Europe's inner demons

In almost every society sexual intercourse between close relatives— father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister — is absolutely forbidden and is regarded as “against human nature”. The same may be said of the worship of a man’s genitals; that too is generally felt to be “against human nature”. Similarly, babies and small children, as helpless beings who are nevertheless the bearers of new life and the guarantors of the future, are expected to be protected and nurtured. To kill them and use them for one’s own nourishment is felt to be as “unnatural” an act as anyone could perform. To this one may add that, in societies which are not cannibalistic, cannibalism in any form is felt to be “against human nature”. In most societies, therefore, to say that a group practises incest, worships genitals, kills and eats children, amounts to saying that it is an incarnation of the anti-human. Such a group is absolutely outside humanity; and its relationship to mankind as a whole can only be one of implacable enmity. And that is in fact how the Christians were seen in the Graeco-Roman world in the second century.⁽³⁸⁾ That the Christian god was supposed to be worshipped in the form of a donkey points in the same direction.

The explanation lies in the absolute incompatibility of primitive Christianity with the religion of the Roman state. Roman religion had always been less a matter of personal devotion than a national cult. Ever since the days of the Republic the gods of Rome had been regarded as, collectively, its guardians — indeed, they were religious embodiments of the supernatural power and holiness which were felt to be indwelling in the Roman community. It was the duty of all Roman citizens to pay them due respect and reverence, in rites which were rigidly prescribed by traditions of immemorial antiquity. If this was done, the gods in turn would carry out their task of protecting the Roman people; but any slackness in observance would bring disaster upon the whole community. Innovations could be made, and were made over the centuries, without affecting this basic attitude. Thus when, from the second century B.C. onwards, vast numbers of foreigners streamed into Rome, every effort was made to harmonize their deities with the indigenous gods. The resulting syncretism was still a national cult.

Under the Empire, the Roman gods were intimately associated with the imperial mission. They came to be seen as guardians of the peace and order that the Empire brought, guarantors that the Empire would never pass away. And in addition, the emperor himself was deified. The worship of the emperor began in a veiled form already under Augustus, and was carried on quite openly under his successors. Deriving partly from the Hellenistic concept of divine kingship, partly from the Roman habit of identifying high office-holders with the protecting gods, and partly from political calculation, it bound together the western and eastern halves of the Empire. More and more, from around A.D. 70 onwards, a conscious policy of Romanization brought the native religions in the various provinces into association with the imperial cult. Throughout the Empire the emperor’s birthday was a religious festival, on which libation was offered. The emperor and the traditional gods together upheld the Empire, and reverence for them created and sustained a unified Graeco-Roman world.

It was a world from which, by the very nature of their religion, Christians excluded themselves. Their god too was a ruler of the universe and demanded total allegiance; conflict between his claims and those of the world-empire and its religion was inevitable. Not that the early Christians were political revolutionaries — but they were millenarians. As they saw it the existing world was thoroughly evil, the realm of the Devil; it was about to go under in a sea of fire; and it would be replaced by a perfected world, in which all power and glory would belong to the returning Christ and his Saints. As for the Roman Empire, it was the representative for the time being of the Devil; and in opposing it the Christians were carrying on not a political but an eschatological struggle. With its pantheon of gods and its deification of the emperor, Rome was the embodiment of “idolatry”, it was the Second Babylon, the realm of Antichrist.

This attitude was fully developed already in the sub-apostolic age, when the Roman authorities themselves were scarcely aware of the very existence of Christians. It was intensified from A.D. 70 onwards, as a protest against the Roman policy of associating the native religions in the provinces with the imperial cult; for though this policy was not consciously anti-Christian, it was interpreted by Christians as a further manifestation of idolatry. And the same attitude of rejection persisted into the second half of the second century. This was a time when the peoples of the Empire were enjoying unexampled prosperity and were united in genuine loyalty to Rome and to the emperor. In this environment the Christian communities were singled out as small, inward-looking communities which took not the slightest interest in civic affairs and ignored civic obligations. Interested only in the speedy end of the world, they took no part in the daily life in the city and refused to make even token gestures of loyalty to the emperor, or of reverence to the gods of Rome.

In all their ways, Christians negated the values and beliefs by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not surprising that to pagan eyes they looked like a body of conspirators intent on destroying society. “A new and maleficent superstition”, “an immoderate and perverse superstition”—the phrases of Suetonius and Pliny show clearly enough the mixture of contempt and anxiety with which Christians were regarded. The very presence of such people was felt to be an offence to the gods, such as might well induce them to withdraw their protection; in which case a whole civilization would be engulfed in earthquake, revolution or military defeat. It was precisely because he was such a conscientious emperor, and so genuinely concerned for the public good, that Marcus Aurelius permitted agitators and informers to go into action against the Christians, and encouraged trials and executions. In the late second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken for granted that “the Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the cries go up at once: ‘Throw the Christians to the lions!’”⁽³⁹⁾ It was in the same period that Christians came to be suspected of incestuous orgies, of killing and eating children, of worshipping a donkey-god or a priest’s genitals. In these fantasies and accusations the Graeco-Roman world expressed its feeling that these people were indeed outside humanity and hostile to it.

It was only in the second century that Christians were accused of such things by non-Christians,^†† and it is easy to see why. Before that, Christians were too few and obscure to attract attention, or to be at all clearly distinguishable from the main body of Jews. By the third century, they were becoming too numerous, and above all too widely dispersed through the population, for such tales to retain much plausibility. Countless aristocratic families had some Christian members, mostly women — and how could these people really be suspected of indulging in incestuous orgies and ritual cannibalism? Moreover the attitude of the Christians themselves was changing. They were no longer so obsessed by fantasies of the imminent end of this world and the coming of the Millennium. The hierarchy was becoming more developed, the clergy were acquiring wealth, the bishops were becoming important public figures and leaders. By about 23 °Christianity had established itself as one of the principal religions of the Empire, and the Church was beginning to look upon the Empire less as a realm of demons than as a potentially Christian institution. Such persecutions as came after that date were imposed by imperial decree and no longer invoked these horrific fantasies.

††

If one excludes a curious revival in the mid-nineteenth century, which involved no less a personage than Karl Marx. In 1847 Marx read and was impressed by the newly published work by Georg Friedrich Daumer, Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Altertums (The secrets of Christian Antiquity). In a speech delivered to a meeting of German-speaking workers in London in November of that year Marx summarized its argument as follows: “Daumer demonstrates that the Christians really did slaughter human beings and eat and drink human flesh at Communion. This explains why the Romans, who tolerated all religious sects, persecuted Christians, and why the Christians later destroyed all pagan literature that was directed against Christianity. . This history, as it is portrayed in Daumer’s work, is the final blow to Christianity, and we may ask what it means to us. It gives us the certainty that the old society is ending, and that the structure of deceit and prejudices is collapsing.” The meeting was much impressed, and it was decided to purchase Daumer’s book. Later Marx became more doubtful about the theory, while in 1858 Daumer himself formally renounced it and became a fervent Catholic. But the episode remains a curious one: Marx on Christian ritual murder appears in the same volume of the official German edition of the collected works as the Communist Manifesto. Cf. W. Schulze, “Der Vorwurf ties Ritualmordes gegen die Christen im Altertum und in der Neuzeit”, in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, vol. 65, Gotha, 1953-4, pp. 304–306.