Christianity in the later Roman Empire Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Christianity in the later Roman Empire - Essay Example Christianity has its own struggles before it became the widely accepted and practiced religion in the world. Its history has its own share of historical significance that had made it become more meaningful to its followers. There had been too many stories to tell that eventually made the Christian faith even stronger and richer. Looking into the Christian faith today, it could be drawn from the mere observation of the society at present â€Å"that the most important basis for this development is to be found in the fact that the genuine Roman view concerning the general nature of the supernatural remained a national religiosity of peasantry and patrimonial strata.† (â€Å"The Sociology†) What Christianity offers its believers and followers is with a rich context of human religion that requires the least of his capabilities in honor of the god they now admire and respect. After Christianity had gone through various transitions and reformation; after it had confronted and overcome all the challenges that it had faced, what results is a polished, spiritually stimulating and that is more universally accepted and acclaimed. The Christian religion has not only taught the purest and sublimest code of morals ever known among men, but actually exhibited it in the life sufferings, and death of its founder and true followers. (â€Å"Literary Contest†)"Literary Contest") Religio from Superstitio In the Roman context, religio is defined as the "proper reasonable awe of the gods." ("Reclaiming") The primary characteristics of the Roman tradition were conserved virtually unchanged in ritual practices. Looking at its historical context, Roman religio was associated into two derivations such as "religare," which means to tie, "relegere," which is to consider, that is tied with tested cultic formulae and a consideration for "numina" or spirits - which are active everywhere. ("The Sociology") Every member of the Roman Empire is acquainted with his or her duty regarding the traditional rituals that constituted religio even if the nature of the gods whom they offer these rituals is vague. Romans in the ancient Rome had continued to perform rites and rituals in honor of the gods they have traditionally praised. "Religio meant fulfilling an understood contractual relationship with the gods. It involved acts, rather than beliefs; it centered on cult, instead of theology." ("Reclaiming") Life in the case of the Roman was spent under conditions of austere restraint, and, the nobler he was, the less he was a free man. All-powerful custom restricted him to a narrow range of thought and action; and to have led a serious and strict or, to use the characteristic Latin expressions, a sad and severe life, was his glory. No one had more and no one had less to do than to keep his household in good order and manfully bear his part of counsel and action in public affairs. But, while the individual had neither the wish nor the power to be aught else than a member of the community, the glory and the might of that community were felt by every individual burgess as a personal possession to be transmitted along with his name and his homestead to his posterity; and thus, as one generation after another was laid in the tomb and each in succession added its fresh contribution to the stock of ancient honors, the collective sense of dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into that mighty civic pride, the like of which the earth has never seen again, and the traces of which, as strange as they are grand, seem to us, wherever we meet them, to belong as it were to another world. It was one of the characteristic peculiarities of this powerful sense of citizenship, that it was, while not suppressed, yet compelled by the rigid simplicity and equality that prevailed among the citizens to remain locked up within the breast during life, and was only allowed to find expression after death; but then it was displayed in the funeral rites of the