Between Pagan and Christian by Christopher P. Jones (review)

Real history is too high-spirited to be fenced in by binary models and essentialist propositions. Far better to hunt down “the ways in which Christianity and paganism interpenetrate” (7) than to fall back on the hermetic taxonomies of inclusion and exclusion fashioned by ancient polemic. If all religions are mongrels, tracing their ancestry requires tracking them out of bounds. Between Pagan and Christian is just such an expedition.

Two chapters—after a foray into the thickets of naming and othering—consider the impact of emperors between Constantine and Justinian’s immediate successors. Jones is drawn to the inconsistences of the legal codes and the vacillation of policies between tolerance for paganism and the persecution of those who continued to honor its ways. If emperors seldom resorted to outright oppression, Jones avers, imperial policy nevertheless “operated indirectly by encouraging the use of force” (29). Although the spates of violence were never able to drive Christianity’s alternatives from the field, conflict’s marquee moments do have the power to distract our attention from the more subtle interactions that better express the dynamics of the age.

Three chapters examine areas of thought and action in which Christianity and paganism overlapped with magnetic effect, “creating both positive and negative force, both attraction and repulsion” (42). Just as Christianity never jettisoned its conception of a universe populated by a plurality of divine beings (while wrangling over the nature of its own triune god), so late ancient paganism increasingly recognized one supreme deity ruling over a host of lesser ones. This convergence of belief made it easier for apologists on both sides to explain themselves, for people to slip across boundaries without disorientation, and for a myriad of sects and cults to spring up in the borderlands. By the fourth century, a similar permeability characterized the barrier between acceptance and opposition to visual representation of the divine. At certain times and places that border was heavily guarded by Christian activists, for it also seemed to hold at bay the deadly contagion of idolatry. Yet the physical record reveals the influence among Christians of a “desire for representation” (53) deeply rooted in ancient ways of thinking, the same impulse that partially explains Neoplatonic theurgy, the clandestine hoarding of cult images, and the public conservation of cult statues as works of art. Yet on one matter Jones finds no middle ground. Though blood sacrifice was deeply ingrained in Mediterranean religious culture, it was superseded in Christian minds by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and its Eucharistic commemoration. Here was a darker line, blurred only at times to facilitate proselytization in the countryside—or in faraway places like Gregory the Great’s England.

Two chapters consider the ways in which ideas and people moved through the borderlands. One excavates the traces of “debate” left behind in literary dialogues, letters, and reminiscences of the lecture hall. Ideas seeped through these media in both directions as Christians explained themselves to pagans, as they replied to critique and inquiry, and as the committed and the wavering mingled in the schoolrooms of Alexandria and Athens. Christians may ultimately have won this contest of words and ideas, but it was “a victory by absorption rather than by conquest” (89). People, too, switched sides, carrying baggage with them—though most, of course, emigrated to the new promised land. Jones charts the ways and means of “conversion.” Words persuade; violence motivates; opportunity knocks. Destruction and mockery reveal the impotence of ancient idols. The relocation of whole populations also brought the supremacy of novel conceptions of sin, redemption, and the body.

Two chapters lead to the conclusion. Together they spotlight the “persistence of paganism” in the late ancient West and East. Only because they were enshrined in texts do the cultural and religious allegiances of a Symmachus, Ammianus, or Macrobius stand out amid the “borderland practices” (121) of thinly Christianized festivals and tenacious rural custom. In the East, the relative vitality of urbanism and prestige of Hellenism further propped...