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The creation of perennialism 2,000 years ago

Today I recorded a podcast for Rationally Speaking. Julia Galef wanted to talk to me about my recent post, Stuff I Was Wrong About!. It was a long discussion, and I don’t know what will go into the final edit. But we did touch on this point from my post:

…I believe that some sort of complex ethical religious system was going to become dominant in the Roman Empire at some point. If Arbogast had won the Battle of Frigidus I think ultimately Christianity would still have become dominant within the empire (see the resistance to Buddhism in Tibet to envision a possible scenario).

The context here is that there is a tradition with the historiography which sees Theodosius the Great’s conquest of the Western Roman Empire from the usurper Eugenius, who was a puppet of the Frankish general Arbogast, as the final victory of Christianity as the state religion over the customary pagan cults. Though non-Christians, or people with strong non-Christian religious sympathies, were persistent as public figures in the Roman world for decades, the last hope for state paganism seems to have ended with Theodosius’ victory.

There are nuances and details here. Alan Cameron presents a mildly revisionist take in The Last Pagans of Rome, arguing that state paganism was in sharp decline after the withdrawal of public subsidies decades before Theodosius’ victory. But that does not impact my general argument. The emergence of Julian the Apostate as emperor heading a counter-Christian movement in the early 360s, and varying degrees of toleration of non-Christian cults in the decades after, tells us that the rise of Christianity as the Roman state religion was a gradual affair that took decades.

Many people perceive that Constantine’s patronage of the Christian religion in the early 4th-century as analogous to Henry VIII changing the English Church from the Catholic to the Protestant camp.* But this is not so. Though Constantine favored Christians, the ruling class of the Roman state remained predominantly pagan for decades.

There was no break with the pagan past. But a gradual evolution. Even though the Roman Empire had been ruled by Christian emperors for nearly two centuries, Anastasius I was still deified upon his death. Presumably, this was a customary honor which persisted, even though by the early 6th-century everyone understood this was a legacy of pagan emperor-cult.

With the gradual withdrawal of paganism’s hold on the landed aristocracy, the old cults declined as features of public culture due to lack of patronage. And, the eventual extinction of the tradition of philosophy also resulted in the intellectual death of elite paganism. By the early Dark Ages, paganism was associated with rustics and marginal peoples. Even if radical Protestants are correct that Europe’s people remained predominantly pagan their primitive beliefs and practices until the 16th-century, European political systems and elite culture were thoroughly Christian long before that.

Back to the original question: is there a scenario where Christianity did not succeed in capturing the Roman state, and so becoming the Roman religion? If Arbogast had won at the Battle of Frigidus in 394, would paganism have revived in the Western Empire? Perhaps, but, I think Christianity had sunk roots too deeply into the matrix of Roman culture and society to be turned back. The fact that Arbogast’s puppet, Eugenius, was a nominal Christian illustrates the reality that even in the Western Empire, where many elite families had pagan sympathies, the head of state was now expected to be a Christian. Christianity was the normative religion of the state.

We don’t know much about Arbogast. He was a Frank by origin, that is, a German. But the ancient sources indicate that Arbogast was a cultured individual, and assimilated into Romanitas. He was also a pagan, though from what I have read, one of the Greco-Roman variety, and not a devotee of Woden or any German god. There was likely an avenue of assimilation and integration whereby men from barbarian cultures could integrate into the high culture and society of old Rome during Late Antiquity, but we know little about it from Christian sources, who were likely not privy to such circles in any case.

If Arbogast had won at Frigidus and pushed forward a revival of the old pagan religion and Roman traditionalism through state patronage, some sort of short-term revival is likely. But a key issue to observe is that we are not talking about the old religion which Augustus attempted to preserve. The Roman religious culture was literally multicultural and very promiscuous. The 1st-century emperor Vespasian was a devotee of Isis, while the cult of Sol Invictus was popular in the 3rd-century. Roman religious traditions evolved and changed, and Kyle Harper suggests in Fate of Rome that pagan temple building decreased sharply after the Plague of Cyprian in the 260s. One interpretation might be that pagan religious practice itself was evolving in a less monumental and personal direction.

