used in some pagan circles to identify the high god, and figured importantly, as we shall see, in the lives of both Constantine and Julian. “If the sun is the ruler of the other lights of the heavens,” reasoned one ancient philosopher, “the sun must then be the lord and author of all.”
¹⁹
Above all, the pagan moralists insisted that the supreme deity demanded that ordinary men and women strive toward goodness as well as godliness: “Without real moral strength,” insists Plotinus, “
God
is only a word.”
²⁰

The Philosopher and the Magus

One school of philosophy, however, was not content with such abstract and elevated notions. Like the priests of the mystery religions, the practitioners of a school of philosophy that came to be known as Neoplatonism offered something far more thrilling, a potent blend of mystery and philosophy that originated in Alexandria and soon reached Rome. Echoing ideas that were first expressed by Plato in the fourth century B.C.E., the Neoplatonists taught that mortal human beings possessed a divine soul that was capable of achieving union with the “One Supreme Being.”
²¹
But they, too, were syncretists, and they borrowed much of the mysticism and magic that suffused the other mystery religions of Rome.

Along with a single high god, for example, the Neoplatonists believed in the existence of a vast but invisible population of demigods, some good and some evil, a concept borrowed from the elaborate system of angelology and demonology that originated in Persia. They taught that the power of the god on high could be invoked for practical purposes down here on earth by use of “theurgy,” a kind of white magic that was attributed to the Chaldeans of the ancient Near East; indeed, the word “Chaldean” was now a synonym for “magician.” They also engaged in mystical rituals that were designed to send the participants into a state of ecstasy and thus provide them with insights into the secrets of the cosmos or even a glimpse of the divinity.

Neoplatonism, then, engaged in practices that were as eerie as anything offered by the imported mystery religions—a “strange mixture of lofty speculation and superstition,” according to historian Samuel Dill.
²²
Although it was later hailed as “the ‘highest’ and most philosophical variety of paganism,” according to historian Diana Bowder, its rituals can be seen as “really nothing more than an exalted and exotic form of magic.”
²³
And yet, precisely because it catered to the human appetite for mystery and ecstasy, Neoplatonism was a powerful competitor in the pagan world—“a world tantalized by a belief that some men at least had seen God and had found in the vision the sum of human happiness,” as historian K. E. Kirk puts it, “a world aching with the hope that the same vision was attainable by all.”
²⁴

“Neither Jew nor Greek”

When the Roman historian Tacitus (56-c. 120) complains that “[a]ll degraded and shameful practices eventually collect and flourish in Rome,” he is referring to not only the strange kinds of polytheism that came from Egypt and Phrygia and Persia, but also the even stranger kind of monotheism that came from the unruly Jewish province of Judea—the so-called Christians.
²⁵

At first, the followers of Jesus were only one of the many “Judaisms” of the ancient world—the Talmud counts twenty-four Jewish sects and schisms during the period of Roman occupation, most of which are now only historical curiosities. And the same fate might have befallen the first Christians if they had remained a sect within Judaism. But the Christians, still small in number but already diverse in opinion, soon began to fight among themselves; one faction insisted that anyone who wished to embrace the teachings of Jesus must embrace the Jewish faith, too, and the other faction insisted with equal fervor that it was unnecessary to convert to Judaism in order to call oneself a Christian.

The defining moment came when the two factions argued over the fundamental question of whether to require pagan converts to Christianity to undergo the ancient Jewish rite of circumcision and to comply with the strict dietary laws. Such practices had always tended to keep the Chosen People apart from the pagans among whom they lived, which is precisely what they were intended to do, and thus reassured the Roman authorities that Jewish monotheism did not pose a threat to polytheism; after all, who would voluntarily submit to circumcision and forgo the pleasures of the banquet table? Now the followers of Jesus debated the same question among themselves—how could they carry the “good news” about Jesus to the pagans if, at the same time, they were obliged to deliver the bad news about the burdens that Judaism imposed on its converts?

The debate among the first Christians, as reported in the Christian Bible, turns on the old issue of rigorism. James, the brother of Jesus, refuses to sit down at the dining table with non-Jews who do not observe the Jewish dietary laws. Paul, by contrast, regards the rites and rituals of Judaism as an affliction—“Christ,” he argues, “has redeemed us from the curse of the Law”—and he recognizes that the old ways must be discarded if the Christians hope to win converts outside Judaism. Paul prevails over the “Judaizers,” as they came to be called in Christian tradition, and he is set free to preach the new faith without having to explain why a pagan needs to be a good Jew before he can be a good Christian.

Paul was born a Jew, but he revolutionized early Christianity by carrying it far beyond the confines of the Jewish world: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female,” he famously announces, “for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
²⁶
Paul’s missionary travels amount to a grand tour of the eastern Roman empire, and his last stop is the imperial capital. The final destination is crucial and fateful—Paul, who boasts of his Roman citizenship, regards it as his sacred duty to win converts among the pagans in Rome itself.

“As you have testified of me in Jerusalem,” God is shown to instruct Paul, “so must you bear witness also at Rome.”
²⁷

Paul and his fellow missionaries discovered that Rome’s willingness to tolerate and even embrace strange new gods and goddesses, an old and honorable tradition in paganism, did not extend to the Only True God. Indeed, pagan Rome was offended by the Christian claim that the deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon were not merely inferior to the Christian god, not merely false gods, as the Jews claimed, but demons in disguise: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice,” insists Paul, “they sacrifice to devils.”
²⁸
Thus provoked by the uncompromising zeal of the Soldiers of Christ, according to Christian tradition, the Roman authorities arrested Paul and sentenced him to death during the reign of the emperor Nero. Ironically, one of the privileges that Paul enjoyed as a Roman citizen was immunity from crucifixion; therefore, he was beheaded.

While Rome Burned

Jesus and his followers went largely unnoticed by the ancient chroniclers who were at work in pagan Rome during the period that is described in such detail in the Christian Bible. Josephus, for example, makes only a passing reference to “Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man,” and the authenticity of even these few words has been the subject of hot debate among scholars for several centuries. Suetonius (c. 69-c. 122), the Roman biographer and historian, was so unfamiliar with the Christians that he seems to have been under the impression that Jesus himself was living in Rome and stirring up trouble in the Jewish neighborhoods in the middle of the first century C.E.