Caesarius of Arles

It was in confrontation with the attitudes and practices he condemned as “pagan” that Caesarius's program of christianization met its most severe test. Like “superstition” and “magic,” “paganism” was not a label that its practitioners applied to their own activities; it was rather a Christian term of opprobrium for the (deficient) religion of others. To Caesarius, as to other church leaders, “paganism” designated all religious behavior and belief that he could not ascribe to Christianity or Judaism. In addition to the phenomena of Gallo-Roman religion, it included all other ritual activity that evaded his control, much of which was arguably Christian or religiously neutral in intention, if not in appearance. So broadly defined a set of attitudes and practices could not have been confined to the countryside, and we must be careful not to equate “pagans” (pagani) with peasants (rustici), as the speakers of late Latin appear to have done. Rusticitas, as Caesarius understood it, was above all an ideological or behavioral category, and not a sociological one. As Peter Brown has observed, “rusticitas overlapped with the habits of the rural population; but it by no means coincided exclusively with them.” In other words, the acts which made people pagan in Caesarius's eyes could be observed as easily in the center of the city as deep in the countryside (serm. 52.2). Still, it makes sense to discuss these diverse “pagan” phenomena together and to do so primarily in the context of the countryside, since it is in these manifestations of behavior among the peasants of Aries that we can most clearly see both the effects of Caesarius's program of christianization and its limits.