Christian Assimilation of "Pagan" Elements: An Apologetic Concept?

New Perspectives on Late Antiquity

New Perspectives on Late Antiquity

Edited by

David Hernández de la Fuente

New Perspectives on Late Antiquity, Edited by David Hernández de la Fuente

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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Copyright © 2011 by David Hernández de la Fuente and contributors

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ISBN (10): 1-4438-2718-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2718-8

CHRISTIAN ASSIMILATION OF “PAGAN” ELEMENTS:

AN APOLOGETIC CONCEPT?

MIGUEL HERRERO DE JÁUREGUI

1. Assimilation and resistance Novelties in Altertumswissenschaft come from new evidence or from new approaches. In a volume dedicated to the latter in Late Antiquity, I would like to follow the trend of the last thirty years and discuss a concept that turned itself into a novelty decades ago, as an overcoming of the traditional “conflictual paradigm” that viewed the religious panorama of Late Antiquity in terms of pure struggle pagans vs. Christians as simple, reductionist and loaded with apologetic connotations. “Assimilation” has been the most popular term to express the idea that relations betweens Christianity and other religions were not only conflictual but that many elements of Christianity were originated in other surrounding religions. And indeed this concept paid great service to scholarship and allowed to analyse much evidence from a better perspective. In our days, however, it is the destiny of any generalizing category—and those words with the abstract Latin suffix –tio in it are particularly prone to suffer it—to be subject to critical scrutiny, confronted against the evidence which does not adjust to it, and be restricted in its usage to a narrow meaning, often downgraded to a humble usage between quotation marks (e. g. “pagan”). Unless it is not overtly inadequate—and this is evidently not the case—this kind of traditional categories are seldom rejected, since they are born precisely because they spring from the evidence itself. They just take a subtler, more nuanced, and therefore more useful and precise meaning.

In this paper I will argue that it can be misleading to present assimilation as the only alternative to conflict, as if both dimensions stood as the only two possible hermeneutical tools. Indeed, expressions like “assimilation and resistance” are common in scholarship as if they covered the entire ground of possibilities. Thus they are defined against the other

Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui

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and assimilation becomes, therefore, an antonym of conflict and separation, implying peaceful coexistence between the otherwise conflicting sides, increasing convergence of values, and ultimately the fusion of originally different entities into one. What I will try to show is that if this model accounts for a large part of reality, as “conflict” also does, it is inadequate to interpret many other parts of the Late Antique evidence which simply are not concerned with the boundary-building or boundary-blurring between the different religious identities. In other words, I will try to show that assimilation, defined as it is as the opposite of conflict, is also carrying the heavy inheritance of the apologetic literature, whose primary concern is to build a religious identity for a specific group (e. g. the Christians)1. Once these boundaries are firmly settled, an element may be rejected or assimilated. It tends, therefore, to assign a religious denomination of origin to any single element under discussion. That was indeed the goal of much of the ancient Christian literature which tried to build a completely coherent system which encompassed all areas of life. But, although rejection or assimilation are undoubtedly present, that is not necessarily always the case.

If one looks to the actual use of the word “assimilation” when applied to modern problems—often accompanied by its counterpart “and resistance”—it is most often linked to ethnic boundary-breaking. The same occurs, in fact, in scholarship on the ancient world. A recent history of Roman Spain says: “assimilation, acculturation, Romanisation... though different historians have their own preferred word (and may pretend, by using one in preference to another, that their approach has greater sociological or anthropological validity), all these expressions refer to the same process, whereby the behaviour, customs and lifestyle of the conquered population gradually become compatible with and, in the ideal model, indistinguishable from, those of the conqueror”2. Now it is well 1 This is the sense in which I will use “apologetic” throughout this paper. It can be directly addressed to the (real or virtual) pagan audience, like Clement’s Protrepticus or Origen’s Contra Celsum, or to an internal Christian audience which is constantly defined, however, in contrast to the non-Christian, be it Pagan, Jewish or heretic (the Clement’s Stromata or the theological works of Origen). On Christian apologetic literature, cf. Edwards / Goodman / Price 1999. On the creation of Christian identity, cf. n. 3. 2 Curchin 1991, 55, whose title is “Conquest and Assimilation”. “Assimilation and resistance” is the subtitle of the book of Frankfurter 1998 on religion in Roman Egypt. A French colloquium (ed. Puppidi 1976) was called “Assimilation et résistance à la culture gréco-romaine”. Such dichotomies, like “Tradition and innovation”, are characteristically frequent as titles of conferences in order to cover up the maximum possible diversity of subject-matters.

