Possible reprucussions of no Christianity?

No decree of Theodosius means no christian initiated destruction of the great temples of Alexandria like the Mousaion and the Serapaeum either.

Or no maiming of the temples of Rome that they didn't destroy and turn into soul-less chuches. I would imagine a religion akin to Hinduism forming in the Roman Empire, perhaps with an emphasis to one of the gods as the head deity.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Or no maiming of the temples of Rome that they didn't destroy and turn into soul-less chuches. I would imagine a religion akin to Hinduism forming in the Roman Empire, perhaps with an emphasis to one of the gods as the head deity.

Flamines are basically the same root word and position as Brahmins; so yeah it could work out. And I still hope some day a gutsy neopagan group will set a claim for the right to hold novoroman ceremonies in the Pantheon :D .
 
Flamines are basically the same root word and position as Brahmins; so yeah it could work out. And I still hope some day a gutsy neopagan group will set a claim for the right to hold novoroman ceremonies in the Pantheon :D .

Much to the aghast Catholics. Damn Romans, they follow a darn carpenter but not the Invincible Sun! Simply blasphemous. :mad:

The Romans were pretty good at incorporating foreign deities and basically adopting their attributes to their own pantheon. Jupiter was identifed with Zeus, Ammon, and a couple of other Gods whose name I can't seem to recall.
 
Disagree. The pagan philosophical traditions prized intellect and learning more than did early Christianity (which was very much an apocoliptic cult concerned with separating oneself from the world). A world where the Platonic Academies of Athens and other cities remain open-and great theological centers of the official state religion-will probably better preserve Classical literature and philosophy than OTL did.

As to what will take Christianity's place, I think it will most likely be some form of Neoplatonism, which incorporates Roman, Celtic, Greek, Egyptian, Semetic, and Germanic Gods as representatives of Neoplatonic divinities. The end result would probably look very similar to Hinduism.


I don't disagree with you on this. Early Christianity did much to shut down ancient centers of learning which helped to devastate the scholarly class. That being said, unless the POD leads to serious Roman reforms there will likely be a dark age. In my opinion said dark age would be worse.

In OTL neither the Roman republic nor the Roman empire were exactly beacons of stability. While Rome fell due to a combination of factors, the biggest reason for its eventual collapse was in my opinion its nearly perpetual state of civil war. Despite brief interludes of competence these gravely weakened the empire, as they gradually ground down its military, economic, and political power. These problems were amplified by plague which dramatically reduced the empire's population as well as its economic output. This was followed by de-urbanization, resulted in a loss of specialization of both crafts and general knowledge and a decline in trade. Inclimate weather further reduced the ability of the empire to produce economic surpluses, and support specialization. Worsening matters, it lead to mass migrations of "Barbarians" which stretched the ability of the empire to defend itself past the breaking point.

Now back to Christianity. The only praise I will give it, is that it was a centralizing agent in an era of decentralization and decay. The church (or for that instance churches or better yet islam) served as a unifying cultural force for wide geographic areas. Their influence brought them wealth, which it used to establish a theological bureaucracy, and serve as patrons for arts and education. It did a poor to mediocre job of it.

However, roman pantheism lacked the same unifying structure. Roman religion was decentralized, and un-bureaucratic. More often than not its priests were extensions of the aristocracy. This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, when the roman state collapses politically and economically, who will provide the patronage to maintain the scholarly class? Certain centers of trade, knowledge, and learning which withered in OTL might survive, and vice versa, but what factor is there to keep them linked?

Hence, to restate my thesis, for all of its ills, Christianity had a positive role to serve in the Dark Ages as a centralizing agent.
 
Much to the aghast Catholics. Damn Romans, they follow a darn carpenter but not the Invincible Sun! Simply blasphemous. :mad:

The Romans were pretty good at incorporating foreign deities and basically adopting their attributes to their own pantheon. Jupiter was identifed with Zeus, Ammon, and a couple of other Gods whose name I can't seem to recall.

That's true, and in fact the christian god could easily have been incorporated into the Roman empire, providing a few key elements were changed.

But the question is how would the lack of christianity change Europe as a whole? I think the Roman empire would still have collapsed, but that history afterwards would be very, very different. For starters, the Carolingian Renaissance would have been very different. There would have been more co-operation, I think, between East and West, North and South.

