Pagan Apologetics and Christian
Intolerance in the Ages
of Themistius and Augustine 1
CLIFFORD ANDO
This essay charts some trends in pagan-Christian dialogue in the fourth and ear-
ly fifth centuries, particularly in light of recent attempts to foreground the intel-
lectual achievement of post-Constantinian Christian apologetics and political
thought. Many pagans consciously attempted to appeal to Christians on their
own terms through allusions to themes in contemporary Christian debate and,
above all, through the adoption of Christian vocabulary; this rhetorical strategy
is compared to the introduction into early Christian apologetic of currents in
middle Platonic theological speculation. Contrasting Christian response to such
appeals with Christian legislation on pagan ritual behaviors allows us to col-
lapse a distinction traditional in both fourth-century attitudes and modern
scholarship between literary defenses of paganism and “pagan survivals,” and
reveals a distinct lack of philosophical rigor among Christian legislators and
bishops alike.
INTRODUCTION
Among historians of the Christianization of the Roman empire certain
generalizations have not died easily. Foremost is the assertion that by the
fourth century paganism was morally, spiritually, and intellectually bank-
rupt and that consequently the men who would formerly have served their
1. The following abbreviations are used: Conflict 5 The Conflict between Paganism
and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963). Knowl-
edge 5 Knowledge of God in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. R. van den Broek, T. Baar-
da, and J. Mansfeld (Leiden, 1988). Themistius is cited from the Teubner edition by
Schenkl-Downey-Norman. Dates for Augustine’s sermons are supplied from P.-P. Ver-
braken, Études critiques sur les sermons authentiques de Saint Augustin, Instrumenta
Patristica, vol. 12 (Steenbergen, 1976). I would like to thank for assistance and en-
Journal of Early Christian Studies 4:2, 171–207 © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press.172
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
country now chose to serve the Church. That such an analysis was already
expounded by Lactantius has not convinced many that it might be bi-
ased. 2 It is also a commonplace observation that, for all their apologetics,
Christian and pagan had very little to say to one another. 3 The accompa-
nying tendency to see the issue in terms of moments of crisis was largely
set by ecclesiastical historians; 4 and recent attempts to reevaluate the vi-
tality of late antique paganism have yet to make their mark. 5 This tradi-
tional narrative requires a twofold correction: an appreciation of those
moments in which the categories pagan and Christian may be decon-
structed, 6 and a reevaluation and redefinition of the historical process that
we call Christianization. The dearth of the former no doubt results from
couragement Profs. Henry Chadwick, Sabine MacCormack, John Matthews, David
Potter, and Sara Rappe, as well as Elizabeth Clark and an anonymous reader for the
Journal.
2. See for example A. Momigliano, “Christianity and the Decline of the Roman Em-
pire” (in Conflict), 9; A. D. E. Cameron, “Paganism and Literature in Late Fourth-Cen-
tury Rome,” Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique (Fondation Hardt) 23 (1977): 1–40 at
22, 27–28; J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, 1987), 76. For
S. Mitchell, Christianity was based on “humility and charity”; its victory was there-
fore “social” as well as “moral”: Anatolia (Oxford, 1993), 2:82 and 108. R. Bagnall,
Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993), 261–268, writes on a similar premise: once
the institutional supports for paganism disappeared, it did, too. Cf. Lactantius, inst.
5.19, esp. at 28–29 (SC 204.236–238).
3. The classic statement is by E. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa (Leipzig, 1909), 2:517f.
See more recently F. Paschoud, “L’intolérance chrétienne vue et jugée par les païens,”
CrSt 11 (1990): 549.
4. F. Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle (Paris, 1981), provides an exem-
plary analysis of Rufinus’ vision of “Christianization”; see esp. 159–163 and 309–322;
cf. P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Madison, 1992), 28, and idem,
“The Problem of Christianization,” PBA 82 (1992): 89–106. One expression of this
tendency in ancient thought is the frequent attribution of mass conversions to the mir-
acles of a particular saint: see Thelamon, Païens, Part III, and C. Stancliffe, St. Martin
and His Hagiographer (Oxford, 1983), 328–340. Pagans also understood the process
in these terms: Eunapius, v. soph. 6.9.17, ed. Giangrande (Rome, 1956), 36.
5. G. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor, 1990); F. Trombley, Hel-
lenic Religion and Christianization c. 370–529 (Leiden, 1993); cf. R. Rémondon, “L’É-
gypte et la suprème résistance au christianisme,” BIFAO 51 (1952): 63–78.
6. Some earlier efforts along these lines include P. Batiffol, “La conversion de Con-
stantin et la tendance au monothéisme dans la religion romaine,” Bull. d’ancienne litt.
et d’arch. chr. 3 (1913): 132–141, reprinted in his Paix Constantinienne, 5th ed. (Paris,
1929); C. Guignebert, “Les demi-chrétiens et leur place dans l’église antique,” RHR
88 (1923): 65–102; A. D. Nock, “Studies in the Graeco-Roman Beliefs of the Empire”
( JHS 45 [1925] 5 partially reprinted as chapter 4 in Essays on Religion and the An-
cient World [Oxford, 1972]); B. R. Rees, “Popular Religion in Graeco-Roman Egypt
II: The Transition to Christianity,” JEA 36 (1950): 86–100; H.-I. Marrou, “Synesius
of Cyrene and Alexandrian Neoplatonism” (in Conflict), 141–144; and J. J. O’Don-
nell, “The Demise of Paganism,” Traditio 35 (1979): 51–52.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
173
our post-Christian perspective, which encourages us to view pagan and
Christian as inherently mutually exclusive categories differentiated ulti-
mately by beliefs rather than behaviors. Robert Markus has provided a
distinguished and thought-provoking contribution to the latter process,
in which he emphasizes first “that in the non-Christian world religion
touched everything, that the distinction between sacred and secular is es-
sentially a Christian one which we impose on a culture to which it is for-
eign,” and second “there just is not a different culture to distinguish Chris-
tians from their pagan peers, only their religion; and any attempt to invent
one reveals itself as a disguise for what is simply a difference of religion.” 7
In his essay Markus draws our attention away from traditional fields of
inquiry—for example, the continued existence of pagan rituals in daily
life—and towards the intellectual debate among Christians about the for-
mation and definition of the Christian community.
Within this debate, the coercive power of the government gave new
force to the public utterances of Christian intellectuals in both ecclesias-
tic and political contexts. Two distinguished historians of late antiquity
have recently examined the place of a specifically Christian rhetoric in the
post-Constantinian age: Averil Cameron concentrates on the development
of a “Christian discourse,” and Peter Brown presents with a wealth of
anecdotal data the replacement of “men of paideia” with “Christian
spokesmen.” 8 At one level this essay both complements and complicates
these inquiries by examining the rhetorical tropes exploited by pagan
apologists in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, and by suggesting
that pagan intellectuals developed their rhetorical strategies by imitating
those previously adopted by Christians in the foundational period of
Christian apologetics. 9 One important strand in Christian apologetics
had been its “exploitation of areas of ambiguity, the appeal to and sub-
sequent use, that is, of themes and language already familiar” to the Chris-
tian author’s postulated audience. 10 In his political speeches, Themistius
presented his political program as a more tolerant and catholic alterna-
7. R. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), 7, 12–13.
8. See Av. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley, 1991), 1–14,
and Brown, Power, 3–4 and 33–34.
9. For example, scholars have long recongized that many pagans agreed with Chris-
tian objections to sacrifices—indeed, that Christians learned how to debate the subject
from pagans; see R. Turcan, “Les motivations de l’intolérance chrétienne et la fin du
Mithriacisme au IV e siècle ap. J-C,” Actes du VII e Congrès de la FIEC (Budapest,
1984), 214–218.
10. The quotation is from Av. Cameron, Christianity, 130, where she discusses the
oratory of Chrysostom, Basil, the two Gregorys, and Ambrose; it seemed appropriate
to Christian apologists as well.174
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
tive to the sectarian politics of the Christian court; he expounded this
ideal using “themes and language” already familiar from contemporary
Christian debate, concentrating in particular on the unknowability and
consequent possible identity of the pagan and Christian supreme deity
(Section I). The size of Themistius’ corpus permits a reasonably full sur-
vey of the motifs within Christian rhetoric and literature which struck a
chord with sympathetic pagans; this in turn permits us, somewhat
counter-intuitively, to review the background to Themistius’ rhetoric
within Christian apologetic in a more selective fashion. Briefly put, Chris-
tian apologists of the second century adapted concepts and vocabulary
popular in middle Platonic theological speculation in order to render
Christian theology intelligible to themselves and to a wider, Christian and
pagan audience in the terms in which they both had been educated (Sec-
tion II).
This Platonic veneer remained visible in Christian writings of the fourth
century and suggested to pagans that appeals to Christian “ignorance”
might succeed. We can observe their attempts at two levels. In public dis-
course some pagan orators invoked a supreme deity of ambiguous reli-
gious persuasion, at times explicitly responding to the traditional aspects
in the monotheism of the Constantinian court. In private correspondence
with Augustine, some pagans wrote in these terms and some along more
traditional lines, while others evinced an astute appreciation for specifi-
cally Christian elements in contemporary philosophical jargon. When in
a reflective mood, Augustine doubted even the possibility of secure knowl-
edge about the divine, but in responding to these letters he showed no hes-
itation. He subverted traditional pagan attacks with clever allusions to pa-
gan literature; he proved, however, unable or unwilling to justify his
rejection of his more subtle correspondents. Ultimately he fell back on a po-
sition which proved useful in his fights with heretics: a shared and proper
Christian faith was necessary for any profitable exchange (Section III).
The conversion of the emperor of the Roman world had marked in one
fashion the end of an era in Christian literature: martyr-acts and apolo-
getic, two major genres, had no place in a Christian empire. 11 Apologetic
arises from its author’s minority status and position of relative weakness
in his political context, and to that extent post-Constantinian tracts like
the Contra gentes of Athanasius were anachronistic; the aggressive tone
of Firmicus Maternus is more comprehensible. 12 Understandably, it took
some years before Christian writers and Christian emperors began to take
11. G. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995), 23–24, 55–57.
12. Cf. Av. Cameron, Christianity, 120–123.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
175
aggressive action against paganism in its varied manifestations, but the
vigorous activity under Theodosius ultimately had a profound effect on
Christian conceptions of their community and of the recent past, as well
as on attitudes towards the scope and efficacy of religious legislation. 13
Christian legislators attempted to end pagan belief by outlawing pagan
practice. At one level this started a long debate among Christian over the
virtues of forced, and therefore possibly faked, conversions; and on an-
other it caused more thoughtful Christians to reflect on the interaction be-
tween the faith of the inner man and the outward, physical signs of that
faith in his words and behavior (Section IV).
Ultimately pagan apologetic was bound to fail, because neither Chris-
tianity nor paganism was intellectually respectable: Platonism could not
become an intellectual meeting-ground because it did not map the con-
cerns of either Christianity or fourth-century paganism. As intellectuals
and as historians dependent on literary texts, we might wish that it did.
Yet even an educated man like Praetextatus defined his religion by listing
the ritual acts which he regularly performed as an initiate of several mys-
tery cults. Christian bishops and legislators indirectly confronted this fact
when they outlawed sacrifices and magical practices, but they justified this
legislation in terms of its potential impact on an individual’s beliefs. Since
officials could not test an individual’s convictions, they attacked the out-
ward expressions of belief: words and deeds. In responding to apologetic
rhetoric from pagans, Christian intellectuals privileged words as signs of
pagan belief, and on this subject they have exercised a profound influence
on modern scholarship; this is true even though, in Augustinian thought,
words and actions operate equally well as carriers of meaning. Perhaps
Christians of that day sensed, but were not able to express, that a much
greater gulf separated the pagan and the Christian than the similarities in
their writings might lead one to believe (Conclusion).
One methodological point. It has become fashionable to lament the use
of the terms “pagan” and “paganism” in scholarship. 14 I do not see that
we have many alternatives, nor does that upset me. The categories pagan
13. Av. Cameron, Christianity, 129, and Markus, End of Ancient Christianity,
28–30, emphasize the increased confidence among Christian writers at the end of the
fourth century; Brown, “Problem,” 100, cites the battle of Adrianople as a turning-
point.
14. G. Fowden, JRS 81 (1991): 119 n. *; Av. Cameron, Christianity, 122. Fowden
has henceforth used the term “polytheist,” but he applies it quite arbitrarily wherever
another might have used “pagan” and to men of sharply different religious sympathies:
Eunapius may have been a “polytheist,” but I suspect that Themistius (or Symmachus
or Longinianus, for that matter) would have found the term insulting (G. Fowden, Em-
pire to Commonwealth [Paris, 1993], 44 on Eunapius, 100 on Themistius). See now176
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
and Christian, always applicable in the study of apologetic literature,
serve us well enough in the fourth century, by which time it had become
clear to pagans that the Christian authorities viewed these categories as
mutually exclusive. For example, in his famous plea to Theodosius, Liba-
nius clearly divides the world into two religions: “[You could forbid pa-
ganism], but you don’t think it worthy of your position to place such a
yoke on the souls of men; you think that this [religion] is better than the
other one, but the other is neither impiety nor just reason to punish a
man.” 15 To insist on further specificity all the time would be self-defeat-
ing, for there are surely as many types of Christians, all of whom viewed
each other with a degree of suspicion and hostility, as there are of pagans.
