The secular, a notion that is now so firmly fixed in modern minds as to pass as a part of the natural order, was in Late Antiquity largely an unintended product of christianization. As such, it was a ‘‘betwixt and between’’ that was regarded as neither christianized nor pagan. Certainly the very label ‘‘pagan’’ was not itself unproblematic from a philological standpoint; in fact, it had to be gradually invented and made to fit the contours of what Christians imagined paganism to have been (O’Donnell 1971). As mentioned earlier, this process eventually led to an emerging consensus that saw the cultic worship of the gods as the core of paganism, and it was eventually to sacrifice, especially blood sacrifice, that the label was most fully applied.
Tertullian was only one Christian among many who voiced the opinion that almost every aspect of traditional Greco-Roman culture was pagan and hence ought to be rejected by Christians. But such sharply sectarian claims, made in a tutored rhetoric, simply helps underscore the fact that most Christians did not accept the view that all that was ‘‘old’’ was also ‘‘bad.’’ Many indeed subscribed to the view that cultic practices such as sacrifice must go, but most other aspects of traditional culture, with appropriate reconfiguration, could be retained. In the process of negotiating between what among the ‘‘old’’ was bad and had to go and what was either good or at least neutral and hence could stay, late antique persons were engaged with each other over a vital debate regarding the nature and pace of christianization and, ultimately, the kind of society in which they wished to live. It was in this same process that the secular was to play a signal role as an enabling conceptual category in Late Antiquity.
How individuals and groups used the category of the secular in their mutual negotiations can be seen in several places. Earnest discussions, such as one finds in Basil of Caesarea’s Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature and Augustine of Hippo’s On Christian Doctrine, regarding the value of traditional Greek and Roman literary classics in a christianizing culture, are too well known to require further treatment here (Rousseau 1994; Vessey et al. 1999). A similar dynamic can be discerned in the rival attempts to categorize particular physical spaces and objects. How the statues of the gods were treated in this period is most instructive (Curran 1994; James 1996). While many - probably even most - Jews and Christians long regarded such statues as demonic, others proposed that only certain statues, including cult statues found inside shrines and temples, were idols and hence subject to censure and destruction; others, such as those on public display, were in the latter view to be safeguarded and cherished as cultural artifacts, as neutral symbols of past achievements.
World History