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known that the most forceful and succesful attempts of early Christian thinkers to build an identity for the members of the new religion were precisely those who defined Christianity in ethnic terms: the people of god, the new Israel, etc3. To put it in the popular terms of the cognitivists, Christian apologists create a conceptual metaphor, that of the Christian nation or people, and the concept of assimilation is suspiciously coherent with it—and therefore all-too-likely to highlight only those aspects consistent with the apologetic Weltanschauung and hide those which are not4.

There are two more texts relevant to this introduction: More than thirty years ago Peter Brown, talking about the relationship between town and village in Syria, tries to “disengage from this vast topic aspects of the theme of assimilation and resistance... they presuppose a relationship between two elements in a society. If the relationship does not exist, then the theme itself cannot be said to have any significance as a historical process”. He concludes that the dichotomy cannot be applied to the town/village because it was a non-relationship. There is no possible dialogue when there is only complete silence5. Now with this thought in mind let us refer to a recent book by Isabella Sandwell, where she compares John Chrysostom and Libanius approach to religious identity in the same city, 4th century Antioch. In the fourth century, she argues, “there were competing ways of understanding the place and role of religion: on the one hand, clear-cut notions of religious identity, as proposed by Chrysostom, and on the other hand, more strategic and practical uses of religious allegiance, as represented by Libanius. The former approach was accompanied by an understanding of social interaction in which religious factors were central, the latter by one in which they were marginal”.6 If the dichotomy pagan / Christian was primordial for the former approach, it played a minor role for the latter approach, in which religious affiliation was (deliberately or not) ignored. Combining both quotations, it is easy to see that if conflict and / or assimilation are central questions in for the first (apologetic) approach, they are largely irrelevant for the second, in which there is no dialogue between pagans and Christians for these are not self-defining categories. I will concentrate in this second approach, which the ancient sources, primarily concerned with apologetics, neglect.

Enough of methodology. Let us go down to the matter with the examination of some real evidence. I will test this idea using three 3 Lieu 2004, Buell 2005. 4 Lakoff / Johnson 1981 is the foundational text. 5 Brown 1976, 214ff 6 Sandwell 2007, 279.


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different types of evidence: images, rites, and poetry. As I will hope to show, the convergence of results from diverse types of materials independently interpreted (and as we shall see, by other scholars too) seems to support the validity of the conclusions which I have put forward.

2. Images: Orpheus in Christian contexts In order to avoid the arrogance and universal reproach sometimes conveyed by this kind of studies on redefinition, I will start with an accusation on myself which exemplifies how the wrong label, or the wrong question, may cause misconstruction. In the Spanish book which sprang from my dissertation on Orphic tradition in Christian apologetic literature I drew a very neat opposition between the Orpheus attacked by the apologists as champion of pagan religion (and held by pagan apologist as such too), and the Orpheus who would have announced the truth to pagans when he converted to monotheism; an obvious case, it would seem, of “conflict and assimilation”. So far so good, as long as we stay within the domain of apologetic literature with its neat distinctions. But the situation turns more complex when approaching the much-debated images of the Christian Orpheus, or rather, of Orpheus in Christian contexts.