The more important issue, which a change in terminology will not ad-
dress, is whether men who identified themselves as Christian, knew what
that label properly entailed.
I. THEMISTIUS AND THE EAST
There can be little question that the persecution of Christians launched at
the beginning of the fourth century did not have the support of all the pa-
gans in the empire; 16 Lactantius suggests that some were so repulsed by
the scenes in the arena that they converted—or, at least, admitted what
they already knew in their hearts, that there was only one living God, and
He was in heaven. 17 But we should never underestimate, in the words of
Momigliano, “the determination, almost the fierceness, with which the
Christians appreciated and exploited the miracle that had transformed
Constantine into a supporter, a protector, and later a legislator of the
Christian Church.” 18 The attitude is nicely expressed by Eusebius, whose
statement also represents a tidy transformation of the accusations of anti-
Christian polemic: all war, rape, adultery—indeed, the very lack of unity
among men—are attributable to polytheistic error. 19 Indeed, almost as
soon as the emperor converted, Eusebius—and a generation later Firmi-
the insightful responses to such complaints by F. Trombley, Hellenic Religion, ix–x,
and T. D. Barnes, From Eusebius to Augustine (London, 1994), x-xi.
15. Libanius, or. 30.53 (LCL 452.148)
16. See R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1987), 596–601.
17. Lactantius, inst. 5.13.11 and 22.18–23 (SC 204.194, 254–256); cf. Ambrose,
ep. 18.11 (CSEL 82.3.39–40). See also Gregory of Nazianzus on Julian: from his
knowledge of the history of persecutions, Julian knew that it was counterproductive
to make martyrs (or. 4.57–58 [SC 309.162–164]).
18. Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century a.d.”
(in Conflict), 80.
19. Eusebius, l.C. 16.2–3 (GCS 7.248–249).ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
177
cus Maternus—urged him to use his power to eliminate pagan worship
altogether. 20 At the very least, adherence to a non-Christian set of beliefs,
like visitations to astrologers in the first century, became yet another
charge to be leveled against one’s enemies before a court. 21 At its worst,
this politicizing of religious issues produced a climate of fear in which peo-
ple shunned pagan learning as well as pagan practice. During the witch-
hunts under Valens at Antioch, men throughout the east burned their en-
tire libraries rather than be caught owning improper books. 22 Some
members of the western aristocracy felt threatened enough to flock to the
standards of the Christian usurper Eugenius when he waved a token flag
of tolerance. 23 Augustine quite typically wrestled with the issue of reli-
gious coercion, but there can be no doubt where he finally ended up: “it
is well established that it has benefitted many to be compelled initially by
fear so that later they might learn.” 24
The philosopher Themistius had the gall to flourish in this environment;
indeed, he was without a doubt the most important public official in Con-
stantinople for almost forty years, maintaining close relations with every
20. Firmicus Maternus, err. 16.4 and 20.7, ed. Turcan (Paris, 1982), 112–113 and
125–126. Though Turcan doubts that Firmicus here alludes to actual legislation (i.e.,
to C. Th. 16.10.2–4), I find it easy to believe that Firmicus knew of and was influenced
by the content and wording of contemporary legislation: cf. below on Palladas, at
n. 26.
21. Eg. the thorny case of Isocasius (PLRE 2.633–634). Accused of being a pagan
in 467 he was arrested and sent to Bithynia for trial. He was released after Iacobus Psy-
christus interceded with Leo and had the good sense to “convert” immediately there-
after: John Malalas chron. 14.38 (CSHB 15.369–371) and Chronicon Paschale s. a.
467 (CSHB 16.595–596).
22. Ammianus, 29.1.41, 2.4, ed. W. Seyfarth (Leipzig, 1978), 103, 104–105; cf.
Synesius, insomn. 12.145A–C, ed. Terzaghi (Rome, 1944), 169–170.
23. Eugenius a Christian: Paulinus, vit. Ambr. 8.26 (PL 14.36B), and Ambrose, ep.
10(57).8–10 (CSEL 82.3.209–210); an important fact sometimes forgotten (eg. R. Van
Dam at Viator 16 [1985], 2; A. D. E. Cameron at JRS 55 [1965], 25). Several Gallic
bishops supported him and went in embassy to Theodosius (Rufinus, h.e. 2.31 [PL
21.538B]). Eugenius’ motives and religious convictions nevertheless aroused specula-
tion in antiquity, as in the present: see J.-R. Palanque, Saint Ambroise et l’Empire Ro-
main (Paris, 1933), 274–275; on distortions, deliberate and otherwise, in Ambrose’s
and Paulinus’ accounts of these events, see N. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan (Berkeley,
1994), 344–354.
24. Ep. 185.6.21 (CSEL 57.19–20), cf. 7.28 on heresies (CSEL 57.26–27); see also
epp. 93 (CSEL 34.2.445–496), 204 (CSEL 57.317–322) and compare Firmicus Mater-
nus, err. 16.4. On Augustine and religious coercion, see P. Brown, “Religious Coercion
in the Later Roman Empire: The Case of North Africa,” History 48 (1963), and “St.
Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion,” JRS 54 (1964), both reprinted with ad-
denda in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (Berkeley, 1972); and
esp. C. Kirwan, Augustine (London, 1989), 212–218. On Ambrose, see Palanque,
Saint Ambroise, 358–364, with the cautions offered by McLynn, Ambrose, 332.178
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
eastern emperor from Constantius to Theodosius—with the exception of
Julian. 25 For this crime modern scholars have generally condemned him
to obscurity. 26 Though Themistius was quite public about his paganism,
he was the most prominent orator of his day, serving on ten embassies
from the Senate to the emperors. How did Themistius manage this tight-
rope act?
We must first credit him with considerably more political astuteness
than Julian: Themistius certainly realized that Christians were around to
stay and that nothing would be gained by antagonizing them. More im-
portantly, he succeeded in part by adapting the methods of Christian
apologetic, though he probably did not think of it in such terms; he sim-
ply paid close attention to the contemporary political rhetoric of Chris-
tians. In doing so he acted no differently than did Palladas who, as Alan
Cameron has shown, absorbed and iterated—though with a rather dif-
ferent spirit than Themistius—“the catch-phrases and clichés of Christian
apologetic”; nor differently than Libanius, who imitated the utterances of
Constantine’s apologist when declaiming before and about his sons. 27 In-
deed, Averil Cameron’s generalization—that Themistius and Eusebius
possessed a view of the Constantinian empire quite different from that of
Julian, Libanius, and Synesius 28 —must be qualified: when appropriate,
Libanius could express views similar to those of Eusebius and did so by
direct imitation of the Christian rhetor. This was, after all, a technique fa-
miliar to Christians, displayed above all in the forgery of imperial rescripts
in their favor. 29
For example, it has been suggested that in his first public performance
Themistius made a chiding reference to the Arian controversy, chiding be-
cause he suggests that disputes about names are unworthy of the divine. 30
But such a reference might well have aroused anger if it had not been
couched in language otherwise calculated to sound comfortably familiar
25. PLRE 1 Themistius 1; PW 5.1642–1647 (Stegemann). See also O. Seeck, Die
Briefe des Libanius (Leipzig, 1906), 291–306.
26. The publication of G. Downey’s translation of the orations might have changed
this, but only Oration 1 ever appeared (“Themistius’ First Oration,” GRBS 1 [1958]:
49–69); the mss. of the remaining text was apparently deposited with W. Kaegi and
has not been published (cf. MacBain in BS/ÉB 10.2 [1983]: 247). The most significant
modern work is G. Dagron, “L’Empire romain d’orient au IVe siècle et les traditions
politiques de l’hellénisme: le témoignage de Thémistios,” TM 3 (1968): 1–242.
27. A. D. E. Cameron, “Palladas and Christian Polemic,” JRS 55 (1965): 17 and
passim; P. Petit, “Libanius et la ‘Vita Constantini’,” Historia 1 (1950): 562–582.
28. Av. Cameron, Christianity, 131–132; cf. Dagron, “L’Empire romain,” 183.
29. See the famous, fake letters in the Passio S. Sabini and Passio S. Symphoriani
and those attached to Justin’s corpus. On the fabrication of imperial rescripts, see
L. Wenger, Die Quellen des römischen Rechts (Vienna, 1953), 431.
30. Themistius, or. 1.8b; cf. Downey, “Themistius’ First Oration,” 59 n. 11.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
179
to its imperial audience. In that same speech he describes the good king
as one who chooses to do good by viewing himself as analogous on earth
to God in heaven. The theme is a common one, its most recent exponent
having been Eusebius in his Tricennial Orations; 31 and Eusebius, as Nor-
man Baynes has shown, drew on a set of Pythagorean political tracts, by
Sthenidas, Diotogenes, and Ecphantus, accessible to us in the anthology
of Stobaeus. 32 I wish to suggest that Themistius got the idea from Euse-
bius himself. 33 The concept is discussed in Stobaeus almost exclusively
through forms of mimÝomai/mßmhsiv; Eusebius uses both forms of
mimÝomai and forms of eiÃkþn; the vocabulary used by Themistius is sug-
gestively close to that of Eusebius. 34 Since Themistius returned to Con-
stantinople from his philosophical studies in Pontus around 336, he may
have been able to hear Eusebius himself, but obviously it is not necessary
for him to have done so.
Two further observations strengthen this possibility. In a speech deliv-
ered before Jovian in 364, Themistius made a plea for religious toleration.
He argued primarily that men have a natural tendency to follow different
paths to God; significantly, his evidence for this was a simplistic descrip-
tion of the variety of traditions in contemporary Christianity. 35 In that
same year, he gave another speech to celebrate the accession of Valentinian
and Valens; in this speech he suggests once again that kings have a duty
to imitate God, noting that God is not like the god described by Homer:
“he does not have two urns, one filled with evil and the other with noble
gifts, for there is no storehouse of evil in heaven.” There follows an odd
picture of a vessel filled with dirt of the earth, and of a God attended by
31. Cf. H. A. Drake, In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Trans-
lation of Eusebius’ Tricennial Orations, University of California Publications in Clas-
sical Studies, no. 15 (Berkeley, 1976), 10–11, 57.
32. N. H. Baynes, “Eusebius and the Christian Empire,” Mélanges Bidez (Brussels,
1933), 13–18, reprinted as chapter IX in his Byzantine Studies (London, 1960). Ex-
cerpts from the Pythagorean texts are translated by E. R. Goodenough in YCS 1 (1928):
55–102, and have since been edited with translation and commentary by L. Delatte as
Les Traités de la Royauté d’Ecphante, Diotogène, et Sthénidas, Bibliothèque de la Fac-
ulté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liége no. 97 (Liége, 1942).
33. General similarites between the political views of Eusebius and Themistius are
canvassed by Dagron, “L’Empire romain,” 135ff., F. Dvornik, Early Christian and
Byzantine Political Philosophy (Washington, D.C., 1966), 622–626, and Av. Cameron,
Christianity, 131–132; none advances the suggestion that Themistius had read Euse-
bius, though Dagron (135 n. 70) notes some similarites in their vocabulary.
34. Compare Eusebius, l.C. 1.6 (GCS 7.198–199), with Themistius, or. 1.9b, and
especially or. 11.143A.
35. On this oration see L. J. Daly, “Themistius’ Plea for Religious Toleration,”
GRBS 12 (1971): 74–75; for another, more persuasive view, see Dagron “L’Empire ro-
main,” 163–172 (with his note 135), or Petavius’ note ad loc., reprinted in Dindorf’s
edition on p. 534.180
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
the Graces, to whom are attached a series of epithets appropriate to
Zeus. 36 Some years later Themistius again urged an emperor, this time
Theodosius, to model himself on God, and again he cites and refutes the
description by Homer; but Themistius has learned an important lesson in
the meantime: no, writes Themistius, a king has only a jar of life, and
would do better to abide by the saying of the Assyrians, that the heart of
the king is guarded in the hand of God. 37 Themistius has changed his
practice and astutely employed an apologetic technique—privileging
Scripture over pagan literature—in a plea for toleration. The remaining
question then is where did his inspiration lay? He need not himself have
read Scripture, but only the letter to Jovian from Athanasius and the
Alexandrian synod of late 363, which opens with a quotation of the
Proverb in question. 38
Finally, mention should be made of Themistius’ most interesting speech,
the lost oratio ad Valentem delivered, in all likelihood, circa 375; it was
a plea for religious toleration as well, but it was specifically addressed
against Valens’ attack on non-Arians. Themistius apparently suggested to
Valens that disagreement about the nature of God was inevitable because
true knowledge of Him was beyond the capacity of men. Valens, we are
told, softened, if only a little. 39 The Latin version of that speech, printed
in all editions of Themistius, is now thought to have been written by An-
dreas Dudith in the mid-sixteenth century. 40 Of course, if Themistius had
wanted Valens to understand something he would have had to say it in
Latin; 41 and there is no reason why he couldn’t have read a translation
into a language in which he himself was not fluent: 42 after all, for that he
had a precedent in Constantine and Constantius. 43
36. Themistius, or. 6.78d–79a, 79c–d.
37. Themistius, or. 19.228d–229a; cf. 7.89d and 11.147b–c.
38. Quoted by Theodoret, h.e. 4.3 (GCS 44.212–216).
39. Socrates, h.e. 4.32, ed. Hussey (Oxford, 1893), 209; Sozomen, h.e. 6.36.6–37.1
(GCS 50.294); cf. Themistius, or. 1.8b.
