Vanishing Identity: The Impossible Definition of Pagans and Paganism in the West from the 4th to the 6th Century

Abstract

To understand Antiquity, we must avoid starting from our own categories. We therefore reject the contemporary notion of collective identity in favour of a sociological analysis of ancient texts and the authoritative relationships between emic and etic discourses on the definition of religious groups. Taking into account the plurality of Christian discourses, both sociological (those of believers, clerics, monks, the emperor or the king) and thematic (in the theological domain, that of personal morality, collective ethics, relationship to the world) allows us to conceive that between 300 and 600, it was possible to define oneself as Christian (‘bad Christian’ in the eyes of religious and political authorities) and to venerate certain traditional superhuman entities linked to natural forces yet considered by the same authorities as the demons of paganism. This Christian polylatrism can be explained by the difficulty bishops had in controlling certain sectors of society, particularly in the countryside, but also by the impossibility for late antique Christianity to transform its theological claim to truth about salvation in the afterlife into a convincing model for explaining the world here below. Only the cult of holy (wo)men and relics, and the Christianisation of certain sacred places or the acceptance of certain ancient practices in order to neutralise them, were to fill the gaps in the Christian meaning of the world over time.