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It is indeed remarkable how far and fast the pagan system fell that in less than 200 years, the Romans deemed necessary to initiate empire wide persecutions; and in less than 100 years afterwards the whole system was wholly replaced by Christianity - all of this done without the sword of conquest.
A little ‘devil’s advocacy’ …
An interesting
way of phrasing the transformation, its motivation(s) and effects.
It is worth contemplating what might be meant by “pagan system.”
I don’t believe there was ever any such thing, though
Julian II had some ideas about
creating and implementing one, in numerous forms mirroring the ‘Galilean’s’
system. I’m more struck by
his failure to apprehend that such would have destroyed the greater
part of the beauty and efficacy of the
true religion by doing so, than I am by the fact that the idea died with him – in the East.
To how “far and fast” pagan
ideas, beliefs and
values “fell” – I don’t think they fell far at all until perhaps the Renaissance and certain idealistic and ‘Romantic’ efforts to reconstruct them artificially from ‘above,’ and from out of a largely christianized (and somewhat secularized) perspectivism with
motives that could never in a trillion years have ‘re-invented’ what the Greco-Roman world
had once achieved and enjoyed.
If we are to accept that the
Romans deemed it “
necessary to initiate empire wide persecutions,” we should understand such ‘necessity’ critically I think. I speak solely for myself of course, saying I do not think it can be called true or real ‘necessitation.’ Something more akin to a political expedient inexorably mingled with and diluted by hosts of individual motives.
“
..less than 100 years afterwards the whole … wholly replaced by Christianity - all of this done without the sword of conquest.”
I think this greatly oversimplifies an exceedingly complex and dynamic reality.
‘The sword of conquest,’ itself, for example … Once
Rome achieved true Empire,
Roman Law became such a ‘sword.’
That “the whole [was] wholly replaced by Christianity,”
would have been true if christianity
had preserved itself ‘wholly
intact’ – but it did not and was, as it has been throughout
history since, almost entirely ‘paganized.’ Which began with
Constantine and the
Chi Rho labarum and ever-afterward only picked up momentum.
In the end, both Greco-Roman ‘paganism’ and ‘christianity’ so far transformed one another that one has an almost Hegelian sort of religio-cultural dialecticism and a completely new, barely ‘unique’
synthesis. Whether the preponderance of what ‘survived’ of the ‘originals’ is pagan or Galilean may be disputable for many: for me it is not – and christianity is just paganism after sixteen hundred years of estrogen injections and poorhouse moralism.
Best,
T.
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