Anyone who takes an interest in early Christianity can observe that it evolves and mutates from its origins as a Jewish sect into something more elaborated in the 2nd-century. Very much a mystery religion of the gentiles. The life and thought of Origen illustrate the nexus between Christians and the broader culture. But the influence did not go in a single direction. Not only did the currents of Roman society affect Christianity, but the currents that led to Christianity shaped Roman society. Prominent Jews were already associated with some of the Julio-Claudians, in particular, Gauis, but the penetration of Near Eastern sects into Roman society was high. Christianity was one of these new religious movements.

Just as Arbogast’s personal evolution as a man of Roman culture is hidden from us, so we perceive the cults of the Great Mother, Mithras, or Isis, darkly through a fog. They seem but shadows of the depth and richness that was early Christianity. And they may indeed have been such. But there is an alternative hypothesis: perhaps a large set of new religious movements were converging toward the same broad configuration, and Christianity was the one which won the race to the top, whether through chance or necessity.

And there was a necessity. In my post The Invention Of World Religions 2,000 Years Ago I argue that “higher religions” evolved to fill a cultural niche that became very open with the rose of the Iron Age Empires. Rome, China, Persia, etc. The argument about whether “big gods” came before or after complex polities is a different one than the question I’m exploring here. Rather than “big gods,” the imperial polities of the last few thousand years seem to need “big systems.”

These systems can take various forms but share broad family features. One of the arguments made for the revival of paganism in the Roman Empire is that in the 9th-century Tang China suppressed the power of Buddhism at the cultural commanding heights. Though emperors could be personally devout Buddhists, the religion never obtained the same stature and monopoly power that Christianity or Islam did in western Eurasia. What this analysis ignores though is that the arrival of Buddhism fundamentally transformed the Chinese religious landscape. The development of complex religious Daoism was clearly due to Buddhist stimulus, while Neo-Confucianism took for granted many metaphysical presuppositions inherited from Buddhism. Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism in China began to operate as three legs of a religious stool.

If “paganism” had revived in the Roman Empire, it would have had a heavily Christian flavor by the 5th-century. The use of the word pagan in a non-pejorative sense is somewhat broad. Many Christians consider those outside of the Abrahamic tradition “pagans.” But there is a world of difference between Indian practitioners of Vedanta, and a Korean shaman. The latter is pagan in a way that is analogous to the augurs of ancient Rome. Those who espouse Vedanta have views sharply at variance with Nicene Christianity, but their philosophical sophistication is no less than that of the heirs of Basil of Caesarea.

The Romans of the Republic practiced what we would today call a “tribal religion.” The similarities between orisha and numina are not coincidental. The Romans of the Republic were a tribal people in a quite literal sense and worshipped gods of particular places. Though some of their elites were already cosmopolitan and Greek-educated, Roman religion and philosophy remained primitive. By 300 AD the situation was very different. Pagan Romans worshipped a variety of gods and adhered to many different cults, but Neoplatonic philosophy added an intellectual sheen to the new paganism, introducing monism whereby all gods might be emanations from the Ultimate. Christianity came out of the same milieu and was somewhat influenced by Neoplatonists, though Neoplatonists were some of the earliest intellectual critics of the religion, and the school remained the refuge for diehard pagans into the 6th-century.

Which brings us to perennialism. The perennial philosophy is the idea that the world’s religious traditions share a single, metaphysical truth or origin. Unlike perennialists, I do not believe in a single metaphysical truth or origin. Rather, I believe that particular social and cultural conditions 2,000 years ago made it very likely that a set of higher religions would emerge. In particular, in large and complex multi-ethnic societies you need more than big gods. You needed big religions.

These higher religions always came with abstruse and complex philosophies opaque to the vast majority of adherents. But these elements were appealing to and justified the project of a large empire for religious professionals. A unitary principle, a Ground of Being, justified the necessity of a vice-reagent of God upon the earth, the son of Heaven, or the Cakravartin. Pre-modern states lacked the tools for genuine totalitarianism or the rapidity of unifying information technology. They required ideological bindings across their administrative classes. Philosophy injected into supernatural systems and then universalized provided just that.

These higher religions had localisms (e.g., Rome), but they were not fundamentally local. Priests and monks could travel across the world with some surety of safety due to the respect given to them by rulers. Rather than appealing to raw power or the capricious favor of household gods, universal rulers could argue that their power was a reflection of the universal gods and universal principles. Just as there was a God in heaven there was an emperor on earth. Karma and the Dharma applied to all peoples.

