God Against the Gods (3 page)

Indeed, many of the commonplaces of paganism will strike the modern reader as both familiar and inoffensive. Tossing a coin in a fountain, for example, is a distant echo of the offerings of jewelry or coins that were made to the gods who were thought to reside in lakes, streams and pools. The horoscope in the morning newspaper recalls the daily astrological readings that a cautious pagan would consult before taking a bath or getting a haircut. Tying a ribbon around a tree is our way of honoring a missing child, but the same gesture was used by the ancients to honor an unseen god. And the essential feature of the shrines where oracles were thought to channel the voices of the gods—“the conjunction of an uncanny place and a canny person,” as historian J. L. Myers describes them—can be found in
any
place where one might have a “spiritual” experience, whether a single god or many gods or no gods at all are worshipped there.
⁷

Nor was sexual adventure quite as common in paganism as we are led to believe by the scenes of orgiastic excess that we find in biblical writings or Hollywood epics. Although we will encounter a few examples of sex, sacred or otherwise, taking place in the precincts of a pagan temple, the fact is that paganism was as capable of prudery and puritanism as the strictest forms of monotheism. The more exotic rites and rituals were regarded as scandalous by the sober senators of pagan Rome, who insisted, for example, that the worshippers of Bacchus, the god of wine, do their drinking off the public streets. Virginity until marriage and fidelity during marriage were as highly praised—if also as rarely practiced—by the worshippers of Jupiter as by the worshippers of Yahweh. Priestly celibacy was enforced in some pagan cults long before it was adopted by the Christian clergy and in fact the Christians may have copied the whole idea from the hated pagans.

Nor did the pagans seek from their many gods and goddesses anything different from what Christians, Jews and Muslims seek from the deity that they regard as the one and only god. Pagans prayed for health and happiness, safety and security, a good life here on earth and some kind of salvation in the afterlife. They embraced the values of justice and mercy, and, by and large, they sought to live decent and moral lives: “Temperance, courage, chastity, obedience to parents and magistrates, [and] reverence for the oath and the law,” according to the venerable historian Franz Cumont, were the core values of paganism as it was practiced in ancient Rome.
⁸

But one crucial quality distinguished Christianity from classical paganism. Polytheists, as we have seen, were not inclined to dictate to others how and to whom prayer and sacrifice should be offered. They were perfectly willing to mix and match gods and goddesses, rituals and beliefs, and they sought the divine favor of many different deities at once. A conquered people might embrace the gods of their conqueror—and the conqueror might return the favor. Nowhere in the ancient world was the open-mindedness more apparent than in imperial Rome. Indeed, Roman paganism was not a religion in the same sense that we use the word to describe Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Rather, what we call “paganism” was, as historian Ramsay MacMullen puts it, “no more than a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition.”
⁹

“ ‘Paganism’ to the pagan never existed,” explains historian John Holland Smith in
The Death of Classical Paganism
. “It is not far from the truth to say that before Christianity invented it, there was no Roman religion, but only worship, expressed in a hundred-and-one different ways.”
¹⁰

The Only True God

Monotheism, by contrast, insists that only a single deity is worthy of worship for the simple reason that only a single deity exists. On this point, Judaism, Christianity and Islam agree, at least in principle: the deity that is variously called “Yahweh” or “Lord” or “Allah” is thought to be one and the same god. Pagans certainly understood and embraced the idea that some gods are more powerful than other gods, and phrases like “Supreme God” and “Highest God” fit comfortably into the language and theology of polytheism. But monotheism insists that the other gods to whom worship is offered are not merely inferior in power or stature; rather, they are false, according to the Hebrew Bible, or even demonic, according to the Christian Bible.

“For though there be gods many and lords many,” explains Paul, “but to us there is but one God.”
¹¹

The point is made plain in a phrase that is found in the scriptures of both Christianity and Judaism. The god of monotheism is not only “the living God,” not only “the everlasting King,” as the prophet Jeremiah puts it, but “the
True God
.”
¹²
The apostle John is even more plainspoken—the god of monotheism is “the
Only True God.
”
¹³
By contrast, all of the gods, goddesses and godlings of paganism are “no-gods,” in the words of Jeremiah,
¹⁴
or even worse, “devils,” according to the apostle Paul.
¹⁵
To worship the wrong god, according to the value system of biblical monotheism, is not only a sin but a crime, and a crime that is punishable by death.

Monotheism, for example, cruelly punishes the sin of “heresy,” but polytheism does not recognize it as a sin at all. Significantly, “heresy” is derived from the Greek word for “choice,” and the fundamental theology of polytheism honors the worshipper’s freedom to choose among the many gods and goddesses who are believed to exist. Monotheism, by contrast, regards freedom of choice as nothing more than an opportunity for error, and the fundamental theology of monotheism as we find it in the Bible threatens divine punishment for any worshipper who makes the wrong choice. Against the open-mindedness of the pagan Symmachus, who allows that there are many roads to enlightenment and salvation, Bishop Fulgentius (468-533) insists that only a single narrow path leads to the Only True God.

“Of this you can be certain and convinced beyond all doubt,” declares Fulgentius, “not only all pagans, but also all Jews, all heretics and schismatics will go into the everlasting fire which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels.”
¹⁶

Here is the flash point of the war of God against the gods. The deity who is worshipped in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is described in the Bible as a “jealous” and “wrathful” god, and he is believed to regard the worship of any god other than himself as an “abomination.” The deities who populate the crowded pantheon of classical paganism, by contrast, were believed to be capable of thoroughly human emotions, including envy and anger, but they were never shown to deny one another’s existence or demand the death of someone who worshipped a rival god or goddess.

