Post: #26

Quote:The Romans were never much of a spiritual people to begin with. They adopted the Greek religion and then later on Christianity. There was always a void there. Constantine happened to be ultra brutal but then again so was nearly every successful Roman Emperor.

It seems to me that the Romans were very spiritual and religious, it's just that they did not think of religion as a uniquely Roman heritage or a particularly important part of their ethnic identity the way subsequent civilizations (Christian and Islamic) did.

Post: #27

(02-28-2016 07:19 PM)Samseau Wrote:  Saga: Good history. You present convincing counter-arguments that can only be settled with more research and I will leave the issue open to the reader to decide. However, I do take some issues:

And I return the compliment. I'll be reading more on it myself because I should have a stronger grasp of it. Of course the fall of Rome doesn't make for the sunniest of reading material, but I should be better versed in it anyway, especially considering all that's going on.

Quote:This simply isn't true, pagans wiped each other out and their beliefs all the time. The Romans in particular razed and salted the Carthaginians and Jews and whatever religion they had was utterly decimated. The Jews managed to survive but only barely. They were taxed for almost 400 years after Jewish-Roman wars as punishment. This is one of the reasons Talmudic Jews became so bitter towards Christians, as they saw Jewish converts to Christianity as those who were defecting against their race.

Their wartime harshness was out of a national and not religious enmity. The Punic religion continued after the fall of Carthage: there was a temple to the Carthaginian goddess Tanit in Dougga, a Roman city in North Africa. Baal, the main god of Carthage, was worshiped under Roman rule (reportedly even in Italy), and we have religious objects belonging to that cult dated to around a century after Carthage was conquered. This was typical of their adaptive approach towards religion: when they encountered new gods dwelling in formerly-foreign lands, they thought it only proper to join in honoring them.

Yes, the Romans and Jews had a tempestuous relationship at times, but on the main it wasn't so bad. From John Scheid's "An Introduction to Roman Religion":

Jewish communities had been established in Rome ever since the second century BC and, despite the terrible upheaval of revolts in the first and second centuries AD, they continued to flourish throughout the Empire, both in Rome and elsewhere. Christian communities, which were distinguished hardly at all from the Jews until the second century, were also firmly planted in towns throughout the Empire. Despite the persecutions that struck them from time to time, particularly from the mid-third century on, long periods of relative calm allowed them to practise their religion freely, so long as it gave rise to no public disturbances. That liberty was even greater at the domestic level.

At least as I understand them (which, again, isn't saying much), the Jewish Wars were largely because the Zealots didn't want to accept Roman rule, not because the Jewish religion was being suppressed. There's also some debate as to whether Titus deliberately destroyed the Second Temple...Josephus insists that he didn't and that the burning was accidental, although he undoubtedly has a pro-Roman bias so I can understand if people take that with skepticism. We do know the Romans weren't shy about pillaging the city, but that's how they always were. Whichever way it happened, it clearly wasn't a war initiated by Rome to squelch out the Jewish religion, nor did they attempt to afterwards...there's no evidence of any desire to do so.

The clearly unjust post-rebellion tax imposed on the practice of the Jewish religion, however, was simple vindictiveness, and you're right to point that out. Possibly some small consolation is that it was the last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian, who most likely abolished it.

Quote:The Romans were never much of a spiritual people to begin with. They adopted the Greek religion and then later on Christianity. There was always a void there. Constantine happened to be ultra brutal but then again so was nearly every successful Roman Emperor.

Where Greek religion ends and Roman religion begins is very complicated territory. From the little I know, Greek deities and practices were adopted into Roman religion but despite many similarities the two had important differences. The worship of the Lares and Penates (possibly the most common form of Roman worship by daily frequency) as well as Janus were uniquely Roman with no equivalent in the Greek tradition, festivals would be quite different and depend on locality (ie the Panathenea would obviously only be found in Athens and so on) and many other differences besides. But this connection wasn't limited to religion, Hellenistic influence on all aspects of Roman life was strong: the Greek language was even permitted for official use in the Roman Senate (which would be like the US Congress conducting official business in French).

However, I don't think this influence implies a lack of spirituality, for most of their history the people of Rome seem to have been very ritually observant...Pompeii is full of devotional artifacts, reminders of the gods and opportunities for prayer were constant. Even the fire of the household hearth was regarded as an extension of Vesta, for instance. In fact, the alacrity with which they adopted new gods can very well be taken as evidence of spiritual enthusiasm and not apathy. It's true there was a decrease in religious devotion during the late empire, sure, but so much of Roman society was in crisis at that point. Using that to measure how strongly Romans felt about their gods is like using modern-day Britain to measure the importance of Christianity to the country...looking at it now in a distinctly irreligious period (also, one might say, in the midst of cultural and social crises) would ignore how pivotal Christianity was to the people of Britain for so many centuries.

