The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity

The End of Sacrifice

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

Guillaume Bud? who suggested to François I that a Parisian equivalent of the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain be created, published in 1534 a large volume on "the shift from Hellenism to Christianity," De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum. 'Ellenismos, a term borrowed from Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus, meant for him what the New Testament calls "the world." Budé wanted to understand and explain to a knowledgeable and enlightened readership the essential workings of a profound transformation in the religious identity in the Mediterranean world under the Roman Empire. From Marcus Aurelius to Augustine, one can in effect follow the Christianization of subjectivity, of anthropology, of the emotions, along with the Christianization of structures of thought and of religious practice. More profoundly, it seems to be the very definition of religion, as well as its dialectical relations with society, that emerges transformed in a radical way toward the end of Late Antiquity—thus heralding the medieval cultures in their three essential forms, those of Byzantium and of Islam alongside that of the Latin West. The religious transformations of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world in the first centuries of the Roman Empire are so radical that one may speak of mutations, using a term derived from biology in a metaphorical way. I should right away justify using a metaphor that might seem implicitly to suppress human actions and intentionality. On the contrary, it is evident that changes (even the most dramatic and revolutionary) in human societies do not occur as if by magic, but rather are due to actions, decisions, and reflections that are both conscious and voluntary on the part of individuals and collectivities. But these human decisions, specific and individual, are never sufficient, even in their sum, to explain the transformation as a whole. In other words, referring to a concept familiar to us from Thomas Kuhn's epistemology of the sciences, we are witnessing a "paradigm shift" in the domain of the religious under the Roman Empire. If one has to specify in a single word the nature of this change, I would accept the Hegelian analysis that stresses the interiorization of religion, even if this means seriously qualifying the use of that term.

Since Budé this fundamental issue has been constantly restated, taken up a thousand times from different angles, sometimes with fresh illumination, yet without establishing answers that seem totally satisfactory, despite all the progress in historical thinking, in philology and archaeology, which have taught us that matters were extremely complex. With regard to our present subject, we have learned that neither "paganism" nor even "Christianity" can be reduced to a factitious unity that represents anything. The forms of Christian existence in the first centuries are numerous—and the concept of "paganism" is of course only the creation of Christian thinkers and does not correspond to any concrete reality. Here at the Collège de France, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault have offered reflections of great fecundity on this "shift" and its dramatic consequences. If today I propose to take up the question once more, I also wish to pay homage to these two great names. To attack head-on such vast and fundamental questions—especially when the time available requires me to make assertions (at best half-true ones) without really being able to demonstrate them—is to risk failure, as I am only too aware. But in the Republic of Letters, a little audacity seems to be a duty.

The transformations that one observes across the longue durée of the Roman Empire (for which I use the fashionable term "Late Antiquity" in perhaps an overly loose way because I make it start very early, in the second rather than the fourth century) are certainly not all of a religious nature. But starting with Albrecht Dieterich before the end of the nineteenth century, via Henri-Irénée Marrou and Eric Robertson Dodds, to Peter Brown and Robin Lane Fox, all historians interested in religious phenomena have not hesitated to speak of a new religiosity or piety, even a religious revolution, that sets in during the third century to assert itself during the fourth. On this point, Peter Brown states flatly: "We live in a world where it is imperative that we should learn to understand revolutions." It is a religious revolution because we are witnessing the crumbling of the ancient systems of the Greeks and Romans, but also that of Israel, founded as it was on daily sacrifices at the Temple of Jerusalem. Of all these religious systems, Judaism alone survived and was able to reconstitute itself, but at the price of radical transformations. If it was able to do so, this was undoubtedly because it found within itself, more so than did polytheistic systems, an implicit medium of change, the leaven of interiorization. And yet Judaism remains all too often absent from studies of the religious transformations of Late Antiquity. Dieterich remains typical in this respect: in his "Der Untergang der antiken Religion," dating from 1892, one finds not a word on Judaism. This absence—due no doubt in large part, but not solely, to difficulties of a linguistic order—seems to me to prevent real understanding of these transformations.

Questions linked to religion and to religious identity that were previously thought to be settled, or nearly so (with the naïveté too often manifested by the master thinkers of the twentieth century), are today being reasserted, often in a stark and conflictual way. But in an era so troubled as ours, humanist and secular thought about the religious transformations at the very basis of our societies not only is not superfluous, but even appears with a new urgency.

