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How Europe became the Faith

Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome is a work of monumental scholarship. The late author was a master of the textual sources to such an extent that no non-specialist can truly comprehend the force of his argument or its veracity in a deep manner. That being said, the book is essential reading in large part because it is an armamentarium against a conventional argument that the victory of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire was established and sealed by the victory of Theodosius the Great at the Battle of the Frigidus in 394. And, that that victory was contingent upon that battle.

The standard model is that the rise of Christianity among the ruling class of the Roman Empire after the conversion of Constantine in the first decades of the 4th-century triggered a conservative traditionalist reaction, centered around prominent Roman Senators, precipitating out into armed resistance in the 390s. The rebellion against Theodosius is framed as a pagan cause against the devoutly Christian ruler.

Cameron rejects this whole narrative to a great extent as a projection of contemporary sensibilities and preoccupations with the ancient past. The Last Pagans of Rome presents the case that it was Gratian’s removal of public subsidies from the traditional cults in the early 380s which marked the turning point.

The term “case” must be used because the author is so convinced of his argument and conclusions (reached after a lifetime of scholarship), that the text comes across as almost lawyerly in its tone. At some point, you realize that whenever there is ambiguity and uncertainty, the conclusion will always be drawn in a way so as to buttress the thesis favored by the author, rather than simply leaving the uncertainty as is. Whereas those presenting the contrasting thesis (that pagan revival and resistance was real in the 390s)  might assume that a particular individual was a pagan, Cameron points out various reasons to be uncertain about this inference, and often will conclude “it is just as likely or perhaps more like that this person was a Christian!”

In the footnotes of The Final Pagan Generation, a more sober work, you actually see comments which argue that Cameron pushes his case for the decline and extinction of paganism too far.

Despite this qualm, I believe that Cameron’s thesis is broadly correct. First, it is entirely reasonable to suggest and suspect that modern authors are laundering their own romantic preoccupations into their interpretation of the past. I myself have been known to portray Quintus Aurelius Symmachus as a paragon of broad-minded latitudinarian tolerance, in sharp contrast with the narrow-minded intolerant scold, St. Ambrose. This is a common reflex among those given nourishment by the values of the Enlightenment.  The Last Pagans of Rome casts doubt on the way in which these men have been depicted historically, suggesting that their own self-conceptions and place in society was fundamentally different from what we might assume (to obtain powerful Christian sympathy, Symmachus had to portray himself as a tolerant individual. To maintain Christian respect, Ambrose had to show that he was a zealot).

Second, our understanding of the anthropology of religion of the past flattens the true realities and imposes cartoonish identities which likely did not correspond with anything real. Our modern idea of religion and society is conditioned on the sectarian conflicts in the West in the wake of the Reformation, as well as the formal separation of confessions enriched in the legal framework of Islam. That is, individuals are seen to have delimited and exclusive identities. Though this framework is somewhat a difficult fit in South and East Asian societies, they have nevertheless integrated and accepted it in some fashion due to the hegemonic influence of the modern West, and in South Asia the historical legacy of Islamic rule.

Obviously none of this applied to the late Roman Empire. Though Christianity made exclusive claims upon its believers, just as the Jewish God made exclusive claims on the Jews, pagan religiosity was pluralistic and promiscuous. It was integrative, non-exclusive, and diffusely delimited. This was, in fact, one of the reasons that Judaism and Christianity became influential and widely practiced in the ancient world. In The Fate of Rome, the author suggests that civic public paganism declined in the late 3rd-century, after the Plague of Cyprian, and well before Constantine’s conversion. One could argue that the centrality and dominance of Christianity in the 4th-century had less to do with victory in the competition with paganism, than the fact that there was a vacuum at the center of the state which Christianity was suited to fill.

