The modern reader is likely to be somewhat stunned by the fact that the early Christians were charged with atheism; yet, as we have seen, that was the principal objection to which the so-called apologists reply. What the charge really amounted to was an expression of dismay and distaste over the fact that people were abandoning conventional ritual practices on conscientious grounds. To appreciate the ‘scandal’ of abandoning traditional religion, one has only to read Cicero’s work On the Nature of the Gods.
Cicero adopts the dialogue form in order to present a reasoned debate on religion between the leading intellectual positions of educated Romans some 200 years earlier. It would seem from later evidence, such as that provided by Augustine, that the reasoned stance vis-a-vis religion which is implied in this work was simply reinforced in what would become the ever-deepening conflict between Christianity and the traditional way of life. Roughly contemporary with our apologists, Celsus provides insight into somewhat the same traditionalist position, though without Cicero’s own tendency to intellectual scepticism alongside a defence of conservative practice. In other words, despite the time gap, Cicero’s work is not irrelevant to understanding the apologists.
Cicero has three characters: Cotta the Academic, Velleius the Epicurean, and Balbus the Stoic. The latter two are ‘types’, while Gaius Aurelius Cotta was a well-known figure belonging to a generation prior to Cicero himself, one who had been consul and pontifex maximus. It is his position which is of interest. He exposes the weaknesses of Stoic and Epicurean views from the perspective of one whose life was devoted to upholding civic society. Religio meant the binding ties of duty to the gods, the state, and the family, expressed in the virtue of pietas. It was therefore the cement of society and the foundation of justice. Even if rationality led to scepticism about the nature of traditional gods, the ancient customs should be maintained. The dialogue surveys the long discussions in the Greek philosophical tradition, ultimately to argue that in practice religion is vital for the maintenance of morality.
The first book disposes of Epicureanism, a discussion which is of interest here only because the Epicureans too were accused of atheism. It is significant that these ‘atheists’ did not question the existence of the gods. Rather, they liberated people from religion by suggesting that the blessed immortals were not the slightest bit interested in what goes on among human beings, providing a scientific explanation of events which excluded ideas of fate, providence, punishment, reward, and other such common religious ideas. That being the case, traditional prayers and sacrifices were clearly irrelevant and unnecessary. The Graeco-Roman world generally disapproved of this philosophical position, but tolerated anyone’s beliefs as long as they conformed to social convention. The Epicureans were not unreasonable, unlike the stubborn Christians with their conscientious objections. Needless 34 Examples of other texts that provide evidence of this dislike include Cicero’s Against Piso, where Piso’s Epicurean associations provide a stick for mockery; Plutarch’s two works against Epicureans preserved among the Moralia, The Impossibility of a Pleasant Life on Epicurean Principles and Against Colotes; Lucian’s satire Alexander the False Prophet, in which atheists, Epicureans, and Christians are linked more than once, and ‘Epicurean’ is taken to be a term of abuse (25, 38, 46—7); and Plotinus’ Enneads, 2. 9. 15. to say, Christians, like everyone else, contested the atheistic position of Epicureanism.
Cicero’s second book expounds Stoic views. By contrast, providence lay at the heart of Stoic doctrine, and whatever their ‘theology’ in theory, Stoics were prepared to go along with traditional practices, providing through allegory a rational account of what the various gods stood for. Sceptical arguments are rather lamely brought to bear on their position as we move into book 3, and the work ends abruptly with the Epicurean thinking that Cotta’s critique has had the best of the argument, while ‘it seemed to me [i.e. the author, Cicero] that the reasoning of Balbus brought us nearer to an image of the truth’.
There has been much debate about what conclusion Cicero really meant his readers to draw. But for our purposes the dialogue provides a significant perspective. Philosophers had long questioned the nature of the gods as presupposed in traditional practices and presented in the myths of classical literature. The apologists would exploit these arguments against the gods, and show that Christian truth was a fulfilment of the philosophers’ quest. On the other hand, no philosopher, except Socrates, had died for challenging the age-old practices. That was a risk virtually unprecedented. The world of traditional rituals was too sacrosanct for philosophical scepticism to dismantle it, and increasingly, reason would justify it, especially as the threat of Christianity grew.