In evolutionary biology on occasion, there is a rhetorical question asked: why doesn’t evolution favor a single fit species? Why is there diversity? One explanation is that there are different adaptive niches, but even here there is no single species that occupies an adaptive niche across the whole world. Abiotic factors dictate certain parameters in terms of body-plan and behavior for numerous species. They are clearly being pushed and shaped by the same selective forces, but history is such that they are distinct and different.

And so it is with cultural evolution. I have observed that pagan and antique cults of Babylon existed in Mesopotamia in the early centuries of the Common Era. But by the 4th-century they faded and under the Sassanians Mesopotamia became dominated in its public culture by a welter of sects, Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, and Zoroastrian, with combinations thereof. This is important because unlike in the Roman Empire, the Sassanian Persians took a liberal attitude toward religious liberty.  There was no coercive imposition of the new religions on the elites. Rather, the elites adopted the new religions to integrate themselves into the Roman and Persian world.

There were selective pressures that militated in favor of this transition. It wasn’t simply an accident of history. It was an inevitable consequence of social complexity.

* I am aware that Henry VIII maintained a basically Catholic Church that had broken from Rome.

18 thoughts on “The creation of perennialism 2,000 years ago

  1. The vast majority of people in the pagan Roman Empire, including many ruling class women, were subject to random brutality and poverty. Rullng Class women had no actual rights, and their husbands could readily dispose of them. The traditional Church teachings against divorce and abortion scored points with many people.

    The pagan Roman government was egregiously corrupt and violent, even under the Good Emperors. In those circumstances, most people were better off in a Christian society that preached the dignity of each person, including slaves and women. There would have been a large scale movement towards Christianity even without Ruling Class endorsement. That endorsement itself recognized the attraction and growth of the Christian church.

  2. I agree with the basic premise but all I see is that the old grand narratives (pagan religions) became outdated, did not have anything interesting to say about the new societal issues that were on people’s minds in the new environment of large empires with large centralized hierarchies, so new grand narratives that did incorporate these issues (e.g. inequality, legitimacy of the emperor) into their narratives could easily become popular.

    An analogy (that is far from perfect) would be the emergence of communism and fascism after the disruption that the industrial revolution caused in the structure of society: the old religious narratives didn’t have anything useful to say about the new problems like the tensions between capitalists and their workers or what the new society-transforming capabilities provided by technology could be used for. So these new grand narratives that claimed to have the answer to these questions filled the vacuum.

    However, sometimes I get the feeling that you are talking about the new religions being “adaptive” to the host (the empire) rather than just to themselves. I don’t see anything supporting this view (and it certainly wasn’t true in the case of my analogy about communism)

  3. Rullng Class women had no actual rights, and their husbands could readily dispose of them. The traditional Church teachings against divorce and abortion scored points with many people.

    you are confusing the official laws with norms. in practice the gap wasn’t that great, though you are correct that church moderated and codified certain rights (the extreme power of the paterfamilias was also not enforced after the republic from what i know).

    also, you seem ignorant or confused as to the power of roman (latin) women in particular. they had some independent power, and their fathers and brothers were a major impendent toward simply treating them in such a brutal manner.

    There would have been a large scale movement towards Christianity even without Ruling Class endorsement.

    the church was a lower middle class urban movement. some of the early intellectuals referred to rural people as animals. it’s not true that the church really attracted the lowest orders. its strength was somewhere to the ‘middle.’

    you don’t seem to know much about what you are talking about.

    (and it certainly wasn’t true in the case of my analogy about communism)

    it’s a very bad analogy to what i’m talking about because there wasn’t much of a mass society in the ancient world. mass political ideologies need mass movements. i don’t believe that this works too well before he reformation and printing press (at the earliest).

  4. The Roman world created a mass urbanized culture that put many unrelated people into chaotic urban settings. The Christian Churches provided those people with fellowship, social services, and promise of ultimate salvation.

    Christianity grew in the Roman world because it supplied adherents with a supportive social system, that helped people cope with major life events (e.g. birth, death, marriage) in a structured and communal way. The congregations also helped with care for the sick and those who fell on hard times. They were also easy to join. Perhaps most importantly they provided fellowship to people uprooted from rural communities and tribal settings.

