Empire, celebrations such as the Maiouma (month-long nude bathing) in
spring to celebrate the return of warm weather continued until at least the
early 600s. Clearly, pagan culture lived well beyond the demise of pagan
Rome, and shaped the cultural development of Christianity from its begin-
nings as an ascetic cult into the ostentatious pageantry and embrace of life
by the time of the Renaissance. Indeed, the Renaissance – the Rebirth – was
a rebirth of the ancient pagan arts and sciences, architecture, sculpture, and
philosophy. For our purposes, this demonstrates that the relationship between
paganism and Christianity was not an either/or proposition. Various and
often competing priorities would eventually lead to a Christian Europe, yes,
but along numerous and changing paths. Clearly, more than just rational cal-
culation of gain and loss was in play.
Rural areas beyond Mediterranean Europe accepted Christianity only nom-
inally, and blended it with many traditional pagan and folk beliefs and prac-
tices, including animal husbandry and farming (Kieckhefer 1989), herbology
and medieval medicine (Barstow 1994), and trade guilds (Hutton 1999).
Whether threatened with forced conversion or allowed to live peacefully, peo-
ple held fast to deeply held paganism, both as a belief and as a tradition. If
paganism was instrumentally irrational because it meant censure from office
in both the east and west, confiscation of land and title, or death, it certainly
proved its worth for much of the population in terms of emotional commit-
ment. Using Bell’s framework introduced earlier, the bonds of pagan society
had not snapped, and hence its religious expression continued.
The Problem of Distinguishing Christianity
Long assumed that decisive dates could mark the end of one age and the
beginning of another, Jonathan Smith instead identifies the inherent prob-
lems with such attempts, most of which rely on literature, written by Christian
apologists. Most relevant here, the notion that pagan Rome ended with
Constantine or with the final collapse of the imperial government in the West
in 476 CE, and furthermore, that Christianity introduced a radically new sys-
tem of beliefs and ethics that relied on the assumption that linguistical evi-
dence, namely, scripture and related ancient documents, manifest actual radical
change in society (Smith 1990). Smith demonstrates that such conclusions
based on linguistical data are simply false, and arose from the pre-conceived
belief that Christian scripture reflected a new and utterly unique religion
(Smith 1990:37–53).
236 • George Lundskow