40. Printed by Dindorf as or. 12, printed in vol. 3 of Schenkl/Downey/Norman. The
speech is at the very least a clever pastiche of themes Themistius used or very well might
have exploited. See in particular 156d–57b, 158d, 159b, and 160a–c.
41. Themistius himself writes that Valens did not know Greek (or. 9.126b).
42. If, that is, we are prepared to believe Themistius when he says that he did not
know Latin (or. 6.71c–d); but I incline to believe that this is part of the posturing which
also gave rise to his apologetic works (on which see the translations and commentaries
of H. Schneider [on or. 34; Winterthur, 1966] and J. G. Smeal [on or. 23; dissertation,
Vanderbilt 1989]).
43. For the sources on Constantine’s difficulty with Greek, see Lane Fox, Pagans,
629–630, 643ff.; T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, 1981), 215 with
notes 62 and 63; and H. Dörries, Das Selbstzeugnis Kaiser Konstantins (Göttingen,
1954), 55–66. Constantius wrote to the senate of Constantinople in Latin concerning
the adlection of Themistius, and a Greek translation of that document has come downANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
181
Themistius’ patent success—if measured by the length of his career—
appears all the more exceptional when contrasted with the contempora-
neous challenge posed to Christianity by Julian and its place in the history
of pagan-Christian dialogue. If Themistius resembled Palladas and Liba-
nius in his belief that addressing the Christian entailed the reading not of
Christian Scripture but of contemporary legislation and apologetics, his
approach was anything but typical of rhetoric in the East. In the genera-
tion of the Great Persecution and later, that debate was marked by an in-
creasing knowledge of Christianity on the part of pagan apologists. Con-
tinued pagan devotion to the formulae of apologetic literature lends
fourth-century works a sense of unreal continuity with the past—as
though, for a time, some intellectuals refused to believe that the imperial
throne was permanently Christian. Porphyry’s books interest modern
readers because of their sophisticated analysis of the authorship of Scrip-
ture, 44 but both Eusebius and Athanasius open their catalogs of Por-
phyry’s accusations with the long-familiar slanders against the Christians’
irrational pßstiò. 45 Julian explicitly appeals to this tradition in his contra
Galilaeos when he tells the Christians, “There is nothing to your philos-
ophy but confusion, boorishness, and the word ‘Believe!’” 46 Julian’s
Christian upbringing served him well when he forbade Christians from
holding high office, on the grounds that their own Scripture forbade them
to do things which a governor of a province would have to do; and he ex-
plicitly turned Christian law against the Christians of Edessa: since their
own “most admirable” law urged them to renounce their material prop-
erty, Julian would help them by confiscating it. 47 In general authors of this
with Themistius’ corpus (printed in vol. 3 of Schenkl/Downey/Norman; Dindorf pp.
21–27). Seeck, Die Briefe, 294 n. 1, canvasses the idea that Themistius wrote this trans-
lation himself (cf. Stegemann, RE 5.1646), though this suggestion has not met with
much approval (see Downey/Norman’s introduction to this speech; Dagron, “L’Em-
pire romain,” 20 and 82); nevertheless, I take assurance in Seeck’s willingness to posit
real knowledge of Latin on the part of Themistius.
44. On Porphryry see J. Bidez, Vie de Porphyre (Gand, 1913), esp. 1–4, 65–79; on
his knowledge of Christianity see J.-M. Demarolle, “Un aspect de la polémique païenne
à la fin du III e siècle: le vocabulaire chrétien de Porphyre,” VC 26 (1972): 117–129;
T. D. Barnes provides an assessment of the fragments of his contra Christianos in “Por-
phyry Against the Christians: Date and the Attribution of Fragments,” JTS 24 (1973):
424–430.
45. Eusebius, p.e. 1.2.4 (SC 206.106); Athanasius, gent. 1 (SC 18bis.46–48).
46. Julian apud Gregory Nazianzus, or. 4.102 (SC 309.250); cf. Cyril of Alexan-
dria, Juln. 1.20 and esp. 1.30 (SC 322.144–146 and 164–166).
47. Socrates, h.e. 2.13 (ed. Hussey, 74); for the sources see Bidez and Cumont, Cae-
saris Iuliani Epistulae Leges Poematia Fragmenta Varia (Paris, 1922), no. 50; and Ju-
lian, ep. 115 (ed. Bidez 3 [Paris, 1972], 196–197 5 Spanheim 424d). Compare Greg-
ory, or. 4.57–58 (SC 309.162–164): Julian knew better than to make martyrs.182
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
period indicate their nervousness about how well-informed their oppo-
nents are by slandering them with charges of intimate and personal fa-
miliarity: Porphyry suggested that Origen was simply a renegade pagan
ripping off Greek philosophy; Lactantius thought Hierocles so familiar
with exegetic technique that he might have been a Christian; and many
later writers accused Porphyry of having apostatized from Christianity—
to the list of such passages compiled by Dodds should be added the com-
plaint by Proclus that Porphyry has, on the subject of demons and angels,
adopted phrasing full of barbarian arrogance. 48
II. BORROWING THE PLATONISTS’ INEFFABLE DEITY
Themistius had good reason for believing that an appeal for tolerance
based on a mutual belief in God’s transcendance might succeed. As a man
steeped in philosophical learning, he no doubt recognized familiar con-
cepts and terminology in the theological and political literature of his
Christian contemporaries. He would have felt far less confident if he had
read only Scripture. This use of Platonic language is a distinguishing char-
acteristic of Christian apologetic literature; theological concerns of this
sort, expressed in such language are absent from the Apostolic fathers. A
review of the history of this development within Christian literature will
highlight the apologetic nature of Themistius’ rhetoric and provide per-
spective on the challenges faced by Augustine.
The dialogue between pagan and Christian in its first two centuries was
notable primarily for getting nowhere. Even to those who got past the
slanders about secret meetings and the sacrificing of babies, 49 the strate-
gies of attack rapidly became fixed along traditional lines, to which Chris-
tians responded in an equally dogmatic way. 50 Celsus had iterated the
charge that Christians should not call themselves patriotic if their law for-
bids them to serve the state, and he probably would not have accepted
Origen’s defense, that Christians do more good than anyone else by stay-
ing at home and praying. 51 This was an issue of considerable importance,
48. E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1965), 126
n. 4; Proclus, In Timaeum 47c, ed. E. Diehl (Leipzig, 1903), 1.153.
49. For the weight carried by this latter charge in its cultural context, see now
A. McGowan, “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism against Christians in the
Second Century,” JECS 2 (1994): 413–442.
50. The best introductions to pagan-Christian dialogue in the second and third cen-
turies are P. de Labriolle, La réaction païenne, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1948), and R. Wilken,
The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, 1984).
51. Origen, Cels. 8.73–75 (SC 150.344–352).ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
183
and it seems likely that Plotinus echoes this sentiment in order to indict
the Christian: “But it is not lawful for those who have become wicked to
demand others to be their saviors and to sacrifice themselves in answer to
their prayers, nor, furthermore, to require the gods to direct their affairs
in detail . . . ” 52 Nor would Celsus have liked Origen’s response to his
challenge over the divisiveness of contemporary Christians: Origen sim-
ply berates him for not noticing that Christians had been a divided lot
since the beginning. 53 Celsus apparently added the suggestion that what
unity exists among Christians comes about through their fear of outsiders;
any triumph by Christianity, he implies, would be short-lived because in-
ternal differences would destroy the faith. 54 In works not intended for a
pagan audience Origen himself expressed doubts about the rapid expan-
sion of the Church, but these doubts were not voiced in the Contra Cel-
sum. 55
Christians seem to have been of two minds in their response to the de-
bate over faith and reason. Christian response was primarily twofold—
Tertullian’s antagonistic attitude represents an exception 56 —: first, they
insisted on the rationality of Christian belief by claiming a privileged place
in the history of philosophy for Scripture. This insistence was often joined
to a claim that Plato simply represented an offshoot of Hebrew wisdom.
Christians even managed to convince one pagan—or at least claimed that
they had (the only references appear in Christian authors); they quoted
Numenius asking “What is Plato other than Moses speaking Attic?” 57
Second, apologists explained that the rationale, the logismüv, behind
their religion was properly kept to those who could understand it, and
52. Plotinus, 3.2.9 (LCL 442.72–74; trans. Armstrong); cf. 3.2.8 (LCL 442.70–72).
On these passages see C. Schmidt, TU, n. F. 5, part 4 (Berlin, 1901), pp. 82ff and
M. Wundt, Plotin: Studien zur Geschichte des Neuplatonismus (Leipzig, 1919), 54–55.
53. Origen, Cels. 3.10ff. (SC 136.30ff.). Compare the claims of Hegesippus on the
uniformity of belief among early Christians apud Eusebius, h.e. 4.22.1–3 (LCL
153.374). Polemon was probably ridiculing Christian divisiveness when he asked Pio-
nius which church he belonged to (Acta Pionii 9.2, ed. L. Robert [Dumbarton Oaks,
1994], 25); Polemon would have learned quickly about such matters, since before ques-
tioning Pionius he had already imprisoned a Catholic and a Montanist; for a different
interpretation of this passage, see Bowersock, Martyrdom, 31 and 35.
54. apud Origen, Cels. 3.14 (SC 136.38) and cf. 6.57 (SC 147.156).
55. Origen, comm. in Matt. 13.24 (PG 13.1158–1160); cf. comm. in Rom. 5.8 (PG
14.1040–1041). See also H. Chadwick, “The Evidences of Christianity in the Apolo-
getic of Origen,” Studia Patristica 2 (1957): 337.
56. See his quips at apol. 38.3, 46.2 and18 (CCL 1.149, 160, and 162), and carn.
Chr. 4–5 (CCL 2.878–882).
57. Numenius fr. 8, ed. E. des Places (Paris, 1973), 51.184
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
that simple faith, pßstiv, would have to do for the multitude. 58 This last
claim, of course, was simply taken over from the Timaeus. 59
The Christian writers who turned to the Timaeus to justify Christian
practice came from a different culture than the writers of the Gospels, and
they wrote for a different audience. The apologists of the second century
were educated Greeks living in big cities; they were not bishops, and their
audience was likely to have been other educated men with similar back-
grounds. 60 In the initial stages of the apologetic movement some hesitated
about where to ground their claims for the validity of Christian theology:
like Theophilus, Melito of Sardis explicitly denies that his philosophy
has any connection to Greek learning. His use of the word cilosocßa,
however, gives voice to this developing concern for communicating with
the pagan, as well, perhaps, to the growing influence wielded by the cur-
riculum in which these men were educated. 61 This concern also manifests
itself in the addressing of apologetic tracts to prominent pagans, even if
we are inclined to doubt that apologetic literature had pagans as its pri-
mary audience. 62 Origen certainly doubted the efficacy of apologetic in
converting the unbeliever; however, it was, he asserted, a boon to those
weak in faith. 63 The genre undoubtedly underwent a fundamental trans-
formation during the reign of Constantine. By the time we get to the anti-
Christian arguments cited by Ambrose and Ambrosiaster and so carefully
catalogued by Courcelle, the accusations merely provide the Christian
preacher with the means to highlight whatever he feels is basic and fun-
damental to proper belief. 64
58. For the term, see Athenagoras, leg. 8.1, ed. W. R. Schoedel (Oxford, 1972), 16,
and compare the phrasing of Eusebius at p.e. 3.13.24 (SC 228.246).
59. Timaeus, 28c. It would be difficult to find a Platonist, however broadly defined,
who doesn’t cite these lines; for example, Albinus, epit. 27.1, ed. P. Louis (Paris, 1945),
129; Apuleius, de Plat. 1.5, ed. C. Moreschini (Leipzig 1991), 92–93; Athenagoras,
leg. 4.1–2 (ed. Schoedel, 8–10); Celsus apud Origen, Cels. 7.42 (SC 150.110–112)—
but it is a sentiment of which Origen approves, and he himself paraphrases it at 1.10
(SC 132.102); Clement, str. 5.12.1 (SC 278.152, and many other times); Eusebius, p.e.
11.29.4 (SC 292.200).
60. Lane Fox, Pagans, 515–516; Av. Cameron, Christianity, 78–80, 109; cf. on Ori-
gen and Celsus, H. Chadwick, “Origen, Celsus, and the Stoa,” JTS 48 (1947): 34–49.
61. See Melito, fr. 1 apud Eusebius, h.e. 4.26.7 (LCL 153.388–390).
62. Cf. two recent efforts to understand the public and rhetorical nature of these
tracts: R. M. Grant, “Forms and Occasions of the Greek Apologists,” SMSR 52 (1986);
and M. McGehee, “Why Tatian Never ‘Apologized’ to the Greeks,” JECS 1 (1993):
143–158.
63. Chadwick, “Evidences,” 338, citing Origen, Hom. in Ps. 36 5.1 (Lommatzch
12.221 5 PG 12.1360); cf. Lactantius’ criticism of earlier apologetic works at inst. 5.4
(SC 204.146–150).
