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The Wiles Lectures
Pagani e cristiani in un'epoca di angoscia
Le theme aborde par E. R. Dodds dans cet ouvrage ? la transition du paganisme au christianisme de Marc Aurele a Constantin ? est de ceux auxquels on revient indefiniment, car il reste, malgre tout, le grand mystere: pourquoi et comment des paiens cultives de ce temps, qui avaient, en somme, une religion quasi monotheiste, une morale en substance peu differente de la notre ? il suffit de lire Libanius ?, un tresor de culture infiniment superieur a tout ce que pouvaient offrir les chretiens, pourquoi, dis-je, et comment ces paiens ont-ils pu devenir chretiens? Laissons la question en repos. . A. J. FestugiereEric Robinson Dodds (1893 - 1979) etait Regius Professor of Greek a l'Universite d'Oxford. Ses travaux, tres influents, portent aussi bien sur le neoplatonisme (Plotin, Prochus) que sur la tragedie grecque ou sur les problemes les plus importants de l'histoire de la culture grecque. Mentionnons son ouvrage universellement connu Les Grecs et l'Irrationnel (Los Angeles, 1959). Paiens et Chretiens dans un age d'angoisse est le texte des conferences Wiles, prononcees a Belfast en 1963 et publiees en 1965 a Cambridge. La traduction francaise due a H. D. Saffrey, a ete publiee en 1979 et revue pour cette edition.
145 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
E.R. Dodds
25 books33 followersEric Robertson Dodds was an Irish classical scholar. He signed all his publications E. R. Dodds.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
October 27, 2010
This book is absolutely fundamental. It is brilliant and short. It should be read by anyone in any field. I cannot stress it enough. The title, of course, comes from Auden.
Dodds' father was friends with MacGregor Mathers and Stephan McKenna (the translator of Plotinus) and other 19th cen. Irish mystics. Dodds himself was a brilliant classical scholar.
He is best known for his Greeks and the Irrational
http://www.amazon.com/Greeks-Irration...
-- a book as fundamental as it is flawed (and his account of Plato IS flawed). This is ironic, since his commentary on the Gorgias of Plato is his best book. And it is a masterpiece:
http://www.amazon.com/Gorgias-Clarend.... The text is superb, and is an improvement on Burnet, and the commentary will never be surpassed. His judgement is flawless.
On gnosticism generally -- after reading Dodds' lectures - read Jonas, not Pagels. Yet another example of how modern scholarship proves that what is new is often not what is improved.
Anyway - consider this book as most HIGHLY recommended to anyone who chances on this review.
Dodds' father was friends with MacGregor Mathers and Stephan McKenna (the translator of Plotinus) and other 19th cen. Irish mystics. Dodds himself was a brilliant classical scholar.
He is best known for his Greeks and the Irrational
http://www.amazon.com/Greeks-Irration...
-- a book as fundamental as it is flawed (and his account of Plato IS flawed). This is ironic, since his commentary on the Gorgias of Plato is his best book. And it is a masterpiece:
http://www.amazon.com/Gorgias-Clarend.... The text is superb, and is an improvement on Burnet, and the commentary will never be surpassed. His judgement is flawless.
On gnosticism generally -- after reading Dodds' lectures - read Jonas, not Pagels. Yet another example of how modern scholarship proves that what is new is often not what is improved.
Anyway - consider this book as most HIGHLY recommended to anyone who chances on this review.
May 28, 2023
I appear to have read this twice, though I don't recall the first time. To be fair, that was in the middle of doing a PhD and so I read everything at high speed and at high levels of intensity.
The book is well-written, challenging and structured for scholars but also accessible to lay readers. It is an attempt to by an admittedly 'agnostic' author to understand the religious and philosophical thought-world of 'pagans and Christians' during a particular period under the Roman Empire (late 2nd-early 4th centuries). This, according to the author, was a period of cultural decline -- a common and older view of late antiquity -- in which widespread anxieties triggered religious and superstitious impulses.
It is an erudite, though brief volume, and draws from an extensive array of primary sources and scholarship in English and non-Anglophone works. The main focus is on religion and religious instinct as psychological phenomena. This is a strength of the work, but at the same time a weakness. The strength is in making the religiously-oriented ancient world more comprehensible to a modern audience. However, the weakness is in how Dodds' psychological explanations tend to read back into the ancient world explanations and reasons that pagans and Christians would not have necessarily understood or accepted for themselves. To me as a historian and reader, I am less interested in understanding other times and places from my own point of view and vastly more concerned with better comprehending how people in these other times and places understood themselves.
A further strength of the work is that it brings Christians and pagans in dialogue with one another, rather than viewing them in total distinction from and conflict with one another. The complexity of the thought-world of denizens of the 2nd-4th centuries is recognized and confronted head-on, without oversimplifying either conflict or dialogue. Christian and pagan owe much of their ideas and assumptions to one another in numerous regards, even as their interpretations differ. A newer work also worth reading along this book would be Robin Lane Fox's 'Pagans and Christians', which covers roughly the same period as Dodds.
