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Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen investigates the transition from paganism to Christianity between the 4th & 8th centuries. He reassesses the triumph of Christianity, contending that it was neither tidy nor quick. He shows that the two religious systems were both vital during an interactive period that lasted far longer than historians have previously believed. He explores the influences of paganism & Christianity upon each other. In a discussion of the different strengths of the two systems, he demonstrates that pagan beliefs were not eclipsed or displaced by Christianity but persisted or were transformed. The victory of the church was one not of obliteration but of widening embrace & assimilation. This book also includes new material on the Christian persecution of pagans over the centuries thru methods that ranged from fines to crucifixion; the mixture of motives in conversion; the stubbornness of pagan resistance; the difficulty of satisfying the demands & expectations of new converts & the degree of assimilation of Christianity to paganism.
282 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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274 people want to read
About the author
Ramsay MacMullen
32 books24 followersA specialist in Roman social history and the rise of Christianity in the Roman world, Ramsay MacMullen was Dunham Professor of History and Classics at Yale University, where he taught from 1967 until his retirement in 1993. Educated at Phillips Exeter and Harvard, from which he held all three of his degrees, MacMullen taught at the University of Oregon and Brandeis before moving to Yale.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 18, 2013
A lucid and accurate account of the conflict between paganism and Christianity in late antiquity.
Professor MacMullen sheds light on the dangers of Christian absolutism, and the violence which early Christians employed in the service of their faith.
Professor MacMullen sheds light on the dangers of Christian absolutism, and the violence which early Christians employed in the service of their faith.
January 24, 2017
Of all of the scholars who have written widely on Christianity, paganism, imperial patronage, and the transformation of the late Roman world, Peter Brown and Ramsay MacMullen stand above the rest. I've read a number of Brown's works, but this is the first of MacMullen's books that I've read. The general slant on the church's intolerance towards paganism makes this an excellent companion volume to Peter Brown's Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Curti Lecture Series).
This book is divided into four main sections with a conclusion at the end. The first chapter, "Persecution" deals with the attempt of the Christian church to eliminate religious alternatives. This chapter also introduces the book and here MacMullen lays out some of the challenges that the source material presents, namely that there is very little pagan material to work with. He also gives a little attention to some general issues in the study of early imperial Christianity, such as its expansion. However, that is not what the crux of this chapter is on. The focus is on the Christian desire of a systemic set of universal beliefs led to intolerance. He juxtaposes the positions of Christians before Constantine to the position of Symmachus, a pagan official at the end of the fourth century trying to convince Ambrose, that intractable bishop of Milan, for toleration. There is no doubt that there was persecution, and while this chapter explores it, MacMullen fails to really get below the surface and see why there was some much intolerance, of both pagans and other Christians alike. He only touches on it at the end of the chapter when he gets into Justinian and his immediate successors persecuting their opponents, but fails to address the fact that "orthodoxy" was tightly bound up with imperial power and the belief in the salvation of the state. There are fascinating reasons for the persecution, but MacMullen sadly fails to really address them.
The next chapter, "the cost to the persecuted" is exactly as it sounds and discusses the dismantling of paganism and what happened after it was no longer required to participate in pagan rituals and festivals. In general, the customs continued, although many of the original meanings were lost. He concludes by saying that what survived of paganism was closest to superstition, which leads right into the next chapter. One could argue that the idea of the survival of pagan rituals is not all that relevant, since the people who participated in them clearly saw them as totally compatible and likely as part of their Christianity. This particular chapter argues that due to the expansion of the curial class in the third century, the "skeptical and empirical-thinking extreme" of the traditionally educated elite began to be besieged by the influx of their more poorly-educated brethren. It really feels like MacMullen is trying to blame Christianity for the decline of classical literary culture. Instead, the number of highly-educated intellectuals in any given era seems to have always remained rather small; MacMullen's own examples of Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Pliny are all the evidence that is needed. It is true that the ascetic tradition in the east rejected classical learning, but as Brown has demonstrated in Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Canto original series) this is a case of power politics. The convoluted arguments surrounding the issues discussed in the late antique church councils, and well past iconoclasm in the east show that sophisticated intellectualism always existed. MacMullen argues that the well-educated of the fifth and sixth-centuries write primarily of the wonderful, but this can hardly stand up to scrutiny. MacMullen's own example of Plutarch fits into this category (and so does Pliny, at times), yet Socrates, Sozomen, Procopius, Agathias, and Theodoret all wrote sober histories in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The final chapter is entitled "Assimilation". In this exceptionally good chapter, MacMullen explains how the major pagan god's disinterest in the "little people" helped the rise of the cult of saints, and how Christian burials retained pagan curses for the destruction of the tomb robbers. He gives another in-depth explanation of how the eastern holy men functioned much like pagan predecessors in performing what we would class as magic, and how Christian and pagan acclamations existed side by side in the fifth century.
