When did people stop believing in the old gods like Greek and Norse? Did the Vikings just wake up one morning and think ”this is bullshit”?
In: Culture
Here’s why, in bullet points:
* Christianity appeared.
* Local rulers noticed that the main point of Christianity is “life sucks, but grin & turn the other cheek and then you get eternal rewards (TM) after death.”
* Local rulers thought, “hey, this means God is telling them not to rebel against me when I raise taxes, sweet!”
* Rulers then found God and converted to Christianity.
* Any vikings who weren’t so sure about the new, merciful God got burned at the stake or murdered.
* The Vikings who remained alive decided that it was safer to follow Jesus than not to.
I would argue that the Greek and Roman pantheons were never believed in, in the same way that Christianity is believed in. Christianity is a faith based on specific historical claims about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it has produced a series of creeds and confessions that lay out precisely what Christianity believes to be true. Greek, Roman, Norse, and other myths belong to a different category entirely. They have no creeds, no confessions, and no catechisms. Their adherents would have been puzzled by the suggestion of such a thing. Their “faith” such as it was, existed in a different frame from their philosophy, which co-existed fairly happily but remained separate. (You might see something similar today in the practice of Shinto, for instance.) Christianity was the first faith to put the two together and give us theology.
I’m not sure if this is an original thought to him, but G.K. Chesterton elaborates on this at length in one of his great works, *The Everlasting Man.* (You can easily find it as a free PDF, and can just jump to the part where he starts discussing “comparative religion.”)
Incidentally, this is part of the reason that the line used by folks like Dawkins in debating Christians is mistaken: “You’re also an atheist when it comes to Zeus and Thor and Baal, I’m just an atheist for one more god than you.” It’s a category error. There was never anything like Jewish monotheism, until Christianity which consummated it (Jews would disagree). And there hasn’t been anything comparable since that hasn’t somehow descended from Christianity.
I think I can answer this.
I have done some research into the normans, and it turns out that they originated as vikings who invaded northern France.
So they carved out the territory they needed and became an enclave. They freely adopted the the french language, customs and way of living, but still maintained their ferocious army.
The French king ended up giving them their own lands, in exchange for giving the Italians a pasting in the south.
So after a while they became as french as the french, and set about improving the french system of administration.
So the answer is that they readily adopted overseas cultures and “gods”.
Both were converted to Christianity.
Greece converted when it was a part of the Roman Empire at the same time that the whole of Rome was converting. This took centuries.
The Vikings Converted due to Christian Missionaries sent by the Catholic Church specifically to convert them (and others in Northern Europe). This also took several hundred years.
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