I originally wrote this for publication in a magazine, but was later informed that the magazine was plagued by limbo disease so I’m just going to upload it to a place that would never betray me. I am not going to include any links so you can better imagine yourself reading a distinguished magazine. You might also consider seeing further coverage of this book on “Do You Even Read?” here.
In Christianity & Classical Culture, Canadian philosopher Charles Cochrane illuminates the triumph of Christianity in Rome over Hellenism and the multitude of competing cults drawn into its civilizational vortex. For generations a variety of explanations have been proffered, and to their credit all seem valid: the power of elite theory, the inability of paganism to collectivize, the sheer persuasiveness of the Word of God, violence, etc.
Cochrane provides another dimension which accounts for all of these: nothing less than a mind revolution, one that absorbed an otherwise Eastern spiritual incursion and synthesized it with a sociocultural paradigm shift centuries in the making. Put simply, Rome was Christianized because Rome was made ready for it.
The shift that culminated in the spread of Christianity marked not only the individual’s conception of self, but the relationship he forged with the state apparatus on Earth and, most importantly, the opportunities presented by the divine’s integration with corporeal form. The paranormal world lunged closer, afforded the space by Roman excellence.
One could draw a parallel to our current historical period and the slow-motion ontological crisis that has thus far decimated Christianity. The same forces may be blossoming the crisis and driving another paradigm shift.
The Crisis of the Third Century as a Spiritual Crisis
We must begin with the Crisis of the Third Century, which marked the transition from Classical to Late Antiquity in the Roman Empire. It was an era of existential despair. Disintegration of the empire bred chaos, and the bankruptcy of the Augustan system was finally exposed when the empire went into receivership at the hands of Constantine. With the overthrow of Carthage and the kingdoms of the Hellenized East, it became evident that the indomitable spirit of Pax Romana contained no ingredient by which it might guard against its own excess.
Crises stress tests the pillars of principles. Classicism resolved the concept of power into a subjective factor of character (art and industry) and an objective factor of circumstance (fate and fortune of the gods.) Draping this musculature was a belief in astrological and solar determinism. Acceptance of such beliefs involved a picture of nature in terms either of sheer fortuity or inexorable fate, however in this combination no intelligible relationship could be established between the two poles.
The capabilities of this nuanced spirituality, manifested as The Total State, were being probed and found wanting.
The history of Graeco-Roman Christianity is a confrontation of the belief that permanent security, peace, and freedom were attainable through political action, especially through submission to the virtue and fortune of a political leader. Not even a leader in particular; the office of such a figure. Such a notion the Christians denounced with uniform vigor and consistency, and the rejection was actualized by the eventual decline and fall of the Roman empire. Notions of true authority – that of the ultimate kingdom – trembled forth from a chrysalis of tension, and with them the understanding of power itself.
Nietzsche condemned this as the victory of Slave Morality over Master Morality, a triumph of the weak and jealous collective over the aristocratic and honorable individual. Absent from his analysis is the decrepitude of the aristocratic class, and power failing to justify itself. Authority unable to withstand the forces of natural or synthetic entropy deserves no tending as the memory of a supernova.
Cochrane posits the maelstrom of calamities that befell the empire must be viewed beyond the economic or political. A collapse of complex systems requires interlinking complex causes, just as the collapse of Western birthrates cannot be blamed on any singular culprit. It may sound reductive to say the collapse of the system is caused by the collapse of the system, but this might as well be the case due to the multitudinous pain points being exploited. In Rome’s case, the aggregated triggers of decline were symptoms of deeper moral and intellectual failure, a failure of the Graeco-Roman mind to address emergent problems and, most importantly, the demands of the citizenry.
Pax Romana was threatened by perils evident in the days of Cato the Elder, senator and author of the celebrated Origines history of Rome. Terrible peasant revolts broke out across the empire, culminating in that of the Gallic Bagaudae in 282. Viewing with apprehension the dissolving of traditional morale, Cato attributed it to the wars of overseas conquest, which had exposed the state to foreign customs such as Greek philosophy.
“In his hostility to influences such as those represented by the Scipios may be found the explanation of Cato’s famous observation that the reception of Greek culture would mean ruin for the Roman state. By thus endorsing doctrines which undermined the very being of the commonwealth, Aristotle revealed the inadequacy of philosophic naturalism to provide an effective sanction for the claims of civic freedom and equality.”