This is a good book, although there are some flaws in it. Read it alongside some of Peter Brown's work for a much more fulfilling explanation of the Christian church in late antiquity - both authors compliment each other wonderfully. However, MacMullen's writing is also much more difficult to read, and at times his prose can be rather painful. In the end, however, this is a useful piece of work. Just not on its own.
This book is divided into four main sections with a conclusion at the end. The first chapter, "Persecution" deals with the attempt of the Christian church to eliminate religious alternatives. This chapter also introduces the book and here MacMullen lays out some of the challenges that the source material presents, namely that there is very little pagan material to work with. He also gives a little attention to some general issues in the study of early imperial Christianity, such as its expansion. However, that is not what the crux of this chapter is on. The focus is on the Christian desire of a systemic set of universal beliefs led to intolerance. He juxtaposes the positions of Christians before Constantine to the position of Symmachus, a pagan official at the end of the fourth century trying to convince Ambrose, that intractable bishop of Milan, for toleration. There is no doubt that there was persecution, and while this chapter explores it, MacMullen fails to really get below the surface and see why there was some much intolerance, of both pagans and other Christians alike. He only touches on it at the end of the chapter when he gets into Justinian and his immediate successors persecuting their opponents, but fails to address the fact that "orthodoxy" was tightly bound up with imperial power and the belief in the salvation of the state. There are fascinating reasons for the persecution, but MacMullen sadly fails to really address them.
The next chapter, "the cost to the persecuted" is exactly as it sounds and discusses the dismantling of paganism and what happened after it was no longer required to participate in pagan rituals and festivals. In general, the customs continued, although many of the original meanings were lost. He concludes by saying that what survived of paganism was closest to superstition, which leads right into the next chapter. One could argue that the idea of the survival of pagan rituals is not all that relevant, since the people who participated in them clearly saw them as totally compatible and likely as part of their Christianity. This particular chapter argues that due to the expansion of the curial class in the third century, the "skeptical and empirical-thinking extreme" of the traditionally educated elite began to be besieged by the influx of their more poorly-educated brethren. It really feels like MacMullen is trying to blame Christianity for the decline of classical literary culture. Instead, the number of highly-educated intellectuals in any given era seems to have always remained rather small; MacMullen's own examples of Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Pliny are all the evidence that is needed. It is true that the ascetic tradition in the east rejected classical learning, but as Brown has demonstrated in Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Canto original series) this is a case of power politics. The convoluted arguments surrounding the issues discussed in the late antique church councils, and well past iconoclasm in the east show that sophisticated intellectualism always existed. MacMullen argues that the well-educated of the fifth and sixth-centuries write primarily of the wonderful, but this can hardly stand up to scrutiny. MacMullen's own example of Plutarch fits into this category (and so does Pliny, at times), yet Socrates, Sozomen, Procopius, Agathias, and Theodoret all wrote sober histories in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The final chapter is entitled "Assimilation". In this exceptionally good chapter, MacMullen explains how the major pagan god's disinterest in the "little people" helped the rise of the cult of saints, and how Christian burials retained pagan curses for the destruction of the tomb robbers. He gives another in-depth explanation of how the eastern holy men functioned much like pagan predecessors in performing what we would class as magic, and how Christian and pagan acclamations existed side by side in the fifth century.
This is a good book, although there are some flaws in it. Read it alongside some of Peter Brown's work for a much more fulfilling explanation of the Christian church in late antiquity - both authors compliment each other wonderfully. However, MacMullen's writing is also much more difficult to read, and at times his prose can be rather painful. In the end, however, this is a useful piece of work. Just not on its own.
January 29, 2015
On the slow, slow death of Roman paganism. The sources that survive -- kept alive by the victor religion -- used to lead historians to conclude that paganism was on its last legs, of no real religious value to people of the age, and expired with a whimper. Not so, argues Ramsay MacMullen, who here strives to resurrect a less one-sided story.
He's a graceful writer, and I'll be happy to read anything he writes: a major social historian of Rome and Late Antiquity. Next, the attractive title: Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest & Alienation in the Empire.
He's a graceful writer, and I'll be happy to read anything he writes: a major social historian of Rome and Late Antiquity. Next, the attractive title: Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest & Alienation in the Empire.
July 1, 2022
In Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (1997), Ramsay Macmullen shows us that paganism died hard, if at all. This goes against the central argument of a newer, much larger book by Alan Cameron: The Last Pagans of Rome (2010). I have not read Cameron’s book, which is over 800 pages long, but I have read two positive reviews, including one by the renowned scholar of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown. Macmullen actually published a response to Brown’s review in The New York Review of Books, to which Brown responded defensively in turn (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011...). As I understand it, Cameron’s main arguments are that the Church defeated paganism swiftly and thoroughly; without state support, the tired old religion gave up and died; clergymen became the new guardians of classical culture. These arguments are presented as a novel challenge to the orthodox view, yet Macmullen, writing over a decade earlier, describes similar arguments in his opening pages and sets out to disprove them. The title of Macmullen’s book shows how much more credit he gives to the tenacity of paganism, which apparently lingers on to the eighth century.