The most significant impact, I think, would actually have been on colonization. Without the religious zeal to go and explore and christianize the rest of the world, would European explorers have undertaken the endeavour?
 

archaeogeek

Banned
The most significant impact, I think, would actually have been on colonization. Without the religious zeal to go and explore and christianize the rest of the world, would European explorers have undertaken the endeavour?

The religion that motivated the genoese explorers and their western funders, behind the religious pretense, was the church of St Bullion and St Spice.
 
The most significant impact, I think, would actually have been on colonization. Without the religious zeal to go and explore and christianize the rest of the world, would European explorers have undertaken the endeavour?

Commercial access to exotic goods is a stronger motivator for exploration than religious fanaticsim ever was. There maybe would have been a European colonial phase even if Christianity never became integrated into the cultural make-up of Europe.
 
Rhunidian's question on European explorers brings up an interesting point. Much of modern Europe's colonialism was philosophically justified by the superiority of European culture and ethnicity-but ITTL those assumptions might not exist. The greatest effect on Europe of no Christianity may be that a European identity doesn't even develop. Without a common religion to unite Europeans, and with no Islam or other external forces for them to unite against culturally, there may be no Europe. The 'Spanish' and 'Italians' might feel closer culturally to the Vandalusians of North Africa than to the Viking occupiers of northern France and the British isles (the Vikings would still be up to their tricks ITTL). European identity might be replaced by Mediterranean, North Atlantic, and other identities.
 
Could a no christianity roman world adopt a Japanese style religion? Where the emperor is revered as a god but reduced to a ceremonial figurehead by a strong general who sees the imperial institution as a powerful unifying force?

One thing that always amazed me about Japan was the numerous civil wars between different Daiyos and Shoguns etc, but the one thing that united was their belief in the divine Emperor. Because he doesn't wield actual power there is no need to actually remove him.

Would be interesting to see Rome evolve into that where a particularly gifted general essentially sidelines the Emperor and devolves real power to the army or senate. They keep the emperor around by blackmail/intimidation and after a few generations they have no de facto power. Hopefully not too asb.
 
Rhunidian's question on European explorers brings up an interesting point. Much of modern Europe's colonialism was philosophically justified by the superiority of European culture and ethnicity-but ITTL those assumptions might not exist. The greatest effect on Europe of no Christianity may be that a European identity doesn't even develop. Without a common religion to unite Europeans, and with no Islam or other external forces for them to unite against culturally, there may be no Europe. The 'Spanish' and 'Italians' might feel closer culturally to the Vandalusians of North Africa than to the Viking occupiers of northern France and the British isles (the Vikings would still be up to their tricks ITTL). European identity might be replaced by Mediterranean, North Atlantic, and other identities.

Even if we're assuming here that an ATL devoid of Christianity, or without Christianity being endorsed by the Roman state, won't feature the rise of a different religious or cultural ideology, the mark of Roman civilization would still exist in Europe after the collapse of imperial Roman authority. Both Germanic and Alan migrants into western Europe (and North Africa) chose to preserve pre-existing infrastructures. They didn't want to destroy, they wanted to benefit from the best parts of Roman culture and put themselves out there as the new management. The Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and others wanted preserve the villas, roads, towns, basilicas, forums and churches. A cultural identity may organically evolve from the collapse of imperial Roman authority in whether or not a distinct ideology, espoused from a geographically expansive corporate agency similar to the OTL Church.

As others have touched upon the subject of the survival of literacy in post-Roman Europe without the Church, I should point out that the possibility exists that high-placed educated people from within the more urban parts of Roman Europe would have sought favour with their new Barbarian overlords by volunteering as secretaries and bureaucrats. Within a couple of generations, homegrown, Latin-speaking bureaucracies would have evolved with the post-Roman societies.

Even Attila the Hun had a Roman Notarius in his service, the Pannonian-born Orestes, who was himself the father of the future western emperor Romulus Augustulus.

Lets not forget either that at least some of these Barbarians warlords that carved out new kingdoms for themselves from Italy to Iberia, Alaric, Theodoric and Odoacer, had themselves held rank high rank in the Roman army in addition to leading their own tribal forces. And on top of that, the Romans would take hostages from the children of allied tribes, and educate them to their culture (Arminius, Alaric and Theodoric to name a few). With all these factors, I don't see Europe as being exactly worse off without Christianity.
 
