The First Missionary War, Chapter 1
by Michael Routery
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Introduction
The Christian religion has, so often, spread through violence, force and coercion, yet, its advocates, who have written the histories most of us learned in school, portray it, as having been, joyfully embraced by the ancient world, a loving embrace whose only restriction was imposed by the corrupt Roman state like a mean father with an innocent child. In this essay, I present the view of the pagans for a change and without apology. In truth, the Church triumphed by marrying the Empire, in that most fateful of centuries, the Fourth, and for the most part people converted because they were terrorized into doing so or forced to by ferociously repressive new laws. As Christ, is reputed to have said, he came with the sword. In the forced conversion of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to Christianity, the new religion set itself apart from others, particularly, in its jealousy and extreme intolerance of any other spiritualities. In the ancient world this mania to impose one God, exclusively, was an aberration. Israel had attempted it, but only upon its own ethnic group.
The stage was set, by Christian mobs, led by their bishops, performing as shock troops, rampaging through pagan temples, looting, destroying art works, burning books and often murdering the priests and priestesses and assaulting their humble followers. The third century was a period of worsening economic crisis and social decline for the Mediterranean world, the Imperial government searched for ways to fortify the state structure with drastic laws curtailing people's freedom of movement, profession and eventually religion. The emergence of church dominance can only be understood within this matrix of decay. Taxation became extremely harsh, laws tied people to the professions of their parents, destitute farmers fled the tax men and sought refuge on the vast estates of the extremely rich, laying the pattern for medieval serfdom. The church, which was much more organized than the pagan religions, was seen by the state as a scaffolding upon which the sociopolitical order could be strengthened.
Contrary to the carefully fabricated 'histories' of the church, the hierarchically structured church had many wealthy members. It was not a movement with socially 'progressive' features as many contemporary liberal Christians believe. Christian apologists assert the supposedly compassionate stance of the new religion in contrast to the classical values, particularly in regards to slavery, yet in reality, the church officials supported slavery. A prominent Christian woman, Melania the Younger, was the owner of 24,000 slaves.1 Christianity actually used the metaphor of the slave's relationship to his/her master as that of the human to God as in a parable of Jesus. Paul exhorted runaway slaves to return to their masters, determined that the church present no signs of rebellion to the established social order. Ambrose and Augustine stated that the institution of slavery was actually good for the slave who, insidiously, was said to receive a reward in heaven for what s/he suffered in this world. Jerome, on the other hand, was critical of household slavery, seeing it as a threat to sexual virtue, a temptation to whet the lust of the owners.
The early church tended to be hostile to all sexuality; even heterosexual relations between husband and wife were generally viewed as an unfortunate but necessary evil in a fallen world. The Church certainly wasn't entirely responsible for this gloomy attitude towards the world and its pleasures, the late pagan philosophers had taken an increasingly pessimistic turn, roots of such thinking can be seen in Platonic thought, where the world of ideas is seen as superior to the world of forms, but the Church, influenced by Gnostic and Manichaean (Persian) duality, wove together the more anti-worldly aspects of Greek and Hebrew thought with its particular salvation myth. While the Greco-Roman world was certainly a patriarchal one, it was a very complex, 'multi-cultural' society where many diverse cultural traditions , some extremely ancient, existed side by side and quite a few of these traditions provided a place for independent women in spiritual roles in temples. Both Roman and Greek women of the imperial period had more freedom than they did in either classical Greece or republican Rome. The Mother Goddesses temples were popular with many women and also gender-variant males; these especially met the wrath and hatred of the emerging church. These goddesses were labeled demons by the 'Church Fathers' and villainy was heaped upon their priestesses and priests.
Many of these spiritual traditions are often referred to as Mystery cults, a term perhaps confusing in terms of modern usage. They were personal religions, as opposed to the rather austere and formalist official cult and offered 'initiations': powerful psychic dramas that often occurred as part of festivals and pilgrimages. They offered experiences that deeply engaged the senses and imagination of the participants. They were not exclusive and often a single individual would undergo initiation from several. Their attitude towards myth was playful, not dogmatic, leaving plenty of room for personal interpretation and creation of meaning, but they often leaned towards ideas of the soul's continuation, mirrored in metaphors of the agricultural round of the death and renewal of plant life, and had emerged at an early date out of seasonal rites reflecting such natural cycles. Essentially, these were not religions in the modern Christian defined sense; there were no boundaries between them, a priestess of one was often a priestess of others, in short, they were part of the overall fabric of pagan spirituality.2 They did stand in contrast, though, to the state cult which by imperial times had become a rather dry and formalistic affair that left many people cold. Some of the most popular Mysteries included that of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the originally Anatolian (Turkish) goddess, Cybele, of the Greek god, Dionysus, of the Persian solar god, Mithra, and probably the most famous of them all, that of Eleusis, a Greek ritual cycle of the earth and grain goddess Demeter and her daughter Kore (Persephone). It was these personally empowering centers and movements, which attracted people from all social strata, that the Church saw as such a major threat, its foremost competitors, and it seems no accident that their integral placing of women and sexually and gender variant people had something to do with the Church leaders extreme hostility towards them.
Notes to this chapter
1. Grant, A Social History of Greece and Rome, p.110.
2. see Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults
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