From the Sun God to the Son of God . . .

By the third century A.D., over two hundred thousand of Rome’s million inhabitants were on welfare. Depression, loneliness, and the meaninglessness of their existence had caught up with them in the high-rise tenement anonymity. Their inherited lack of self-worth was only medicated by cheap sensual thrills; and the precariousness and insecurity pervading the Roman world had translated itself into their desire to see other people get debased and hurt. This class was the ‘Mob,’ a dangerous and powerful animal whose sensibility extended well beyond the fifth of the city’s population it composed, effecting the freedmen, bondsmen, slaves and servants, and a great part of the upper class as well.

But the situation in Rome was merely a symptom of the disease infecting the empire as a whole, which was overextended, bankrupt, and composed of a widespread, multi-ethnic lower class for which it could no longer provide physically or emotionally. By the third century A.D., the sensibility of the Mob in Rome was merely a symptom of the disease infecting the empire as a whole, which was overextended, bankrupt, and composed of a widespread, multi-ethnic lower class for which it could no longer provide physically or emotionally. Spending their days at the baths or watching the games in the half-a-dozen amphitheatres around the city only furthered their need for something more to hold onto – a need which the government could no longer fulfill, only mollify with bread and circuses. Their politicians were corrupt, their arts and letters stale, and each bad emperor served to undo more and more the work of the good ones. In short, they had no one to trust anymore. Yet wild beast hunters and swordsmen facing death in a variety of more or less inglorious forms in the arena they could trust. There was nothing to hide out there. And with little else to live for, it was not uncommon for fans to throw themselves on the funeral pyres of favorite gladiators and charioteers.

The impetus of Western Civilization was petering out, the endless reproduction of Greek bronzes in Roman marble similar to the rash of lyrics, rhythms and back-beats from earlier decades copied by today’s musicians. The increasingly banal repetition of Greco-Roman culture in the form of cities each with their temples to Rome and Augustus, and villas decorated with the same frescos and sculptures, had opened the door for its own dilution – a gradual dilution eerily similar to the way in which the former stanchions of Microsoft, Levis and MTV are today being subverted by the Chinese.

Moreover, the traditional Western religious beliefs – the concept of the individual at the whims of mercurial deities that were basically larger versions of himself – were incapable of fulfilling the needs of a populace increasingly confronted with the scope, potential and danger of the world surrounding them. Trajan had brought them the Persian Gulf, Hadrian Scotland; Antoninus Pius gave them the fruits of the ‘Pax Romana.’ But Marcus Aurelius – through the essentially defensive campaigns against the barbarian tribes – brought them the realization of the decline of their times.

The meaninglessness of their existence caught up with them in the high-rise apartment anonymity of living in a city of a million people. The economic tangle of cheap foreign labor rendered them unemployed, and just another product of a generational welfare society. The insecurity and feeling of precariousness silently undermining the Roman world – the losses in Germania, the shrinking frontiers – was developing a new kind of need, a need to believe in something more. It was opening, not merely the door to their culture, but the door to their souls, leaving them ripe for the opportunity of being infused with new religious life. This vulnerability was perhaps best evinced by the growing popularity of eastern mystery cults, certain characteristics of which exerted a pull upon a populace suffering from depression and loneliness. The increased emphasis on the individual in these cults, and their sensory-laden liturgies – which provided the comfort of the shared meal and the supernatural – offered the attraction of strong feelings, and a sense of belonging devoid in the formalistic worship of the Roman gods, and formerly felt only in the Colosseum.

Exposed to a religious ferment that had been stirring for centuries in the Mediterranean basin, an increasing awareness was spreading across the Roman Empire – the globalization of a world seeking a synthesis between knowledge and faith as it teetered on the verge of great change. Though none of the divinities of these mystery cults were members of the traditional Western pantheon, the Greeks and Hellenized Easterners had been transporting and adapting them for a thousand years, making their diffusion and compatibility with the classical Western gods more flexible. With the free passage and melding of many different races and cultures, the interchange of sensibilities and ideas enabled by the ‘Pax Romana,’ these religious syncretisms had become essential to both peace and commerce. Thus colonial officials had long been charged with studying the attributes of the native gods of each newly acquired province, and matching them with the traditional ones in a policy of practical religious subversion – a subversion which, in time, began to work in reverse.