I'd agree that most emperors were brutal when their position demanded it. However, some of the suppression that Constantine started (closing pagan temples and prohibiting the building of new ones, stamping out Arianism and other dissident Christian theologies) simply weren't necessary to the maintenance of the empire, and even worse they soon grew into a total intolerance under his successors. Such steps, made a permanent part of Christian Rome and Byzantium, were only very rarely taken by pagan authorities, and only perhaps once (Diocletian's persecution) was it with anything approaching a similar level of aggression, and even then it was uneven across the empire.

Quote:Right, but it's not like any of his soldiers understood or had faith in such a symbol. Constantine could have easily chosen a God of war or something else to that effect that his soldiers believed in. And yet the version reportedly given by Constantine says that the symbol was made visible not only to himself, but all of his soldiers on a bright sunny day. It makes sense if Constantine used the symbol because his soldiers saw and believed, but it doesn't make sense if Constantine used an obscure symbol none of his soldiers knew or believed in.

Again, you can say he got lucky and just happened to win with the symbol, but all in all it was a very strange thing for an army general to pick a religious symbol completely foreign to his troops and ask them to rally around it. It doesn't matter how close he was to his mother, for his soldiers to have no reason to believe and yet have Constantine march them under the Chi-Rho symbol would be foolish by any rational consideration.

You bring up a reasonable point in the motivation of his men. However let's not forget that sun deities were widely popular among the legions at the time (Sol Invictus and Mithras among them), and it's very possible they identified the god championed by Constantine with any number of these, especially given the source of Constantine's claimed vision (there seems to have been some overlap between Roman representations of Sol Invictus and Jesus). It's also feasible that they saw the new symbol as one associated with Constantine himself, to whom they must have been quite loyal. If you believe it a miraculous event, I don't intend to question that, my only point is that profane facts can adequately explain his victory, and that even less likely triumphs are found throughout ancient history.

Quote:Come on, you expect me to believe that? At least some of them desired that level of power, such as Ares.

Ares or Mars was one of many deities to whom people could choose to worship or not worship depending on the person and situation. Roman gods were worshiped according to context and familial, professional, regional and/or individual inclination. If someone started learning a trade, Minerva would probably become more important to him as the patron goddess of artisans; if a man was hoping to find a good wife, he might make offerings to Juno or Venus; a sailor would have reason to venerate Neptune. And if someone from a foreign land wanted to worship their own gods in their own manner, it was almost never an issue, and their Roman neighbors would probably join in (especially if there was a party involved). It was a highly pluralistic, non-dogmatic, decentralized religion.

Diffuse beliefs and practices result in diffused religious structures. Pagan religious authority belonged as much to the pater familias (the man of the house was the designated leader of all household rituals, which is probably where most worship took place for most people) as to the pater patriae. Paganism didn't even possess the language (the very word and concept of "heresy" has its origins in Christianity and as far as I know it had no real equivalent in paganism) necessary for the centralization of religious control and prohibition of all other faiths that developed in the church less than a century after Constantine's reign.

Of course, it can be said that this reflects on how Christianity was used, not the Christian faith itself, and that Christian institutions have changed greatly since then...although that's probably another subject entirely.

Post: #28

I don't have specific books to recommend although I've read Gibbon and he is known for his anti-Christian bias in his otherwise excellent work.

Slightly out of topic but nobody raised the demographic argument here. You probably know that Romans had a demographic slump sometime after the Empire was instituted - slow at first then alarming to contemporary writers. Abortion and exposition of unwanted children was common. Poor living conditions in cities meant that there needed to be a constant influx of outsiders to maintain the cities' population. Just like today, pagans seemed to think that children were a burden keeping them from enjoying life.
Against this pattern, early Christians were keen to make and keep their children, even adopting exposed ones out of charity. After a few generations these contrasting behaviours should have and probably did alter the balance of power between pagans and Christians. You can see the same pattern at work in Europe today but towards Islam (and Trad Christianity as well).

Post: #29

Quote:Their wartime harshness was out of a national and not religious enmity.

Not so sure about that. There was no clear distinction between Church and State like there is today. The ancients saw a people and their Gods as one and the same.