The book is well-written, challenging and structured for scholars but also accessible to lay readers. It is an attempt to by an admittedly 'agnostic' author to understand the religious and philosophical thought-world of 'pagans and Christians' during a particular period under the Roman Empire (late 2nd-early 4th centuries). This, according to the author, was a period of cultural decline -- a common and older view of late antiquity -- in which widespread anxieties triggered religious and superstitious impulses.
It is an erudite, though brief volume, and draws from an extensive array of primary sources and scholarship in English and non-Anglophone works. The main focus is on religion and religious instinct as psychological phenomena. This is a strength of the work, but at the same time a weakness. The strength is in making the religiously-oriented ancient world more comprehensible to a modern audience. However, the weakness is in how Dodds' psychological explanations tend to read back into the ancient world explanations and reasons that pagans and Christians would not have necessarily understood or accepted for themselves. To me as a historian and reader, I am less interested in understanding other times and places from my own point of view and vastly more concerned with better comprehending how people in these other times and places understood themselves.
A further strength of the work is that it brings Christians and pagans in dialogue with one another, rather than viewing them in total distinction from and conflict with one another. The complexity of the thought-world of denizens of the 2nd-4th centuries is recognized and confronted head-on, without oversimplifying either conflict or dialogue. Christian and pagan owe much of their ideas and assumptions to one another in numerous regards, even as their interpretations differ. A newer work also worth reading along this book would be Robin Lane Fox's 'Pagans and Christians', which covers roughly the same period as Dodds.
April 8, 2018
Klasyczne dzieło wybitnego filologa, odwołujące się do wielu starożytnych klasyków, szczególnie widać zachwyt nad Plotynem, ale także Markiem Aureliuszem. Ciekawe spostrzeżenie, że wczesne chrześcijaństwo miało wiele wspólnego z ukąszeniem komunizmem, przyciągało młodych, dzieliło rodziny.
September 30, 2016
Dodd provides an intriguing look at the interaction between pagan and Christian notions during the first three centuries after Christ. Definitely worth the read.
December 23, 2021
More about neoplatonism and its influence on Christianity, not much about the age of anxiety and dissolution of empire that mirrors our own and its influence on religious thought.
February 17, 2025
Dodds does two things in Pagan & Christian in an Age of Anxiety; He:
1. Shows ways in which Christian Philosophers and Pagan Philosophers interacted and understood each other.
2. Suggests tentative reasons why Christianity “won” over the Greco-Roman philosophical schools in the battle for the Roman Empires “soul.”
Dodds does a better job with the first rather than the second. Regardless, I laud the fact that Dodd's doesn’t take sides in the battle for Rome's soul:
“I am interested less in the issues which separated the combatants than in the attitudes and experiences which bound them together.”
I try to take the same approach in this review.
I'll be quoting more passages of a longer nature than usual in this review; because Dodd's is a pleasure to read and what he has to say radically undermines what are normally seen as the differences between religion and philosophy.
Dodds does a great job revealing the striking degree to which Pagan Greco-Roman philosophers and Christian philosophers shared common practices and ideas.
The example of the Roman Emperor Severus is illuminating:
“The Emperor Alexander Severus, kept in his private chapel statues of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ and Apollonius of Tyana, four mighty prophetai to all of whom he paid the same reverence. He was not alone in adopting this attitude: about the same date the Gnostic Capocrates was preaching a similar comprehensive cult-if we can believe Irenaeus and Augustine, his followers worshipped images of Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Christ and St Paul. The same spirit is illustrated in the undated letter of a Syrian named Serapion in which he cites Christ, ‘the wise King of the Jews’, along with Socrates and Pythagoras, as an example of a sage whose teachings has survived unjust persecution.”
Emperor Severus was not unusual. Eclecticism in philosophical and religious belief and practice was the rule rather than the exception in the early and late Roman Empire.
Reflecting this philosophical and religious diversity, what being a “Christian” meant was also highly flexible and uncertain.
For example, take a look at the conflict of Celsus and Origen. Celsus was an Anti-Christian author, and Origin and early church father who wrote a work to refute Celsus.
Orthodoxy was not yet clearly marked off from heresy: it was easy to slide from one to the other, [...] If Celsus sometimes confused Christianity with Gnosticism, as Origen alleges, it is probable that his confusion was shared by a good many contemporary Christians."
It would take thousands of; years, heresies, and persecutions for Christianity to achieve anything near the level of orthodoxy we think of today.