These images are divided into two groups .The first one is the very particular case of the Seal of Berlin (Fig. 1), a magical gem lost in the Second World War which shows a crucified figure crowned with stars and labelled by an inscription as “Bacchic Orpheus”.7 I conventionally labelled it as “syncretism”, which we may legitimately consider a special instance of assimilation.8 However, I also called “assimilation” a very different group of images, those of a singer or lyre-player (Christ) dressed as Orpheus found in several Christian catacombs and sarcophagi (fig. 2). I supposed that if the first one showed a fusion of two figures, Christ and Orpheus, into one, the second one presented Christ as Orpheus. The

7 This seal has been thought to be a forgery, but these suspicions are now generally discarded. See all bibliography in Herrero 2010, 123 (the English revised version). 8 However, led by the inertia of the idea that what is not conflict must be assimilation, I gave as a literary parallel the famous passage of the Historia Augusta which in a largely fictional portrait of the Emperor Alexander Severus says that he had in his private altar images of Apollonios, Christ, Abraham and Orpheus. In fact there is no syncretism inthe latter and the fictional Alexander Severus holds these figures as parallel, but independent theoi andres, and he also venerates other figures like Vergil, Cicero, Achilles and Alexander the Great. Cf. Herrero 2010, 124. I wish I had read before the illuminating article on this passage by Bertrand-Dagenbach 1997.


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former case, I thought, constituted an instance of uncontrolled assimilation and the second of controlled one. A distinction, let us note in passing, in which orthodoxy played the fundamental role.

Following the overwhelming scholarly tradition, I interpreted that in the images of the catacombs, instead of fusing both personalities into one, the external features of Orpheus would have been borrowed by the Christians to characterize Christ and therefore suit the tastes of the most philo-Hellene tastes of their people. Of course there is a textual parallel case which has been often adduced as interpretative key for these images. Clement of Alexandria begins his Protrepticus presenting the Christian Logos as the true Orpheus, who with his songs liberates men and leads them to life, while the Orpheus of the Greek mysteries enslaves them and subjects them to death. Even if most scholars do not think that the paintings could have been inspired by Clement’s text (though the contrary is possible), the text, with all its apologetic message, lures unconsciously into their minds—including, of course, my own—when confronting the paintings of this allegedly Orpheus / Christ.

That is, in effect, the crux of the matter. There is absolutely nothing in all these paintings to suggest that they represent Christ, but nevertheless, the force of the Christian context in which they are found leads us to think that they do, instead of taking the most obvious solution, i. e. that they simply depict Orpheus. Such images may indeed have suggested that idea to Clement, since he approached them with an apologetic mindset in which everything contributed to the building of a firm frontier between Christianity and “paganism”. Therefore he uses the mechanism of assimilation in order to adapt Orpheus to the Christian needs. However, the view of the scholar should in principle be free of this apologetic viewpoint and should try to interpret the images as close as possible as their commissioners, painters and viewers interpreted them. And again, although some viewers other than Clement may have liked to identify that figure with Christ, there is nothing that leads to think that the painters did. For them, and for those that told them to paint the Thracian singer with his traditional attributes, there was no assimilation whatsoever. He was just Orpheus, the same decorative figure, with some associations with mysticism and music, that was so popular in many other mosaics and frescoes along the whole Roman Empire. This is not assimilation, at least in the sense in which we are used to think of it. It is rather a shared way of decorating walls and sarcophagi, just as if there were geometrical or vegetal motifs we would not speak of Christian assimilation of pagan elements. “Assimilation” comes later, when apologetic-minded viewers


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redefine the pagan / Christian boundary to include these paintings into one side or the other9.

Such was the view I adopted in my later revision of the work to translate it into English,10 but I can claim no credit for it. All must be given to an enlightening book by Laurence Vieillefon on the image of Orpheus in Late Antiquity: as she shows, the way of representing Orpheus and the probable meaning of the image seems exactly the same in all contexts, regardless of they being pagan or Christian. And therefore she boldly, and rightly, argues, against the overwhelmingly predominant scholarly tradition, that we are not dealing with Orpheus / Christ, but with just Orpheus.11 To talk of assimilation there introduces a category which is alien to the primary interpretation of the image.

