Pagans and Christians in the City by Steven D. Smith

Author:Steven D. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

1. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971), 73.

2. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 129 (describing “polytheists firmly established in small cities all over the eastern empire . . . up to and beyond the end of the sixth century”). Cf. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1993), 168–69: “In rural districts the country folk were deeply attached to old pagan customs, especially those associated with birth, marriage, and death. In the Western provinces the pastoral problem for centuries was to stamp out pagan superstitions among the peasants on the land. But in the towns, even in such Christian citadels as Syria and Asia Minor, clandestine rites, including occasional sacrifices, continued to be practiced as late as the seventh century.”

3. See, e.g., Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–19; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 2:71.

4. See above, 88.

5. See Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 439 (1968) (explaining that the Thirteenth Amendment allows Congress to regulate to address the “badges and incidents” of slavery).

6. See generally Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).

7. Cf. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 80 (“Throughout the Middle Ages, the stars still hung above Christian Europe, disquieting reminders of the immortality of the gods. The gods had left their names on the days of the week”).

8. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 54.

9. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 150–59. See also Peter Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63: “The [pagan] temples were by no means to be destroyed, but only the images which they housed. If the temples were well built they were to be consecrated to the service of God so that the people might continue to worship in familiar places. They should not be deprived of their customary sacrifices of oxen, but on appropriate days they should build wooden booths in the neighbourhood of former temples, now converted to Christian use, and celebrate with religious feasting, their animals no longer sacrificed to devils, but killed for their own food with thanksgiving to God.”

10. On the proliferation of saints and their function in restoring sanctity to nature, see Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, rev. ed. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 161–65.

11. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 159.

12. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, [1860] 1990), 306.

13. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 307.

14. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), 22.

15. See Owen Davies, Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91.

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