Episode 10 – Crushing The Pagans

• Ambrose had Theodosius so whipped that he was able to publicly declare that the emperor had recognised the moral supremacy of the church over the actions of an emperor.
• It’s from this point onwards that the church decides it has the power to make and break emperors.
• It was soon after the incident in 390 that Ambrose forced Theodosius embark on a massive programme suppressing paganism.
• But maybe it wasn’t only Ambrose.
• Another theory is that it was the work of a guy called Flavius Rufinus.
• Rufinus’ official title in Milan had been magister officiorum, `head of the offices’, a powerful position in the court.
• Rufinus is known to have been fanatical in his Christian belief and determined to take one of the top posts in the eastern administration.
• This meant ousting Tatianus, the praetorian prefect, who was a pagan.
• So maybe the harsh laws of 391 to 392 against paganism might be related to the power struggle, those of 391 having been passed when Theodosius was on the way back to the capital with Rufinus.
• In the summer of 392, Tatianus was deposed and Rufinus, who inherited his post as praetorian prefect of the east, issued a wide-ranging law against paganism.
• Sacrificing was forbidden, as it had been before, but now entry to pagan shrines was banned as well.
• Which brings us back to the Theodosian decrees againt paganism.
• The punishment for worshipping pagan images was the forfeiture of your house.
• The punishment for sacrificing in temples or shrines was a fine of twenty-five pounds, 11 kgs, of gold.
• Which is a lot of fucking gold.
• And the oppression of the pagans started to spread across the empire.
• In the year 391 in Alexandria “busts of Serapis which stood in the walls, vestibules, doorways and windows of every house were all torn out and annihilated…, and in their place the sign of the Lord’s cross was painted in the doorways, vestibules, windows and walls, and on pillars.
• In 392, he authorized the destruction of many pagan temples throughout the empire.
• Including the temple of Serapis in Alexandria, or the Serapeum.
• This building was so fabulous that writers in the ancient world struggled to find ways to convey its beauty.
• the historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote: ‘Its splendour is such that mere words can only do it an injustice,’ Another writer thought, ‘one of the most unique and uncommon sights in the world.
• For nowhere else on earth can one find such a building.’ Another called it ‘the most magnificent building in the whole world’.
• One day, early in AD 392, a large crowd of Christians started to mass outside the temple, with Theophilus, the Bishop of Alexandria, at its head.
• Then the crowd surged up the steps and burst into the most beautiful building in the world.
• And then they began to destroy it.
• Theophilus’s followers began to tear at the famous artworks, the lifelike statues and the gold-plated walls.
• But they hesitated when they came to the massive statue of the god: rumour had it that if Serapis was harmed then the sky would fall in.
• Theophilus ordered a soldier to take his axe and hit it.
• The soldier struck Serapis’s face with a double-headed axe.
• the statue shattered.
• The Christians surged round to complete the job.
• Serapis’s head was wrenched from its neck; the feet and hands were chopped off with axes, dragged apart with ropes, then, for good measure, burned.
• Any activity associated with pagan rites was suppressed and any symbol of paganism was banned.
• Officials could even enter homes in search of offensive material.
• There was really no precedent for this kind of sweeping law.
• To find an equivalent one would have to go back to midfourteenth century BCE Egypt when the pharaoh Akhenaten was banning all rivals to his god Aten.
• Akhenaten’s campaign collapsed with his death.
• Theodosius’ proved permanent.
• Archaeological research confirms that the temples in the Roman forum were still being restored in the 380s.
• By the 390s, on the other hand, Jerome, the protégé of Pope Damasus, was reporting that `the gilded Capitol falls into disrepair, dust and cobwebs cover all Rome’s temples …
• The city shakes on its foundations, and a stream of people hurries, past half-fallen shrines, to the tombs of the martyrs.’ Jerome approvingly recorded the sacking of a temple of Mithras indeed excavations under the church of St Prisca on the Aventine Hill have uncovered a ruined Mithraeum, in a building built by the Emperor Trajan, on which the church was later built.
• The destruction of temples to Mithras is well documented – with their initiation rites, internal hierarchies and welcoming of free citizen, slave and freedman, they appear to have been rivals to the Christian communities.
• The Olympic Games – inaugurated in the eighth century BC – were held for the last time in 393, and it is believed that Theodosius banned them.
• In Egypt, the use of hieroglyphics had survived through centuries of Greek and Roman rule: the very last date from 394 and it was to be over fourteen centuries before anyone could again read them.
• Porphyry, the bishop of Gaza, visited the imperial court in 400 and managed to persuade the emperor Arcadius to provide him with troops to sack the main temple in the city.
• As the temple burned, neighbouring homes were raided for books and `idols’ that were either burned or thrown into the public latrines.
• And so here’s the point.
• Christianity didn’t gently make itself the favourite religion of the Roman Empire.
• The Romans were forced to become Christians by a series of brutal and intolerant Christian emperors and bishops.
• As Diarmin McCulloch wrote in his book “A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years”: “For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes.
• In 80 years after Constantine’s Edict of Toleration, when Christianity first became legal, it had managed to effectively crush the thousand year old traditional religions of the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Syrians, etc.
• Not with “love and peace” and “love thy neighbour”, but by violence and force.
• Theodosius died, after suffering from a disease involving severe edema, in Milan on 17 January 395.