Lysandros-a lack of European identity doesn't mean that Europe is worse off, just that it doesn't have a European identity. East Asia doesn't really have the same cohesive sense of 'Asianess' despite cultural similarities, but that hasn't stopped the Asian Tigers from thriving.

You may be right that a common Roman identity could develop, but a Roman identity need not be the same as TTL's modern European identity (though granted, the latter owes almost everything to the former).
 
Lysandros-a lack of European identity doesn't mean that Europe is worse off, just that it doesn't have a European identity. East Asia doesn't really have the same cohesive sense of 'Asianess' despite cultural similarities, but that hasn't stopped the Asian Tigers from thriving.

You may be right that a common Roman identity could develop, but a Roman identity need not be the same as TTL's modern European identity (though granted, the latter owes almost everything to the former).

Does your definition of a "European identity" include having a uniform or definitive religious doctrine? Because the term "Hindu" was originally a secular term for the indigenous people of India, regardless of their religious affiliation. Without Christianity or some other universal religious doctrine permeating European culture, you would still have a culture with a common belief system that isn't centrally directed by a college of priests acting as governing body for international spiritual thought. It might not be even necessary for the development of an alternate cultural identity.
 
Lets not forget either that at least some of these Barbarians warlords that carved out new kingdoms for themselves from Italy to Iberia, Alaric, Theodoric and Odoacer, had themselves held rank high rank in the Roman army in addition to leading their own tribal forces. And on top of that, the Romans would take hostages from the children of allied tribes, and educate them to their culture (Arminius, Alaric and Theodoric to name a few). With all these factors, I don't see Europe as being exactly worse off without Christianity.

And I don't doubt such a thing would happen. The problem is chiefly what happens to those scrolls and manuscripts in the meantime. Its awfully expensive to retain libraries, especially the scholarly class needed to maintain them. This is doubly true when combined with the dramatic declines in western urban civilization. In OTL the church shouldered the burden, in the name of preserving religious texts.

As I mentioned earlier, it did a rather piss poor job of it as heretical texts of math, science, and literature was often less important than another hymnel. However, the church was the main patron of the scholarly class for a long period of western civilization. Untill urban life and trade returns to Europe, it will be difficult to support a scholarly class without a major and consistent patron.

On Edit: The East however will probably end up perfectly fine.
 
Does your definition of a "European identity" include having a uniform or definitive religious doctrine? Because the term "Hindu" was originally a secular term for the indigenous people of India, regardless of their religious affiliation. Without Christianity or some other universal religious doctrine permeating European culture, you would still have a culture with a common belief system that isn't centrally directed by a college of priests acting as governing body for international spiritual thought. It might not be even necessary for the development of an alternate cultural identity.

As I define it, European Identity is how OTL's Europeans saw themselves in the early modern and modern eras. A major part of their self-perception was the feeling that they had a duty to evangelize their culture and religion, something that yes, you do see in some ways among some Hindus and Taoists in some points of history, but not to nearly the same extent as with the Abrahamic religions. A Europe without Christianity may still be European, but it is a very different sort of European.

Example: Pagan Spaniards who don't see a need to replace Native American religion and culture with their own (though they probably would ban human sacrifice) and are even willing to syncretize their belief systems with the native religions of their colonies would result in a vastly different sort of American conquest.
 
Yahweh was originally a Sumerian thunder god...

No. There is no evidence for that. There is a theory espoused by ONE source (THE DICTIONARY OF DEITIES AND DEMONS IN THE BIBLE) that Yahweh may have been an early SEMITIC...not SUMERIAN...storm god who competed with the god Hadad or Baal but lost out nearly everywhere but in Israel. However, that is a highly minority point of view.

However, I don't deny your main point, which is that a polytheistic religion can evolve into a monotheistic one. That is almost certainly what did happen with the religion which eventually became Judaism.
 
No. There is no evidence for that. There is a theory espoused by ONE source (THE DICTIONARY OF DEITIES AND DEMONS IN THE BIBLE) that Yahweh may have been an early SEMITIC...not SUMERIAN...storm god who competed with the god Hadad or Baal but lost out nearly everywhere but in Israel. However, that is a highly minority point of view.

Probably referring to the Biblical origin of Abraham (Ur).
 
Since no Christianity almost certainly means no Islam, the Hindu expansion into Indonesia would be more successful-maybe even permanently moving that region into India's cultural sphere. Alternatively, might India spread its influence in East Africa? Or even both?:D
 
Top