Cybele, the Earth Mother goddess, was the first non-traditional religion to be legitimized in Rome, in the third century B.C. during the Punic Wars against Carthage, when Hannibal was ravaging the countryside and meteor showers terrifying the populace. Referred to by her celibate priests as both ‘Great Mother’ and ‘Holy Virgin,’ she was soon followed by Isis – fertility goddess of the Nile – and gods of the Greek east like Adonis and Salambo in the early empire. The Roman legions stationed in Palestine were largely responsible for the importation of some of these gods, most notably Mithras, Zeus-Heliopolitanus and the Syro-Phoenician Baals.

Diffuse and disjointed, elusive and volatile, each of these cults evoked a spirituality dazzled by ecstasies, presences and emanations, by demons and angelic hosts. Regardless of their iconographical differences, however, their gods had one key thing in common which differed from those of Greece and Rome (and which increased their appeal in the face of economic depression and shrinking frontiers). For each of them, both inside and outside the body, offered total security of the soul. Thus they came to be known as ‘salvation religions.’

A caesura was coming in history which would make Julius Caesar look like a street-side juggler. That caesura was the advent of a new religion, and the assimilation of all others into that religion. Not simply to facilitate peace and commerce, but to facilitate control.

In the midst of these clamorous cults came a quiet one that stemmed from a carpenter in Palestine. Sources in agreement ranging from the Roman historian, Tacitus, to the Biblical book of Acts suggest that Christianity set forth out of Judea under the Emperor Caligula in the 30s A.D. It was introduced to the city of Alexandria by the apostle Mark, who founded what is today the oldest branch of the Christian church. Perceived as just another of these eastern mystery cults at first, it exercised a pull upon the lower classes with its belief that all people were created equal. In the first century A.D., however, the Classical Western belief system was still deeply ingrained – a belief system based upon the idea that people are either born to rule, born to serve, or born to die. The thought that all men might be created equal, and all have ‘God’ inside, was not only absurd, but dangerous in its implication of social leveling.

On the night of July 18th, 64 A.D., a great fire broke out in the Circus Maximus which spread to completely destroy three of Rome’s fourteen regions and severely damage seven others. Tacitus speaks of it as one of the greatest disasters to ever befall mankind, and it was during this conflagration that Nero supposedly fiddled while Rome burned, and directly afterwards embarked upon his great palace-building campaign. Having quite possibly ordered the fire started, the emperor needed a scapegoat; and, with an ideology that had spread inexplicably out of Palestine and which was considered low-brow and subversive to the system, the relatively small but stubborn Christian community in the city seemed ideal. Nero’s persecution marked the first organized, holocaust-like attempt to erase these perpetrators of the most radical new idea that history has ever seen. Hundreds of Christians were rounded up and executed publicly in the circuses, some crucified throughout the emperor’s garden grounds, doused in pitch and set aflame to provide lighting for his night-time debauches. It was in this wave of persecutions that the apostles Peter and Paul – both in Rome at the time – were arrested and executed. Paul, as a Roman citizen with a right to a merciful execution, was taken out the eastern city gate and beheaded. Peter, not being a Roman citizen, was crucified in the circus of Caligula at the base of the Vatican hill. Fifteen hundred years later, these martyrdoms would form one of the key defenses of the Roman Church against Martin Luther’s Reformation.

For the next two hundred and fifty years after the Neronian holocaust, Christianity was more or less steadily persecuted by the Roman state. Its initial pull upon the lower classes, however, grew with the widening of those classes throughout the empire to encompass an innumerable amount of slaves, bondsmen, freedmen and tradesmen, all living under the authority of Rome. The more Christianity was persecuted the more it grew, until under the emperor Diocletian in the late 280s A.D., an estimated 144,000 Christians were executed in the city of Alexandria alone.