To many minds there was more overlap than difference between Greco-Roman philosophy and Christianity. For example, Celsus and Origen both saw Christianity as a kind of “idiot's guide to” Platonic philosophy:
"[Celsus found] Christian ethics banal: they ‘contain no teaching that is impressive or new’: the advice about turning the other cheek is old stuff, better expressed by Plato. And Origen for his part does not deny this: the difference, he says, is that the Christian preachers ‘cook for the multitude’, whereas Plato spices the same dish to please the gentry. His admiration for Plato is hardly less than that of Celsus; but Plato is read only by the learned. Christianity, he seems at times to suggest, is Platonism for the many."
What difference would a pagan defender of philosophy like Celsus see between Christianity and philosophy?
“Had any cultivated pagan of the second century been asked to put in a few words the difference between his own view of life and the Christian one, he might reply that it was the difference between logismos and pistis, between reasoned conviction and blind faith.”
Such a “cultivated” pagan would have been in a pickle. Because any difference between “reason” and “faith” was based on shaky ground.
All ‘sacred texts,’ Plato, the Gospels, etc, were considered more-or-less equally legitimate. Textual criticism hadn’t yet achieved its current tentative ability to reach a consensus on authors identities and texts dates of composition.
‘Christians and pagans were alike schoolmen: they could not challenge the authority of ancient texts; they could only evade it by reading back their own thoughts into them.’
There were, and perhaps still are, no “rational” grounds on which to prefer a Socratic dialogue as more faithful to the historical Socrates than a Gospel is to the historical Jesus.
This levels the playing field for all sorts of things we might now call “fake news.”
Thus, even if Celsus disagreed with a text like the Bible; he could not argue based on “reason” that it was false; instead Celsus could only argue that it was more inconsistent than a competing text like Plato’s.
This is what pedantic polemicists like Celsus and Origen did:
‘Origen was ready to refute the pagans point by point, borrowing for the purpose all the weapons in the arsenal of Greek philosophy. His contempt for mere pistis [blind faith] is hardly less than that of Celsus. ‘We accept it’, he says, ‘as useful for the multitude’: it is the best that can be done for them, ‘since, partly owing to the necessities of life and partly owing to human weakness, very few people are enthusiastic about rational thought.’ And he goes on to point out, with justice, that pagans do not always choose their philosophy on purely rational grounds. (P122)
Dodds claims that as the years passed slowly but surely the Christians learned from the Pagans to argue with “reason” and the Pagan’s learned from the Christians to appeal to authority and faith:
In fact, while Origen and his successors were endeavouring to supplement authority with reason, pagan philosophy tended increasingly to replace reason by authority-and not only the authority of Plato, but the authority of Orphic poetry, of Hermetic theosophy, of obscure revelations like the Chaldaean Oracles. Plotinus resisted revelations of this type and set his pupils the task of exposing them, but after Plotinus Neoplatonism became less a philosophy than a religion, whose followers were occupied like their Christian counterparts in expounding and reconciling sacred texts. For them too pistis became a basic requirement.’ (P122)
Dodds claims that it was not a stretch of the mind for the average citizen of the Roman Empire to see a "Christian" as a "philosopher," or a "philosopher" as a "Christian."
This was the deliberate goal of the early Christians, who sought to make their religion more universal by presenting it as a kind of philosophy.
Echoing the earlier example of the Emperor Severus's eclecticism, Dodds relates the life story of a man named Peregrinus who shows just how slippery the categories of “Christian,” “philosopher” and “prophet” were.
The passage is long, but also hilarious, and therefore worth quoting in full:
"Born of wealthy parents at Parium on the Hellespont, he [Peregrinus] gets into trouble as a young man through disreputable love affairs, quarrels with his father, and leaves home under suspicion of having strangled him.
In Palestine he is converted to Christianity and becomes a prophetes and a leader in the community; he expounds the Scriptures and writes numerous books himself. Gaoled as a Christian, he wins great credit by his stubborn refusal to renounce his faith, but is eventually released by an enlightened Governor.
Next, he goes home, voluntarily, to face charges of parricide, but silences his accusers by presenting the whole of his estates to the town for charitable purposes. For a time he is supported by the Christians, but he quarrels with them and is reduced to asking, unsuccessfully, for the return of his estates.
After this he visits Egpyt, where he practices flagellation, smears his face with mud, and adopts the Cynic way of life in its crudest form. From there he goes to Italy, whence he is expelled for insulting the Emperor; once again his indifference to personal danger wins him admirers. We next find him settled in Greece, where he attempts to start a rising against the Roman power and publicly insults the philanthropic benefactor Herodes Atticus.
Finally he crowns his career by a sensational suicide, burning himself to death before an admiring crowd at the Olympic Festival of A.D. 165. Whereupon he becomes an object of a cult: the stick he once carried sells for a talent; a statue set up in his honour works miracles (as a Christian writer testifies) and attracts pilgrims in great numbers."
Peregrinus was not the only L. Ron Hubbard or Mary Baker Eddy around.
Cults and sacred texts were popping up everywhere. There are multiple examples suggesting that late antiquity was a great time to start a new religion or philosophy of self improvement for personal profit.
At least, so long as your religion doesn’t require too much education.
