When the Oracles Fell Silent, Part 1
How Jesus Overthrew the Ancient World
(The following is an imagined online chat.)
Greece. Late 1st Century. A prominent philosopher named Plutarch and his companions are discussing a troubling phenomenon in regard to the oracles — places at which advice or prophecy were sought from the gods in classical antiquity.
PLUTARCH: (to Cleombrotus) Brother, tell us something about the oracle. Its religion has been famous since ancient times— yet now it seems to have withered away.
CLEOMBROTUS, eyes downcast, gives no reply.
DEMETRIUS: Ah, no need to ask him. It is happening — all the oracles are going extinct, except one or two. Why don’t we instead turn our attention to why, to the reason for their decay?
ALL nod in agreement.
DEMETRIUS: What need is there to talk about others, when even the celebrated Bœotia has now failed as utterly as a water-spring, and a great drought of prophecy has overspread the land? Only in Lebadeia is there anything going on for those who wish to draw from the oracular fount. The rest, well, they seem possessed by nothing but silence or desolation.
After a few moments of thought, reasons begin to fill the air.
DIDYMUS THE CYNIC: (strikes the ground with his staff) Providence packed up its oracles and left! It’s because of the filthy and impious questions the people were asking, I tell you.
AMMONIUS: Look, the region has been desolated and depopulated by war. It makes sense that the need is now less…
CLEOMBROTUS: (at last) We must admit, the same god who gave may also take away…
PLUTARCH: No, though God is eternal, spiritual things are like natural things. Eventually, inevitably, they wear out and revert back to themselves.
The companions continue to argue back and forth, talking the sun out of the sky and the moon into it.
CHILTON: There’s plenty about demonic activity and their control throughout the ancient heathen world in the first ten books of St. Augustine’s City of God. Yet, the fact is obvious even in the writings of the pagans themselves. Look at Herodotus’ History or Virgil’s Aeneid — virtually every page bears eloquent and explicit testimony of the tyranny the “gods” exercised over every aspect of life and thought.
ATHANASIUS: Yes, not only did they make idols for themselves instead of the truth, and honour things that were not before the living God, and serve the creature rather than the Creator, they, worst of all, transferred the honour of God even to sticks and stones and to every material object and to men, and went even further than this. So far indeed did their impiety go, that they proceeded to worship devils, and proclaimed them as gods, fulfilling their own lusts. For they performed offerings of brute animals, and sacrifices of men, as was suitable for devils, binding themselves down all the faster under their maddening inspirations.
PAUL THE APOSTLE: So also we, when infants, were enslaved in subjection to the elements of the cosmos.
ATHANASIUS: True, also that magic arts were taught among us, and oracles in various places led men astray, and all men ascribed the influences of their birth and existence to the stars and to all the heavenly bodies, having no thought of anything beyond what was visible. In a word, God and His Word was unknown. Yet He had not hidden Himself out of men’s sight, nor given the knowledge of Himself in one way only; but had, on the contrary, unfolded it to us in many forms and by many ways.
[Author’s Note — To the ancients, qualities like aristocratic worldliness and martial valour represented the highest ends of life. This was, after all, the lifestyle of the gods themselves, as perceived for millennia. Yet, the same gods freely, even shamelessly, engaged in more savage pleasures also. The Romans believed strength and dominance were good, morally so, and should be encouraged. One scholar, Wu Haiyun, notes that during the Shang dynasty, human sacrifice reached an apex in China. In the dynasty’s famous oracle bone script, two of the most common glyphs were those for “conquest” and “killing.” Studies of the era’s religious beliefs suggest a vision of the world as a cold place where ghosts and gods were temperamental and insatiable, and would only provide their blessings in exchange for sacrifices of life. In the world of the ancients, violence and rape were simply facts of life.]
JESUS: The kings of the gentile peoples dominate them, and those having power over them are called benefactors! But not so you.
[As a result, a fatalistic attitude overshadowed antiquity like a fog. Detected in the constant references to “the will of the gods,” this malaise, a pernicious breed of existential nihilism (the belief that existence ultimately has no purpose or meaning) effectively sapped the life out of living.
HOLLAND: This is the extreme callousness of the ancient world. I found it a world with a morality so alien to me, so foreign that I vowed to find out exactly what changed. Why do we moderns enjoy such a very different set of values today — yet take it almost completely for granted?
In that age, societies like the Spartans routinely murdered “imperfect” children. The bodies of slaves were treated like outlets for the physical pleasure of those with power. The poor and the weak were thought undeserving of even basic rights.
[It’s actually quite hard to imagine from our lofty vantage point. Perhaps those who have lived through conflicts in Asia and Africa might be able to relate more fully. It seems to have been a nightmarish brand of Darwinian ethics whose rule was virtually unimpeachable being that they were so thickly veiled and confused with divine will and decree.
Thus did life proceed in antiquity: the strong were thought to survive because it was the will of the gods. Yet, the mightiest also discovered that they were but brittle glass in comparison to the capricious meteor strikes of cosmic fate. Their lives, everyone’s really, were the merest scarlet threads: spinning, twisting, tangled and fraying inside the cold and unfeeling loom of Providence.]
CHILTON: Then, one day, [the oracles] came to a halt. The gods suddenly seemed to stop talking. Ancients like Plutarch and his friends observed it, and Athanasius remarked on it in his classic treatise On the Incarnation of the Word (ch. 46).