In The Last Pagans of Rome  Cameron suggests that the elite pagans of the late 4th-century were not religious fanatics. On the contrary, their priestly duties were hereditary marks of prestige and status, rather than earned piety. One of the major reasons that they likely lagged in their adherence to the new favored religion was that it did not have a patina of prestige. As noted in Through the Eye of the Needle and The Making of the Christian Aristocracy, class prejudice, and snobbery against the decidedly middle-brow character of Christianity retarded adoption by the elite. The class origins of the early Christians was evident in the early translations of the Bibles into Latin: they were not of the aristocratic variant, but a more common register. Only when aristocrats began to convert to Christianity and join the Church in large numbers did the religion become part and parcel of the identity of elite society.

The elite of the Roman world had seen sects and cults come and go. In the late 1st-century, Vespasian brought an affection for Isis to the center of the Roman world, while in the early 3rd-century a priestly Syrian family ascended to the purple. In the late 3rd-century Solar religion and Mithraism became quite popular. It is entirely likely that the many 4th-century Roman Senators viewed the rise of Christianity as just another religion, that would have its time in the sun and fade.

Cameron in The Last Pagans of Rome argues that rather than Christian and pagan (the latter being a set defined by all those who were not Christian or Jewish), many people in the 4th-century occupied a range of views in terms of religion and identity. Some individuals were exclusive and devout Christians, while others were convinced pagans. But many individuals were nominal and mercenary about their religious affiliation, moving with the winds. This is important because it implies that not all identified Christians would be unremittingly hostile toward pagan religion due to deep ideological commitments. The 4th-century man of letters, Ausonius, is perceived by many to have been Christian primarily due to its social advantage.

Conversely, many who were nominally pagans may have not had much opposition to becoming Christian in regards to their beliefs, but were held back by other considerations. For example, perhaps their role as pagan priests was socially advantageous in the locality to a far greater extent than the low probability of obtaining favor from the imperial center through conversion to the favored imperial religion. This example then suggests why the cessation of subsidies to the pagan cults in the 380s was so essential and critical: without public funds, the maintenance of the urban and elite segment of the old religions would fall back on the wealthy families. Instead of being a social boon obtained at no personal cost, the old religion would become a fiscal burden upon the traditional elites.

For many Westerners, the premodern shift of religious identity is framed by the Reformation. Religious lands were seized and secularized. Monks were defrocked. To a great extent, it was a rupture and a forcible one. This has analogs in other societies. China in the 9th-century saw the evisceration of the Buddhist establishment by Emperors who feared an over-mighty “First Estate.” Similarly, Oda Nobunaga in the 16th-century literally burned down the Buddhist monasteries of  Japan because so many had become laws unto themselves. Cameron’s argument in The Last Pagans of Rome is that paganism in the Roman Empire expired of natural causes. It was not killed. The assault on the Serapeum was the exception, not the rule. Though some Christians in the 4th-century began to make the case for coercion in religious belief, this seems to have been rare (in contrast, practices offensive to Christians, such as animal sacrifice, were clearly sharply curtailed).

To understand what happened in the 4th-century, and later, it is useful to look at analogies in other societies and at other times. Both Tibet and Japan saw strong reactions against the adoption of Buddhism by elements of the nobility. This is strikingly similar to what reputedly occurred in the Late Roman Empire. There was resistance to the move away from Roman Catholicism in England in the 16th-century, from principled intellectuals such as St. Thomas More, to aristocrats such as the Duke of Norfolk, and peasants in the northern English countryside. In the Indian subcontinent, a succession of Muslim monarchs and elites presented the native peoples with a religious vision sharply distinct from the customs and traditions of the local religious movements. Finally, in Germany in the 17th-century several lines of rulers changed from the religion of their subjects, but were unable to convert any of their subjects.

In Tibet and Japan, the anti-Buddhist faction initially succeeded, arresting or reversing the spread of the religion, but ultimately failed in changing the long-term religious arc of the society. In India, the Muslims only converted a minority of the population, and those conversions were regionally concentrated (Islam was much more successful in the far west and east of the subcontinent). In England, there was a gradual shift toward Protestantism in the 16th-century, though a minority always remained Roman Catholic. Finally, in Germany, the confessional identities were deeply rooted enough that elite preferences were irrelevant.

