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A review by mburnamfink
Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity by James J. O'Donnell
4.0
Give me that old time religion! The kind with bloody sacrifice, sacred groves, portents and oracles. By Jove! And Athena, and Serapis, and Ba'al, give me that old time religion.
In Pagans, O'Donnell tackles the question of what happened to the traditional religion of the Mediterranean. How, in the 4th century, did the rites of the old gods up and vanish? The mundane argument is pretty simple. The Emperor Diocletian (284-305) massively reformed the civil service, centralizing power and finances at the expense of local elites. Money, which used to support local civic rites across the Empire, was distributed from Constantinople to new Christian leaders via the mechanism of the military and the Church.
That, of course, is a paltry explanation. Belief that exists only in the presence of cash subsidies is a paltry belief indeed. But that may have been enough. O'Donnell argues that the old religions were transactional. A sacrifice to a god was the human side of a deal, the divine side of which was victory in battle, prosperity in trade, or healthy children. Gods which lost the support of human emperors were no longer worthy of emulation by the masses. 4th century Christians had a number of rhetorical and technological advantages, as their doctrine combined the sophisticated philosophy of the neoplatonists, a strong tradition of public oratory and writing, and the political power of the assembled congregation (Oh, and the True Gospel of Christ's Love). Against this, the old religion had the obscurity of signs and portents, the spectacle of rite and sacrifice, and Bronze Age traditions that seemed sclerotic and obsolete.
O'Donnell writes clearly for the new reader, while placing this work in an ongoing scholarly dialog about the Classics that I don't know enough about to criticize. His most original argument is that pagans as such did not exist. Augustus would never have used the word to describe his beliefs. Rather, paganism was constructed as an opponent by the early Church, a specific kind of rhetorical move to distinguish 'soldiers of Christ' from the ignorant superstitions of the countryside, which is the root word of 'pagan'. Similarly, one should not speak of belief in Jupiter, but rather an assemblage of practices and images relating specific human beings to a common vision of a 'heavenly father'. There's a frustrating skipping around in the arguments and primary sources. These are very much O'Donnell's interpretations, and I'm not convinced they are the interpretations. Still, this is an interesting book for a modern atheist who loves Rome, but knows relatively little about the end of the Empire.
In Pagans, O'Donnell tackles the question of what happened to the traditional religion of the Mediterranean. How, in the 4th century, did the rites of the old gods up and vanish? The mundane argument is pretty simple. The Emperor Diocletian (284-305) massively reformed the civil service, centralizing power and finances at the expense of local elites. Money, which used to support local civic rites across the Empire, was distributed from Constantinople to new Christian leaders via the mechanism of the military and the Church.
That, of course, is a paltry explanation. Belief that exists only in the presence of cash subsidies is a paltry belief indeed. But that may have been enough. O'Donnell argues that the old religions were transactional. A sacrifice to a god was the human side of a deal, the divine side of which was victory in battle, prosperity in trade, or healthy children. Gods which lost the support of human emperors were no longer worthy of emulation by the masses. 4th century Christians had a number of rhetorical and technological advantages, as their doctrine combined the sophisticated philosophy of the neoplatonists, a strong tradition of public oratory and writing, and the political power of the assembled congregation (Oh, and the True Gospel of Christ's Love). Against this, the old religion had the obscurity of signs and portents, the spectacle of rite and sacrifice, and Bronze Age traditions that seemed sclerotic and obsolete.
O'Donnell writes clearly for the new reader, while placing this work in an ongoing scholarly dialog about the Classics that I don't know enough about to criticize. His most original argument is that pagans as such did not exist. Augustus would never have used the word to describe his beliefs. Rather, paganism was constructed as an opponent by the early Church, a specific kind of rhetorical move to distinguish 'soldiers of Christ' from the ignorant superstitions of the countryside, which is the root word of 'pagan'. Similarly, one should not speak of belief in Jupiter, but rather an assemblage of practices and images relating specific human beings to a common vision of a 'heavenly father'. There's a frustrating skipping around in the arguments and primary sources. These are very much O'Donnell's interpretations, and I'm not convinced they are the interpretations. Still, this is an interesting book for a modern atheist who loves Rome, but knows relatively little about the end of the Empire.