Perhaps I have been marked by that experience and therefore I give too much weight to the possible misplacements which can be brought by the wrong understanding of “assimilation”. But I do not think it is just scholarly hysterics. Vieillefon’s book was published in the same year as an important article by Jas Elsner entitled “Archaeologies and agendas” suggested that traditional labels like “Early Christian art” or “Jewish art” do not generally respond to true artistic or historiographical criteria, but to the more or less conscious projection of modern ideas on how religions interrelate12. Such modern ideas come, surely enough, from the efforts of many contemporary texts which try with apologetic zeal to build boundaries of separation and occasionally some bridges to cross them under control. But we must not remember that these texts come from a very active and successful group, the apologists, who did not, however, represent the general (let alone unanimous!) attitude of religious men, be they Christians or pagans, in the first centuries of our era. Of course the conflictual dimension (and with it its assimilative counterpart) gained 9 A similar explanation may perhaps be given to the two instances of Orpheus’ images in Jewish contexts (cf. bibliography in Roessli 2008). In the synagogue of Dura Europos (3rd cent. CE) there is a painting of the singer Orpheus. In a 6th cent. CE mosaic from Gaza an inscription proves beyond doubt the identification with David. The second is a case of assimilation like Clement’s text (who also mentions David, Protr. 1.5.1), the former is not. In any case, the Gaza mosaic cannot serve as interpretative key of the paintings in Christian catacombs more than 200 years earlier. 10 Cf. Herrero 2010, 116, correcting 2007, 100ff (although still using too freely “assimilation” as a category). Bibliography on the images of Orpheus in Christian contexts is given there (cf. also next note). 11 Vieillefon 2003, with full previous bibliography. 12 Elsner 2003. Cf. the observations in Fine 2005, 51f. on Elsner’s scholarly evolution until arriving to this conclusion


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much relevance from the mid-second century onwards, but nevertheless we need not think that it ever attained the total omnicomprehension which would allow it to be the only interpretative key of any piece of evidence.

3. Funerary rites Let us now turn from an art which turned out to be more secular than it was thought to the most religious of domains, the attitude before death, as exemplified in funerary rites. The continuity and similarities between pagan and Christian rites has been one of the favourite subjects of the historians of religions of all times and it would be futile even to attempt at a selection or a summary here. Let us just focus on one significant instance which illuminates the approach with which such research is undertaken. Much of the most careful and best explained research on rites in Late Antiquity has been carried out by the historian Ramsay MacMullen. In his Christianity and Paganism in the fourth to eighth century he has a chapter entitled, appropriately enough, “assimilation”, in which his declared aim is to show how large was “the flow of practice and belief from the old faith into the new”13. He shows, therefore, how many of the daily rituals, and also of the more extraordinary ones, kept a fundamental continuity in pagan and Christian practices. “The identical nature of the Christian and non-Christian cult of the dead appears not only in its physical details themselves, all of those just reviews being of the third century and so at the earliest end of the chain of information we possess; but they are clear as well in the impossibility, sometimes, of determining which religion is represented by a given piece of evidence... for various reasons, none of them decisive, this epitaph and burial may be judged Christian or not; but it hardly matters. Sarcophagi with symbols and reliefs made for pagan customers were used by Christians... or it may equally be said: for hundreds of years the pagan cult of the dead was a common part of Christianity”.

This paragraph is very true and it is proven with great wealth of detail. Only the last sentence takes it to a doubtful conclusion, i. e. that these were truly pagan rites assimilated into Christianity. What this identity of funerary practices precisely shows is that for the practitioners of this rites the labelling of these as pagan or Christian was not relevant. Why, if not carried by a faint rest of the apologetic perspective, should we impose these labels upon them? The fact that Christianity is later than paganism, i. e. that it is a “newcomer” to these rites, is in fact of no relevance for the

13 MacMullen 1999, 109.


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knowledge of these rites, above all in the third century and later when Christianity is not any more a recent phenomenon14. What are we exactly trying to show by denying “authentic Christianness” to these rites?