Quote:Baal, the main god of Carthage, was worshiped under Roman rule (reportedly even in Italy), and we have religious objects belonging to that cult dated to around a century after Carthage was conquered. This was typical of their adaptive approach towards religion: when they encountered new gods dwelling in formerly-foreign lands, they thought it only proper to join in honoring them.

Come on man, the amount of people who worshipped Baal after the destruction of Carthage must have been an extreme minority. I'll agree that the Christian persecutions of the pagans was more complete and total, but to say the pagans never persecuted each other and their religions to an extreme degree is not true. They did horribly violent things to one another, at least under Christianity a man could convert and avoid persecution. Under the pagans if you were seen as part of a people and their Gods, you couldn't expect mercy. At best your life would be spared as a slave.

Quote:However, I don't think this influence implies a lack of spirituality, for most of their history the people of Rome seem to have been very ritually observant...Pompeii is full of devotional artifacts, reminders of the gods and opportunities for prayer were constant.

Their rituals came from the people they conquered.

Quote:In fact, the alacrity with which they adopted new gods can very well be taken as evidence of spiritual enthusiasm and not apathy.

Maybe, or it just shows they saw religion as a fun thing to do with their spare time and didn't really care about the Gods over their State.

Quote:It's true there was a decrease in religious devotion during the late empire, sure, but so much of Roman society was in crisis at that point.

I'm talking about the original Romans, who seemed to be quite lacking in the spirituality department.

Quote:You bring up a reasonable point in the motivation of his men. However let's not forget that sun deities were widely popular among the legions at the time (Sol Invictus and Mithras among them), and it's very possible they identified the god championed by Constantine with any number of these, especially given the source of Constantine's claimed vision (there seems to have been some overlap between Roman representations of Sol Invictus and Jesus). It's also feasible that they saw the new symbol as one associated with Constantine himself, to whom they must have been quite loyal. If you believe it a miraculous event, I don't intend to question that, my only point is that profane facts can adequately explain his victory, and that even less likely triumphs are found throughout ancient history.

These "profane facts" are conjecture and make less sense than the miracle explanation. None of those guys had any clue what XP meant and you're trying to guess what they were thinking at the time, which is not even close to a profane fact.

If they were unquestioningly loyal to Constantine and put the XP on themselves despite not caring or know what it meant, that is quite reasonable but it does not explain why Constantine decided to do it. Like I've said since many times in this thread: there was absolutely nothing for him to gain by going with the Christ compared to any other God.

Quote:Ares or Mars was one of many deities to whom people could choose to worship or not worship depending on the person and situation. Roman gods were worshiped according to context and familial, professional, regional and/or individual inclination. If someone started learning a trade, Minerva would probably become more important to him as the patron goddess of artisans; if a man was hoping to find a good wife, he might make offerings to Juno or Venus; a sailor would have reason to venerate Neptune. And if someone from a foreign land wanted to worship their own gods in their own manner, it was almost never an issue, and their Roman neighbors would probably join in (especially if there was a party involved). It was a highly pluralistic, non-dogmatic, decentralized religion.

All of this shows that religion, for the average Roman, was just a bunch of fads and whims of their practitioners. It wasn't any more spiritual or religious than today's "New-Age" California hippies.

Post: #30

(03-03-2016 12:32 PM)Samseau Wrote:  Not so sure about that. There was no clear distinction between Church and State like there is today. The ancients saw a people and their Gods as one and the same.

But that matters little when the pagan 'church' had no interest in imposing orthodoxy (if it can even be called that) on anyone, and had no theological justification or motivation for doing so...someone praying to Sekhmet didn't stop anyone from praying to Venus across the street, so they had no reason to care, much less interfere.

Further, a people and their gods weren't set in stone. Romans adopted non-Roman gods and non-Romans adopted Roman gods. Polytheistic paradigms across the world are able to do this without internal contradiction.

Quote:Come on man, the amount of people who worshipped Baal after the destruction of Carthage must have been an extreme minority. I'll agree that the Christian persecutions of the pagans was more complete and total, but to say the pagans never persecuted each other and their religions to an extreme degree is not true. They did horribly violent things to one another, at least under Christianity a man could convert and avoid persecution. Under the pagans if you were seen as part of a people and their Gods, you couldn't expect mercy. At best your life would be spared as a slave.