    I don’t think any other religious cult of the Roman world supplied such a comprehensive package at such a low cost. Most of the mystery cults limited themselves to a short menu of rituals that dealt with a limited set of issues. And, by cost, not just social and behavioral cost, but initiation to the cult of Mithras, which was very popular, required the sacrifice of a bull. Bulls, are cash out of pocket expensive.

    My impression is that Buddhism did not provide as comprehensive a set of rituals and community as did Christianity, and that is a major reason why it disappeared from India proper.

    I think a comparison of Indian and Roman religious evolution is an interesting exercise. It is possible that the Romans might have followed a course similar to that of India and constructed a philosophical structure that incorporated their cults and rituals. But, I think the middle of the 4th Century (Julian the Apostate) was too late. Christianity had already become to important and wide spread to allow that to happen.

  5. Christianity grew in the Roman world because it supplied adherents with a supportive social system, that helped people cope with major life events (e.g. birth, death, marriage) in a structured and communal way. The congregations also helped with care for the sick and those who fell on hard times. They were also easy to join. Perhaps most importantly they provided fellowship to people uprooted from rural communities and tribal settings.

    this is basically stark’s supply-side model. it’s plausible enough, though please remember most romans were not urban. additionally, patronage through family and regional networks even in urban areas seem to be a big deal.

    I don’t think any other religious cult of the Roman world supplied such a comprehensive package at such a low cost. Most of the mystery cults limited themselves to a short menu of rituals that dealt with a limited set of issues. And, by cost, not just social and behavioral cost, but initiation to the cult of Mithras, which was very popular, required the sacrifice of a bull. Bulls, are cash out of pocket expensive.

    this is over-determined. if christianity had expensive rituals you would say this is a “hard to fake” signal of commitment (this is in fact arguments for why some sects like early christianity do so well). if you take the christian matyrology at face value (you probaby shouldn’t), joining christianity had a cost too. possible death.

    you don’t think that any other religious cult supplied this package because the christians are the ones who are recording and transcribing your ancient history! this is a bit conspiratorial, but you need to keep this sort of thing in mind. our knowledge of ‘hellenistic judaism’ for example gets illuminated now and then by a cache of records or archaeology. the late antique christians weren’t that interested in the ethnography of other groups except where useful or important for polemics.

    additionally, the benefits of christianity as a cohesive social system dissapated once it became normative. stark outlines the ‘problem’ explicitly, that top-down imperial conversion was actually a problem for the ‘goods and services’ that the religion provided.

    i>My impression is that Buddhism did not provide as comprehensive a set of rituals and community as did Christianity, and that is a major reason why it disappeared from India proper.

    you probably don’t know well enough actually compare. this is an unfortunate problem.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangha

    buddhism’s disspation in india and success in much of the rest of asia illustrates the uniqueness of india and the power of what became hinduism, nothing more. there have been native christians in south india for over 1,000 years. they have basically become a caste. these christians have all the same tools as the christians elsewhere. but india is not fertile ground.

  6. Regarding Christianity, recent adna work does make part of me wonder how much is explained simply by talking about an ethnic movement of an actual Christian / monotheist populations from the Levant.

    There are some leaks of ancient DNA on Rome and Iraly that suggest that Italic and Etruscan peoples were much like Iberians of the time (broadly like present day Basques) and Greek colonists in Italy were like Mycenaens (and overlapping no present day people).

    So a large folk movement of peoples to Italy and across the centre+east southern shore Roman Empire from the Levant seems plausible, and if so, this may explained much of the retreat of old style Paganism to what Christianity, a syncretic creation of Hellenised Hebrew beliefs and mystery cults etc. From there, the Church could use political means to spread further into Europe.

    Basically, I’m suggesting we may not have to look to pure cultural evolution reasons for the spread of Christianity, if much of it is explained by simple migrations.

  7. “it’s a very bad analogy to what i’m talking about because there wasn’t much of a mass society in the ancient world. mass political ideologies need mass movements. i don’t believe that this works too well before he reformation and printing press (at the earliest).”

