Introduction of Christianity and Mithraism
By now, however, the humanistic idea that men could become gods had ceased to have any plausibility. Plotinus and his Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophy of the pagan world from the mid-3rd century ad, had given powerful, mystical shape to the Platonic and Stoic conception that the universe is governed by a single force. On the other hand, the greatest religious figure of the century, the Iranian Mani, who had started to preach in Mesopotamia c. 240, dramatically preached the opposing dualistic idea that the world is the creation not only of a good power but of an evil one as well. Mani’s church, which alarmed Diocletian and for a time attracted the great Christian theologian St. Augustine, absorbed many of the innumerable cults of Gnostics who claimed special knowledge (gnōsis) by illumination and revelation and taught how people can purge the nonspiritual from within themselves and escape their earthly prison. More impressively, the cult of the Persian Mithra blended the dualism of Mani with the emotional initiations of the mystery religions (corrected by a much sterner tone of moral endeavour) and became a strong link between the cult of the Sun (which appealed to contemporary monotheists) and the fashionable revulsion from the senses that was shortly to lead to Christian monasticism. Like Christianity, Mithraism had its sacraments; but the life of Mithra exercised a less far-reaching appeal than the life of Christ, and Mithra’s cult excluded women.
Christianity, unique in its universal charity and unique also in its demand for a noble effort of faith in Jesus’ blend of divinity and humanity, was the religion that prevailed in the Roman world. It satisfied the emperor Constantine’s impulsive need for divine support, and from ad 312 onward, by a complex and gradual process, it became the official religion of the empire.