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... the Christian side. The destruction of all copies of this treatise was ordered by Constantine, an action which has been termed the first instance of the secular arm proceeding against a work of the mind (une oeuvre de l esprit) on the ground of heterodoxy. In Catholicism the spiritual forces of the Pagan world found a new rallying-ground.
It was in Catholicism ultimately that the creative powers and assimilative energies of pagan Greco-Roman civilization became most alive as the forerunner of modern civilization. It met the needs and satisfied the demands of that age. I was accomplished through breathless search for a new religion with redemption at once personal and cosmic, based on authority and revelation, conspicuously other-worldly, promising cleansing and supernatural aid, and envisaging a mystic humanity. In Catholic Christian theology the myth with its symbolic expression has either been harshly expelled as mere superstition or more generally been treated with undue respect as literal fact. Catholic apologists treated all myths of their competitors and contemporaries as false or grotesque, while their own mythopoeia activities undertook to match or outstrip pagan myths. Catholic apologists also, insisted that pagans accepted their myths literally -- in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary extant to this day -- and popular Christianity has ended by accepting its own myths in the same literal fashion.
A religious myth may be the poetical and imaginative expression of truth, and Greek mythology has been found wonderfully suggestive of timeless truth. There is the truth of myth, and there is the truth of historical fact. Catholicism appropriated much of permanent interest and moral worth from that ancient pagan civilization. Catholic Church also acted in much the same way to its old home as Israel did to Egypt, from which it brought the cult of the golden calves but left the doctrine of immortality.
So Catholicism appropriated much that had better been abandoned and that has proved perilous and a handicap to its subsequent history. But it also repudiated much as pagan which impoverished its outlook and narrowed its apprehension of its universal mission. The early Catholics saw so much of evil in their environment against which they were in revolt that they were naturally less conscious of the elements of good. Paganism essayed to meet the religious situation by a process of selection and assimilation of the best elements and by toleration; Catholicism by intolerance and repudiation of surrounding culture as the wisdom of this doomed aeon.
Besides, traditions of culture rarely or never appeal to the leaders of a popular movement. Because pagans employed physicians and physic, many Catholicism regarded medicine as the possession and mark of heathenism and the employment of physicians as disloyalty to Christ the Physician. As philosophy was the occupation of Pagan thinkers, the term took on for many Christians the connotation given it by Paul as synonymous with false teaching and became caviare to the general. Some Christians would ask, what has Christ to do with Socrates?
And the unfortunate position arose -- unfortunate both for the conservation of the spiritual values of paganism and for the comprehensiveness of Christianity -- that the Christian propaganda offered as irreconcilable alternatives Plato or Christ, Greek truth or Christian revelation. In Pagan thought the demons exercised much the same function as their angelic counterparts, especially in supplying the demand for intermediaries created for both Pagans and Christians by the conception of a transcendental deity; by the dualism between Stuff and Mind, and the need of an adequate theory of the origins both of the world and of evil. There must be to Pagans and Catholics an ordered hierarchy of superhuman beings, demons, saints, angels, seraphim, to carry out the will of the Deity in a world unworthy of His presence. Demons acted as satraps of the Gods.
They carry up the prayers of men to the gods and bring back the answers and blessings. They also executed the behests of the Deity in protecting the righteous and punishing the wicked both here and hereafter. They may also act as guardian genius or as the voice of God or the conscience of men, an example of which was the demon of Socrates, about which there arose so much interesting speculation. They are not wholly beneficent; evil demons still exist, for they deceive men by forging oracles, they cause divorces and other evils. The Deity can be justified or exonerated from evil on the theory that it is the demons that perform evil, and so a solution is offered of the existence of evil under a good Deity.
By one of the many surprising developments within Catholicism the much-maligned pagan demons became, with their Jewish compeers, the predecessors of the Christian angels and saints, to whom they bequeathed their more useful and popular functions. As in Catholicism the path to sainthood is open officially to the most meritorious members, so demonology held out to pagan saints the possibility of becoming demons after death charged with the honorable privilege of shepherding their fellow-men or even of becoming deities in full sympathy with mankind. Plutarch cites Isis and Osiris as examples of demons raised to the rank of Deities. When an Egyptian priest went to the Item on the Campus Martius to interview the demon of Plotinus, he found to his amazement that he was no longer a demon but had become a god. Thus the doctrines of demonology furnished to the most convinced believers a religious idealism by becoming the vehicle of expression in Catholicism were adopted from paganism. The Pagan miracles, too patent to be denied, were the work of demons.
When the demons learned that Jesus would be a physician of all diseases and raise the dead, they anticipated Him by bringing Aesculapius on the scene. Christians sometimes called for test cases of demon-possessed to prove the superior Catholic way of dealing with them. Christians held that images of the Deities and Pagan temples were the favorite abodes of demons. Catholic ecclesiastics did not doubt that demons could enter even Christian bodies through eating foods consecrated to idols. According to Tertullian, the demons are all the more dangerous because they are equipped with wings like the angels; they are everywhere at once, and know all that is taking place in every quarter. The demons also forced polytheism on the heathen, mimicked the Christian sacraments, and hardened mens minds against the force of evangelical arguments.