“The pagan gods, even the gods of mysteries are not jealous of one another,” explains historian and anthropologist Walter Burkert. “ ‘Envy stands outside the divine chorus,’ as the famous saying of Plato’s puts it.”
¹⁷

The polytheist can live in harmony with the monotheist: “[M]any pagans could still extend to the new worship,” writes historian Robin Lane Fox, “a tolerance which its exclusivity refused to extend to them.”
¹⁸
Pagan Rome offered the ultimate gesture of respect to the Jews and Christians by adding the God of Israel to the pantheon of gods and goddesses, where he was called Iao and offered worship along with Apollo and Zeus, Isis and Mithra. “If the Supreme God was unknowable, who was to say which one of the many cults of different peoples was right or wrong?” explains Fox. “At its heart, therefore, pagan theology could extend a peaceful coexistence to any worship which, in turn, was willing.”
¹⁹
But the pagans who did so, of course, missed the whole point of monotheism, and the Jews and Christians refused to reciprocate.

Indeed, the monotheists condemned not only the rude and crude deities of the “barbarians” but even the elegant and refined deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon who were so richly embroidered into the fabric of classical civilization and high culture. A sixth-century Christian militant called Martin of Braga, for example, describes the most revered gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome as demons who had been cast out of heaven along with Satan and now tricked the benighted pagans into offering them worship.

“So one said he was Jove, who was a magician and so incestuous in his many adulteries that he had his sister as his wife, who was called Juno [and] corrupted his daughters, Minerva and Venus,” insists Martin of Braga. “Another demon called himself Mars, who was a perpetrator of strife and discord. Then another chose to call himself Mercury, who was the wretched inventor of all theft and fraud. Another demon took the name of Saturn, who, basking in cruelty, even devoured his sons at birth. Another demon feigned to be Venus, who was a whore. She did not only whore with innumerable adulterers but even with her father Jove and her brother Mars.”
²⁰

For true believers like Martin of Braga, then, the tales that are told in the pages of Homer are not merely charming myths, and the pagan gods are not merely “no-gods”—rather, they are all the work of the Devil. Indeed, the monotheists of late antiquity were convinced that they lived in a world populated with evil spirits, and they relied on amulets and charms, prayers and exorcisms, to keep the Devil and his minions at bay. A vigilant Christian who passed a pagan shrine in town or country, for example, would hiss out loud and make the sign of the cross to scare off the unseen demons that he or she believed to linger there. “The air between heaven and earth is so crammed with spirits, never quiet or finding rest,” writes the Christian sermonizer John Cassian in the fifth century, “that it is fortunate for men that they are not permitted to see them.”
²¹

Thus the militant monotheist condemns polytheism in general as an “abomination,”
²²
in the words of the Hebrew Bible, and pagan Rome in particular as the “mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth,”
²³
according to the Christian Bible. Precisely because the monotheist regards the polytheist with such fear and loathing, peaceful coexistence between the two theologies is possible only from the pagan’s point of view and never for the true believer in the Only True God.

The Tragic Legacy

The strict and uncompromising attitude of monotheism, approvingly described in the Bible itself as “zeal” for the True God,
²⁴
sometimes manifests itself in a strange phenomenon that historians of religion call
rigorism
—that is, “extreme strictness” in religious belief and practice.
²⁵
The Jewish men and women who were the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, disciplined themselves to refrain from bowel movements on the Sabbath lest they defile the “Lord’s holy day of rest.” Among the hermit-monks of early Christianity were men who banished themselves to the desert wilderness, spending years atop stone pillars and feeding themselves only on crushed greens. But paganism, too, produced its own rigorists—some of the Romans who worshipped Isis, a deity who was borrowed from the pantheon of ancient Egypt and embraced throughout the Greco-Roman world, were inspired to show the same kind of devotion to their goddess. “Three times, in the depths of winter, the devotee of Isis will dive into the chilly waters of the Tiber, and shivering with cold, will drag herself around the temple upon her bleeding knees,” observes the Roman satirist Juvenal (c. 60-40). “[I]f the goddess commands, she will go to the outskirts of Egypt to take water from the Nile and empty it within the sanctuary.”
²⁶

But, tragically, rigorism is not always or only expressed through acts of self-discipline and self-affliction. Extreme strictness in religious observance is possible only when a man or woman is so convinced of the truth of a certain religious teaching that it becomes quite literally a matter of life or death. Turned inward, rigorism may inspire a true believer to punish himself by holding back a bowel movement or feeding himself on raw vegetables. Turned outward, however, rigorism may inspire the same man or woman to punish others who fail to embrace the religious beliefs that he or she finds so compelling. The history of religion reveals that rigorism in one’s beliefs and practices can readily turn into the kind of zealotry that expresses itself in unambiguous acts of terrorism. Indeed, the very first use of the word “zeal” in the Bible is used to describe God’s approval of an act of murder, one Israelite murdering another Israelite and his Midianite lover.
²⁷

Examples can be found in every faith, in every place and in every age, including our own. A Jewish man in Israel, for example, was recently moved by his own religious passions to open fire with a machine gun on Muslims at prayer in a mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. A Christian man in America was inspired by
his
religious passions to pick up a sniper’s rifle and shoot down a doctor who performed abortions. Neither of these true believers would be quick to recognize a kindred spirit in the other, but they both share the same tragic legacy of rigorism, a legacy that is deeply rooted in monotheism.

Nowadays, of course, religious terrorism is carried out by true believers in one or another variety of monotheism against their fellow monotheists, and the same has been true ever since the final victory of monotheism over polytheism in the war of God against the gods. Ironically, the worst excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition were inflicted by Christians on Jews and Muslims, all of whom claimed to believe in the same god. But the first casualties in the war of God against the gods were found among those tolerant polytheists whom we are taught to call “pagans.”