Many adherents of older spiritual folkways (derogatively categorized as “pagans”) view Christianity as a feminized virus deployed to suffocate the vitality of a more martial and patriarchal tradition, but in this model it was the inverse; Christianity was the inspiring, electrifying system that propagated in a hostile wasteland of thought. Christianity was able to spread so effectively because faith in the prevailing spiritual structure was already weakening as predictably as barbarian onslaught is assured throughout crippled nations. Like insects claiming a corpse. Authority cannot succumb to the violences of weakness unless it has lost its power; we cannot wander blindly through labyrinths of theory-poetry muttering ruminations concerning this paradox.
While Christianity contained elements which could have been leveraged to reinforce the established order – subverted or integrated into the existing framework – it was animated through a highly explosive character sufficient to shatter the already weakened faith in classical ideals. Many shards of this classical framework were then reassembled into something greater. An Eastern idea was thus Romanized. Or perhaps it imbued a whisper of life which allowed the dream of Rome to carry on.
Rome Creating the Terrain for the Individual
In Cochrane’s view of Classicism, the power deemed necessary to protect civilization depended upon a fortunate coincidence of character and circumstance, thought to have been finally realized in Augustus. While Christianity is frequently belittled by Vitalists attempting to leverage the raw undomesticated power of pre-Christian Europe, it seems clear that the lived experience of the Classical individual was as a slave to forces beyond their control and lacking, despite countless rituals and sacrifices, any direct connection to the forces of supreme authority. That realm was distant and incomprehensible, having no genuine interest in mere mortals.
This evolution in thinking, even when not consciously meta-analyzed during that epoch, is what E. Michael Jones expounds in his history of the Word of God, Logos Rising. There he posits that humankind needed a philosophical foundation developed by the Greeks to apprehend an idea as abstract as Logos, the word of God embodying the creative logic of existence itself. Greek literature reveals many varieties of excellence, including the Faustian curiosity which gave their civilization forward momentum, even if the Greeks themselves formulated no theory of progress as we would understand it.
Put another way, the least of us had to be granted tools to grasp the universe more comprehensively – tools smuggled through Greek concepts throughout the empire as a separate tectonic shift of the consensus.
“Hellenism maintained throughout a consistent attitude in seeking to view its problem ‘objectively’ and looking to nature for the answer. And, from this standpoint, one ideal at least appeared to be excluded as beyond the reach of humanity; this was that of Cyclopean, i.e. of absolute individual self-sufficiency.”
From this standpoint the permanence of Romanitas was ensured by its making possible a realization of the essential and indestructible elements of the private personality. The Christians discovered in this doctrine reason for comfort. To apprehend it was to grasp what St. Paul had called the law of life or law of the Spirit which was thus put forward as the one means of redeeming men from the ‘law of sin and death’. For it enabled them to perceive that the only creature of whom eternal life could properly be predicated was the individual human being, because he alone was the real unit of conscious and deliberate activity.
Cochrane isolates the myth of Hercules – appropriated from the Greek “Heracles” – as an illustrative example of this transition of thinking. Hercules represented a form of power-cult which appealed to the populace as elevating rather than degrading to the human spirit. Cicero declared “Hercules has gone to join the gods; but he never would have done so, had he not paved the way for himself while he was still a man among men.” That the law commanded worship of certain consecrated individuals indicated that, while the minds of all men were immortal, those representing bravery and goodness were intrinsically divine. This crossed a demarcation from strictly human excellence achieved by strictly human powers towards a new frontier of supermen – or more accurately, the infusion of the flesh with the divine through acts of sheer will.
While Classicism rejected the possibility of true apotheosis outside of the superman, this opened the gate for the process to eventually extend to all who believed in Christ. For the hero, such apotheosis depended upon the possession of inherent virtue. For everyone else, it was accomplished not through intrinsic qualities of surpassing excellence, but by submission to a law superior to that of nature. A law superior to the mathematics of the mystically implanted world. In a world of ancient tribes it was the purview of oracles and medicine men to commune with the mystical realm however it was understood, and even they were kept at fearful distance. Mircea Eliade explored how rituals were an attempt to momentarily integrate with this other world, to step outside of time and inaugurate a new cycle. Apotheosis could not have been conceptualized until Rome was impregnated with Greek thought, thereby preparing the stage for Christ.
The doctrine of the Trinity provided the basis for a radically new and unclassical account of experience, thereby granting power to the individual. Yet subverting the ideology of secularism was not to destroy the actual structure of Roman society; it was merely to envisage it in a new light. For it was to see the state no longer as the ultimate form of community, but merely as an instrument in service of an even higher authority reified by the direct participation of the citizen.
Here we see a developing trend of what would later be termed populism, a phenomenon the state was forced to reckon with as never before.
