Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

by Glenn S. Sunshine

Since we know what is superior and what is inferior, we have the basis for determining what is right and wrong. The higher up on the hierarchy you are, the more authority you have over the things that are below you and the more rights and privileges you can claim for yourself. Herbivores can demand the lives of plants for their food. Carnivores can take the lives of herbivores. Humanity can kill both. And the gods can demand whatever sacrifices they want from humans.

Most pagan religions practiced human sacrifice at some point in their history. Each of the three principal gods of the Celts demanded human sacrifices by a different means — Taranis by bashing the skull in with an axe or burning, Esus by strangling, and Teutates by drowning. The Druids, who presided over these sacrifices, were also well known for putting prisoners of war in wicker cages and burning them alive as a sacrifice to the gods.

Greek legend tells of a number of human sacrifices in the Mycenaean period, but according to Plutarch the Greeks sacrificed humans as late as the Persian Wars, just prior to the battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Romans did not generally sacrifice humans to the gods, but they did sacrifice them to the manes (spirits of the dead) during the Republic. Archaeologists have uncovered the tombs of some of these victims, including those buried alive in Rome’s walls. Romans buried pairs of victims alive on other occasions as well, most notably in the wake of Rome’s defeat by Hannibal at Cannae. The reasoning in all these cases was largely the same: the gods (or manes) wanted human life or at least valued it; thus, to honor the gods or curry their favor, it was perfectly appropriate to kill those whom the society deemed expendable.

They picked up the Etruscan practice of having people fight to the death in “games” in honor of the dead (another form of human sacrifice) and moved it away from funerals to turn it into a form of popular entertainment. Gladiatorial matches and other spectacles at the circus entertained the population and fed the reputation of the sponsors at the cost of the blood of the slaves who fought and died in the arena. And in daily life, the Roman authorities would act with unsurpassed brutality against anyone who dared to question or challenge their authority.

even among humans there was a natural hierarchy. What set humans above animals was their rationality — it brought them closer to the world of the spirit, the world of ideas and forms. Within the value system, things that lead to the spirit are superior to things that cater to the merely material. But not all people are as rational as others. Men, for example, were believed to be intrinsically more rational than women, along with being “obviously” superior physically. Men thus properly had authority over women.

Philosopher-kings were to rule in Plato’s Republic, and each person would be given her or his proper place in society according to her or his capabilities in a hierarchy down the social order. In the real world, a nearly Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mentality prevailed.

the word aristocracy literally translates “a rule by the best.”

It was true of criminals and of prisoners of war, who by virtue of being on the losing side demonstrated that they were inferior to winners.

In the early days of the Roman Republic (prior to the Empire) and even in early Greece, the nobility owned and worked their land alongside their servants and slaves. As the Republic expanded and encountered Carthaginian and Hellenistic Greek cultures, many of their ideas spread to Rome, and a decided shift in attitude took place among the Roman elites. Now, as had happened in Greece, contemplation of the spirit was seen as higher than mucking about with the material world. Roman nobles began developing large, slave-run plantations known as latifundia, in which they increasingly gave themselves over to lives of luxury, with beautiful artwork, gardens, and homes. What better way to live a life contemplating the spirit than to live in the midst of beauty? After all, is not the One the source of the Beautiful, along with the Good and the True?

the luxury they sought in their quest to contemplate the spirit inexorably pulled the Romans toward activities that catered to the flesh. As often happens, luxury led to excess, in terms of both gluttony and sexual orgies. The pornographic images that adorn everything from clay oil lamps to the walls of Roman villas are ample evidence of the sexual obsession of the Romans by the time of the Empire. And the higher up the social scale, the more perverse and extreme the sexual activities often became. As evidence of this, consider Caligula, the only Roman emperor who had a biographical film about his life produced by Penthouse magazine.

Still, most of the urban residents in the Empire lived in appalling squalor in disease-ridden tenements, living hand-to-mouth existence with a life expectancy of around thirty years. The great engineering and building achievements primarily and intentionally benefited the elites. They may have provided employment for the masses, but they did little else for them.

Although some people may have discarded their children because they simply could not afford them, the wealthy did not have that problem and yet they practiced contraception, abortion, and infanticide at least as often as the poor. The only explanation is that it was a cultural trend, not one that was dictated by economics.

With birthrates dropping, the Romans were forced to make up the gap by permitting into the Empire more and more Germanic immigrants from beyond the borders, lured by the promise of being able to share in the benefits of Roman rule. By the late third century, the army was increasingly becoming Germanized, as was a growing percentage of the population. This resulted in a cultural change within the Empire and a transformation of what it meant to be Roman. When the barbarian tribes moved into the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, they were following a path that others had already laid out, and the transformation of the Latin-speaking western half of the Empire was already well under way. Another force was involved in the transformation of the Empire, however — one that did not come from migration from the outside. An obscure Jewish sect arose in the first century that, despite its unpopularity, became a rising force that transformed the fundamental worldview of the Empire and laid the groundwork for the development of what we today call Western Civilization. That force was Christianity, the subject of the next chapter.