Dodds argues that an advantage that Christianity had over Pagan Philosophy was the fact that it required less education.
To develop this line of argument more fully than Dodds does is suggestive.
I do agree that Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy require an amount of education impractical for mass adoption. The only other philosophies with a mass appeal and lower educational bar were Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Skepticism.
With the exception of Stoicism and Skepticism, all of these philosophies, which were ways of life, tended to encourage the avoidance of political life. But to a potential convert, even this lower educational bar would have required more reliance on “reason” than Christianity.
Dodds suggests that "Reason" was losing the "battle" against "Faith," and that the "Reason" being appealed to slowly became mere "Faith."
With all the tyranny of hindsight, Dodds’s view implies that Christianity was simply better suited as a mass philosophy and imperial state religion.
I’m not totally convinced by this, and I think Dodd's overreaches here. Dodds is at his best when he focuses on similarities between Pagans and Christians rather than when he tries to diagnose the historical "victory" of Christianity.
It seems to me that if Pagan and Christian practice and thought were so intermixed that it is very misleading to speak of a "victory" at all. There was no zero-sum game going on in “the battle for the Roman Empire’s soul.”
While the Christian Roman Emperor Justinian may have closed the Schools of Philosophy in 529 AD, it seems that philosophy, in some odd form or another, lived on in Christianity. As Dodd's wryly notes:
"Nilson laments that the Church threw out the baby with the bathwater, rejecting not only the superstitions of late paganism, but ‘the sound kernel of ancient science.’ One may question, however, whether the kernel could at this point have been saved at all."
My issues with Dodd's are small relative to the strengths of this book. I strongly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in the history of philosophy or religion. It’s only 130 pages long and because the writing comes from Dodd’s transcribed lectures it reads very well and has good jokes strewn about.
1. Shows ways in which Christian Philosophers and Pagan Philosophers interacted and understood each other.
2. Suggests tentative reasons why Christianity “won” over the Greco-Roman philosophical schools in the battle for the Roman Empires “soul.”
Dodds does a better job with the first rather than the second. Regardless, I laud the fact that Dodd's doesn’t take sides in the battle for Rome's soul:
“I am interested less in the issues which separated the combatants than in the attitudes and experiences which bound them together.”
I try to take the same approach in this review.
I'll be quoting more passages of a longer nature than usual in this review; because Dodd's is a pleasure to read and what he has to say radically undermines what are normally seen as the differences between religion and philosophy.
Dodds does a great job revealing the striking degree to which Pagan Greco-Roman philosophers and Christian philosophers shared common practices and ideas.
The example of the Roman Emperor Severus is illuminating:
“The Emperor Alexander Severus, kept in his private chapel statues of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ and Apollonius of Tyana, four mighty prophetai to all of whom he paid the same reverence. He was not alone in adopting this attitude: about the same date the Gnostic Capocrates was preaching a similar comprehensive cult-if we can believe Irenaeus and Augustine, his followers worshipped images of Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Christ and St Paul. The same spirit is illustrated in the undated letter of a Syrian named Serapion in which he cites Christ, ‘the wise King of the Jews’, along with Socrates and Pythagoras, as an example of a sage whose teachings has survived unjust persecution.”
Emperor Severus was not unusual. Eclecticism in philosophical and religious belief and practice was the rule rather than the exception in the early and late Roman Empire.
Reflecting this philosophical and religious diversity, what being a “Christian” meant was also highly flexible and uncertain.
For example, take a look at the conflict of Celsus and Origen. Celsus was an Anti-Christian author, and Origin and early church father who wrote a work to refute Celsus.
Orthodoxy was not yet clearly marked off from heresy: it was easy to slide from one to the other, [...] If Celsus sometimes confused Christianity with Gnosticism, as Origen alleges, it is probable that his confusion was shared by a good many contemporary Christians."
It would take thousands of; years, heresies, and persecutions for Christianity to achieve anything near the level of orthodoxy we think of today.
To many minds there was more overlap than difference between Greco-Roman philosophy and Christianity. For example, Celsus and Origen both saw Christianity as a kind of “idiot's guide to” Platonic philosophy:
"[Celsus found] Christian ethics banal: they ‘contain no teaching that is impressive or new’: the advice about turning the other cheek is old stuff, better expressed by Plato. And Origen for his part does not deny this: the difference, he says, is that the Christian preachers ‘cook for the multitude’, whereas Plato spices the same dish to please the gentry. His admiration for Plato is hardly less than that of Celsus; but Plato is read only by the learned. Christianity, he seems at times to suggest, is Platonism for the many."
What difference would a pagan defender of philosophy like Celsus see between Christianity and philosophy?
“Had any cultivated pagan of the second century been asked to put in a few words the difference between his own view of life and the Christian one, he might reply that it was the difference between logismos and pistis, between reasoned conviction and blind faith.”
