It seems to be a condition of putting together a book on ancient monotheism that one must leave the term undefined. The reason is that, when conceived as a form of linguistic behaviour – the refusal to use the term ‘god’ of more than one entity whom one believes to be real – was peculiar to Jews and Christians in antiquity; under other definitions we find it everywhere and nowhere. Many of the contributors to this volume regard the assertion that all is one in the divine realm as a trope of eloquence rather than a philosophic dogma. Thus Alfons Fürst (‘Die Rhetorik des Monotheismus im Römischen Reich’) concludes that Christian apologists were studiously deaf to the polyphony of classic pagan texts, in which both unity and plurality in the divine realm were affirmed as occasion demanded. Peter Lötscher (‘Varro in der lateinischen Apologetik’) interprets Varro not as a champion of polytheism, but as a circumspect historian of the guises under which an inscrutable power had made itself known to the Roman people. Gian Franco Chiai (‘Die Ortsgebundenheit des Göttlichen bei Macrobius') argues that Macrobius is attempting to render pagan worship palatable to Christians when he applies allegorical readings to myths and insists that the gods are not physically bound to the sites from which they derive their epithets. Nicola Hümke (‘Pater rerum und dreieiniger Gott’) suggests that if we attune our ears to the rhetoric of the fourth-century poet Ausonius we will no longer feel obliged to determine whether he was a pagan or a Christian. Sara Stöcklin-Koldewey (‘Göttliche Hierarchie und Aufgabenteilung bei Kaiser Julian’) shows that Julian the Apostate, far from eschewing the language of monotheism, turned it against the Christian doctrine of Trinity: he himself worships many gods as one, while they incongruously proclaim one God as three.

The difficulties to which Christians exposed themselves by proclaiming Christ as a second god are discussed at length in a number of contributions. Christian Gers-Uphaus (‘Rhetorik des Monotheismus in der Oratio ad Graecos Tatians') maintains that this second-century apologist found it possible to uphold monotheism only by remaining silent about the incarnation. Christian Müller (‘Aggressiver Polytheismus?’) finds that the proclamation of one god is by no means a ubiquitous feature of early Christian martyrologies, and surmises that the veneration of Christ, which is necessarily implied in all such texts, gave rise to paradoxes that were best left unexamined. Andrea Villani (‘Tertullianische Variationen zum thema Monotheismus') combines rhetorical and theological analysis, pointing out that the monotheism of Tertullian is particularly strident when he is urging the rule of faith against Marcion and the monarchians. Christoph Bruns (‘Uberlegungen zum Subordinationismus in der Trinitätslehre des Origenes') advises us not to force the rigid categories of our own theological textbooks onto an author who is carrying out the first complete reconnaissance of the Scriptures and cannot be expected to speak to us more consistently than the evidence speaks to him. Jochen Sauer (‘Eine Anthropologie der Erkenntnis in Laktanz’ Argumentation für den Monotheismus') argues that Lactantius grounds his defence of the biblical revelation not on Cicero's theory of natural law but in the self-evident absurdity of all pagan representations of the divine. Thérèse Fuhrer (‘Augustins Modellierung des manichäischen Gottesbildes in den Confessiones') offers a subtle reading of Augustine's polemic against the mythological cosmogony of the Manichees, which, precisely because it is myth, is calculated in his view to keep us in thrall to the bodily senses and prevent us from growing into the image of the invisible God. We hear the last trump of paganism in Ilinca Tanseanu-Döbner's article on Proclus (‘Alles, was am Einen teilhat, ist Eins und Nicht-Eins’): the Christian redaction of this Neoplatonic system which survives in the Liber de causis has reduced its dynamic antinomies to an inflexible scheme of three hypostases.

It is all too easy to carry away the impression that early Christians were mere sophists, forcing a choice between strict alternatives on their pagan interlocutors while allowing themselves unbounded flexibility in their own religious parlance. We must remember, however, that ‘monotheism’ is not their term but ours: what they proclaimed to the world was no abstraction but the one true god in contrast to the false gods of the nations and the lewd cults that had been set up in their hour. As Luise Ahmed demonstrates (‘Das monotheistische Gottesbild als Konversionsmotiv?’), they charged the pagans not only with believing in many deities rather than one, but also with failing to honour that one by their moral conduct, fabricating images which belied his nature and wilfully ignoring his self-revelation in the Scriptures. So long as the monotheism of the orators and philosophers failed to wean their pagan readers from these errors, they could not be said to be worshipping the same God.