64. P. Courcelle, “Propos antichrétiens rapportés par saint Augustin,” Rech. Aug.
1 (1958): 149–186; “Critiques exégétiques et arguments antichrétiens rapportés parANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
185
Educated Christian apologists turned, in these circumstances, to
“themes and language already familiar” to themselves and to their audi-
ence, and sought in popular philosophy a mode of discourse which could
make Christianity explicable to their educated peers. 65 Platonism thus
provided a language with which both sides would be intimate: that is, af-
ter all, why both sides fought so hard over Plato himself. 66 To the mod-
ern observer the superficial similarities between pagan and Christian
theologies of this era are startling. Though the specific vocabulary which
they use to describe God appears most clearly for the first time in Philo, 67
both pagan and Christian Hellenizing authors of the second century and
later learned to discuss theology from the same passages of Plato—
primarily from the Republic, Timaeus, and seventh Letter—and from
the hermeneutic tradition which surrounded them. Thus Dio Chrysos-
tom, 68 Pseudo-Aristotle, 69 Seneca, 70 Albinus, 71 Maximus of Tyre, 72 Am-
Ambrosiaster,” VC 13 (1959): 133–169 (5 Chapter 8 in Opuscula Selecta [Paris,
1984]); and “Anti-Christian Arguments and Christian Platonism: From Arnobius to
St. Ambrose” (in Conflict).
65. The bibliography is huge. Some highlights include C. Andresen, “Justin und der
mittlere Platonismus,” ZNTW 44 (1952/53), 157–195: J. H. Waszink, “Der Platonis-
mus und die altchristliche Gedankenwelt,” Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique (Fon-
dation Hardt) 3 (1955), and “Bemerkungen zum Einfluss des Platonismus im frühen
Christentum” VC 19 (1965). Hilary Armstrong’s recent essay, “Plotinus and Chris-
tianity,” in Platonism in Late Antiquity, S. Gersh and C. Kannengiesser, eds. (Notre
Dame, 1992), is full of insights: see, for example, 119 on Numenius fr. 2 (ed. des Places,
43–44).
66. This reaches a rather amusing summit in [Justin], coh. Gr. 21 and 26 (CA
CSS 3.74–76, 88–90), where [Justin] maintains that Plato learned much from Moses
but was afraid to say what he knew because he feared to suffer the fate of Socrates.
Eusebius did not so much assert dependence on the Old Testament on the part of
Plato as simply find Plato in the Old Testament (see E. des Places, “Eusèbe de Césarée
juge de Platon dans la Préparation Évangélique,” Mélanges Auguste Diès [Paris,
1956], or the introduction to Book 11 of the praep. by G. Favrelle in her edition [Paris,
1982]).
67. De mutatione nominum 9–11, 27–30 (LCL 275.146, 156–158); Quod deus sit
immutabilis 78 (LCL 247.48); de somniis 1.67 (LCL 275.330). See Dillon, Middle Pla-
tonists, 155; H. Chadwick, “Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought,” in The
Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (1967), 141–143;
and D. T. Runia, “Naming and Knowing: Themes in Philonic Theology” (in Knowl-
edge), 77.
68. Dio Chrysostom, or. 12.27 (LCL 339.28–30), 31.11 (LCL 358.16).
69. [Aristotle], de mundo 397b.13–20, 400b.10–15; and 401a.12–13 (LCL
400.384, 402, 404).
70. Seneca, nat. quaest. 2.45 (LCL 450.172).
71. Albinus, epitome 10.3–4 (ed. Louis, 57–59).
72. Maximus Tyrius, Philosophumena 2.10a, 11.5a–b, 39.5b–e, ed. G. Koniaris
(Berlin, 1995), 28, 129, 468.186
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
monius, 73 Apuleius, 74 Plotinus, 75 and even the author of a late Orphic
hymn 76 describe their transcendent, nameless, incorpeal, and ineffable
supreme deity with the same vocabulary used by Aristides, 77 Justin, 78
Athenagoras, 79 Tatian, 80 Theophilus, 81 Pseudo-Justin, 82 and, to an ex-
tent, Origen 83 and Arnobius. 84 Indeed, I have sometimes felt a vague de-
sire to read the famous assertion by Maximus of Tyre, that Greek and bar-
barian share a vague concept of the Deity, as an early reference to
Christians. 85
It is difficult to tell how deeply this Platonism permeated; Christian au-
thors also possessed a theological vocabulary independent of this tradi-
tion. For instance, Origen, Eusebius, and Chrysostom follow Philo in call-
ing their God incomprehensible, aŠkatÜlhptov, but I do not think pagans
use the word thus. The commonplace adoption of this rhetorical strategy
imposes on apologetic literature in particular, both eastern and western,
a similarity which belies modern treatments of their respective theologi-
cal traditions. In addition, such a strategy may be compared to the Chris-
tians’ somewhat more fitful acknowledgement of the similarities between
Christianity and the mystery religions and the use they made of this com-
mon ground in apologetic literature. 86
73. apud Plutarch, de E apud Delphos 393a–b (LCL 306.244–246).
74. Apuleius, de Platone 1.5 (ed. Moreschini, 92); cf. de deo Socratis 3 (ed. Mores-
chini, 11).
75. Plotinus, enn 5.3[49].13–14 (LCL 444.116–122). Cf. D. J. O’Meara, Plotinus
(1993), chapter 5.
76. Orphicorum fragmenta no. 245.6–16, ed. O. Kern (Berlin, 1922), 257.
77. Aristides of Athens, apol. 1 (ed. and trans. by J. R. Harris 2 [Cambridge, 1893];
the Greek text edited from Barlaam and Josephat in that volume by J. A. Robinson).
Cf. W. C. van Unnik, “Die Gotteslehre bei Aristides und in gnostischen Schriften,” TZ
17 (1961): 166–174.
78. Justin, 1 apol. 13.4, 20.3–4, 61.11, and 2 apol. 5(6).1, ed. G. Rauschen (FP
2 2 .28, 42–44, 100, 122). Cf. L. W. Barnard, Justin Martyr (Cambridge, 1967), 77–80.
79. Athenagoras, leg. 6.2 and 8.1 (ed. W. R. Schoedel, 12, 16).
80. Tatian, orat. 4.1–3, 15.1, 25.2, ed. M. Whittaker (Oxford, 1982), 8–10, 30,
and 48.
81. Theophilus, Autol. 1.3–5, ed. R. M. Grant (Oxford, 1970), 4–6.
82. Coh. Gr. 21 (CACSS 3.74).
83. Origen, Cels. 7.43 (SC 150.114–116); cf. J. M. Dillon, “The Knowledge of God
in Origen” (in Knowledge).
84. Nat. 1.62, ed. H. Le Bonniec (Paris, 1982), 188; cf. A. J. Festugière, VC 6 (1952):
222.
85. Philosophumena 11.5a-b (ed. Koniaris, 129).
86. Cf. R. P. C. Hanson, “The Christian Attitude to Pagan Religions” in his Stud-
ies in Christian Antiquity (Edinburgh, 1985), 166–167, citing in particular Tertullian,
apol. 7.6 (CCL 1.99), and Clement, prot. 12.120.1–2; cf. also A. D. Nock, “Hellenis-
tic Mysteries and Christian Sacraments,” Mnemosyne 5 (1952): 177–213 (5 Chapter
47 in his Essays), especially sections 2 and 5.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
187
It is important to recall here that the complex of philosophies which we
call Middle Platonism was on the whole no more or less monotheistic than
contemporary Christianity; whether this was due to Plato or to an influx
of Stoicism was not entirely clear to later readers: lines of Vergil which
Servius labels as “Stoic,” are used by Augustine to illustrate Platonic the-
ology. 87 The position of all these men—with the possible exception of
Theophilus—is well described by Celsus, who argues that there is indeed
one supreme God, but they obviously disagree on how much to honor and
to supplicate the other demons who surround God like so many satraps
and generals. 88 Some Christians even conceded that they did honor these
lesser figures, with the caveat that they did so when they paid their re-
spects to the highest God of all; 89 Christians were, in fact, aware of
monotheistic strands in contemporary paganism and were quick to dis-
tance themselves from such groups: thus Lactantius singles out as partic-
ularly impious those polytheists (cultores deorum) who “confess and ac-
knowledge the Supreme God (deum summum) . . . who, when they swear
an oath, or make a wish, or give thanks, name not Jupiter nor many gods,
but God.” 90
III. AUGUSTINE, SYMMACHUS, AND THE WEST
Latin literature yields far less evidence on these issues than does Greek:
the West produced no pagan literary figures to rival Porphyry or Julian,
though these figures drew the attention of Latin writers. The single great
literary moment in the conflict there centered on the struggle over the pres-
ence of the Altar of Victory in the Senate; on that subject from the pagan
side we possess only the great Relatio of Symmachus. 91 The corpus of Au-
87. On the mingling of Stoic and Platonic thought see H. Strache, Der Eklektizis-
mus des Antiochus von Askalon (Philologische Untersuchungen, 26; 1926); and R. E.
Witt, Albinus and the History of Middle Platonism (Cambridge, 1937), 11ff. See
Servius on Vergil the Stoic at Georg. 1.5 and Aen. 4.638; and compare Augustine on
the same passage of the Georgics at civ. 9.16 (CCL 47.265).
88. apud Origen, Cels. 8.35–36 (SC 150.250–254); cf. 7.68 (SC 150.172–174). On
pagan monotheism see Batiffol, “La conversion de Constantin”; M. P. Nilsson, “The
High God and the Mediator” (HThR 56 [1963]: 101–120); the introduction to
H. Chadwick’s translation of the Contra Celsum (Cambridge, 1953); and Armstrong,
“Plotinus,” 122–130.
89. Arnobius, nat. 3.3 (CSEL 4.113). Compare also 3.2 (CSEL 4.112–113) with
Origen, Cels. 8.35–36 (SC 150.250–254).
90. Lactantius, inst. 2.1.6–7 (SC 337.26), and cf. 1.6.4 (SC 326.74), on Hermes
Trismegistus. On the names of the High God, cf. Celsus apud Origen, Cels. 5.45 (SC
147.128–130).
91. On the religious feelings of Symmachus see N. H. Baynes in his review of
McGeachy, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, JRS 36 (1946), 173–177, and Nock, “Stud-
ies,” 40.188
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
gustine’s correspondence, however, preserves several letters from pagans.
This section concentrates first on the apologetic rhetoric employed by
Symmachus and the men who wrote to Augustine and then on the evolu-
tion in Augustine’s reaction to such letters, contrasting his rejection of ap-
peals to God’s transcendance with his personal ambivalence regarding hu-
man capacity to know God.
Like Themistius before Jovian or Libanius before Theodosius, in Rela-
tio III Symmachus pleads for religious toleration and does so in a defer-
ential tone: “to you we address prayers, not arguments.” Like Themistius
again, Symmachus bases his plea in part on the possible identity between
the object of Christian and pagan worship—an identity made possible be-
cause of the unknowability of the supreme God. “It is reasonable,” he
writes, “to regard as identical that which all worship. We look on the same
stars; we share the same heaven; the same world enfolds us. What differ-
ence does it make by what system of knowledge each man seeks the truth?
Not by one road alone can man arrive at so great a secret.” 92 It has been
suggested that Symmachus here makes an allusion John 14:6: “Ego sum
via.” 93 But a further question can be asked: why does Symmachus use se-
cretum?
I do not believe this usage has much precedent in pagan literature, but
secretum appeared most recently in the panegyric to Constantine of 313:
“What god, what so imminent power encouraged you, so that, in spite of
not merely the silent whispering but even the open fear of practically all
your companions and generals, against the advice of men and the warn-
ings of the haruspices, you decided on your own that the time had come
to liberate the city? Surely, Constantine, you must share some secret with
that divine intelligence which relegates our care to the lesser gods but
thinks it appropriate to reveal itself to you alone.” 94 The similarity of this
vocabulary to that employed on Constantine’s arch (ILS 694) seems to
confirm that the panegyrist sought out suitable language to satisfy Con-
stantine’s predilection for ambiguous self-presentation; it is tempting,
then, to ask whether, in the charged atmosphere of the religious and po-
litical discourse of that age, the panegyrist referred to the same summus
deus and dii minores as Arnobius. 95 The peculiarly ancient monotheism
92. Symmachus, rel. 3.10 (MGH AA 6.1.282).
93. Cf. O’Donnell, “Demise of Paganism,” 73 n. 113.
94. Pan. lat. 9(12), 2.4–5, ed. Galletier (Paris, 1952), 124. It is just possible that the
author here uses secretum in its more literal sense of “private audience chamber.”
95. Cf. Arnobius, nat. 1.25–27 (ed. Le Bonniec, 151–153), 2.2 (CSEL 4.48–49),
and. esp. 2.3 (CSEL 4.49): nisi forte dubitatis, an sit iste de quo loquimur imperator,
et magis esse Apollinem creditis, Dianam Mercurium Martem . . . dii enim minores qui
sint aut ubi sint scitis?ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
189
which informs their vocabulary, regardless of their creed, must also lie be-
hind the prayer written by Licinius at the behest of an angel of the sum-
mus deus before his battle with Maximin Daia, and likewise behind the
prayer commended by Constantine to his armies and especially to those
still ignorant of the jeiœov lügov. 96 Furthermore, the resemblance beween
the language used in these prayers—pronounced by some to be neither
“explicitly Christian” nor “unambiguously monotheistic”—and that
adopted in the dedications of the Divine Institutes again suggests the de-
liberate adoption of terminology which could pass for pagan or Christ-
ian. A professional orator like Lactantius, whatever his religious inclina-
tions and however strongly held, is likely to have learned from, and
himself influenced, the way in which Constantine and his court described
his God. 97 We cannot know conclusively whether Symmachus had read
the panegyric of 313, but it is virtually certain that he had read the arch.