Such a “cultivated” pagan would have been in a pickle. Because any difference between “reason” and “faith” was based on shaky ground.
All ‘sacred texts,’ Plato, the Gospels, etc, were considered more-or-less equally legitimate. Textual criticism hadn’t yet achieved its current tentative ability to reach a consensus on authors identities and texts dates of composition.
‘Christians and pagans were alike schoolmen: they could not challenge the authority of ancient texts; they could only evade it by reading back their own thoughts into them.’
There were, and perhaps still are, no “rational” grounds on which to prefer a Socratic dialogue as more faithful to the historical Socrates than a Gospel is to the historical Jesus.
This levels the playing field for all sorts of things we might now call “fake news.”
Thus, even if Celsus disagreed with a text like the Bible; he could not argue based on “reason” that it was false; instead Celsus could only argue that it was more inconsistent than a competing text like Plato’s.
This is what pedantic polemicists like Celsus and Origen did:
‘Origen was ready to refute the pagans point by point, borrowing for the purpose all the weapons in the arsenal of Greek philosophy. His contempt for mere pistis [blind faith] is hardly less than that of Celsus. ‘We accept it’, he says, ‘as useful for the multitude’: it is the best that can be done for them, ‘since, partly owing to the necessities of life and partly owing to human weakness, very few people are enthusiastic about rational thought.’ And he goes on to point out, with justice, that pagans do not always choose their philosophy on purely rational grounds. (P122)
Dodds claims that as the years passed slowly but surely the Christians learned from the Pagans to argue with “reason” and the Pagan’s learned from the Christians to appeal to authority and faith:
In fact, while Origen and his successors were endeavouring to supplement authority with reason, pagan philosophy tended increasingly to replace reason by authority-and not only the authority of Plato, but the authority of Orphic poetry, of Hermetic theosophy, of obscure revelations like the Chaldaean Oracles. Plotinus resisted revelations of this type and set his pupils the task of exposing them, but after Plotinus Neoplatonism became less a philosophy than a religion, whose followers were occupied like their Christian counterparts in expounding and reconciling sacred texts. For them too pistis became a basic requirement.’ (P122)
Dodds claims that it was not a stretch of the mind for the average citizen of the Roman Empire to see a "Christian" as a "philosopher," or a "philosopher" as a "Christian."
This was the deliberate goal of the early Christians, who sought to make their religion more universal by presenting it as a kind of philosophy.
Echoing the earlier example of the Emperor Severus's eclecticism, Dodds relates the life story of a man named Peregrinus who shows just how slippery the categories of “Christian,” “philosopher” and “prophet” were.
The passage is long, but also hilarious, and therefore worth quoting in full:
"Born of wealthy parents at Parium on the Hellespont, he [Peregrinus] gets into trouble as a young man through disreputable love affairs, quarrels with his father, and leaves home under suspicion of having strangled him.
In Palestine he is converted to Christianity and becomes a prophetes and a leader in the community; he expounds the Scriptures and writes numerous books himself. Gaoled as a Christian, he wins great credit by his stubborn refusal to renounce his faith, but is eventually released by an enlightened Governor.
Next, he goes home, voluntarily, to face charges of parricide, but silences his accusers by presenting the whole of his estates to the town for charitable purposes. For a time he is supported by the Christians, but he quarrels with them and is reduced to asking, unsuccessfully, for the return of his estates.
After this he visits Egpyt, where he practices flagellation, smears his face with mud, and adopts the Cynic way of life in its crudest form. From there he goes to Italy, whence he is expelled for insulting the Emperor; once again his indifference to personal danger wins him admirers. We next find him settled in Greece, where he attempts to start a rising against the Roman power and publicly insults the philanthropic benefactor Herodes Atticus.
Finally he crowns his career by a sensational suicide, burning himself to death before an admiring crowd at the Olympic Festival of A.D. 165. Whereupon he becomes an object of a cult: the stick he once carried sells for a talent; a statue set up in his honour works miracles (as a Christian writer testifies) and attracts pilgrims in great numbers."
Peregrinus was not the only L. Ron Hubbard or Mary Baker Eddy around.
Cults and sacred texts were popping up everywhere. There are multiple examples suggesting that late antiquity was a great time to start a new religion or philosophy of self improvement for personal profit.
At least, so long as your religion doesn’t require too much education.
Dodds argues that an advantage that Christianity had over Pagan Philosophy was the fact that it required less education.
To develop this line of argument more fully than Dodds does is suggestive.
I do agree that Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy require an amount of education impractical for mass adoption. The only other philosophies with a mass appeal and lower educational bar were Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Skepticism.
With the exception of Stoicism and Skepticism, all of these philosophies, which were ways of life, tended to encourage the avoidance of political life. But to a potential convert, even this lower educational bar would have required more reliance on “reason” than Christianity.
Dodds suggests that "Reason" was losing the "battle" against "Faith," and that the "Reason" being appealed to slowly became mere "Faith."