I need to make a methodological point. The history of religions, as we know, has an ambiguous status. A science born of theology, by contrasting itself to the latter, finds it difficult to completely disengage from it. In my case, I will be studying dead and living religions together, some of which are our own or those of contemporary societies and, alas, sometimes still in conflict with each other. Neither infatuation nor disdain nor unacknowledged polemic is acceptable. As a principle of method, I therefore propose to study dead religions as if they were alive, and the living ones as if they were dead. The death of the former might help us to better understand the life of the latter, and vice versa.

The shift that interests us here is not simply from one religion to another, from paganism to Christianity, as it was formerly expressed, or even from polytheistic to monotheistic systems, to use terms more in vogue today. Yet I am indeed fearful that these modern concepts ("polytheism" and "monotheism" date from the seventeenth century) do not always reflect entities or historical realities that are clearly defined, and especially so in the period that concerns us. Whatever the case, I am not sure that this heuristic principle is very useful for understanding the nature of the transformations that we are trying to observe. For example, the Platonist Celsus seems to be more strictly monotheistic than the Christian Origen. Moreover, it seems to me that the predilection for both these terms, "polytheism" as well as "monotheism," reflects or sometimes hides apologetic or polemic attitudes that one does not dare to display in our societies, where religion and secularism remain in conflict, whether muffled or shrill.

The German philosopher Karl Jaspers characterized the first half millennium before our common era as an Achsenzeit (axial age), when across different (often imperial) civilizations there developed a hierarchical differentiation between the visible and invisible, the material and spiritual, worlds. Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, and the first Greek philosophers represented for Jaspers the types of this intellectual and religious transformation. It seems to me that the era and domain we are studying also has a claim to this title of "axial age," an epoch in which the very frameworks of a civilization are transformed in a radical way. I would like to try to show how one may follow, roughly from Jesus to Muhammad, the transformation of the very concept of religion. In a sense, then, the conversion of Constantine and the Christianization of the empire permitted the establishment of a new sort of religion that was unknown in the ancient world. To a great extent, the religious transformations of Late Antiquity mark the foundation of European culture.

The victory of Christianity in the Roman Empire risks distorting the way the problem is posed. Marrou wondered whether we should speak of "Low Empire" or "Late Antiquity." In our case, we might ask whether we are dealing with ancient Christianity or else Late Antiquity. In other words, are we not faced, in the Roman Empire of the second to the end of the fourth century, with transformations of societies and of the Zeitgeist—of which the religious transformations that may be observed are merely the consequences? Are the religious ideas of Christians the source of the observed transformations, or should we say that the Christians, more so (or better) than other religious groups, were able to make use of the new conditions offered by a culture in transformation? Without denying the dialectic between religion and culture, I support the idea that these transformations were above all religious in nature.

Despite the inclusion of Hebrew alongside Greek and Latin by the humanists within the educational curriculum at the beginning of the modern era, it seems that many scholars still forget or minimize the contribution and impact of ancient Judaism within our equation. Thus, the "shift from paganism to Christianity" is too often conceived, or at least perceived, as an internal transformation, whether it is considered as beneficial or ill-fated. One will allow the Jerusalemite that I am to present things by taking into account both Judaism as an essential piece of our subject and Christianity as an Eastern religion, in its sources as well as in some of its developments. Christianity, a religion coming from the Near East to conquer Europe, has also remained until our day a religion of the Orient, from Ethiopia to Armenia. In one of his last articles, Arnaldo Momigliano speculated about the simultaneous religious sentiments in Jerusalem, Athens, and in Rome in the first century BCE. Momigliano was clearly aware that the integration of Judaism into our equation might help to resolve the question of the essentially religious nature of the major transformations during our period.

