The savior who failed
By Leonard Hitchcock
He was born into a distinguished Roman family — so distinguished that several of his not-too-distant relatives were emperors. His own life was far from easy. His father was killed by one of those emperors as part of a purge of potential rivals for the purple robe, and he and his brothers were raised in exile. Eventually both of those brothers were suspected of aspirations to the imperial throne and were murdered as well.
As a youth he was instructed in the state-decreed religion, undergoing years of tutoring in its doctrines and the proper performance of its required ceremonies. But it was later revealed that he had, even during those years, been drawn to another religion, one that was outlawed by an imperial decree. Secretly, he read the sacred texts of that faith, and managed to meet with, and learn from, some of its adherents. His commitment to that faith deepened but he could not publicly avow it, for those who did so were persecuted by the Roman courts. As a member of a noble family, his punishment for practicing the forbidden faith would be especially severe.
Surprisingly, the affairs of the empire unfolded in such a way that this young man was recalled from exile and given a position in the Roman army. He excelled as a military leader and eventually rose to such popularity that the troops under his command declared him to be their Caesar and urged him to seek to be the Augustus, i.e. the emperor himself. A war for control of the empire loomed when, suddenly, the existing emperor (he who had murdered our young man’s father and brothers) died and willed his crown to the cousin he had exiled. Suddenly, our outcast was the ruler of the empire and no longer needed to hide his religious commitments. He soon issued an edict which ended the persecution of his fellow believers by requiring the toleration of all religious beliefs and practices.
The young man of whom I’ve been speaking was named Julian, and he was a half-nephew of the Emperor Constantine. The emperor who exiled Julian and killed his brothers was one of Constantine’s sons, Constantius II. The religion in which Julian had been reared was Christianity. The faith to which Julian had been attracted as a youth was paganism. And the tolerance that Julian restored to the empire upon becoming Augustus was tolerance of pagan worship.
Remember that Constantine, after his famous conversion to Christianity, halted his predecessors’ persecution of Christians with an edict proclaiming the freedom of all Roman citizens, including Christians, to worship as they saw fit. During his thirty-year reign, he clearly favored Christianity, but did little to inhibit paganism. The vast majority of his subjects were, after all, pagans.
The Christianity that Constantine oversaw was, however, a constant disturber of the Pax Romana that the emperor sought to establish. Christians bickered with one another over doctrinal issues and riots and urban warfare between congregations occurred all over the empire. It was the great age of “heresies,” (def.: if your opinions regarding the nature of God and the proper way to worship Him differ from mine, yours are heretical). Constantine tried to resolve the famous Arian controversy (Arianism is essentially the view that Jesus was the son of God, and divine, but not God himself) and failed. Scholars now estimate that the number of Christians killed by other Christians due to doctrinal squabbles during this period exceeds the number of Christians killed during all the Roman persecutions prior to Constantine’s reign.
Constantine’s sons and heirs, who were all Christians, eventually revoked the imperial tolerance of paganism. Constantine died in 337; in 341 appeared the first imperial edict that criminalized pagan rites and rituals. That ushered in centuries of persecution, interrupted only by the brief reign of Julian. Pagan temples were dismantled and their holy objects desecrated and destroyed. Pagans who were discovered practicing their rituals were arrested and often tortured, burned, flayed, torn asunder by beasts or crucified.
The savagery of the persecution made manifest a characteristic of Christianity that had shocked pagans from the beginning: its intolerance of other beliefs. Pagan gods, in all their multiplicity, got along with one another. Their human devotees were largely unconcerned with the gods’ comparative power or status. The Christian god, on the other hand, was a jealous god (Exodus 20: 1-5). Christians believed that the pagan gods were not just false, but demonic. Those gods (and, if necessary, their adherents), had to be exterminated.
The emperor Julian ruled for a mere 18 months. His efforts to restore paganism’s tradition of religious tolerance were cut short by his battlefield death while protecting the empire’s borders against the encroaching Persians. His determination to thwart the triumph of Christianity seems, now, to have been quixotic and hopeless. The emperors who followed him renewed the persecution of paganism and, within a few centuries, had largely succeeded in crushing it. To them we owe the fact that western civilization’s religious attitudes have been shaped by the Christian tradition of bigotry and sectarian squabbling, rather than the tolerance and open-mindedness of paganism.
Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is a professor emeritus at Idaho State University.
Wow. Over the top comes first to mind. A millennium and a half of human history and human nature condensed into the eulogy of a forgotten dead emperor of a failed dead empire. All of our most cherished traditions negated with a single swipe of the pen. Such a prodigious mind! Do you do future as well?
Great, let’s badmouth Christianity one more time. That’ll solve all our problems. And conveniently say nothing about bigotry and sectarian squabbling in Islam and a couple of other religions I can think of, while you’re at it.
Open-mindedness of paganism? What, you mean like human sacrifice?
I think there are a lot of people who try to undermine Christianity and religion in general these days so they don’t have to feel guilty about the bad things they do. Go ahead and lie a little, cheat a little, talk crap behind people’s backs, take advantage when you can, sleep around, even murder if you can, just don’t get caught. Then ease your conscience because you think you can debunk Christianity with your high and mighty science and scholarly studies.
Go ahead and overlook the fact that while in the past much bad was done in the name of Christianity, there has also been a world of good done, too.
Go ahead and overlook the fact that if you throw out the Judeo-Christian values our society is based on, you’ll either end up with anarchy or a police state.
It is interesting to surmise that religion itself, whatever brand one happens to be imbibing in this week, is a real social cohesive element. That controversy over
religous doctrine is more a matter of social
domination and has very little to do with basic doctrine. By the time of Constantine
the Roman world was already in a state of decline. Constantine’s decision to make Christianity the religion of the Empire was
just as much a political one as a religious one.
Soldiers, many of whom by this time were not Romans at all, by comprised all the different nationalities and religions of the empire. The thing that characterized paganism was its diversity. Like Charlemagne’s rule it was just a good sound idea for the benefit of keeping your head to become a Christian, thus making more true the slogan,”when in Rome, do as the Roman.
But Christianity itself was never devorced from paganism or tribalism. Roman catholicismgood example of Hellenistic and Roman mythology mosy notably the god-man theories. But Christianity offered a new twist that the common everyday Joe could sink his teeth into,’life-everlating.” Paganism of both the Romans and the Greeks were hard pressed to come up with a better sales option. But that did not mean they gave up the
symbols of the Roman religion. They merely changed the subjects. The Virgin Mother was now a substitute for Venus and Aphrodite. The saints and the angel Gabriel and Michael and all the rest were good for the legions. The Celts and the Nordic’s had their favorite in St george the Dragon fighter..
A favorite Christian devise was that the enemy is always “of the devil.” So on the battlefield or even while raiding a defenseless village and slaughtering helpless women and children the real grounds of moral justification was that you were not killing people at all, you were killing the devil.as you pointed ou the demonic element here in your artice. Mr. Hitchcock.
While many people might think that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is the best band in town these days–
I am afraid they can’t hold a candle to “Soul Children of Chicago,” when it comes to music
that “moves the soul.” But like anything else, “it is all a matter of taste.”
It’s a choir, no band. At least I can make out the words they sing. Watched the Kennedy Center Honors recently and the group they honored, screamed obscenities as lyrics as best I could deduce. Best in town is not a compliment like it used to be, either that or the town isn’t that great either.
And the “Soul children “is a choir, no band.
A Baptist choir of the most accomplished vocalists in the world. When they sing “Joy to the World” it is an effort of body, soul, and mind, that makes your Tabernacle Choir nothing but a third rate show to say the least
by comparison.
And there is no musical choir accomplishment in the entire world that can even hold a candle
to the “Hallelujah chorus’these children have accomplished.. If you have a soul at all you will emerge from the experience totally shaken.
And I know that must blow your little racist mind as you wallow in sub-culture of black inferiority. This is just another example of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. There is nothing I like more than to show you an utter idiot and fool Texan. The only problem is you make it so easy.
I think Ranger must be eating too much “soul” food!
CR
Is it a very big risk to your health when you do that?
I think it a shame this article died.
It has good potential. Most likely the town
has gotten gun shy about religion as a topic of discussion for fear that anybody talking religion will automatically be branded a bigot.
Oh how narrow the minds grow!!!!
We can tolerate the bigots, even the narrow-minded – it’s the nut cases that are hard to abide.