Europe's inner demons

If the passage in Minucius Felix stood alone one might suspect the author of rhetorical exaggeration; but other sources bear him out in almost every detail. The first really great writer of the Latin church, Tertullian, was familiar with these same accusations, and in the year 197 he set out to refute them. He describes how, in his own town of Carthage, a criminal who normally earned his living dodging wild beasts in the arena had recently been hired to display a picture of the donkey-god. It showed a creature with ass’s ears and a hoofed foot, but standing erect, dressed in a toga and carrying a book; and it bore the inscription “The god of the Christians, ass-begotten”.⁽²⁾ Tertullian’s answer is ridicule: “We laughed at the name and at the shape.” Mockery is also his response to the tales of incestuous orgies, infanticide and cannibalism. If these tales were true, he comments, a would-be Christian would be confronted with some curious demands: “You will need a child of tender years, who does not know what death means, and who will smile under the knife. You will need some bread to soak up the blood; also some candlesticks and lamps, and some dogs, and some scraps of meat to make them jump and upset the lamps. Above all, be sure to bring your mother and sister. But what if the mother and sister will not comply, or if the convert has none?… I suppose you cannot become a regular Christian if you have neither mother nor sister?”⁽³⁾

Minucius Felix and Tertullian provide the fullest evidence for the suspicions under which the Christians laboured, but by their time the suspicions were already traditional. The most damaging can be detected already in the comments of the younger Pliny in 112 or 113. Installed as Governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, Pliny had the task of examining some former Christians he found there; and he wrote to the emperor asking how they were to be treated. These people, he reported, admitted that they used to attend meetings where they took nourishment together; but they insisted that, whatever others might say, the nourishment was an innocent one.⁽⁴⁾ There is little doubt what lies behind this cryptic phrase: Pliny had been trying to establish whether Christians did or did not practise collective cannibalism.

By 152 the Christian apologist Tatian, writing for the benefit of the pagan Greeks, thought it necessary to state explicitly, “There is no cannibalism amongst us.”⁽⁵⁾ In the same decade Justin Martyr also refers repeatedly to these slanders. In his Apology he asks how a glutton who enjoys eating human flesh could possibly bring himself to welcome death, as Christians did; for would it not deprive him of his pleasure?⁽⁶⁾ And in his Dialogue with the Jew Trypho he asks whether, like the Gentiles, the Jews believe that Christians eat human beings.⁽⁷⁾ Justin recognizes, too, that this particular accusation docs not stand alone: when Christians are accused of cannibalism they are also commonly accused of promiscuous and incestuous orgies.

It remained for Athenagoras, around 168, to find the appropriate technical terms for these imaginary offences: alongside “Oedipean mating”, “the Thyestean feast”.⁽⁸⁾ The name is highly significant: the children of Thyestes were killed by his brother Atreus and served up to him at a banquet. If the cannibalistic feasts in which Christians were believed to indulge could be called “Thyestean”, that means that the supposed victims were not adults but children. And that is confirmed both by Minucius Felix and by Tertullian.⁽⁹⁾

Tertullian might make fun of such beliefs, but they were really no laughing matter. They were very widespread, both in the geographical and in the social sense. Christian apologists referred to them as flourishing in all the main areas where Christians were to be found — north Africa, Asia Minor, Rome itself; and not only amongst the unlettered populace, either. In the 160s M. Cornelius Fronto made a speech accusing the Christians of infanticide, cannibalism and incest — and Fronto was not only a famous orator and an influential senator but the tutor and adviser of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. In fact, these rumours constituted a mortal threat to the Christian community. It is quite possible that Fronto influenced Marcus Aurelius in his persecution of the Christians, which was severe. And in the frightful persecution which struck the Christians at Lyons towards the end of his reign these same accusations certainly played an important part.⁽¹⁰⁾