The charge of atheism against Christians focused on their refusal after conversion to continue to participate in traditional religious customs. New superstitions were suspect, but in the case of Christianity the conscientious objection to old practices was the more damning. Religion, embedded in ethnic cultures, was a matter not of belief but of loyalty. On the whole, Jews were permitted to follow the laws and practices they had inherited from antiquity, and their taboos on images and on syncretic accommodation with other cults were respected; Philo’s Embassy is an instructive account of what happened when this was not so. The problem for Christians was that they were not assimilated into the Jewish ethnos, while apparently abandoning their own ethnic cultures and adopting Jewish exclusivity. Thus they were neither Jew nor Gentile.
The Epistle to Diognetus, like the early work of Aristides, shows that this was at the heart of the problem, and confirms the now classic insight of Harnack that the hostile tag ‘third race’ (tertium genus, first attested in Tertullian) was one Christians would acknowledge and defend. Diognetus had apparently enquired what God Christians believe in, what sort of cult they practise, and how this enables them to set so little store by the world, and even make light of death—‘since they reject the deities revered by the Greeks no less than they disclaim the superstitions professed by the Jews’ (Epistle to Diognetus, I). There follows an explanation of this double rejection, consisting of a standard critique of idolatry and the gods of the Greeks, then a parallel attack on Jews, who know the true God, but then worship with irrational sacrifices just like the Greeks, when they should know that God cannot be in need of material offerings, and follow irrational practices such as their dietary laws, sabbath keeping, circumcision, and festivals. The presentation of the Christians which follows is most instructive.
The difference between Christians and the rest of humankind is not a matter of nationality, or language, or customs. Christians do not live apart in separate cities of their own, speak any special dialect, nor practise any eccentric way of life . . . Nevertheless, the organization of their community does exhibit some features which are remarkable, and even surprising. For instance, though they are residents at home in their own countries, their behaviour there is more like that of transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country. (Ibid. 3)
Having characterized Christians in various ways as being ‘in the world’ but ‘not of the world’, and so subject to persecution from both Greeks and Jews, the Epistle suggests that ‘the relation of Christians to the world is that of a soul to the body’ (ibid. 6). The implication of the whole passage is that Christians have a ‘heavenly citizenship’ and are ‘resident aliens’ in the world, terminology anticipated in some New Testament writings. Christians wish to claim that they are an ethnos, a people, despite the evident fact that they have no common ethnic roots, and the arguments of some of the other apologists make it clear why: everybody else is allowed to practise their traditional religion, so why cannot Christians be allowed to do so also? They claim ‘ancestral customs’ too, and they do it, as we have seen, through the argument that the ancient prophecies of the Jews have been fulfilled, and so the truth revealed.
To legitimize their position, Christians claimed to be a people or a race, alongside others to whom rights were given. This argument is clear in Athenagoras.
The inhabitants of your empire, greatest of kings, follow many different customs and laws, and none of them is prevented by law or fear of punishment from cherishing his ancestral ways . . . All these both you and the laws permit, since you regard it as impious and irreligious to have no belief at all in a god and think it necessary for all men to venerate as gods those whom they wish, that through fear of the divine they may refrain from evil ... To us, however, who are called Christians, you have not given the same consideration. (Embassy, I. I—3).
Athenagoras’ Embassy presupposes a situation analogous to that of Philo when he pleaded on behalf of the Jews of Alexandria. Here is a distinct people with its own politeia, which deserves the same rights as other peoples. Thus, in explaining their anomalous position, Christians asserted, as Jews like Philo had done before, that they prayed for the emperor to the god of the whole universe, and their non-conformity with respect to religious practices did not mean atheism. Tatian may have indulged in sustained invective against poets and philosophers, but Athenagoras as well as Theophilus brought forward a battery of poets and philosophers to substantiate their claims that they were merely taking philosophy to its logical conclusion. In so doing, they initiated the trend that would eventually turn religion into a belief system rather than traditional ethnic customs. Meanwhile, they did not fit into the assumptions of society around them, and paid the penalty for that.
These explorations confirm the statement made at the beginning. Literary genre is not the best way of characterizing what the second-century Greek apologists have in common. They write in various genres, and their object was not simply defending themselves against charges. Their common intent is justification of an anomalous social position, whether in the eyes of others or themselves, whether in real live courtroom situations or more informally. The audacity with which they exploited both classical and biblical traditions to challenge the literary and religious cultures of Greek as well as Jew is remarkable, though some may judge that it boded ill for the future when power relations were reversed and Christianity itself was turned into an ethnic tradition.