Throughout all his work MacMullen himself has done much to show that Christianity, regardless of what pastoral and apologetic literature may say, often did not make much a difference in people’s lives, and that after converting their rhythms, actions and thoughts remained quite the same than before15. However, it is paradoxical that he applies the conversion paradigm by labelling elements as pagan—before such conversion took place—and Christian—after it. The idea of passing from the older to the newer is in fact wholly consistent with the metaphor of conversion as a spatial movement, but it does not need to reflect a historical real process16. To call the old “pagan” and the new “Christian” imposes upon funerary rites a label which makes very little, if any, difference precisely in the cases he shows. Leaving apart whether there might be a more or less conscious apologetic agenda in such paradox17, the fact is that it is almost inevitable that any analysis based on the dichotomy pagans / Christians will end up falling into the old trap.

If we depart instead from the contrary default idea, i. e. that unless there is an explicit allegiance to a religious group in a piece of evidence within its context, we should not impose it automatically, perhaps the

14 In fact the straightforward idea of dependence of Christian rites on pagan predecessors is very questionable also for the previous centuries. As Smith 1991 showed in classic work, the idea of dependence of Christianity on Greek mystery cults is itself heavily loaded with apologetics and originates in the Protestant polemics against Catholic religiosity. There was no “original” un-Greek Christianity (just as there was no Christian Greek different from the koine), but Christianity was born into the same Hellenistic background than the rest of mystery cults. 15 Cf. MacMullen 1983, 1984, 1986. He reacts against A. D. Nock (1933) idea of conversion as a decisive phenomenon. Cf. Herrero 2005 with further bibliography. 16 Cf. once again the beginning of Clement’s Protrepticus: “let them abandon Helicon and Cithaeron, turned old, and live in Sion” (1.2.3); Orpheus is the old song, the Logos is the new song (1.2.4-5), etc. I analyse conversion as a spatial metaphor in Herrero 2005. 17 The final sentence of the book (admitedly a place suit for rhetoric) leaves open the doubt of whether there is a program behind the word assimilation: “the triumph of the church was not one of obliteration but of widening embracement and assimilation” (MacMullen 1999, 159). Besides, the finding of “pagan elements into Christianity” is a temptation hard to resist in part because of the bewilderment, slightly scandalized, that it continues to cause in the audience, as it did in the 19th century.


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ritual practices which are not evidently Christian will be considered something more than acts of resistance to episcopal orthodoxy, survivals of paganism creeping into Christianity, efforts to assimilate the Hellenic heritage into Christian Weltanschauung, or similar judgments. If we stop thinking like the bishop or the preacher who would condemn any piece of evidence, e. g. a funerary epitaph, as unsatisfactorily non-allegiant (or if we stop focusing on how it must have scandalized ancient bishops and also some modern readers), perhaps we will come closer to understand what the defunct under the epitaph or the family who placed it meant with it.

4. Poetry: Gregory of Nazianzus Our third element of analysis is even more difficult to place in the non-apologetic perspective, for if there was an element which served religious-identitarian discourse in Late Antiquity, that was precisely poetry. The ancient poets were compared to the Bible by apologists of both sides, Christians to show the impiety of Homeric gods, pagans to show the lack of beauty of and majesty of the biblical portrait of the divine18. As a culmination of such dispute, Julian’s most extreme measure was to forbid the teaching of Greek poetry to Christians. In reality, he carried to the end the consequences of centuries of apologetic attack, when justifying his decree he said: “if they think that these (i. e. the ancient poets) were mistaken in respect to those they held in the highest honour (i. e. the gods), let them go to the churches of the Galilaeans and explain Matthew and Luke, since they are those in whom they trust when they set rules that take people apart from temples!”19

However, the measure raised great protests. A superficial observer might be surprised that the most forceful of these protests came precisely from Gregory of Nazianzus, who in many of his discourses had launched merciless attacks and mockeries on the Greek poets20. Still, he says: “he has expelled us from literature as stealers of an alien property, as if he

18 Cf. Celsus and Origen in Orig. CC. 1.18: “And challenging a comparison of book with book, I would say, "Come now, good sir, take down the poems of Linus, and of Musæus, and of Orpheus, and the writings of Pherecydes, and carefully compare these with the laws of Moses— histories with histories, and ethical discourses with laws and commandments—”. Cf. Herrero 2010, 219-295. 19 Iul. Ep. 36, 426 CD. 20 Cf. e. g. Or. 4.115, 31.16, analysed in Herrero 2010, 173-177. Note that the attack on Homer and Hesiod and the defense of the Christian right to Greek literature coincide in Discourse 4.