In any event, he certainly appeals to the same vague, monotheistic senti-
ment with his own reference to the mens divina. 98 The broad applicabil-
ity of the strategies adopted by the orator in 313 is proved by resonances
with his speech found in the orations of Themistius and the letter of Max-
imus of Madaura. 99 Symmachus would have looked to the rhetoric of the
Constantinian age for precisely the same reason that Libanius and
Themistius evoked Constantinian tolerance: they assume that Christian
emperors will look for precedents to the first Christian emperor. 100
Symmachus, however, uses secretum in a more metaphorical meaning
96. Licinius’ prayer apud Lactantius, mort. 46.6, ed. J. L. Creed (Oxford, 1984),
66. Constantine’s prayer apud Eusebius, v.C. 4.20 (GCS 7.125).
97. The judgement by Creed in his note ad loc. The authenticity of the dedications
of the Divine Institutes has long been disputed; see inst. 1.1.13 (SC 326.36) and 7.27
(CSEL 19.668, in app. crit.); Monat has promised a thorough treatment of the issue in
the Introduction Générale to his edition. On the evolution of religious language around
the court of Constantine at this time I find Batiffol, Paix Constantinienne, 5th ed.
(1929), 214–230, particularly persuasive; and I am inclined to agree with A. Piganiol
in positing a close connection between Lactantius and the court at this time: L’em-
pereur Constantine (Paris, 1932), 48, 69, 94–95.
98. Symmachus, rel. 3.8 (MGH AA 6.1.281).
99. Cf. pan. lat. 9(12).26.1 (ed. Galletier, 144): Quamobrem te, summe rerum sator,
cuius tot nomina sunt quot gentium linguas esse voluisti (quem enim te ipse dici velis,
scire non possumus), sive tute quaedam vis mensque divina es. . . . For the vocabulary,
cf. Arnobius, nat. 2.2 (CSEL 4.49). Compare also Themistius, or. 1.8b, the descrip-
tions of his or. ad Valentem (references in n. 39); and Celsus apud Origen, Cels. 5.45
(SC 147.128–132). For Maximus, see apud Augustine, ep. 16.1 (CSEL 34.1.37).
100. Libanius, or. 30.6, 37 (LCL 452.104, 132–134); Themistius, or. 5.70d. That
this is a purely rhetorical strategy on the part of Libanius, is asserted—I believe cor-
rectly—by S. Bradbury, “Constantine and the Problem of Anti-Pagan Legislation in the
Fourth Century,” CP 89 (1994), 127–128; cf. Petit, “Libanius,” 578–582.190
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
than does the panegyrist of 313. This usage, I suggest, he could have
learned from a Christian. It is unnecessary for Symmachus himself to have
read Scripture; indeed, the phrase as such is absent from surviving texts
of the Bible. But Augustine, for instance, uses precisely the same phrase,
tam grande secretum, twice, both times while alluding or explicitly refer-
ring to Ps. 72, verse 17. 101 Curiously enough, his letter to Honoratus and
his readings in the Enarrationes clearly show that his text of the Psalm
read donec introeam in sanctuarium Dei; but secretum is quite common
in the Vulgate. Though Augustine may have learned the psalm in a slightly
different version, it is in any case clear that for Augustine knowledge of
the Divine could be described as “so great a secret.” Ambrose’s sarcastic,
condescending response to Symmachus closed the door on any chance for
dialogue, but even before he had read the relatio he urged Valentinian that
a vote for religious tolerance was equivalent to apostasy. 102 His response
typifies a generation that took the time to mock the eloquent and moving
epitaph that Paulina wrote for Praetextatus. 103 And who could discuss
anything with Prudentius, who asserted that while Romans and barbar-
ians obviously shared the same sky, they were as different as man and beast,
and concluded that a similar difference separated Christian and pagan? 104
The other echo of Symmachus in Augustine is well known, as is Au-
gustine’s concern expressed in the Retractationes that this phrase could be
interpreted to mean that there is a way other than Christ. 105 This recon-
sideration of the role of philosophical learning in Christian life and espe-
cially of the dangers inherent in language are entirely typical of Augus-
tine, and it is to his apologetics, and the continuities and changes within
it, that I now turn. Around 390 the grammarian Maximus of Madaura
wrote to Augustine on behalf of his town and attempted to flatter the bishop
by asking him to explain Christian theology: it seems obvious, he argued,
that pagans and Christians agree about the nature of the one God, and
equally obvious that their systems of veneration are different; can Au-
gustine please explain, without resort to Chrysippean arguments, who
that God is whom the Christians claim as their own. 106 Augustine’s re-
101. See ep. 140.5.13 (CSEL 44.164–165) and vera rel. 28.51 (CCL 32.220).
102 Ep. 17.8 (CSEL 82.3.14), and note the similarly rigid stance taken by Firmicus
Maternus, err 8.5 (ed. Turcan, 112–113), and compare also Ambrose, ep. 18.8 (CSEL
82.3.38) with Firmicus Maternus, err. 8.4 (ed. Turcan, 98).
103. For the epitaph see ILS 1259 5 Carm. Lat. Epig. 111; see Jerome, ep. 23.2–3
(PL 22.426), on which see P. Courcelle, Late Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources
(Cambridge, 1969), 47 at notes 87–89.
104. Symm. 2.816–821 (CCL 126.239–240).
105. Sol. 1.13.23 (CSEL 89.35) with retr. 1.4.6 (CCL 57.14–15).
106. Maximus apud Augustine, ep. 16.1, 3 (CSEL 34.1.37, 38–39).ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
191
sponse typifies his methodology elsewhere; he shows himself superior in
his use of quotations from classical authors against classical belief, and he
mocks the silliness of polytheism. 107 Finally, Augustine tells Maximus
that he will only correspond further, with the help of the one, true God,
when he sees that Maximus is prepared to be serious (ep. 17.5 [CSEL
34.1.44]).
Augustine’s harshness to the old grammarian comes as a surprise to the
casual reader of his letter to Deogratias, written about fifteen years later.
In that letter he plays on the themes of apologetic literature by asserting
that pagans cannot rationally explain their own practice (ep. 102.1.5
[CSEL 34.2.548–549]); however, he does allow that salvation has always
been open to good and pious men, regardless of the forms of worship
which they use (ep. 102.10–12 [CSEL 34.2.552–555]). Augustine runs
into a similar difficulty in his debate with Nectarius. Nectarius had asked
Augustine to intercede on behalf of his town, appealing to a common car-
itas patriae: each man posseses a dilectus et gratia civitatis which grows
every day (ep. 90 [CSEL 34.2.426]). Although Augustine refuses the re-
quest, pointing out that his loyalty lay first with the “country above,” he
invites Nectarius to join him on the journey to that country (ep. 91.1
[CSEL 34.2.427]): for the present, Augustine wrote, Nectarius must for-
give the Christians if, for the sake for their patria, they cause anguish in
his. 108
Augustine was probably surprised that Nectarius replied, and very likely
was irritated that his letter had raised for Nectarius the shades of Plato
and Cicero. Nectarius confessed to hearing Augustine’s exhortations to
the worship of the exsuperantissimus deus gladly; and he eagerly read on
as Augustine directed his eyes at the caelestis patria. That patria, Nectar-
ius wrote, is not an earthly one of the sort which philosophers describe,
but one which the magnus deus inhabits, and which all all laws seek by
diverse paths and ways, which we cannot express by speech but which we
may happen to find by meditation. 109 Nectarius argues, however, that
men reach this place by serving their native cities and securing their safety,
by word or deed. Though Nectarius disavowed any reliance upon philo-
107. Compare Maximus’ use of Vergil at 16.4 (CSEL 34.1.39) with Augustine’s re-
ply at ep. 17.3 (CCL 34.1.42–43).
108. Ep. 91.2 (CSEL 34.2.428); Augustine not only turns several allusions to Vergil
against Nectarius but even tells him to reread his Cicero (ep. 91.1–2 (CSEL
34.2.427–428)).
109. Ep. 103.2 (CSEL 34.2.579–580). For a similar—no doubt deliberate—attempt
to sound Christian by the citizens of Madaura, an attempt which momentarily fooled
Augustine, see ep. 232.2 (CSEL 57.511–512).192
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
sophical learning, his heavenly city was essentially Ciceronian—as we
might have suspected from his allusion to the de re publica at the open-
ing of his first letter, and is in any event made obvious by its similarity to
the eternal abode of great men described by Macrobius and Favonius. 110
Nevertheless, it is easy to believe that Nectarius, Macrobius, and Favo-
nius emphasize the nature of their heaven and the path to it in a reaction
to contemporary debates about the proper relationship between pious
Christianity and service to the state. 111 Augustine precedes his reply to
the above passage with a confession that “he does not know what lies in
the plans of God, for he is only a man” (ep. 104.3.11 [CSEL 34.2.589]),
but also with the aside that Nectarius didn’t know the appropriate exem-
pla with which to embellish his plea. But what Augustine quite clearly
knows is that there is only one path to God; he even stops to explain the
essential identity between references in Scriptures to “ways” and “way”
(ep. 104.4.12 [CSEL 34.2.591]). There might be different ways to the cae-
lestis habitatio, Augustine concedes, but the path which Nectarius has
chosen ex quorundam philosophorum is clearly perverse and will lead
only to the most destructive delusion (ep. 104.4.13 [CSEL 34.2.592]).
The most important letter comes from Longinianus. Longinianus is
about to enter into a pagan priesthood, to begin, as he describes it, a jour-
ney, consecrated by sacred and ancient tradition, toward the one, univer-
sal, incomprehensible, ineffable, and untiring Creator (ep., 234.2 [CSEL
57.520]). In light of the possibility that Symmachus alluded to John 14:6,
it should be noted that Longinianus repeatedly adopts the same metaphor
to describe his own journey of religious discovery (ep. 234.2 [CSEL
110. Ep. 103.2 (CSEL 34.2.579–580); compare Macrobius, Comm. in Somnium
Scipionis 1.8.12, ed. J. Willis, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1994), 39, and also Favonius Eulogius,
Disputatio 1, ed. R. van Weddingen (Brussels, 1957), 12. Compare Augustine’s use of
civiles virtutes at ep. 138.3.17 (CSEL 44.144–145).
111. See above on Origen and Julian at nn. 47 and 51. Compare Augustine’s letters
with Marcellinus and Volusianus (epp. 136–139 [CSEL 44.93–154]): there he con-
cludes that Christians are true citizens of the heavenly city, but as long as they journey
far from it they must get along with those in the earthly city: the men who founded the
Roman empire preserved it through a certain sui generis probitas: indeed, “God has
thus shown in the exceedingly wealthy and famous empire of the Romans how much
civic virtues can achieve, even without true religion” (ep. 138.3.17 [CSEL
44.144–145], but cf. cons. eu.1.12.18 [CSEL 43.17]). Augustine’s letters also reveal
that some Christians felt awkward about holding office; he must assure them, for ex-
ample, that God loves soldiers, provided that they wage war in order to secure peace
(ep. 189 to Boniface [CSEL 57.133]); cf. ep. 151.14 (CSEL 44.392), where Caecilian
has decided to postpone baptism until he has left office, and ep. 158 (CSEL
44.495–496), where another young man evidently made the same decision. Cf. civ.
19.6 (CCL 48.670–671).ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
193
57.520]). Augustine responds to Longinianus with gentle confusion; there
is none of the sarcasm dealt to Maximus. Why? In part the answer must
be that Longinianus is a polite correspondent; he explicitly refrains from
commenting about Christ because he cannot express what he does not
know (ep. 234.3 [CSEL 57.52520–521]). Augustine may also have found
his description of his God appealing because it was cast in Christian terms:
for Augustine reveals on various occasions that he recognized the exis-
tence of a specifically Christian, theological jargon—whether he was cor-
rect in this, is of less consequence than what it suggests about how he
might have read the letter of Longinianus. 112
Consider, for example, the word ineffabilis. It appears almost exclu-
sively in Christian writers and becomes prominent in Augustine’s genera-
tion. 113 Of its three appearances in pagan literature outside of this letter
only one occurs in a remotely similar context, but I am inclined to think
that this exception arises out of sarcasm, since its author, Apuleius, in fact
writes at some length about just what he means by this certain incredible
and ineffable nimietas. 114 When Apuleius reverently describes his Pla-
tonic high God, he employs a different vocabulary, as does Calcidius in
his translation of and commentary on the Timaeus. Calcidius does use in-
effabilis once (summum et ineffabilem deum at 188 [ed. Waszink, 212])—
but Calcidius was probably, but not definitely, a Christian; it is therefore
worth noting that the word appears in Marius Victorinus only after his
conversion. 115 A considerable expanse of time separates Apuleius and
Augustine, and therefore also Apuleius and Longinianus; we cannot,
therefore, discount the possibility that the word entered the vocabulary
112. See, for instance, the amusing note at retr. 1.3.8 (CCL 57.12–13), where he ad-
mits that Plato may have gotten something right, even if he didn’t use proper, Christ-
ian vocabulary: Nec Plato quidem in hoc erravit, quia esse mundum intellegibilem
dixit, si non vocabulum quod ecclesiasticae consuetudini in re illa inusitatum est, sed
ipsam rem velimus adtendere. Cf. civ. 8.10 (CCL 47.227), paraphrased below at n.