    Mass movements are not required for what I described: a religious narrative that took 200 years to spread across a continent could now spread in 2 decades, but that’s just a quantitative change. People still gravitate to grand narratives that claim to provide answers to, or at least reflect on, the societal issues that interest them, no matter how slow the information flow is. The old Pagan religions simply had nothing to say about the new environment that people were living in.

    Just to clarify: Do you claim that these big religions owe their success to some (partially hidden and still mysterious) benefit that they provided to the empire, so that they helped the empires survive? Because this is the impression I get (and similar ideas where described in Peter Turchin’s books) but you never spell this out explicitly, so I’m not even sure I’m arguing against your real position. (My position would be that religions (when they are not coerced) owe their success mostly to people’s choice, people selecting the ones that, for whatever reason (spiritual or political), appeal to them)

  8. . People still gravitate to grand narratives that claim to provide answers to, or at least reflect on, the societal issues that interest them, no matter how slow the information flow is. The old Pagan religions simply had nothing to say about the new environment that people were living in.

    yes, i don’t believe this

    1) most ppl were rural

    2) i don’t believe that most ppl have ‘societal issues’ they worry about

    i think a modern sensibility re religion definitely is present in the 17th-century. not sure how much earlier (at this point rulers switched religions, but their subjects refused; e.g., hohenzollerns)

  9. Basically, I’m suggesting we may not have to look to pure cultural evolution reasons for the spread of Christianity, if much of it is explained by simple migrations.

    stark argues the core of the christian church in early period were hellenized jews. he uses some data to show correlation of early church + early jewish commuities. the main objection is that it might just be a confound for general cosmopolitanism. the christian church seems to have been more numerous in the greek speaking portion than latin.

  10. yes, i don’t believe this
    1) most ppl were rural
    2) i don’t believe that most ppl have ‘societal issues’ they worry about

    a counterexample: in the Taiping Rebellion millions of illiterate peasants converted to (a branch of) Christianity because it promised them an end to poverty, divine legitimacy to the emperor, and rewards in the afterlife. So rural people with societal issues can result in the spread of religions at least in some cases.

  11. There have long been suggestions that Christianity incorporated elements of the mystery religions: several aspects of the stories of Isis and Horus map to those of Mary and Jesus, including e.g. the nursing iconography, and the interest in baby Jesus as such. Several aspects of the cult of Mithras map to Christianity, including symbolism involving blood, and miraculous birth.

    So, on the one hand, it seems entirely plausible that early Christianity would include such elements, to keep people in a religious setting they would find comforting and familiar, much as English Protestantism was pretty close to Catholicism in its rituals. And it would be very much in the interest of Christianity later on to suppress as much as possible knowledge of such acquisitions. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be anything about the “Madonna and child” thing that has much bearing on the adult Jesus and his teachings. And the whole “body and blood of Christ” thing also seems very contingent and arbitrary. If not adaptations from other religious settings, what are they “for”?

    On the other hand, all religions at that time and place were existing in a common cultural setting, so overlaps due to common ancestry would not be surprising. And resemblances in iconography could simply be due to the convenience of re-purposing artworks and skills.

  12. a counterexample: in the Taiping Rebellion millions of illiterate peasants converted to (a branch of) Christianity because it promised them an end to poverty, divine legitimacy to the emperor, and rewards in the afterlife. So rural people with societal issues can result in the spread of religions at least in some cases.

    it’s not a counter-example for several reasons

    1) it’s early modern. something changed with the spread of printing and modern communication technology. i note that above. it’s a quantitative, not qualitative change, but beyond a certain point elite fiat didn’t matter (this is why i keep bringing up the fact that early modern european rulers couldn’t change their subjects’ religion beyond a certain period; they converted to the religion of their subjects or were tolerated by their subjects).

    2) taiping was strongly ethnic in character. all the major leaders (with one exception last i read) were hakka. it wasn’t purely a religious movement, and can be easily explained in part by turchin’s elite over-production thesis (late manchu china was at the end of the line when it came to malthusian conditions and squeezing efficiencies out of the margin)).