It is clear that deeply rooted mass confessional identity in a modern sense did not exist in the ancient world. Some Protestant thinkers go so far as to assert that Europeans were not truly Christian until after the Protestant Reformation, which forced individuals into personal religious faith. This seems to go too far in light of broad-based popular religious movements in the late medieval period, but the relatively muted reaction of the peasantry of the rapid shift to Protestantism triggered by elite conversion and identification strongly indicate that religious identity was weak and diffuse in the pre-modern period. In the ancient world, Christians introduced a sharp and clear religious identity, but to a great extent, this was a feature of urban areas and urban sub-elites (see Rodney Stark’s unfortunately polemical Cities of God). Similarly, in the early modern period, Protestantism was initially rooted in urban areas around cultural and socio-political elites, only slowly transforming the religious life of peasants with a new sort of piety.

So the issue then is not the whole society, it is the nature of the conversion of the political and cultural elite of the Roman world. The Neoplatonists of the 6th-century remained non-Christian because their metaphysical system could not be fully integrated into Christianity (though it clearly influenced Christianity). In contrast, it seems that the social and political elite became predominantly Christian much earlier. Why? As suggested above the disconnect between the state and traditional religion starved the old cults of fiscal support, and their withering removed any prestige accrued to elite lineages through patronage and priestly duties. Additionally, it took several generations after the initial patronage of Constantine for Christianity to produce the sort of highly cultured elite individuals which added a luster of cultivation to the religion which was attractive to the sensibilities of the aristocracy. It was a much easier task to convert nobles if those who preached Christianity to them were from their own class, sharing broad values and educations.

The spread of Christianity can be analogized to the spread of Islam in the Christian and Zoroastrian world in the 7th and 8th-centuries. Aristocratic Christians such as John of Damascus had a role within the Islamic polity so long as Greek language and forms were the dominant administrative culture of the Ummayyad state. The shift to Arabic changed the incentive structure. In The Rise of Western Christendom Peter Brown contends that the movement to Arabic by Christians was the dominant variable in the conversion of the Near East. In Iran, the emergence of Islam as a majority religion was coincident with the conversion of the local nobility and the defeat of the last independent Zoroastrian warlords.

We tend to carve reality into distinct and striking categories. The Last Pagans of Rome argue that the categories “pagan” and “Christian” divided into two classes what was really a spectrum. Similarly, the Christianization of antiquity was a gradual affair, and numerically the punctuated nature of events such as the Battle of Frigidus was probably far less striking than we wish them to be.

There are similarities to the situation of early Muslims in India to early imperial Christians in Late Antiquity. Islam in the subcontinent was very much a court religion. Though Hindu rulers persisted around the peripheries for nearly the whole time, the pinnacle of rule by and large took on a Turkic and Islamic cast in the subcontinent for many centuries. And yet Hinduism, or what we call Hinduism, but was truly a multiplicity of native Indian religious forms, persisted in the face of Islam. This is a contrast to Zoroastrianism and Christianity, which eventually lost their demographic preponderance in the face of Islam.

The situation of ancient paganism may have been even more hopeless. Rather than terming these “pagans,” an appellation that some Christians might apply to Hindus and Buddhists, I think a better way to think of the Greco-Roman traditional religions is that they were tribal religions. The Greco-Romans had a sophisticated set of metaphysics and ethics elucidated in their philosophies, but these remained sealed off from the traditional religion. Christianity integrated some elements of philosophy into the tribal religion of the Jews and then universalized it. In the short term, there were strong incentives for individuals and communities to resist Christianity, but its cultural innovativeness made its final victory likely inevitable, just as in Tibet and Japan Buddhism returned after the initial persecution.

