RELIGION 199But Christianity was already a success, and we should try to understand
why. Explanations have been offered in terms of its ability to meet the social
and psychological needs of the individual,^23 and again in terms of the power
of the Christian god as displayed in miracles.^24 These explanations have
merit but should not be seen as mutually exclusive. The role of the Christian
community in supporting the individual and nurturing spiritual growth may
be readily admitted. But the part played by miracle is also undeniable. In a
superstitious age Christians as well as pagans (and Jews) found evidence of
the interaction of the world of the spirit and the terrestrial world in signs,
symbols and dreams, and held wonder- workers in awe, or condemned them
as sorcerers and magicians.^25 Other interpretations point to weaknesses in
polytheistic paganism that facilitated the growth of Christianity. In one
formulation, paganism, ‘a very spongy, shapeless, easily penetrated structure’,
was always vulnerable to attack from ‘a sharply focussed and intransigent
creed’.^26 This is unexceptionable, but lacks a specifi c historical reference.
The solution to the problem of Christianity’s success is not to evoke an
alleged weakening in the fabric of polytheism (for example, a supposed
increased tendency toward syncretism), which reduced its appeal and gave
additional impetus to Christianity.^27 On the contrary, paganism at the level
of personal religious experience was manifesting considerable vitality,
especially near the end of our period. It would be consistent with the
argument of this chapter to suggest that the source of the problem lay in the
ambivalent attitude of the Roman authorities to religious change, which
was permitted in the private, but not the public, sphere. An ossifi ed offi cial
religion fi tted the image of changelessness and stability that Roman emperors
were concerned to project. Meanwhile, however, they failed both to control
the forces of innovation, pagan and non- pagan, that were active at an
unoffi cial level, and to harness those operating within paganism against the
challenge of Christianity.
ADDENDUM
R.L. Gordon
When Chapter 11 was fi rst published in 1987, religion was a topic that hardly fi gured
in accounts of the Roman empire, and then mainly in two hackneyed contexts, the
so- called imperial cult and the ‘rise’ of Christianity. Emperor- worship was viewed as
a largely political institution engineered from the centre. As for the traditional grand
narrative of Christianity’s triumph over a discredited paganism, Ramsay MacMullen
(1981) and Robin Lane Fox (1986) had only recently demonstrated the continuing
vitality of public cult both in the western and the eastern empire right up to – indeed
well beyond – the era of Constantine I. The only large- scale publishing enterprise
devoted to religion in the empire was the enormous green series (113 titles, many of
them multi- volumed) loosely edited by Maarten J. Vermaseren, Études préliminaires