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Ancient and Modern

Peter Jones

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Peter Jones on Christianity and the Olympics

The Anglican bishops have met and reached their grave conclusions on a number of doubtless vital issues — except one. What about the Olympic Games? Are they not pagan rituals? And was it not for that excellent reason that the Church banned them?

It was Constantine the Great, founder in ad 324 of Constantinople as the ‘new Rome’, who encouraged the spread of Christianity without condemning other beliefs. But bishops like Ambrose of Milan were not enthusiastic about tolerating polytheistic cults or pagan intellectual movements, and their influence began to be felt. In 380 the emperor Theodosius I decreed that Christianity should be the official religion of the Byzantine empire, and in 391-92 took the final step of outlawing all pagan ritual — sacrifice, divination and so on. It took some time for the interdict to have effect, but the final result was the closure of Olympia as a religious sanctuary where for the previous 1,200 years Zeus Olumpios had been worshipped every four years with athletic competitions (increasingly international) in his honour, and with barely an intermission either. The argument for so doing — alongside mundane concerns about nudity and so on — was theological. Theodosius was an advocate of the Nicene Creed, and that Creed took no prisoners. Everything to do with polytheism and its rituals had to be wiped off the face of the earth.

In that light it is interesting that St Paul uses the language of the âthlêtês (‘one who competes for a prize, suffers’) and agôn (‘a struggle, contest, game’, cf. agony) to describe aspects of the Christian life. He talks of running the race to win the prize; of mastering oneself to win the crown; of boxing not simply to flail at the air; of contesting the good contest of faith in order to win eternal life; of the necessity of a man to compete within the rules if he is to gain the crown. Later Christians who entertained cheering crowds by competing against wild beasts in the arenas were saluted as ‘athletes of Christ’ — sufferers indeed.

Presumably today’s bishops prefer St Paul’s tactic of drawing from these pagan rituals wholesome lessons about the Christian agôn for the prize of eternal life to inveighing against the political and sporting greed, excess, vanity and corruption endemic in honouring the pagan god of the Gold Medal.

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