122.
113. Thesaurus Linguae Latinae s.v. “ineffabilis.” The creation and diffusion of a
more rigorous Latin vocabulary for theological speculation was largely the work of
Marius Victorinus, and the ever-increasing influence of Platonic language in this pe-
riod due indirectly to Porphyry: thus implies P. Hadot’s Porphyre et Victorinus (Paris,
1968).
114. De deo Socratis 3 (ed. Moreschini, 11).
115. Calcidius 188, ed. Waszink, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1975), 212. Calcidius as Christ-
ian: Waszink has tended to carry the day—see the introduction to his edition, pp. ix–
xiii—but his arguments are not all convincing. Calcidius’ vocabulary on demons and
angels, for example, is unproblematic: this is precisely the issue that got Porphyry in
trouble with Proclus (n. 48), but on that issue Porphyry had simply been influenced by
all his readings in Christian texts.194
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
of theological discourse via some pagan writer in the interim; but Apuleius
stands out as the only Latin author in Augustine’s list of significant Pla-
tonists (civ. 8.12 [CCL 47.229] : Platonicus nobilis). Of course Longini-
anus needn’t necessarily have read Christian writings; the word was in the
air, so to speak, but then Longinianus must have inhaled a lot of secondary
smoke from Christian theologians. 116
We will never know whether Augustine and Longinianus made any-
thing of this shared vocabulary; their correspondence is limited to these
letters. But what prevented Augustine from sympathizing with appeals
from pagans on the basis of God’s unknowability? That God was beyond
our understanding, and even more so beyond our capacity for expression,
was fundamental to Augustine’s belief. 117 Nowhere does Augustine sug-
gest this more clearly than when he wishes that he, like Moses, could write
at such a level of authority that his words “would sound out with what-
ever diverse truth in these matters each reader was able to grasp, rather
than to give a quite explicit statement of single true view of this question
in such a way as to exclude other views—provided there was no false doc-
trine to offend me.” 118 Towards the end of his life Augustine would feel
forced to write a lengthy defence of his belief that certain things—in this
case, the origin of the soul—lay beyond human comprehension; in the last
book of that curious and repetitive document Augustine marshalls an ar-
ray of Scriptural passages to justify his claim of ignorance (an. et or. 4.1–5
[PL 44.523–527]; cf. retr. 1.11.4 [CCL 57.34–35]). Furthermore, early in
his life Augustine had acknowledged that many Platonists converted to
Christianity paucis mutatis verbis atque sententiis (ver. rel. 4.7 [CCL
32.192]). By the time he wrote the City of God, although Augustine still
concedes that the Platonists are closest of all pagans to a Christian posi-
tion, he condemns them utterly for their willingness to countenance poly-
theism. 119 He performs a similar rhetorical trick in his remarks on read-
ing several books of the Platonists: having praised the authors for
expressing Christian-sounding sentiments about God “not in [the same]
116. The word takes center stage when Augustine, for instance, lectures his con-
gregation on the difficulties of Scripture and its catachrestic language in serm. 117.5.7
(PL 38.665).
117. On Augustine’s doubts about human knowledge and human speech, see
C. Ando, “Augustine on Language,” RÉAug 40.1 (1994), 45–78; cf. John Rist’s Au-
gustine (Cambridge, 1994), Chapter 3, esp. 56–63.
118. Translation H. Chadwick; conf. 12.31.42 (CCL 27.240). After his battles with
Donatists and Pelagians Augustine is less certain about the value of sententiae and
opiniones (an. et or. 2.1.1 [PL44.495]; cf. 3.15.23 [PL 44.522–524]).
119. Civ. 8.9–10, 12 (CCL 47.225–227, 229); compare [Justin], coh. Gr. 26
(CACSS 3.88–90).ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
195
words [as the Gospel], but with entirely the same sense and supported by
numerous and varied reasons,” he chastises them for failing to recognize
the divinity of Christ and above all for their labelling assorted “idols and
images” as divine. 120 We can see him moving towards this position when,
in his unfinished commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, he suggests
that he expected pagans to mock the Trinity and especially Christ but to
honor the Holy Spirit—a suggestion that may find a vague echo in a homily
of Chrysostom. 121
In his increasingly rigid rejections of the possibility of shared truths, Au-
gustine did not take the easy path. He denied any possibility that Plato
had learned from Moses: it was, he confessed, a chronological impossi-
bility (civ. 8.11 [CCL.47.227–228]), stressing at the same time that the
Christian can know all he needs about grace without knowing words like
naturalis, physicus, rationalis, or logicus. 122 Instead he began to find in
Scripture the evidence which could replace any references to or reliance
upon pagan learning; for example, he eschewed references to Timaeus 28c
in favor of 1 Cor. 3.1–2 (eg. at conf. 13.18.23 [CC 27.254–255], and esp.
trin. 1.1.3 [CCL 50.30]). This process is visible in the Retractationes not
only where he explicitly rejects Platonism, but also in the positive esti-
mations he makes of early works: the de magistro is thus not about signs,
but about Christ the teacher; all of his quotations from the de musica are
from book 6. 123 In a related move, evident in the exegesis of Scripture and
pagan literature in the City of God, Augustine concludes that the failings
of human language as a system of signification privilege Scripture and not
pagan texts as the recipients of allegorical reading—ie., it is the nature of
the signified that determines whether allegorical hermeneutics must be ap-
plied to the signifier. 124 Thus there is more to his method in the City of God
than the apologist’s trick of turning classical allusions against the pagan.
Augustine grounded this move above all in the transformation of an-
other theme from apologetic, a transformation that ended all possibility
for discussion with the pagan. Augustine found faith. Beginning with his
earliest written works, Augustine displayed an interest in the epistemo-
120. Conf. 7.9.13–15 and 13 (CCL 27..101–103; trans. Chadwick).
121. See ep. Rm. inch. 15.2–3 (CSEL 84.165); compare Chrysostom, Sur l’incom-
préhensibilité de Dieu, ed. Cavallera and Daniélou (Paris, 1951), 268–270. Augustine
also knew that some pagans played on this theme by inventing oracles instructing Por-
phyry to honor Christ, and by arguing that pagan anger was directed towards the mis-
representation of Christ’s teachings by his disciples (cons. eu. 1.15.23–16.24 [CSEL
43.22–23]).
122. Civ. 8.10 (CCL 47.227); cf. retract. 1.3.3, quoted above in n. 112.
123. On mag., see retr. 1.12 (CCL 57.36) ; on mus. see 1.11 (CCL 57.33–35).
124. Cf. Ando, “Augustine on Language,” 45–47.196
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
logical difference between knowledge and belief, and he will continue to
investigate this issue and its vocabulary throughout his life. But we must
differentiate this from his growing certainty that an individual had first to
believe, to acquire faith, before he could even begin to engage in a dia-
logue about Christian theology. He had clearly reached this position by
412 in his letter to Volusianus: “All these issues of Christian doctrine are
widely discussed . . . but it is faith which opens the approach to them for
the intellect, and lack of faith closes it.” 125 Augustine’s response to
Longinianus frustrates us because Augustine seems unwilling to justify his
refusal to treat with him; but Augustine clearly feels incapable of dis-
cussing important matters with Longinianus until the latter sheds even the
appearance of improper belief. Equally important is Augustine’s belief
that faith ultimately makes the Christian; he had no expectation that
everyone would understand their religion: “This ‘foolishness of preach-
ing’ (1 Cor. 1.21) and the ‘foolishness of God which is wiser than men’ (1
Cor. 1.25) drag many to salvation, in such a way that the salvation which
that foolishness of preaching bestows on the faithful is available both to
those who are not yet strong enough to perceive with certain under-
standing the nature of God which they have by faith, and also to those
who do not yet distinguish in their own soul incorporeal substance from
the common nature of the body, to the extent that they are certain that
they live, know, and will. For, if Christ died only for those who are able
to discern these truths with sure understanding, our labor in the Church
is almost worthless.” 126
125. Ep. 137.15 (CSEL 44.117–118; c. c.e. 411). Compare the similar warning to
his congretation at serm. 117.5.7 (PL 38.665; c. c.e. 418); the early statement of this
theme at mag. 11.37 (CCL 29.195); and the lengthy treatise sent to Paulina de videndo
deo (ep. 147 [CSEL 44.274–331]). Augustine argues with particular eloquence that our
understanding comes about through faith by the gift of God at en. Ps. 118.18.3 (CCL
40.1724–1725). He tends to emphasize the straightforward nature of the truths of
proper Christianity against his opponents, doctrinal and otherwise; Augustine’s truths
require only faith (expressed with fides or, curiously, credulitas): Gn. adv. Man. 2.10.23
(PL 34.208); c. Iul. 1.19 (CSEL 85.1.16–17); and c. Faust. 12.46 (CSEL
25.1.374–375). As with the concept of ineffability, so Augustine frequently cites this
verse of Isaiah in his sermons, and usually against the opponents of Catholic ortho-
doxy: s. Guelf. 11.4(3) (in Miscellanea Agostiniana 1.476.11–15 and 477.5–6; c. c.e.
417;); serm. 89 (PL 38.556; c. c.e. 397), 91 (PL38.570–571; post c.e. 400), 118 (PL
38.672; c.e. 418), 126 (PL 38.698–699, 701–702, 704; c. c.e. 417), 139 (PL
38.770–771; c. c.e. 417), 140 (PL 38.775; c. c.e. 427).
126. Ep. 169.1.3–4 (CSEL 44.613–614). On the catachrestic use of language in
Scripture, on the limits of human understanding, and on knowledge of oneself as a
benchmark in epistemological awareness, see Ando, “Augustine on Language,” sec-
tions 3 and 6, discussing in particular conf. 13.11.12 and trin. 15.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
197
His emphasis on faith and therefore on the content of one’s belief al-
lowed Augustine to indulge his anxieties about the failings of human
speech, and thus to justify his rejection of pagans who tried to sound
Christian, however seductive their rhetoric: their words were necessarily
improper guides to the beliefs of the inner man. This practice did not ex-
tend merely to pagans: in his fights with Pelagius and Julian late in life,
Augustine attacked their positions in part by including more and more
features of Catholic doctrine in this initial and necessary “faith.” In the
handbook on heresy he compiled for Quodvultdeus in 428, Augustine
makes no mention whatsoever of any concern that heretical doctrines
could arise from misconstruing human language or from the complexity
of the subject at hand: though in the preface to that work Augustine ques-
tions the value of such a compilation, he asserts at its close that a heresy,
once identified and labelled as such, need not be questioned or under-
stood, but simply avoided. 127 He acts somewhat hypocritically, therefore,
when in his letters Augustine worries endlessly that his friends might in-
advertently use words that could be construed as heretical: “Wherefore I
ask or, rather, I recognize, in what way you understand Christ to be a man;
obviously not as some heretics do, as the Word of God which happens to
be flesh . . .” 128
The exchange of literature between educated men affected a tiny mi-
nority of the population, but Augustine and his opponents alike under-
stood that their behavior reflected poorly on their Church: the infighting
among Christians continued to provoke the embarassment of their apol-
ogists and the derision of their enemies. As a bishop Augustine expressed
genuine concern that heretical bishops could lead their unwitting flocks
into sin. In trying to correct this situation, he encountered considerable
resistance: Prosper provides a fine description of popular feeling regard-
ing church heresies in Aquitane in a letter of 429: “Many of the people
here do not think that Christian faith is harmed by the disagreement [be-
tween Pelagians and Catholics]; you must write to them and reveal how
great the danger is in this opinion.” 129 By this period, of course, Augus-
tine genuinely believed in the good to be won by this “kindly harshness,”
and was convinced that it was fine to use an earthly power to achieve this
127. Augustine, haer. praef. 7 (CCL 46. 289) and epilogus 3 (CCL 46.344): Quid
enim contra ista sentiat catholica ecclesia, quod a me dicendum putasti, superfluo
quaeritur, cum propter hoc scire sufficiat eam contra ista sentire, nec aliquid horum in
fidem quemquam debere recipere.
128. Eg. at ep. 187.2.4 (CSEL 57.83–84; to Dardanus, de praesentia dei).
129. apud Augustine, ep. 225.8 (CSEL 57.394–396).198
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
pretence of unity. 130 Prosper’s letter also hints at a far more troubling phe-
nomenon, the educated bishop’s inability to convey the importance of the-
ological subtleties to his less educated flock. Does the answer which Au-
gustine found to this problem bear any relation to his replies to challenges
from his more sophisticated correspondents?
IV. FICTI, FALSI, ET SIMULATORES CATHOLICI 131
Themistius based his appeal for tolerance on the inscrutability of God; in
doing so he adopted a strategy familiar from the Christian apologists who
themselves had appropriated this vocabulary from the theological specu-
lations of contemporary Platonism. Themistius cleverly based this appeal
on the evidence of disagreements in theory and practice in contemporary
Christianity. The appeal, as it turns out, was hardly clever at all, and for
two reasons: first, the masters of triumphant Christianity were no longer
open to appeals based on the rhetoric of their own apologetic literature.
