|
|
|
| 
|
| |
|
|
3
of 4 - Middle Eastern/Greek/Roman Topics covered in post 3 of 4: o Christianity : The Contemporary Social, Religious, and Intellectual World / Early Heret- ical Movements / Relations Between Christianity and the Roman Government and the Hellenistic Culture Church-State Relations / The Alliance Between Church and Empire o Greek : Philosophers - Socrates (470-399 BC), Plato (428-348 BC), Aristotle (384-322 BC) / Religion o Ancient Rome : Culture and Religion / Map - The Extent of the Roman Empire in AD 117 / Emperor Worship / Cult of the Emperors - - - Christianity The Contemporary Social, Religious, and Intellectual World http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=108295&tocid=67420#67420.toc Excerpt: "The church inherited from Judaism also a strong sense of being holy, separate from idolatry and pagan eroticism. As polytheism with its attendant permissiveness permeated ancient society, a moral rigorism severely limited Christian participation in some trades and professions. At baptism a Christian was expected to renounce his occupation if that necessarily implicated him in public or private compromise with polytheism, superstition, dishonesty, or vice. About military service there was disagreement. The majority held that a soldier, if converted and baptized, was not required to leave the army, but there was hesitation about whether an already baptized Chris- tian might properly enlist. Strict Christians also thought poorly of the teaching profession because it involved instructing the young in literature replete with pagan ideals and what was viewed as indecency. Acting and dancing were similarly suspect occupa- tions. Any involvement in magic was completely forbidden. The Christian ethic therefore demanded some detachment from society. In some cases this made for economic difficulties. The structure of ancient society was dominated not by class but by the relationship of patron and client. A slave or freedman depended for his livelihood and prospects upon his patron. In antiquity a strong patron was indispensable if one was negotiating with police or tax authorities or lawcourts or if one had ambitions in the imperial service. The authority of the father of the family was consid- erable. Conversely, a man's power in society depended on the extent of his dependents and supporters. Often, Christianity penetrated the social strata first through women and children, especially in the upper classes. But once the householder was a Christian, his depen- dents tended to follow. The Christian community itself was close-knit. Third-century evidence portrays Christians banking their money with fellow believers; and widely separated groups helped one another with trade and mutual assistance. ... Traditional Roman religion was a public cult, not private mysticism, and was upheld because it was the received way of keeping heaven friendly. To refuse participation appeared to be disloyal. The Jews could gain acceptance for their refusal by virtue of the undoubted fact that their mono- theism was an ancestral national tradition. The Christians, however, did everything in their power to dissuade people from following the customs of their fathers, whether Gentiles or Jews, and thereby seemed to threaten the cohesion of society and the principle that each racial group was entitled to follow its national customs in religion. If ancient religion was tolerant, the philosophical schools were seldom so. Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics tended to be very critical of one another. By the 1st century BC, an eclecticism emerged; and by the 2nd century AD, there developed a common stock of philosophy shared by most educated people and by some professional philosophers, which derived metaphysics involving theories on the nature of Being from Plato, ethics from the Stoics, and logic from Aristotle. This eclectic Platonism provided an important background and springboard for early Christian apologetics. Its main outlines appear already in Philo of Alexandria, whose thought influenced not only perhaps the writer of the anonymous letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament but also the great Christian thinkers Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose of Milan. Because of this widespread philosophical ten- dency, the Christian could generally assume some belief in Providence and assent to high moral imperatives. Platonism in particular provided a metaphysical framework within which the Christians could interpret the entire pattern of creation, the Fall of humanity, the incarnation, redemption, the church, sacraments, and last things." - - - Christianity Early Heretical Movements http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=108295&tocid=67425#67425.toc Excerpt: "Gnosticism was the greatest threat to Christianity before 150 and somewhat thereafter. Gnostics taught that there is total opposition between this evil world and God. Redemption was viewed as liberation from the chaos of a creation derived from either incom- petent or malevolent powers, a world in which the elect are alien prisoners. The method of salvation was to discover the Kingdom of God within one's elect soul and to learn how to pass the hostile powers barring the soul's ascent to bliss. ... Relations Between Christianity and the Roman Government and the Hellenistic Culture Church-State Relations The Christians were not respectful toward ances- tral pagan customs. Their preaching of a new king sounded like revolution. The opposition of the Jews to them led to breaches of the peace. Thus the Christians could very well be unpopular, and they often were. Paul's success at Ephesus provoked a riot to defend the cult