With all the tyranny of hindsight, Dodds’s view implies that Christianity was simply better suited as a mass philosophy and imperial state religion.
I’m not totally convinced by this, and I think Dodd's overreaches here. Dodds is at his best when he focuses on similarities between Pagans and Christians rather than when he tries to diagnose the historical "victory" of Christianity.
It seems to me that if Pagan and Christian practice and thought were so intermixed that it is very misleading to speak of a "victory" at all. There was no zero-sum game going on in “the battle for the Roman Empire’s soul.”
While the Christian Roman Emperor Justinian may have closed the Schools of Philosophy in 529 AD, it seems that philosophy, in some odd form or another, lived on in Christianity. As Dodd's wryly notes:
"Nilson laments that the Church threw out the baby with the bathwater, rejecting not only the superstitions of late paganism, but ‘the sound kernel of ancient science.’ One may question, however, whether the kernel could at this point have been saved at all."
My issues with Dodd's are small relative to the strengths of this book. I strongly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in the history of philosophy or religion. It’s only 130 pages long and because the writing comes from Dodd’s transcribed lectures it reads very well and has good jokes strewn about.
May 16, 2025
Thoroughly informative little book about Christians and Pagans during the former’s rise and the latter’s decline. Dodd is not Christian but neither is he rhetorically anti-Christian and I think this makes him more clear eyed and less dogmatic. He is less willing to paint Christianity as a complete and total innovation and superior trend, while also avoiding the tendency to romanticize Hellenic culture. As such he ends up defending a thesis I have long believed. That there is much less difference between Neoplatonists, Platonic Christians, Hellenized Judaism, the New Testament writers, and Gnostics than is usually apologetically implied. Since they all shared a common starting point and were subject to the worldview and concerns of the age. And the author pushes back again simple binaries (pagans and gnostics hated the body but Christians celebrated it… false. Pagans were polytheistic and Christians and Jews were staunchly monotheistic… also false.) That is not to say there are no differences and Dodds does point to the circumstances that lead to Christianity’s rise: the martyrs, its appeal to the masses, and its charity during the period. Overall a fascinating little work if you are interested in early Christianity, Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Origen, or many other subjects.
March 15, 2025
Este libro me ha encandilado hasta lo más profundo. Repasa los cambios intelectuales y místicos, el diálogo entre paganismo y cristianismo, el declive de unos y triunfo de otros, y la forma de ver el mundo atendiendo a causas históricas y psicológicas con una agudeza maravilloa. Pese a ciertas afirmaciones anticomunistas (lol), el libro ofrece una óptica sumamente ilustrativa sobre una época definitoria de la historia y del pensamiento alternando entre el proceso histórico, la anécdota y lo puramente filosófico, místico y religioso. De lo particular a lo general del pensamiento, desde categorías del psicoanálisis y la antropología, el recorrido del libro es claro y accesible, valiendo además de introducción al pensamiento particular de grandes personalidades de la época.
September 7, 2025
got this for a couple bucks at a bookstore on a whim and enjoyed it way more than I expected. the ending section on the debate between paganism and Christianity was especially interesting. in general fascinating how much thinking about religion at the time circled around similar themes as in the United States of (including with Eastern philosophy and religions like Buddhism as an increasingly influential element in American spiritual life). also various interesting philological details such as that θεος was originally used in a way quite similar to 仙 before becoming more what we think of now as “God” or even “a god”
August 8, 2023
This was a book I liked from the beginning. Succinct and memorable, not given to over simplification or laziness.
What truly shines most about this book, as with the last book I reviewed (The Fall of the Roman Empire and the End of Civilization), is that despite being written by a candid non-Christian it presents the Faith fairly well. He is not hostile or bitter; I would disagree with him on several issues, but Mr Dodds seems like he was an honest and deeply thoughtful fellow.
I look forward to reading his famous book, "The Greeks and the Irrational," shortly.
What truly shines most about this book, as with the last book I reviewed (The Fall of the Roman Empire and the End of Civilization), is that despite being written by a candid non-Christian it presents the Faith fairly well. He is not hostile or bitter; I would disagree with him on several issues, but Mr Dodds seems like he was an honest and deeply thoughtful fellow.
I look forward to reading his famous book, "The Greeks and the Irrational," shortly.
July 13, 2025
Fascinating subject Mediocre treatment
As Christianity has found itself, right at the dawn of the 21st century, in a battle against other religions once again, it’s important for Christian’s and non to understand what made this religion win the first time over. But the book seems sporadic in this treatment, obsessing about minor characters whose example could have been described in a sentence. The premise is sound, but the overall work is found wanting…
As Christianity has found itself, right at the dawn of the 21st century, in a battle against other religions once again, it’s important for Christian’s and non to understand what made this religion win the first time over. But the book seems sporadic in this treatment, obsessing about minor characters whose example could have been described in a sentence. The premise is sound, but the overall work is found wanting…
July 31, 2016
"I will not discuss the intrinsic merits of the Christian creed; but I will end this chapter by mentioning briefly some of the psychological conditions which favoured its growth and contributed to its victory.