    3) they didn’t really convert to a branch of christianity really. they created a post-christian ‘new religious movement’ which co-opted a lot of the millenarian tendencies preexistent within chinese cults and secret societies (they exhibited a lot of similarities to anabaptist millennarianism in munster actually).

    as you may know, the ming dynasty emerged out of a post-manichaean sect in the same region (the founder pretty much erased his past as leader of a minor religious cult). so it wouldn’t have been unprecedented.

    i’m not saying here that rural people couldn’t be moved to rebellion and mass activity. the 1525 peasant’s rebellion in germany, the yellow turban rebellion in han china, etc. indicate this (though often these peasants are led by more prosperous people with their own agendas; e.g., the peasants rebellion had a lot of small ‘knights’ running it). my point is that the spread of religion doesn’t happen because of spiritual or existential needs in these scenarios. the millenarian cults emerge in a context of starvation or deprivation, and the two synthesize into something bigger. but, as with the peasants rebellion, it’s a cultural explosion that doesn’t usually lead to long-term change, once the exigent circumstances pass.

  13. @Razib

    Where do you position the Babai revolt of the Rum Seljuk Anatolia, the Sheikh Bedreddin rebellion of the early Ottoman Anatolia and the Balkans, and the Shahkulu rebellion of the Classical Ottoman Anatolia in this context? They were all pre-modern, had strong religious motives from the beginning, and involved and mobilized rural people, peasants as well as nomadic tribes.

  14. Going back to the first comment by Robert, there was actually a humanistic trend in the 2nd Century Roman Empire which saw for example the introduction of protections for slaves. This was also a period of self-conscious prosperity (if you read for example the Roman Oration by Aristides or even any of the works of Lucian), and of elite cooptation and integration throughout empire (with Greek taking the role of the binding culture, and Roman law and emperium as the binding government).

    Driving a lot of this was the deep hellenization of the Roman elite (to the point where some emperors wrote largely in Greek, and took up Greek philosophy with some skill), and the role of the most popular philosophy at the time, Stoicism. Stoicism reminds me a lot of Buddhism in its precepts, and it definitely had a humanistic influence during the 2nd century.

    So this was not a period of struggle and barbarism, unless you classify all pre-modern societies that way.

    Tangentially, it’s interesting to me that Stoicism was a lot like early Buddhism, in the sense that it was a humanistic philosophy without a religious aspect. Later (by the Roman period) Buddhism had a religion grafted onto it. And similarly it seems to me Christianity was a religion that later had a philosophy grafted onto it. I think both grafts were done rather poorly, which is perhaps why non-Christians rarely took Christian philosophy/theology seriously (vs the interest outsiders have in Hindu, Buddhist or even Daoist thought). And maybe why Buddhism never did very well as a religion when in competition with Christianity or Islam.

  15. China during the same 2nd century period is also religiously interesting. You had the Five Pecks of Rice movement which started in 142, before any real Buddhist influence in China. Without any outside (Buddhist or Christian) influence, it was still a fully formed mass confessional religion that reminds me a lot of very early millenarian Christianity, but with temporal power to the point where they established their own small state inside China.

  16. @Razib

    so revolts can use the energy of the people. what’s your point?

    My point is that even before the modern era these non-orthodox Sufi religious movements were successful in spreading among the rural masses in large territories, who were largely either from superficially Islamized communities or Christian communities and had problems with the orthodox Sunni establishment on religious grounds.

    do most people know of these movements you are talking about? not really. what was their long-term impact?

    The Babai revolt, and with it the Babai movement, was brutally suppressed by the Rum Seljuk government. The Sheikh Bedreddin revolt was brutally suppressed as well, but the Bedreddini movement had a long-term impact in some rural parts of the Balkans until their full integration with the similarly heterodox Alevis and Bektashis. The Shahkulu revolt was part of the larger Qizilbash movement that was loosely directed by Safavids but had a strong appeal among the rural communities of a large territory stretching from the Balkans to Iran, a territory most of which was never under Safavid rule, modern Alevism and to some extent Bektashism are the legacies of that religious movement.

  17. I believe the fundamental facets of Christianity, and maybe, Islam also, go against your idea of a “big religion”. For Christians broke down religion and stripped it all back, got rid of the chaff, and railed against priestly orders and older superstitions. Now, you only had to go through Christ/God to get to God. The appearance of the Roman Catholic church may seem to cloud that idea, granted. Originally is was a big spiritual simplification. Which to me speaks against “religion” and more toward personal spirituality.

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