Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

978 conclusion
and pagan philosophers travelled in the sixth century on religious pilgrimages
to sacred spots in Syria and wrote important and lasting commentaries
on Aristotle. 18 How far Christianity had completely won over the
population at large by the late sixth century is still an open question: St
Nicholas of Sion in Lycia, like pope Gregory in Sardinia, found country
people prone to folk practices connected with sacred trees, and it was still
more than worth while for Christian literature to insist on the superiority
of the faith over ‘Hellenism’. Far from indicating an inexorable advance of
Christianity towards the position it occupied in the medieval world, this
diversity of belief and practice gives late antiquity a vividness and life
hardly paralleled in any other period. Another feature of the period is the
evident vigour of the well-to-do Jewish communities in Palestine,
confident and settled enough to build and decorate substantial synagogues,
and numerous enough to attract Christian suspicion and distrust during the
Persian invasions of the early seventh century. Christians themselves were
divided and sometimes persecuted by fellow Christians in the name of
religious unity. There was nothing monolithic about late antique religion.
Late antiquity was a time of change, mental and psychological. It was not
a revolution, not an enlightenment, not the discovery of a New World. But
the change did involve, as well as the closing in of some of the old, the shifting
of mental horizons and the construction of new imagined worlds. The
clearest sign of this change is in the breaking down of existing barriers, with
a corresponding sense of possibility. Yet a parallel struggle was going on to
control the many possibilities that were opening up. 19 It was both a psychological
struggle and a struggle of cognition. This was still a world in which
Dionysos and Orpheus were very much alive, whether in imaginative recreations
in visual art, or in the exotic mélange of memory and fancy that is
Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, where the signs of the zodiac exercised a lively fascination,
where astrologers at once sprang to mind when someone needed
advice, and where a philosopher could still appeal to the example of Heracles
and Asclepius, and hold up for imitation the teachings of Pythagoras. It was
a world in which synagogues in Galilee or elsewhere were decorated with a
rich profusion of plant life, zodiacal signs or even figures such as Orpheus. 20
It was not surprising that so many people tried so hard to lay down sure
guidelines. His disciples reported with admiration the loathing which St
Euthymius felt for heresy, spelling out with relish the six types which he
most detested. As the possibilities of error proliferated, so did the polemics
and the denunciations. Public confrontations took place under the auspices
of the emperor, as when a hundred or so eastern monks debated
Monophysitism in Constantinople in the early years of Justinian. Justinian
and his wife liked nothing better than to debate with the Monophysite
18 Chuvin, Chronique; Tardieu (1990). 19 Lim (1995). 20 Levine (1981).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008