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could separate us from any art invented by the Greeks” (Or. 4, 5), and elsewhere “do you own Hellenism? Do you own Attic style? Do you own poetry?” (Or. 4, 107-108).

The same author who in many of his discourses mocked the theology of Greek poets complains now that they are as much his as Julian’s. It would be mistaken, however, to take his statements now as a pure exercise of cynicism. His feeling for poetry is true: Gregory’s poetic work, in fact, shows his love and dedication to Greek poetry in its most classical forms. What his apparent contradiction shows that in some cases the two attitudes exemplified by Sandwell in her aforementioned work in two different people, John Chrysostom and Libanius, could in fact coexist in the same person. On the issue of “what really matters to me is this” few people are the same all the time, since more often than not there is a “now” attached. It is even less the case of a polygonal figure as Gregory of Nazianzus. Let us quote these famous lines of his poem known as On his own poems21:

First, by working on other things, I wished to subdue my own unmeasuredness; indeed, though I write, I don’t write much when toiling on the metre. Secondly, for the young, especially such as love to read, I’d give this as some kind of cheering medicine, guiding the trustful to things most worthy, sweetening by artful means the commandments’ tartness. And the harpstring’s tension also likes relaxing if you want this too: if nothing else that these in place of songs and lyre-tunes. I have given you them for play, if you care to play a bit, least some injury should come to you in your contest for the good. A third thing I know affects me: not so important a thing, perhaps, but it has influenced me: to see to it that strangers have no advantage over us in literature. For their sake I speak in highly-coloured language, even though beauty, for us, is in contemplation. It is for you, O Sophists, that I write— Such is my lion-hearted gratitude! Fourth, I have found these poems a consolation when, weighed by illness, like an aging swan, I make the whistling of my wings a song:

21 PG 37, 1335ª33-55. Its real title in the manuscripts is On metre. I follow the translation of P. L. Gilbert (2001). There is a detailed commentary on this poem by Milovanovic-Barham (1997). On Gregory’s life and poetry, cf. Daley 2006 and McGuckin 2006.


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not mournful, but a kind of parting hymn. In these lines the Cappadocian Father four reasons to write poetry, two

of which could in fact be considered examples of “assimilation”: the second and the third reason aim to present the Christian message in the elegant form of hexametres, to make it easier to understand and admired and to counter pagan superiority in the field of poetry. Since it implies an adaptation of the Bible to hexametric poetry, this does indeed account for assimilation. Some forms of Christian poetry, including much of Gregory’s, fit perfectly into that pattern22. However, the first and four reasons given by the Cappadocian Father are different: to keep him from excess within measure (in writing?), and as a consolation for the pains of old age. They have nothing to do with conflict with paganism or with adaptation of Christianity. They have to do with Gregory’s wish to use poetry to cure his own psychological needs, a kind of poetic therapy which stands in a long tradition starting with no others than Homer and Plato. Gregory was familiar with that tradition since his early youth: he had not converted to it, or arrived late, but had been educated in it just as, for example, Julian or Libanius. Any Greek-speaking educated man, regardless of whether he was pagan or Christian, could have written poetry to gain internal measure and combat melancholy. This is what he does in his personal poetry, which, although Christian and evidently marked by religion, is not more “assimilation” of earlier tradition than Julian’s poetry might be.

As I said, the apologetic approach and the neutral one could coexist not only within the same city, but also within the same person. They were not so mutually exclusive as the published literature by people in office (e. g. John Chrysostom) could let us think. Even though he had to take the place of bishop much against his will, Gregory of Nazianzus remained an ascetic monk at heart. His fondness for “private literature” offers a glimpse on the rich and complex internal life which some people had beyond their public façade. So does Cicero seem very different in his public discourses, in his philosophical treatises, and in his private letters. And Gregory, of course, was not “assimilating Cicero”. He just happened to cultivate both private and public literature in many different genres.

