History
4th century CE onward
The triumph of Christianity over the older religions of the world was among the most consequential transformations in history — and, for the tradition preserved in this library, the event that brought the open life of Hellenic philosophy and the worship of the old gods to an end. It was achieved by a combination of sincere conversion, imperial law, force, and the patient absorption of the sacred places and seasons of those it replaced.
For its first three centuries Christianity was a minority faith within a pagan empire, and at times a persecuted one — most fiercely under Diocletian's Great Persecution of 303–311. Then came a swift and total reversal. With the conversion of Constantine, the Edict of Milan in 313 granted toleration to all religions; within two generations the balance had inverted, and by the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, under Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity was made the sole lawful religion of Rome, all other beliefs branded the creed of the 'insane and mad'. Some who were born watching Christianity be a capital offence lived to see the old religion itself outlawed.
The change was carried through in a chain of imperial decrees, gathered in the sixteenth book of the Theodosian Code. Constantine had merely restricted private divination; his son Constantius II ordered that 'the madness of sacrifices be abolished', closed temples, and by 357 made sacrifice and the worship of images punishable by death. After the brief pagan restoration of the emperor Julian (361–363), the Theodosian decrees of 391–392 went furthest of all: every act of the old devotion — sacrifice, incense, a garland hung, a lamp lit at the household hearth — was declared treason, punished with ruinous fines and the confiscation of property, and provincial officials were made personally liable, on pain of their offices, if they failed to enforce it.
Law was followed by demolition. In 391 the Serapeum of Alexandria, among the most magnificent temples of antiquity, was stormed and razed by a Christian crowd led by the city's bishop; in 394 the sacred fire of Vesta, tended in Rome for over a thousand years, was extinguished; the Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated for some two thousand years, fell silent. The violence could reach the philosophers themselves: in 415 Hypatia, the Platonist teacher of Alexandria, was seized and torn apart by a mob. And in 529 the emperor Justinian moved against the last Academy at Athens, heir to Plato's school; its Neoplatonist masters, among them Damascius and Simplicius, went into exile, and with them the open life of the golden chain came to an end.
Beyond the Mediterranean, Christianisation unfolded over centuries, by preaching and royal patronage but also by conquest. Missionaries struck deliberately at the visible heart of the old worship — the felling of the thunder-god's sacred oak by Boniface in eighth-century Germany was staged to prove that the gods could not defend even their own trees. Where preaching failed, the sword followed: Charlemagne's decades-long wars against the pagan Saxons ended in mass executions and in laws making refusal of baptism a capital crime, and the later Northern Crusades carried forced conversion by arms to the still-pagan peoples of the Baltic. Organised European paganism made its last stand in Lithuania, which did not accept baptism until 1387.
With the European voyages of conquest from the fifteenth century, the pattern was carried across the world: the spread of the faith went hand in hand with empire, as native temples and images were destroyed, indigenous priesthoods broken, and conversion imposed by force or as the price of survival. The losses to memory were vast — in 1562 a Spanish bishop burned the painted books of the Maya in the Yucatán, leaving only a handful of codices from a literate civilisation; campaigns for the 'extirpation of idolatry' sought to stamp out the worship of the Andes; and into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mission and residential schools across the colonised world laboured to sever indigenous peoples from their ancestral traditions.
How a single religion came to hold so near a monopoly over the spiritual life of so much of humanity is a question historians answer by pointing, alongside genuine conviction, to a recognisable set of methods. The first was the alliance with state power, which turned a faith into a law and unbelief into a crime. The second was the redefinition of the old gods as demons: the very word daimon, which for the Platonists named the benevolent spirits between gods and men, was bent into 'demon', so that the whole pantheon of the ancestors became a host of devils to be feared and renounced. The third, and subtlest, was absorption rather than destruction — temples rededicated as churches, holy wells and hilltops given new patrons, the festivals of the pagan year quietly reassigned to Christian saints and seasons. A famous letter of Pope Gregory the Great, in 601, expressly counselled his missionaries in England not to destroy the shrines but to convert them, and to let the people keep their accustomed feasts under holy new names, so that the rhythm of devotion might continue while its object was changed.
How complete and how violent this triumph truly was remains debated. Older narratives — whether Christian tales of glorious conversion or their mirror-image of pagan martyrdom — tend to dramatise a sudden and total victory; more recent scholarship stresses how gradual, uneven, and negotiated the process often was. Paganism faded over generations rather than being extinguished in a stroke; much conversion was nominal and slow to reach the countryside (where the very word for a villager, paganus, became the name for the old believers); a great deal of pre-Christian practice survived for centuries within folk custom, magic, and the cult of the saints; and even the anti-pagan laws were enforced unevenly, with some, by the fifth century, forbidding Christians to attack peaceable pagans and Jews. Coercion and destruction were real and at times terrible — but so were persuasion, syncretism, and the genuine appeal of the new faith.
For the tradition gathered in this library, the consequence was nonetheless decisive: the public worship of the old gods was ended, the philosophical schools were closed, and the Hellenic wisdom of Plato and the Neoplatonists survived only by going underground — copied in monasteries, carried into the lands of Islam, and waiting through the long centuries for the rediscovery that would come at last in the Renaissance.
PLATO SCROLL