The obvious difference between them and the rest of the Roman world was that they were radical monotheists. They believed that there was one and only one God. But in many ways, the number of gods worshiped was less important than the nature and character of the God of Israel. All of the pagan religions had origin stories for their gods. Not Judaism. The God of Israel simply was and is and will be forever. To put it another way, Israel’s God was self-existent.

The god of the Neoplatonists is impersonal, has no will, and simply throws off the emanations by virtue of its own existence. The God of Israel, on the other hand, is personal and created the world as a voluntary act. Also, the Neoplatonic universe is eternal. While the One exists, the universe does as well. The Jewish universe was created at a particular point in time.

The conception of a personal God who is creator of all things shapes the Jewish understanding of what it means to be human.

Jews adamantly rejected infanticide because it was murder, a position that the Roman historian Tacitus described as “sinister and revolting.”1

God is not simply a personal, transcendent creator; he is holy and righteous as well, and he expects the same from humanity. In most of the pagan world, ethics was part of philosophy, not religion. It would be difficult to find strong moral standards among the gods of Greece and Rome. For example, Jupiter (Greek Zeus) regularly impregnates human women, provoking his wife Juno/Hera to jealousy and revenge against the children;

God also required all males in Israel to be circumcised, the mark of the covenant God made with Israel. Being God’s chosen people was a tremendous privilege, but it also carried with it a great deal of responsibility. Since God chose them and revealed himself to them in a unique way, more than he did for any other people, he also had very high standards for Israel.

the Romans gave them a special dispensation so that they did not have to participate in religious rituals (such as emperor worship) that would violate their monotheistic beliefs.

The Greeks exercised in the buff — in fact, the word gymnasium literally means something like “a place to get naked” — so even if you were willing to be circumcised, it would set you apart from your peers when you met to exercise and socialize.

Christians also had a missionary zeal to bring the message of “salvation through Jesus Christ” to the entire world.

Jewish leaders introduced the Eighteen Benedictions into the synagogue liturgy, which among other things included a prayer for the damnation of the “Nazarenes.” This was presumably an effort to prevent Jewish Christians from becoming leaders in the synagogues, since they would then be obliged to call on God for their own destruction.

Since Christians were increasingly Gentiles, not Jews, their refusal to worship the emperor meant that they were guilty of treason. This was at least the official reason the Romans used most often to justify persecuting Christians.

Christians did not rebel against Rome. They did not use force or defend themselves when the Roman authorities came for them. Nonetheless, they were an unpopular minority in the Empire. First, some of Christianity’s ideas were patently offensive to Roman sensibilities. The idea of using a cross as a symbol of hope was absurd. Crucifixion was the ugliest, most degrading, and most painful form of execution the Romans could devise — a punishment reserved for slaves, rebels, and the dregs of society. Using a cross as a symbol for a religion would be roughly as outrageous and tasteless as Jews in Nazi Germany using the gas chambers at Auschwitz to represent God’s love for us.

the claim of exclusivity — the claim that Christianity is true and everything that contradicts it is false. As in any society that makes tolerance its principal virtue, there were limits, and Christianity’s claims of exclusivity clearly crossed them.

Because of the practice of infanticide, the Roman world had far more men than women.

What is clear is that they were given a freedom within the church that was denied them in the pagan world. They could take leadership roles within the church as deaconesses, and some of the wealthier women sponsored house churches. So contrary to popular belief, the rise of Christianity had a very positive effect on the place of women in society.

slaves were not just “living tools” but were equals before God with even the most exalted members of society. In fact, some early church bishops seem to have been former slaves. But to take this even further, the New Testament writers talk about Jesus Christ becoming a slave for us and dying to set us free.

designed to be as painful, perverse, and entertaining as possible. And Christians went to their deaths without a fight, singing hymns, preaching, and otherwise refusing to be cowed or intimidated by the abuse they were suffering. This was in many ways the undoing of the persecutions. People in the arenas saw the confidence with which Christians approached death, and this vision of boldness forced spectators to ask themselves whether they had anything they were willing to go through that kind of horror for, whether they had anything that gave their lives the confidence and purpose they saw in the despised Christians.

the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church.

they did it with ideas rather than force.

Apologists began to explain Christianity in terms drawn from Greek philosophy. In fact, Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Apologists, wore a philosopher’s cloak and presented his teaching as the true philosophy — the philosophy of Jesus Christ.

It also meant that the church began to de-emphasize the physical world in favor of the spiritual. Thus, although the churches continued to feed the poor and take care of the sick, they began to put more and more emphasis on martyrdom and, failing that, asceticism — fasting, poverty, solitude, and especially virginity.

These “Gnostic gospels” date from the second to about the fifth century, well after the gospels of the New Testament were written.

Gnostics tended to be extreme dualists. They believed that the physical world was not simply inferior to the spiritual but was flat-out evil. One of the most telling examples can be found in the Gnostics’ attitude toward the Jewish Scriptures. In the Gnostic gospels, Jesus never referred to Judaism or the Old Testament, speaking instead from a framework drawn entirely from pagan philosophy and particularly from an extreme form of Platonism. This is rather unexpected behavior from someone who was a Jewish rabbi. What few references there are in Gnostic writings to Judaism are negative. In fact, some Gnostic texts depict the god of the Old Testament as an evil offshoot from the main line of emanations from God. This Jewish god is ignorant and wicked, as evidenced by the fact that he created the material world, which itself is evil by its very nature.

many Gnostic writings were anti-sex and anti-marriage, since both can lead to procreation, which is a bad thing since it traps an intrinsically good spirit into intrinsically evil matter. As just one example, the Book of Thomas the Contender is “dominated by condemnation of sexual intercourse and attachment to the flesh,” as summarized by Gnostic scholar Karen L. King.5

the Gnostic gospel of Thomas tells us, “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary [Magdalene] leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her to make her male so that she might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”6

Christianity’s legal situation in the Empire changed in AD 313, when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan. The year before, just prior to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine claimed to have had a vision from God, after which Jesus appeared to him in a dream and explained what he needed to do. Constantine had his soldiers paint Christian symbols on their shields, and when he won against his opponents’ superior forces, he took it as a sign from God and converted to Christianity. The Edict of Milan followed in short order, making Christianity a legal religion.

the edict simply legalized the Christian church. It did not outlaw paganism or make Christianity the “official” religion of the Empire, though Constantine’s conversion certainly made it the favored religion.

Christianity was a growing religion, centered in the cities, with a high degree of organization. It could thus provide an important base that Constantine could rely on. On the other hand, Christians were still unpopular, and they made up by modern estimates only about 10 to 15 percent of the Roman world — hardly an overwhelming number. Besides, many or perhaps most were pacifists, though there are indications of Christians serving in the military even prior to 313. It is thus far from clear that there was any real political advantage in embracing Christianity.

his action set a precedent for state interference and coercion in the church.

A second area of change involved the adoption of elements of paganism into the church. Constantine, possibly out of earlier devotion to Sol Invictus, made the first day of the week (“Sun” day) a holiday in 321, though there is strong evidence that from the first century on, Christians had worshiped on this day in commemoration of Easter. But the Feast of the Nativity (aka Christmas) was set to December 25, the birthday of the sun, in part to compete with the pagan holiday of Saturnalia. Elements of pagan worship such as candles, garlands, and incense were gradually introduced into the church, though they had been avoided earlier because of their association with paganism. The Virgin Mary grew in importance, at times being connected to pagan goddesses such as Isis. The cult of saints and martyrs also grew, with Christian saints sometimes replacing pagan deities. Technically, the saints were not supposed to be worshiped, but people coming from a pagan background in which they were encouraged to pray to the saints were not likely to understand the distinction between prayer and outright worship.

“white martyrdom” — the living of a strict, ascetic life — as the most viable alternative to actual martyrdom.

Infanticide was on the way to being banned, along with crucifixion and ultimately abortion. Gladiatorial matches also came to an end, largely because a courageous monk named Telemachus went onto the floor of the arena to try to stop the killing and was himself killed in the process.9 The change was gradual, but the value of human life was being increasingly recognized in the Empire.

Too many centuries of antinatalism and too much reliance on immigration to make up the gap in population combined with administrative and military blunders to leave the borders of the Empire wide open to migrating barbarian tribes. Roman authority in the Latin-speaking West collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence and the onslaught of Germanic tribes. The eventual fusion of Roman, Germanic, and Christian traditions would result in the emergence of a new culture and worldview in medieval Europe. But it would be a long, slow transition.

Germanic migrations, a corrupt and ineffectual government, insecurity within the borders, a breakdown of trade, and an economy built on slavery when the end of territorial expansion shut down new sources of slaves — all combined to destabilize Roman society.

In many places, the bishops emerged as the political rulers of cities, not necessarily because they wanted power, but because somebody had to hold the civil administration together — and the bishops were frequently the only ones with the education, administrative expertise, personnel, and popular support to do it.

The basic idea was that the proper structure for a society was based on lordship, in which one person was owed allegiance and service from others.

God who gave his Son to die for us rather than a god who demanded we give our sons to die for him.