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The slaughter of animals for religious feasts, the tinkling of bells to ward off evil during holy rites, the custom of dancing in religious services-these and many other pagan practices persisted in the Christian church for hundreds of years after Constantine proclaimed Christianity the one official religion of Rome. In this book, Ramsay MacMullen investigates the transition from paganism to Christianity between the fourth and eighth centuries. He reassesses the triumph of Christianity, contending that it was neither tidy nor quick, and he shows that the two religious systems were both vital during an interactive period that lasted far longer than historians have previously believed.MacMullen explores the influences of paganism and Christianity upon each other. In a rich discussion of the different strengths of the two systems, he demonstrates that pagan beliefs were not eclipsed or displaced by Christianity but persisted or were transformed. The victory of the Christian church, he explains, was one not of obliteration but of widening embrace and assimilation. This fascinating book also includes new material on the Christian persecution of pagans over the centuries through methods that ranged from fines to crucifixion; the mixture of motives in conversion; the stubbornness of pagan resistance; the difficulty of satisfying the demands and expectations of new converts; and the degree of assimilation of Christianity to paganism.… (more)
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He discusses the political and social ascent of Christianity and the tide of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism that accompanied it. The new dominance of supernatural thinking demanded continued expressions and mechanisms for celebration, community, and magic that had been developed in the pagan world, but were lacking in Christianity. So there was ultimately an assimilation of pagan forms of practice, leading to survivals even into modern times.
The narrative of assimilation that MacMullen offers makes this book into something like a complement to Hislop's The Two Babylons. Where Hislop's Protestant paranoia guided his interpretation of the pagan features of traditional Christianity (which he read as the pernicious institution of the Roman Church), MacMullen appreciates the basic social and cultural dynamics that made such assimilation necessary and inevitable.
MacMullen emphasizes the qualitative difference between Christianity, a religion prioritizing creed and rooted in texts, and its local and imperial predecessors, anchored in practices and tolerant of varying or absent belief. He cautions against "presentist" bias in the treatment of ancient religions (107), and he welcomes the anthropological perspectives that have made it "common to accept the impossibility of separating magic from religion" (144).
Half of the book is endnotes, opaquely replete with a classicist's pervasive abbreviations, and the body of the text is laden with data that sometimes feel difficult to keep in context and perspective. But the argument is worth following, and represents a sane and realistic take on an important historical change of episteme.