of the goddess Artemis. In AD 64 a fire destroyed much of Rome; the emperor Nero killed a 'vast multitude' of Christians as scapegoats. For the first time, Rome was conscious that Chris- tians were distinct from Jews. But there probably was no formal senatorial enactment proscribing Christianity at this time. Nero's persecution was local and short. Soon thereafter, however, the profession of Christianity was defined as a capital crime, though of a special kind because one gained pardon by apostasy (rejection of a faith once confessed) demonstrated by offering sacrifice to the pagan gods or the emperor. Popular gossip soon accused the Christians of secret vices, such as eating murdered infants (due to the secrecy surrounding the Lord's Supper and the use of the words body and blood) and sexual promiscuity (due to the practice of Christians calling each other 'brother' or 'sister' while living as husband and wife). The governor of Bithynia in AD 111, the younger Pliny, told the emperor Trajan that to his surprise he discovered the Christians to be guilty of no vice, only of obstinacy and superstition. Never- theless, he executed without a qualm those who refused to apostatize. Early persecutions were sporadic, caused by local conditions and depending on the attitude of the governor. The fundamental cause of persecution was that the Christians conscien- tiously rejected the gods whose favour was believed to have brought success to the empire. But distrust was increased by Christian detach- ment and reluctance to serve in the imperial service and in the army. At any time in the 2nd or 3rd centuries, Christians could find themselves the object of unpleasant attention. A pogrom could be precipitated by a bad harvest, a barbarian attack, or a public festival of the emperor cult. Yet, long periods of peace occurred. In 248-250, when Germanic tribes threatened the empire, popular hostility culminated in the persecution under the emperor Decius (reigned 249-251): by edict all citizens were required to offer sacrifice and to obtain from commissioners a certificate witnessing to the act. Many of these certificates have survived. The requirement created an issue of conscience, especially because certificates could be bought by bribes. Under renewed attack (257-259), the great bishop- theologian Cyprian of Carthage was martyred. The persecuting emperor Valerian, however, became a Persian prisoner of war, and his son Gallienus issued an edict of toleration restoring confiscated churches and cemeteries. The church prospered from 261 to 303, but the empire suffered external attack, internal sedition, and rampant inflation. In February 303 the worst of all persecutions erupted under the co-emperors Diocletian and Galerius. The persecutions ended and peace was reached with the Edict of Milan, a manifesto of toleration issued in 313 by the joint emperors Licinius and his Christian colleague Constantine. Disagreements about the point at which the state must be resisted led to long lasting schisms in Egypt (Melitianism) and North Africa (Donatism). ..." - - - Christianity The Alliance Between Church and Empire http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=108295&tocid=67431#67431.toc Excerpt: "Constantine the Great, declared emperor at York, Britain (306), was converted to Christianity (312), became sole emperor (324), virtually presided over the ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325), founded the city of Constantinople (330), and died in 337. In the 4th century he was regarded as the great revolutionary, especially in religion. He did not make Christianity the religion of the empire, but his foundation of Constantinople (conceived to be the new Rome) as a Christian city profoundly affected the future political and ecclesiastical structure. Relations with old Rome were not to be cordial either in matters of church or state. Despite massive legisla- tion (some attempting to express Christian ideals--e.g., making Sunday a rest day), he failed to check the drastic inflation that began about 250 and that soon created deep unrest and weakened the empire before the barbarian invasions of the 5th century. Constantine brought the church out of its withdrawal from the world to accept social responsibility and helped pagan society to be won for the church. On both sides, the alliance of the church and emperor evoked opposition, which among the Christians emerged in the monks' retirement to the desert. Except for the brief reign of Julian the Apostate (361-363), pagans relapsed into passive resistance. The quietly mounting pressure against paganism in the 4th century culminated in the decrees of Emperor Theodosius I (reigned 379-395), who made orthodox Christianity an ingredient of good citizenship. Under Theodosius many pagan temples were closed or even destroyed (e.g., the Alexandrian Sarapeum). ..." - - - Greek Philosophers Socrates (470-399 BC) http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=117549 Excerpt: "Ancient Athenian philosopher. He was the first of the great trio of ancient Greeks --Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--who laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture. As Cicero said, Socrates 'brought down phil- osophy from heaven to earth'--i.e., from the nature speculation of the Ionian and Italian cosmologists to analyses of the character and conduct of human life, which he assessed in terms of an original theory of the soul. Living during the chaos of the Peloponnesian War, with its erosion of moral values, Socrates felt called to shore up the ethical dimensions of life by the admonition to 'know thyself' and by the effort to explore the connotations of moral and humanistic