Terms of generalization: ‘‘paganism’’

Casting religion of the Roman period as a movement towards the triumph of Christianity or as the end of Classical culture, or even as the dissipation of original Christian ideals, has historically been facilitated by the term ‘‘paganism,’’ which claims the monolithic capacity to represent all religious things outside Christianity (and, to some degree, Judaism). As a catch-all for the vast world of philosophies, local and migratory cults, and religious traditions in the Roman Empire, ‘‘paganism’’ (and its recent replacement, ‘‘polytheism’’) has allowed simplistic contrasts between Christianity and prevailing religions of a region (Brown 1998: 639-42). Christianity, for example, might provide ‘‘salvation,’’ whereas ‘‘paganism’’ only offered ‘‘ritual.’’ Thus ‘‘paganism’’ as an idea allowed the possibility of deducing influences on Christianity - to its perfection or pollution. Most of all, ‘‘paganism’’ has allowed historians to assume that Christianity - still in the third century but a loose assortment of warring apocalyptic sects with only the most general overlaps in ritual and belief-was essentially distinct from its immediate environment (rather than being a part of it, interacting thoroughly with other religions). The term creates a standard of imprecision that easily leads to theologically-based judgments about religion ‘‘apart from’’ Christianity.

It must be acknowledged that the third and fourth centuries saw the consolidation, in various social arenas, of a religious-cultural identity juxtaposed to Christianity and called hellene, after the Greek culture to which it laid claim. For many scholars, the fact that both Christians and non-Christians spoke of a unified religious realm opposed to Christianity and consisting essentially of ‘‘Hellenic’’ heritage and devotion to all things traditional, justified the modern use of the term ‘‘pagan’’ or its facile substitutes (cf. Trombley 1993/4). However, these predominantly fourth-century efforts at defining an intellectually coherent non-Christian religiosity were idiosyncratic hybrids, not extensions, of indigenous piety, often the inventions of philosophers and imperial programs, and hardly indicative of a common ‘‘paganism’’ across the diverse and far-flung religious cultures of the Roman world. Often these intellectual pagans had more in common with the Christian fathers they opposed than with the villagers and pilgrims who crowded shrines in an effort to resolve quotidian crises (Geffcken 1978; Fowden 1982; Athanassiadi 1993; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 312; Frankfurter 2000a: 184-92). When one seeks terms of generalization like ‘‘paganism’’ to cover the non-Christian religions of a period and place, one needs to consider the general (cross-cultural) applicability of such a word. In this case it should be noted that studies of comparatively modern religious worlds - African, Asian - do not employ such categories as ‘‘paganism’’ or ‘‘polytheism,’’ since - apart from missionary interests - these terms would not be appropriate to describe the variety of regional religious traditions.