The main reason that Macmullen and Cameron are so at odds is that they have different areas of focus. Cameron concentrates on the senatorial classes and the high priesthoods of paganism; Macmullen’s work is social history, even at times verging on anthropology. For anyone studying late paganism among the aristocracy (Cameron) or among the broader populace (Macmullen), the sources are scant. I only hope that Cameron gives as much attention to this fact as Macmullen does. Cameron argues that there was no pagan intellectual revival, no last stand of pagan senators. But how would we know, when there is only one surviving pagan historian post-400? Macmullen draws our attention to the incredibly expensive and time-consuming physical process of copying, which ensured that pagan writings were unlikely to be preserved or disseminated. Indeed, Christian authorities even went out of their way to destroy unedifying pagan works. Cameron says that the Christian elite embraced classical culture, but I wonder what he makes of the fact that the only reason that we have Livy’s writings is because the pagan Symmachus (much maligned by Cameron) commissioned a copy? Or that the only surviving text of Cicero’s De Re Publica was expunged for yet another copy of Saint Augustine? We may ask, along with the Church father Tertullian, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”. Saint Jerome agonised over whether he was “a follower of Cicero and not of Christ” – plainly he could not be both. The classical literary tradition was indeed inescapable for the Christianised ruling classes, but they embraced it only reluctantly and with great difficulty. In contrast to these figures we have such valuable late pagan writers as Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Claudian, and Proclus. Literature and the literary classes are not, however, the subject of Macmullen’s study.
Macmullen perhaps finds some common ground with Cameron in the idea that most of the city-dwelling upper classes converted quickly; but Macmullen stresses that for the bulk of the empire’s population in the country, conversion took centuries, with frequent relapses. The process of conversion was from the top-down, beginning with Constantine. It was a progressively more violent process, but it was also frequently ineffective. Why else would a succession of increasingly exasperated emperors and bishops find it necessary to repeat the same anti-pagan rules? Paganism did not die when state support was withdrawn (as Cameron argues). Rather, it continued on with as much vitality as ever, offering ordinary people a greater variety of fulfilling spiritual practices than the rigid doctrines of Christianity could: “the old religion suited most people very well. They loved it, trusted it, found fulfilment in it, and so resisted change however eloquently, or ferociously, pressed upon them.” Macmullen dispels a few myths about Christianity, such as its supposed appeal to women and slaves. Both women and slaves had the opportunity to join pagan cults where they could mix freely with social superiors, or cults consisting only of their peers, in which they could rise to high priesthood. It is also forgotten that temples, like churches, provided poor-relief and refuge. “Taken as a whole,” Macmullen concludes, “paganism worked.” Naturally, paganism survived for longest in its least structured forms, away from centres of imperial authority. Macmullen estimates that half the empire’s population was Christian by 400 A.D., whereas Cameron says that it was “overwhelmingly Christian” in the 390s. As Cameron does not provide evidence for his estimation, and Macmullen does, I will trust the latter.
Macmullen partly attributes the rise of Christianity to the loss of an earlier class of intellectuals who upheld empirical thinking. He gives as examples Pliny, Plutarch, and Plotinus, who, while they were not atheists, sought natural explanations to natural phenomena. The Christian clergy, by contrast, shared the superstitious beliefs of their laity, seeing only divine explanations behind everything. According to Macmullen, this is the result of the massive expansion of the Roman bureaucracy, which empowered a new class of literate but not necessarily well-educated clerks. Perhaps there is something to be learned about our own times here—the ubiquity of middle management and dogmatic thinking—but for me this part of Macmullen’s argument is a little too speculative.
The last part of the book deals with the assimilation of paganism into Christianity. Of particular interest is the “graveside cult” of dinner parties in cemeteries. Perhaps the most important practice that paganism contributed to Christianity was the “cult of martyrs”. Following the Constantinian shift, the numerous new converts to Christianity were used to bringing their small problems to small gods (daimones), not the supreme deity. This accounts for the proliferation of martyria and saints’ shrines in the fourth century, where converts to Christianity could continue to seek help from superhuman beings. Macmullen only dedicates a few words to the endurance of paganism in art and literature, which is an intriguingly rich topic. Do allusions to the gods in artistic works still count as paganism in some way? When I read Roberto Calasso’s Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, I feel that paganism is alive and I am reading a work that has a profound spiritual connection to the old gods, but I am fairly sure the author has never sacrificed a bull to Zeus. The boundaries between culture and religion are not clear, and become even less clear when we bring up other terms like folklore, superstition, and belief.