The possibility of a Late Antique poetry, even with a religious subject-matter, which does not imply reactive or aggressive attitudes against the other side must be taken, therefore, into account, before imposing the 22 The best-known example is the cento Christus Patiens, which tells Christ’s Passion with lines from tragedy, specially Euripides’ Bacchai. It was probably composed by Gregory himself (cf. Trisoglio 1996).


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apologetic outlook into it. Synesius’ poetry is no that of a “superficial Christian” or even less a crypto-Pagan23. It is just the poetry of someone who, at least as a poet, is not primarily concerned with apologetics and religious identity. As other papers in this volume show, the vexed question of the Konfessionsangehörigkeit of Nonnus has recently changed under the light of the recent find in an Egyptian tomb of parchments of cloth with Dionysiac and Christian scenes24. The enigmatic Egyptian poet who wrote both the Paraphrasis to the Gospel of St. John and the Dionysiaca tends now not to be explained in terms of conversion (or crypto-conversion) from paganism to Christianity or viceversa, but perhaps as a poet who did not feel the incompatibility of writing hexametrical poetry about Christ and Dionysus. Of course from an orthodox and apologetic point of view this is rather condemnable, but we need not suppose that Nonnus shared such priestly perspective. Just as there is not any clear conflict, neither is any “assimilation” self-evident: it is true that he is innovating by telling Christ’s Gospel in hexametres, but he is also innovating by telling the entire Dionysus’ mythology in 48 books, an enterprise never attempted before to our knowledge. To think of both poems in Christian vs. Pagan terms seems less relevant than comparing them with other late antique poetry, whatever its religious affiliation may be.

5. Conclusion

The converging evidence from different corners (visual arts, rites, poetry) sums up to a solid result. Although it is clear that there are many cases that can be explained through the paradigm “conflict or assimilation”, others cannot, and therefore to label them as cases of “Christian assimilation of pagan elements” is misleading if there was not any conscience of Christian appropriation of formerly “pagan” elements. These labels are ubiquitous in apologetic literature, but not the whole spectrum of reality was tainted by the apologetic approach and its obsession with self-definition and “the Other”. Other paradigms like coexistence, continuity, change, rupture, abandonment, are preferable, in these cases, to concepts like assimilation, conflict or triumph, since they link the object under analysis “vertically” with the previous and later tradition, rather than “horizontally” with a fixed religious affiliation.

Of course none of this categories is pure and immaculate either. To put a trivial example, it is well known that in Late Antiquity the roll was

23 Cf. Bregman 1982, 65f. 24 Cf. Willers 1992 and the papers in this volume by Garcia-Gasco and Hernández de la Fuente.


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progressively abandoned in favour of the codex. Now, it is also clear that part of this evolution was due to the Christian preference for the codex for many reasons, while other communities (e. g. the Jews) rejected its use for identitarian reasons. However, it would be clearly mistaken to see this process primarily through the apologetic lenses and talk of it as a Christian triumph over paganism or Judaism, or as a late pagan assimilation of Christian ideology. The evolution of the writing techniques should be analysed in a purely material, non-religious ways, and there are many codicological arguments to show the objective advantages of the codex over the roll. And yet it is clear that religious conflict (and assimilation) also played a part in that process; just as Gregory of Nazianzus may have written some poems it for many different reasons, both apologetic and personal; just as some Christian performers of funerary rituals may have had the feeling that they were performing pagan rites hidden as Christian; or just as some Christian painter may have depicted a portrait of Orpheus with a vague idea of representing Christ. All this may of course have happened—and it surely did sometimes. This vagueness should bring no distress, but scholarly patience, precision and sincerity to acknowledge when we simply do not know: let stress, rigidity and unbreakable rules to the apologists.

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Christian Assimilation of "Pagan" Elements: An Apologetic Concept?

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