A historian as brilliant as he is exceptional, both in his career and in his personality, Paul Veyne was one of the best specialists in the ancient world. If his favorite field remained pagan Rome, the professor emeritus at the College de France has also published fascinating works on the process which led the West to become Christian. In an interview published in December 2016 in “The World of Religions”, he revisited the cultural heritages that shaped Europe.
In your book When our world became Christian (Albin Michel, 2007), you note that at the beginning of the IVe century, the Roman Empire had barely 10% Christians. Two centuries later, paganism is residual. How can this tremendous success of Christianity be explained?
Two elements can explain this success: not only, from the reign of Constantine, the emperors – with the exception of Julian the Apostate (361-363) – support Christianity and finance it heavily; but Christianity also has an exceptional characteristic of its own: it is organized like an army, with a chief, sub-chiefs and local chiefs (archbishops, bishops, priests). In fact, this organization made it possible to set up a military-spiritual framework, if I may say so, of the population. I don’t know where this particular organization of the Christian religion came from, which deserves to be studied.
Conversely, how to explain that paganism is so quickly passed into oblivion?
You should know that paganism had been in crisis for six or seven centuries. In the eyes of scholars, it contained too many fables and naiveties, so much so that the educated pagan no longer knew what he should or could believe. Moreover, money and hierarchical power had changed sides. That said, paganism has not completely disappeared: entire regions remained pagan for a long time without saying so. Thus, the farmers, sharecroppers and agricultural workers who worked in the great domains of the Roman lords in Sardinia were still largely pagan around the year 500. But we did not say it too much: that was no longer done.
Note that God was asked for the same things as pagan deities – good harvests, for example. The ex-voto Christians are perfectly comparable to ex-voto pagans. Nevertheless, for the scholars, the Christian religion had an intellectual and spiritual superiority incomparable with paganism, from all points of view. Love and infinite mercy of a deeply charismatic God, moralism that penetrates all aspects of the believer’s life and the divine project of Creation that gives meaning to humanity: so many elements that could only attract the elites.
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