Nevertheless, Macmullen does an excellent job treating a complex topic. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries is a work of social history, dealing mostly with the everyday practices of ordinary, illiterate people. The title does not make it obvious that the study is limited only to the Greco-Roman world, and Macmullen draws upon the third century possibly as much as the eighth. The book is extremely well researched and displays extraordinary erudition for such a small volume: in fact, about half of the book’s 282 pages are notes directing the reader to historical evidence.
Amid revisionist works that take a dim view of paganism, like Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome and Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019), Macmullen reminds us that Christianity’s only real advantage over the plethora of paganisms was its intolerance: “ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exod. 34.13-14).
April 12, 2016
Dans ce petit livre assez court, l'auteur, un historien anglais, montre comment le paganisme a longtemps survécu malgré l'adoption du Christianisme par Constantin, et même comment il a lui-même beaucoup influencé la nouvelle religion, en dépit des persécutions dont les païens ont été l'objet. Rien de nouveau donc dans ce constat, sinon ce que l'on sait depuis fort longtemps, mais que l'auteur appuie thèse par une bibliographie si abondante qu'elle dépasse de plus du double la matière du livre proprement dite! La démonstration est ainsi entrelardée d'extraits d'articles de certains de ses collègues, ou de sources dont il extrait les éléments propres à appuyer son raisonnement. On découvre donc certains épisodes curieux qui relèvent purement de l'érudition, mais aussi des textes qui me semblent plus connus, sans doute parce que je les avais déjà lu. L'antiquité tardive revit dans ces pages, avec son flot désespérant de superstition et d'enthousiasme désordonné.
May 1, 2013
Ramsay MacMullen (born 3/3/28), formerly a professor at Yale University, is a safe bet as an authority about late Roman antiquity and this is an unusually balanced book about the transition from a traditional to a Christian Rome.
October 31, 2019
What a mess -- basically this book is what you would get if a Reddit /r/atheist teenager went to grad school, never changed his underlying belief system, and then somehow wrote a book for Cambridge Press. I expect that the average historian is going to be comically biased against Christianity but this book approaches Poe's Law / The Onion territory. Yes, obviously, paganism didn't magically vanish from Europe after the Edict of Milan . . .? And yes, Christian theologians and emperors were advocates for Christianity against paganism . . . ? These facts that are obvious to any rational adult are framed in the most melodramatic way possible; also his caricatures of Christian theologians (Augustine, Eusebius, etc.) are hilarious. I understand wanting to be a provocative/revisionist historian but MacMullen is saying the quiet parts out loud, here; it's hard to take any of his arguments seriously.
September 24, 2018
Scholarly treatment of this topic with notes and sources, this account shows a slight bias against Christianity and for paganism to counter the many accounts with opposite bias. The book offers a good survey of the growth and triumph of Christianity, with the rough outlines of the pagan doctrines, religious rites, celebrations and practices that were blended with original Christianity and still exist today in local customs and localities' unique Christian rites and celebrations.
October 27, 2025
Christians, Pagans and Bad Writing: A Book Review by Dominick Maino
MacMullen, R. (1997). Christianity and paganism in the fourth to eighth centuries. Yale University Press. 282 pages with notes, bibliography and index.
https://dominickmaino.substack.com/p/...
MacMullen, R. (1997). Christianity and paganism in the fourth to eighth centuries. Yale University Press. 282 pages with notes, bibliography and index.
https://dominickmaino.substack.com/p/...
June 19, 2023
this is the only book i have ever read which has seriously made me consider giving this book to someone else, then i'd feel guilty for making someone else have this book
January 10, 2018
Initially, the book raises the question, “How much tenacity did paganism have in the face of spreading Christianity?” It is an interesting question that I have not given much thought to. Was paganism hollow and burned-out and easily replaced? The first part of the book is difficult to follow; the author has done much research and quotes many bits of old text and laws but haphazardly and without a connecting thread of argument. (There is something to be gained by learning that such text and laws existed, regardless of the lack of focus by the author.) He grows more clear as the book progresses. In the end, basically his argument is that paganism was vital, persistent, and served a basic instinct of people, and this is evidenced by repeated laws directed against pagan practices over the centuries (inferring therefore that pagan practices continued, which is clever). Christianity ended up assimilating many of these practices, due in part to the strategy of the church leaders (this is fairly well-known, I think) but also largely due to the people converted, who felt a need for such practices (use of candles, appeal to the dead, saints, angels, etc) and who continued these practices even though some of the church leaders preached against them. It is an interesting area of study, and I do not regret reading this book as background, but I believe better books on the subject probably exist.
March 16, 2013
fascinating and scholarly discussion of the overlap in the 4th-8th centuries AD of traditions and customs between old pagans and new christians.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews