Mattias Gassman (University of Oxford)
Since Guignebert 1923, much effort has gone into studying Christians deviant from episcopal norms (e.g., Frankfurter, MacMullen). The existence of non-Christian counterparts of Guignebert’s “semi-Christians” has been recognized (e.g., by Cameron), but their beliefs have received much less attention. This article studies two late Roman people who had articulately non-Christian ways of seeing god, humanity, and the cosmos, but nonetheless adopted a few distinctively Christian beliefs or philosophical ideas.
The first example is Augustine’s correspondent Nectarius. An eminent citizen of Calama in North Africa, he contacted Augustine after rioters burned down a basilica in 408. Sometimes taken to be a Christian (Hermanowicz), sometimes a pagan (Magalhães de Oliveira), Nectarius occupies an ambiguous position. The son of a Christian, he is—maybe—on the path to the heavenly city (Augustine, Ep. 91.2) and offers fulsome praise for Augustine’s rejection of temples and idols (Nectarius, Ep. 103.1). Augustine neither treats him as a Christian nor ranks him among his pagan opponents (91.10). However, Nectarius avows to believe that “all laws” (~ religions; cf. Symmachus, Relatio 21) lead to the city of God, and pins his hope on the Ciceronian promise of heaven for the good statesman (e.g., Atkins; 103.2). He is a Ciceronian and not a Christian, but neither is he a worshipper of many gods.
By Nectarius’ day, Platonism had come to dominate Latin philosophical reflection. A (probably) early example is Calcidius’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. The work reflects a largely Middle Platonist view of the universe, and the hints of Christianity are not sufficient to identify Calcidius as a Christian (Reydams-Schils, contra Waszink). They are nonetheless more substantial, in one vital area, than has generally been recognized (Somfai, Bakhouche): his view of intermediary spirits and practical cult. Calcidius links the invention of traditional polytheism to a flood narrative rooted in Plato, Laws 3, but adapted to the Christian and Jewish belief in a verus deus (Commentarius 128). He not only identifies the good daemones with the scriptural “holy angels” (a much-commented move), but removes any mention of multiple gods in his account of mediation, despite his acceptance of the stars’ divinity (132). The intermediary spirits are thus split, as in Christian thought, between messengers with direct access to the supreme and true God and the servants of his adversary (133). Calcidius claims, however, that the angels’ mediation has been experienced by “all Greece, Latium, and Barbary,” and his discussion of divination (e.g., 185) confirms that this includes both biblical and Classical cult. Calcidius thus embraces a Christian way of thinking about human-divine communication, endorses Christianity as a superior “sect” with a “history holier” than Homer (55, 126), but ultimately slots Christianity into a polytheistic view of the world.
To proliferate new terms in our religious typology (e.g., “semi-pagans”) is only to add epicycles to an imperfect model. However, in discussing the complex reality of late antique religion, we must reckon not just with deviations from Christian norms, but also with non-Christian interest in Christian thought.