A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

and imagery of the Bible. He was remarkable for a Christian of his time in being
able to read Hebrew and thus the Old Testament in its original language. He kept
an extraordinarily open mind. His pupil, Gregory of Thaumaturgus, recorded that
‘Origen saw fit for us to study philosophy by reading with our entire energies all
the writings of the ancients, both philosophers and poets, rejecting nothing and
refusing nothing. He excepted only the works of the atheists [by whom he would
have meant the Epicureans, who believed that the gods did not exist].’ 11 (I will
discuss Origen more fully in Chapter Ten.)
Yet the mid third century was a time of persecution for Christians. It was
stimulated by their rejection of the traditional gods of the Roman Empire,
especially by their refusal to carry out the sacrifices that were at the core of
ritual. When the empire was under pressure, as it was in the the third and early
fourth centuries, it was easy to believe that this refusal to sacrifice had offended
the gods, who had then withdrawn their support from the empire. Persecution of
Christians was as much about their refusal to sacrifice as about their actual
beliefs, yet there were also deep-rooted prejudices against them. Christian
services were ridiculed as occasions for cannibalism (the eating of the body of
Christ) or sexual debauchery (a misinterpretation of Christian ‘love’).
Christianity was seen as an upstart religion, and its growth and vitality appeared
to threaten traditional worship.
So here was a contradiction - a society that normally tolerated free debate was
persecuting one of its minorities. A few thoughtful pagans spotted the problem.
The matter was raised, for instance, by the philosopher Porphyry in a work
called Philosophy from Oracles, which survives only in fragments. 12 Porphyry
had been born in 234 in Tyre. He provides an excellent example of how a scholar
could exploit the intellectual resources of the empire. As a young man he had
studied with Origen in nearby Caesarea. However, he never converted to
Christianity and progressed to Athens, the centre of pagan philosophy, before
moving west to Rome, where he studied with the distinguished Neoplatonist
philosopher Plotinus. It was Porphyry who published Plotinus’ famous Enneads
after the great philosopher’s death. The Philosophy from Oracles is probably a
work of Porphyry’s old age. (It is first mentioned in 305 and may have been
completed just before then.) Porphyry accepts the importance of tolerance of
religious belief and is one of the first to talk of there being different paths to the
truth, a view echoed by Themistius sixty years later. Among these paths are
those of the philosophers and those of traditional religious cults, all of which