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novelty and creative transformation, subject to
conflicting versions and multiple interpretations –
were now characteristically understood as absolute,
historical, and literal truths, and every effort was
made to clarify and systemize those truths into
unchanging doctrinal formulae. In contrast to the
pagan deities, whose characters tended to be
intrinsically ambiguous – both good and evil, Janusfaced,
variable according to context – the new
Christian figures, in official doctrine at least,
possessed no such ambiguity and maintained solid
characters definitely aligned with good or evil.
(111)
And about this circumscription of the possibilities for seeing
and thinking, leaving behind but a severely polarized “good or
evil” way of perceiving the world, Tarnas continues:
There were not many true paths, nor many gods and
goddesses differing from one place to the next and
from one person to the next. There was but one God
and one Providence, one true religion, one plan of
salvation for the entire world. […] And so it was
that the pluralism of classical culture, with its
multiplicity of philosophies, its diversity of
polytheistic mythologies, and its plethora of mystery
religions, gave way to an emphatically monolithic
system – one God, one Church, one Truth. (119)
The very basic result of this, then, was the rooting of
perceptions of “truth” and reality in certainty. Because of
Christianity’s “unchanging doctrinal formulae,” represented by
Tarnas’ simple, and very apropos, equation of “one God, one
Church, one Truth,” for those earliest Christians – and, very
possibly still for some uncountable flock of faithful almost two
millennia later - there was nothing but certainty. Because the
dogma of the new religion offered nothing that smelled of
“diversity” or “ambiguity” – its “true” doctrines was anything
but, as Tarnas wrote, “malleable, undogmatic, open to
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