The Evolution of God and Flesh
The assumption of Classicism was that in nature there was an exact equivalence between being and knowledge. Its effort had therefore been directed towards the attainment of a ‘pure’ knowledge as the means of harnessing ‘pure’ reality. But then a new deity presented itself, not as an object of, but as the basis for, experience. A God unbounded by a natural order; He was the order we inhabit, both intelligible and intelligent.
The rule of Christian faith contained two propositions of vital importance. The first affirmed that the historical Christ was the only Son of the Father: the final God, the apex God. To accept this thesis was to reject as fraudulent the multifarious deities of civic secularism and, in particular, the claim to divinity put forward on behalf of the virtue and fortune of Caesar. The second was the prospect of eternal life extended to the faithful. That prospect was based, not on the common pagan aspiration to transcendence, but on a new sense of the relationship between body and spirit. Bound in that proposal were the potentialities of human nature to be realized through a redemption of the flesh.
Most importantly, there was no attempt to demonstrate the truth of these assertions in terms acceptable to classical science. The power to assert these truths lie in the consciousness of the believer, unanswerable to the systems of man. That granted incredible influence to the adherent, not only the steward of the ancestral hearth but the vanguard of a new flame.
The philosophical synergizing of the body and spirit was mirrored by the enveloping of Christianity by the Roman state during its sunset. Theodosius, emperor from 379 to 395, was the last before the schism of East and West, and instrumental in the creation of the Nicene Creed. Cochrane asserts that the ultimate consequence of Theodosianism was to lay the foundation for a new European order while precipitating the final destruction of the old.
“The formal liquidation of paganism under Theodosius and his successors has been characterized as ‘perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition’ and thus deserving of consideration as ‘a singular event in the history of the human mind’. The prohibition of pagan worship was followed, in 396, by a final cancellation of privileges and immunities accorded by ancient law to the priests and ministers of pagan cults, whose profession was now officially outlawed.’”
To the fourth-century Church the vision of the Kingdom was the vision of a spiritual aristocracy, a society regenerated by the acceptance of Christian truth. Theodosianism, however, betrays a fatal confusion of ideas. As with Emperor Constantine, integration of the religion into the state does not mean subservience to the theology any more than the Third World learning English imparts the full spectrum of Angloness (although there is certainly an alteration of mental faculties.) If it is true to say that Rome was Christianized, then it is also true that Christianity was Romanized. This is reflected in the distinct aesthetic and cultural character of the Catholic Church.
The new faith was to revive and give direction to the expiring spiritual ideals of classical antiquity, while carrying forward the elements of truth contained in philosophic paganism. Viewed thusly, the European mind is not a computer within which operating systems are installed and deleted. This phenomenon recurred everywhere in Europe the faith took root, notably Germany and Russia, leaving a legacy of schisms largely along civilizational lines.
Modern Subordination of the Mystery
As we return to the present day we are compelled to wonder if the same crisis is befalling our expansive – ostensibly, however mutedly, Christian – multicultural empire. We may further wonder if the material and technological demands of the population signal an oncoming mind revolution similar to what I have described. If God cannot be supplanted by a more enchanting authority, then the theological may have to grapple with the metaphysics of the rational mind, present in atheists and followers of Christ alike.
I am reminded of another work titled The Disenchantment of the World by Marcel Gauchet. In it the French historian encapsulates the spiritual history of the West, constructing a thesis pertaining to the distance we all likely feel from the spiritual world of our ancestors. Our ancestors who felt a stronger connecting to the paranormal, a stronger faith. They were immersed. We are so accustomed to assessing matters of faith with the rationality of philosophy it’s impossible for us to believe in things as completely as the ancients.
We ritualize, we honor, and we tend the flame of religion but still we have drawn a circle around God, a circle we stand outside of, viewing the subject as a surgeon does a patient. Our desire to understand has rendered us incapable of being within. We interrogate the unknown with the tools of science even in the name of traditonalism. What is currently alive in the Christian faith has no connection with the circumstances surrounding its birth, the conditions that allowed it to assert itself. The same can be said of neopaganism and even wicca; these are leveraged politically -particularly in a reactionary, adversarial ambition – but in those lonely moments of the soul they may acknowledge they don’t actually believe in these gods. It’s reminiscent of young men flooding into Catholic or Eastern Orthodox communities because they view it as the best army to join in the war against social degeneracy. They are all worshipping strategy.
Religion’s most complete form is its initial one, back when people believed with a totality we cannot relate to. This was true faith, the sole engine of the early church before it was vulgarized by the organs of state power. We civilized God and drew Him into the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, all the way to grey goo accelerationism.
While Cochrane does not align with this model depicting the state as a fundamentally corrupting apparatus, he nonetheless identifies a feedback loop of sociocultural hybridization that, viewed from the vantage point of our inescapable context, may be craving another paradigm shift.