India and China both resisted assimilation by foreign religions because they had more than simply tribal religions. In China Buddhism in the 9th-century became overbearing, which resulted in concerted persecution by the state (a practice which would reemergence several times in Chinese history). But there was also a strong anti-Buddhist elite critique from Neo-Confucians. Neo-Confucianism presented itself as a better alternative, rather than simply a reversion to a tribal religion. In China, the tribal religion persists in the form of local folk religion. But this is an entirely plebian affair. In India the religious traditions were fertile and robust, giving birth to the first world religion in the form of Buddhism, and pioneering the idea of the mobile religious community, the sangha. Some of the same could be said of the Hinduism of the period, which had integrated insights from Buddhism, and developed a complex fusion of philosophy and spirituality that became the Vedanta. The Hindu-Muslim tension and conflict which has been a feature of Indian history in various forms emerges from the fact that the assimilation of Hindus into Islam as converted Muslims is not inevitable due to the latter’s clearly superior sophistication over the former.

The Last Pagans of Rome describe a world in which inchoate and decentralized paganism was confronted with a new cultural innovation, a universally oriented exclusive religious community that synthesized popular devotionalism with elite rationality. The Christianization of the aristocracy was a matter of establishing the details of the accommodation, not whether that accommodation would happen.

18 thoughts on “How Europe became the Faith

  1. As Slapstik once noted while making another point on Brown Pundits, within India, one major cause of the robustness of Hinduism seems to have been the Brahmin practice of composing stories, stories, and more stories. They seem to have sung the hell out of their vocal cords trying to keep even the mass populace at least mildly informed about advanced religious concepts and connections between mundane secular things and Brahminical religious concepts. I am rather surprised ancient Greek and Roman elites did not attempt such a thing. Does this mean that Brahmins singlehandedly invented this very effective strategy?

    (I have seen people like INDTHINGS say on Brown Pundits say that caste system was the major reason why Islam and Christianity did not spread much in India but I don’t see how. At this point though, I have no shame whatsoever in admitting that I don’t have either any scholarly knowledge of the subject (I have personally read zilch on the topic – even Wikipedia I never read regarding this lol) or a high enough IQ to try and divine up novel creative possibilities for myself. To me, clearly there are castes within robustly functioning Muslim and olden Christian communities of south India like the Kerala Christians, etc., and they became no more Hindu because of the presence of caste. Perhaps ancient Christian and Muslim elites would have been rather happy if entire castes converted to their own fold and they would have practically allowed them to continue their practice of caste endogamy, even untouchability, etc. easily (even now, at least in south India, sometimes there tends to be practical physical differentiation between churches based on caste differences alone, not theological, etc.). But a lot of Christian and Muslim castes never seem to have emerged. This is why I believe something other than this would have been the most important factor behind this and that it might be the efforts and the robust persistence of the Brahmins.)

    Regarding a slightly different thing, how did pagan elites know where to draw boundaries between religious traditions as ideal vs. okay vs. completely undesirable? For monotheist elites this appears trivial but for the pagan polytheist ones? For example, why did Brahmins (who are polytheistic in some sense though they are the most sophisticated polytheists on earth) never warm up to Islam and Christianity though they seemed to have, over time, warmed up to some folk gods and goddesses like the village deities worshipped by the lower strata of Indian society (under some conditions and requirements such as more Brahminisation of the cults of said deities, reducing blood sacrifices, etc.)? The very easy answer seems to be that Islam and Christianity were so unthinkably beyond the pale of the Vedic and Puranic religion, but why were some old folk traditions of India that Brahmins okay-okayed for themselves with the passage of time not similarly beyond the pale of the Vedic religion? Maybe the mere existence of names of lower castes in the canonical Brahminical literature made their deities somewhat more okay for the Brahmins to worship (for themselves) as the forms of the Devi, Shiva, etc., over time? Or I might have been simply mistaken here and my initial impression that Brahmins did indeed adopt some genuinely low-strata-origin deities into their fold for themselves is so blatantly wrong and they have always remained super-conservative with respect to theology limiting exclusive worship to at most only the 5/6 Smartic deities (who are all classically Brahminical) and not even entertained the genuinely low-strata-origin deities as forms of one of the 5/6 when doing their personal and familial religious worship. In which case, there vanishes my problem into thin air as the easy answer of the Avaidikaness and Mlecchaness of Islam and Christianity to explain the Brahminical aversion to them holds true. Of course as is usual with me I might be missing lots and lots of relevant things and phenomena here. But I don’t think I will suffer my usual levels of cringing, embarrassment, and suicidal dishonour when I ultimately notice how stupid this all was. That’s because writing this comment was such a joyful activity for me (of course, more joyful was the reading of the main post) and it is likely that this euphoria lingers on a bit more than usual.