terms. ..." - - - Greek Philosophers Plato (428-348 BC) http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=115123 Excerpt: "Ancient Greek philosopher, the second of the great trio of ancient Greeks--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--who between them laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture. Building on the life and thought of Socrates, Plato developed a profound and wide-ranging system of philosophy. His thought has logical, epistemological, and metaphysical aspects; but its underlying motivation is ethical. It sometimes relies upon conjectures and myth, and it is occasionally mystical in tone; but fundamentally Plato is a rationalist, devoted to the proposition that reason must be followed wherever it leads. Thus the core of Plato's philosophy, resting upon a foundation of eternal Ideas, or Forms, is a rationalistic ethics. ..." - - - Greek Philosophers Aristotle (384-322 BC) http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=114501 Excerpt: "Greek ARISTOTELES ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the two greatest intellectual figures produced by the Greeks (the other being Plato). He surveyed the whole of human knowledge as it was known in the Medi- terranean world in his day. More than any other thinker, Aristotle deter- mined the orientation and the content of Western intellectual history. He was the author of a philosophical and scien- tific system that through the centuries became the support and vehicle for both medieval Christian and Islamic scholastic thought: until the end of the 17th century, Western culture was Aristotelian. Even after the intellectual revolutions of centuries to follow, Aristotelian concepts and ideas remained embedded in Western thinking. ..." - - - Greek Religion http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=119810 Excerpt: "Greek religion, in its developed form, lasted for more than a thousand years, from the time of Homer (probably 9th or 8th century BC) to the reign of the emperor Julian (4th century AD), though its origins may be traced to the remotest eras. During that period its influence spread as far west as Spain, east to the Indus River, and throughout the Mediterranean world. Its effect was most marked on the Romans, who identified their deities with the Greek. Under Christianity, Greek heroes and even deities survived as saints, while the rival madonnas of southern European communities reflected the independence of local cults. The rediscovery of Greek literature during the Renaissance and, above all, the novel perfection of classical sculpture produced a revolution in taste that had far-reaching effects on Christian religious art. The most striking characteristic of Greek religion was the belief in a multipli- city of anthropomorphic deities, coupled with a minimum of dogmatism. The student of Greek religion is naturally con- cerned to know what the Greeks believed about their gods. They had numerous beliefs, but the sole requirement was to believe that the gods existed and to perform ritual and sacrifice, through which the gods received their due. To deny the existence of a deity was to risk reprisals, from the deity or from other mortals. The list of avowed atheists is brief. But if a Greek went through the motions of piety, he risked little, since no attempt was made to enforce orthodoxy, a religious concept almost incomprehensible to the Greeks. The Greeks had no word for religion itself, the closest approximations being eusebeia ('piety') and threskeia ('cult'). ... it is easy to overlook the fact that most Greeks 'believed' in their gods in roughly the modern sense of the term and that they prayed in a time of crisis not merely to the 'relevant' deity but to any deity on whose aid they had established a claim by sacrifice. ..." - - - Ancient Rome Culture and Religion http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=109194&tocid=26619#26619.toc Excerpt: "... In earlier centuries Rome's innate religious conservatism was, however, counter- balanced by an openness to foreign gods and cults. As Rome incorporated new peoples of Italy into its citizen body, it accepted their gods and religious practices. Indeed, among the most authoritative religious texts, consulted in times of crisis or doubt, were the prophetic Sibylline Books, written in Greek and imported from Cumae. The receptivity appears most pronounced in the 3rd century: during its final decades temples were built in the city for Venus Erycina from Sicily and for the Magna Mater, or Great Mother, from Pessinus in Anatolia; games were instituted in honour of the Greek god Apollo (212) and the Magna Mater after the war. The new cults were integrated into the traditional structure of the state religion, and the 'foreignness' was controlled (i.e., limits were placed on the orgiastic elements in the cult of the Great Mother performed by her eunuch priests). The openness, never complete or a matter of principle, tilted toward resistance in the early 2nd century. In 186 Roman magistrates, on orders from the Senate, brutally suppressed Bacchic worship in Italy. Associations of worshipers of the Greek god Bacchus (Dionysus) had spread across Italy to Rome. Their members, numbering in the thousands, were initiated into secret mysteries, knowledge of which promised life after death; they also engaged in orgiastic worship. The secrecy soon gave rise to reports of the basest activities, such as uncontrolled drinking, sexual promiscuity, forgery of wills, and poisoning of kin. According to Livy, more than 7,000 were implicated in the wrongdoing; many of them were tried and executed, and the consuls destroyed the places of Bacchic worship throughout Italy. For the