In the first place, its very exclusiveness, its refusal to concede any value to alternative forms of worship, which nowadays is often felt to be a weakness, was in the circumstances of the time a source of strength. The religious tolerance which was the normal Greek and Roman practice had resulted by accumulation in a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe. Christianity made a clean sweep. It lifted the burden of freedom from the shoulders of the individual: one choice, one irrevocable choice, and the road to salvation was clear. Pagan critics might mock at Christian intolerance, but in an age of anxiety any 'totalist' creed exerts a powerful attraction: one has only to think of the appeals of communish to many bewildered minds in our own day.
Secondly, Christianity was open to all. In principle, it made no social distinctions; it accepted the manual worker, the slave, the outcast, the ex-criminal; and though in the course of our period it developed a strong hierarchic structure, its hierarchy offered an open career to talent. Above all, it did not, like Neoplatonism, demand education. Clement might smile at the quaint beliefs of the simpliciores, Origen might declare that true knowledge of God was confined to 'a very few among the few'; but the notion of 'Pass and Honours standards in the service of God' (as Arthur Nook once phrased it) was originally foreign to the spirit of Christianity, and on the whole remained so. In the second century and even in the third the Christian Church was still largely (though with many exceptions) an army of the disinherited.
Thirdly, in a period when earthly life was increasingly devalued and guilt-feelings were widely prevalent, Christianity held out to the disinherited the conditional promise of a better inheritance in another world. So did several of its pagan rivals. But Christianity wielded both a bigger stick and a juicier carrot. It was accused of being a religion of fear, and such it no doubt was in the hands of the rigorists. But it was also a religion of lively hope, whether in the crude terms described for example by Papias, or in the rationalised versions offered by Clement and Origen. Porphyry remarked, as others have done since, that only sick souls stand in need of Christianity. But sick souls were numerous in our period: Peregrinus and Aelius Aristides are not isolated freaks; Porphyry himself had been sufficiently sick to contemplate suicide, and there is evidence for thinking that in these centuries a good many persons were consciously or unconsciously in love with death. For such men the chance of martyrdom, carrying with it fame in this world and bliss in the next, could only add to the attractions of Christianity.
But lastly, the benefits of becoming a Christian were not confined to the next world. A Christian congregation was from the first a community in a much fuller sense than any corresponding group of Isaic or Mithraist devotees. Its members were bound together not only by common rites but by a common way of life and, as Celsus shrewdly perceived, by their common danger. Their promptitude in bringing material help to brethren in captivity or other distress is attested not only by Christian writers but by Lucian, a far from sympathetic witness. Love of one's neighbour is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but in our period the Christians appear to have practised it much more effectively than any other group. The Church provided the essentials of social security: it cared for widows and orphans, the old, the unemployed, and the disabled; it provided a burial fund for the poor and a nursing service in time of plague. But even more important, I suspect, than these material benefits was the sense of belonging which the Christian community could give. Modern social studies have brought home to us the universality of the 'need to belong' and the unexpected ways in which it can influence human behaviour, particularly among the rootless inhabitants of great cities. I see no reason to think it was otherwise in antiquity: Epictetus has described for us the dreadful loneliness that can beset a man in the midst of his fellows. Such loneliness must have been felt by millions - the urbanised tribesman, the peasant come to town in search of work, the demobilised soldier, the rentier ruined by inflation, and the manumitted slave. For people in that situation membership of a Christian community might be the only way of maintaining their self-respect and giving their life some semblance of meaning. Within the community there was human warmth: some one was interested in them, both here and hereafter. It is therefore not surprising that the earliest and the most striking advances of Christianity were made in the great cities - in Antioch, in Rome, in Alexandria. Christians were in a more than formal sense 'members of one another': I think that was a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity."
In the first place, its very exclusiveness, its refusal to concede any value to alternative forms of worship, which nowadays is often felt to be a weakness, was in the circumstances of the time a source of strength. The religious tolerance which was the normal Greek and Roman practice had resulted by accumulation in a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe. Christianity made a clean sweep. It lifted the burden of freedom from the shoulders of the individual: one choice, one irrevocable choice, and the road to salvation was clear. Pagan critics might mock at Christian intolerance, but in an age of anxiety any 'totalist' creed exerts a powerful attraction: one has only to think of the appeals of communish to many bewildered minds in our own day.
Secondly, Christianity was open to all. In principle, it made no social distinctions; it accepted the manual worker, the slave, the outcast, the ex-criminal; and though in the course of our period it developed a strong hierarchic structure, its hierarchy offered an open career to talent. Above all, it did not, like Neoplatonism, demand education. Clement might smile at the quaint beliefs of the simpliciores, Origen might declare that true knowledge of God was confined to 'a very few among the few'; but the notion of 'Pass and Honours standards in the service of God' (as Arthur Nook once phrased it) was originally foreign to the spirit of Christianity, and on the whole remained so. In the second century and even in the third the Christian Church was still largely (though with many exceptions) an army of the disinherited.