  2. A comment on a minor point in what is a very interesting and wide-ranging post.

    Christianity integrated some elements of philosophy into the tribal religion of the Jews and then universalized it.

    In what follows, it is worth knowing and keeping in mind that (a) IANAE (I am not an expert) & (b) I am a secular Jew and thus almost certainly have some skin in the game, if only psychologically.

    I take exception to the sentence in italics above on 2 grounds.

    1) Referring to the “tribal religion of the Jews” comes carelessly close to the relatively mild anti-semitic trope of Jews as being clannish. Certainly the religion today and up until at least the middle of the post-Alexander, Hellenistic period was associated with a single, well-defined people or ethnic group. However at some point before the Roman conquest of the Seleucid empire, other peoples were converting, either voluntarily or under coercion, e.g. the Idumaeans, and by the time of Mohammed, there were large numbers of Jews in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula.

    2) More important, faced with the neighboring Hellenistic polities of Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid empire, Second Temple Judaism began incorporating many elements of that culture long before the beginning, much less the rise, of Christianity. The story of the Macabees can be understood as a rural, fundamentalist revolt against elite attempts to reform both the religion generally and the Temple cult in particular, with the goal of bringing both more closely in line with the surrounding Hellenestic culture. Not too long after having attained victory in that multi-way civil war, later Hasmonean rulers continued the process of Hellenization.

    The Septuagint (the origins of which date to 200-300 years before the beginning of Christianity) was the most well known product of Hellenistic Judaism. The two best known Hellenistic Jews are probably Philo (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE) & Josephus (c. 37-c. 100 CE).

    PS: After typing the note above, it occurred to me to check Wikipedia for Hellenistic Judaism (I had already used Wikipedia to correct some details and provide the links above). There is a whole piece there consistent with what I have written (and I have never written or edited anything on Wikipedia). If you object to referencing Wikipedia as authoritative, the existence of this article is is at least suggestive, i.e., supportive of my assertions.

  3. marcel, jews call themselves tribe. even the reform now accept jewish peoplehood. if you care about the trope please tell other jews to become explicitly confessional like xtians and muslims.

    i think you are on track to say that judaism/jewishness was more diverse around 0 AD. but that window closed.

    ‘orthodox’ judaism is really a sister religion of christianity (both developed together). but, classical judaism was highly tribal, and this was a major argument in christianity (as you know from st. paul). this is nothing exceptional. most religions were tribal for most of history.

  4. the rise of the dragoman class makes it comprehensible. the social status and connections gained by converting to christianity rose as the ottoman power declined, and some peripherals areas of the near east (mountains of lebanon) were always mostly outside of direct ottoman rule.

    subalterns pick winners

  5. Razib,

    Riffing on the “tribal Judaism” thing a bit, what do you make of the theory that the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE fundamentally transformed the nature of Judaism due to the subsequent exposure to and influence from Achaemenid “Zoroastrianism”? Mainly, the theory seems to go that Zoroastrianism bequeathed a strong conception of ethics and a theory of transcendental/divine justice that didn’t exist before in Judaean/Israelite religion, which influenced later beliefs about good and evil, God and Satan, heaven and hell, dichotomies which don’t seem to have been well elaborated in the earliest strata of the Hebrew religion (the Torah).