In chapter 2, I deal with the idea of a "religion of the Book" by trying to show the development during our period not only of this concept, but more profoundly of a new type of religion founded on revealed writing (or set of writings). Chapter 3 explores the deep transformation in the very idea of religious practice with the end of public blood sacrifices in the various religious systems of Late Antiquity and with the reconstitution of religious rituals on other bases. Chapter 4 discusses the new emphasis put on communitarian religion, of a community established voluntarily by individuals around a common faith, and the consequences of this transformation for interreligious relations (rather than the civic religion) functioning at the very heart of the city (or the state). Let me stress right away that this is more a change of emphasis than either a dichotomy or a linear progression, since religious communities had coexisted with the civic religious system since the Greek period. My pressing need to schematize and to cover long durations means running the great and almost inevitable risk of excessive generalization and simplification, a risk to which I have perhaps succumbed. Yet I hope I have succeeded, here and there, in discerning vectors and trajectories and in freshly illuminating certain essential questions.

In the course of the first stage of this overview, we will study a profound psychological transformation, perhaps the most profound psychological transformation in the history of the West. I am alluding to the shift of the center of gravity from the human person, from the subject, from life in this world, to the growing interest in the future of the person after death. Such a shift evidently must have had deep consequences for the implicit structures of religion, if not also for its explicit structures, by proposing a new construction of identity.

About eighty years ago, Gilbert Murray thought he had discerned in late paganism a "failure of nerve" of Greek religion, heralding its demise. In his wake, E. R. Dodds proposed in Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (a book conceived and written at the beginning of the 1960s, amid great fear of nuclear war) a psychological and psychologizing analysis of religious experience (like William James's) under the Roman Empire. "Where did all this madness come from?" asks Dodds, referring to the exploits of Christian ascetics. I would like to follow another path here, putting the accent on the impact of beliefs and practices on the structures of personality, rather than on the psychology, even a historicized one, of religion.

The new importance of individual eschatology, of the fate of the person after death, has less to do with the idea of the eternity of the soul (already central for Plato) than with the idea of the resurrection of the body and the Last Judgment. As we know, this is an idea that came from Iran and passed from there to Judaism, and from the latter into early Christianity. This was also one of the characteristics of Christianity that would repel intellectual pagans the most. Judgment obliged each person to invest in his postmortem future rather than in the present. In a sense, the famous wager—whose attribution to Pascal often makes us forget its many antecedents, from Augustine to al-Ghazali—was already present, in an implicit fashion, among Christianized Romans.

The very idea of a wager shows the new importance of both the reflexivity and radical seriousness of religious thought. Of course, theology as reflection on the gods is not a monotheistic idea. But the acceptance by Philo, the last representative of the Alexandrian Jewish tradition, of the Greek intellectual tradition and its application to the Bible, or "barbarian philosophy," opens a new era, at least until Spinoza. Reflexive thinking about religion—on myths as well as on practices—would now become an integral part of religion instead of remaining outside it. Jewish theology, then Christian and Muslim theology, allows philosophy to study the myths and rites from both inside and outside. This new reflexivity is well-known, yet we have not finished interpreting its consequences—far from it. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, speaking in his book Moses the Egyptian about the essential difference between the monotheisms of Israel and Akhenaten, relies on what he calls "the Mosaic distinction," that is to say, the requirement of truth in religion, a requirement that is found nowhere else in the ancient world. Such a requirement of truth, equivalent to a new status for truth, traverses all of ancient Christian thought, from the idea of verus Israel and that of true sacrifice, to Augustine's famous "Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas" (Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth). Verus Israel: the locution implies the discovery of the deep meaning of Scripture, under the surface, that only the Jews see. Similarly, true sacrifice refers to the sacrifice of Christian liturgy, where blood is not spilled. Augustine, on his side, proposed finding God within oneself; the movement of elevation and that of interiorization are identified with each other. One might argue that a similar pattern of thought can be observed in Plotinus. No doubt we may speak of continuity between Greco-Roman and Christian conceptions of the self, as does, for instance, the British philosopher Richard Sorabji. The essential difference, though, is that neither in Plotinus nor in Porphyry is such a requirement identified as essential to the religion of the collectivity. Therefore it seems to me that one may discern, alongside evident continuities, deep ruptures in the conception of the self. The requirement of truth at the very heart of religion is, in other words, the idea of faith. Paul Veyne has shown how the Greeks could not really believe in their myths. But the Christians did believe in their myths and did adhere to them totally: "Alithos anesti" (Truly he is risen), according to the ritual words of the Easter liturgy.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The End of Sacrifice by GUY G. STROUMSA Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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