Just Thinking About the Roman Empire, Mostly the Murders

Reflections on Tom Holland's Pax and the Limits of the Relation Between Religion and Culture

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The Many Cultures of Religion

In his previous book, British historian Tom Holland offered a multi-century sweep of the cultural effects of Christianity upon the European world. Even if you don’t go in for multi-century works of history, it’s a very enjoyable read. But it broached a variety of questions about the role of cultures in religious conversion, and what to make theologically of the place of culture.

On the one hand, saying that cultural presumptions have no place in how we think about religious conversion makes no sense: people don’t convert to something unless that something has a sustainable space within the structures of our ordinary lives to grab on to. I take this to be a different question than whether or not religion is only a cultural artifact, as opposed to a work of God: I’m simply saying that there’s no such thing as an a-cultural religion.¹

In his new book, we move backwards into the heart of the pre-Christian Roman world, by which I mean, “there are Christians around, but they’re definitely weirdos and scapegoats.” Covering the years 64-139, the age between Nero and Hadrian, we are treated to lurid stories of royal affairs and bloody contests between contenders and pretenders to the throne. Between the castrations and murders on the Senate floor, it’s a miracle that the Empire survived the so-called “year of four Emperors”, A.D. 69.

Like his prior work, Pax turns on a question of how deeply the connection runs between religion and culture: how deep are the gods involved in the various catastrophes of these years? Was Rome’s collapse due to leaving its gods behind? And what if the fights against Christians and Jews weren’t personal? But the question that provoked me the most was the question of how a religion’s ethics and a religion’s worldview are related.