    I know this theory is popular in some academic and lay circles, but I also recall reading that this line is highly overstated because we actually know very little about what Zoroastrian was really like doctrinally, ritually, etc., before the common era. Most of what we take for granted as classic Zoroastrian precepts (dualism, emphasis on ethics, ritual purity, etc.) is only first clearly expressed in the Parthian and especially Sassanian periods.

  6. Riffing on the “tribal Judaism” thing a bit, what do you make of the theory that the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE fundamentally transformed the nature of Judaism due to the subsequent exposure to and influence from Achaemenid “Zoroastrianism”?

    i think this is on the right track. judaism become disconnected from heimat due to the captivity, and they began transporting their god all over the place.

    i think zoroastrian influence on abrahamic religions understated because early zoroastrianism was inchoate, and there aren’t many zoroastrians around to make the claim for the seminal importance of their religion.

    that being said, i think ‘universalism’ was to some extent an inevitable dev. of imperial social complexity. i think the tribal religion doesn’t scale.

  7. RK: I am reluctant to respond, having at least once previously derailed what I think would have otherwise been an interesting comment thread. Nevertheless, 2 points in response.

    1) Yes, we Jews do call ourselves a tribe and refer to other Jews as members of the tribe. Many groups use words about themselves, among themselves, that they find offensive when others use them: I am confident that anyone reading this blog can quickly come up with examples.

    My wife’s paternal grandmother was an unpleasant woman, and my wife and in-laws used to laugh about how awful she was. One time while talking to my father-in-law, a sweet man with whom I had a good relationship, I made a comment trying to join in the laughing-at-her, and he was, unusual for him, very irate with me. As a matter of etiquette/getting along in civil society, there are different rules about what is acceptable usage. One person’s use of a word may be affectionate in-group bonding, while another’s use of the same word, even if intended to be affectionate, will be at a minimum grating, and perhaps extend into being offensive.

    2) Yes, the window closed, though I think several centuries later than 0 CE. According to Feldman (“Proselytism By Jews in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Centuries”, Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, v. 24, 1993) there is a wealth of evidence that conversion to Judaism was not rare in the Roman Empire well into the 5th century CE, long after the failed insurrections. This evidence includes repeated Imperial bans, inscriptions, and strident denunciations of Judaism by leaders of Christianity (e.g., John Chrysostom). According to one source online, conversion from Islam to Judaism became illegal under Umar II in the early 8th century CE: presumably the ban was in response to contemporaneous activities, and even if it was earlier, there is clear & uncontested evidence of Jews throughout the Arabian peninsula until at least the time of Mohammed.

    So, while I am in agreement about both early Judaism and Judaism of the last 1200-1500 years, there was a period of many centuries — the long ago closed window — when the religion was more demographically diverse.

    PS: I am hoping that you can say something knowledgeable in response to Mick. I have often wondered about that issue myself but know almost nothing about it. OTOH, this may send the thread off in the wrong direction 😉

  8. marcel, no offense, it’s not all about the jews. the term ‘tribal religion’ is highly useful. i can use the term ‘ethnic religion.’ the term ‘traditional religion’ is too vague.

    However at some point before the Roman conquest of the Seleucid empire, other peoples were converting, either voluntarily or under coercion, e.g. the Idumaeans, and by the time of Mohammed, there were large numbers of Jews in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula.

    there were instances of this. but it was exceptional. if pharisaic judaism had been allowed to ‘evolve’ it would probably be like islam in relation to its tribal/ethnic element. but as a matter of fact this trend in what we call jewish religion was stillborn due to islam/xtianity (which themselves are imo jewish religions too).

    anti-semitism of the form is directed against rabbnical judaism. the tribal judaism i’m talking about sort of predates it (at least in its full form).

    so what term do you want me to use so i don’t offend you? i’m serious. give me a word that’s accurate and NOT offensive (don’t make one up).