Second, his evidence struck a raw nerve with Christians who had long
been taunted about their internal dissension. The doctrinal disputes of
Christians had provoked harsh legislation in the past and would do so
again. 132 Indeed, the fights between various priests in North Africa in the
420s provide a convenient frame to the assertion of Lactantius with which
this essay began: Augustine warned the violent mobs in Carthage that
their efforts were counterproductive: it served no one if Christian violence
encouraged the pagans, heretics and Jews to join together. 133 It is no co-
130. Augustine, serm. 47.15.28 (PL 38.314); cf. ep. Rm. inch. 15.11–16 (CSEL
84.166–168); and esp. Chrysostom, Homil. in Acta Apostolorum 33.4 (PG 60.245).
On the good that comes from coercion, the need for “kindly harshness,” and the use
of secular power see ep. 185.3.13–14 (CSEL 57.12–13; compare the phrase per ordi-
natas a deo potestates cohiberi atque corrigi at ep. 93.1.1 [CSEL 34.2.445–446]).
131. On fictos catholicos, see ep. 93.5.17 (CSEL 34.2.445–446), and on falsos et
simulatores catholicos, see ep. 185.7.25 (CSEL 57.23–24). Markus, End of Ancient
Christianity, 8 n. 13 (cf. 33 n. 13), takes issue with modern usage of the term “half-
Christian” but seems to regard (p)seudochristiani as the only ancient equivalent for the
modern misnomer.
132. See above at nn. 53 and 54 and the texts listed in n. 130. Subsequent legisla-
tion against heretics: Sirm. 12 (c.e. 407), against Donatists and Priscillianists, among
others; N. Th. 3 (c.e. 438), against Eunomians, Montanists, Phrygians, Photinians,
Priscillianists, et al.; and the laws collected in C. J. I.5. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix has writ-
ten a particularly colorful evocation of the motivations which drove Christian to fight
with Christian in The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981), 447–452.
133. Ep. 20*.18.1, 26.2, and esp 20.2–3 (CSEL 88.104, 105, 108); compare serm.
62.17–18 (PL 38.422–423). On “apostatizing” to Donatism, see at n. 152. Again, this
sort of fighting was typical of the African church, quite aside from conflicts with Do-
natists: cf. Acta Conc. Carthag. sub Grato 10–12 (CCL 149.8–9), 10–12; such a prob-ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
199
incidence that the first imperial laws against apostates appear just after
the mass-production of Catholic legislation begins in the early 380s, leg-
islation that was addressed to the pagan and heretic alike.
Earlier I mentioned the possibility that the distinction between pagan
and Christian might be reassessed on the basis of behaviors. To a certain
extent this was a contemporary concern; the histrionic nature of pagan
worship had lead Firmicus Maternus to suggest that pagans be forced to
conduct their ceremonies on stage. It is matter of some irony, then, that
the persecution of pagans forced them to act like Pliny’s Christians and
worship together in secret meetings, which were themselves banned by a
law of 382 which allowed—without any of the humanity displayed by
Trajan—the use of indices denuntiatoresque. 134 Augustine’s stress on the
importance of belief over understanding, of faith over theological sophis-
tication might easily provoke the conclusion that, for Augustine, Chris-
tianization involved in the first instance the “reorientation of the soul”;
the adornments and rituals of daily life were a secondary concern. 135 In-
deed, Augustine repeatedly emphasized that words were necessary be-
tween men because of the Fall, but that God obviously had no need of
such symbols in his communication. Thus, reasoned Augustine, Christian
forms of worship—both sacrifices and prayers—are merely outward signs
of the true sacrifice and the true sign within. 136 Augustine addressed this
theme not merely in his discussion of the forms of prayer, but in his ex-
pressions of tolerance when asked about the fate of men who didn’t have
the opportunity to be Christian: “Thus at that time with other words and
other signs, at first secretly and later more openly, at first by few people
and later by many, this one, single true religion was expressed and prac-
tice” (ep. 102.12 [CSEL 34.2.554–555]).
This emphasis on the character of an individual’s beliefs begs the ques-
tion, how could one man truly know what another believed? Augustine
had faced a similar question in an early dialogue: “You will say in good
conscience that you have not lied, and you will assert this with all the
words at your command, but they are only words. For you, being a man,
lem may also lie behind Acta. Conc. Carthag. a. 390 4–5 (CCL 149.14) and Canones
in causa Apiarii 37 (CCL 149.128).
134. Firmicus, err. 12.9 (ed. Turcan, 104–105). On pagans meeting in secret, see
Augustine, cons. ev. 1.27.42 (CSEL 43.42); cf. C. Th. 16.5.9, outlawing secretas tur-
bas pessimorum and occultos latentesque conventus.
135. The phrase is that of A. D. Nock, Conversion (Oxford, 1933), 7; cf. Markus,
End of Ancient Christianity, 32–34.
136. Civ. 10.19 (CCL 47.293). A list of cross-references and fuller discussion avail-
able in Ando, “Augustine on Language,” 64–68.200
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
cannot so reveal the hidden places of your mind that you may be known
intimately to another man.” 137 Even if religion is a matter of belief, its
practice in society is, according to that argument, even for Christians a
matter of behavior: how else could one argue that different peoples cele-
brated one and the same religion using “diverse sacraments in diverse lan-
guages” (ep. 102.10 [CSEL 34.2.552–553])? Such a challenge to Augus-
tine’s position is all the more valid—and this should be stressed—because
Christians would have maintained that their acts of worship were meant
to express doctrine; no pagan believed that about his own practice. Was
it, then, even remotely apparent to a member of Augustine’s flock that the
ritual acts which gave rhythm and order to daily life prior to his “con-
version” were incompatible with his new status—that these acts consti-
tuted “pagan survivals?” 138 Augustine wrestled with these questions, not
least because he understood the costs of religious coercion: in a world in
which bishops could act as judges and lecture pagans on their sins before
issuing unappealable verdicts, 139 what was one to make of the vast num-
bers who flocked to Christian churches following the conversion of Con-
stantine? While other Christians applauded this narrative of the Chris-
tianization of the empire, Augustine worried that the speed of this process
had simply flooded the Church with people incapable of truly giving up
the food and drink and long-familiar pleasures of pagan festivals. 140
We might first raise the problem of interested conversions. If T. D.
Barnes is correct in following Eusebius and suggesting that Constantine
sought out Christians for office, then how should we read his statistics, or
137. Util. cred. 10.23 (CSEL 25.1.29). Compare the wording at serm. 62.17 (PL
38.423): Totum intus esse debet. Si intus est quod videt homo, quare foris est quod
videt Deus?
138. On the use and abuse of this term, see Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 9.
139. On bishops as judges, see C. Th. 1.27.1 and Sirm. 1, with, for example, Liba-
nius, or. 30.19 (LCL). On lecturing plaintiffs and defendants on “how to obtain eter-
nal life,” see Possidius, vit. Aug. 19, ed. H. T. Weiskotten (Princeton, 1919), 86–88.
See A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire (1964), 480–481, and now J. Lamore-
aux, “Episcopal Courts in Late Antiquity,” JECS 3.2 (1995), 143–167, though I
strongly doubt that Lamoreaux (and others) is correct in imagining that pagans, too,
preferred to have their lawsuits heard by Christian bishops: is there any evidence for
that?
140. For Christian statements on the spread of Christianity prior to Nicaea, see the
testimonia and comments in A. Harnack, Mission and Expansion of Christianity, 2nd
ed. (tr. J. Moffatt; 1908) 2.1–32, esp. Eusebius, v. C. 2.18–19 (GCS 7.48), and cf. Gre-
gory, or. 4.74 (SC 309.190–192). See Augustine, ep. 29, esp. 8–9 (CSEL 34.1.119–120)
and sermones 248–251 (PL 38.1158–1171), where Augustine reflects that so many fish
are entering the great fish-net that they have as yet been imperfectly sorted; a similar
sentiment is expressed at en. Ps. 39.10 (CCL 38.433), on the verse multiplicati sunt su-
per numerum.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
201
those of Eck and van Haehling? 141 There were surely men whose conver-
sions were no more sincere than that of Praetextatus, almost the bishop
of Rome; 142 and then there is the real bishop, Pegasius of Ilium, who told
Julian that he had become a bishop in order to acquire the power to pro-
tect the shrines of the gods. 143 Indeed, no less an authority than Eusebius
laments how many feign conversion to earn the favor of Constantine; 144
similarly, Socrates mocks the multiple conversions of Hecebolius, who
was not alone in switching his allegiance when Julian took the throne. 145
And it has been proposed Augustine’s lament in the Retractationes for
Manlius Theodorus may well have been prompted by an increasing real-
ization of the shallowness of the latter’s Christianity. 146 People could fake
a conversion for reasons both less ambitious and more pressing: Ambrose
rails against those who act Christian merely to get dates with Christian
girls; and Libanius talks of troops of peasants who, out of fear, parade to
church but stand silent, praying to their gods. 147 The anti-pagan riots
spurred on by Theophilus of Alexandria in 391 caused even Heracles to
fake a conversion—or so maintained Palladas. 148 The pagan Olympius
tried to reassure his followers that the destruction of statues should not
cause them to desert their religion of their ancestors: the statues were but
perishable material (õ
 lh cjartḉ), while the powers which inhabited them
had gone to heaven. 149 Pagans were subsequently horrified when Theo-
141. Eusebius, v. C. 2.44 and 4.54 (GCS 7.59–60, 139–140). Barnes, Constantine
and Eusebius, 210; idem, “Christians and Pagans in the Reign of Constantius,” En-
tretiens sur l’antiquité classique (Fondation Hardt) 34 (1987): 311–321; idem, “The
Religious Affiliation of Consuls and Prefects, 317–361,” in his From Eusebius to Au-
gustine (London, 1994); W. Eck, “Das Eindringen des Christentums in den Sena-
torenstand bis zu Konstantin d. Gr.” Chiron 1 (1971): 381–406; R. van Haehling, Die
Religionszugehörigkeit der hohen Amsträger des Römischen Reiches seit Constantins
I. Alleinherrschaft bis zum Ende der Theodosianischen Dynastie (Bonn, 1978).
142. See the famous anecdote related by Jerome, adv. Io. Hier. 8 (PL 23.361C).
143. Ep. 79 (ed. Bidez, 86).
144. V. C. 4.54.2 (GCS 7.139).
145. PLRE 1 Felix (3), Helpidius (6), and Julian’s uncle, Julian (12). Compare the
case of Isocasius (see in n. 21).
146. O’Donnell, “Demise,” 61. J. Rist, “A Man of Monstrous Vanity,” JTS 42
(1991): 138–143, questions identifying the “intermediary” of conf. 7.9.3, with
Theodorus, but Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 29–30 retains the traditional
identification.
147. Ambrose, psal. 118 20.48–49 (CSEL 62.468–469). Augustine used very simi-
lar wording in serm. 62.11.17 (PL 38.422.423). Cf. Libanius, or. 30.26–29 (LCL
452.122–126).
148. Cameron, “Palladas,” 29.
149. Sozomen, h.e. 7.15.6 (GCS 50.320); see also the prophecy of Antoninus re-
ported by Eunapius (v. soph. 6.9.17 [ed. Giangrande, 36]), and the similar prophecy202
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
dosius, instead of stopping the destruction of property by Christians, be-
rated the pagans for their obstinacy and gave imperial sanction to the
seizure of the Serapeum. 150 What is gained, asks Libanius, when a con-
version is achieved in word but not in deed? Ambrose and Libanius may
grieve for different reasons, but both acknowledge that such conversions
are both false and undetectable.
What should be absolutely clear is the contemporary awareness of the
role that social and political power could play in the religious landscape.
Eusebius also complained that heretics, afraid of the emperor’s threats,
“crept” back into the church by disguising their true sentiments (v. C.
3.66 [GCS 7.113]). Procopius of Caesarea describes a similar result to re-
ligious coercion: when a persecution of heretics began, men thought it stu-
pid to suffer over a senseless doctrinal issue, and so adopted the name of
Christians and by this pretence escaped danger. 151 Augustine’s congrega-
tion knew about such conversions: though Augustine wanted to accept
the pretence of Donatists-turned-ficti Catholici, his congregation refused
to play along, with the result that at least one Donatist lapsed. 152 His con-
gregation was equally unwilling to accept as real the conversion of a man
whom they knew as a pagan ambitious to hold office; Augustine at-
tempted to assuage his audience by claiming to quote Faustinus himself:
maioratum nolo, christianus esse volo. 153 Pagans, too, understood the im-
portance of controlling the instruments of secular power: many had in-
terpreted Julian’s ascent to the throne as giving them license to release
pent-up bitterness at their Christian antagonists. Furius Maecius Grac-
chus probably counted on a similar reaction when he had himself bap-
tized along with his lictors in the insignia of his office. 154 This undoubt-
in the Aesclepius which, even if not written around 391 (as maintained in a brilliant
argument by Cameron, “Palladas,” 24 n. 48; cf. Nock and Festugière in their edition,
pp. 288–289), nevertheless was read in the fourth century as describing the demise of
paganism, as maintained by G. Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (Cambridge, 1986) 39,
though he dismisses such readings as anachronistic. R. Lane Fox reasserts, with cogent
and persuasive arguments, a fourth-century date in his review of Fowden (JRS 80
(1990), 237–238).