Why do you assume the existence of a persecution that never happened? We know Carthaginian gods were worshiped under Roman authority (sometimes in temples built in Roman style in Roman cities) with zero evidence of attempts to suppress it. I'm not aware of any Roman writers even recommending that the state do so. The policy, as almost everywhere, was one of uncompromising political hegemony and broad religious toleration.

Non-Romans trying to assimilate into Roman life could worship only the Roman pantheon if they wished (and thereby "convert" if you want to call it that, though polytheism lacks the strict dichotomy this term implies), but there was no spiritual dilemma in choosing one pantheon over the other, and they could and did overlap without trouble.

Quote:Their rituals came from the people they conquered.

Not the most common household rituals which were arguably the most important for the common family. Others may have been adopted, but again this is evidence of toleration and open-mindedness, which contradicts your earlier claims of a supposed (and non-existent) Roman bigotry against non-Roman religions.

Quote:Maybe, or it just shows they saw religion as a fun thing to do with their spare time and didn't really care about the Gods over their State.

A thriving religious tradition will always involve fun things to do in one's spare time...medieval Christianity was replete with saint's days greatly enjoyed by all social classes and jealously guarded against the encroachments of the industrial calendar. However that is not the end of it. Roman religion found expression in the neighborhood party, yes, but no less in the kitchen, the farm, the library, the school, the legionary camp, the Senate House, the trireme, the oracles consulted for counsel in times of uncertainty, the craftsman's workshop, the shrines along the roads crisscrossing the empire and everywhere in between. Like I said, it was an intensely, profoundly religious society.

If that fails to convince you, just read (as merely two of many examples) the writings of Cicero and Marcus Aurelius on the subject. They, two of the greatest minds ever produced by Rome, took the gods quite seriously. This wasn't just something for fun, it defined their entire relationship with the world around them.

Quote:These "profane facts" are conjecture and make less sense than the miracle explanation. None of those guys had any clue what XP meant and you're trying to guess what they were thinking at the time, which is not even close to a profane fact.

If they were unquestioningly loyal to Constantine and put the XP on themselves despite not caring or know what it meant, that is quite reasonable but it does not explain why Constantine decided to do it. Like I've said since many times in this thread: there was absolutely nothing for him to gain by going with the Christ compared to any other God.

Well we've discussed Constantine's family and upbringing as a source of his attraction to Christianity, and it's an influence that Christians themselves accept and in fact celebrate by regarding his mother as a saint. However at some point, insisting upon a miraculous explanation comes down to faith, which is about belief and therefore personal desire and is something we naturally won't see eye to eye on (just as I imagine you would reject my opinion that the Oracle of Delphi did in fact provide divine inspiration to the Athenians at Salamis). Nothing wrong with that, we can agree to disagree here.

But in the bigger picture, there were several objective advantages to a religion that was predisposed to a centralized hierarchy (under the authority of Constantine), a codified and compulsory dogma (compiled and enforced under the authority of, again, Constantine) and a millenarian ideology.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting he was a charlatan...I think Constantine believed in Christianity, and I think his pursuit of this belief (and that of his successors) led to the destruction of central western traditions that the west is worse for lacking. And I'm not ruing the appearance of Christianity, either, only saying that if Christianity was to rise, the far better result would have been something similar to Buddhism's place in China and Japan...a large and important influence, but one that coexists in relative harmony alongside other older religious traditions. Evidently, early Christianity was too zealous for this scenario, but looking forward, I think that if there is to be a new renaissance of western civilization sometime in the future, it will likely include both Christians and people interested in following revitalized pagan practices...hopefully working together civilly for their common inheritance. The ancient followers of Constantine and Julian may have been at odds, but the heirs of Constantine and the heirs of Julian need not be today. Perhaps I'm getting off topic now, though.

Quote:All of this shows that religion, for the average Roman, was just a bunch of fads and whims of their practitioners. It wasn't any more spiritual or religious than today's "New-Age" California hippies.

If that's the case, why do you suppose the Christian church a millennium later decided to essentially plagiarize these supposed "fads and whims" in order to patch together a more compelling theology?

But of course your characterization is mistaken. A religious tradition that endured over 1000 years of tremendous political, technological, social and finally religious upheaval cannot be labeled a "fad". Roman paganism, like most other polytheisms, was based on a deep veneration of ancestry, a firm adherence to ancient tradition, a respect for the authority of the family and state, robust philosophical inquiry (philosophy so profound that Christian thinkers have constantly drawn from it). However unfavorably you may look upon it, nothing could be further from modern "New Age" spectacles, that much is abundantly clear.