  9. I agree that “tribal religion” is highly useful in general, but because of the history of that word specifically with regard to Jews… And I agree that it is not all about Jews (although as I mentioned, I have been responsible for unintentionally encouraging at least one comment thread to go off the rails in that direction). “Ethnic religion” seems fine to me. I won’t vouch that it is for other Jews, but the word “ethnic” does not have the same overtones to this Jew that “tribal” does. And the religion is certainly skeptical of converts today and has been, so far as I can tell, for centuries. And not just converts (e.g., The central rabbinates treatment of the Ethiopian Jews). Thank you.

  10. Religion is part of the cultural package humans developed to deal with the challenges of the world and their mind. “Traditional” religions were all tribal and served those practicising to find their place in the world, even if degenerating into something of a burden because of human behavioural creativity.
    Even if such a tribal religion made its believers “the best” or “most pure” and “people apart”, this doesnt have to mean others couldn’t join.

    In the case of Judaism there were different trends and sects, but overall it always remained a tribal and non-universal religion favouring its own adherents in a different, more ethnocentric way.

    How anybody can deny that if reading the Torah and Jewish laws and rabbinical decisions, or even just the old Testament of the Christian bible, is beyond me.

    The old Testament is for the most part an heroic epos of the Hebrew people.
    Enemies being smashed and butchered, heroes emerge and lead the tribe in difficult times, god assists the chosen people in the face of danger and so on.

    Its not just the social practise, but the content which is ethnic.

    If someone disagrees, just compare the old Testament first with the New Testament or the Koran and then with tribal and ethnic “pagan” myths and epic stories.
    The old Testament has just a lot in common with tribal/ethnic “great storytelling”, the real religious content is, in comparison, minor and was later blown up and reinterpreted it seems.

    And Razib is absolutely right that most religions were ethnic and tribal, because thats the social and biological unit which mattered.

    Universalistic religions, with the pretension to be valid for everyone and the only rightful path to spirituality and transcendence, are the exception. Born from the urban setting of dissatisfied mass people in search for a new meaning to their life beyond tribal, ethnic, philosophical, even all natural, reasonable foundations.

    What makes Jews peculiar in this more modern context is that the Jewish religion evolved on, to a relatively higher cultural level, beyond the more primitive roots of tribal religion,but unlike philosophy and universalistic religions they stayed tribal nevertheless.
    What’s peculiar about Christianity is that its an universalistic religion based on a foreign tribal one. Which led to absurdities like European aristocracy claiming descend from king David, not just in a spiritual way, or Christian radical sects believing to be the better Hebrews.
    But thats just logical if accepting the old Testament which is a national Epos of the Hebrews.

    There is nothing strange about that, don’t get me wrong. The strange thing is that non-Jews accepted it as their holy book. So they didnt just give up their ethnic religion, but adopted elements of another, foreign one instead.

    Christianity is therefore, in its essence, the universalistic Judaism, while Judaism is what stayed in the tribal tradition when the split took place.

  11. By the way, before the split was definite, we can observe a surge of “conversions” in both directions. Proselytism was at its height in the early Christian phase and the earlist Christians were all Jewish and Christianity just became universalistic with Paulus and his followers.

    I’d say that most of the Southern European ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews dates to this period of uncertainty, of blurred borderlines, when the appearance of Christianity made Judaism more interesting for many and led to increased rates of Proselytism.

    The end result was many Hebrews becoming Christians and many Europeans Jewish. But after that period of exchange endogamous behaviour became the norm again.