[This was probably clearer in hindsight than at the time, as we heard in Plutarch’s discussion. But why? What happened that the most trusted sources of knowledge in the Greco-Roman world deteriorated so quickly?
The church fathers, along with many others, believed that the answer was to be found in a seemingly innocuous episode some seventy years before Plutarch, in a province a thousand miles to the east.]
The Cross and the Sundering of Antiquity
HOLLAND: No death was more excruciating, no demise more contemptible than crucifixion. To be hung naked, “long in agony, swelling with ugly weals on shoulders and chest”, helpless to beat away the clamorous birds… such a fate, Roman intellectuals agreed, was the worst imaginable. But this was what rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves, for without such a sanction, it was thought the entire order of the city might fall apart. Luxury and splendour such as Rome could boast were dependent, in the final reckoning, on keeping those who sustained it in their place.
TACITUS: After all, we have slaves drawn from every corner of the world in our households, practicing strange customs, and foreign cults, or none(!) — and it is only by means of terror that we can hope to coerce such scum.
[Tacitus’ comments notwithstanding, it’s ironic that the average Roman shunned the brutality of their own practice. They refused even to take credit for the cross, considering themselves too civilized to have invented such an ignoble means of death.]
HOLLAND: Only a people famed for barbarousness and cruelty could ever have devised such a torture; therefore, Romans tried to convince themselves, it must have come from the Persians or the Gauls. So shameful was this manner of death that the word crux became an unmentionable four-letter word. How astonishing it was, then, that people in their dominion should have come to believe that one victim of this cruel and unusual instrument — an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus — had been a god.
A folly to the Gentiles…
Divinity was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.
…but to the Jews a stumbling-block.
The ultimate offense, though, was to one particular people: The Nazarene’s own. The Jews, unlike their rulers, did not believe that a man might become a god; they believed that there was only the one almighty, eternal deity. Creator of the heavens and the earth, he was worshiped by them as the Most High God, the Lord of Hosts, the Master of all the Earth. Empires were his to order; mountains to melt like wax. That such a god, of all gods, might have had a son, and that this son, suffering the fate of a slave, might have been tortured to death on a cross were, to most Jews, claims as stupefying as they were repellent. No more shocking a reversal of their most devoutly held assumptions could possibly have been imagined. This was no mere blasphemy, it was madness.
[And yet this was the gospel. Accompanied by signs and wonders, it is the message that abolished whole religions together with their pantheons, and introduced Jesus in their place. The journeys of his sent-out-ones, his apostle-witnesses, their speech and their writings (even informal correspondences) subverted and transformed the reigning principles and sensibilities of every cultural milieu they encountered.]
HOLLAND: The writings of St. Paul were like a depth charge to the Greek-speaking world, the shockwaves of which pulse and ripple outward through the centuries.
PAUL: I decided when among you to know nothing except Jesus the Anointed, and him crucified.
BONNKE: Indeed, the Son of God came into the world, not to defend heaven, but as a conquering man of war “to destroy the works of the devil.” Christ took the battle into the enemy’s camp, invaded hell, relentlessly flushed out the foe, hunted him down, drove Satan into a corner, gave him neither quarter nor mercy, bruised that serpent’s head and left him defeated and useless. Satan is not “alive and well on planet earth”. Jesus has mortally wounded him.
The world had known conquerors who invaded foreign lands to plunder and kill their enemies, laying waste to vast areas. Others, like Alexander, conquered with the intent of forcing native populations to adopt new habits and beliefs. Some, it is true, ranged abroad to acquire knowledge and wisdom, to explore and to study. But no one had ever traveled to foreign lands at fearful risk just to love people, to save them, heal them, bless them and lift them out of their mess. Jesus is the Savior of the world. His victory is our victory.
HART: “I am the Lord thy God,” says the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This was, for Israel, a demand of fidelity by which God bound His people to Himself. To Christians, however, the commandment came through — and so was indissolubly bound to — Christ. As such, it was not simply a prohibition of foreign cults, but a call to arms, an assault upon the antique order of the heavens — a declaration of war upon the gods. All the world was to be evangelized and baptized, all idols torn down, all worship given over to the one God who, in these latter days, had sent His Son into the world for our salvation. It was a long and sometimes terrible conflict, occasionally exacting a fearful price in martyrs’ blood, but it was, by any just estimate, a victory:
The temples of Zeus and Isis alike were finally deserted, both the paean and the dithyramb ceased to be sung, altars were bereft of their sacrifices, the sibyls fell silent, and ultimately, all the glory, nobility, and cruelty of the ancient world lay supine at the feet of Christ the conqueror.
N E X T → When the Oracles Fell Silent, Part 2
The Judgment Seat of Christ ← P R E V I O U S
(Cover image: The Pythia, a virgin from the local village selected in ceremonies that established her as Apollo’s choice, sits atop the sacred tripod as the Delphic oracle. To the left is the omphalos, the most sacred object at Delphi, regarded as the center of the earth. A plinth on the right bears an inscription describing Apollo’s conquest of Delphi with the Cretans, who became his first priests. The prophetess went to the tripod on the sacred seventh day of each month, the day of Apollo’s birth, nine months of the year, to await the god’s inspiration; her inspired utterances were later interpreted by a priest. The ancient Greeks considered the Delphic oracle — both Apollo’s divine prophecy and the prophetess through whom it was spoken — the final authority on almost any matter, whether religious, political, or social. —description courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum)