future, the (extant) senatorial decree prohibited men from acting as priests in the cult, banned secret meetings, and required the praetor's and Senate's authorization of ceremonies to be performed by gatherings of more than five people. The terms of the decree provide a sense of what provoked the harsh senatorial reaction. It was not that the Bacchic cult spread heretical beliefs about the gods--Roman civic religion was never based on theological doctrine with pretensions to exclusive truth; rather, the growing secret cult led by male priests threatened the traditionally dominant position of senators in state religion. The decree did not aim to eliminate Bacchic worship but to bring it under the supervision of senatorial authorities. The following centuries witnessed sporadic official actions against foreign cults; it happens to be recorded that a praetor of 139 removed private altars built in public areas and expelled astrologers and Jews from the city. Thus the reaction to eastern religions paralleled that to Greek philosophy; both were perceived as new ways of thinking that threatened to undermine traditional mores and the relations of authority implicit in them. ..." - - - Map - The Extent of the Roman Empire in AD 117 http://www.britannica.com/eb/art?id=4470&type=A - - - Ancient Rome Emperor Worship http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=109197&tocid=26657#26657.toc Excerpt: "For this priceless gift of peace many individuals and even whole communities, in Italy and elsewhere, expressed their thanks spontan- eously by worshiping Augustus and his family. Emperor worship was also encouraged officially, however, as a focus of common loyalty for the polyglot empire. In the provinces, to emphasize the superiority of Italy, the official cult was dedicated to Roma et Augustus; to celebrate it, representatives from provincial communities or groups of commun- ities met in an assembly (Consilium Provinciae), which incidentally might air grievances as well as satisfactions. (This system began in the Greek-speaking pro- vinces, long used to wooing their rulers with divine honours. It penetrated the west only slowly, but from 12 BC an assembly for the three imperial Gallic provinces existed at Lugdunum.) In Italy the official cult was to the genius Augusti (the life spirit of his family); it was coupled in Rome with the Lares Com- pitales (the spirits of his ancestors). Its principal custodians (seviri Augustales) were normally freedmen. Both the Senate and the emperor had central control over the insti- tution. The Senate could withhold a vote of posthumous deification, and the emperor could acknowledge or refuse provincial initiatives in the establishment of emperor worship, in the construction for it, or in its liturgical details. The energy, however, that infused emperor worship was to be found almost wholly among the local nobilities. ..." - - - Ancient Rome Cult of the Emperors http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=109198&tocid=26678#26678.toc Excerpt: "Among the institutions most important in softening the edges of regional differences was the cult of the emperors. In one sense, it originated in the 4th century BC, when Alexander the Great first received veneration by titles and symbols and forms of address as if he were a superhuman being. Indeed, he must have seemed exactly that to contemporaries in Egypt, where the pharaohs had long been wor- shiped, and to peoples in the Middle East, for similar reasons of religious custom. Even the Greeks were quite used to the idea that beings who lived a human life of extraordinary accomplishment, as 'heroes' in the full sense of the Greek word, would never die but be raised into some higher world; they believed this of heroes such as Achilles, Hercules, Pythagoras, and Dion of Syracuse in the mid-4th century BC. Great Roman commanders, like Hellenistic rulers, had altars, festivals, and special honours voted to them by Greek cities from the start of the 2nd century BC. It was not so strange, then, that a freedman supporter of Caesar's erected a pillar over the ashes of the dead dictator in the Forum in April 44 BC and offered cult to him as a being now resident among the gods. Many citizens joined in. Within days Caesar's heir Octavian pressed for the declaration of Caesar as divine--which the Senate granted by its vote in 42. By 25 BC the city of Mytilene had organized annual cult acts honouring Augustus and communicated their forms and impulse to Tarraco in Spain as well as to other Eastern Greek cities; and by 12 BC divine honours to Caesar and Augustus' genius were established through the emperors' initiative both in the Gallic capital, Lugdunum, and in the neighbourhood chapels to the crossroads gods in Rome. From these various points and models, emperor worship spread rapidly. Within a few generations, cities everywhere had built in its service new temples that dominated their forums or had assigned old temples to the joint service of a prior god and the imperial family. Such centres served as rallying points for the citizenry to express its devotion to Rome and the emperor. To speak for whole provinces, priests of the cult assembled during their year of office in central shrines, such as Lugdunum, as delegates of their cities, where they formulated for the emperor their complaints or their views on the incumbent governor's administration. Whether these priests were freedmen in urban neighbourhoods, municipal magnates in local temples, or still grander leaders of the provinces, they perceived the imperial cult as something of high prestige and invested it and Roman rule with glory. ..." --- end 3 of 4 --- |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