  12. A couple other brilliant ideas of Slapstik regarding the interaction/lack of it between Islam-Christianity and Brahmins – he once hypothesized it may have become extra-difficult for Brahmins to try and Brahmanise Islam and Christianity because the elites/people from these two religions were neutral/averse to the Sanskrit language. Of course the only pathway to do such a thing even in that scenario would be to create/discover Agamic liturgies for these deities but also very very importantly under the strict requirement that they be subsumed into one of the 6 popular Brahminical Hindu deities of Nigamic provenance – most likely Vishnu. In addition to not caring much about Sanskrit, Muslims and Christians would have presumably loathed such a thing as what I wrote above (oh the horror!) and they probably never made an effort to bride the religious gap between themselves and Brahmins (and Brahmins ended up never caring about them much). It is here that perhaps the people of low-strata ancient and medieval Indian society were more open-minded and were okay with sharing religion with Brahmins – and subsequently Brahmins Brahmanised several village boundary goddesses, etc. to some extent by categorising them as the Devi, etc.

    The other wonderful brilliant idea of Slapstik was that he thought Sikkhism to be a version of Islam thoroughly assimilated to Indian sensibilities, culture, etc. My mind was blown like anything reading that at the time lol.

  13. For what it’s worth, despite centuries of political dominance on the subcontinent, the various Islamic dynasties never seemed able to wrest economic dominance from the Hindus. For example, Muhammad Tughluq tried to extract more taxes on the Hindus and impose sumptuary laws, and his attempt to relocate the administration from Delhi to Daulatabad may have been an attempt to impose to wrest financial control away from Hindu merchants.

  14. I guess what I was told in college, a long time ago, is ‘the consensus of scholarly opinion’, moves around. I’m not a scholar of that particular question, but I’ve read quite a bit about this issue, as in more than the average person, and per all that I thought that Cameron’s thesis was the ‘consensus of scholarly opinion’ and that a book arguing for Cameron’s thesis would be very surprising because no one disagreed with his thesis.

    I haven’t read the book, but as far as I know the standard story is the one that led to Gibbon’s quip about true/false/useful, and that no educated ancients believed in what’s in Hesiod from at least 400 BC, but the populares did and as the pillars of society that educated aristocrats were, they generally discharged their religious duties. If one reads Cicero or Plutarch, each is clearly a monotheist, as in believes in capital G God, and not in little g gods, though both obviously did discharge their religious duties as they were expected to, since their societies as a whole demanded it.

    For religion to work for society as a whole, it needs both an orthopraxy and a orthodoxy, and in the ancient world, philosophy, like Platonism, didn’t come with an orthopraxy, and the religions with praxis, roughly Hesiod, didn’t have an orthodoxy that an educated person could espouse. Christianity had both an orthopraxy and an orthodoxy that an educated person could believe in, the Christian God is the God of the philosophers, so one needn’t be a Christian to see why Christianity would have displaced ancient paganism.

    Is all that no longer ‘the consensus of scholarly opinion’? I guess that might go along with a guy in a dress not being ‘a guy in a dress’.

  15. “had less to do with victory in the competition with paganism, than the fact that there was a vacuum at the center of the state which Christianity was suited to fill.”

    Can’t comment on the provincial level, but I don’t think there was a vacuum at the imperial center just before Constantine turned to Christianity. Under the tetrarchs there was a deliberate attempt to revitalize traditional Greco-Roman religion, with Diocletian and his co-emperor Maximian being basically identified with/depicted as representatives of Jupiter and Hercules on earth (this was also expressed in the creation of the Jovian and Herculean legions, whose names persisted into Christian times) to an extent that hadn’t been there before. Diocletian probably sincerely thought he had a personal relationship with Jupiter. Maybe that attempt at revitalizing traditional religion was always doomed, but imo it would be wrong to claim there was no potential at all for innovation there.

  16. ” The Hindu-Muslim tension and conflict which has been a feature of Indian history in various forms emerges from the fact that the assimilation of Hindus into Islam as converted Muslims is not inevitable due to the latter’s clearly superior sophistication over the former.”

    Could you explain what you mean here? You mean that Islam is more sophisticated than Hinduism? Or Vedanta is so over Buddhism? Or what?

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