150. Sozomen, h.e. 7.15.7–8 (GCS 50.320–321).
151. Procopius, arc. 11.24–26 (LCL 290.136–138). He describes in similar terms a
contemporaneous persecution of pagans: they, too, responded by pretending to be
Christians, but they were usually later caught performing libations, etc (11.31–32
[LCL 290.138–140]). I find no indication that Procopius there discusses the persecu-
tion of apostates, as suggested by Van Dam, Viator 16 (1985), 4 n. 12 and his source,
Rémondon, “L’Égypte,” 69.
152. Serm. 296.11.12 (PL 38.1358–1359).
153. Serm. Morin 1 (in Miscellanea Agostiniana 1.592.21).
154. PLRE 1 Gracchus 1; sources also listed in A. Chastagnol, Les Fastes de la Pré-
fecture de Rome au Bas-Empire (1962), 198–200.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
203
edly explains why Augustine occasionally describes the emperor kneeling
in Church: the organs of the state, he suggests, are at the disposal of the
Catholics. 155 Both Maximus of Turin and Augustine at the turn of the
century longed for the conversion of prominent senators; and Ambrose
gloated when one did; note also Jerome’s description of the conversion of
Furius Gracchus: “Did not your Gracchus, advertising his patrician no-
bility in his name, when he was holding the urban prefecture, overthrow,
break, and destroy the grove of Mithras . . . and, with its statues before
him like hostages, seek Christian baptism?” 156 Augustine even confessed
that while the conversion of lowly people was appreciated by God, he and
his fellows were most excited by the conversion of a nobilis (conf. 8.4.9
[CCL 27.118–119]). Augustine may here have been thinking only about
the propagandistic value of such a conversion, but the imperial govern-
ment was more realistic and counted on such men to convert their peas-
ants. 157 That physical and social power could play a role in converting
the oppressed had, in fact, implicitly been recognized almost three hun-
dred years earlier, in the Apology of Aristides. 158
As Origen had expressed concern about the rapid expansion of the
church, Augustine, too, worried that the Church in North Africa had not
been equipped to educate the vast numbers who converted following the
victory of Constantine. Paganism had satisified certain needs in the lives
of its practitioners, and it was not immediately clear whether or how
Christianity would satisfy them. Augustine and other Christian bishops
were the most troubled by their inability to convey to their flock precisely
what parts of their heritage must be shed now that they are Christian.
Thus we find Augustine reprimanding his congregation because someone
wanted a requiem to encourage the death of his enemy, or worried be-
cause a Christian couple had made a sacrifice to heal their already-bap-
155. Ep. 232.3 (CSEL 57.512–514), reminding the citizens of Madaura of the
power of the Catholic Church to destroy both heretics and pagans; cf. cons. ev. 1.27.42
(CSEL 43.42).
156. Jerome, ep. 107.2 (CSEL 55.291–292); Maximus, serm. 106.2 (CCL
12.417–418); Augustine, en. Ps. 54.13 (CCL 39.666); Ambrose, ep. 27(58).3 (CSEL
82.1.181). The same mindset obviously informs Prudentius, Symm. 1.566–572 (CCL
126.205).
157. Augustine was sad when a recently converted rich man did not order the de-
struction of pagan idols on his estates (serm. 62.11.17–12.18 [PL 38.422–423]). Com-
pare the law addressed to African landowners: they would be fined if they refused to
recall their slaves and coloni from that depraved religion with frequent floggings (C.
Th. 16.5.52.1, 4).
158. Christians “persuade” their male and female slaves to convert, “out of love for
them”: apol. 15 (ed. Harris, 49); a Greek fragment of this passage has subsequently
been discovered and published by H. J. M. Milne, “A New Fragment of the Apology
of Aristides” ( JTS 25 [1923/24]: 73–77); see lines 7ff.204
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
tized baby, or had asked that their sick baby be baptized a second time. 159
Augustine was especially angry about the vendors of amulets who wrote
KURIE BOHJI, “Lord help us,” on their charms: “a coating of honey on
a bitter poison” (eu. Io. 7.6 [PL 35.1440]). This is reminiscent of the many
magical papyri which appeal to Jesus Christ or the saints or the holy spirit,
sometimes in conjunction with a host of pagan deities, asking for every
conceivable favor, 160 and also of responses Gelasius received when he
tried, and failed, to stamp out the Lupercalia. 161
Contemporaries recognized that these difficulties in “Christianization”
didn’t just spring from the new converts’ unfamiliarity with their new re-
ligion. Libanius was at his most eloquent, and most sincere, when de-
scribing the sorts of needs which he felt Christianity could not fulfill: “the
temples are the soul of the countryside . . . In them the farming commu-
nity places its hopes for husbands and wives, for children, for their live-
stock, and for the earth they sow and the harvest they reap” (or. 30.9–10
[LCL 452.108]). This was undoubtedly the reasoning adopted by Bishop
Marcellus of Apamea who ordered the destruction of temples in the city
and countryside—a project he sometimes oversaw himself with a troop of
soldiers and gladiators—on the grounds that pagans would not convert
so long as the temples stood. 162 Likewise, when Theodosius, Arcadius,
and Honorius outlawed the burning of incense or binding of trees with
fillets in private households, they took aim at deeply rooted feelings about
the presence of the supernatural in every aspect of household affairs: it
was, after all, still possible for pagans like Ammianus to use penates in
metonymy for “household.” 163 Augustine tells us that some Christians,
when confronted about their continuing devotion to amulets, astrology,
and the like, responded: “these things are necessary for this present life;
159. Serm. 90.9 (PL 38.565); ep. 98.1, 5 (CSEL 34.2.520–521, 526–527). An al-
most infinite variety of such examples could be collected: en. Ps. 26.2.19, 43.17,
88.2.14 (CCL 38.165, 38.489, 39.1243–1244); serm. 376.4.4 (PL 39.1671). Else-
where we find baptized Christians becoming flamines in local cults (Canons of the
Council of Elvira in Hefele-Leclercq, Histoire des Conciles [Paris, 1907], 1.1.221ff.).
Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius informed the prefect of Egypt that it was “in-
decorous, well, to put it truthfully, illegal” for a “those whose conscientia has been im-
bued by the vera ratio diviniae religionis” to perform certain sollemnia templorum (C.
Th. 12.1.112).
160. Cf. Rees, “Popular Religion,” 87. See now A. Papaconstantinou, “Oracles
chrétiens dans l’Egypte byantine: le témoignage des papyrus,” ZPE 104 (1994):
281–286; and Trombley, Hellenic Religion, 176, on magic in the epistles of Basil.
161. The relevant texts are collected in Gélase I er . Lettre contre les Lupercales et
dix-huit messes du sacramentaire Léonien ed. G. Pomarès (1959), and cf. H. Chad-
wick, Boethius (1981), 12–13.
162. Sozomen, h.e. 7.15.13–14 (GCS 50.322).
163. C. Th. 16.10.12.2; see also Ammianus, 18.5.3 (ed. Seyfarth, 141).ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
205
we are Christians for the sake of eternal life” (en. Ps. 40.3 [CCL
38.450]). 164 He provides a more explicit list of the concerns of this world
in another sermon, echoing for us the lament of Libanius: some faithful
Christians thirst for God and yet, when they have worries about bread or
water or wine or money or their cattle, they turn to Mercury, or Jupiter,
or some other such daemon (en. Ps. 62.7 [CCL 39.798]). It must, there-
fore, have frustrated him greatly when his congregation, no doubt think-
ing itself pious, followed a harangue against the pagan gods with the ac-
clamation, Dii Romani (serm. 24.6 [PL38.166]).
CONCLUSION
Neither Augustine nor any of his fellow bishops went so far as to call
someone who indulged in the occasional amulet a pagan, so long as they
professed to be simply a wayward Christian. When Martin of Braga com-
plained about the observance of days for moths and mice, he still referred
to the superstitious individual as homo Christianus. 165 Martin reminded
his “rustics,” whom he addressed as fideles, of the words they spoke at
their baptism: how can they continue to light candles at crossroads, or to
pour wine on logs in their hearths? He desired that they should under-
stand now, if they did not before, the far-reaching ramifications of their
“Christianization”—which, we may surmise, had not been a conversion
in Nock’s sense: a “reorientation of the soul,” with the understanding that
“the old was wrong and the new is right.” 166 Augustine had obviously
not been the first to label certain ritual behaviors as pagan and therefore
incompatible with Christian belief: Constantine had began the process of
restricting praeteritae usurpationis officia, the rituals of a bygone perver-
sion. 167 Augustine nevertheless formulated most clearly an explanation
to why such ritual practices had to be eradicated—all such acts were the
outward signs of res ipsas in corde—even if he tended in his sermons to
the public towards rhetorical effect rather than explanation, away from
the philosophical justification and towards the citation of Scripture
alone. 168
164. See also en. Ps. 34.7 (CCL 38.304), “They leave aside God, as if these things
did not belong to Him; and by sacrifices, by all kinds of healing devices, and by the ex-
pert counsel of their fellows . . . they seek out ways to cope with what concerns this
present life” (translated in Brown, “Problem,” 94).
165. corr. 11, ed. C. W. Barlow (New Haven, 1950), 190.
166. corr. 15–17 (ed. Barlow, 196–201; Nock, Conversion, 7.
167. The phrase is from C. Th. 9.16.2; see Bradbury, “Constantine.”
168. For the phrase, see civ. 10.19 (CCL 47.293); cf. the catalogue of acts which
delight the demons in serm. 198.3 (PL 38.1025–1026), or his description of a sermon
on Gal. 5:19–21 (ep. 29.4–6 [CSEL 34.1.115–117]). New Year’s celebration also irked206
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
Herein lies, too, the root of the failure of pagan apologetics, no matter
how carefully its practitioners imitated their Christian models. In his de-
nunciation of pagan monotheists, Lactantius no less than Augustine in his
remarks on Platonic theology and theological vocabulary, shows himself
aware of the seductive power of apologetic: to the unwary the invocation
of “themes and language already familiar” could mask the profound dif-
ferences between sides which, by the end of the fourth century, had grown
too much like each other. “They are only words,” Augustine might cau-
tion: “We must attend to the reality itself.” On that level pagan apolo-
getics was condemned to be as much of a failure in appealing to Chris-
tians as Christian apologetic had been in its day, for the Christian faith
was a package, and it came with a manual: God’s “self-revelation of him-
self to one particular and peculiar people in the Old Testament, and the
union of God and man in Christ” and the texts which that event gener-
ated, “reduced all other modes of divine presence in the world . . . to re-
ligious irrelevance.” 169 A pagan could no more satisfy a Christian by im-
itating the most familiar catch-phrases of popular theological speculation,
than a Christian could properly introduce Christianity by marketing it as
a branch of philosophy.
That Augustine and Martin identified as Christian their parishioners
who used magic is all the more startling because the use of magical
amulets presumes the continuing relevance and power of that “vast living
complex of multifarious theophanies in the cosmos” which was essential
to the theology of Plotinus, no less than to Praetextatus or Ammianus. 170
Robert Markus has remarked on the issue of such “pagan survivals”—al-
though he eschews the use of that term—that “there was a wide no-man’s
land between explicit pagan worship and uncompromising rejection of all
its trappings and associations.” 171 “Trappings” seems, however, equally
unsatisfactory; in Augustinian terms, at some level such pagan behaviors
were signa no less than the tears and groans which, he once maintained,
functioned as well as words when praying to God. 172 Augustine would
John Chrysostom (PG 48, cols. 953–962); see M. Meslin, La fête des kalendes de jan-
vier dans l’empire romain (Brussels, 1970), 95–118.
169. Armstrong, “Plotinus,” 127.
170. Armstrong, “Plotinus,” 127, discussing in particular enn. 2.9[33].9.33–40; on
Praetextatus, see ILS 1259 (a tergo), ll. 15, 25: the divum numen is multiplex, and
should be worshiped cunctis mysteriis.
171. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 33.
172. Ep. 130.10.20–11.21 (CSEL 44.62–64); cf. ep. 102.12 (CSEL 34.2.554): . . .
quia una eademque res aliis atque aliis sacris et sacramentis vel prophetatur vel praed-
icatur, ideo alias et alias res vel alias et alias salutes oportet intellegi.ANDO/APOLOGETICS AND INTOLERANCE
207
have attributed the efficacy of magic to the devil, but the belief of his flock
that local, supernatural powers could be helpful “in this present life” sug-
gests that it retained an attachment to a more pagan monotheism than
Augustine would have liked. “Pagan survival” may not, on those terms,
adequately describe the role such ritual behaviors played in the lives of
their practitioners, but, as a concept, it may be the least unsatisfactory
way to describe the tolerance of the Christian establishment towards mag-
ical practices and its corresponding intolerance towards those intellectu-
als who merely gave voice to an evidently widespread failure to under-
stand the implications of Christian conversion. Eschewing the term and
topic of pagan survivals simply deflects modern surprise at how little
Christians authorities of that age demanded in their litmus-tests; in many
ways, the process was no more rigorous than, and little different from,
the obtaining of a libellus during the Decian “persecution.” Fourth-cen-
tury pagan apologists however, might well have expressed exasperation
at the inefficacy of their well-crafted attempts to establish some common
ground with a Christian audience that seemed, in their homes, at cross-
roads and at festivals, so similar to themselves.
Clifford Ando received his Ph.D. in Classical Studies from The
University of Michigan.
Strange People Of Politics of the Female Species 