Читать книгу Crises in the History of the Papacy. Lives and Legacy of the Most Influential Popes Who Shaped the Development & History of Church онлайн

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The old gods were dying, it is true. In many a cool atrium there must have been some such discussion about the successor of Jupiter as has been finely imagined by Anatole France; but assuredly not the weirdest of the Syrian visionaries who abounded would have said that, in a few centuries, those neglected fields beside the Neronian Circus at the foot of the Vatican would become the centre of the world, and that men and women would come from the farthest limits of the Empire to kiss the bones of those obscure Christians. Men talked of the progress of the cult of Mithra, which spread even to distant Eboracum, or the success of the priests of Isis or of Cybele, but few thought about the priests of Christ. Earlier in the century, Pliny had written to court to say that he had found, spreading over his province, a sect named the Christians, whose beliefs seemed to him "an immoderate superstition"; though they had, he said, under pressure, abandoned their God in crowds; and he had little doubt that he would extinguish the sect. Few even of the Christians can have imagined that within two centuries their cross would be raised above the proudest monuments of Rome, and that the eagles of Jove and the rams of Mithra would lie in the dust.