page_title: Interpretatio Christiana
section_title: Reinterpretation of sacred sites
hierarchical_section_title: Interpretatio Christiana / Practices / Reinterpretation of sacred sites
caption_attribution_description: Der Menhir Men Marz ist mit einer Größe von 8,50 Meter und einem Gewicht von 80 Tonnen einer der vier höchsten Menhire Frankreichs. Das Kreuz an seiner Spitze als Zeichen seiner späteren Christianisierung. Brignogan-Plages, Finistère ,Côte des Légendes
context_page_description: Interpretatio christiana is adaptation of non-Christian elements of culture or historical facts to the worldview of Christianity. The term is commonly applied to recasting of religious and cultural activities, beliefs and imageries of "pagan" peoples into a Christianized form as a strategy for Christianization. From a Christian perspective, "pagan" refers to the various religious beliefs and practices of those who adhered to non-Abrahamic faiths, including within the Greco-Roman world the traditional public and domestic religion of ancient Rome, imperial cult, Hellenistic religion, the ancient Egyptian religion, Celtic and Germanic polytheism, initiation religions such as the Eleusinian Mysteries and Mithraism, the religions of the ancient Near East, and the religion of Carthage.
context_section_description: The Christianization of sites that had been pagan occurred both as a result of spontaneous conversions in early Christian times, and an important part of the strategy of Interpretatio Christiana. The landscape itself was Christianized, as prominent features were rededicated to Christian saints, sometimes quite directly, as when the island of Oglasa in the Tyrrhenian Sea was christened Montecristo.
  Missionaries to the pagan nations enthusiastically turned pagan sites immediately over to church use. For example, Sulpicius Severus, in his Vita of Martin of Tours, a dedicated destroyer of temples and sacred trees, remarks "wherever he destroyed heathen temples, there he used immediately to build either churches or monasteries" (Vita, ch xiii), and when Benedict took possession of the site at Monte Cassino, he began by smashing the sculpture of Apollo and the altar that crowned the height.
  The letter from Pope Gregory I to Mellitus copied by Bede says in part:
  ...that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.
caption: A menhir in Brittany topped with a cross
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