They were more afraid of Christians than of the heathen. Gregory of Nyssa tells in his Life of Gregory the Thaumaturge how the latter banished the demons from a pagan shrine and by the Name of Christ and the sign of the Cross purified the air. Subsequently at the challenge of the local priest, who had returned and found his temple empty of demons, Gregory caused the demons to come back in obedience to the permission Gregory to Satan, enter. Orphism first heralded by the Catholic Church this new doctrine of the weakness and sinfulness of man and his need of grace and of cathartic ritual which a thousand years later in Augustine Confessions found its classic expression.
The Pythagorean's took up the Orphic pessimistic anthropology and furthered it by emphasizing the necessity for holiness and by dwelling on the awful retribution awaiting the unforgiving sinner beyond is similar to Catholic teaching. Another cause decidedly favorable to the elaboration of a supernatural machinery of rite and the materialization of the Catholic sacraments into what they became toward the end of the pagan supremacy and through the Dark Ages and what they are to the majority of the Christians to-day was the passing of Platonism and the coming of the long reign of Aristotelianism in the Christian Church. There was continuity in the historic and psychological reactions between the paganism and the Catholicism which was recruited out of it. Of course there was no need for the Catholic Church to repudiate the harmony between the earth and the cosmos that was established pagan belief. Just as her doctors have preserved, often felicitously, many habits of thought and turns of phrase which are tainted in origin, so does the Catholic Church gather to her vast treasury riches rescued from all sides. She took the sumptuous setting of her worship from dying paganism, making a halo for the Sun of Justice out of the glory of the Sol Invictus, adorning her cathedrals with the signs of the zodiac, harmonizing her ceremonies with the rhythm of the seasons.
But it is neither the natural cycle nor some extra-cosmic deliverance that is portrayed by her liturgical year: it is the vast history of our redemption. Worship like that of the Mithraic mysteries is a perfect example. Within the Mithraeum everything, though under the sign of the twelve regions of heaven and the four elements, was at the same time under the sign of the seven planets: furniture and ornament included seven altars, seven knives, seven Phrygian caps, seven trees; among the statues, seven busts of the Gods. Origen mentions the scale of seven portals that was shown to the initiate, and nowadays there may be seen at Ostia the seven-arched portals outlined on the pavement of a Mithraeum; on the banks of the Rhine, whither soldiers of the Roman Empire had transported their cherished worship, miniature scales have been found in many tombs.
They were symbols of the seven degrees of Mithraic initiation by which the heavenly ascent of the worshipper was affected. Now in Christian liturgy there is one privileged part of the year which is also under the sign of the number seven. It is the season, with its imaginative rather than real divisions, which beginning on Septuagesima terminates on the Saturday in Albis or on Laetare Sunday according as it is counted on the basis of seven times ten days or seven consecutive Sundays. But the symbolism of this series of seven is quite different. In the Babylonian captivity we have a figure of the long captivity of the whole human race from the time of its original sin down to its being set free by Christ, and in the forty years from the time of the exodus from Egypt to the entry into the promised land is figured its long earthly pilgrimage, the long ascent to its heavenly home. In practice, then, it is the whole of human history.
We have here our six ages of the world, the six great stages of the redemption, with the addition of the final age which begins with the resurrection, the definitive Sabbath, when Christ at last takes his rest, the seventh day which shall know no decline. The scripture read in the breviary at the beginning of this period is the account of the creation, and the Gospel of the Mass is the parable of the laborers sent into the vineyard in whom tradition sees a figure of the divine economy; this also is the burden of the homily by St Gregory the Great read at Matins on that day. It is the history of salvation wrought by Christ, a single history with its components closely bound up together, wherein all the characters, laborers at an identical task, are mysteriously united, and where escape has no place. In accounting for the protracted history of paganism, for that apparent long desertion of the world by God, the same tendencies are apparent. Some of the Fathers insist especially on the fact that human understanding had to make much progress so as to be able to receive the object of revelation.
According to some authorities, the name Vatican is derived from the Etruscan town Vatican; other savants hold that in very ancient pagan days the hill of the Vatican was part of a country district covered with farms, having on it a temple in honor of Dvds Pater Vatican us, in which this god expressed himself in oracles or prophecies. It may be so; we cannot presume to decide when learned men differ on such points; but as it is certainly true that the Catholic religion has incorporated into its system all the elements of pagan religion and ritual and ceremony and customs which it found to be in harmony with the truths revealed by Christ, it would be quite fitting that a place once dedicated to a local pagan religion should become the holy city of that universal religion which came into the world to unite mankind in the worship of the One God of all. Even Vatican, Catholicism Capital had pagan roots. The triumph of Catholic Christianity over paganism, whether intellectual or popular, and over heretical Arian or pagan barbarism was certainly due in large part to the support it received, first from the declining Roman State and later from the barbarian monarchies. From the first, Catholicism was a missionary and exclusive religion. It had all the strength of pagan refusal to compromise, to join (and be dissolved) in the syncretic welter of beliefs and cults that characterized the Later Roman Empire.
Bibliography: Carrington P. , The Early Christian Church, 2 vols. , London, Cambridge University Press, 1957. Daniel, J. The First Six Hundred Years of Church History. New York, 1964.
Dowden, Ken. European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Routledge, 2000. Glover T. R. , The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, 10 th ed. , New York and London, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923. Goff art, W.
Barbarians and Romans A. D. 418 - 584: The Techniques of Accommodation. Princeton, 1980. Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.
Oxford University Press, 2002. Momigliano, A. , ed. The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century. Oxford, 1963.
van der F. Meer, and Mohrmann, C. Atlas of the Early Christian World. New York, 1958.
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