By this point, the Roman Empire was fragmenting politically. Too large and diverse to be administered from a single capital by a single ruler, Diocletian devised a scheme to split it into a so-called tetrarchy, or ‘rule of four.’ Thus the empire was officially divided into a western and an eastern half, with one emperor presiding over each. Diocletian installed his comrade Maximian as emperor in Rome, while he took responsibility for the East. They each in turn adopted junior emperors to be their designated successors – Galerius in the East, and Constantius in the West, who in turn chose two further juniors.

The nature of power being what it is, this system did not succeed. After Diocletian abdicated in 305 and forced Maximian to do the same, the empire passed to Galerius and Constantius. Constantius died in 306 and his junior was challenged and defeated by Maximian’s son, Maxentius, who seized control of Rome. When Galerius died in 312, Constantius’ son, Constantine, invaded Italy. Routing Maxentius’ northern army at Turin and Verona, on October 28, 312 A.D., Constantine also wrested the city of Rome and the western half of the empire from him. What started as a cavalry skirmish between forward scouts of both armies at a defile on the Cassian Road at Saxa Rubra, continued downhill to the Tiber and across the Milvian Bridge – still intact a short walk from the northern city gate – ending in the conquest of the capital.

SYNCHRONICITY

The German psychologist Carl Jung defined ‘synchronicity’ in terms of ‘events having a coincidence in time which, because of this, elicits the feeling that some much deeper motivation is involved.’ Having spread like wildfire through the lower classes over the preceding two hundred and fifty years, by 312 A.D., as much as a third of the population of the Rome facing Constantine may have belonged to the Christian ‘church,’ or at the least looked upon it with sympathy. Nor could he have been ignorant of this fact. Like their counterparts in cities throughout the empire, these people needed a sense of belonging to something besides birth – a sense of belonging to something instead of being held down by it – of being held down by heredity, and the lifeless formalities of the state religion kept in favor by what they most probably perceived as a geriatric upper class intent on keeping them down. The sources say that Constantine’s mother was even a Christian convert. Whatever the case, before the famous Battle of the Milvian Bridge, he claimed to have seen a vision of the cross in the sky and heard a voice from nowhere and everywhere at once say, ‘In this sign you shall conquer.’ With this battle, the official history of Christian Rome begins, and history was set on an irreversible course from which the Christian faith was indelibly linked not only to the Roman state but the Western world.

The Empress Helena was installed in pre-existing imperial property on the Lateran hill, in a suburban villa originally built by the Severan Dynasty, known as the Sessorium. Today, to a discerning eye, large ruins of this villa still remain, not least of which are those of what were its own private amphitheatre. Most prominent is the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, which Helen constructed to house what she claimed was the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified, which she brought back from a documented pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 330s A.D.

And yet there was a small hiatus – a last chance for paganism – during the reign of Julian the Apostate (360-363 A.D.), who backslid into a worship of the old gods in the face of the already apparent corruption involved with the new. Actually ‘converting’ to paganism after being reared a Christian, Julian’s Neo-Platonism – a synthesis of Platonic wisdom with strong devotional and ritual practice – presented a stunning refutation of the Christian power base, and a crucial buffet in the path Constantine set the world on fifty years before. History has idealized Julian as much as it has vilified him, but what is fact is that he sought hard to strengthen the Roman Empire, and even died in battle leading its army against a rejuvenated Persia – the progenitor of modern Islam. As an intellectual, Julian emphasized the Greco-Roman cultural tradition in all of its aspects and implications, and sought the advancement and progression of it at a time when the ‘Psychic Break’ had not yet been finalized.

But Julian’s vision ended with his death. And ninety-eight years after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge – in 410 A.D. – the city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, irreparably damaging the civic infrastructure and plunging the West into a decline most evocatively known as the Dark Ages.

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