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The Greek romance says the very nature of existence is found in the mystery of Eros, that mysterious all powerful, natural attraction.
The god Eros who will grab you and make even a tough guy like you feel love.
It said that you as a human are part of nature.
You are part of nature and nature's cycles.
And the gods oversee you.
The gods are all around you.
Today, I want us to talk about this religion that animates the Greek romances.
Paganism under the Roman Empire.
You cannot understand the significance of the triumph of Christianity without understanding the essence of the religion that it displaced.
Greco Roman polytheism or what we can call paganism.
You cannot understand Christianity without understand the religion that it displaced.
Two, the second reason why we must consider paganism to try to feel what paganism meant spiritually is that paganism
in the Roman Empire underwent profound transformation.
The Roman Empire was a period of tremendous religious ferment of which Christianity was a part, but only a part.
And if you could, for a moment, imagine away Christianity.
Imagine that we knew nothing about it.
We would still look at the Roman Empire as one of the greatest periods of religious change in all of human history.
So I want us to explore Roman paganism and to explore the changes in Roman paganism as we approach this classic text of Roman religion in the Empire, the golden past.
The Romans were especially a religious people.
And they believed that they were especially pious and that the gods had blessed them and given them their empire.
Their religion, they would not have called it paganism.
In fact, paganism is a later term.
Their religion is polytheistic.
What does that mean?
Many gods.
And that is the beginning of the fundamental differences between Greco Roman religion and Judeo Christian religion.
Monotheism comes out of Judaism.
And it is absolutely the historical exception.
Polytheism, the belief in many gods is the original state.
It's the early religion of the Mediterranean and, indeed, the vast majority of the Earth.
The belief in many gods.
And we need to think about how different that is because polytheism is very different from Judeo Christian and Islamic religions, the Abrahamic faiths, the monotheisms.
Polytheism is a religion of myth and a religion of cult.
It's a religion based upon oral tradition.
Now so pervasively influential have Judaism and Christianity been on the history of the world that it's somewhat difficult even to reenter the mindset of pre Judeo Christian religions.
But these are religions of myth.
And the prime significance of that is that they are not religions of revelation.
They are not religions in which there is some form of revealed truth such as the law that God delivered to Moses, such as the incarnation of God in the flesh as Jesus.
Judeo Christian religions are religion of an authoritative text and of authoritative figures who receive certain kinds of revelation.
They're religions of scripture.
Polytheism has no bible.
Indeed, there's very, there's very little that we would even begin to consider sacred text.
To some extent they think of Homer as inspired, as someone who had deep understanding of the gods.
The polytheistic religions are religions of myth meaning that there are religions that aren't based on a scripture, they aren't based on a revelation, but are based on traditions, traditions about the gods.
There are many gods.
Polytheism, there are more gods than you can count.
In fact, there is no number.
The number is fluid.
At the same time the myths tell of stories of the greater gods, of the more important gods, of the more powerful gods.
There are hierarchies of gods.
And by the time of the Roman Empire, the Romans and the Greeks of the Mediterranean have long since worshipped a basically shared pantheon or set of gods.
What the Greeks call the Olympians, the high gods of Olympus.
These are the gods that you will recognize from the most prominent Greco Roman myths.
These gods are like big, powerful humans.
Both sexes, imperfect, full of passions, human-like passions but on a greater scale.
Their one defining trait that makes them divine, the one thing that makes the gods gods is that they are, unlike humans, immortal.