Thirdly, in a period when earthly life was increasingly devalued and guilt-feelings were widely prevalent, Christianity held out to the disinherited the conditional promise of a better inheritance in another world. So did several of its pagan rivals. But Christianity wielded both a bigger stick and a juicier carrot. It was accused of being a religion of fear, and such it no doubt was in the hands of the rigorists. But it was also a religion of lively hope, whether in the crude terms described for example by Papias, or in the rationalised versions offered by Clement and Origen. Porphyry remarked, as others have done since, that only sick souls stand in need of Christianity. But sick souls were numerous in our period: Peregrinus and Aelius Aristides are not isolated freaks; Porphyry himself had been sufficiently sick to contemplate suicide, and there is evidence for thinking that in these centuries a good many persons were consciously or unconsciously in love with death. For such men the chance of martyrdom, carrying with it fame in this world and bliss in the next, could only add to the attractions of Christianity.
But lastly, the benefits of becoming a Christian were not confined to the next world. A Christian congregation was from the first a community in a much fuller sense than any corresponding group of Isaic or Mithraist devotees. Its members were bound together not only by common rites but by a common way of life and, as Celsus shrewdly perceived, by their common danger. Their promptitude in bringing material help to brethren in captivity or other distress is attested not only by Christian writers but by Lucian, a far from sympathetic witness. Love of one's neighbour is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but in our period the Christians appear to have practised it much more effectively than any other group. The Church provided the essentials of social security: it cared for widows and orphans, the old, the unemployed, and the disabled; it provided a burial fund for the poor and a nursing service in time of plague. But even more important, I suspect, than these material benefits was the sense of belonging which the Christian community could give. Modern social studies have brought home to us the universality of the 'need to belong' and the unexpected ways in which it can influence human behaviour, particularly among the rootless inhabitants of great cities. I see no reason to think it was otherwise in antiquity: Epictetus has described for us the dreadful loneliness that can beset a man in the midst of his fellows. Such loneliness must have been felt by millions - the urbanised tribesman, the peasant come to town in search of work, the demobilised soldier, the rentier ruined by inflation, and the manumitted slave. For people in that situation membership of a Christian community might be the only way of maintaining their self-respect and giving their life some semblance of meaning. Within the community there was human warmth: some one was interested in them, both here and hereafter. It is therefore not surprising that the earliest and the most striking advances of Christianity were made in the great cities - in Antioch, in Rome, in Alexandria. Christians were in a more than formal sense 'members of one another': I think that was a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity."
May 4, 2021
Небольшое и наглядное даже для невежды типа меня исследование (мини-цикл лекций) про то, что первые христиане и поздние язычники это почти близнецы-братья. Из книжки узнал, откуда пошла фраза "Если в кране нет воды, значит выпили ж**ы". У римлян была поговорка: "Нет дождя — благодари христиан".
А книжка "Греки и иррациональное" Доддса — это вообще боевик.
А книжка "Греки и иррациональное" Доддса — это вообще боевик.
October 5, 2022
Very interesting take on how the material factors of an era lead to similar external expressions in both the pagan and the Christian world of Late Rome. Dodds is a Freudian as well as a skeptic and that colors much of what he says, but he still has interesting things to say on early-AD attitudes around dreams, visions, the divinity, etc.
December 21, 2023
This book is thin, but very dense with information and ideas. It is especially remarkable how meticulously argued and sourced all the author's conclusions are. Watching his mind unravel the complex subject was very enjoyable.
On the other hand, I would like to see broader elaboration on historical and psychological context of the era connected to this topic. But that would probably be more than what the goal was originally.
If you don't feel like reading the whole book, skip to the last chapter. You loose most of the dialogue between various sources describing pagan and christian attitudes and views on god and each other and their development, but you still discover a pretty decent take on why christianity won.
On the other hand, I would like to see broader elaboration on historical and psychological context of the era connected to this topic. But that would probably be more than what the goal was originally.
If you don't feel like reading the whole book, skip to the last chapter. You loose most of the dialogue between various sources describing pagan and christian attitudes and views on god and each other and their development, but you still discover a pretty decent take on why christianity won.
August 20, 2023
trochę nudne, ale język bardzo naukowy, przez co książka jest wartościowsza
December 4, 2023
3.5 Finally finished. Short book but also dense so difficult to read at times, but the last chapter I especially appreciated.
December 30, 2024
forse il primo saggio che ho letto, per la tesina delle superiori. ne ho un ricordo entusiasta e grato
December 12, 2007
(read this in Greek)
August 31, 2011
¡Atención! la primera edición no es de 1980, sino de 1968, en Cambridge university press, Londres.
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